Streaming Availability: Pluto TV
A lot of the reason I do these Spooky Months is because it
allows me to swing back around to movies I fairly or unfairly skipped. In 2007, I was sixteen, a horrible little brat, and loved being too good for things. 30 Days of Night did not look like the classic Eighties or
Nineties vampire movies I loved, so I decided it was trash. It is a
very digital, then-"modern" take on the undead, basically a Fast Zombie movie
but the zombies can talk (a bit). So now, being twice as old as I was back
then, do I have enough gray hairs and wisdom to appreciate this movie as
something special?
Well, Space Monkeys, I can conclude that 30 Days of Night
is… fine. It is okay. It was better than the trailers made it look,
but also, it was that movie from the trailers. Maybe I’m still the same asshole
from high school. Or maybe 30 Days of Night is not enough fun for what it is.
Now the premise is great. 30 Days of Night is set in the
town of Barrow, Alaska (since renamed "Utqiagvik"), the northernmost town in
the United States. Since this municipality is well into the Arctic Circle, one of the few places in the US where you can buy Arctic Ocean beachfront property, it has long
periods of long nights, usually around 66 days with the Sun below the horizon.
I’m to understand that this is not quite 100% blackness, with plenty of twilight
coming over during the “day” hours, giving plenty of light. However, for simplicity’s
sake, the movie depicts this as thirty days of full darkness and the town fully
cut-off from the outside world. This means Barrow is the perfect setting for an
endless vampire attack.
Deep winter isolation is creepy. Some of the
greatest horror movies of all time have been set in spooky cabin fever
locations such as The Thing or The Shining or more recent greats like The Lodge
or Krampus. I expected a slow build into the vampire attacks, maybe full weeks passing before anybody realizes how fucked they are. Instead, Barrow is fully under vampire
assault a half hour into the movie. They barely make it a day before all Hell
breaks loose. Most of the few hundred residents of the town that have not left
for winter are massacred immediately
That leaves only a small band of survivors, led by Sheriff Eban (Josh Hartnett) and his estranged wife, Stella (Melissa George). They spend most of the movie held up in various attics or make-shift fortresses, joined by a cast of six or eight or maybe even ten minor characters, few of which have enough personality to be worthy of discussion. I kept losing count of how many survivors there were. It felt like people kept showing up who were not there before.
On the positive side, Josh Hartnett is a more than capable lead for 30 Days of
Night. He’s got a great tan despite living up in the frozen asshole of the world, and he’s game for the movie’s bigger dramatic swings.
I always thought of 30 Days of Night as a zombie film that called itself vampiric. This is nothing that new, The Last Man on Earth in the Fifties anticipated all the zombie tropes to come. And this is the mid-2000s, when zombies were the hottest thing in horror cinema, vampires were extremely yesterday's news. The surviving band has to
follow the usual zombie survivor rules. You know somebody will get bit and not
tell anybody. You know one person will lose their composure and blow up everybody's spot. The movie says it is taking place over the course of a
month, but it also feels like only a few days are passing, maybe even hours.
Again, I wish the movie had been more willing to invest in the monotony of
isolation, or making the character conflicts more distinct. I never found out why Eban and Stella were separated, and that's your central relationship in this movie!
But monotony requires pauses in the action, and 30 Days of
Night does not want to be anything other than action-packed. Its vampires are
doing huge Wuxia-style leaps and tearing through flesh like deep sea creatures. If the movie is going to pause, it will be so characters are stuck together hiding in extreme tension. Nobody really has a moment to talk. There's no time for paranoia.
You cannot be paranoid when you're constantly in danger from vampires all over the place. Everything about the 30 Days of Night Nosferatu is shark-like, from their slanted eyes to gaping mouths
full of rows of razor-sharp teeth to their vacant dilated pupils. They're the least sexy vampires we've seen this month. The vampires
even have a guttural language created for the movie, a conlang that sounds like
the Black Speech of Mordor with added click consonants to sound more unpleasant. A few of them
have pretty recognizable looks, like the big bald one or the skinny guy, but they're not characters. Really
the only vampire you’ll remember is the vampire leader played by Danny Huston
(the credits tell me he’s named “Marlow”). Huston has a proper Lugosi widow’s
peak, but is no Dracula. He’s just the chief monster in the end.
One really spooky guy is Ben Foster’s unnamed Renfield
character, who sabotages the town before the vampires attack. He’s a nasty little man, which is what Ben Foster does best as an actor. His teeth are all black and disgusting. Sadly, he has a lot more
personality than most of the vampires.
I mean, there’s plenty of cool violence at least. A poor
dude gets impaled to the wall while the Vampire Chief plays a record with his
talons. At one point Beau (Mark Boone Junior) drives a massive tractor to slice
a few vamps in half whiling blowing their brains out with his shotgun. We’re introduced
to a big metal grinder at the beginning of the movie and you know somebody is
getting thrown into the teeth of that monster. A fully vampired Eban rips out
Marlow’s brains at the end, and I'm not too good for that.
However, for my money, 30 Days of Night just isn’t fun
enough. Why are there so few laughs? You have this school of shark-people leaping around like
Edward Cullen, feasting on people with full gluttony. That sounds fun. But then everybody is so
swallow and dramatic and sad. You have ridiculous rock drumming during the
action scenes. I just think 30 Days of Night needs to embrace its trashiness more. It wants to be an austere melodrama too often. One
character is revealed to have murdered his entire family. I
could use a lot less of that and more of the cute little vampire girl happily gnawing on a dead guy
in the supermarket.
Next Time! We cannot have a Spooky Month without a Korean
horror movie. Park Chan-wook’s Thirst.
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