30
Days of Night
Director: David Slade
Icon Films
R4 DVD
I have
always loved vampire films, the old Hammer classics, the romantic figure of
Christopher Lee and of course, the rampant eroticism of Lestat
and the Anne Rice novels. However, there is an anomaly within such depictions. Vampires
are predators who live on human blood, they hunt and kill humans, so while we may gloss over the point and enjoy some of the
more “romantic” imagery of sex and death, I have always felt that the sheer
animalism of the vampire has been missing. If we look at the animal kingdom and
examine predators we could presume that if vampires existed and we were the
prey they would be something like portrayed in this highly creative adaptation
of the myth.
While
the “vampire as animal” does occasionally appear in more “gothic” oriented movies
such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Underworld, and to a lesser extent within Anne
Rice’s various novels, it is with 30 days of Night that the vampire as a true predator
and as an animal is brutally depicted.
The film
is an adaptation of the Steve Niles-Ben Templesmith
graphic novel 30 Days of Night. The simple yet innovative premise of both the
comic and the film is that once a year the sun sets in the frozen, remote town
of Barrow, Alaska, indeed Barrow is the northernmost settlement on the whole North
American mainland. It is a real town and is considered part of the
As
darkness approaches, Barrow is left without contact with the outside world
except for some radio equipment, its last plane has left and the town’s people
are alone, they will remains so for the next 30 days.
Vampires
have to feed; they like to feed in the dark and would prefer not to be noticed
as humans become rather difficult when they realize they are prey not predators.
So what a better choice as a feeding ground than an isolated,
lonely town, where there is no means of escape. I
Sheriff
Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett)
is faced with a bizarre series of crimes as the last hours of daylight begin to
fade. Somehow all the cell phones in
town have been stolen and burnt, the watch dogs have been brutally slain, the
radio transmitters have been destroyed and the town’s infrastructure is under
attack. Many of the locals have left and those who remain are getting a little
nervous, many of them live in Barrow as they do like being disturbed by the outside
world and its intrusion is making them testy.
At first these attacks seem like random
events, yet as time progresses Oleson begins to
suspect there is another agenda in play. His fear becomes tangible with the
arrival of a crazed stranger (Ben Foster), not only cannot he account for how
he arrived in the middle of nowhere but he babbles about others on the way. At
the same time Oleson has to deal with the fact that
his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) is still in town, having missed the
last plane out. They are now stranded together in mutual dislike for the next
30 days. This mixture of “prey versus predator” and personal tensions is what
makes 30 Days especially impressive.
As more
isolated killings occur, Oleson realizes the town is
under attack and the death toll is rising. He realizes that there are many
killers and they are not like anything he has even seen, it seems they are not
even really human. The horde of vampires led by Marlow (Danny Huston) are not like
the romantic figures of legend. They are brutal predators, they don’t just
nicely bite the neck of their victims, they tear them
to shreds and are given to frenzied mass orgies of violence. There are no
religious overtones here either, the vampires can be killed by heat and fire
and injured by direct attack but not much else. They speak in a guttural tongue
and look like a mixture of human and beast, they are clearly intelligent but in
the way an animal is.
This
is a lot to like about this film - its frenetic pace, its brutal presentation
of the vampires as true predators and its unrelenting gore and violence. At the
same time, there is solid character development, you feel for the survivors and
what seems like a hopeless battle against all odds. The romantic interest
between Oleson and Stella is, of course, rekindled
and offers a real human touch in a film which is otherwise a maelstrom of
violence and slaughter.
The
ending is a superb reversal of traditional vampiric
lore. Oleson injects himself with vampire blood so he
has the strength to fight off the vampires and defend Stella, as the film ends
she holds him in her arms and he dies as the sun rises. Love has triumphed and
rather than the vampire’s death being the end of the cycle, it is Stella’s
survival.
The
special edition is a 2 DVD set and includes lots of extras including:
Special Features:
Audio
commentary with cast and crew
Pre-production
featurette
The
Vampire featurette
Building
Barrow featurette
The
Cast featurette
The
Look featurette
Blood
Guts & Nasty @#$% featurette
Night
Shoot featurette
Stunts
featurette