Horror movies long ago accustomed us to vampires snoozing away the daylight hours in their coffins while waiting for nightfall. The vampires in 30 Days of Night enjoy no such comforts, writes Michael Dwyer.
30 DAYS OF NIGHT ***
Directed by David Slade. Starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster, Mark Boone Junior, Mark Rendall. 16 cert, gen release, 113 min
The setting is the Alaskan town of Barrow, the northernmost in the US, where every winter the sun sets for a month of permanent darkness.
Most of the residents get out of town, and as the movie opens on the last day of sunlight, Stella (Melissa George), the estranged wife of local sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett), is heading for the airport and a flight south to Anchorage.
As the antagonism between the former couple is established at the outset, and as genre conventions require at least one woman in a significant role, we strongly suspect she will miss her flight. Sure enough, she has a car accident on the way to the airport.
There are ominous signals of the dangers that will ensue when Eben finds a stash of mobile phones that have been burned, and when the sled dogs are barking anxiously and later found dead. The bloodsuckers have arrived and the round-the-clock darkness ensures that there will be no idling around in coffins by day.
Led by the fearsome Marlow (played by an unrecognisable Danny Huston), the vampires are pallid creatures with talons for nails. These are darting, fleeting figures, bulletproof and with superhuman strength. And they communicate in an indecipherable, presumably invented language that is subtitled for our benefit.
"Vampires don't exist," Stella assures Eben's kid brother (Mark Rendall), and once again the viewer is second-guessing her. Following his disturbing feature- film debut with the challenging Hard Candy last year, director David Slade proficiently takes the vampire movie back to basics, refreshingly eschewing the nudging feeble humour that has debased the genre in recent years.
Based on a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, Slade's film could have been even more effective had he tightened it in the editing room by losing a few superfluous sequences. However, it is particularly strong on atmosphere, and the decision to make one of the vampires an exceptionally bloodthirsty little girl adds to the movie's frissons of menace.
