30 Days of Night (2007)

Directed by: David Slade | 115 minutes | horror, thriller | Actors: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Ben Foster, Danny Huston, Manu Bennett, Mark Boone Junior, Craig Hall, Mark Rendall, Joel Tobeck

Comic books still remain a rewarding resource for filmmakers. The superheroes have already been used extensively and ‘300′ and ‘Sin City’ have also managed to get their place on the silver screen. Directed by director David Slade (“Hard Candy”) and producer Sam Raimi (“Evil Dead”, “Spider-Man”), the dark comic “30 Days of Night” has been made into a movie. A story about vampires who run the household in a town where it is night for thirty days. A true paradise!

The story is set in the remote Alaskan town of Barrow where most residents head south before the last sunset. Yet many people are still left behind in the icy cold that always plagues their village. On the eve of long darkness, dogs are suddenly brutally killed, cell phones burned and computers shut down. The vampires know exactly what to do to cut the remaining inhabitants even further from civilization.

The vampires in ’30 Days of Night’ are not your everyday vampire. Director Slade has given the time-honored Nosferatu a makeover that makes them look scarier and more bloodthirsty. Slade wanted eating machines with a hint of ‘Alien’ and that’s exactly what we get to see. The vampires are not afraid of anything and just tear the inhabitants to shreds with their razor-sharp teeth. These new vampires cannot be killed with bullets and they are very fast. They even have their own unintelligible language. A tough enemy that the residents, led by Sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett), must avoid or defeat if they are to make it out alive.

Like many horror films, this one also has its downsides. In this film, the emphasis is on the characters where things don’t quite go well. There is too little depth in these characters so that you as a viewer don’t care what happens to whom. It is therefore impossible to identify with the inhabitants. The thin love story surrounding Sheriff Eben and his wife Stella is also not convincing. The story itself also has little to say but that is filled with brutal action and lots and lots of blood.

The filmmaker has therefore focused more on the visual and also makes good use of many shock effects. For horror lovers, ’30 Days of Night’ is a delicious blood feast. Fortunately, the negatives do not make the viewing pleasure any less. ’30 Days of Night’ is therefore a great film in the vampire and horror genre.