With a few exceptions, the vampire movie hasn’t got much love lately as werewolves and zombies, though more likely the latter, have become the go to monster of choice for filmmakers. Contrarians include the Underworld and Blade films, but to call those vampire movies is like saying that M*A*S*H was about doctors performing surgery. In other words, they were movies that just happened to be about vampires and not vampire films in the way that Bela Lugosi or Hammer Studios understood them.



But then came 30 Days of Night, a graphic novel that reenergized a previously defunk genre of the comic medium: horror. For years, horror comics had been prolific, even big publishers like DC and Marvel had their scary staples. But the burst of the comics bubble in the 90s forced publishers to go back to their primary money-makers and focus on them. There were no time or money to experiment or try new things which is why when Steven Niles brought his idea for a screenplay about vampires laying siege to an Alaskan town during a month long night, it was indie IDW Comics that jumped at it.



Thanks to producer Sam Raimi and director David Slade (Hard Candy), 30 Days of Night now returns to the medium it was originally intended to be in: the cinema. The town of Barrow, Alaska is hunkering down for a month without sun; its Sheriff (Josh Hartnett) is making the rounds and the Fire Marshall (Melissa George) is finalizing her inspections. Meanwhile, a stranger (Ben Foster) snakes through town unseen, sabotaging the helicopter, killing the sled dogs and basically cutting off all means of escape. When night comes, so do the vampires. They come swarming through town and treating its residents as an all you can eat buffet. The few survivors are kept out of sight by the Sheriff and the Marshall as they wait for dawn.



Refreshingly, the film portrays the vamps as monstrous and not refined aristocrats or yuppie business people in fancy suits that manipulate humans to do their bidding. Further, we see vampires actually feeding on humans, which is something missing from a lot of recent vampire movies and shows, they’re always trying to come up with “cloned blood” or visiting blood banks for their fix. Why not go right to the source? I ask. There’s six billion of us around, after all.



Slade also does a good job of not giving us too much of a good thing, and gives the vampires just enough personality to differentiate them from each other while keeping them a single-minded, feral pack of hunters.



At the same time though, the vampires are almost too mysterious and the whole enterprise comes dangerously close to being something more akin to a zombie movie like Dawn of the Dead. In the graphic novel, there’s a prologue deals with questions of origins, but for the sake of brevity, it was cut from the movie script and turned into its own little web series. The same goes for the vampires’ connection to the Stranger character, what was that deal there? Sometimes it seems that there was whole flashback scene or prologue or something that was cut out of the final film that’d answer some of these questions.



The human characters are also kind of problematic. Hartnett and George are supposed to be playing an estranged couple, but there’s really not even a hint at to why they’re estranged and exactly how these 30 days under siege conditions have reaffirmed their feelings for each other. Also Hartnett doesn’t really seem all that commanding for someone who’s supposed to be the lone voice of the law in what is basically a frontier town. Foster, meanwhile, turns in another wonderful, dirty red neck performance, but like I said, we unfortunately don’t know enough about him to make it a well-rounded effort. On the vampire side, Danny Huston, evaporates behind his vampire persona, making him a fascinating and terrifying leader of the pack.



So despite acting shortcomings and some obvious pacing problems, 30 Days of Night handily succeeds at satisfying vampire survival movie. Will it revolutionize the vampire picture the way that 28 Days Later shook up the zombie movie? Probably not since 30 Days owes so much to Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic pandemic allegory and all those that followed in its wake. There is a lot of spirit though and a real dedication to the source material, up to, and including, the bittersweet fate of the main characters. Though nor revolutionary, the movie is definitely worth recommending.