30 Days of Night / David Slade (2007)
Vampires treat darkness as a natural resource and a competitive advantage. What a premise. It's borne from the original comic mini-series. A traveling band of vampires set up the town of Barrow, Alaska to become their hunting ground during the long sunless period of polar night.
It's bleak. It's dark. It's Alaska. When we first meet Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett), he's going person to person reminding them to get their final prep in before they enter the long dark period. It's a nice way to be oriented to the town, and the townspeople. We meet lots of characters that don't get much deeper than their conversations with Eben. He and his wife Stella (Melissa George) are contemplating a divorce.
Let's be honest. We're not here for the townspeople. The story doesn't take very long to get into dusk where we start to realize things aren't quite ready. Some people prepare to leave town for the long night. The airport will close, there's some mysterious challenges with communications. Phones go missing and lines are cut. There's a stranger in town (Ben Foster). Sled dogs are murdered.
That's the set up.
Then, the vampires come. In an amazing shot by director of photography Jo Willems, we get an overhead view of chaos descending on the town. Barrow transforms from a community to a feeding ground in a matter of seconds. The town is nearly wiped out. If you've seen any other vampire content, you're likely to be surprised by this version. These are not regal, stately creatures. These vampires are hungry monsters. They move quickly. They're coordinated hunters working as a pack; intelligent and brutal.
From here, we're left with a small group of survivors of the opening attack. The movie changes pace to a bit of a cat and mouse game, in which the individual survivors hide and try to move. The citizens of Barrow are hiding in attics and buildings, closets. The vampires become more of a pack and the individual humans are under siege. We follow the attrition of the group as they're picked off one and two at a time.
When man meets a force he can't destroy, he destroys himself. What a plague you are.
It becomes clear that the vampires are organized and are following a plan. Marlow, the lead vampire played extremely well by Danny Huston, reveals their desire to hunt openly for the duration of the polar night. They didn't end up in Barlow by accident. They've been planning for it and have likely done this before.
In traditional vampire movies, the fear is being turned. The main character flirts with the prospect of being transformed from a human to something immortal but evil. The vampire seeks to add to their kind. Here, the vampires want the opposite. They don't want to add mouths to feed and they don't plan to leave any witnesses. At one point a girl is turned. Marlow kills her, letting the audience know the rationale he's employing and revealing that there's no chance they will leave any survivors.
Ultimately, the film hinges on this tension between being human and monster. Eben, realizing they are outflanked in every possible way, sacrifices his humanity to gain the ability to fight Marlow.
But the film strips the human characters of any depth. They're sketched and in the opening massacre, their individual traits and bonds are ignored, largely for spectacle. Excellent spectacle, but hollow none-the-less.
Eben's decision falls short of the emotional release it could be, because we don't really know him or Stella especially well. We know they're working through a rough patch in their marriage, and they've decided they love each other enough to fight. In general, the lack of character depth makes 30 Days of Night a cool vampire novelty, but keeps it from being great film.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
The overhead massacre. This scene sets the sense of scale of how horrible this is. The camera rises above the streets of Barrow and glides over the town as the attack unfolds below.
Framed against moonlit snow and patches of blood, residents flee in every direction, vampires move through the streets in coordinated packs, houses burn, people disappear into the snow, the town's social order collapses in minutes. The perspective matters here. Instead of identifying with individual victims, the audience sees the event almost as an aerial observer or a predator surveying a feeding ground. The scene communicates the film's central idea: The humans are no longer the protagonists of this environment. They have become wildlife.
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