Official trailer
30 Days of Night gets its 7 on the strength of a single perfect premise and the brutal conviction with which it executes it. The idea is so good it feels stolen from someone smarter. A town in northernmost Alaska experiences a full month of darkness every winter when the sun never rises. A pack of vampires arrives to exploit it, turning the isolated town into a thirty-day all-night feeding ground. No sunrise to wait for, no escape, no help coming.
It’s one of the cleanest high-concept horror setups ever, and David Slade directs it with a savagery that mostly honors it. The film is lean and mean and frightening in stretches, with a vision of vampires-as-predators among the best the genre has offered. Where it falls short is in everything around the premise, the thin characters and a sagging midsection, but the core idea and the ferocity of the execution get it past its flaws.
I’m a sucker for a premise this mean. No sunrise for a month is the kind of idea that makes me wish I’d thought of it, and Slade’s vampires scare me in a way most movie vampires stopped doing a long time ago. What keeps me at a 7 is that I never cared about a single person they were eating.
The Premise as a Machine
The brilliance of 30 Days of Night is that its premise removes every escape route at once.
Vampires are vulnerable to sunlight, so the standard survival strategy is to last until dawn. Set the story in a place where dawn won’t come for a month and that strategy evaporates. The humans can’t wait out the night because there’s no morning. They can only hide and die slowly as the days, all of them dark, tick by.
The film uses its setting relentlessly. The snow, the cold, the total isolation of a town cut off by winter, the long unbroken night, all of it deepens the dread. The survivors huddle in attics and crawlspaces. They ration food and hope, and they watch the calendar instead of the sky. Slade makes the passage of sunless days a structural device and marks time with title cards as the situation grows more hopeless. The premise is a machine for generating despair, and the film runs it well.
Vampires as Pure Predator
The film’s vampires are among the genre’s best monsters, and the design is a major part of why it works. These are alien, shark-eyed predators who speak in a guttural, subtitled language of their own and regard humans purely as food. Danny Huston leads them as Marlow, and he plays the head vampire with a cold, intelligent contempt, a creature puzzled that the cattle keep trying to survive.
Slade shoots the vampires with real menace. They move wrong, fast and jerky. They toy with victims. A famous overhead shot surveys the town as the massacre unfolds, the camera drifting over the snow as the vampires hunt, and it’s one of the great horror images of its decade. The decision to make the vampires utterly inhuman, with no romance and no negotiation possible, turns the creatures back into a real threat after decades of domestication. These vampires want one thing and the film never pretends otherwise.
That overhead shot is the image I carry away from the film. The camera drifts over the snow while the town gets eaten, and the calm of that movement is colder than anything the vampires say.
Hartnett and the Human Problem
Josh Hartnett plays Eben, the town sheriff trying to keep a dwindling group of survivors alive, and Melissa George plays Stella, his estranged wife trapped in the town. They’re the film’s weakness, and I blame the script for it, since the actors do what they can.
Eben is the competent protector, Stella is the woman he must protect, and their strained marriage is sketched instead of felt. I kept waiting for one scene that told me who these two were before the sun went down.
This is the film’s central limitation. The premise and the monsters are first-rate, but the people we’re meant to care about are thin. We fear for them as bodies in danger instead of as characters we know. That caps the film’s emotional impact. The best survival horror makes you ache for specific people. 30 Days of Night makes you flinch at a great situation. Hartnett does committed work, especially in the harrowing finale, but the script never gives him enough person to play.
The Sagging Middle
The film’s other flaw is pacing. The opening is superb, establishing the town, the isolation, and the arrival of the vampires with mounting dread, and the climax delivers. But the middle, the long stretch of survivors hiding and waiting, sags. The film struggles to fill the thirty days with enough incident, and some of the hiding-and-creeping sequences blur together. A film about endless, hopeless waiting risks making the audience feel the wait, and this one occasionally does.
By the third title card of people hiding in an attic I’m restless, and I’d have cut twenty minutes of creeping around. I think the ending would hit even harder for it.
Slade keeps the dread simmering and stages periodic set pieces to break the monotony, but the structural challenge of the premise, a month is a long time to hide, isn’t fully solved. The film is strongest at its bookends and weakest in the long middle, the opposite of what you want. Still, the ferocity of the opening and the gut-punch of the ending carry enough force to compensate.
Is 30 Days of Night worth watching?
30 Days of Night gets its 7 on a terrific horror premise and a frightening vision of vampires as alien predators. The month-long Alaskan night is a perfect machine for despair, the monsters are superbly designed and menacing, and Slade stages the horror with real savagery and at least one indelible image. It loses points for thin characters who never become more than bodies in peril and a middle section that sags under the weight of its own long timeline.
It’s a 7 because the premise and the monsters come close to perfect and the people are cardboard. I’d rank Marlow’s pack with the scariest vampires I’ve seen, and I’d trade a chunk of that attic-hiding middle for ten minutes that made me care whether Eben and Stella got out. Give those two one real scene together and I think this climbs a couple of points.
