Just a way to pass the time

Rating: 3/10 (5 April 2009)

The last 3 decades of vampire movies have usually needed to tap into something else in the culture to find relevance. Frank Langela's Dracula introduced a yuppie-stud vampire conceived to soothe female horniness, and cashed in on the play's success. The Lost Boys toyed with vampire gang violence. Copola/Stokers Dracula exploited blood fears and the HIV virus, Van Helsing tried an action movie makeover to tap into the success of the Mummy franchise (It failed). Almost everyone of the others use a recognizable "drug addiction" arc... i.e. the vampires behave like junkies, as here.
30 Days of Night takes one original overall gimmick (vampires above the Arctic Circle) and forgets to supplement it with other supporting ideas. It's structured hap-hazardly so the 30 days feel no different as a timeframe, than a movie that covers 4 days. I'm continually amazed that there are always funds available to make more vampire movies, since there's really only one vampire movie and they just keep making it over and over. Only the surface style changes. They haven't been scary in decades. (Are we even capable of being scared by movies anymore?) Here, the whole show is carnage. And it lazily borrows motifs introduced in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the latest wave of zombie movies & Buffy.
30 Days of Night is sad evidence that surface activity reigns. As a culture we've become full time pushers of design and style to the degree that certain movie-goers are now merely design and style consumers; frontal lobes with legs and the cash for a ticket. Horror movies are designed, rather than thoughtfully conceived. Is there time to write a good script? Um, sorry no... we're waaaay too busy designing the credit sequence, and we have to pick out the right contact lenses and teeth for the vampires so they look rilly kewl! Then we have to overdesign the kills so they're kewl. And then we're on to the poster cause that has to look kewl. With tasks like those eating up brainpower, movies like "30 Days" never get around to content or depth.