Moody, tense, grim vampire flick

Rating: 7/10 (22 October 2007)

In recent years, vampire movies have transformed the undead into urbane clothes horses and pouting cannon fodder for roided-up alpha humans. Now, "30 Days of Night" takes vampires closer to their mythological roots than they have been in years. The bloodsuckers in this film are vicious, bestial, and ugly. Though humanoid in appearance, they truly seem monstrous. Their descent on the remote town of Barrow, Alaska has the sole aim of allowing them to feast on all the inhabitants as quickly and as brutally as possible. Barrow is so far north that in winter the sun does not rise for thirty straight days. As a result, a small group of (quite honestly, rather colorless) survivors led by Josh Hartnett have to evade and fight off the vampire horde for what seems like an eternal night.
Director David Slade creates an atmosphere of tense foreboding, peppered with unanticipated shocks for the audience. The audience is drawn into a merciless, frozen world where the only thing that matters to either side is simple survival. Though the action scenes are expertly staged and plentiful, there are none of the completely OTT set-pieces (with souped up vehicles, guns firing holy water, ridiculous pyrotechnics, and obviously CGI effects) that have contaminated the horror genre in recent years.
The vampires are allowed to be mysterious and menacing. We are not given any back story as to where they came from -though we see a derelict freighter in one of the opening shots, and they seem to speak some Slavic dialect. They are deliberately left as a terrifying enigma. Unfortunately, the human characters are really rather dull and it is difficult to care deeply for any of them.
To wrap up, this is the best vampire movie in years. It lingers in the mind and offers ample quantities of gore, suspense, and thrills. There are a number of solid plot twists, and the script resists the temptation to offer any easy answers to the dilemma facing the ever-more overwhelmed townsfolk. By any standards this is a gruesome, chilling, Halloween treat for horror fans of all sorts.