30 Days of Night Equals 113 Minutes of Fright

The Alaskan town of Barrow is the Northern most human settlement in the United States, eighty miles from anywhere. Every year, the sun sets and does not rise again for a month, leaving the town isolated for thirty days of night. This is where the movie begins, as the town's population settles in for a long, cold, snowy, dark month. The town sheriff Eben Oleson, played by Josh Hartnett, makes his rounds before night falls while dealing with the separation with his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) who is looking to hop on the last flight out. Suddenly, seemingly random acts of vandalism strike the town: stolen cell phones are burned, the tourist helicopter is sabotaged, and most disturbingly of all, every sled dog in town is slaughtered in their pens. A belligerent stranger (Ben Foster) is arrested and begins to taunt his captors that "They're comin'" Soon, the town's electricity fails, the phones are dead, and Eben makes a horrific discovery: the severed head of one of the townsfolk adorns a pike. Then all hell breaks loose.

30 Days of Night does something I've not seen in a long time: make vampires scary as hell. These aren't your sexy, Euro-trash, evening-wear goth vampires, but vicious, cruel predators, more shark than human with black eyes, deformed faces and mouths literally full of razor-sharp teeth. Their leader speaks in a guttural, alien tongue, and they spend the film with faces, teeth, and long, sharp taloned-finger nails covered in blood and gore. They scream in an inhuman, unholy shriek that gave me the chills. They don't daintily put two neat little needle-like holes in their sleeping victims neck, but pounce like lions on a gazelle and tear out throats with vicious aplomb.

The movie's pacing is very well done, letting the tension build and build before the ultra-violence occurs, and begins building immediately after the buckets of blood have been let. Hartnett and George do a fine job as the central characters, and all of the secondary characters are well-drawn enough that you care what happens to them. A major change from the source material of the comic book seems rather gratuitous, though. In the book, the two human leads are happily married instead of estranged. I felt that whatever extra drama the script writers felt they got from making the marriage estranged robbed the film's ending of extra poignancy. In the beginning of the movie, Hartnett's character watches the sun set for the last time in thirty days with his deputy, whereas in the book he watches it set with his wife. If you've read the book or seen the movie, you'll know what I mean.

It's hard these days for a movie to scare me, and 30 Days does a hell of a good job of it. It's the perfect Halloween fright fest, and the best vampire flick since Shadow of the Vampire.