Anyone paying even a small bit of attention to recent film production has to have noticed Hollywood’s newest favorite child—the graphic novel. The success of Robert Rodriquez’s “Sin City,” movies have been springing to life from the pages of the world’s newest forms of storytelling. “V for Vendetta,” “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” “300,” “Wanted,” “The Watchmen”—productions have been popping up like it’s a fanboy’s wet dream out there. The reasons are simple. One: successful stories. Producers already know people like the stories that are in these books, that’s why they buy the rights to them. Two: the art and storyboard is already done. Just as Hitchcock considered his films to be completely finished as soon as he was done with the story boards, it cannot be overlooked that graphic novels will continue to have far reaching effects on the fecal factory of recent Hollywood.
Simply put, Hollywood is out of ideas. “Superbad” was probably the only great original story I have seen on the super-metroplex screen in about five years, and it’s a script so meticulously crafted that it contains over five minutes of solid dick jokes, not to mention it positions “getting totally fucked up and then laid” as character motivation. I’m not hating on it; I’m just putting things in a little perspective. I think this marks a great day in storytelling history, because here we have a fairly drastic role reversal, an instance where might does not make right. We find multimillionaire movie moguls scratching their heads, trying to figure out why attendance has dropped constantly for a decade, while art school daydreamers are expertly executing cinema’s most successful tales with little more than pen and paper.
Enter “30 Days of Night”: Hollywood’s newest addition to the graphic novel-turned-multimillion-dollar picture genre, a horror/vampire/action film based on an eerily feasible premise. The film centers around Barrow, Alaska, America’s northernmost town, which suffers from 30 days of unending night during the winter months. As the last light for a month fades beneath the horizon, vampires begin a month of gory feasting, completely unhindered by the searing rays of the sun. Sure it’s a vampire movie, sure it’s unrealistic, but if you are the type of person to admit for one second that there might be things in this world that we don’t understand, then you’ve also got to admit that this is about as realistic as vampires get. I’m not saying that it’s real, it’s just that I can’t promise you this story could never happen.
The film centers around teen heartthrob-by-way-of-vampire-fighting Alaskan sheriff, Josh Hartnett. It opens with Hartnett’s character leading the small town (population 150) through its regular paces as it prepares for a month of darkness. Things quickly start to go very wrong—all the cellphones in the town are stolen and burned, all the sled dogs are murdered, a helicopter is destroyed. In the chaos, Hartnett’s old flame, a cute blonde named Stella (played by Melissa George), misses the last flight out of town and is stuck in Barrow for the entirety of the upcoming 30 days of darkness. During an expert first act, suspense builds as the town is slowly cut off from the rest of the world, waiting for the vampire assault to end them all.
When the vampires finally do attack, it’s in a dark red flash. The city streets soon become a Nosferatu-induced blood bath, with almost the entire city meeting gruesome deaths in a long, brutal montage. From here on, the film focuses on the town’s few survivors who, cut off from the nearest form of civilization by hundreds of miles of arctic tundra, are left with no choice but to wait for the next sunrise. The film quickly takes on a “we’ve got to move…then wait…now we’ve got move again” pattern as the survivors slowly make it through the month. Though repetitive, the film does not suffer from lack of action. I actually found myself wanting to see more of the boring “in between” parts, consisting of five people waiting in an attic for four weeks. As the countdown to sunlight continues, the arrival of which will (of course) destroy all the vampires, tensions mount and give way to a surprisingly cool showdown between Hartnett and the vampires in the name of love. Forced to become that which he is trying to defeat, the last act finds Hartnett shooting up vampire blood to gain their strength. Having tested H.I.Vampire positive, Hartnett is now able to save his town and the woman he loves as one of the damned, only to burn away as the sun rises for the first time in 30 days.
Essentially, this movie didn’t do anything wrong. It’s a stylized genre piece with nothing to lose, full of action, gore, blood, and a little romance. That’s all I really need from a horror movie with vampires and Josh Hartnett. Honestly, who shoots up vampire blood? That is so fucking rock and roll.
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