Welcome to JOE’s 31 Days Of Hallowe’en. For each and every day of October, we’ll be bringing you a horror movie to tuck into for the lead up to the big night. It could be new, old, an undiscovered gem, or a classic you’ll have seen a thousand times. No matter what it is, we guarantee you that it is brilliant, and it is SCARY.
For Day 18, we’re looking back over 2007’s icy modern vampire horror, 30 Days Of Night.
Vampires are hard to take seriously anymore. We can probably thank the one-two punch of Twilight (sparkly eternal heartbreakers) and Dracula Untold (Luke Evans is a long-tooth superhero?), but they hadn’t been properly scary for a while.
30 Days Of Night is the outlier in that scenario, as it sets up shop in the Alaskan town of Barrow, the most Northern settlement in the planet, and every Winter, it must endure (three guesses, but you’ll only need one!) 30 days of night.
When a stranger appears in town after the last plane has left for the month, suddenly every satellite phone has been destroyed, every sleigh-pulling husky is found dead, and the innards of the only helicopter in town are torn out.
The town’s sheriff (Josh Hartnett) and his estranged wife (Melissa George) begin investigating the situation, when suddenly a group of blood-hungry vampires arrive and begin to kill off the isolated town’s population one-by-one. There is no help coming for the month, and no sunlight to drive the vampires off.
It is purely a matter of survival.
Clip via N.B.
Based on a famous graphic novel, with the stark whiteness of the town slowly bleeding out more and more red blood as the body count climbs, the movie follows suit by setting up the beautiful but foreboding isolation of the town before letting lose with more torn open throats and snapped bones than you might be able to deal with.
Hartnett does a decent job of the good guy caught in the middle of an insanely spiralling evil, and Danny Huston is fantastic as the leader of the vampires, coming across as an ageless angel of death with an insatiable hunger and an almost apathetic approach to the humans around him.
Directed by David Slade (who went on to direct some of the best episodes of American Gods, Hannibal and Breaking Bad, but also directed The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, undoing all the good work he’d done with making vampires scary again), 30 Days Of Night is one of the most visually unique horror films in recent years – check out that aerial tracking shot over the entire town as it descends into anarchy – and should have kick-started the vampire subgenre into being properly scary again.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter just isn’t going to cut it.
Check out our previous recommendations below:
Day 2 – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Day 13 – Friday The 13th (1980)
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