30 Days of Night

One of the reasons I've not blogged this weekend was because I was at the flicks. Film is a big passion of mine and I'm also partial to a graphic novel as well. The movie I went to see, 30 Days of Night combined both these mediums nicely, so it seemed like the perfect film for me.

Making well-known, if slightly cult in tone, graphic novels into films seems to be all the rage at the moment. You've got to look at far as Frank Miller's 300 for a recent example and Sin City a couple of years prior to that. I'm a fan of both of those movies; whether it's the noirish stylings of Sin City, replete with gore and tin-pot philosophy or the brutal and otherworldly 300, replete with gore and enough machismo to turn the average Mardi Gras straight (well, maybe...).

30 Days of Night isn't a Miller incarnation this time, though, but it does have the requisite gore in common with the aforementioned titles. Written by Steve Niles, essentially, it's a vampire movie - a pretty bold choice of subject matter given the dirge the horror sub-genre is currently experiencing - and a damn good one at that.

Set in the town of Barrow on the northern most point of the North American continent, the premise is relatively simple. Due to their global position, every year Barrow experiences a month of darkness (30 days in fact, hence the title). A group of blood sucking vampires (these guys are scary as hell in this movie and just a tad screwed up) decide to take advantage of this fact by first sending a human thrall to sabotage the town's communications in during the last hours of daylight in anticipation of their invasion and then attack he helpless town, cut off from anyone else, to enjoy a nice human banquet. It's then up to the human inhabitants to try and survive the month.

The vampires are absolutely savage, nothing like the suave of a dreary Anne Rice adaptation but not as bestial as Dracula's alter-egos as played so well by Gary Oldman in the Bram Stoker version . There's a certain wrongness about them and their attacks, preceded immediately by an unearthly scream, are just terrifying. The sense that they are in fact an entirely different species is well conveyed and compounded by the vampires only speaking in their own depraved language and even then only by their more human-looking leader.

Some of the scenes are breathtaking (watch out for an aerial shot lasting about five minutes that pans over part of the town as the battle for survival is unfolding) and the tension is full on. There are nods to the graphic novel format in places but these aren't intrusive and are actually pretty nice to see. It doesn't mess about either. Segues from one scene to the next are dealt with quickly so that the narrative is kept fresh and constantly on the move.

I'd highly recommend it.

As well as enjoying the film, the way that it was handled from a structural point of view was very interesting, particularly the short, scene setting segues used to move the narrative along. There's a lesson to be learned from a writing point of view in there, somewhere - I'm sure of it.