Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the century so far. Today, he looks at the 2007 David Slade film, 30 Days of Night. This article will contain spoilers.
Finally, in many ways, we’re back.
30 Days of Night is not a subtle film. It comes from a comic book series that’s mainly a vehicle for Australian artist Ben Templesmith to draw all the haunted weird shit that made him famous, and the main ethos of the film is that while Josh Hartnett has top billing, the blood and the violence are the stars, and these vampires are gonna get their work in.
The conceit is in the title: Our story is set in Barrow, Alaska, at the top of the world. It’s that time of the winter when, well, it’s about to get dark for a number of days. We open with Sheriff Eben Oleson (Hartnett) figuring out that someone’s gathered and destroyed all their sat phones. Someone’s then gonna kill all their sled dogs, sabotage their helicopter, destroy their cell tower, cut their phone landlines and power, and then the trouble will really begin.
One thing worth mentioning up front that’s both refreshing and a clear product of sequencing for this feature is: There are so many vampires behaving badly in this. 30 Days trends really hard towards the “these guys are unrepentant predators, lower lifeforms in suits” interpretation of vampires, and while it does take a good half hour to really get into the meat of the situation, once we’re there these hedonists with shark mouths tear it up. They’re really the most fish-like of all the vampires reviewed so far; teeth like sharks or lampreys, dead doll eyes, bullet-shaped heads, clammy skin and powerful jaws.
A lot of how this movie is shot feels stage-y, and that’s wholly to its benefit, I think. What it’s really doing a lot of the time is recreating panel framings from the comic, shots that fans will remember and that director David Slade enjoyed. This was a fad in the 2000s non-superhero comic movie boom; the obvious leaders in the space are Zack Snyder’s 300 and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, both based off of Frank Miller comics (in both cases they tried to give him co-director but that’s not how their union rules work; Rodriguez quit the Director’s Guild so that the co-credit could stand). At the time I remember not liking the trend but now I’m perfectly fine with a camera that frames a scene and knows what it’s doing, and either stays put or moves in a consistent direction on purpose to accomplish a task. I’m fine with a general store set that’s clearly a set with clearly theatrical snow blowing past the windows. The contrast you can create between the white of the snow and the shadow in the unlit store is great in 2025. Every movie I’ve had to watch for the past month and a half for this feature was shot like a CW show with too much CGI budget.
Hartnett is also very good here. He’s a guy who was a terrible fit for mid-Aughts male lead; both the projects on offer and his inclinations as a tall, hot, fundamentally sad-eyed man didn’t really work for an age that frosted-tipped and completely insane. Those instincts serve him well here. His Eben is an asthmatic who cries a little and has a panic attack after seeing his first grotesquely decapitated man, the one running the power station on the edge of town; he whispers fantastically and with great force in the middle section of this movie. His relationship with his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) is revealed over time and under duress, and it works well coming from both of them. You do wonder what he might have done in his youth in a saner environment; he’s doing very funny things now in 2025 as a dad-level actor. And he’s good in those projects, because he’s always been good. He was just in movies like Lucky Number Slevin and Hollywood Homicide back then.
We get a long lead before anyone starts killing the town invaders; you get the initial home invasion murders of the townfolk, the big bad town massacre, and then a fairly extended brutal murder of a high school teen where the vampires play with their food, which does actually serve a narrative purpose — the movie is introducing the vampire minibosses. The first vampire to get it is a townsperson who is turning and doesn’t understand what’s going on — John Reese, whose dogs got killed — which establishes decapitation is the play. The second one is a little Orphan Annie terrorist monster in the general store who our heroic few can team up on to keep at arm’s length and decapitate. Once the seal is broken, though, it’s really broken; we’re murdering them with giant construction equipment chainsaws by the end of these proceedings.
It’s worth remarking on: No one in this movie wants to say ‘vampire’ out loud, but vampires clearly exist in the world; Beau (Mark Boone, Jr., who you might remember as the real sloppy Detective Flass from Batman Begins) makes a crack about Bela Lugosi, everyone intuitively understands that they’re not gonna like sunlight or simulated sunlight (ultraviolet weed glowlamps), and no one has to interrogate what’s going on when people start to change. This is mainly a matter of convenience, since we don’t need the extra 5 minutes of looking at the camera and going “Wow! Vampires are real!”, and I appreciate that.
Our cast of mortals gets smaller and smaller, as horror movie ensembles are wont to do, and we learn more about the process of vampirism as we get closer to the finish. A lot of vampirism is solved with fire axe decapitation, even up to the last 15 minutes of the film, and I respect that. We get a monologue from Carter (Nathaniel Lee) who’s turning about the thirst and the hunger, before Eben takes him into another room and does the business. Eventually the vampires corner everyone in the trash plant, and Eben realizes that the way to beat these guys — as they set the entire town on fire to burn the evidence of what they’ve done in, with one of the single funniest shots of any movie reviewed in this series to date, with the vampire-hands boss lighting a match and throwing it into an oil slick — is to become one of them.
Eben shoots up with vampire blood from his dead buddy (who got incredibly groadily on-screen beheaded with an axe, really a great bit)! This is both smart, because it means they can’t bite you and kill you anymore, and stupid, because you clearly don’t have enough vampire XP yet to fight the big boss. The reason he does this is because his wife is out there hiding under a car with a kid that reminds them both of the child they never had — this bit is pretty forced. What it gets us is a showdown with Marlow, the final vampire boss, who frankly has been a step behind Eben this whole film. Marlow beats the brakes off of the sheriff, because turning yourself into a vampire and then going out into a big fight with a guy who’s been a part of that lifestyle for many years while you’re still getting used to it isn’t the best idea. But he eventually puts his hand through the back of Marlow’s head in a fairly lucky shot, and everyone decides to bail before the sun comes up in a few hours.
This is one of the least satisfying parts of the film: All titular thirty days pass during its runtime, but it feels like maybe 18 hours pass total. There are a number of “we’re gonna sit here and talk” scenes but the pacing doesn’t actually make it feel like weeks are passing. Part of this is we’re working within the structure of a feature film, and part of it is that “oh just turn it into an HBO miniseries,” which was the constant refrain about every single signature comic series in the first two decades of this millennium, doesn’t actually make it better. And hell, they actually did turn Preacher into a television show! Eventually. Results were mixed on the outcome.
Eben and Stella walk out to the end of the ice floe outside of town and watch the sun rise together; he dies, and frankly, that’s good. Midnight Mass, the Netflix show by Mike Flanagan, might eventually be reviewed in this space, or in the addenda, and there are some good parallels here, which is funny because Midnight Mass is trying for a significantly higher intellectual operating level than this film is going for. The joining link is a vampire who knows what he is and wants to go out in the way he chooses, and that’s respectable. A lot of the minor vampires run off in the end, so that they can serve as fodder for the follow up comic book series, or direct-to-video sequel hooks. Unimportant for our purposes; this is a good ending.
Last thing to be said about this movie: Ben Foster is in it for about 40 minutes. He does one of the stupidest accents possible for a man to do in 2007; I actually respect him for it. It’s like he’s trying to do a Southern accent by way of Pittsburgh. It is truly impossible to place where this moron comes from. He’s the guy that cut the power lines and killed the sled dogs and so on; he thought the vampires would reward him by turning him into one of them, but Marlow makes very certain to snap his neck instead of bite him in the jail. I actually thought Jake — Eben’s little brother, who gets out of a lot of sticky situations without them being shown on camera — would be revealed in the end to be the traitor that would become the next Ben Foster, but maybe that was too interesting for this format. So it goes. I would like to have seen Ben Foster get fed into some kind of industrial equipment, if they’re doing a remake. That’s just what I prefer.
Alright, next week, it’s Thirst.
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