What is wrong with 30 Days of Night? Could it be that it is all too symptomatic of the contemporary approach to horror, which requires fake blood to be thrown everywhere? Could it be that it has a nonsensical timeline that skips forward suddenly without cohesion or justification? Perhaps it’s the lack of almost any scary moments? To be honest, it’s probably just that there is nothing good about it.
The story revolves around some fairly non-descript characters that muddle along in their out of the way, shit-hole of a town, until some vampires decide that they feel like a killing spree and descend upon the area just as it begins to undergo its annual 30 days of night (something to do with not having much light in winter etc. etc. blah blah). Feeding on men, women and children, they dispatch most of the town during the chaotic first day of their attack, and then slowly pick of the survivors over the next twenty-nine days. Josh Hartnett and his ex-girlfriend find time to discuss the failure of their relationship, while attempting to lead the few remaining townsfolk to safety. Considering they only have half their minds on the task, it’s not really surprising that most of the people who have put their trust in them end up dead.
Admittedly, the acting isn’t atrocious, or at least, amidst all the other elements that are wrong with this film, it didn’t seem noticeably so. Sadly, there really isn’t much scope for anybody to show any acting talent because the back stories of the characters are all so horrifyingly shallow and generally non-existent. Of course, this might be excusable if the film achieved a creepy, disturbing atmosphere, but even the use of children as bait to draw out the surviving townspeople provokes only a yawn, rather than a pleasant outrage. Undoubtedly, the best thing about the film is its ending, not solely because it signals the finale of this terrible experience, but because it is the only non-clichéd part of 30 Days of Night. However, the lack of empathy at this point for the cast, the direction, the vampires, for anything at all, means that what could have been a beautifully tragic ending is merely a tedious epilogue.
