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A vampire flick set in a small, snowy town where there’ll be no daylight respite for a whole month? Been done before, in last year’s Swedish scarer Frostbite. That film, though, angled for yuk-yuks as often as yucks. 30 Days Of Night – based on the same-titled cult graphic novel – takes its killer pitch very, very seriously. There are spikes of black humour: a game of rock-paper-sciss-AARGH!; or a bit where a neck-gnawing nipper charges through a door, without opening it. But this is a bleak, dialogue-pinched, survivalist spooker; its keynotes fear, hopelessness and bitter sacrifice. Get the popcorn in...
Instead of seeming po-faced, there’s a stark, harsh integrity. Instead of a suave, seductive über-villain, there’s Danny Huston. Shark-eyed, slack-jawed, needle-mouthed, he’s an unholy terror as Marlowe, leader of the ravenous pack of claret-cravers who invade Barrow, Alaska when the sun sinks into hibernation. Trouble is, Houston’s so frightful he makes the rest of his expanding clan (feral, zombie-like meat-munchers) look like, well, suckers. He’s also used a tad too sparingly by director David Slade (hiking up the Holly-ladder on the impact of Hard Candy). Elsewhere, however, less is definitely more: the subdued, gathering chill of the pre-blackout build-up; the off-screen atrocities amplified in the imagination by the sounds of characters retching, screeching, dying.
This has more bite than we've come to expect from Sam Raimi's Ghost House production outfit. Some of the action misses the jugular, but Danny Huston makes for a sensational baddie.
