Save for one minor hiccup near the end, David Slade’s adaptation of the graphic novel 30 Days of Night is every bit as beautifully horrifying as I hoped it would be. This down-and-dirty saga of an Alaskan town faced with a marauding force of vicious vampires during their normally quiet month of wintry darkness isn’t just good it’s damn good, the film a potent limerick of blood, suspense, heroism and violence I couldn’t help but enjoy.

Josh Hartnett has an axe to grind in Sony Pictures' 30 Days of Night

The town of Barrow, Alaska is used to taking things easy. Perched up at the top of the world, each winter they face 30 days of darkness as the sun hides on the other side of the meridian and those that stay behind are used to taking care of themselves in during these days of endless night.

All this changes the moment a mysterious stranger (Ben Foster, who with this and with 3:10 to Yuma probably has the market cornered on skuzzy bad guys) wanders in to town seemingly from out of nowhere warning of a coming danger. At first Barrow sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett) doesn’t take much stock in the man’s cryptic musings, but when strange occurrences begin to rip the small community apart it suddenly is up to him to save as many as he can from a shadowy pack of apparently unstoppable invaders.

Soon he and a few others, including his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George), realize they are facing a band of bloodthirsty vampires intent on wiping their town’s existence straight off the map. Somehow they must find a way to make it through the next thirty days, holing up in abandoned homes and scrounging up food in every nook and cranny they can quietly climb into. But these immortal demons will not stop until they have drunk every last drop of human blood Barrow has to offer. With time running out Eben and the rest must make the decision whether or not to stand and fight, praying for ray of sunshine not soon to come.

It’s a great scenario, one brought to vivid life in Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s original novel. And while the film doesn’t quite capture the giddy malevolent terror of the duo’s pages, the director and his trio of writers Niles, Stuart Beattie (Collateral) and Slade’s Hard Candy scribe Brian Nelson do come petty darn close. The film builds terror with ferocious subtlety, admittedly using some of the usual clichés to do so but still in a way that feels fresh and new (even if they’re not).

From top to bottom the work done here is pretty much fantastic. Jo Willems (Rocket Science) shoots the frigidly blue landscapes with a canny eye for malicious detail, while Paul Denham Austerberry’s (Assault on Precinct 13) production design evokes the eerie spirit of the graphic novel to pinpoint perfection. I also absolutely loved Brian Reitzell’s (Stranger than Fiction) furiously pulsating score, each chord and riff evoking sensational shivers of startling apprehension at almost every turn.

There are some minor annoyances, not the least of which is the fact that, for a film set in the dead of the Alaskan winter, not a single person is ever seen with their breath fogging up when the speak. I’m sure this was an artistic decision on Slade’s part but, for me at least, it does hurt the picture (if only slightly) and I couldn’t help but think of John Carpenter’s version of The Thing every time someone spoke jittering from cold but without any sort of visual clue that it actually was so. In that arctic thriller you believed the actors were freezing because by golly they really were. Not so, here, a small part of me never quite 100-percent with the characters just because I never fully believed they were actually freezing.

My other problem comes close to the very end and, as I don’t want to spoil the fun, I can’t really go into it. All I can say is that this continuity issue could have been solved with one additional title card listing Day 30, and while that probably doesn’t make a lick of sense to those reading it now, don’t worry, it will by the time you reach the final vampire versus human Alaskan showdown. 

Otherwise, I really liked this movie. This thing got under my skin almost right from the start (Danny Huston makes for a dynamite villain, and as Hard Candy showed Slade definitely knows how to make audiences squirm in giddily uncomforting psychotic delight), building to a crackerjack climax almost worth cheering. For fans of the genre, 30 Days of Night is a marvelously bloodcurdling horror show easy to sink one’s teeth into.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  30 Days of Night Theatrical Trailer