Now I’m really scared. 30 Days of Night.

It’s a skill, scaring people. There have now been decades of having film vampires creeping out of the darkness at people unexpectedly on the one hand, and spraying the screen with gallons of blood on the other. So, how to scare the hardened audience?

What a vampire movie can do is to keep our interest enough and involve us in the action long enough to learn to care about the characters so that it really matters if they are killed. If we care, then we can be scared. Otherwise, it’s settle down to a shoot ‘em up gorefest with lots of CGI and precious little emotional concern for the characters at all, like Starship Troopers (but not the novel) or Blade 2. Who worries about the Dhampir himself being killed? He won’t be; he’s Wesley Snipes as a good guy and this is Hollywood, and (possibly apart from Whistler), who gives a clot for the rest? Even the free humans are merely scenery against which Blade slugs it out with the vampires, the Reapers, and legions of armoured renfields.

30 Days of Night scared me because the characters are made to seem like real people. In the Alaskan far north, as the month of total darkness approaches, a small American town prepares for shutdown. A large part of the population leaves for the more comfortable south and the hero, Sheriff Eben Oleson, watches them going as he investigates a number of mysterious incidents of vandalism. On the way, we see his friends worrying about his failing marriage to Stella, a fire marshall. Oleson sympathises with the local helicopter pilot whose aircraft has been sabotaged, and the couple whose huskies have been slaughtered. He argues with Beau Brower an eccentric snow-plough driver, and tickets him to remind him he’s a part of the human race.

The broken marriage being repaired in the face of danger is a Hollywood convention, and the director David Slade is not above using such things to play on the imagination. How will facing vampires bring this embittered couple closer together? Will they both survive? Eben’s grandmother grows cannabis to treat the pain of her cancer and the Sherriff’s younger brother is a suitably demanding teenager. No-one here is glamourous in the way the vampire covens are in Underworld, or the vampires of the Lestat films, or the cute-ish nightstalkers in Blade Trinity. Most of the adult men have beards apart from the asthmatic Dudley Do-Right sherriff, and the women are girl-next door wholesome if young, and practical pioneers if older. We don’t get the workout-every-day physiques and perfect complexions of the Dream Factory. This is a generator-warmed, short-on-women, shotgun-against-polar-bears frontier town. There’s a church (of which ostentatiously we never see the inside) and a general store and a poster-papered jail-cum emergency services Sherriff’s office. Plus a marvellous garbage crusher with rotating blades that, again, Slade wants us to remember and anticipate being used. But against whom? Against what?

This is the real town which is about to be destroyed by vampires. Real people are going to die. It is going to matter to us when they do.

Credibility is a neat trick to pull with such implausibilities as vampires. Leather-clad supervamps are fine for the Marvel adaptations and the gloss of the big-budget SFX, and the rotting-face horrors of the stumbling revenants film are conventions in their own right, but vampires, winning, on Main Street USA? Come on. Puh-lease! Those Alaskans are literally loaded for bear with shotguns and bear-traps and with the internet and mobile phones they’ll all be in touch with each other and organize when the vampires attack. Won’t they? And they can call in the mighty US military; bound to be plenty of them around, being so close to Russia, and all. A couple of companies of Marines with automatic weapons and body armour and night-sights and ground-attack helicopters could blow any walking dead into mincemeat toot-sweet, right?

Wrong. Credibility Technique Number One; the mobiles and the phones and the internet are disabled before the vampires emerge. So, no coordinated resistance, no massed-fire shotgun fusillades, and no USMC in Apaches and sno-cats. Guess it’s down to us plain folks, huh?

Only the plain folks are just that. They aren’t Special Forces troops. They take too long to come to terms with the disaster. None rush to barricade themselves in when Eben and Stella return from their first encounter with the vampires on the edge of town. Even after the first victim is taken at breathtaking speed in front of their eyes, the surviving pair of an Alaskan ménage-a-trois return home and react foolishly. That is, normally. Would we really dig in deep at that stage, arm up to the teeth and get a posse together, or would we hope for normality, make dinner, and hope that the bad things will go away? Plain folks. About to die, most of them.

Credibility Technique Number Two.

When the vampires arrive in town they are shocking in their speed and aggression. It’s not that shotguns don’t work, but you’ve got to aim for the head, and these things run like hell. Dark blurs cross the screen and human beings are dragged away like small animals in the mouths of cheetahs. The scene where the town falls to the vampire horde is a truly thrilling one; tense and exciting and yet it avoids being a splatter-movie massacre. It is still compelling, like the sequences in Mississippi Burning where the Feds turn the heat up on the Klan by arresting local members or when the Bureau goes after Buffalo Bill and Clarice Starling goes on her own way in Silence of the Lambs. In a few minutes the darting, scarcely-seen vampires have reduced the town’s population to a handful of scattered survivors cowering in the snow or crouched in unlit and rapidly-cooling buildings. I won’t write much about the plot here, see for yourself when you watch it (please!), but the struggle for survival over the next twenty-nine days provides a structure for some really gruesome and tense vampire movie scenes.

These vampires are truly horrible. The makeup and acting are first-class because they make these bloodsuckers seem to be what is rarely achieved at the cinema. These are dead people infested with an alien and remorseless and voracious will to drink blood. They are neither sexy giants like Vampires’ Jan Valek nor sardonic killers like Jesse Hooker the Confederate soldier of Near Dark: nor are they rotting corpses from a treadmill ‘Something Of The Dead’ movie. They are pale dead flesh. Empty-eyed and crooked-fanged, and they exist to kill and bleed their victims. They sprint jerkily like lizards and in the still moments before they kill they examine their prey with the incurious concentration of snakes or spiders. The actors and FX people have produced something which, I think, novelists usually do so much better than film-makers: they have created utterly soulless, human-shaped, but entirely inhuman predators. They are messy eaters, too, and their gore-stained fox-faces seem to drive out any hope to those who see them. One victim calls out to God and the blood-streaked leader looks briefly up at the sky, blank-eyed and unrepentant, as if inviting thunderbolts. Rescue, however, does not appear from on high at this point, and the bleak choice between capture and death on the one hand and freezing and starvation on the other confronts the remaining humans. They also have to make some morally and emotionally agonizing decisions. Hope seems to be impossible.

The middle section of the film sees the vampires searching for the survivors, but we see nothing at all of them when they are not hunting or feeding. They seem to do nothing that is separate from their hunger. Only their leader speaks; in a clicking and croaking language which subtitles shows us to be his terse orders to the hunting pack, or expressions of his loathing for human beings. They stand in light summer clothing unmoved by the arctic cold, and the fiendish shrieking of the pack occasionally sounds across the ruined town along with the dying wails of their latest captive. Sometimes, it is hard to tell the sounds apart. The vampires are invisible for much of the time, keeping our tension high as to when they might appear again and who they might do things to…

Credibility Technique Number Three. There is little actual darkness in this film. The ice is so highly reflective that even when the mains electricity goes off there is still plenty of light from starlight, battery-power and unsabotaged generators. Much of the violence (and there is a lot of it compared with most films, except for sci-fi slaughterhouses such as the Terminator and Predator series) is committed against the ghastly background of starlight on the snow. There are many red-black patches on the ice and bloody trails across floors and a goodly few severings of body parts as the film progresses. Much of the nastiest business takes place just a little off-camera, or in the rare patches of darkness, but with the terribly suggestive sound-effects; tearing, dripping and guzzling. This is how in the UK the film earns its 15-years certification. There are crimson splatters aplenty, and some nasty biting, but we’re allowed to imagine the worst. And imagine it we do.

Against this background the human beings put a succession of plans into action about where to hide and when to move on and how to draw the vampires’ attention away from this relocation or that foraging party for stores. We are always aware, no matter what they do, that the survivors can be whisked away into the shadows at any moment, or flung to the snow and drained in seconds. We are also shown, midway in the film, how rapidly the rare escapee from attacks has transformed and then turns on their former neighbours. Oleson though has faith: faith in his fellow Alaskans’ resilience and knowledge of their harsh environment; faith that the elements can be turned against the monsters; faith in his duty and his will to do it. Watch how far he goes for his fellow men. If there’s moral uplift in this film it is that when you believe that your neighbours deserve to live then no matter what duty requires and no matter how implacable, heartless and savage the enemy might be, and no matter at all how remote the possibility of winning might seem, then you should and can do what that duty dictates. Perhaps you can win. This is 2007. This is an American film.

I watched it for the vampires, and these are the worst - that is the best - vampires I have seen in the modern cinema. After all the soppy victimhood of Louis and Angel and the hapless Caleb, Slade has recreated something of the fear of inhuman predators that the readership of Dracula must have felt and enjoyed and left the lamps on overnight for.

This is a great vampire movie; an instant favourite. The DVD on release please, Lucy.

AB-

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