30 Days Of Night

30 Days Of Night, the cinematic adaptation of the popular graphic novel adds a few interesting dimensions to old vampire lore.

Vampires shun the ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun as everyone well knows. It's become an all too familiar stock scene now where an all powerful vampire is locked in a race with time against an over matched mortal foe. The night is long but Dawn always breaks so there is always hope.

Evil is dark according to archetype, it inhabits the subterranean realm of our unconscious, lurking there until therapy, faith, selfless love, or in vampire metaphor the bright rays of sunlight illuminate and burn it away. Archetype blends with fictional reality in the Vampire world. An immortal evil that waits in the shadows, a hunger that must be fed. In 30 days of night it is the darkness that is the main character. Set in Barrow, Alaska at such a latitude that the winter solstice leaves the land under a perpetual shadow. A place where if Vampires come there will be no escape, no respite, and certainly no hope.

The film takes the vampire race idea from Anne Rice but these brethren are a far cry from the seductive appeal of the Lestats and Mekares. This has long has been the other side of the vampire myth, its' celebration of the decadence. Undead immortality is set in a different cast when it is sexually charged- endless nights of clubbing, sleeping in, and always looking good; it's compromise worth making to some, almost a lifestyle choice, an opportunity even.

There's no such ambiguity here. These vampires are the Nosferatu, an old race, one set apart with no interest in mingling- tapping an anxiety about assimilation of obstinate immigrants perhaps.

The story does not aim for high art but does achieve a poetic moment. A bitten victim becomes aware of the transformation. He has lost his wife and children in a traffic accident some years back. Wanting to but unable to take his own life to join them, his constant dream is one of reunion. Now as the change occurs he begs his friend to take his life because as he pleads he does not want to live forever. He wants to join his family. It's an ironic play on immortality, the kind into which he descends and the kind that he dreams awaits him. For me it made the film.