| Horror
Movie Index
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30 Days of Night, 2007. Directed by David
Slade. Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster, Mark Rendall.
Synopsis: As Barrow, Alaska prepares for the long mid-winter night, a night that lasts a full month, malevolent eyes lay heavy upon the town. Someone has been playing malicious pranks on the townsfolk. All of the satellite phones have been stolen and burned. All of the sled dogs have been killed. And many of the town's basic utilities have been sabotaged. A stranger has arrived, and no one knows how he got there. He preaches death and destruction. And as night falls, death and destruction comes. A band of vampires has laid seige to the town, with no fear of that the sun will rise and send them scurrying. They make mincemeat of the townsfolk in short order, and soon, there are very few survivors left, led by the town's sheriff, Eben Oleson, and his estranged wife, Stella. Eben leads them into hiding, then takes the burden of the fight on himself when it becomes clear that they won't survive the night if they do nothing but hide.... Run and Gun: At the risk of stamping myself as a cinematic conservative, I need to state right at the start of this assessment that 30 Days of Night employs a shooting and editing scheme that I don't like. This is the so called "run and gun" style that consists of very shaky hand-held camerawork combined with very fast editing and frame compositions that focus tightly on faces rather than on environments. The object of this sort of scheme is to create a more "immersive" and "subjective" film experience. While I'm sure that there are filmmakers who use it for just this reason, most of the uses to which I see this scheme put are fundamentally deceptive. It is used to cut corners, saving the filmmakers the need to compose the frame in depth, to choreograph action, and, indeed, to create a world. It's ironic that 30 Days of Night is based on a comic book, because this sort of thing exists in comics, too. Will Eisner called it being a "slave to the close-up," a technique used primarily to avoid the heavy lifting of drawing backgrounds. Also for the record, I haven't read the comic book at this writing. While either intention is perfectly justifiable, either aesthetically or economically, the results tend to make me physically sick. Some of this is my own fault. My preferred seat in a movie theater is in the center of the third row, where the movie screen envelops my sphere of forward perception. A lot of flash-pans or rapid jump cuts from that perspective will make me nauseous. And not in a good, horror movie sort of way. This is a pity, by the way, when it comes to 30 Days of Night, because it's an interesting environment. Unfortunately, we never get the feeling of the environment as a player in the film, which is odd given the extreme nature of the setting. Not only do the characters not seem to feel the effects of the environment (frostbite, et al.), but we also rarely see their breath. The film also never gives the impression of time passing. While part of this may stem from the ever-present night of the film's title, I think it's also a side effect of that "immersive" quality the filmmakers are going for, in which the audience is encouraged to participate in an exhillarating "now" rather than a contemplative few seconds or hours into the past or future. In the case of this particular movie, I think the filmmakers are using the run and gun technique to disguise the deficiencies in their screenplay. The movie is a variant on the Rio Bravo/Night of the Living Dead plot, in which a cast of interesting characters are trapped in a microcosm by indians/zombies/gang members/aliens/what have you. And here, it makes two crucial mistakes: it doesn't create a credible microcosm and it doesn't provide interesting characters. Let's start with the first point. When the movie opens, the town of Barrow is emptying. Our hero's estranged wife is rushing to catch the last flight out of town before nightfall. There is an overall sense that night alone will isolate the town. But let's think about this. Do the filmmakers want us to believe that airplanes cannot land at night? Barrow is obviously built around the oil pipeline (which becomes a plot point late in the film). Do the filmmakers honestly believe that the oil company will not react to the town falling ominously silent for an entire month? And what of the friends and families of the citizens of Barrow. Are we to believe that they will shrug off the ominous silence of the town? For an entire month? I think not. An essential component of the more fantastical horror movies is the audience's willingness to suspend their disbelief, and I think most audiences will meet the filmmakers half-way, but this relationship is a two-way street. The filmmakers need to at least make an attempt. The second half of this story construction is the assembly of interesting characters, and, again, the filmmakers have skimped. The strong, silent lawman with a troubled marriage is a cliche, as is the female half of that equation. As is the kid brother. It's a pity that the "catholic priest who is losing his faith" stereotype has fallen into disuse, because it would have been in perfect harmony with this story. Still and all, it's not a total botch--though it's close. Ben Foster's "stranger" provides yet more evidence that Foster is the best young actor for batshit insane characters currently working (see also 3:10 to Yuma). The stranger is this film's Renfield, and like some past Renfields, Foster steals every single scene he's in. And Danny Huston's lead vampire is an interesting interpretation, too. He seems like they've recast the vampire as a Russian mobster, which kinda sorta works. The vampires themselves are refreshingly savage. They bleed (natch) into the running zombies from Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, until they are farily indistinct from them. They serve to remind us that the vampire and the ghoul are two sides of the same archetype, but it does tend to make the movie seem like every other zombie movie made these days.
10/30/2007.
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