|
Honest-to-Badness
Good Horror: 30 Days of Night
by Christian De
Matteo
Super
A few years ago, Jorge, our
resident John Carpenter expert and good friend,
passed on a graphic novel to me entitled 30 Days of
Night. I was intrigued and I read it
immediately. It was great. It was one of
the best comic stories I'd seen in a long time.
Then I heard they were making a
movie out of it. I could see it already.
Hell, I'd read the movie. I hoped they'd be
faithful.
Directed by David Slade who cut
his teeth on the creepy and ethically challenging
excellent film Hard Candy, has directed the first
great vampire horror movie I've seen in at least ten
years. Herein are no stupid jokes, no quirky
baddies, no funny kills. In other words, it
flies in the face of 99.9% of all horror coming out
today. And it truly is a horror film, not a
terror film. It's not about torture or clever
ways to make people suffer. This is a survival
film, and you honestly aren't sure who, if anyone,
is going to make it.
In case you don't already know,
the plot is very basic: A group of vampires
finally realize that Alaska is the perfect hunting
ground, since many towns experience a natural
phenomenon where the sun doesn't come up for thirty
days. Where better to hunt? The towns
are also isolated and can be swiftly wiped out with
no trace of feeding left behind. In a demon's
world, this is Heaven.
Our story is about the victims.
The movie moves swiftly, setting up the plot in a
speedy, but character-developed way. We don't
spend a pleasant week with them at first to
establish why they don't deserve this. No, we
open on the incredibly creepy Ben Foster (check him
out in Liberty Heights, the first place I noticed
this excellent actor) entering town to scout out and
set up the attack. We know nothing about him,
except that he's clearly up to no good.
And the plot goes from there.
Josh Hartnett (in the most actorly performance of
his career) plays the local sheriff, a man who cares
deeply for his responsibilities and his family, but
is currently going through a seperation with his
wife. The audience never finds out why, and,
clearly, neither does he. We meet his wife,
brother, grandmother and a number of the local
residents and then we get to watch them die.
And that really is the gist of it.
But not in the Hostel, Saw kind of
way. No. Hartnett's sheriff wants to
save as many of his people as he can. They
don't really want to die. We watch them try to
survive, try to live to the next sun-up, 30 days
away. The kills are amazing.
The vampires are brutal predators. There
exists here no dainty, Anne Rice homo-erotic
gentility to the vampires. There is no chic,
no class, no romance. No, they are monsters in
the most true to nature form: Hardcore
predators. They tear into their victims,
shredding them and splattering them, almost
liquefying them. And, oddly enough, the movie
is not disgusting, not gory sense we've gotten used
to, and not over the top. All of it feels like
it belongs in a survival movie, like if this were a
movie about attacking lions we would see much the
same things. The vampires even have their own
language like animals, maybe Romanian, maybe
Russian, maybe Gypsy, but probably much more animal
than anything else. The film
moves fast, moves heavily and moves with horror.
Here we get real scares: No people jumping out
of corners, no slashers and prom queens, no clever,
over-thought kills. No this is the horror of
the explorers: That at any moment any one of
the party could be taken out of the troop and into
the woods, never to be seen again. Anything
can happen and there's almost no way the humans can
win. The vampires have the perfect plan.
And it really is.
30 Days of Night is extremely cool
and scary horror. It does what horror was
intended to do, what Bram Stoker might even have had
in mind when he wrote Dracula: It tells a
story that could never really happen to us in a way
that makes it clear that it could. It reminds
us that we may not have "ghosties and goulies and
four legged beasties", to quote Stephen King's story
1408, but that doesn't mean there is no evil.
It entertains us in such a way that later on we go
home and realize that these kind of terrible things
can be done by one human to another and not just by
"monsters". Modern Terror cinema, "torture"
horror, does the opposite. It makes us
painfully aware that other human beings can do these
things to us, so much so that we find the only way
to survive on a day to day basis is to pretend those
movies aren't real and couldn't happen, making us
prime victims all over again. Monster horror,
and 30 Days of Night is a perfect new example, let's
us come to the conclusion that the Vampires are just
an allegory for real life and real evil people and
therefore to be on our guard.
And it's a helluva lot of fun. |
