Chapter One - Second Film: 30 Days of Night (2007)

 

Are you afraid of the dark?

Or are you afraid of what hides inside it?

Our second film in Splatter Fest is 30 Days of Night (2007), one of the few supernatural films in the roster for this time period. Pitched as 'an actually scary vampire movie', this film meets and exceeds that bar by a mile.

The film itself is a well shot, well acted gem of the early 00's. It releases a year out before Twilight had the genre steeped in young romance. The story pertains around feral acting vampires begin to lay seige to a town in northern Alaska, where the sun has set and will not rise for a month.

Imagery of brutal, bloody attacks and blood splattering across snowy streets makes this an easy include into the 'splatter' genre, yet the film still has a structure that pulls from older films with a vampire mythos. There's a Renfield type character, a rank and file amongst the blood-sucking fiends, and even the implications of their existence going back a long, long time. But what caught my attention was not the old, but the inspiration of the new.

An early hint to the attack is found by the sheriff of the town (played by the always wonderful Josh Hartnett), where he finds a pile of burnt cellphones. Early on, all of the sled dogs get killed and the ways out of town cut off. There's planning in the intack; it is an invasion.

What came to mind was the film Red Dawn (and it's terrible remake in 2012). I believe 30 Days of Night to be far better, but there is a thread here of US invasion. There is a theme in the film that the small town was not ready for an attack, and was destroyed for it. It is in this kind of thread that I believe we can see an influence from the US's so-called 'War on Terror' seeps in from the cultural zeitgeist.

Early in the film, we see the townsfolk talk about the population there for the sunless time being 'those who can hack it'. Follow this up with the brutal ways vampires and humans alike are killed, and with a brave self sacrifice at the end, there is a through line of masculine detachment. Writing in 2026, this feels touched by the same blueprint of what would manifest itself into the far right culture of today.

Not to say that 30 Days of Night is 'right wing', but that the same cultural influence that gave us this modern toxic masculinity also gave us this idea of heroism in the face of bloody assault. There are the beginnings of the culutral shift in America here, a snapshot of horror during the 'War on Terror' era.

Part of the film that works surprisingly well is during the seige of the town. A group of our remaining townspeople hide in the hidden attic space turned bunker, often hiding as the vampires search around and below for any remaining survivors.

The imagry immediately calls to mind stories of Jewish people hiding from the Nazis during WW2. Not even in a metaphorical sense, these scenes must be a direct allusion to the stories from survivors. To the film's credit, the scenes are terrifying while also being taken serious. There isn't any of the bitter taste of exploitation filmmaking here. Yet the question calls to mind, why evoke the darkest moments seen in modern times?

I believe the effect is two-fold. First, is to invoke the idea of an enemy would would invade your homw and kill you without thought. This feeds into the second effect, of showing a world that is cold, cruel and uncaring. It's like a nihilist philosophy, where the world and others are at a base line sociopathic. As someone who came into adulthood during the era of 24-hour news cycles following 9/11 and brushfire wars that followed, the connection seems to be from the timeframe of the film. 

This is why I thought of Red Dawn immediately; American fear of the 'end of empire'. Lindsey Ellis put forward the theory that War of the Worlds becomes popular again when an empirical force fears its own tools being turned against it. I would out forward that when America was faced with asymmetrical warfare, including acts of terror, our media produces films like 30 Days of Night.

I believe this theme will come up again as we look through Chapter One, of this era of mainstream bloodshed. We will be returning to the idea of terror from the War on Terror, to looks into counter-culture as well. For this strange decade of horror, we have yet to bite in too deeply. And the most brutal is yet to come...