I love vampire films, always have. Right from way back when, watching the old hammer horror films running on BBC2 in the school holiday afternoons, there’s always been something about these creatures that can’t ever see daylight with their addiction to life-giving blood which has stirred something deep inside me.

And whether we make them mindless killing machines or immortal philosophers, they seem ripe for new and ever-more inventive interpretations, born once, born twice and returning yet again, like Christopher Lee’s Dracula always rising from their cinematic ashes to (hopefully not) suck once more.

I’ve not read the graphic novel series, so I can’t say how well this informed the vampires that appear on screen in 30 Days of Night, but either way I was amazed by them. You don’t get to actually see the vampires until a while into it, at least not for long enough to get a good look at them anyway, as the film spends a good deal of time building the atmosphere and suspense.

But when they do arrive, there is something wonderfully other-worldly about them. Their clawed hands and distorted faces are inhuman and more than a little feral, as if there is something truly monstrous hiding somewhere behind those dark eyes. When excited or in pain, they emit a high-pitched and alien-sounding cry and, at times, this act has the air of a wolf beckoning the rest of the pack. Even their movements are at some level just plain wrong – one moment lazy, then suddenly the jerky and direct mannerisms of a prey bird which has just caught a whiff of lunch.

And better than this, they (well, only really the leader, Marlow) appear to have their own ancient language, seeming able only to speak a little English – and slowly, brutally, as if they are really not suited to doing so. Subtitles are provided, yet this ancient language is so well done that you still feel you are not getting the whole meaning of what is being said.

But 30 Days of Night is not really all about the vampires. At the end of the day, it’s a fairly standard horror film with a slightly unusual setting. When seen from that point of view, what we get are a bunch of people (a slightly flawed hero, a ballsy heroine, a teenage kid, the town outcast… not exactly ground-breaking character archetypes) trapped somewhere remote and hunted by monsters. Well, how many times have we seen that one before?

If I could be marking the film on just the vampires, we’d have to be talking at least a 9/10, but as a horror film it still stands up okay, with the right mix of comedy and tragedy and suspense in bucket loads. 30 Days of Night takes time to build up its atmosphere and tension and seems to understand about how much we do/don’t need to care about the characters in a horror flick. All in all, not so bad.

7/10

I was stood in a sandwich bar the other day, waiting for my order. Behind me a man was instructing one of the shop staff about what he wanted in his salad box. When he started speaking I turned around, the way we all often do – unthinkingly, with our mind mostly somewhere far away. The man’s voice was harsh-sounding and his appearance intimidating. Though an inch or two shorter than me, he was massively built with a neck that could have supported a mighty oak and that regulation skinhead haircut which the media has informed us we should associate with football hooligans and right wing, bovver-booted neo-Nazis.
I didn’t like him. Give us a dark alley and him a long Saturday filled with pint after pint of wife-beater, and just the threat of boredom would give him enough of a reason to make me into another statistic. But then I noticed something.
It was a tiny gesture, but it changed my opinion of him in a moment.
He licked his lips. Watching the shop guy move from one Tupperware container to another filling up his order, the man licked his lips. He was imagining how it would taste, maybe how it would feel as it slid down into his hungry stomach. I could relate; I had been having similar thoughts about the big, fat sandwich that was soon to be heading my way. And in that moment his ugly mug was a picture of beauty. Really, I say this without any hint of irony and in complete confidence of my own orientations: the man was beautiful.
I felt ashamed about having judged him so harshly and so quickly, about only seeing a monster when I should know that not only are we all complicated beings capable of a range of emotional extremes, positive and negative, but that appearances are deceptive – not every bad guy has a hooked nose, a bald head and a maniacal laugh. And… you know, vice versa.
Not that any of this necessarily excludes the possibility of Saturday night, the alley and wishes that I had stuck with karate when I was fifteen. But nonetheless I was troubled about our violent world as I headed back to work. What was it about life in our society that had helped to make me automatically so judgemental towards this guy? I guessed at least part of it was the overwhelming evidence that, time after time, we human beings visit horrific pain, death and torture upon one another, often seemingly for no other reason than the apparent pleasure of doing so. ‘Why?’ I asked myself again. And my thinking sort of went like this:

What’s wrong with us?

Why can such empathetic animals as we are so often revel in causing each other pain and suffering? Wars are fought all over the world for reasons which, if not condonable, can in some way be understood… Protecting what you have, taking someone else’s land, revenge, disagreements over the ownership of God. Well, maybe I can’t understand the last one so much. But what I certainly don’t get is the Saturday night punch up down the pub, the finding some poor guy who only wants to mind his own business and kicking him until he goes squishy.
British society clothes, feeds and houses most of us. The vast majority of people will have the chance to fall in love, to reproduce if they want to. So where is the need to fight, unless there is some dark and violent evil within us which requires satisfaction?

Did we grow up too fast?

Or maybe we all could do with recognising the monster within ourselves, the primal animal held in check by our laws, our three-piece suits and our suburban living. The adrenaline monster left unsatisfied by pixel violence or sporting competition is that same monster which did its fair part in ensuring our survival when we competed with all the other animals for the right to exist, and now it finds itself left out in the cold while its goody-two-shoes brother ‘superior brain capacity’ continues to be celebrated and gets to play with all the best toys.

We should be better than this.

‘But recognising our flaws is only ever half the battle,’ I thought to myself as I reached around in my pocket for my work keys.
So there I was struggling with a door handle, a Yale lock and arms full of goodies while being possessed of just the two hands; something had to give and, somewhat typically, it was the sandwich which flew from my grasp and splayed itself all over the filthy cobbles. Frustration boiled over within me and I felt my skin becoming like a claustrophobia-inducing barrier as anger rose inside, my muscles tensing up and suddenly screaming for action.
And I’ll tell you this: I really felt like hitting something at that moment. But I didn’t.

This is what every disaster / monster movie should be.

They’ve really cottoned onto something here: the idea that a monster movie could have a greater impact when taken away from the grander scale and made more personal, more relevant to the individual. And nothing says this better than a first person point of view.

That’s the gimmick – a (moderately) big-budget movie shot to look as if it was made on a home video camera. Authenticity. And just for that sort of bravery I would have been prepared to give them a big thumbs up. Yet this isn’t just a good idea, it’s a good idea done incredibly, incredibly well.

The device of a recovered video tape is used superbly well throughout. A mostly taped-over piece of footage reveals a previous fling between two of the characters at the beginning of the film, and returns briefly at poignant moments throughout. What quickly becomes apparent is that Cloverfield really wants you to care about its characters. And, through the lens of over-enthusiastic video maker, Hud, we get a sometimes secretly-filmed insight into the lives and relationships of our characters as a going-away party is held for one of their number.

This is important: they really spend time involving you in these people’s world, there’s no “Right, now that’s done – so where’s the monster?” here. I found that wonderful, because by the time the skyscraper-sized proverbial shit hit the fan, I had virtually forgot that I was supposed to be watching a monster movie, and was nearly as shocked as the characters.

From this point on as they race back and forth across New York, the camera work does get decidedly shaky, and there’s no getting round it: if you have a big problem with this sort of thing then Cloverfield could be a difficult film for you to watch. But that said, they have showed some sense and moderation, achieving a balance between authenticity and watchability that The Blair Witch Project never managed.

If I have one criticism (and it’s a small one which I’m sure many people may not share) it’s that the actual quality of the picture is too good. While the camera work says “handicam”, the picture says “expensive high-def”. Evidently this has been done so that their expensive CGI effects aren’t entirely wasted, but nonetheless I did find myself wishing that the picture was just that bit grainy and a little darker. Okay, so we wouldn’t see the big monster in such detail when that moment finally comes, but I think we would be twice as terrified and feel that bit more like we are actually there and that this crazy thing is actually happening.

This aside, Cloverfield is by far the best movie of its kind. A rounded experience that crucially leaves you little wiser about what is going on at the end than you were at the start. If a giant monster came to destroy the world, this is how it would feel.

10/10