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