30 Days of Night Special Screening
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[Photo: David Slade, Rob Tappert, Steve Niles, and moderator Scott Mantz (c) Enzo Giobbe]
Steve Niles, author of the IDW graphic novel 30 Days of Night pitched his idea for the movie to producer Rob Tappert (and Ghost House Pictures partner Sam Raimi) as "the anti-Buffy."
And he was sure right. I'm not allowed to officially review the film just yet, but having seen it last night at a special press screening and Q & A event on the Sony Pictures lot, I will say that there's not a snarky cheerleader in sight.
In fact 30 Days of Night, directed with true menace by David Slade (Hard Candy), does something a vampire movie has not accomplished in years: It makes the mythical monsters scary again.
The premise remains close to the comic book created by Niles and artist Ben Templesmith: Every year, the sun retreats from the Alaskan town of Barrow for 30 long days and nights. This enduring darkness is discovered by a band of rogue vampires who plan on devouring the people and leaving their isolated town a lifeless ruin by sunup. But they are met with resistance by residents led by husband-and-wife sheriffs Eben (Josh Hartnett, in the most compelling performance of his career) and Stella (Melissa George, who's proving she can play almost any kind of role).
Slade said that although Bela Lugosi is referenced in the movie's dialogue, in his estimation the gold standard for cinematic vampires is Max Schreck (Nosferatu) — and now, hopefully, Danny Huston as Marlow, the leader of the shark-toothed pack. Slade said Marlow developed a life of his own as the script progressed. "[Slade] fought for Danny Huston eight months through rejection, from the studio saying no to Danny saying no to finally getting Danny to sign on at the very last minute," added Tappert.
It was important that Marlow and his henchmen be nihilistic (or "Niles-listic", as the case may be) and quite different from the humans they once were (supposedly; their back story is appropriately ambiguous). In a departure from the novel, these bloodsuckers speak their own language — it's subtitled, and it was developed by Slade, actor Danny Huston, and a linguist. Slade says the language was based on guttural sounds characteristic of "hunger and hatred".
But it's not just about "rampant nihilism," Slade explained. "Marlow is actually someone with great burden, great responsibility and a hatred for humanity. Maybe jealousy. He has a great hatred for God, which I like. One of my favorite lines is when he kind of looks around and says, 'No God.' You want to ask somebody about God? Talk to the undead." But deity devotion isn't all bad… in fact, Slade says Huston is "a god!"
Another standout character in the movie is The Stranger, played by Ben Foster. Slade met Foster a couple of years ago through his Hard Candy lead Ellen Page (she costarred with Foster in X-Men: The Last Stand), and quickly learned that Foster had "a vampire fetish," and wanted to play a monster in 30 Days of Night. Instead, he got a "Renfield" style part. "I just got to know him socially and I saw this kind of Renfield character in him, weirdly, long before we were at the casting stage. And six months before we were making offers I said, 'I really want you to do this film'," Slade revealed.
"As it turns out, he's mad about vampires. He was like, 'Yeah, I've got to do that!' Only I think he was expecting to be a vampire. He wanted to be a vampire. And I said, 'But you can't be a vampire.' [laughter]... He was brilliant from the word go. Ben, I think, carries the first half of the film." Foster dons a Cajun accent for his role of The Stranger, and it's really perfectly, um, strange, in the snowy setting.
Speaking of strange things, Slade said that the two months' worth of night shoots started playing with everyone's minds ("Grips, most notably, go crazy," he chuckled), and complicating matters even more were the actors' beards, which had to be matched from day-to-day in that 30 days period even though the movie was, as the great majority are, filmed out of sequence.
After the Q & A, we genre journalists joined the filmmakers in a special Dark Dining Experience and left the lot full and frightened! The very scary 30 Days of Night opens October 19, 2007.
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by Staci Layne Wilson