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Cinema Basement Vampire Spectacular: 30 Days of Night

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman I don’t know why I love this movie. 30 Days of Night is not a film to wax poetic about and its barely a movie that revels in being a B-movie. It is an odd artifact of a different time in Hollywood Studio filmmaking like most things from the 2000’s but it is far from a deeply memorable film but yet it is a movie I think of often. When we thought about talking Vampire films it was the first film I thought of yet I don’t speak of it as masterpiece. So why is that? Well I think 30 Days of Night was the last time for decades I saw vampires as being scary before the great vampire romance that made up the end of the 2000’s 30 Days of Night has one of the best premises in history. Alaska has 30 days of night and vampires come and destroy a town in what become a human all you can eat 24-hour buffet. There is no romance. There is no well spoken dialog. It is vampires as a force of nature, as an absolute predator and as something that cannot be stopped. They barely look human. They move like rabid animals. They speak in a tongue beyond human language and they revel in being straight up evil. To a young Azzam this is how he had always seen Vampires. Not as some sexy demons but as straight up monsters that are designed to kill you quickly. They are an apex predator awaiting their time to strike. They don’t care about lulling you into a sense of security then disarming you with charm. They are super beasts and this movie saw it the same way. There is a one-er in this film that shows the town engulfed in vampires violently assaulting towns people in the wake of darkness. That is how vampire cinema should be. No frills, just violence. Now this movie has faded with time. Its director a journeyman now. Its lead actor now a strange curio of a time since past and its leading woman a cardboard cut out of someone who could be. Yet to me it is the last time vampires would be monsters. Twilight would end that and the rise of sexy vampires would come again after interview with a vampire had faded from memory. If you take anything from this remember, vampires are evil.

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