In a vampire slasher about the thirty days a year that Alaska is abandoned by light, teenage girl-idol and perfect son-in-law Josh Hartnett would not be the first you expect as the main actor. In the comic adaptation that carries the oxymoron 30 Days of Night as its title, this is exactly what you get. Director David Slade, known from the disturbing psychological thriller Hard Candy, has made this movie into a very improbable story. Even when I keep in mind that this is an adaptation, I can’t regard the manner in which  the blood shedding in this film takes place as plausible.

In a small village that is preparing for the withdrawal of light for the next thirty days, Hartnett is the sheriff. Boredom and alcoholism are the two most likely problems that he will have to be dealing with. He thinks. This changes when a stranger appears with the message that ‘they’ are coming. ‘They’ is a group of vampires that is planning to drink themselves full with the red liquid we call blood for the next thirty days. Naturally, the sheriff will do anything to prevent this from happening.

The film looks flashy, most of the time too flashy. The digital snow irritates me to no end, just like the filthy vampires. They are hungry all the time and want more and more blood, but they do not even wipe the blood off their faces, so they keep running around with dried red! blood on their snouts, while they let flow away gallons of blood in the snow because of their highly careless way of killing. It would seem to me that creatures that fond of blood would kill their victims with as little loss of blood as possible, and would certainly clean their covered-with-blood faces.