By Kent M. Beeson
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
One day, when I was eight years old, I was in the family room, reading comic books or drawing or, just as likely, both at the same time, when my dad comes home and drops something next to me. It lands with a papery flap. I look over and immediately a shock hits my body, like being dropped in ice-cold water. It's a magazine,
Famous Monsters of Filmland, and from the cover, something hideous stares back at me -- a deformed kid, bald, burned and bloodied. It's Jason from the first
Friday the 13th, before the hockey mask, when he preferred to lurk at the bottom of lakes in cheap-fright dream sequences. Even though by that time I'd already expressed interest in "monster movies" as I called them, I'd be lying if I said that cover didn't scare me. But I didn't jump or scream or cry. It was more like an internal shiver -- one that still reverberates to this day.
As the 80s progressed, I became both a horror geek and a comic book fan, but these two interests ultimately ran parallel with each other. Film's greatest asset is its immediacy, and big obvious monsters, ones that jump out and yell "boo!", work well because of it. (Case in point: my all-time favorite movie,
Jaws.) But this kind of horror just doesn't translate well to comics, in my experience. Despite their visual nature, the best horror comics I've read owe more to literature than film -- stories that are about mood and the subtle transformations of perception. I can only think of three that worked for me. There was a
Swamp Thing story about a town of vampires (who slept in pinball machines!) that gave me chills; yet it drew a lot of power, not from the vampires themselves, but from the empty, dead town and the fear and the paranoia of loved ones changing into something else. Daniel Clowes'
Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is one of the most nightmarish and disturbing sustained comic stories I've ever read, and quite possibly more effective than any given David Lynch film. And then there was the eighteen issue run of DC's
Wasteland, by John Ostrander and the late, great Del Close. An anthology comic that always featured three stories (and the cover, which usually counted as a one-panel fourth),
Wasteland remains my gold standard for horror comics: consistently disquieting, sense-disrupting, and darkly funny. "R.ab", "This Time We Win", "Dissecting Mr. Fleming" -- if you remember
Wasteland, the recitation of the titles is all you need to shudder.
I think the horror I find worthy, in literature or comics, are stories where the horror is based on moral choices the characters make. (I'm still susceptible to the adrenaline-pumping horror film, though, whether it's Zack Snyder's
Dawn of the Dead remake or Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's brilliant
28 Weeks Later or the criminally unreleased
[REC].) So it was with trepidation that I cracked open
30 Days of Night, the vampire series created by writer Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith. Vampires, more often than not, are big and obvious. But, I said to myself,
30DoN is a cottage industry, with a shelf full of spin-offs (some by other writers and artists), novelizations, a feature film and as far as I know, Underoos and a pregnancy test. Surely there was something there that captured readers' imaginations, something that justified its continually expanding vampire universe.
Reading the first three books in the series was a reality check for my own naiveté. While I've read that the median age for comic book readers has advanced to the 30s, you wouldn't know it from this simple-minded splatterpunk, an excuse to set up diorama figurines in place of actual characters, and knock them down as bloodily as possible. The first volume,
30 Days of Night, is the worst, a potentially interesting premise (a horde of vampires unleashed on a town without sunlight) wasted from lack of follow-through, reflected in its measly three-issue length. (The most interesting part of the premise -- day to day survival -- is reduced to a series of captions.)
Dark Days, the second book, picks up sometime later and follows town survivor-now-badass vampire hunter Stella Olemaun on her quest to bring the vampires to light. (How do we know she's a badass? She wears sunglasses.) It's a better story, if only because it's longer, giving it some breathing room, but it's undone by a convoluted plot and Templesmith's increasingly incoherent visuals. (Seriously. There are moments when I can't tell what's going on.) The last book I read,
Return to Barrow, is probably the best of the lot, with a much stronger narrative (the vampires lay siege to Barrow, but this time the townsfolk are ready for them), with clearer action (Templesmith's art gets a bit cartoony, which actually helps) and,
quelle surprise, characters worth caring about. Yet it ends on a shockingly sentimental note, one that reverses the bitter ending of the previous story and throws into question how much thought Niles has put into his vampire mythology.
I think I get what Niles and Templesmith are trying to do: a dose of pure shock value, a kind of no-holds-barred blast of pure gore and violence. On a very basic level it works, thanks to Templesmith. I'm not a big fan of his art (at least as seen here) -- his human characters can go off-model and all Francis Bacony at the turn of a page -- but it's definitely distinctive, and pictures of black-eyed vampires with giant fanged mouths will always have a certain primal frisson. The problem is that those moments don't work without the necessary emotional set-up. It's just empty posturing.
Clearly, though, there's an audience for this kind of thing, which makes me wonder how they reacted to director David Slade's adaptation of the first volume, or if they even showed up. With almost two hours to fill, the writers (Niles, along with Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson) are forced to expand the story with such niceties as character development, rising dramatic tension and coherent action. The Olemauns, instead of being a tight law enforcement team, are now splitting up. There's a guy who doesn't like Sheriff Olemaun, but the two are forced to work together against the vampires. There's a kid and a grandmother. The Stranger, the spy who scouts out the town for the vampire's arrival, a character that got about two pages of play in the comic, is sketched out more thoroughly. (Ben Foster, who plays the Stranger, actually gives the character more nuance than I think anyone, Niles and Slade included, expected. You get the full sense of this monster, his point of view, in just a few scenes.) It's all hackneyed, it's true, little tricks of the trade to get the audience empathetic to these characters, but that's the point. It gives us a playing field to relate to before it goes all to hell.
Amazingly, these aren't the major changes to the comic. The biggest, most decisive change is that the film focuses on the terrible things the humans, particularly Josh Hartnett's Sheriff Olemaun, are forced to do to survive this nightmare scenario: kill longtime friends, lest they become bloodsuckers; leave others to die so that they may live; and finally, literally becoming a monster to defeat monsters. (Hartnett is nobody's idea of a great actor, but this could be the best performance he's given. He's never the stoic, badass hero; rather, he registers the pain at every moral breaking point he's forced to cross.) Yes, it's the same ending as the comic (with the same Grand Guignol money shot), but the film takes the time to follow each terrible action, step by step, until the unthinkable becomes the only option. The vampires aren't the enemy, they're merely the catalyst. The real enemy, as always, is us.
Slade's
30 Days of Night isn't going to go down in history as one of the great horror films. The climax, while thematically appropriate, is still weak. The "thirty days" concept, while good marketing, ends up undermining the drama -- it's too long for us to believe these people could survive this onslaught, while at the same time, the stresses of their enforced confinement are dramatized just enough to get marked off a screenwriter's plot checklist. These problems are offset by the remarkably passive vampires, but that just creates more questions this movie can't answer: what are they doing, exactly, for these thirty days? Not hunting for food, certainly; based on the establishing shot of the town, they could raze the whole damn thing in less than a week.
But that's okay. It offers small pleasures and fulfills its modest ambitions. It doesn't wring out the senses. But neither did
Friday the 13th, which I somehow got my dad to take me to. (Why shouldn't he have? He started the whole thing!) Maybe some kid will catch
30 Days of Night on cable, or an older brother's DVD, and he or she will get that same shiver, that same unquenchable urge to peek past what's known and look into what's dark. I certainly hope so; it's worth it.
Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.
The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008
