- Directed by David Slade
- Written by Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie, Brian Nelson
- Stars Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 53 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndk5vySgz6Y
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Vampires don’t have to worry about sunlight if the sun never rises, right? That’s the basic premise here, and it’s a pretty good one. Way up North in winter, the sun sets and stays down. The vampires are dangerous and creepy, the effects are great, the acting is good. This one is a winner that we enjoyed just as much on our second watching.
Synopsis
We see that Barrow Alaska is surrounded by eighty miles of barren wilderness, cut off every winter for thirty days of night. There’s a huge, dark ship just off the coast, apparently frozen in the ice. A very cold-looking man trudges through the snowy hills until he sees the town in the distance. It is now the last day of sun.
Eben Oleson finds a pit full of cell phones out in the snow; they’ve been burned. What could that be all about? They watch the last sunset for nearly a month. Eben is the sheriff. They change the population sign to read “Population 152.”
Eben and his wife Stella are separating, and she’s waiting for the last flight out. A lot of people can’t stand a month in the dark, so they’re all leaving town. Meanwhile, across town. someone kills all the sled dogs. Stella’s truck hits some road equipment, and she has to call Eben for help. Eben sends Deputy Billy to go help her while he checks out the dead dogs. Stella misses the plane and is now trapped in Barrow for a month.
Eben gets called to the utilidor for a vandalism problem. They have a huge trash grinder, and they found a bunch of helicopter parts in it. Someone destroyed the town’s only copter. The power goes off at the town’s cell and radio tower, and something kills the attendant rather viciously. All the Internet and phones go out shortly after that.
There’s a weird stranger at the town diner, and he wants to eat raw hamburger. Eben arrests the guy with Stella’s help. He immediately suspects the stranger is behind all the vandalism. The stranger seems to think something’s coming. “So helpless against what’s coming…” Power goes off all over town.
Eben goes to the cell tower and finds Gus’s head. Something kills John and Ally, who lost their dogs earlier. Eben and Stella soon realize that the town is under an attack of some kind; this is confirmed when someone jumps on the roof of the car when they get back to town.
We finally see the attackers; it’s a clan of vampires, all speaking a foreign language. They say to remember to separate all heads from bodies. There’s a couple of vampires who appear to be leaders, but Marlowe appears to be the main boss. “We should have come here ages ago,” he says.
A group of people take shelter in the diner. Eben’s brother Jake is with them. It’s soon open season on humans in the town as the vampires play without anything to stop them. Eben sends the survivors to go hide in an abandoned home’s attic while he and Stela go after bear traps. Several vampires attack their car, and they finally get a look at what’s been killing them. Jake suggests that they’re vampires, but that’s impossible, right?
Pretty much everyone is now hiding in the attic, including an old man with dementia. The vampires are moving from house to house. The group makes plans to move to the utilidor where they can last the month. They hear a woman screaming for help outside, but they realize that she’s bait.
Eben finds John, whose dogs were killed. He’d been attacked, but they didn’t take his head, so he’s one of them now. Eben hacks his head off with an ax. Back at the house, the old dementia-man starts causing trouble and escapes outside. That goes about like you’d expect.
On day 18, a snowstorm kicks in, so they use that cover to move. They stop at the general store and kill a little girl vampire. Stella figures out that they don’t like sunlight, and she knows where there are some grow lamps.
Eben runs to Grandma’s house and starts the generator. He gets the grow lights ready as the vampires approach. Meanwhile, the other humans head to the police station. The vampires are suspicious that it’s a trap, but one of them charges in and is burned by the lights. They cut off the generator, so that’s the end of that plan.
Beau decides it’s his turn next, and he gets in a trencher and kills a bunch of the vampires with his shotgun and then several more as he blows himself up with dynamite.
Day 27 arrives, and they’re still hiding in the police station. They see a signal across the street; they think Billy is still alive. He killed his own wife and kids so they wouldn’t be killed by the vampires but then couldn’t kill himself. When they get back to the police station, everyone is gone, so they try to head to the utilidor.
The interior of the utilidor is a big maze of tunnels and passages. A vampire attacks Billy and Eben, but he ends up in the grinding machine. Stella is trapped hiding under a car outside as the vampires surround her. Eben notices that the streets are filling with oil; the vampires have burst the pipeline to destroy the town and all evidence of their existence.
In desperation, Eben injects himself with vampire blood, hoping to fight the monsters as one of them. As he starts to turn, he walks to where the others are waiting. He and Marlowe fight one-on-one as the others watch. Marlowe loses badly. As the sun begins to come up, the others leave.
Eben and Stella then sit and watch the sunrise. Eben turns to dust.
Commentary
Isolation is often a good part of horror films, and this one nailed that in the first ten minutes. The sets and the town really make the film; people do live in places like this, but it’s definitely not easy or always safe.
The mostly non-vocal screaming of the vampires and the fact that they don’t speak English helps keep the monsters from being at all sympathetic. They are very animalistic and don’t seem like they could ever live in civilization. They are almost pure beast, but they are very smart. And also really messy eaters.
This is absolutely one of the best recent vampire films.