You may not believe there's any more blood to suck from the shriveled corpse of the vampire movie, but you'd be wrong.
"30 Days of Night" finds a way, moving the setting north of the Arctic circle to Point Barrow, Alaska, where marauding vampires migrate to take advantage of a full month of midwinter darkness.
As the date for nightfall approaches, the Point Barrow police chief (Josh Hartnett) investigates a series of puzzling crimes - someone has stolen and burned all cell phones, murdered all the sled dogs and disabled the emergency helicopter.
These are not, of course, random events - the actions are taken to further isolate the isolated Alaskans when the sun sets and the vampire horde may commence to feed, without interruption, on the trapped inhabitants.
What follows is a gory siege movie, pitting tough-minded, survivalist Alaskans against the pasty-faced, European, highly agile (like Danny Boyle zombies) creatures of the night.
A highlight features a particularly independent Alaskan going after the vampires with a snow-carving machine, several shotguns, lighter fluid and a case of dynamite.
The level of violence in "30 days" is extreme and hair-raising. As humans hunker down and hide, hoping to outlast the vampires, the invaders conceive various treacherous, ruthless schemes to draw them out - including sending a dazed child down the middle of the street as bait.
The violence is not, on the other hand, gratuitous. The spectacular gore (this movie is not for all tastes) drives home the movie's main theme - faced with an enemy that's completely ruthless and depraved, what must you do, what must you prepare to become?
Most of our post-9/11 movies, outside of maybe "300" (also based on a graphic novel) have warned against the idea that matching the violent commitment of a depraved opponent is a good idea.
"30 Days of Night," on the other hand, shows the winnowed band of survivors gradually concluding that the only way to defeat or outlast the vampires is by being just as brutally determined to win.
This after pointedly discarding a defensive strategy - "this place is strong, maybe we can outlast them," says one terrified human.
This results in more dead Alaskans, until one of the survivors finally finds a way to express what is on the movie's mind:
"We can't fight them the way that we are."
The script finds a way to merge this sentiment with the particular mythology of the vampire/zombie movie for an ending that's as inventive as the movie's Arctic-circle premise. *
Produced by Sam Raimi, Robert G. Tapert, directed by David Slade, written by Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie, Brian Nelson, music by Brian Reitzell, distributed by Columbia Pictures.