Josh Hartnett pretty much had given up on scary movies.
Even though the horror hits “The Faculty” and “Halloween H20” had helped establish the actor’s career early on, Hartnett more recently had steered toward artier movies such as “Lucky Number Slevin” and “Resurrecting the Champ.” Then Hartnett met David Slade.
The British video and commercial director had arrived in Hollywood with a clatter: Even though critics were split over his 2005 Sundance sensation, “Hard Candy,” studios were eager to engage the maker of the unsettling low-budget drama about a pedophile and his would-be victim. The movie that came together was “30 Days of Night,” a $30-million vampires-in-Alaska story adapted from the popular three-book graphic novels by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith. The film opens nationwide today.
Slade visited Hartnett in Minnesota, where he lives. They met in a combination bar/bowling alley, and as they left, Slade took a few photos.
The director later e-mailed them to Hartnett after altering the images.
“I didn’t even recognize the place,” Hartnett says. “It looked haunted.”
Slade’s photo trickery persuaded Hartnett to return to gore, and the director’s visual manipulations also would prove central to his adaptation of Niles and Templesmith’s work.
“David’s whole pitch was he wanted to go back to the core graphic novel,” says “30 Days of Night” producer Rob Tapert. “He felt very strongly that there was a real clean story within the graphic novel.” Or as clean as a pack of bloodthirsty vampires descending on an Alaska town can be.
Like the graphic novel, the movie unfolds in Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States. For a month every winter, the sun never rises, pitching the small working-class city into darkness.
Just as the sun is setting for the last time, a number of disquieting things start happening: Cellphones vanish, a helicopter is sabotaged, the power fails and all the town’s dogs are slaughtered. There’s not even e-mail! The town’s several hundred residents, it seems, are stuck. But not quite alone.
Stopping into Barrow for a quick bite is a band of voracious vampires, led by a particularly nihilistic guy named Marlow (“The Constant Gardener’s” Danny Huston). It falls to Sheriff Eben Oleson (Hartnett) and his ex-wife, Stella (“Turista’s” Melissa George), to keep the town from being completely overrun by the bloodsuckers.
“I wanted to make a scary movie,” Slade says, “but the idea was not to make a fantasy. So you have to set it in reality as clearly as possible.”
Hartnett’s Oleson, for example, is hardly a Rambo on a mission.
“He actually makes a lot of mistakes,” Slade says.
Slade and producer Tapert know the film’s real challenge is proving to audiences it’s not just another clone trying to cash in on the “Saw”-spawned fright flicks. “The same goes for any genre – it gets overused, and it’s no longer fresh and original,” Tapert says.
