30 Days of Night: Page to Screen Pt. 1

In recent years, comic books have become increasingly popular as source material for movies.  Once limited to superhero adventures, new genres are increasingly being translated from newsstand to multiplex, with varying results.  What things have to be considered when turning a comic book or graphic novel into a movie?  To find out, I dissected one of the most popular horror comics ever, 30 Days of Night, and its cinematic counterpart of the same name.

In general, I would consider 30 Days of Night, the movie, made in 2007, to be a fairly faithful adaptation of the IDW comic, which was written by Steve Niles and drawn by Ben Templesmith.  In each, the story begins in Barrow, Alaska on the eve of the annual period during which the sun does not rise for 30 days.  A band of clever vampires has realized that invading Barrow would provide them with a month of unlimited feeding without the hassle of having to sleep during the daylight hours.  General mayhem ensues.  The framework for the story is simple, and it is identical in both comic and movie.

Supposedly, Niles wrote the first draft of the screenplay, so if not perfectly faithful to his own material, we can assume it at least started out close to his original vision.  However, two subsequent screenplay revisions by two different writers (Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson) altered details of the story in ways that remain unknown.  It would be easy to blame them for any shortcomings of the movie, but we can't be sure they were really the ones responsible.

The fundamental concern in translating the comic to a movie must have been that the original comic book version of 30 Days of Night is only three, 22-page issues.  And since many of the pages consist of single panels with no dialogue, a two hour movie needs a lot of original material.  This is where its transition to the big screen fails the most for me.  While both comic and movie span the same length of time (30 days), the movie chooses to break that time into more scenes than the comic does.  The problem is that these scenes are formulaic: our heroes assess the situation, they argue about staying where they are or moving to a different hiding place, Eben (Josh Hartnett) decides to go outside, Stella (Melissa George) joins him, the vampires attack, Eben and Stella return to find something bad has happened.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Individually, some of these scenes are creative, exciting and gory, but one after the other, they become predictable and boring.  Plus, it makes the characters seem less intelligent.  You'd think after the second or third time of doing something, they'd learn not to do the same thing again.  Granted, the structure of the story puts constraints on what can happen between point A and point B; straying too far outside the box could dilute the constant feeling of dread and desperation that the comic conveys so well.  However, this is a problem that I'd hoped the movie would do a better job of overcoming.

Another way to fill time is to add more characters, which 30 Days of Night, the movie, does.  But this is problematic, also.  First of all, wrapped in winter coats, hats and scarves, lurking in the dark or wandering through snow storms, it's hard to recognize anyone.  Second, the purpose of existence for most of the additional characters is simply for them to be killed, so there's not much time to invest in them as characters.  (The movie doesn't try: the first time we even hear some of their names is right before or right after they've been killed.)  Finally, if a few new characters do have a higher purpose, it's only as a device to further the plot.  For example, Helen, Eben's grandmother, exists because she has cancer, she has cancer so she can smoke marijuana, she smokes marijuana so she can grow it at home, and she grows it at home so she can have an ultraviolet light to later test as a vampire deterrent.

Movies use characters to advance their plots all the time; it just seems particularly obvious here.  And speaking of obvious, there's a scene early on that introduces a "muffin cruncher" in the town's power station.  You don't have to be a genius to know that later on, someone or something is going to meet a grisly destruction in its deadly teeth.  Again, this is a common device that movies use.  It's just that in 30 Days of Night, it seems more heavy-handed than usual.  And at its shorter length, the comic avoids such clichés.

Please return tomorrow for part two, where I'll offer a visual comparison of one specific scene from both the comic book and the movie.  And if you like what you're reading, check out my review of the direct-to-DVD sequel, Dark Days over at Downright Creepy...