The 30 Days of Night helmer tells David Grove how to go about making a scary vampire flick...

Were you a fan of the 30 Days of Night comic book series before you became involved with the film project?

I remember picking up the first issue of the series at a newsstand in Los Angeles sometime in 2002. This was before Hard Candy, so I wasn’t even thinking about directing 30 Days of Night as a feature film. I was just a fan.

What did you like about the story?

When I first opened the comic book, I was thinking that it was going to be another vampire story, feeling that vampires have become very stale, very much a horror cliché. That’s what’s great about the comic books. They hook you on the first page, thanks to Steve Niles’s writing and Ben Templesmith’s drawings.

We see Barrow, Alaska, which is completely isolated from the rest of the world, so cold and desolate. Then the town is covered in darkness for a month, which is what happens in that part of the world, and then the vampires appear and they scared me. I hadn’t been scared by vampires since I was a little kid, but these vampires are scary because they defy all of the misconceptions we’ve had of vampires all of these years.

They’re not elegant vampires, like the vampires in the Anne Rice books. They’re foul, messy vampires who just want to feast on humans. I just thought that the atmosphere, the vampires, the creepy visual look, and the original approach to the genre all made for a great story.

How did you get involved with the film project?

In 2003, Sam Raimi’s production company, Ghost House, got the rights to the comic books, as I was working on Hard Candy. A lot of people thought Sam would direct 30 Days of Night, but he was in the middle of doing the Spider-Man films so he couldn’t do it, even though he loves the comic books so much.

What happened was that an executive at the studio, Sony, saw Hard Candy at the Sundance Film Festival and recommended me to Sam and his producing partner, Robert Tapert. I had a meeting with Robert and Sam and I talked about my vision for the material, and how I wanted the film to be very faithful to the graphic novel. We hit it off really well and I got the job.

Would you say that the vampires in your film look exactly like they did in the comic books?

Yes, very much so. They’re ugly and messy. Their faces are covered in blood and their teeth are ragged and huge. The film is violent. We shot the film in Auckland, New Zealand, so we were able to use Weta, Peter Jackson’s FX company, to do the film’s effects. The film is very violent. There’s lots of decapitations, stuff like that.

In the story - and this is another thing I liked about the comic books in terms of demystifying the vampire - the only way to kill the vampires is to totally dismember them and slice them to pieces. You can’t kill them smoothly, or just kill them with a wooden stake. You have to completely destroy them. All of the violence and gore in the film, as well as the visual look, is in the name of being faithful to Ben Templesmith’s great artwork. We’re not making Sin City here in terms of turning the movie into a comic book, but we’re being as faithful as possible.

How do you make a scary vampire film nowadays?

It’s really hard, like I said, because vampires don’t really seem that frightening anymore. So we’re lucky that 30 Days of Night is such great source material. What I like about the story is that it totally reinvents vampires and demystifies the genre. These vampires are real and they’re not hiding behind all of the myths that have existed for all of these centuries. What happens in the movie is that the vampires play upon the fact that nobody believes in them, and they cover their tracks, make it look like something else. Barrow is just the next stop.

We establish a history and mythology for our vampires and because we don’t follow the rules of what vampires are supposed to be, we could make them into anything we wanted them to be. We want to make vampires frightening again. We’re not romanticising our vampires like the other films do, and we’re not making fun of them like you see in stuff like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The vampires in the film see the humans as cattle, plain and simple. They see you, they want to eat you, tear you apart, just like that.

The vampires have black eyes, shark teeth, they look terrifying. The leader of the vampires is Marlow, played wonderfully by Danny Huston, and he’s a terrifying vampire villain. I spoke to Sam about the film and he told me he thought that Danny Huston’s work in the film is one of the great vampire performances he’s ever seen.

What was it like shooting in Auckland, New Zealand, and using it as a double for Barrow, Alaska?

It’s a beautiful location and a perfect match for the Alaskan setting in terms of the snowy climate and the dark skies. We also needed to be close to Weta for the effects work, so it was perfect. There’s mountains here and lots of great snow fields that look great on film. It definitely has that Alaskan feel. We also did a lot of filming on stages where we used fake snow.

The setting is key to the story, the atmosphere, because Barrow, Alaska, is on the edge of the world, totally isolated, which makes it the perfect target for the vampires. It’s also freezing cold so you could freeze to death just going outside, much less being eaten by the vampires. There’s no food, no help, no power. The tension builds and builds throughout the film.

We shot for 50 days, which is a very long shoot, and practically all of the shooting was done at night which is very difficult, but good because I think it put us all in the mood of the kind of story we’re telling.

30 Days of Night is out now on DVD (region 1 & 2).