Even More Vampires!

Readings in the Genre - Week 5 - 30 Days of Night

The Arctic Circle, not exactly the sort of place I would normally place a vampire story, but then Vampire stories have proven to be so flexible that you can do almost anything you want with them.  As a concept, the idea of using the extremely long periods of darkness of the Arctic Circle for a story about Vampires actually makes awesome sense.  So many of their traditional weaknesses revolve around sunlight that using that setting makes for a very interesting motif especially when you know a bit about astronomy and just how the day/night cycle actually works in those locals.

I’m not sure that the story actually ever points this out, but the opposite of the 30 Days of Night is also true with such a location… Daylight reigns for just as long as night and for several months approaching both extremes darkness and light are extremely short.  Say the day before the last day of daylight you might have sunlight for ten or fifteen minutes?  If we apply typical ideas about vampires to such an environment you realize that maybe that 30 Days of Sun is just as important to the story because it would suggest a gorging – hibernation pattern to the vampires cause they can’t feed when the sun is out.  It makes an excellent setting for this sort of ‘wave of attacks’ that could almost be a yearly event if you thought about it.

The story uses a large number of pseudo-scientific concepts in its portrayal of vampirism as well, and there’s a huge amount of influences I can see from other works… considering that the story is done in as a comic book format initially I’m not surprised by clear influences from manga and anime portrayals of vampires.  At the same time the shark like mass of teeth that the vampires are portrayed as having seems to harken back to the first images of vampires in movies from the story Nosferatu.  At the same time it uses a bunch of abilities that are more modern in their appearance in the mythology… superior strength, speed, dexterity, and being almost totally impossible to kill (Grenades anyone?).

Niles has taken the vampires who traditionally are a ‘monster’ that haunts villages using charisma and charm to obtain blood and allies and made them a truly monstrous creature.  They’re a nightmarish and fiendish creature that is much more of a physically frightening and disturbing threat then old Count Dracula.  It’s very hard to believe that these creatures have the same name in our mythology considering just how different they really are.