Vampire film gives audience a foretaste

It took Hollywood awhile to learn exactly how to handle the modern horror film fan, but now studios and filmmakers know you have to win fans over early to make a big splatter at the box office. And you also have to make your film stand out, because the amount of competition has gotten, well, scary.

Take the vampire flick “30 Days of Night” from Sony’s Columbia Pictures and Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures, which opens Friday. The movie, directed by David Slade (“Hard Candy”) and starring Josh Hartnett and Melissa George, centers on an Alaskan outpost called Barrow, where winter brings a month of darkness -- a fact that inspires a vampire convention that quickly turns into a grisly smorgasbord in the snow.

The movie is based on a comic book by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith that started with a just a few thousand copies printed but became a cult sensation. With the film due, the story and its later companion pieces have been repackaged in a dizzying variety -- there’s even a $75 hardcover version of the original story arc with a slipcase. “It’s amazing where this story has gone,” said Niles, who got the notion when he saw a newspaper item on the weeks without sunlight in Alaska.

The film has been intensely advertised -- maybe you’ve seen the commercials, online ads and posters. They have lots of red. Those traditional methods to catch an eye are fine for casual fans, but the makers of “30 Days” also want to win over the more intense devotees of the genre whose Internet chatter can push an opening-weekend surge, which catches the eye of other moviegoers.

To do so, Raimi’s Ghost House created a prequel project that has been online since mid-September. The seventh and final Web episode of “30 Days of Night: Blood Trails” is due to go up this week on Fearnet.com. “Blood Trails” tells a story that leads to the Alaska massacre; Niles was creative consultant on the episodes (which are three to five minutes long), and Victor Garcia directed from a script by Ben Ketai.

The word from the horror fan base on the Slade film is largely glowing, and there’s no doubt the audience will show up if it is energized. And, Niles said, “30 Days” might just bring new lifeblood to the vampire movie, a tradition that traces to the 1922 masterpiece “Nosferatu” but hasn’t always lived up to its undead potential: “Oddly, there haven’t been that many truly scary vampire movies. We all want to see one. And I think this is it.”

-- Geoff Boucher