Almost anyone with a penchant for horror’s bloodsucking subset will surely be in agreement that David Slade’s 30 Days of Night comfortably ranks as one of the 21st Century’s finest vampire movies, with the cult favorite showing impressive staying power to retain its place near the top of the fanged totem pole.
However, there wasn’t really any need for the comic book adaptation to become a sprawling multimedia saga, but that’s not how the industry works. No form of filmmaking on the planet is franchised or run into the ground more regularly than horror, but even the hardiest of supporters can’t stomach the existence of follow-up 30 Days of Night: Dark Days.
The opening installment is a finely-crafted, intensely atmospheric, and blood-spattered delight with a killer concept, but the fact a Reddit thread gathering steam is actively urging people not to waste their time on Dark Days neatly sums up how drastically the quality dipped between chapters.
Kiele Sanchez steps in for Melissa George as Stella Oleson, with the recently-widowed scourge of the undead having unsurprisingly left Alaska behind to build a new life in Los Angeles. Of course, that doesn’t mean she’s left her days of dealing with vampires behind, plunging her into a brand new battle for her life alongside a ragtag group of cohorts.
Unwatchable might be a stretch, but at the very least it’s inarguable that 30 Days of Night: Dark Days is a colossal step down from its predecessor, and we won’t even mention the two episodic prequels for the sake of our own sanity.
