After dinner, they went out for a drink. They didn't speak much in the car. Sasha chain-smoked all the way with the window rolled up. At the club, Dan stared at the petrochemical colouring of the counter while the barman complained to them in an automatic tone about his wife. Dan couldn't make out what he was saying over the music, but he gathered that someone was moving out, or some other sob story.
"It's not like I'm some kind of monster,” said the barman, dully.
Behind them, there were shouts as a fight broke out. A girl in an eighties headband head-butted a blonde girl in a knitted orange sweater, then grabbed the back of her head and bounced it off their drinks table with a crack. Sweater-girl collapsed to the floor, shrieking, and the girl with the headband glared around the bar, looking for more trouble.
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A slight shift in the light snapped Dan back to the second-hand shop. Something was silhouetted in the broken window. Dan backed away slowly, behind the corner of a scratched oak cupboard. He watched as the intruder edged into the shop.
It was a middle-aged man, balding and overweight, and it was searching through the shop, looking over the shelves. It hadn't seen him. Dan's arms prickled. He knew the man was alive, but he couldn't see it. It looked dead. It felt dead. Dan's chest trembled, fighting the urge to run.
Years ago, when Dan was a teenager, his father had gone into their spare room one evening, with no warning, and shot himself. Dan never found out why, and it gnawed at him ever since. He visited the room months later. It had been cleaned professionally. There were lace curtains on the window, a new bed-sheet and a jar of pencils on the desk. But no rationalisation could stop the horror. The sheer normality of the room crushed him with fear.
Looking at the fat man was like being back in that room. The man was alive. He was human. He had thinning hair and a crumpled shirt, and he filled Dan with dread. He made Dan want to run, or scream, or fight. He was a terrible threat, all the worse for being normal.
The fat man spotted a bronze poker on a stand behind a row of rocking-chairs. He pulled it out quietly, and passed it from hand to hand. And his eyes met Dan's.
Dan fought his impulses, and forced himself out of the shadows.
"It's okay,” he said, raising his hands reassuringly. “I won't..."
The man roared, and threw the poker across the room, cracking Dan across the cheek. Dan reeled in shock. He touched the welt with the tips of his fingers, but his mind had gone blank. He looked at the blood on his fingers, then gritted his teeth and charged. The fat man was brain-damaged. It was a zombie. It was trying to kill him.
Dan had been in fights before, after his father died, but even at his most furious, or most drunk, he'd always been fighting someone human. He'd always held back. There was nothing to restrain him any more.
He threw himself at the fat man with all his weight, but it tried to dodge. Dan held on to its shirt-front and fell to the ground, dragging it down on top of him. His head cracked against the tiled floor. The fat man got a couple of blows to his face, but Dan kicked hard and scrambled backwards. He grabbed at a set of free-standing shelves, trying to pull himself up, but they rocked and tipped inwards. Junk showered him: glass picture frames, bowls and an old radio. The top of the shelves arced down and hit the approaching fat man on the shoulder.
Dan half-ran, half-crawled back to the cupboard and grabbed for the fat man's poker, but he lost his grip in the panic and it skittered across the tiles. He heard the man stumbling up behind him, and his legs jolted sideways. He found himself spinning around. He'd been kicked! His left leg bloomed pain. The fat man leered and picked up an aluminium hat-stand, brandishing it like a spear. Dan tried to crawl backwards, and felt the poker under his fingers. But as he lifted it, the fat man stabbed at Dan's guts with the base of the stand, hard. Dan croaked, trying to breathe in. The fat man pushed with all his weight, sliding Dan backwards and pinning him against the cupboard. The poker dropped again. Dan grabbed the stand and pushed back. It shook between them, but the fat man had the advantage of his weight. Dan felt the metal slip, and the sharp legs of the stand cut into his belly. In desperation, he pushed sideways, gashing himself with the stand leg. It slammed into the cupboard. The fat man momentarily lost balance and stumbled forward. Dan grabbed the poker and swung it into the fat man's knees. It wasn't hard enough to bring the man down, but there was a scream, and that gave Dan the time to scramble to his feet.
In the end, it came down to their weapons. The aluminium hat stand was already swinging down at Dan, but it had too much momentum. Dan dodged, and it scraped down his side. And Dan was already swinging the poker up, sharply, into the fat man's jaw. There was a splash of blood and teeth.
Dan spent some time finishing the fat man off. It was easy once the man was down. It was a clinical process of finding the soft points, crushing the smaller bones and severing arteries. It wasn't malicious, and Dan took no pleasure in it. It was just to make sure the man didn't get back up.
Back outside, the drizzle had cleared, but the sky was grey. On the main street, there were more bodies. Dan limped around a blood-stained woman, who was lying with her head twisted at an unnatural angle. Further up was a man with a crushed arm, splayed in the street. At least two doorways had a body shoved outside, like garbage. There were still distant pops of gunfire. Dan felt eyes following him through barred windows and hideouts along the way. For the first time, Dan realised how lucky he was that he felt nothing for these people.
He knew how damaged he was. It came to him with clarity, might never be able to connect with anyone again. Was everyone in the city like him? Stuck in survival mode, going with gut instinct, doing what they thought they had to? If they were, Dan was right to defend himself. They were monsters. It didn't matter that he was like them.
There was only one person that Dan had to convince of his humanity. He needed the house.
* * * *
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The front door was open. The latch was torn from the wood. Dan shifted his grip on the poker, holding it like a club, and crept into the corridor. The lights were out, maybe across the city. He glanced into the bedroom, which was still in disarray from the morning fight, then crept through to the kitchen.
As he rounded the corner he heard a quiet, choking sound. There was a body lying with its back over the kitchen table, arms outspread. Sasha was standing over it with her hands on its throat. There were knives sticking out of the body's chest, three of them, and blood dripping off spread fingers down to a growing pool on the kitchen floor. Dan stood quietly. He was too late to help, even if he wanted to. It was Dashell from across the street, but that wasn't important any more. It was missing three fingers. Sasha turned and saw him.
There were tiny wrinkles on her cheeks and forehead, and around her eyes, and thin grooves on her lips. Her skin was grey, and her eyebrow was cut, leaking blood down her face. And she had killed.
He could talk to her, and tell her how they were damaged. She might understand. They had lived together for seven months, and known each other for years. But could he trust something like her? Could he trust his life to someone that saw him as a monster? Dan knew how he looked. He was covered in blood, and he had a weapon. Even if she wasn't like the rest of them she'd be a threat, because he was a threat to her.
Dan didn't know what she was thinking. He could only see her surface, and that made everything that happened next a lot easier.
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Sam Wilson writes TV shows. He is currently co-writing the sci-fi comedy cartoon show “URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika” with Lauren Beukes and Sarah Lotz, who are both “Something Wicked” contributors.
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This is Sam's first story for Something Wicked, making him tie with Lauren, but one place behind Sarah.
[Back to Table of Contents]
FIRST LOOK: 30 DAYS OF NIGHT by Joe Vaz
all images copyright © 2007 by Columbia Pictures
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According to preliminary reports filtering through, 30 Days of Night might just well be the best, scariest vampire movie ever. Gorey, bloody, dark, wicked and twisted are just some of the words being used to describe this film. Not your parents’ vampires, distinguished Counts, with piercing good looks and wealth, these are eating machines, built for one purpose—to devour human beings—and only daylight can stop them.
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The story revolves around the remote, isolated town of Barrow, Alaska, where every winter the sun sets for a full month of complete darkness. The bloodthirsty vampires, relishing in a month of free rein, are set to take advantage, feeding on the helpless residents. It is up to Sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett), his estranged wife, Stella (Melissa George), and an ever-shrinking group of survivors to do anything and everything they can to last until daylight.
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Based on the acclaimed comics by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, the miniseries—just three books—became a career-defining moment for both. As they brought both a new look and a new story to the vampire legend, Niles’ and Templesmith's work has been lauded as a revival of the horror comic.
"We would always check the paper, and right before it goes dark in Barrow, there is always this little human interest piece about it.” Says Steve Niles in an interview with movieweb,com, “The first thing that interested me was the darkness. But then it was the alcohol. It was not illegal. You could bring it there. But they couldn't sell it because of the increase in suicides ... and I had to think, “God, what kind of people live there?” I tore the story out. This was like twelve years ago. I wrote “vampires” in the corner. And then I just sat on it. It took me another five or six years before I was in LA. I pitched it around for two or three years, to blank faces. It wasn't until we did the comic that it caught on."
He continues, “Ben and I had already been working together on Hell Spawn for Todd McFarlane. And we would have this massive time in-between. Ted Adams called and asked if we had any stories. He said he couldn't pay any money but he could publish our comic. I said, “Okay, here is my rejected pitch list.” 30 Days of Night was fourth on the list. He called me back and said, “This vampire thing sounds kind of cool.” So then we started doing it.
"The first thing we agreed on was that I wanted to write scary vampires and he wanted to draw scary vampires. The more we looked into it, the more we saw what little there was of it. Even the good vampire movies aren't really scary. Ben's style is what it is. What I loved about him was that Ben was not afraid to go dark. Which I think is great for a horror comic book."
Once the first issue was in print Niles’ agent sent it to Ghost House Productions, a production company founded by the original Evil Dead-ites, Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi whose interest was immediately piqued.
"We got the very first [issue].” Says Tapert, “Then we got the rough of two, and three wasn't even written yet. Steve came in, and we heard how it was going to wrap up. [He] kind of pitched it to us. We thought it was a great idea. This seemed original, to have vampires as we'd never seen them. It was being called the anti-Buffy, and that really appealed to us at the time."
They instantly fell in love with the idea of vampires coming to Barrow once the sun has set for 30 days. “It was a project that got us excited because it delivers a level of intensity and stylised horror that, as a young guy, I loved and to this day I still enjoy. For Sam and me, 30 Days of Night is a return to our Evil Dead roots."
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To direct, Raimi and Tapert brought in David Slade, whose first film, the independent Hard Candy, had impressed them. “[David] has a very specific idea of what he wants and how he wants everything to be,” says Tapert, “He is a believer in lots of tight shots, close-ups with attention to details, which frenetically ramp up his movie."
Slade, it turns out, had long ago bought the first edition of the graphic novel and was already a fan of Templesmith's art, “—especially the image of Eben looking out and seeing the vampires for the first time,” he says. “I had a meeting in which an executive at Columbia Pictures mentioned that they owned the property. I said, ‘Hang on a minute. I would chew off my arm to do that!’”
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Though the creature dates back to Lord Byron in Western literature—and is many centuries older in other cultures—the vampire had, in Niles’ and Templesmith's opinions, lost its horror. The authors saw 30 Days of Night as an opportunity to steer the genre back to its roots and away from the gothic, affected vampires that had taken over their favourite monsters. “[We] really wanted to make vampires scary again,” says Niles. “We've seen vampires made into Count Chocula. Teenage girls are dating them. These should be feral vampires that see humans as nothing more than something to feed on. And Ben took that ten steps further with the look of the book."
"I was going for pure savagery, with just a hint of alien,” says Templesmith. “The classic image of the vampire is the goth, romantic ponce. I wanted eating machines."
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The primary goal, as so often is the case when dealing with graphically inspired material, was to bring the books’ striking imagery to life. “I wanted the look of the film to be very close to Templesmith's artwork,” Slade says.
According to Templesmith “...they've taken the look of the movie from the page. The colour's stripped back, the vampires look like the vampires in the book—the integrity is there."
Part of that integrity is presenting vampires that look almost—almost—human. Though the makeup effects team does rely on some prosthetics, it's kept to a minimum.
To bring that vision to life, the filmmakers turned to artists from New Zealand's Weta Workshop, the masters behind The Lord of The Rings.
"We definitely wanted to be faithful to Ben's artwork, but we also wanted to create a new Nosferatu, a shocking original design for this generation of vampire lovers,” says Tapert.
"On meeting David Slade, we quickly realized that this was going to be no ordinary filmmaking opportunity,” says Weta's Richard Taylor. He knew that the film could offer some wonderful creature opportunities “...I felt very strongly from the outset that this would be a film that Gino Acevedo, our longtime prosthetic effects head and colleague, could take on in a senior supervisory role."
Tapert adds, “David worked with Gino and a conceptual artist, Aaron Sims, to create the final look. They did an incredible job of maintaining the aesthetic David and I had hoped for with the vampires."
Most important were the teeth. No mere creatures with two little fangs, the vampires in 30 Days of Night are the eating machines that Templesmith originally envisioned.
"They're almost like shark's teeth,” says Acevedo. “They're wedge-shaped and quite irregular. They're pretty nasty-lookin'."
Weta FX Technician Steve Boyle was responsible for coming up with a special technique for the dentures to enhance the look of the vampires. They each have more than the 32 teeth in the adult human mouth. The most teeth belong to the little girl vampire played by Abbey-May Wakefield. “David wanted her teeth to be long and slender, needle-like—like a puppy's teeth,” Acevedo says.
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Like the other departments, Allan Poppleton's stunt team walked the fine line between recreating the work of the graphic novel and presenting a realistic world on screen.
From the very beginning, Slade wanted the vampires to do only what a human could do. “They're not super-human, just super vicious,” says Slade. “Our objectives created a level of rules that we couldn't break; we can't break the laws of nature very much—just bend ‘em a little bit.
"No wire harnesses was one of the rules we made. If the vampires run from roof to roof, they're going to jump from roof to roof. Allan was very positive and said, ‘We can do this.’”
Rob Tapert confirms, “Allan and his team have succeeded in bringing a whole level of action, violence, and gore into this movie."
Poppleton adds, “We di
d some research and also drew on past experience, including some roof jumping we previously did in a commercial—leaping from buildings in what we call ‘urban free-flying.’ All of the jumping onto vehicles or onto buildings is real—no wires, no nothing!"
Poppleton's team relied on a technique he calls ‘fly-metrics,’ to train, a system involving several different exercises designed to get them up to speed. In addition, Poppleton collaborated with the costume and art departments to ensure that the costumes and sets would stand up under his team's jumps.
The prosthetics from Weta Workshop provided an added challenge.
"The long fingernails made grabbing onto things tricky,” Poppleton says. “Also, each performer had teeth and mouth guards created especially for him, so that nobody would bite their lips during a stunt."
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Chief among the special effects was the creation of snow: for a film set in the Arctic, the snow would almost become a character.
To create the snow, a team of 30 used 150 tons of Epsom salts, 90 tons of shredded paper, 12 tons of wax, 9,000 bags of bark, over 3 tons of fake snow, 26,000 yards of white blankets, 400 boxes of eco-snow (replacing the former ingredient, potato peelings), and 7,000 litres of foam.
The other key ingredient, of course, was blood. When the vampires attack, red becomes the film's primary colour and so 4,000 litres of fake blood were concocted for the film.
"One thing that will make 30 Days of Night stand out,” says Slade, “is lots of red"
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[Back to Table of Contents]
LITTLE HAMMER by TAHL
illustrated by Genevieve Terblanche
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Crack!
Such a soft, boring sound, not like a car door's ring.
Something Wicked SF and Horror Magazine #5 Page 8