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	NEWMAN

30 Days of Night:
The Problem with The Problem of Evil
by Marc T. Newman [media reviewer/critic] 11/8/07

Warning: This film analysis contains plot spoilers that are necessary to make the points contained herein. Read at your own risk.

When Damien Karras, the faith-challenged priest in The Exorcist, decided to liberate Regan from demonic possession, not by invoking the Name of his more powerful God, but by substituting himself for her, I had a strange feeling that an important line was being crossed. If you saw the film, you cannot forget the scene.

Karras walks into the room of that afflicted little girl and finds her standing triumphantly over the fallen Father Merrin. Seeing Merrin splayed across the floor in defeat is more than Karras can bear. Knowing he lacks Merrin's faith, no supernatural help is likely to come to his aid. So Karras reverts to what he knows: boxing. He attempts to beat Regan senseless, and seeing that it isn't working, he simply offers a sweeter deal to the demon inside her. He screams, "Take me!" And once the demon changes residence, with the last ounce of his human strength, he throws himself out the window, down the steps, to his apparent death.

This type of unwarranted self-sacrifice has played out multiple times in films. In order to defeat evil, we have to do, or become evil ourselves. In The Devil's Advocate, Kevin Lomax cannot beat Satan, but rather than join him and complete the Prince of Darkness' plan for world domination, he commits suicide and takes himself out of the picture. In Poltergeist 2, in order to beat back the demonic Reverend Caine, the haunted family has to resort to a pagan shaman and a medium for help. In The Ring, Rachel Keller has to continue to perpetuate evil in order to avoid being its victim.

The latest installment in gratuitous self-sacrifice in the face of transcendent evil is 30 Days of Night. In order to understand how it works, we need to look at the nature of the enemy, the proven weapons, the sacrifice, and what such films reveal about the theological ideology behind them.

Vampires

Until recently, vampires in film were wary, intelligent, seductive creatures. Vampires moved freely among humans after the sun went down, alternately socializing with or hunting them. Vampires were the undead. Their power was otherworldly. Vampires could shape-shift, mentally enslave weak humans to do their bidding (remember Renfield?)and -- as long as they did not see the sun, or find themselves on the wrong side of a stake -- they lived forever.

It used to be that vampires were evil, ungodly, supernatural beings. And they recognized the superior power of God, and His representatives. They retreated before the Cross of Christ, and holy water burned them if it touched their skin. What made vampire movies exciting was the detective work leading to the discovery of a vampire infestation; the matching of wits between the vampire hunter and the creature of the night. Once the crosses and holy water came out, the battle was just about done – leaving only the dramatic chase to vanquish the vampire before the sun went down.

The clever premise of 30 Days of Night is that up in Barrow, Alaska the sun is down for an entire month, making it an ideal environment for vampires – who are allergic to sunlight. These vampires present many of the classic vampire constructions: they appear to come from Eastern Europe, they are organized into a clear hierarchy, they drink human blood, possess tremendous strength, live forever unless killed, and staking, decapitation, or sunlight will do the trick. If these vampires behave in the traditional ways, why, then, do the filmmakers ignore the religious methods historically used (in movies, at least) to destroy vampires?

Weapons

How do you respond to a manifestation of transcendent evil? It doesn't take long for the residents (the few that are left) of Barrow to recognize that they are dealing with vampires – real vampires. All of the tell-tale signs are there. What mystified me was their approach to the creatures after this epiphany.

In line with most slasher films, the survivors come up with many clever ways to dispatch the vampires – nearly all of which end in decapitation. Implements include shotguns, a Caterpillar-sized trencher, a car, dynamite, a mechanical shredder, and a good old-fashioned axe. Eben Oleson, the town sheriff, even manages to dose one of the vampires with enough pseudo-sunshine to turn her face to ash courtesy of a "grow lamp." How the vampires respond to crosses or holy water we never find out, as neither is ever employed.

Perhaps it is because blood-letting is so viscerally cinematic, as compared to using holy objects (not that the old vampire movies were short on gore), that the filmmakers chose to position this movie as a desperate last stand between a rag-tag group of good guys besieged by a bloodthirsty horde. Theological questions might complicate things. But by choosing to refuse to invoke the Christian Church and its symbols, the film lessens the evil of the vampires, denigrating them to the status of a particularly persistent type of rabid wolf, or a thug cult with bad dentition. In the battle between the living and the undead, it seems, brute force is all that counts. And if humans lack sufficient killing power, someone's going to have to go and get it from the vampires.

Sacrifice

Old vampire movies were about the battle between transcendent evil and transcendent good. Vampire hunters did not have to stoop to the level of the monster in order to defeat evil. Vampire attacks are certainly physical (people died), but they were also supernatural (some came back as vampires, in thrall to the one who bit them). The desire of the vampire hunters was to redeem as many victims as they could by destroying the lead vampire – who was often portrayed as evil incarnate. And the redemption was not limited to the body -- the hunters were concerned for the victim's soul.

It is hard to say what 30 Days of Night is about, beyond the idea of mere survival. Yes, it is true that what Eben does in the end, injecting himself with vampire blood so that he can share in their power (hoping to hold on to his humanity long enough to defeat them) is motivated by a noble cause. But his method belies his presuppositions. Eben is a scientific materialist.

Theological Implications

Eben's method of choice, chosen to save his ex-wife and the remaining townsfolk, makes perfect sense. Using his police-honed powers of observation, Eben deduces that the vampire's power is conferred by a bite and a swapping of fluids. But bitten humans, once turned, are able, for awhile at least, to retain their human motivations. If the town's survivors wait for the sunrise to save them, it will be too late.

Eben, seeing no way to beat the vampires in his own flesh, determines to beat them in theirs. Unlike the vampires, who bite their victims, he uses a scientific, medical implement – a syringe – to bring about his transformation. How he reasoned that a few moments imbued with these new powers would be sufficient to overcome beings who had them, and used them, for centuries, I don't know. Perhaps desperate times call for desperate measures.

What does seem clear is that all of the townsfolk of Barrow are afflicted with Eustace Scrubb-itis. Eustace Scrubb, from C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, was a scientific-materialist lad who, like Eben, found himself enchanted (or more precisely, endragoned). He tried everything he could think of to get out of his predicament. But Eustace, like Eben, had "read the wrong books" – books about "facts." Eustace had not troubled to learn about enchantment, because he believed that enchantment was impossible. When he found himself turned into a dragon, he was, therefore, woefully unprepared.

I do not know if we could say that Eben and the oher survivors had read the wrong books, but they had apparently seen the wrong movies. People do not overcome transcendent evil by becoming evil. People overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21). That's the problem -- there is no transcendent good suggested, let alone represented in this film, on which Eben can call. He and his friends are horribly alone.

30 Days of Night is another exercise in cinematic theology-free zones. For example, everything in this film cries out for characters who would pray. If people will pray for rain when a drought is severe, what makes audiences believe that when an entire town is overrun by vampires, that not even one resident will say a prayer, or pull out a cross? Lack of prayer, under such circumstances, is more unbelievable than the existence of vampires.

(To be completely fair, one young victim is on her knees about to be killed and she says, "Oh God!" as an exclamation - that is as close as we get. The vampire hears this and replies, "No God." Would you take your theology from a vampire?)

Portraying a powerful, transcendent evil is okay, but leveling the playing field and admitting that transcendent good, in the form of God, might exist as well, is beyond the pale. The problem with this kind of Problem of Evil – the greatest disservice such films do to those who get a steady diet of such fare – is that it makes people feel helpless and hopeless in the face of the real, supernatural evil that most suspect is really out there.

Audiences deserve better. Evil is not eternal. Perhaps we in the Church need to do a better job of explaining the reality of the spiritual world. We must not leave that job to Hollywood and unscrupulous, pompadoured televangelists. When we enthusiastically tell of our own encounters with God's redemptive goodness, it exposes these fraudulent attempts, such as 30 Days of Night, to debase supernatural warfare (albeit fictional) by turning it into a mere materialist turf war. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places," the Apostle Paul tells us (Ephesians 6:12). And Hollywood does better when it gets that part right. ExileStreet

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