The vampires in 30 Days of Night are a cross between George Romero’s zombies and a pack of hyenas. They possess the relentless inevitability of the former and the cruel intelligence of the latter. They are human, more or less, despite their mouths full of needled teeth and eyes as black as pitch. They appear to know English but prefer their own tongue, a sort of screeching hiss that carries for miles. And it is not enough for them that they kill; they toy with and taunt their prey, delighting as much in the fear they cause as they do in the blood itself. As movie monsters go they’re refreshingly evil. There’s not a drop of Lestat-esque angst about them; they’re psychopathic predators and perfectly fine with that, thanks.

It’s a shame they don’t occupy a more interesting movie. One rule of thumb for story construction is that you need at least three concepts to make something work. 30 Days of Night has just the one, and that one makes up the movie’s log line. Alaskan town on the border of the Arctic Circle experiences 30 days of night once a year. A clutch of vampires hear about this. They descend. There’s a lot of artful spraying of crimson blood on white snow.

Not exactly Shakespeare, but not a bad place to start, either. There’s enough wiggle room to come up with something interesting. But it’s in those other concepts that 30 Days of Night fails to get a pulse. Every single character is no more or less interesting than the blurb it takes to describe them. Josh Hartnett’s Eben Oleson is “good sheriff with estranged wife.” Melissa George’s Stella Oleson is “estranged wife trapped in town.” Ben Foster, recently quite good in 3:10 to Yuma, is “the harbinger of danger.” Mark Boone Junior is “cranky recluse who’s really an okay guy.” Perhaps any character can be boiled down to such simple labels, but most stories (or the actors themselves) endeavor to find some truth inside the clichés. Not so here. Hartnett and company simply go through their paces, dealing with the usual sorts of trouble one expects from lesser zombie movies: Fellow survivors hiding their growing infection, disagreements on whether to stay or flee, and so on.

There are occasional inspired moments and sequences. Most of them you’ve seen in the trailer: an unnaturally long and sharp claw wailing out a song on a record player, a fang-mouthed scream silhouetted in flame. An overhead tracking shot of the vampires’ initial assault on the town is the first and only real indicator of the layout of the town and the sheer scope of the vampires’ monstrous slaughter. And, of course, there are the vampires themselves, capable of frightening bursts of strength and speed. What they lack in sex appeal they make up for in sheer predatory awe. Director David Slade resists the urge to step directly into the music video surreality that has become the horror genre’s stock in trade, and it’s this economy in set design and style that gives 30 Days of Night its rare moments of genuine fear.

But the dearth of imagination in the rest is what sinks the movie. Steve Niles, co-writer of the screenplay with Stuart Bettie and writer of the original comic book series, is a man often praised for revitalizing the horror genre within comics. It’s true that Niles writes about zombies and vampires to the exclusion of all else (up to and including a Batman mini-series with zombies), and the original comic garnered a lot of praise. But a lot of the credit for that original series’ success must go to artist Ben Templesmith, whose abstract, almost expressionist art soared where Niles’ script fell back on the predictable. Here, in film format, that same script is necessarily tied to a more mundane presentation. Its flaws have nowhere to hide.

Waiting for the lights to go down, my buddy Joe and I tried to figure out the last great vampire movie. We came up with a small amount of enjoyable crap (John Carpenter’s Vampires) and action movies wearing horror clothing (the Blade series). We had to go back thirteen years to Interview with the Vampire before we found any vampires that weren’t simply gristle for the action hero’s mill, and further back still to find any that were agents of genuine horror. 30 Days of Night lays some groundwork for rehabilitating the vampire in movies. But don’t expect anything consistently entertaining.