Kiele Sanchez, Sex Scene, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days, Dread Central Review
Producing a successful film sequel is a daunting task, particularly when its predecessor is a film as beloved by fans as 2007’s horror hit 30 Days of Night. Fortunately, director Ben Ketai’s 30 Days of Night: Dark Days, which streets to DVD and Blu-Ray on October 5th from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, is a worthy successor to David Slade’s 2007 original. It’s dark, disturbing and nihilistic, and one hell of a ride.
Co-written by Ketai and originator and co-producer Steve Niles, the film stars Kiele Sanchez as ‘Stella’ (stepping into the role previously essayed by Melissa George in the original), a woman bent on illuminating the public to what actually transpired in her Alaskan town of Barrow a year prior–namely, the massacre of ninety-eight men, women and children at the clawed hands of a group of particularly nasty vampires. With her speaking engagements rather unsuccessful in convincing the masses of the supernatural menace, Stella is unexpectedly recruited by three other victims of related vampire attacks (Coiro, Baird and Parrineau), who alert her to the existence of Lilith (Kirshner), the vampire queen ultimately responsible for the genocide of her Alaskan town’s inhabitants. Together, the quartet set off to avenge the murders in the underbelly of Los Angeles.
A faithful adaptation of Niles’ 2004 graphic novel of the same name, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days opens with a brief and effective recount of the events of the original film and then segues into a Se7en-esque title sequence, which serves to ground Dark Days’ narrative in the urban decay of downtown L.A. Exposition is kept to a verbal minimum with Stella’s pathos following the death of her friends and husband Eben in the first film laid out quickly via the pill bottles and handgun which occupy the bedside table of her seedy hotel room, and with that Dark Days is off and running. (more…)
30 Days of Night: Dark Days, Stars Kiele Sanchez, Diora Baird
30 Days of Night: Dark Days, Stars Kiele Sanchez
In 2007 the vampire sub-genre was almost reinvigorated. Whilst Buffy and Angel (awesome as they were) had made vampires more relatable, 30 Days of Night came along and brought the bloodsuckers gnashing and growling to the big screen with an cannibalistic ferocity that made them genuinely scary for the first time in years. A stylish, neat and visceral mainstream action horror, it was a superb and necessary step in showing that vampires can still send a chill down your spine. Then, a year later, something terrible happened. Twilight.
Now to be perfectly honest, Twilight isn’t a bad film in itself. It’s just that the effect it’s had on the vampire flick has been absolutely devastating. No longer are vamps blood-sucking phantoms that’ll stop at nothing to sink their pearly whites into your jugular. They’re now sparkly, moaning teenagers who would rather whinge about their man-period than rip some poor unsuspecting victim’s throat out. Now this wouldn’t be a problem if it was a one-off, but due to the entire teenage demographic of the western world going batshit for the all things Twilight, it’s spawned a bunch of sequels and opened the floodgates for a heap of other pieces of flightless vampire shire to come sniffling to the masses like an injured puppy. Naturally, they’re all a far cry from the tons of genuinely scary vampire tales that came before. As such, any hopes that 30 Days of Night would cause the genre to step back into terror territory were ashed within a year. (more…)
Dread Central Exclusive, Actress Kiele Sanchez Talks 30 Days of Night: Dark Days
Kiele Sanchez in '30 Days of Night: Dark Days'
“It was a difficult challenge I think at first, just because I had never done something like that,” actress Kiele Sanchez told Dread Central of her casting as ‘Stella Oleson’ last November during the principle photography of 30 Days of Night: Dark Days in Vancouver, Canada.
Bundled in a cold warehouse in Terminal City on the set of director Ben Ketai’s sequel to 2007’s hit 30 Days of Night (the sequel Dark Days bows direct-to-video from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on October 5), The Perfect Getaway actress was thoughtful regarding her assumption of the film’s lead character, as originally essayed by Melissa George, and spent time waxing on that as well as the other challenges inherent in portraying the character.
“I think that in the first graphic novel Stella starts off as so different (from the sequel) that it gave me a lot of freedom to sort of do it my own way,
“I think that in the first graphic novel Stella starts off as so different (from the sequel) that it gave me a lot of freedom to sort of do it my own way,” said Sanchez of the character of Stella, a woman whose husband, Eben (played in the original by Josh Hartnett), and fellow townsfolk met their grisly end in the original film in the Alaskan town of Barrow. “I think also, due to the fact that there’s been eleven months (of narrative) between the end of the first film and this one, that there’s been a lot of transformation that happened to Stella over that time period so that also gave me a lot of freedom to pick up in a different place,” continued Sanchez. “Not just because it’s a different actress that is playing the character, but because Stella is in a different place.”