30 Days of Night is going to be a big hit this weekend. It’s just one of those things everybody knows – it’s October, there’s nothing else (go see Into the Wild, you dumb sons of bitches. Drive as far as you must), and it’s got strong advertising – so thoughts have already turned to sequels. Over at ReelzChannel they have an interview with Brian Nelson, the man who delivered one of the single worst screenplays in the history of a genre that really defines what bad screenplays are, where he says that we should expect to see more of Ben Foster’s character, The Stranger, in a sequel.
Ben Foster was my favorite part of the film by a long shot, and I think between this and 3:10 to Yuma, Foster is really becoming the pre-eminent scenery chewer of his generation. I don’t say this in a bad way, since I love what he does. Obviously I’d like to see him tone it down in a more serious film, but for these two movies he seems like the only guy out there going nuts and giving it his all, and having the most fun. In 30 Days of Night he plays The Stranger, a Renfield-esque Cajun (why a Cajun? Why not!) who leads the vampire horde to the Alaskan town. All he wants is to finally become a vamp himself.
Spoilers ahead: As you’ll know when you go see 30 Days of Night this weekend instead of taking a flight to the nearest city playing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Foster’s character seems to die in the movie. Nelson wouldn’t say if The Stranger would appear as a human or a vampire, but he did say that nobody has actually talked to Foster about it yet.
For more about the people who wrote the terrible script to this movie, head over to G4 where they’re doing 5 Days of Steve Niles.