The vampire chiller 30 Days of Night is so named because of the sunless winters in parts of Alaska. If you happen to be a member of the walking dead, this must make the region an attractive bet for seasonal gatherings — you can party all hours without fear of turning crispy at sunrise. There’s even a small community of the living to snack on, at least in the town of Barrow, where the movie is set.

Budding bloodsuckers can be grateful to director David Slade for this tip, though perhaps not for his film’s gorily instructive scenes of vampire decapitation, vampire squishing in an industrial mangle, and vampire carbonisation under a sun lamp, all of which might be regarded as downers. More seriously for the film’s credibility, the script fails to make clear where these nighthawks are meant to congregate during the rest of the year. Even under the regulation goth-rock coats and lashings of off-white greasepaint, that midnight sun of summer must be a problem.

Adapted from the graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, 30 Days of Night is so dead serious you may feel the frequent urge to poke it in the ribs. Josh Hartnett and Melissa George play the sheriff and his missus, who with a few other locals must fall back on their resources to survive a month-long siege, which they do largely by staying put in someone’s attic.

Given that Barrow consists only of a few snow-covered streets, it’s slightly baffling that the evil scavengers — led by a baying, razor-mawed Danny Huston — aren’t motivated to search just a little harder for their grub.

Slade, who made the inauspicious paedophile thriller Hard Candy, deserves points for style here: his tight close-ups work because there’s always something smudgy and murderous crawling around in the back of the shot. But he can’t think beyond individual sequences, and the sepulchral gloom gets stifling.

The movie wants to play like a suspense Western — Rio Bravo with throat-chomping — but it’s thwarted, increasingly, by a less-than-pressing deadline. Hanging on for dawn is a tense business; waiting 30 days for one becomes a pain in the neck.