'30 DAYS OF NIGHT' resurrected in 'DUST TO DUST'

The cast and crew of the all new web series talk about the sequel

By Rob M. Worley     August 01, 2008

When Steven Niles launched '30 Days of Night' at IDW Publishing in 2002, it became an instant sensation. Six years later, the franchise has continued as a feature film, in numerous comics and graphic novels, and also as a series of original "webisodes" on FEARnet.

In the runup to the feature film, FEARnet launched '30 Days of Night: Blood Trails', a fast-paced six-part series which featured actor Andrew Laurich as George Fowler, a man who unwittingly uncovers the plot by vampires to take Barrow, Alaska.

Now, the online and on-demand horror outlet has launched the sequel to that series: '30 Days of Night: Dust to Dust'. Comics2Film at Mania.com chatted up the cast and crew of the new online show at the recent Comic-Con International in San Diego.

"At the end of the first series George finds the note that predicts what's going to happen in the feature film. This picks up where he ran into the cop at the end of the first series. The cop puts him in jail," Laurich explained. "Nobody believes his story and thinks he's kind of psychotic, so his mission in this story is to prove to everybody that, one, these vampires exist and that he's not crazy and, two, seek retribution for what he had to do in the first series, killing his girlfriend. So it's kind of about his plight to prove his name."

An attack on the prison allows George to escape, but also leaves prison nurse Sara Maguire (Mimi Michaels) in danger of becoming a vampire while her brother, tormented Detective Nick Maguire (Christopher Stapleton) must team up with George to find her before the vampires do.

"It becomes kind of a buddy sort of thing," Laurich said.

The new show is directed by Ben Ketai, who wrote and produced the previous series. Ketai told us that crafting a show for the web has numerous challenges, including short episode times and a smaller budget.

"It's tricky, but it's also really exciting because the short form of a web series, it sort of forces you to pick up the pace and really just trim out all the fat, and find the really fun moments and the really scary moments and the really good characters moments," Ketai said. "That's really what you're focusing most on. You gotta get your whole story out and you have to get the most fun out in four or five minutes."

Actor Ted Raimi, who appears in the series as a prison guard, likens the process to a musical form.

"From an acting standpoint I'll say this: you're condensing everything like what turn-tablists used to do when it first began in the late 70s was to take all the good bits, and all the fun dance bits and play those again and again and again until you had something that was strictly fun and had none of the boring stuff in it," Raimi said.

Indeed, 'Dust to Dust' moves along at an exciting clip. We watched the first three episodes (available online now), one of which kicks off Michaels' descent into Vampirism. Her transformation is depicted not with glossy CGI effects, but rather with jarring camera moves and pulsing sound effects. Ketai said he favored the latter technique, not for budgetary reasons, but because it suited the character's experience.

"We actually get to follow the character's arc as they're becoming a vampire. It's not very often we see that," Ketai explained. "What was most exciting about this story was that we're actually getting to get inside her head and understand her psyche and see her struggle as she's trying not to feed on people. That [camera] stutter effect that we had and the sound design was...internalizing it for her, the pain she was feeling and what it would feel like to be inside her  head when it was happening.

"I'd like to say its a great excuse to not use special effects or CG, but had we had twenty million dollars to make this film I think I would have done the same thing."

There were occasions where budgetary constraints came into play, but Ketai felt that these did not limit the storytelling. Instead he was challenged to raise his game.

"We had a scene in one of the episodes that had to be cut, where a vampire jumps off a rooftop and lands on the hood of the car and the entire car smashes. I think that was one of the first drafts of the series and producer Steve Hein read the script and passed it back to me across the table and said, 'no.'

"But the idea isn't to try to pull something off that we can't. We want to do things we know we can pull off so we can be really creative and work within that space and make it the very best thing it can be, as opposed to looking like some kind of effect they didn't have money for."

Ken Foree, who fans know well from his role in the original 'Dawn of the Dead' also makes an appearance in the series. We asked Foree and Raimi how working on '30 Days of Night' compared to their involvement with two of the best-love horror movies of all time (Raimi having played the demonic monsters in 'Evil Dead').

"Well that was in 1978 so it's quite a difference. It's a different era. It's a new format. You have the Internet and we didn't have that in 78. We had a budget of two million or less. We shot it in two months. Here we're shooting in five days," Foree said laughing. "So it's quite different, very different and exciting.

"You read it and you say, 'Wow, this is really well written and this really moves.' It's like a roller coaster ride. You tell the story and you're out. Different from 78 certainly."

As compressed as the action might be, Foree points out that the distribution of the film to the masses is quite the opposite.

"It took us 3000 theaters and maybe two years to have five million people see ['Dawn of the Dead']," Foree said. 'Dust to Dust' has already reached more eyeballs. "What did we get? Five million hits on the website for the first one? That's not bad."

Foree and Raimi both agree that the new format is more demanding. With the tight schedule there isn't room for more than one or two takes, so the actors have to get their best work out immediately.

"The danger when you're acting in it is that you want to act very quickly. It doesn't really translate to the acting and there's a danger of doing everything very intensely and quickly because the scenes are so fast," Raimi said. "I think the difference between the feature and this, acting wise, is I'd say, be very careful. Don't rob the audience and don't underestimate them."

Raimi, who admits he had a tendency to underestimate his audience early in his career, says he now takes entertainment made for the web just as seriously as he would a big budget feature film like 'Spider-Man'.

"You look at somebody who might have a slack mouth and a dumb expression on their face and look so dopey they might walk into the water and accidentally drown themselves, they're as good a student of human nature as you are even though they don't know it. They might not know the specific questions to ask, but they'll know if you're faking it. In two seconds," Raimi said.

The actor also adds that, in some ways, web-based short films may have a bad reputation.

"For so many years web content producers have been trying to make money by trying to imitate, more ore less, YouTube: 'The shorter, grosser, dumber we can make it, the better it will be. Clearly that YouTube video has had eight trillion hits, that guy getting kicked in the nuts and then vomiting. Eight million people watched it so we should do that,'" Raimi said, eliciting laughs from the table.

"I think what Ben and everyone is trying to do is make this thing quality," Raimi continued. "It's the same length but it has story and it has content, and it's nicely directed and well-written. I hope this is the future of shorts on the web. I think we'll all be in much better shape if it is."

Ketai adds, "Before the Internet there was really no place in the world for short films. They stopped showing them before features. Really people just had them for themselves or to show around town if they were trying to get a job. There was really nowhere to go to try and watch short films. This is kind of opening that doorway."

Laurich points to a long history of people enjoying serialized stories. He sees the web series as, "an extension of what always has been with culture, with the idea of serials, whether its the O. Henry novels from the 1800s. Get part of the story in the newspaper and then the next week you get the next part. It's just kind of an evolution of that," the actor said.

He also likened the format to that of comic books. Ketai agrees.

"Starting off on 'Blood Trails', people didn't really get the whole idea of a web series. 'You're only going to watch an episode for five minutes and then be expected to come back a week later and watch another five minutes,'" was the question Ketai was confronted with.

"What I would tell you is, people would take comic books for granted now, but they're sort of short. The issues that come out, you can read them in ten minutes, but people clamor over them and get so excited to go to the comic book story every month to pick up the new issue and that's kind of the way we wanted to view this and in doing so try to keep it fast paced and exciting and have something really cool, have a really big special moment, have a big scare and a big cliff hanger at the end of each episode.

"I feel really lucky to be involved in something like this so early on, what hopefully will become ubiquitous medium like comic books are."

The first three installments of '30 Days of Night: Dust to Dust' is available now on FEARnet.com. Watch for the remaining three episodes over the next three weeks.