White Fang Ally: The Arctic As Eden of Death in 30 Days of Night

Abstract

A recurrent congenital weakness of 20th and 21st century television, literature, and cinema vampires is their porphyric susceptibility to ultraviolet radiation. Central to vampires’ continued undead life is the problem of sunlight. In this way, sunless environs like the Arctic and Antarctic represent what I describe as purely Gothic environments in whose desolation, cold, and darkness, undead life is able to proliferate, unmarred and unimpeded by the typical diurnal/nocturnal cycles of luminosity that trouble the undead lives of vampires. In order to theorize the value of the Arctic as an embodiment of Gothic-horror, this essay uses Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s 30 Days of Night (2002) as a case study of the pathetic resonances between the Arctic and the figure of the vampire. Following on from this, the analysis turns to Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia in order to theorize the manner in which the Arctic, whose nocturnal/diurnal rhythms stand in radical opposition to the majority of seasonal cycles elsewhere on earth, represents an onto-existential paradise of death for the undead: a chronotope that embodies the essential attributes of the onto-existential condition of the undead.