I saw this last night, and was really surprised by how good it was. I was expecting something pretty cheeseball, but it turned out to be a tight, fully fleshed-out little horror movie. In a wierd way, I was surprised by how restrained it was. For example, four or five people get their heads hacked off in the film. But you only ever see it happen with the very last guy. All the other times, the camera cuts away, or frames the shot so you can’t see the vampire from above the neck. If they’d gone for all the gory detail each time, it would have become routine. By keeping it just out of eyesight until the end, it became incredibly jarring to see the whole thing played out.
Like the other posters said, the dogs were sled dogs. Not much use in outrunning a vampire, but if someone got a sled hitched up and headed out while the vamps were slaughtering people on the other side of town, they probably wouldn’t be able to find him out on the tundra. Towards the end, the lead vampire talks about how they have to make sure no one in the town survives, because they don’t want their existence to become common knowledge again.
The dark skinned guy who has Josh Hartnett cut off his head was bitten by the little vampire girl in the convenience store. He says so when he reveals that he’s been turned.
The vampires appear to have a strong pack psychology. When Hartnett is hiding in his grandma’s grow shed, with the UV light, when all the vampires are outside, the lead female vampire lunges for the door, but draws up short and waits for the alpha vampire to give her the go-ahead, just like would happen with a pack of wild dogs. At the end of the movie, when Hartnett kills the alpha, he becomes the alpha. When none of the other vamps was willing to challenge him, I suspect he just told them, “Get the hell out of this town,” and they took off.
Most likely, they wanted to decimate the population quickly, before the town understood what was going on, so they wouldn’t be able to mount an effective defense. Once the nature of the vampires was understood, the survivors who were the focus of the film were able to mount a respectable defence until daybreak. If there’d been sixty people, instead of six, working together to fight the vampires and knowing how to kill them, they might have been able to save the town.
This is just speculation, but it seems like the vampires don’t need to feed regularly to survive. It looks like their plan is to hit one small Alaskan town a year, wiping it out during the one month when there’s no sun. Maybe they hibernate for the rest of the year or something? Anyway, the vampires were probably fully satiated by the end of the first night. But beyond being simple blood-drinkers, they’re also sadists who like to hurt and terrify people for sport. And, apparently, blood-drenched is quite the fashion statement for these people. The bloody excess of the attack was more about fun than food.
No, it was Eben in the movie.
I haven’t read the comic, but in the movie, the broken marriage really worked, dramatically. It created an interesting tension between the two characters.