The title sequence of 30 Days of Night builds a sinister atmosphere through its creepy soundtrack that gets louder, combined with unfocused images of broken picture frames, icicles in darkness. This sets up the horror/thriller theme. Later, the photos come into focus showing blood-splattered corpses, connoting death. Towards the end, a boy staring at the camera is shown, likely an important character. Various visual effects like fading and blurring are used to obscure most of the photos and draw attention to the broken frames and darkness, making references to the film's title. The sequence introduces the narrative of darkness and death relating to vampires through the blood, haze, and icy atmosphere created by the music and

1. 30 Days of Night: Title Sequence Analysis
The soundtrack in the title sequence builds a sinister
atmosphere, it’s creepy and gets louder as the title sequence
goes along, combined with unfocussed images of
photographs in broken picture frames and icicles surrounded
in darkness, the whole foundations for the theme of a
horror/thriller film is set in just the title sequence and as the
music builds so does the tension. Towards the end of the
sequence the photographs begin to come into focus and we
can see pictures of blood splattered across corpses creating
connotations of death.
Within the last 10 seconds of the sequence we focus on an
image of a boy staring directly at the camera, who is most
likely an important character in the story, as this is an
interesting way of partially introducing him.
During the sequence many effects were used, mainly fading
to black and a black wipe to hide the images, the camera is
constantly zooming into each subject but there is a faint
black haze obscuring most of them, if not then the pictures
seem to blur into each other preventing the audience from

2. being able to clearly see many of the photos, drawing
attention to the broken glass frames and the darkness that is
obscuring them, making literal references to the film and title
“30 Days of Night”.
The sequence starts with a black screen fading into the title
of the film that slowly appears in time with the creepy
atmospheric soundtrack and later the actual titles appear to
fade in non-intrusively to the images behind them, the names
are hardly even noticeable in juxtaposition to what is going
on in the background.
The narrative is introduced through the photograph of the
bloodied corpse, the blood on some of the cracked
photograph frames, the black haze that surrounds them all
and the low light conditions that the pictures are all taken at,
a sense of darkness and death emerges from these relating
strongly to the narrative of 30 days of darkness and
Vampires. The black haze, icicles and “creepy” music build a
cold and dark atmosphere that continues through the
sequence and most likely the film.