Fridae

We only need to look at the Twilight saga to see what’s wrong with vampire flicks these days. As a fluffy teen romance movie with vampires, there’s no real horror. But there’s never been any horror since Blade (gangster movies with vampires), Underworld, Ultraviolet (sci-fi movies with vampires that aren’t even called vampires) and so on... But if you really want a vampire flick with just the vampires, you’ll have a world full of them in Daybreakers. And yes, they come complete with fangs, fear of sunlight, a need to feed, and even possess the ability to morph into gigantic bats. There. Happy now?

In the near future, all of humanity will turn into vampires. And unlike the bloodsuckers in Twilight, these vampires must feed on human blood, and only human blood. Of course, the end of the world as we know it is about to happen when human beings are hunted to extinction. Without any blood to sustain them, the economy will tank, civilisation will collapse, and the vampires will all turn into feral giant bats. Scary!

You’d notice that Daybreakers is a vampire flick with a peak oil premise playing out its worst case scenario. Like the oil corporations in the real world, Sam Neil’s pharmaceutical company races against time to develop alternate blood resources. Ethan Hawke plays the chief scientist whose botched experiments are very gory – complete with head explosions!

This would be a really dreary, preachy allegory about corporate greed and monstrosity – and not a vampire flick at all – without Willem Dafoe, who saves the movie as The Dude with a Crossbow. The story really moves out of its science fiction and social commentary modes and straight into all-out horror and vampire lore with Dafoe’s big screen entrance 20 minutes into the movie.

The Spierig brothers are more competent than most directors in this genre, and succeed in drawing out the horror and even metaphysical aspects of their vampire flick – although I would have liked to see a vampire version of Al Gore running around in this movie.