We have come a long way from the vile, bloodthirsty vampires of the past! Beautiful vamps with glassy skin, like Twilight’s famed Edward Cullen, ruled the decade of the 2000s. This film does the same thing, but with a difference. We encounter lovely, refined vampires, as well as depraved vampires who have become thus due to a scarcity of human blood. The entire film is set in a dystopian world where vampires are commonplace and humans are the minority and so persecuted on a daily basis.
Michael and Peter Spierig wrote and directed the film, which was their first high-budget film. They do a fantastic job of building an alternate universe that comes to life at night, and it is here that we locate our hero. Ethan Hawke’s role, Edward Dalton, is a vampire hematologist whose research is hampered by human survivors led by Willem Dafoe’s character, a former vampire “Elvis” He has a treatment that can turn vampires back into humans, saving the species. Will human beings be hunted to extinction? Or will Edward discover a solution so that the vampires can no longer starve?
The battle between immortality and humanity is on – Daybreakers (2009)
The Spierig brothers set the movie in a world where all humans were turned into vampires, to be safe from a deadly plague that was ravaging the land. The world became nocturnal, as cities became majorly inhabited by vampires.
The film is also set in 2019 and that seems funny because a pandemic did hit the entire world and we did become confined to the four walls of our homes. Clearly, things could have been worse and we could have turned into vampires. Add to that how in the real world the pandemic started with someone eating a bat and we have an eerie coincidence on our hands.
However, the humans still survived and roamed about in open areas during the daytime because vampires could not step out in the sun, at the risk of being burnt alive. In fact, the film’s creators held a competition on Worth1000.com to imagine how the world would appear if practically everyone was a vampire.
A lot of the designs probably played a part in inspiring the tonal, cold design that the movie ended up having, which definitely works in showcasing a nocturnal world where humans live on the run and the sun is not desired.
Keeping this in mind, the backstory gets grittier. Turns out that the humans only makeup 5-6% of the population and thus the blood supply for the massive vampire population was running dangerously low. Vampire scientists and researchers were invested in coming up with an alternative for blood that would continue to feed the vampires. In fact, the vampires were starving to the point where a whole new species called the ‘subsiders’ were formed because they degenerated into humanoid bat-like monsters without human blood.
One such scientist was Edward Dalton whose first name is actually the same as another popular vampire protagonist from the Twilight series. Edward was employed as the head hematologist by the largest supplier of blood in America, a pharmaceutical company known as Bromley Marks. Bromley Marks is owned by a rich vampire named Charles Bromley.
He, along with his colleague, Christopher, was in charge of finding a blood substitute. Might I add, Patricia Bromley Marks, the wife of Australian advertising legend Dick Marks, and mentor to Michael and Peter Spierig is the inspiration behind the name of the company Bromley Marks? We see them conduct an experiment and feed synthetic blood to a subject and the subject explodes into pieces, which shows that they are far from a suitable substitute.
As Edward drives home, he crashes into a car that contained humans. It turns out that he is a human sympathizer and thus protects them from the police car that pulls up to check the accident site. The leader of the group, a woman called Audrey reads Edward’s company nametag and this will be important later on.
Ed drives home only to be surprised by his vampire army enlisting brother, Frankie, who brings with himself a bottle full of pure human blood and this is when we realize that Edward also doesn’t drink human blood and has survived on animal blood all these years. However, before the brothers can properly talk it out, the smell of pure blood attracts a subsider who attacks them. Frankie manages to kill the subsider, saving the two of them.
The next morning, Audrey visits Edward and tells him to come to a location where he can be a part of finding a cure to vampirism. Edward, who was turned into a vampire by force by his own brother, is intrigued by this. He makes his way to the location and meets Lionel Cormac, also known as Elvis, played by none other than Willem Dafoe.
Interestingly, Dafoe’s character is named Elvis because he adores Elvis Presley’s song “Burning Love”. Also, the film was released in the United States on Elvis Presley’s birthday, January 8th, in the year 2010. So, the love for Elvis is pretty apparent. Willem Dafoe has also portrayed a vampire in a number of films.
When Ed meets Elvis he is shocked because he knew that Elvis was a vampire but there he was, standing in front of him with a beating heart and blood running through his veins, completely human. As Elvis begins to explain, their location is raided by the vampire military because Frankie had heard the entire conversation between Ed and Audrey.
Audrey, played by the beautiful and fierce Claudia Karvan, knocks Frankie out and the three of them manage to escape. This is when Elvis reveals how he was turned back into a human. He says that while driving during the daytime, in an accident, he had flown out of the windshield. Subsequently, he was burnt by the sun and had fallen into a river that had saved him from dying, and it kickstarted his heart. This was what Ed had to replicate to turn vampires back into humans.
In the meanwhile, the government put in more resources to capture the humans on the run and one of the humans captured turned out to be Charles Bromley’s daughter. He had her turned by Frankie forcefully, but after she refused to drink human blood, she also turned into a subsider. The subsider population was growing larger and larger and the government decided to simply kill them by capturing them and dragging them into the sun. It is after watching one such incident that Frankie decided to return to his brother.
Ed on the other hand met with a vampire senator who was supporting the humans in a safehouse and decided to set up his experiment for the cure there. However, they realize that the safehouse is at risk. Everyone is evacuated except Elvis, Audrey, and Ed who stay back to take a shot at the experiment. The experiment works and Ed becomes human again.
They go to Christopher for help to spread the cure but he summons soldiers who work for Bromley Marks instead. Audrey is taken away and then Frankie shows up and bites Elvis. However, a miracle happens and Elvis’s blood cures Frankie of vampirism.
Ed then decides to go to Charles and free Audrey by tempting Charles to bite him, turning him human. He does so and while they escape, Frankie stays behind to hold off the soldiers which leads to a feeding frenzy. After they feed on Frankie, the others feed on the ones that have just turned human, and in the end, only 6 are left standing. Christopher shows up and kills them but he is killed by Elvis and the three protagonists ride off into the sunset to spread the cure and save the world.
Deadly Charismatic Vampires
Vampires
Before we move into a detailed explanation of what the vampires in this movie are like, we must understand how almost the entire human species were turned into vampires in the first place. The infectious bite of a type of bat wreaked havoc on earth, causing an epidemic to spread among humans. Those who were infected became vampires, and those who passed the infection to others became vampires as well. Despite all scientific efforts, all attempts to find a cure had failed, and almost all of the planet’s inhabitants had been changed into vampires.
The vampires of this movie follow all the regular rules. They are characteristically pale; they don’t have a beating heart and are considered clinically dead. They have really long fangs with which they drink blood and those are visible even when they talk, along with pale yellow eyes which glow in the dark since they are, after all, beings of darkness. They are also affected by the same things that pop culture has practically drilled into our brains by now, which means that sunlight is their kryptonite. As one expects, they can be killed by wooden stakes as we see Audrey use a crossbow that releases wooden stakes instead of arrows, making the vampires go up in flames.
While the world turned and the planet became nocturnal, problems were not eradicated. Blood became a commodity and the human population dwindled down to 5-6% of the entire population. This means, there was a scarcity of blood. Many vampires starved during this time but unlike humans, vampires are dead so they cannot die by starvation. Instead, vampires who could not drink human blood degenerated into ghastly bat-like beings called the ‘subsiders’.
If vampires don’t obtain enough human blood, they mutate into these terrible, savage bat-like animals, and no amount of human blood will reverse the process. These creatures dwell in the sewers, coming out to find blood whenever they can, and the majority of them are so hungry that they will enter people’s homes in search of sustenance.
They are horrifying to look at, with grey skin, fingers that have turned into talons, and razor-sharp teeth protruding from their faces. They are also immensely strong and can throw a full-grown vampire across a room with terrifying ease.
One entered Edward Dalton’s flat, but he and his brother were able to kill it by swiping its head off with a knife while it hung upside down from the ceiling. Furthermore, it is unknown if fully grown subsiders can fly, but if they do, this could explain how the subsider got inside Edward’s apartment in the first place.
Charles Bromley, the worst of them all
The main antagonist of the movie is a rich vampire named Charles Bromley played by the masterful Sam Neill, who is literally the stamp of approval any horror film needs. Charles is the owner of the pharmaceutical company, Bromley Marks which is responsible for the majority of the blood supply in the US. Bromley was diagnosed with sarcoma in 2008 and given only a few years to live; though he hoped for a miracle, the dying businessman understood that the reality of his position was unavoidable, and his daughter Allison would have to bear the agony of losing him. Bromley willingly infected himself, curing himself of terminal disease and giving himself “all the time in the world” to be with his daughter, seeing the vampire infection as the miracle he’d been waiting for. His turn into a vampire on the other hand terrified her, and she ran away.
Bromley Marks became the largest blood supplier by a quick collaboration with the military, who were now tasked with capturing the remaining humans. They would be kidnapped and taken to the corporate headquarters where they were maintained in a coma-like state, while blood was sucked from their bodies.
However, by the year 2019, there was a growing shortage of humans, with experts estimating that only 5% of the species remained on the planet. This reduction in resources resulted in blood rationing as well as research and development efforts aimed at developing substitute blood. Most of these research efforts were being carried out by this company itself and Edward was in charge of it. Charles and his company were thus extremely powerful and used all means necessary to hunt down humans, extract blood and produce a substitute that would be profitable for them.
We see how the evil corporation performed experiments on other vampires and captured humans to use their blood. The corporation also wields the power of the military to fulfill its goals. Charles Bromley is an equally evil person who forcibly transforms his own daughter and then gives her up to be burned once she becomes a subsider.
He focuses on how a blood substitute would bring him immense profit and thus, doesn’t care for a cure to vampirism. However, he suffers a terrible fate because he tries to bite and turn Ed back into a vampire but Ed’s blood turns him human instead. He is eaten alive by the vampire military personnel when they find him human. Post his death and the death of his fellow researcher Christopher, it is unclear where the fate of Bromley Marks stands at the end of the movie.
It is likely that in a new world where Ed, Elvis, and Audrey manage to turn vampires back into humans, this evil corporation becomes dysfunctional.
Why should you watch ‘Daybreakers’?
The Spierig Brothers are clearly fascinated by the idea of a world where everyone is a vampire and does one hell of a job in painting the complete picture for us. The film opens with images of a homeless man holding up a cardboard sign begging for blood; disgruntled teen vampires hanging out outside a night-time school; and a railway platform where the commuters are all vampires heading to work, stopping at a coffee concession stand to have shots of blood plasma instead of coffee.
It is the small details included by the directors that give ‘Daybreakers’ a science-fiction touch as well. This is seen through vehicles with Daylight Driving Mode that erects UV screens and allow the driver to see everything on closed-circuit cameras.
The vehicle also gives automated “UV warning” alerts when Ethan Hawke opens the door. They bring to us a city that has been rebuilt with a network of tunnels and walkways connecting buildings so that vampires can move around without harm. We find a completely reimagined world and as a viewer, this will definitely draw you in and make it so much more impactful.
The Spierig Brothers return to the basics and give us fiercely predatory and wild vampires, moving away from the teenage love triangle of ‘Twilight’ (2008) and its sequels. They allow the screen to positively wade in gore at times, rather than weepy masculine sensitivity, and let vampires be vampires; feral, wild, and thirsty for blood.
‘Daybreakers’ is a masterful balancing act of genre components. It balances both action and horror to create such a movie where neither outdo the other and is a thoroughly enjoyable watch. It works well because the Spierig Brothers keep the film bouncing back and forth between action, splatter, and a pleasing conceptual balance of ideas.
The Spierig Brothers thus deliver a satisfyingly unique and original vampire film. If you’re a fan of vampires, then this movie should definitely be on your must-watch list. The film asks the biggest question that any vampire fan could ever have, what happens when vampires run out of humans to feed on? This question is the one that this movie tries to answer and you will just have to watch it for yourself to know.