60 Nights of Horror 2022 #6: Daybreakers
2019, the distant future
This film takes place in April 2019, ten years after a vampire plague swept the world. All society has gone nocturnal, the technology has evolved to accommodate a blood-centric populace, capitalism has thrived, and humans, well… they’re mostly gone. There are corporations that capture and farm them for food, but it’s not enough. It hasn’t been enough for a long time. Very much like the real world, this futuristic system doesn’t consider conservation a priority until it’s a global catastrophe, and nobody with any actual power seems to think it will affect them. Until the events of this film, when it does. Cut to the homeless vampire with a “will work for blood” sign around his neck lunging and hissing at some rich people in the “nice district,” because he can’t help it.
Daybreakers follows a traditional vampire mythos, in that they die in the sun, the plague started with a bat, and they need human blood to survive. A starving vampire begins to lose function in their prefrontal cortex first, becoming foggy. Blood deprivation shortly later begins to manifest in physical deformities, eventually leading the body to resemble contorted bat creatures once they’ve gone full feral. This process only hastens if the vampire decides to feed upon other vampires, or upon themselves. Bad news for someone who thinks consuming human blood is wrong, like our main character Ed, played by Ethan Hawke.
That’s a very fine 20% blood coffee that you’re not drinking.
Ed is a hematologist for a pharmaceutical company racing against time to develop a blood substitute, but nothing so far has worked. The alternative blood, hemacillin, is not ready, though that doesn’t stop the big boss, delightfully sinister smug fuck Sam Neill, from pushing for clinical trials. They recruit a private from the vampire army (responsible for rounding up humans for farming purposes, but lately they’ve all been so hungry that they usually just tear them to shreds and nobody is thinking about the future it seems except Ed, seriously) for this demo, and it goes horrifically, explosively wrong.
Now one of the heartbreaking things about this fool’s errand is that despite the efforts of Ed and his team, the super wealthy believe there will always be farmed human blood available to them. They love being vampires, as it suits those with a natural lack of empathy and a tendency to see the less-fortunate as lesser in general. When discussing the prospect of this blood alternative (we’re calling it Tru-Blood but we’re still workshopping it), Sam Neill is too hooked on the good shit to ever consider skimping. Swirling some red red kroovy in a crystal goblet, he muses “The majority of the population will be content with a blood substitute, yes… but there will always be those who are willing to pay top dollar for ‘the real thing.’”
One of the cool things about this movie and its creators, Michael and Peter Spierig, is that they had a very very small budget and a very particular set of skills. There are a lot of beautiful gore effects and a lot of CGI, and these film makers saved a lot of that budget by doing it themselves. It is a labor of love and it truly shows in every frame. There is never a moment where I doubt that there is a cohesive vision. These guys knew exactly what story they wanted to tell and how to depict it onscreen.
“We cannot afford to feel them as well.”
It’s not lost on me that this entire movie is about the war on the poor. Again, the vampires who can afford blood look down on the feral vampires out on the streets, called “subsiders.” Some of these subsiders were normal undead people just a short time ago, til the money ran out. And now they’re subhuman, facing severe discrimination from the rest of society specifically because of an inability to purchase goods. They go ignored until they’re literally breaking into homes and attacking folks, at which point they’re chained together and forced to face the sun, a decision which the wealthier vampires support, saying “We cannot afford to feed them as well.”
“This would have never happened to Ethan Hawke from The Purge,” I thought, watching Batboy interrupt Ed and his army boy brother’s argument for a full on fight that destroys all that shiny Ikea/Gattaca future furniture. Seriously, do these idiots just not lock their doors? He’s GOT an alarm system, the little voice thingy says when the door opens, so why does he not lock his fucking door? Multiple times people walk right the fuck into his house!
Alexa, play possum kingdom
When I was a kid, I was scared shitless of the Vampire of Sacramento, Richard Chase. If you’ve never heard of him, you're welcome. You’re in for a treat. His reasoning was, if your door was unlocked, he was invited to come on in and slaughter everyone in the house. So needless to say, I have always locked every door behind me since I was very little. Except for when my mom took away my bedroom door as a punishment for a couple years while I was in high school and now I have an extreme privacy complex (hiyooooooo).
I haven’t even gotten to the plot of this movie, and I’m not going to. You watch it yourself, and enjoy. I had a great time with it, despite it sending me down several weird medical rabbit holes, like if you’re going to be doing a clinical trial on something that will be drank, as in consumed via the stomach lining, etc, why are you injecting it for the purposes of the test? Also, if they don’t have heartbeats, how is there enough blood pressure in their bodies to create the explosions? What pump system is going that we can’t detect with with an electrocardiogram? Why do we have one at this clinical trial if we haven’t had heartbeats for ten years? What are you monitoring? I can understand monitoring temperature, but there should be a series of pumps he should be hooked up to an afterlife support apparatus that forces the liquid in his body to move if he doesn’t have a heartbeat but y’know what, it’s magic and they’ll turn into insane bat monsters if they don’t get that sweet drip drops, so I should stop nitpicking.