UNDEAD directing pair to helm DAYBREAKERS!

Hey folks, Harry here... Hollywood Reporter picked up on a press release announcement during the American Film Market that basically stated that Lions Gate Films had acquired the original horror script, DAYBREAKERS, which is written and set to be directed by Peter & Michael Spierig. The little log line they reported was, "DAYBREAKERS explores a near-future world conquered by vampires, where a small band of humans are fighting to bring back humankind."

Now personally, I dug the hell out of Peter and Michael's first film, UNDEAD. Screened it at last year's BUTT-NUMB-A-THON and I've been waiting forever for it to get a release here in the states. Meanwhile, the brothers had been rumored to be in discussions on a great many major projects. Stuff like FANTASTIC FOUR - god I wish they'd taken that one... anything other than the hell that's happening with that project. Sigh. Anyway - instead of just sitting on their hands awaiting a U.S. release of UNDEAD, they've spent the past year writing DAYBREAKERS.

The logline is... of course, just a snippet - and one that isn't all that right, as usual. Truth is, Vampires have become the dominant species on Earth - the top of a food chain. Now, the problem with that is... if Vampires are the dominant species, they don't have anyone to feed upon. And in the film, their food supply is dwindling to almost nothing. These aren't animalistic monstrosities, they're essentially a middle-class realm of suburban vampires with wives and kids. And as the food supply dwindles, and vampires begin to starve, they begin to go a bit crazy. The story focuses on two Vampire brothers in the midst of this rather dire universe.

I hear that DAYBREAKERS isn't the tongue in cheek funny poke poke type of genre smorgasborg like UNDEAD, but is rather - a very serious and realistic take. I'm really looking forward to this, as I love the look and feel of their first film, but at the same time, that film was on such a ridiculously low budget - yet so ambitious - that this time out - I'm hoping Lions Gate has given them enough of a budget to expand the scope of their dreams further still, while keeping the same level of invention that I love from their first film.