Hola all. Massawyrm here.
When the Spierig brothers set out to make their new horror/science fiction film DAYBREAKERS, they received a little help from their star Ethan Hawke in procuring a 35mm print of the sci-fi horror classic THE THING. It wasn’t that they wanted to mine the film for ideas, but rather they wanted to show the cast and crew what they were aiming at. They didn’t just want to make a vampire movie. They wanted to make a John Carpenter movie.
There’s just something about the way John Carpenter made movies that few have ever been able to duplicate. You don’t just watch a John Carpenter movie, you think about a John Carpenter movie; you dream about a John Carpenter movie; you posit what ifs about John Carpenter movies. It is a healthy mix of horror and thought provoking speculative fiction flavored with just the right amount of adventure that creates a terrible menace, but also offers heroes that you honestly think are up to the task of meeting that menace. His movies are almost infinitely rewatchable, and even though his endings were often nihilistic, he had a way of thrilling you with that fact rather than depressing you, and filled you with a desire to come back and go through it all over again.
Well, the Spierigs have succeeded. They’ve made their John Carpenter picture. And it kicks an unbelievable amount of ass.
Sometime in the near future vampirism breaks out like a virus, but rather than hiding in the shadows, lurking and biding their time as the secret masters of humanity (as many stories, movies and games have envisioned it) almost the entire world has succumbed. Humans were hunted as cattle and those that refused to turn (or weren’t captured to be farmed for blood) went into hiding, eking out minor existences as the last of their kind. But this story isn’t about them. It’s about the vampires and their inevitable problem of running out of blood. A mere 10 years after the change, there hasn’t been the time to start elaborate breeding programs or develop a blood replacement, and we’ve done what humans do: consume until we can consume no more.
But what sets this even further apart from other vampire films is what comes next. Vampires who don’t feed begin to…change…in very undesirable ways. And as attacks by the monstrous blood-starved beasts grow more frequent and rations run shorter, humanity (vampiric though it may be) is on the verge of collapse and total ruin. This is the world in which our adventure takes place; a dark, moody, science fiction hell steeped in metaphor and startling in its originality.
Just as the Spierigs reinvented the zombie film with UNDEAD, so too do they now reinvent the Dark Science fiction film. These days anything with the words “Science Fiction” and “Horror” used together in the same sentence all comes out as the same thing: survival horror. Monsters on a spaceship or some genetically created beast or something of that nature stalks and kills people one by one. This film is entirely counter to that. In fact, our hero is one of the monsters.
The vampire-ruled world created by the Spierigs is everything you want it to be. Moody, evocative and well thought out, it is clear that the brothers put a lot of effort into the makeup and rules of this world. It lives and breathes on the screen and seems to be the platform for a hundred different stories. But the one they want to tell is incredible. A bloody, intelligent tale about the end of the world AFTER the end of the world. Thematically it serves as a great allegory for what we are running up on. As we mine the last of certain natural resources over the next few decades, we will be confronted with decisions on how best to go on without them. But how do we give up many of the technologies we’ve come to depend upon? The Spierigs frame this interestingly in the form of vampires. Would you be willing to give up everything you’ve come to depend upon if it meant a new, but radically different life without the comfort you once knew?
A brilliant and fantastically original take on the genre, the Spierig’s re-entry onto the scene after a six-year hiatus is fraught with horror, angst and more than a few tense, high octane scenes of action. Driven by a cast of terrific actors like the aforementioned Ethan Hawke, Sam Neil and Willem Dafoe, this film is absolutely everything you want from science fiction, dripping in all the blood you want from horror.
Destined to be considered one of the modern genre classics, this is one of those films that will get into your head and force you to wander around in a post-vampirapocalyptic world, wondering about how this or that would work. Internally consistent throughout, the Spierigs have brought us a new world to play in, and they’ve made it entertaining as all hell to boot. Easily one of the very best things to play at Fantastic Fest this year, you will not be disappointed once this gets unleashed early next year. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, see this film at your earliest opportunity.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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