A New Dawn for Vampires-With Lots Less Angst

It has been difficult for me to find time to post recently because I was working on graduate school applications, and more recently, I have just been working to make money for graduate school. There have been several films I have wanted to post about including "The Invention of Lying" and "The Seventh Seal", both of which I saw a while ago, but I just couldn't get past the basic mapping out of points that I wanted to discuss. Maybe I'll come back to them later.

This post however, I wish to devote to a movie that I just saw yesterday at the Art Theater in Champaign (previously Boardman's Art Theatre, but now under new ownership). I spent several hours there yesterday, as me and my friend went and saw the animated shorts that are up for Oscars, as well as the late night film "Daybreakers".

I want to spend a quick paragraph on the animated features up for the Oscars this year which include "French Roast" from France, "Wallace and Grommit: A Matter of Loaf and Death" from the UK, "La Dama Y La Muerte" from Spain, "Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty" from Ireland, and "Logorama" also from France. They were all wonderful, but I have to say, I'm rooting for "Logorama". While "La Dama Y La Muerte" was my favorite in terms of style and story, "Logorama" was one of the more thoughtful, critical and innovative animated shorts that I have ever seen. It contains over 2,000 images and logos from businesses and commercialized society in general, and while the story is nothing new, the fantastic way in which they have categorized and used the logos makes it this year's best animated short. Sadly, while I love Wallace and Grommit, and realize clay-mation is an incredibly intricate and time consuming art form, it is about third or fourth on my list of shorts that
deserve the Oscar.

But on to the main event!! At 10 PM, I sat down to the new release "Daybreakers", the most current film to come out in theaters about that most popular of subjects these days, vampires. Now, I'm not a huge fan of horror films in general, or of vampire movies specifically. I have been trying to rectify this with classics such as "Suspiria", so we'll see how that goes. However, I am not one of the best sources for information on vampire lore, besides what everyone knows. However, it seems to me that since Anne Rice has started writing, and really as cinematic history continues, vampirism has gotten poncy (see: Interview With a Vampire), and something that is supposed to be aspired to (see: Twilight series, any of the new vampire books, etc.). There are very few bastions left where the true horror of vampires--they feed off people people!--is left ( I have heard 30 Days of Night is a good film for this). Too often now, the fear of being an unstoppable, life-sucking force is taken out of the story ("No Edward, I want to be a vampire, because you're 'vegetarian', and we can make swoony eyes at each other forever!). Not that I'm saying teenage angst and romance doesn't have it's place, but the horror genre is not it.

Now "Daybreakers" is a film that treats vampires in an interesting, and relatively new way. The premise is that in a world where if you are bitten by a vampire you either a)die or b)turn into a vampire, the human population is dwindling. As a hi-tech company races to find a blood substitute, several of the remaining humans turn to Edward Dalton (played by the appropriately somber Ethan Hawke), a leading vampire blood scientist, a reluctant vampire (along the lines of Brad Pitt in Interview...). He doesn't drink human blood. However, in a world where the food supply is dwindling, there is the appropriate amount of terror within the vampire community as they start feeding off each other, and themselves (with horrific results).

Once Willem Dafoe shows up, it turns out that he has figured out a cure for vampirism. He used to be one himself. One aspect that I like about the direction the story takes is that it is not desirable to be a vampire, because it involves taking human life, and Edward Dalton would never bite the girl that he starts forming an attachment too (and she wouldn't ask!). There's nothing romantic about it in this film. What they can become as they slowly starve to death is grotesque.

The plot is another aspect of the film that I love, because it fuses the horror genre with science fiction. There have been many movies about the end of civilization as we know it--this film just takes a different point of view on it. The characters are suitably complex, but not so much that it requires extensive back story. There are no long expository sequences about the past, how they got this way, why they have to go back, etc. Things are the way they are, but there is a slim chance to change things for the better.

I like this film. The cinematography is very nicely done, beautiful blue filters make the night that the vampires live in as cold and lifeless as their undead hearts. The warm yellow filters of the daytime make you feel the relative safety the sun brings to humans (unlike a certain series of sparkly beings, these vampires burst spectacularly into flames in the sunlight). Some of the shots are incredibly structured also, and the inevitable presence of red in horror films always adds a wonderful color to a scene. It is gruesome and gory, however not too realistically so as go flying around, and the vampires explode in a shower of flame and sparks as they get staked through the heart.

Somehow, the actors don't take themselves too seriously, but manage to be perfectly believable in their roles. I have heard that in a movie, you can tell one big lie, and the audience will accept it. Here the one big lie is that vampires are real and they constitute the majority of society. Everything beyond that lies within the realms of believability for this one stretch of reality. At the Art Theater, the owner came out and introduced the film (which I really thought was a nice touch) and he said it was one of the more "realistic" horror films that he had seen in awhile, and I have to say, I agree with him. I give this film two thumbs up, an A, 4 stars, however you want to rate it, and I think that with its combination of horror and sci-fi, and the heavyweight actors in it (including Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill, and Willem Dafoe) this movie is a must see.



As a side note, anyone in the Champaign-Urbana I would encourage to go out and support the newly reopened Art Theater in downtown Champaign. The new owner seems very nice, and you can tell he really likes the movies that he's showing. The prices are reasonable, and I am so glad that we still have an independent, locally owned theater in the area. I highly recommend this theater, it's the best in town! Plus, you don't have to sit through half an hour of commercials before you get to the actual movie.