NOW UNTIL THE BREAK OF DAY

Thanks to the ubiquity of the insipid Twilight film adaptations, the vampire has become a rather sad figure in the cinema of the late noughties – defanged, somewhat, by Robert Pattinson’s pallid moping, vampires have become shadows of what they ought to be.
But a pair of Australian brothers are setting out to redress the balance in no uncertain terms with Daybreakers. The Spierigs, twins Peter and Michael, gained a rep for bloodiness with their low-budget debut horror Undead, and Daybreakers is similarly hard-hitting.
“We’re more drawn to the traditional pop-culture version of what vampires are,” Michael says. “Ours are certainly not Twilight vampires. We want to stay completely away from that. We grew up on Hammer stuff and the original Universal monster stuff and The Lost Boys and Near Dark and Fearless Vampire Killers, so we like the more traditional approach. Lately another one that’s great is Let The Right One In, which is more the type of thing that we like, rather than the sad, teenage-girl kind of vampire films.”
The Spierigs have dreamed up a world where in the near future, a plague of vampirism has spread throughout almost the entire human race. The film opens with shots of vampires going about their daily lives – loading up on blood with their caffeine, commuting to work just after dusk, coming home to blacked-out houses, and generally trying to maintain some semblance of a normal life.
“We just look at an idea that we like, like vampires or aliens or whatever it may be,” Michael explains of their creative process, “and we just kind of ask ourselves what hasn’t been done in the genre before, then we throw out all these ideas. And that’s kind of how it evolved – we just said hang on a second, if everybody’s a vampire how would they live? Let’s just ignore the dilemma for a second and play around in this world. If you’re a vampire and everybody’s a vampire, how would you live, what would you do, how would you get to work? It started to sound really interesting so we just kept developing that further and further and we ended up with Daybreakers.”
Daybreakers is the story of an everyman hero – a meek scientist who just happens to be a vampire, played by Ethan Hawke. When the Spierigs were writing the script, they kept describing their protagonist to each other as “an Ethan Hawke type”.
“By that, we meant this was someone intelligent, whom you believe as a leading man, but also has a certain vulnerability about him,” Peter says. “I think the days of that muscle-bound hero who can go into a situation and just handle it have been gone for quite a while, you know. It’s far more interesting to have the everyman hero.
“We really liked the things Ethan’s done in terms of movies and we just really wanted him but thought there was no way it was ever going to happen. But we thought ‘Screw it, we’ll send it to him anyway and all he can do is pass’, and we were shocked when he wanted us to come and meet him and chat. And as soon as he said yes, it changed the attitude towards the film. Suddenly it had a certain prestige about it that it didn’t have before. Why is such a strong actor interested in a horror film?”
With Hawke’s interest followed a great ensemble cast, including Sam Neill as a villainous corporate mogul, Isabel Lucas as his daughter, Claudia Karvan as a bold resistance leader, and Willem Dafoe as crossbow-wielding bad-ass Elvis.
“Willem’s a great guy,” Peter says, “and we had such a good time working with him. And yes he’s a very serious actor, and they all are to some extent – Ethan, Willem, Sam, Claudia, Vince Colosimo – they’ve all done their fair share of dramatic stuff, but I will say this about all serious actors – once you get them in front of a lot of blood and they get crossbows and get to run around playing cowboys and Indians, they all become little kids, and Willem is no exception. Once he got that crossbow out and he’s screaming at vampires and blowing them away, he was just a little kid again.”
WHAT: Daybreakers
WHERE & WHEN: Screening from Thursday 4 February