Daybreakers

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Andrew Klavan

Meh. My review in a nutshell.

I’m getting kind of tired of vampires actually. First popularized by Bram Stoker who, there’s some reason to believe, was a repressed homosexual in Victorian England – one of the worst places to be a repressed homosexual, I’m guessing – vampires originally dripped with a genuine horror of male-female sexuality. Consider Stoker’s horrifying description of Arthur driving a stake into the heart of his undead fiance [don't read if you're easily horrified]:

“The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, bloodcurdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions. The sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it. The sight of it gave us courage so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault.

And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth seemed to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over.”

I’m no Freudian but, yeah, that sounds like the bad version of Saturday night to me.

All right, I'll bite...

The trouble is, now that everybody screws each other constantly and dare I say soullessly, vampires are kind of the new normal. Which is exactly the premise of this film, come to think of it!

But that’s the last really interesting thing I can say about it. Oh, all right, I confess: the truth is, after the guy’s head exploded about ten minutes in, I asked myself, “Klavan, my boy, is this really how you want to spend the dwindling minutes of your life?” Then I dozed a bit. Then I fast forwarded. Then it was over. On the other hand, if exploding heads are your bag, go for it. Or go for help.

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Category: Culture Tags: daybreakers, vampires

Rose in Ohio (@RoseMillsOhio)

Thanks for your review. I’m over vampires, too. (Except, of course, the campy, technically inept Dark Shadows of my childhood. For me, it lives on, so to speak.)
Ellen

Vampires are all over the romance novel world. I’m tired of them, tired, tired, tired. I remember how horrified I was when I first saw Nosferatu. The vampire trailed rats, terror and plague with him. He was not some sex god.
http://waxingerratic.wordpress.com ECM

I think, sadly, this ‘review’ is mostly spot-on, even though it had a very interesting premise for (a vampire film for) once.
K

I’ve never understood the attraction of vampires, especially to young women. Perhaps because at this point it’s horribly cliche and uncreative. Since animals that suck blood are usually parasites, perhaps they could combine genres and come up with something like “Attack of the Were-Flea” or even something like this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053611/
Pingback: Right-Wing Links (May 31, 2010)
Kit Davis

THANK YOU! I’m glad I’m not the only one sick of those things. I am sick to death (ha ha, get it?) of the “holy trinity” of overused movie monsters: vampires, werewolves, and zombies.
Joshua B.

Even though its very well done on an artistic level, the 1992 “Dracula” film by Francis Ford Coppola genuinely terrified me as a kid, and continues to do so. I haven’t seen it in several years, but some of the images still reside in my mind. Its very disturbing, and to this day I often wish I had never watched it. I also have similar feelings about the “Castlevania” video games series, of which Dracula is often the main villain. I’ve been tempted many times to revisit those games, and have done so a couple of times…but it always leaves me feeling conflicted and uncomfortable.
Joshua B.

I obviously can’t speak for women, but its important to remember that “Dracula” was written in a time and place where female sexuality was deemed either irrelevant, or horribly evil. People even wrote that since a man’s sexual pleasure was necessary for reproduction but a woman’s was not, the latter should not exist. Stoker’s novel has three characters as secondary villains, who exemplify what 19th-century Victorian society deemed especially horrible – insatiable female lust. Dracula’s brides are the epitome of “forbidden fruit” in the story, and it seems 19th-century women would be drawn to that because their own society repressed them so much. The male equivalent would be a young man from a legalistic home becoming addicted to pornography…not from rampant selfishness alone, but from desperation.

Daybreakers

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