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DVD review: Daybreakers

A vampire film that is a little fresher, if not more chilling, than some of the leftovers served up in recent years.

Ed Lake

June 15, 2010

  • English
  • Arabic

So if everyone who gets bitten by a vampire turns into a vampire and vampires bite people every time they get hungry, that ought to mean that the supply of non-vampires dries up pretty quickly, right? Screenwriters call this kind of niggling "fridge logic", because it resembles the thought-processes involved in trying to work out whether the light stays on when you close the fridge door. It is also the plot of Daybreakers, a vampire film from Australia's Spierig brothers, which is a little fresher, if not more chilling, than some of the leftovers viewers have been served in recent years. It's 2019 and Ethan Hawke is a vampire haematologist searching for a blood substitute to end the famine that is sweeping the fanged population of the planet. Instead he finds Willem Dafoe, who seems to have found a cure for vampirism itself. The stage is set for a brisk, none-too-serious parable about sustainability and the corrupting influence of vested interests, enlivened by gallons and gallons of gore. Sam Neill stands out as Hawke's blood-sucking boss, a plump Dracula with a corner office, and Hawke broods serviceably throughout. Much fun is had with the idea of an all-vampire polity, drinking vampire coffee and riding the subway to their vampire jobs. Meanwhile the mythos gets a nice new wrinkle with the idea of "subsiders", abject, Nosferatu-like creatures to which vampires are reduced by starvation. Alas, the third act doesn't quite make good on the promise of these innovations. But perhaps its inconsistencies will cause a lightbulb to come on for someone else. When one door closes...

Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

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