Daybreakers

At least The Matrix let you dream in your little tube...

In the year 2019, a Vampire plague has overtaken the world. Vampires make up 95% of the population and all of its citizens and their legitimate governments. The humans are outlaws and hide mostly in the wilderness where they're hunted like animals.

The first quarter of the movie sets up the all-vampire society with minimal dialogue; the art direction and atmospherics help sell the reality of this world. To keep the sun from destroying them, wealthier vampires drive special cars with shields to block out the sunlight while ordinary citizens make their way through the cities using a massive network of underground streets whenever they have to be awake during the day. Blood is harvested from humans in Matrix-like collection farms and sold to citizens at coffee bars.

As captured humans are tapped out and the supply of free-ranging fugitives is dwindling, the blood supply is running dry. Ethan Hawke plays a man made a vampire against his will who's researching a means for synthesizing blood out of sympathy for the humans' plight, and finds himself falling in with a band of fugitives who claim to have found a cure for vampirism. Sam Neill plays his boss, a deliciously evil vampire (does this remind you of anything?) who insists on developing a blood substitute instead of a cure so he can retain and expand his market share.

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Tropes used in Daybreakers include:

• Exclusively Evil: The subsiders.
• Apologetic Attacker: Christopher near the ending when he tries to gun Edward and Audrey down.
• Automatic Crossbows: The humans use pump-action crossbows (with flick-out bow section) against the vampire military.
• Badass Normal: Lionel 'Elvis' Cormac, played by Willem Dafoe.
• Bat Out of Hell: Blood-starved vampires degenerate into mindless werebat-like "subsiders" that terrify the regular vampires.
• Bat Scare: Very subtly riffed and subverted. The movie pulls the "loud noise and rushing object from off-screen scare" precisely three times, always with an infection-free bat. In contrast, the first time we get a good look at one of the subsiders, it emerges slowly, silently, and somewhat solemnly from the shadows.
• Being Evil Sucks: It certainly does once the food supply starts to run out and citizens get hungry and start mutating.
• Berserk Button: Bromley gets really touchy about anything involving his estranged daughter. As intended, Edward's calling him a coward for sending Frankie to bite her instead of doing it himself pushes him over the edge.
• Bittersweet Ending: Yes, our heroes found a cure, but it's not clear whether it'll work on the subsiders, they still face considerable opposition to administering it, and casualties from the worldwide war between humans and vampires will surely continue to mount.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: Everything needed to solve the problems is present by the end; we just aren't shown the more tedious business of actually doing this. It may also qualify as an And the Adventure Continues... ending.
• Big Damn Heroes: First Frankie, and then Elvis turn up in the lobby just in time to save the heroes.
• Bloody Hilarious: The truly epic failure of the first test subject for the blood substitute is so brutally abrupt, one's reaction may well be a sort of horrified breath of laughter.
• Cool Car: Vampire cars are very sleek and have a wide variety of gadgets to make them suitable for daytime driving (cameras, blacked-out windows, etc.)
  • Cormac also owns a couple of very awesome muscle cars.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Sam Neill's character Charles Bromley is every bit this in his own charming way.
• Crucified Hero Shot: The last shot of Frankie is of him lying on the floor, his legs straight and arms outstretched after sacrificing himself holding back his former comrades so that Allison and Edward could get away.
• Defiant to the End: Even after transforming into a subsider, Alison is still able to recognize and lash out at Frankie, staring him down as she's pulled into the sunlight.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Society is running out of a resource that it needs to keep functioning. Those in charge of procuring it insist they can always find new supplies of it somewhere. At the same time, they are searching for an alternative more easily renewable resource, but have no plans to alter the selfish behavior that brought about this shortage in the first place. Society's last hope is a scientist who was never very happy with exploiting this resource in the first place and refuses to consume it himself. This movie certainly uses a lot of the classic tropes one finds in a conservationist movie with a Green Aesop.
  • While reminiscent of peak oil and fossil fuel depletion in general, it's also reminiscent of any number of scarcity issues, corporate ethics issues, and the like.
  • The forced march of the subsiders was... quite disturbing.
  • Getting Frankie to turn Alison into a vampire smacks strongly of "correctional" rape.
• Eyes of Gold: This is played completely straight as one symptom of vampirism.
• Faceless Goons: Averted and played straight (with the sun visors).
• Faux Action Girl: Audrey; she gets captured no less than three times, and the men are called upon to save her every time.
• Food Chain of Evil: Subsiders -> Vampires -> Humans. However, subsiders will eagerly take human blood whenever they can get it. Feeding off vampire blood (including one's own) accelerates a vampire's mutation into a subsider.
• A Glass of Chianti: Played absolutely straight with Bromley kidnapping Audrey and draining her blood into a wine glass.
• Gorn: Seen in the army-feeding scene, and in the aftermath of one of the vampire raids.
• Gross Up Close-Up: This movie had a lot of these.
• Heel Face Turn: Frankie.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Frankie again.
• High Concept: What if traditional vampires (the kind whose bite always produces another vampire) really did exist, and had all of our modern corporate supply chains and technology to help them survive and keep from going extinct?
• Horror Hunger: The need for blood doesn't seem so bad until one realizes deprivation is what made the subsiders the way they are.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: In some of the images/videos which briefly explain how the world came to be vampire-dominated at the start of the film, one sees indications that the vampires initially attempted diplomacy with humanity, but their envoys were rejected.
  • In turn, this explains a lot of the vampires' cruelty toward the remaining humans: the vampires are as human as ever in everything except their anatomy.
• Human Resources: The vampires "farm" the humans as their food supply.
• Humanity Ensues: This is what ultimately happens to Charles Bromley. Edward Dalton then sends him down the elevator, to where an army of starving vampires are waiting. Hilarity Ensues, albeit very bloody and macabre kind of hilarity.
• I Hate You, Vampire Dad: Played relatively straight twice.
  • First, between Frankie and Edward. Edward admits to Audrey that his brother turned him, and he still resents him for it, though he still loves him. Frankie regrets turning him, but insists he thought it necessary.
  • Second, Charles Bromley and his estranged daughter Alison. She violently rejects all of her father's attempts to persuade her. After he has Frankie turn her for him, she refuses all blood rations and starts feeding from herself to hasten her mutation into a subsider until and he's forced to let the Army execute her. When he pays her a visit in her cell, she even attempts to force her father to drink her blood.
• Idiot Ball: Put mildly, it says a lot about the vampire society's corruption and inefficiency that it's relying solely on the efforts of one joint corporate-government project to solve all of its problems. Even if Charles Bromley weren't so predictably corrupt and self-serving, numerous private corporations competing with each other in the free market would do a far better job of finding various economic and scientific solutions to the vampires' supply problem than any monopolistic military-industrial complex possibly could.
• The Immune: Anyone cured of vampirism is immune to the change, and cures the feeder. The only problem is surviving the violent feeding frenzy that inevitably ensues when one is suddenly placed in a crowd of hungry vampires.
• Karmic Death: The vampire bureaucracy was treating humans like cattle; in the end head bureaucrat Charles Bromley ends up being slaughtered like one.
  • Also, the Vampires who eat Frankie immediately become human. Unfortunately for them, they do so within sight of a small army of starving vampires who subsequently devour them just as messily.
  • Then the surviving ex-vampires are shown clutching their stomachs and looking seriously nauseated at realizing what they've just done a few moments before a much less hungry vampire bursts in and mows them all down with a sub-machine gun.
• Karmic Transformation: After years of farming humans for profit, Bromley gets tricked into taking the cure (Edward's blood) and turning human.
• Kill All Humans: Vampire Uncle Sam wants you to capture humans!
• Kiss of the Vampire: Averted with a vengeance.
• Kryptonite-Proof Suit: The vampires make good use of modern technology, developing day-proofed cars and sunlight-blocking body armor.
• Kill the Cutie: Alison Bromley. See the I Hate You, Vampire Dad entry above. Guilty and horrified at seeing his fellow soldiers cheering on Alison's execution, Frankie ultimately decides to switch sides.
• Large Ham: Willem Dafoe is having a LOT of fun here. Of course, it's not every day he gets to be a good guy, so he probably wanted to make the most of it.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Blood substitute. That's one way to paint a room if you want the whole thing in a rusty red coloring.
  • Also, Vampires will quite literally explode into flaming chunks when staked, sometimes knocking over the furniture if this occurs in an enclosed space.
• Looks Like Orlok: The subsiders are definitely this kind of vampire.
• Made of Explodium: Staked vampires, and any vampire exposed to the sunlight for very long. This applies to any kind of vampire, and the heat of the explosion is a real hazard: according to a television news report in the background in one scene, the vampires have been having a lot of trouble with forest fires caused by exploding vampire wildlife. As one of these traditional vampires' traditional traits, however, decapitation doesn't produce the same reaction.
• Muggles Do It Better: Vampires hunt humans for their blood, and have little choice but to use tranquilizer darts to ensure they capture them alive. Humans, on the other hand, use stake-loaded crossbows with impressive accuracy, and are shooting to kill.
• Nice Hat: Much of the fashion is 1930s retro. For those whom sunlight can burn and kill, wearing a fedora actually makes a lot of sense.
  • This is also possibly an extrapolation of how fashion trends tend to move in cycles, and some have predicted such fashions might come back by 2019.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: The film starts out with a transhuman utopia of immortal, disease-proof vampires, whose only real weakness is a dependence on increasingly scarce human blood. The villain's nefarious plan is to come up with a working substitute for human blood and keep all the other benefits. The hero's plan is to turn everybody back into frail, feeble humans.
  • Sunshine is also lethal to vampires, and children are rendered incapable of maturing physically. Whether vampires can get pregnant or reproduce the natural way is never addressed. Either way, immortality comes with complications. All the same, no one ever suggests making a cure mandatory, just available.
  • Bromley also makes clear that he has no intention of ever letting the captive humans go. Instead, he plans to continue selling genuine human blood to high-paying clients who prefer the real thing to the substitute, just as many people prefer the taste of real meat to any substitute.
• Not Growing Up Sucks: At least one vampire child takes this point of view in a very disturbing scene from the opening showing a "preteen" committing suicide by sunlight. While this has no direct effect on the story, it does establish that not everyone in this society is happy with this kind of eternal youth.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Put to humorous use at one point when a human pops up behind Edward, spooking him. Occurs from time to time during the rest of the movie, too.
  • Later, Frankie manages to sneak up behind Audrey while she's in the middle an open field. Of course, he's a trained soldier, and her being in broad daylight gives her a false sense of security.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Surprisingly averted. For all the "viral outbreak" talk and Edward's very empirical scientific approach to vampirism as a disease, the vampires in this story display all the classic supernatural attributes from more traditional stories: they must feed on blood regularly, do not have reflections in a mirror, will burn at the slightest touch of sunlight, and will explode in a spectacular ball of flame when staked. Moviebob himself dubbed this film "the anti-Twilight" of movies.
• Redemption Equals Death: Frankie spends the majority of the film as a lapdog of the government, intent on hunting down humans and reining in his own brother. Towards the end of the film he repents, becomes human, and dies in his very next scene. Also, the cure for vampirism plays with this trope, as in order to become human again both Elvis and Edward have to absorb (in controlled doses) enough sunlight to kill a vampire.
• Scars Are Forever: Almost all vampires have a scar on their neck from when they themselves were turned. It's also how Elvis proves that he was formerly a vampire.
• Suicide by Sunlight: Played brutally straight in the opening sequence.
• Tested On Vampires: The first test subject for the blood substitute is a military volunteer. The results aren't pretty. Edward tests the cure on himself.
• Terminally Dependent Society: This vampire civilization depends on keeping enough humans alive to manufacture its blood. Apparently, most of them don't think to do the math and realize their supply can't last at the rate they're using it.
• Vampire Bites Suck: See Kiss of the Vampire above. Even the non-fatal bites look really painful.
• Vegetarian Vampire: Played with in regards to Edward. He typically drinks animal blood but still suffers the beginning stages of deprivation and is shown to be developing a subsider's pointy ears. Never clarified is whether this is because the type of blood he was drinking is less effective or simply because of a general shortage, as both human and animal blood are indicated to be getting more difficult to procure. When the human resistance notices his condition, Audrey immediately donates some of her blood to him in a cup and makes him drink it, though he does so against his principles and only very reluctantly.
• Villain World: The setting is basically this from the point of view of the humans. Vampires have taken over the world and are hunting them down to put them in a farm and gradually suck them dry.
  • On the other hand, the film goes to some length to show us that vampires are still very much human and well aware of their moral failings and limitations, rather than Exclusively Evil monsters that revel in their predatory nature.
• The Virus: Vampirism, naturally. To the surprise of many, so is the cure.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The first vampire they test the blood substitute on has a particularly nasty one, right before he explodes, splattering every available surface of the room with his blood.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Discussed; Bromley explains that he's actually grateful for the change since he was dying of cancer as a human. However, some characters, including Edward, are rather weary of never being able to grow old.

Edward: "Yeah well, life is a bitch ain't it? Then you don't die."

• You Are Who You Eat: If a vampire is deprived of blood, he turns into a subsider.
  • If a vampire drinks vampire blood, whether others' or her own, she'll mutate much faster.
  • As established in an early scene, one tends to lead to the other: deprivation tempts vampires to feed on themselves and each other.
  • In a much more literal sense, cured human blood turns vampires human again.
• Your Head Asplode: The first blood substitute still has some kinks to work out.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Not immediately obvious, but as the blood supply dwindles and the effects of deprivation grow ever more widespread and pronounced, the vampire civilization gradually degenerates into something very much like this as the subsider population begins to grow and blood riots break out at the coffee stands. Fortunately, the cure is as contagious as the original vampirism was.
  • Even more so actually: Vampirism is spread one feed at a time (assuming the victim lives), from feeder to victim. Humanity is spread in bursts to everyone who feeds from the ex-vampire, which considering the feeding frenzies we see, seems to indicate that it will have a much faster chain reaction.
  • These feeding frenzies do demonstrate one drawback, however: the one bitten is unlikely to survive. Ex-vampires will probably do better for themselves to try luring hungry vampires to them one at a time. The extraction technology Charles Bromley's corporation was using might also be effective for gathering and distributing the cure without endangering the donors.