Daybreakers
With the release of Daybreakers, which sees vampires take another twist, Femalefirst looks at how vampires have changed from creatures of the night, haunting us like a nightmare, to the stuff of a million girls’ dreams.
We all love them, whether they come from deepest, darkest Romania or reside in rainy Washington; vampires have become part of the cinema scenery and with their sudden rise from the coffin.
Over the years though, vampires have stepped out of the shadows and come into the light. Well, not literally, that would result on flamey death for the most part.
It all began in Germany, with a little silent film called Nosferatu. Based off the Count Dracula book by Bram Stoker, it had film’s very first supernatural vampire.
The classic horror has the vampire, Count Orlok as more animal than nearly any other version seen on screen, small and bony with claws and a mouth full of fangs.
It was what came next that became the most used vampire template, the classic Dracula. Tall, dark and above all handsome, the old style Dracula is a mould that still sticks around to this day, ever since Bela Lugosi took up the cape in 1936.
Whether done by the Italian maestro or British horror favourite Christopher Lee, the charms of the old Transylvanian count didn’t hugely diminish over the years, with movie after movie made about the original vampire.
Come the 1980’s though, and vampires needed a bit of a shake up. The movie world had young, fresh protagonists, and an old, stuffy castle in a far off land didn’t seem as attractive as it once was.
The Lost Boys were what the movies had been searching before. A group of motorcycle punks with a taste for Chinese food as well as blood, The Lost Boys was a revolution for those who only go out at night.
With young vampires doing more than just lie in a coffin until the sun went down, the movie proved a huge hit.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer made huge what Lost Boys had started, a vampire youth revolt, with the television show proving enormously successful, lasting for seven series before it ground to a halt.
Bringing vampires from out of the castle and into the high school cafeteria has now been proved huge not only for TV, but for the book shelves as well.
It started with The Vampire Diaries. Published in the early 1991, it centres on Elena, a young, high school girl who gets involved in a love triangle between two vampire brothers, one good, one bad.
The books were successful, but it wasn’t until the Twilight books that teen age blood sucking really took off.
Having exploded up the best seller lists, it wasn’t long until Hollywood grabbed Stephanie Meyers monster romance hit.
In 2007, before the last book had even been published, we saw the tale of Bella and Edward hit the big screen.
The Twilight vamps weren’t like any others really seen on film before, especially the Cullens. The vegetarian vampire ‘family’ who reside over the town of Forks, choosing not to eat the inhabitants but look after them, are the first truly ‘good-guy’ vampires in a film.
We’d seen a vampire to cheer for before with Blade, the butt-kicking vampire killer who just happened to enjoy the claret himself, but not the type who’d cook you dinner without you being a part of it.
Vampires to sympathise with were at their best in tiny Swedish film, Let The Right One In, which featured one of cinemas youngest ever vampires, Eli, who claims to have been “12 for some time.”
A film that made its vampire just as vulnerable as the people around it, not liking to feed but still animal enough to rip the head (literally) off anyone who crosses her.
Daybreakers brings a different slant yet again on the vampire idea, with humans being the minority and vampires being the dominant ones. With the world going on as normal, apart from nobody gets a tan, and the Starbucks menu isn’t as confusing.
With the vampires now running corporations and facing a blood shortage, these are the most human vampires yet, although that’s never going top be a good thing.
Selfish, cruel and more concerned with profit margins than helping each other, Daybreakers’ corporate vampires are eerily similar to us.
With Daybreakers breaking another vampire staple, that you can be brought back to being human after being bitten, it could be yet another way for the creatures of the night to tread.
Although full of mythology and with plenty of rules, vampires have evolved as much as the movies carrying them have.
While the creatures of the night are taking the limelight still, with the Eclipse set to thrill the Twilight fans again this summer, and another remake of Dracula in the pipeline, the lid isn’t going to close on this coffin for some time.
Femalefirst Cameron Smith
Tagged in Twilight