Vampires Rule: Daybreakers as a Post-COVID “Boring Apocalypse” Movie

This vampire genre movie is a surprising first stab (or bite) into the kind of schlock we need for the “return-to-work” era

In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, many critics seemed braced for an entirely different wave–the swell of pandemic and post-pandemic fiction. Even as many Americans sought out stories of mass outbreaks, zombie apocalypse, and other world-changing events, papers of record grimly foretold the coming of likely-terrible stories and novels about the 2020s quarantine.

Despite the hand wringing, lockdown stories have been written, consumed, and often favorably reviewed. Listicles and critical analyses of the best COVID-19 books and movies appear well before the articles bemoaning their existence in internet searches. What has yet to be narrativized and repackaged for broader consumption is the post-COVID moment, or the era of the “boring apocalypse.” 

The existential crisis begging to be narrativized has passed, and the “return-to-work” era has arrived. The perfect movie for banal world-ending destruction? 2006’s Children of Men. The schlocky, more fun, more Halloween-appropriate version? 2009’s Daybreakers, a campy-as-they-come vampire flick with a surprisingly stacked cast.

In the grimly significant year 2019, humanity has undergone a transformation that will feel eerily familiar (at least up to a point). A bat-originated pandemic has infected 95% of the world’s population with vampirism. Now, ten years later, humanity (vampirity?) has adapted. The neo-gothic post-vampire world continues at night. The world’s food supply, however, has been hunted to near extinction, and the search for a reasonable alternative to human blood is ongoing, headed largely by chief hematologist Edward (Ethan Hawke), and funded by blood banking CEO Charles Bromley (Sam Neill).

The allegory of the vampire is flexible here, accommodating interpretations of the vampires/humans debate as individual allegories for climate change, immigration, marginalized (though almost certainly Christian) religion, and capitalism. The religious angle seems particularly important to the latter half of the movie, as Edward and “Elvis” (Willem Dafoe) are “reborn” to humanity through a fairly unbelievable cure mainly meant to force Hawke into a series of Christ-like poses. But for a post-COVID audience, the setting of Daybreakers is an eerie mirror to our own precarity after a world-altering event. 

The post-pandemic world is dangerous and desperate, but it’s also pedestrian–at least at the beginning. Ten years of the New Normal has changed less than you would imagine, as directors Michael and Peter Spierig see it. Post vampiric transformation, you won’t find many Daybreakers vampires traipsing around in capes or menacing maidens. Most are back at work, or at school. Cars come with UV blocking shades and external cameras. People are more into the brutalistic aesthetic, but there’s otherwise not much difference from pre- and post-event. 

Hawke’s cutthroat boss pressures his employees to find a viable alternative to blood–partially to save the blood-sucking world as we know it from imminent destruction in light of an increasing blood shortage. The most vulnerable of this vampiric society have become something horrifying, a Nosferatu sewer species known as “subsiders,” feeding on other vampires and themselves. Even Edward, shielded from the unrest in a Bromley-Marks gated community, faces an attack from a subsider–a gardener who worked in the company town and transformed as he fed on himself. Yet all this hasn’t stopped the baristas from foaming blood coffee or commuters from boarding trains. 

 It takes time for the upper classes to feel the pinch, but they inevitably do. The intercut scenes of the vampire everyday turn from a slicker version of 2019 to dire and horrifying.  The price of blood skyrockets. The blood shortage almost entirely transforms the working class into subsiders, leaving only the upper crust. The bespoke suited professionals turn into disheveled messes scene by scene, shivering from blood hunger and ready to snap at the slightest provocation. Riots break out. Those in the lower classes who haven’t yet fully transformed into subsiders are rounded up and imprisoned. 

The movie’s framing of its most vulnerable as most susceptible to becoming monstrous is perhaps its biggest sticking point. Yet from the beginning, it’s clear that this is a story told from the perspective of the middle and upper classes. Our entry into this world is not, for instance, through the perspective of Carl the gardener, who later attacks Edward in his home, but Edward himself, a relatively wealthy vampire with a swanky company house. He’s human conscientious, but unclear on how to move forward beyond changing his own personal habits–the equivalent of a hedge fund analyst who always brings his reusable bag to Whole Foods. 

Despite the heavy handedness, too, the vampire world’s ambivalence to the suffering and violence endured by its working class is perhaps most significant to our real-life post-pandemic moment. Even in a movie as unapologetically camp as  Daybreakers–a movie that a) features Willem Dafoe with a bizarre Southern accent  b) has Dafoe make the comparison of living in vampire world to “barebacking a 5 dollar whore” and c) ends the movie with a massive gory feeding frenzy--the social commentary is sound. 

Whether post-COVID-19 or post-vampire, the world has undergone a paradigm shift. Things are harder for the average person, but more profitable for the average CEO. Most feel the pinch of inflation, blood or otherwise. Sam Neill’s character Bromley admits early in the movie that a blood substitute wouldn’t make him stop farming humans. Immortality is a “gift,” as he puts it, and further, there’s literal blood money to be made. When vampires rule, a cure only stops the churn of new profits, both from the blood substitute and from farming increasingly valuable human blood. 

Daybreakers is by no means a perfect movie, but it’s this reveal of corporate shortsightedness in the service of profit that rings most true. In the non-Daybreakers universe, companies continue to post astronomical profits, as they have since 2020, leaving the biggest gains to the most wealthy individuals in the country. Interest rates have skyrocketed. It’s harder to keep up, and it’s harder to get by. It’s too bad a massive feeding frenzy won’t change it, but we can always dream of eating our overlords.