Monster Scholar

As most of you know, I was one of many people who were looking to Daybreakers as the cure for the common vampire. That is not the say that the film did not succeed on this score and I think it does. Honestly, I enjoyed Daybreakers. In a market dominated by touchy-feely vampires, it was refreshing to see vampires depicted as honest-to-goodness bloodsuckers who devolve into monstrous subsiders when they don’t get enough juice. That said, the only thing that might vex audiences is the fact that Daybreakers is really two movies in one. Daybreakers starts off as a moody, sci-fi noir thriller and the comparison of Daybreakers to films like Gattaca and The Island are spot on. Here is a world on the edge of extinction, vampirism is a virus that has spread the world over and the last vestiges of humanity are struggling to survive while evading capture by the undead elite. Enter Edward Dalton, a sympathetic, self-hating vampire scientist who joins with a band of human rebels to find the cure t...

If 2008 was the year of the zombie in the horror icon zodiac then 2009, looking toward 2010 is undoubtedly the year of the vampire. Films like 30 Days of Night paved the way for a new race of vampires in the form of HBO’s True Blood and the Twilight craze. But despite the hype, the question becomes inevitably why? Past trends in horror have drawn on the fears of the culture that produces them. The slasher flicks of the 80s spoke to the prevailing fear of AIDS as a consequence of drug use and premarital sex. Likewise, the science fiction horror films of the 20s featured aliens as a metaphor for fears of communism and the Red Scare. In an era of horror dominated by torture porn fare like Saw and the Americanization of foreign horror, (The Ring, The Grudge) what is it about the new millennia that summons the ghastly specter of the Nosferatu from its dusty coffin? The shadow of the millennial vampire cast its pall over the US at time when most of us where lying in the ruins of a virule...

Daybreakers has to be the most anticipated vampire movie of 2010 for me. Lionsgate has released another TV spot (via Fearnet ) to hype the release of the film in January. It features the appearance of a teenage vampire who looks like she could be a fan of Hannah Montana, sipping what must be blood from a coffee cup, with a questioning look on her face (are you sure this is O+?). It also gives a glimpse of projectile vampire vomit after Ethan Hawke’s character injects a test subject with a blood substitute. (I feel fine, really…[insert vampire vomit here]). Check out Ms. Harker’s take on the Human Milking PSA spot for Daybreakers at Musings Across a Continuum .

Thanks to Shock Till You Drop , the trailer for the latest release by Lionsgate has taken the web by storm and the horror blog-o-sphere has been buzzing about the newest vampire movie to contribute to the the rise of bloodsuckers in 21st century film. Daybreakers stars Ethan Hawke as Edward Dalton who works as the chief hematologist at Bromley Marks Pharmecueticals , the leading supplier of farmed blood for the world's vampire population.The lab itself is like something out of the Matrix, with rows upon rows of humans suspended in midair as machines gather their blood, a much more sophisticated operation than the blood farms depicted in the vampire film Blade Trinity . It seems like these vampires are on top of world, until their blood supply beings to run out and the search for a blood-substitute hits a wall. Without their food supply, the vampires revert into hideous creatures that resemble a much scarier version of Gary Oldman's bat-man in Bram Stoker's Dracula . ...