Daybreakers, a curious little vampire tale, was the only new film to break into the Top 5 at the box office over the weekend, with $15 million changing hands between mostly mindless moviegoers and mostly bored teenage ticket takers.
I doubt very many of you saw this R-rated splatterfest. Still, the film was interesting in some (small) respects, and even curiously spiritual. Vampires rule the world and humanity’s been hunted to near extinction. But despite it all, there’s hope for us mortals: One man has been snapped back from vampiredom into humanity again, and it turns out that any bloodsuckers who quaff his hemoglobin turn human too. It’s a great twist on the vampire trope. In most tales of the undead, the vamps themselves transmit a kind of virus to their victims, preternaturally changing them. In Daybreakers, that’s flipped on its head and we’re transmitting the virus (or, rather, the cure). Truly, the hunters have become the hunted, even though humans do little more than offer up their arteries to their vampire overlords. And we kinda get an inkling that the vampires, even with all their nifty powers and pointed teeth, were always destined for defeat.
Is Daybreakers a strange, gory take on Christ’s own paradoxical sacrifice? His victory in apparent defeat, His triumph in suffering? Welllll. I seriously doubt the filmmakers intended it to be such.
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