Recent Vampire Movies I Just Saw for the First Time

"How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening a vampire rises and realizes what he has feared perhaps for decades, that he simply wants no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to him has been swept off the face of the earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except the act of killing. And that vampire goes out to die. No one will find his remains. No one will know where he has gone. And often no one around him - should he seek the company of other vampires - no one will know that he is in despair. He will have ceased long ago to speak of himself or of anything. He will vanish." (Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, 1976)

Daybreakers (four stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - a world where vampires are the majority and humans are an endangered species

Basically, what we've got here is the reverse of Richard Matheson's sci-fi/horror book, I Am Legend (1954). The whole point of that title (and what was missing from the 2007 movie adaptation) is that humans come to realize they're a greater threat to vampires than vampires are to them. Instead of a sunlight-immune female vampire sent to spy on the only living human, we get a sensitive male vampire who's invited to the human's secret hideout. Willem Dafoe is a former vampire/born again human that has stumbled upon the cure for vampirism (exposure to sunlight minus oxygen for bursting into flames), but he's comic relief, not the Vincent Price or Will Smith lead character. That part goes to Ethan Hawke, a resentful vampire who's ironically still working on a synthetic replacement for human blood. I agree with most of the reviewers on IMDb that the conceptual world of Daybreakers is its most interesting aspect. Unlike I Am Legend, it's not a post-apocalyptic world and the streets are not empty during the day (tinted car windows, wide brim hats and sunglasses go from pimp to purposeful). When I first watched Ethan Hawke's other movie, Gattaca (1997), I hated to see it end because I wanted to hang out a bit longer in its near-future world with zoot suits and self-driving cars. Same goes for Daybreakers (I hated to see its ending because of the cheesy slo-mo and pounding score as well). All you get to see is that coffee shops would serve blood au lait and the homeless population would die real quick without safe shelter, but I could spend all day thinking of ways in which a world full of vampires would be different. Take accidental death and disease out of the question and the healthcare and insurance industries would be gone. Fitness gyms, food and agriculture too, except livestock might still be used for blood, but most country fields would be left overgrown. How would people entertain themselves without drugs or alchohol? What would there even be to escape from if they didn't have to plan for retirement and they couldn't procreate? I know - they would worry about the possibility of starvation without death, which is actually what the movie is about.

Let Me In (three and a half stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - what happens when vampires try to ingest food and go where they're not invited

Like it or not, one of the great and terrible rites of passage in mortality is puberty. What would it do to a person, psychologically speaking, to live forever without ever experiencing those pesky hormones, eternally damned in what is commonly referred to as "the awkward stage?" That, ladies and gentlemen, is horror. The concept of an old vampire trapped in the body of a young girl is not new. It went mainstream with the book, Interview with the Vampire (1976) and even before Dracula was published (1897, exactly 25 years before), it was featured in Carmilla (1872). Nothing is really new in Let Me In, but what can you expect from a remake? Yet that's precisely why I wanted to see it. I had to know if it would have more music (it telegraphs everything, but the '80s soundtrack includes Freur's "Doot Doot"), if it would have better special effects (except for the car wreck, it has worse, actually), stronger actors (I'll come back to this) or more exposition (the storyline just jumps back and forth this time around). I could be a whiner and complain that they left out my favorite scene (the cat attack) from the original Swedish movie. What I'd rather point out though, isn't the remake itself, but the perspective I brought to it. Having heard that it's a faithful adaptation, I was free to ignore minor plot points and focus on the characters. "The father" figure, played by Richard Jenkins, exhibited more the humanity of getting old and tired, coming to terms with it and embracing death. Was he the vampire's first familiar, or did he see that he was part of a centuries-old cycle? Chloë Moretz acts more like an old lady than her vampire predecessor, Lina Leandersson. Her fictional maturity may go a little unnoticed at first, next to Kodi Smit-McPhee, seeing as how girls tend to mature faster than boys. Back to my question up top, what would happen if two prepubescent kids met at the same age, but only one grew up? How would that play into the relationship? That's something I didn't think about before. Nor did I catch a possible moral to the story - don't put cardboard up in your windows lest you look suspicious to police investigators.