The trailer is online for forthcoming vampire actioner Daybreakers, starring Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe. Released in early January 2010, the movie is set in the permanent midnight of a near-future world where a blood-sucking majority reign over a rapidly-dwindling human minority. But the vampiric society comes under dire threat when the supply of claret required to sustain the pointy-toothed populace threatens to run dry.

With the blood-deprived citizens beginning to degenerate into a violent, animalistic state, it is up to Hawke’s research scientist Edward Dalton to try and find a solution that will banish the spectre of total extinction. These endeavours though lead Dalton into contact with a cabal of vampires, led by Dafoe’s Elvis, who have designs on re-establishing the human race.

Daybreakers is the second feature from writer-director twins Michael and Peter Spierig, following their 2003 micro-budget zombie flick Undead, and judging by the trailer it doesn’t exactly seem set to deliver the kind of reassessment of the vampire genre served up by Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In earlier this year.

However it does appear as if there might be the possibility of some modestly-budgeted fun, with the sequences depicting the mainstream vampire society persecuting the few remaining free humans having potential for a little bit of satirical er, bite. And in best sci-fi tradition, there is a serious metaphor lurking underneath the slightly daft accoutrements of Daybreakers’ scenario; in this case, the issue of the Earth’s natural resources dwindling in the face of our gargantuan appetite for fuel.

There is a neat echo of Soylent Green in the shots depicting rows and rows of humans hooked up like cattle to giant blood-milking mechanisms, and overall the movie looks as if it might play like a fairly breezy mash-up between I Am Legend and Underworld. Not keen at all on the Placebo cover of Running Up that Hill in the latter half of the trailer though. That actually caused a little bit of my lunch to sick up into my mouth. Just vile really.

Source: Ain’t It Cool