Daybreakers: Surprisingly Awesome!
January is traditionally the cinematic dumpster, a time when studios are tossing out the films even they think are garbage. But it’s always been a good time for fans of genre film, who can inevitably find a few treasures in the junk pile. So I’m pleased to report that Daybreakers – yes, the Ethan Hawke vampire movie – officially earns a happy dance from me.
Daybreakers actually looks less like horror and more like very stylized sci-fi (the presence of Hawke makes it feel all the more like Gattaca) until the first of many buckets of gore are unleashed on the audience (frankly, I haven’t seen this much head exploding since Scanners) at which point you know that you’re in for some serious horror action. But the premise is smart enough: it’s 2019 and vampires run the show, but they’re about to run out of human blood. Our Hawke hero is a reluctant vampire scientist searching for a blood substitute, who also has a trigger (fang?) happy brother in the vampire army. Enter Willem Dafoe, a redneck former vampire who goes by the name Elvis, and a group of hunted humans, led by the very compelling Claudia Karvan. Rounding out everything is a perfectly cast Sam Neill as a (literal) corporate bloodsucker. There’s a bit of social commentary here – Hawke works for the equivalent of big pharma – but it’s never particularly heavy-handed. Instead, the film is a pretty solid blend of brains, blood and actors who do a good job of selling the script, which gets pretty thin at times. Add to that a solid dose of muscle cars, a lot of cheeky visuals, chimpanzee vampires (chimpires!) the most ludiciously fantastic bloodfeasting sequence – we’re talking SLOW MOTION BLOODFEASTING here, people – and a couple of very good jolts and you’ve got yourself quite a January horror gem. It’s good!
One other item of note about Daybreakers: being a vampire is seriously uncool in this film. These vampires are bad. What a refreshing return to form for a supernatural creature that seems confined to handwringing and canoodling with humans in pop culture these days. Hooray for the return of the bloodsucker!
1. Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) (2008). There’s nothing in this decade that really compares to this powerful, chilling, and inventive Swedish vampire thriller. It’s a dark and compelling (not to mention gender-bending) story of unhinged adolescence and mutual need, framed with some of the best cinematography you’re likely to find in any genre. It’s the best vampire film in two decades, and it’s a major addition to horror. 
1. Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) (1994). This amazing Italian horror film by director Michele Soavi (a protégé of Dario Argento) is a true one-of-kind: a frightening and funny movie about a cemetery caretaker (a fantastic Rupert Everett) who defends a small town from zombies that also doubles as a really sincere exploration of love, death and the meaning of it all. If that sounds a little too heavy, let me assure you that Dellamorte Dellamore is also one hell of a good time: visceral, violent, and weirdly erotic. It’s sublime. 
1. The Shining (1980). Kubrick’s very liberal adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining draws its power from being unlike most traditional horror films. It’s so quiet and monotonous (even boring, at times) that you almost don’t realize how scared you are until all hell breaks loose. In that way, the experience of watching The Shining is not unlike Wendy Torrance’s experience of sudden dread and terror when she realizes her world has been falling apart all along. What’s more, Kubrick evokes madness, ghosts, psychic phenomenon and family dysfunction in the most economical of ways, mixing the ordinary with the terrifying and then totally confusing the two. The Shining makes the banal creepy and then makes the creepy REALLY creepy. It’s the kind of film than can and does stick in your lizard brain forever. 
1. Halloween (1978). It’s darn difficult to pick the top horror film from a decade full of so many classics. Nonetheless, the top spot goes to John Carpenter’s Halloween. It’s hard to overstate how important Halloween was to the horror genre – it spawned countless copycat slashers and codified many of horror’s most treasured clichés, including the killer POV shot and the Final Girl (and there really has been no Final Girl quite like Laurie Strode). Yet, Halloween stands as a first-rate chiller on its own merits: not nearly as violent or gory as its heirs (or its Rob Zombie remake), Halloween is full of strong direction, great compositions, masterful false startles, and a great film score (John Carpenter’s finest – although I’m not sure that’s all that much of a compliment). Best of all, it’s still ludicrously scary, despite the fact that we know all the tricks so well. (I also can’t help but love the fact that the original Michael Meyers mask was a doctored William Shatner/Captain Kirk Halloween mask. Oh yeah.) 