Best first?

The first release date of the calendar year has a special stigma attached to it. Films released on that date are the ones for which the studios have the lowest expectations. It's the earliest release date that doesn't qualify for the previous year's Oscars, and those movies are also expected to lose viewers to the ones that were specifically released with Oscar in mind. In that way, they're kind of like the ultimate anti-Oscar movies.

Well, I'm not saying Daybreakers is going to be nominated for any Oscars, much less win one. But I am saying it may be the first film released on the first Friday that I will actually see in the theater. (Last Friday doesn't count -- although it was the first Friday of 2010, it was also January 1st, and I'm not sure if there's ever been a film released on New Year's Day.)

Yep, I'm currently making plans to go with a friend, possibly one of the weeknights next week. And this is especially tough for a person like me, who tries to focus all his January viewing efforts on movies from the previous year, in time to close off his year-end list on Oscar nomination morning (February 2nd). My viewing time is even more limited this January, as I'm also trying to re-watch some favorites from the last decade in order to compile a definitive "best of the decade" list by the same deadline.

Daybreakers' prospective feat is more unusual in the fact that the entire month of January, let alone the first week, is usually a cinematic wasteland, at least in terms of my own interest in getting out to the theater for a newly released film. It's often not until February, in fact, that I see something released in the new calendar year. There was the famous exception of Cloverfield a couple years ago, which I believe I actually saw twice before the calendar switched to February. (That was kind of a fluke -- the same friend with whom I may see Daybreakers wanted to see a movie, and I told him I'd go to Cloverfield again even though it was only five days after I'd seen it the first time.) But Cloverfield wasn't released until January 18th, or the third Friday of the year.

So what is it about Daybreakers?

You've seen the trailers. You know that this seems like -- are you seated? -- an original idea for a vampire movie. You also know it stars Ethan Hawke, who has been heretofore quite selective in his film roles. Whether or not that translates to hope for you is another question. It does for me.

Like Zombieland last year, Daybreakers imagines a world where almost everybody on the planet is a monster -- there zombies, here vampires. (And for a discussion about the essential similarity between those two kinds of creatures, check here.) Unlike Zombieland, this is not a comedy, and the vampires are smart. Vampirism is simply the rule of the day -- almost everyone sucks blood, a logical end result of this kind of communicable disease, and because it's the norm, the blood supply is running dangerously low. The solution? To farm the remaining humans for their blood (see the above Matrix-inspired poster), while simultaneously trying to develop a sustainable form of synthetic blood. Go without blood for too long, and you turn into ... well, a worse kind of vampire.

There is a good possibility that this movie could suck. After all, January was also the month in which at least the last two Underworld movies came out. And though I did not see those two Underworld movies, in the first movie I saw enough blue and black hues, and enough gothic undead throwing enough doors open, for three movies. What's more, the fact that it is being released on January 8th demonstrates that Lionsgate doesn't have very much confidence in it. There's gotta be a fatal flaw, right?

Well, I may just get the chance to find out myself next week. And that alone is a significant accomplishment for Daybreakers.

Zombies vs. vampires

I saw four movies yesterday.

As far as I'm aware, this ties a modern personal record. (I say "modern" because when I was a toddler, I regularly watched six, seven movies a day. This was before MTV killed my attention span.) I can see myself having watched five movies in a day once, but I don't recall those particular circumstances, so I won't swear to it.

I also feel pretty confident saying this is the first time I've watched movies featuring zombies (Diary of the Dead) and vampires (Let the Right One In) in the same day. Diary of the Dead -- or, George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, depending on your level of formality -- follows the recent Cloverfield/Quarantine model of crazy events spiraling out of control, being captured by someone who'd been filming something else entirely. Let the Right One In is the 2008 Swedish chiller that's already being hailed as one of the best vampire movies of all time -- enough that they are remaking it this year as an inevitably horrible Hollywood film. (Though the director of Cloverfield is directing, so I have some hope.)

But I'm not here today to talk about the merits of these films, only their thematic similarities. As I watched them yesterday, it got me thinking how much vampires and zombies actually have in common. They are both undead creatures. They both spread their infection through the bite. They both feed off humans, though vampires are clearly only in it for the blood, while zombies like chomping whatever flesh and bone they can get their hands on. (And don't think I consider this some great revelation that no one else has ever identified.)

Of course, vampires and zombies differ in many important ways as well -- vampires are sexy and usually have personalities, while zombies are vacant and erratic.

But one of the biggest differences between them -- and this is where I think I've struck an original thought -- is what the people in their worlds know about them. And I realized something very funny about vampire movies and zombie movies:

In vampire movies, all the characters know what a vampire is.

In zombie movies, none of the characters have ever heard of a zombie.

To make this a little more explicit, vampire movies almost always contain the word "vampire"; zombie movies rarely contain the word "zombie." It's almost as though the word "vampire" refers to a known creature in the mythozoological universe, whereas the word "zombie" refers to a genre of film, meaning that using the word stigmatizes and demystifies the actual zombies in the film.

Yesterday's films were a perfect example of this phenomenon. In Diary of the Dead, the word "zombie" is never uttered. The characters refer to the happenings in generic, descriptive ways, like "People who are dying are not staying dead" or "He's become one of them." In Let the Right One In (and this is not giving much away), the little boy starts to get suspicious of the behavior of the 12-year-old girl next door, and asks her directly, "Are you a vampire?"

This familiarity/unfamiliarity extends to knowing the rules that govern both types of creatures. In Diary, they have to learn as they go. "Shoot it in the head! That's the only way it will stay down!" We've seen characters figure out the whole "shoot it in the head" thing in dozens of zombie movies. No one knows it instinctively. In Let the Right One In, the actual title refers to one of the known rules about vampires -- that they have to be invited in to a person's home. When vampires appear in vampire movies, no one needs to tell a person what they have to do to protect themselves. In under five minutes flat, they're wearing a necklace of garlic and sharpening a stake in the shape of a cross.

Now, I may be playing dumb here a little bit. There may be a very simple explanation for all this. After all, the concept of vampires, in all cultures, has been around for millenia, and the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of the actual term in the year 1734. Conversely, the zombie has its history in Afro-Caribbean culture, and the word itself did not enter English usage until 1871. But does the relative newness of zombies excuse the fact that no one seems to know about them?

Let's take it one step further. In movies where there are aliens, everyone knows what an alien is. If they see something they can't identify walk out of a space ship, of course it's an alien. They don't have to learn the concept of "alien." But people are always having to learn the concept of "zombie." If people know aliens from the alien stories in our collective subconscious, and people know vampires from the vampire stories in our collective subconscious, how come none of these movies posits a world where there are zombie stories in our collective subconscious? The world of Diary of the Dead does not have a single zombie movie in it?

(I should pause here to acknowledge that there are, in fact, plenty of zombie movies where they use the word zombie -- but these tend to be the ones that are tongue-in-cheek, better categorized as "zom coms" than horrors.)

This is something for a much longer discussion, but every film, regardless of genre, must first ask itself: "What exists in our world?" You could drive yourself crazy with this question. In the world of Spider-Man, does the Superman comic book exist? Or is this crazy spider dude the person who is actually introducing the characters to the concept of a superhero? If they're aware of the concept of a superhero, which superheroes do exist? I'll be interested to see how they tackle that when the Marvel characters start to appear in each other's movies, namely, the Hulk and Iron Man. If Iron Man was like nothing they'd ever seen, and the Hulk was like nothing they'd ever seen, but they both exist in the same world, which phenomenon appeared first? Let's say it was the Hulk. When Iron Man came along, why didn't somebody say, "Ah yes, this guy is kind of like the Hulk. He's an unusually strong creature who has the ability to fight bad people in a way that's beyond heroic -- almost super-heroic."

You can even extend it to real people. If Mel Gibson is playing a character in a movie, does the actual Mel Gibson exist in that world? What if Mel Gibson's character has a reason in the story to refer to Danny Glover, the real actor? Was that version of Danny Glover ever the star of a movie called Lethal Weapon? This can be dangerous territory, as Steven Soderbergh found in Ocean's 12, where Julia Roberts (playing a character named Tess) is conveniently mistaken for the actual Julia Roberts -- and it's one of the main plot points.

Sometimes these debates are better left rhetorical.