Willem Dafoe: Daybreakers Came Before Twilight

Not your parent's vampires.

In the new movie Daybreakers, vampires aren't the sparkly teen heartthrobs you're used to in the Twilight series. They're more blood-hungry, they're uglier and, in fact, they're older. The script for Daybreakers came out over a year before Stephanie Meyer's first book.

In an interview with MTV, veteran actor Willem Dafoe talked about the long-history of vampires in popular culture, and why we find them so fascinating.

"It's such a well-established genre that usually people are doing takes on it," he said. "You could [go back to the roots.] It's very flexible, the vampire mythology, you can use it to serve lots of things. God knows it's a great metaphor for talking about everything from sex to romance to power to colonialism to ... you name it."

The script for Daybreakers was actually acquired by Lionsgate Films over a year before Stephanie Meyer's first Twilight book came out, a fact Dafoe seems to be proud of. "This was in development far before it," Dafoe said.

The film stars Ethan Hawke as a man fighting to save two races, humans and vampires. A deadly outbreak turned most of the population into blood-suckers, and now human beings are on the verge of extinction... but something even worse lurks in the shadows.

Dafoe plays Lionel "Elvis" Cormac, a vampire who becomes human again after being "cured."

As for the genre, vampires seem to be a part of a current Hollywood trend. "I think there are surges of, whatever, football movies, there are surges of sports movies, there are surges of a certain kind of political movie," Dafoe said. "These things, they're cyclical. The vampire myth keeps on getting recycled."