Willem Dafoe Weighs In on "Twilight" vs. "Daybreakers"

Just in case you haven't heard, vampires are the new fad to hit the teen scene. "Daybreakers" is the newest movie to capitalize on that trend, and film star Willem Dafoe said recently on MTV.com that "Daybreakers" actually predates the"Twilight" novels by about a year.

Writer/directors for the movie, Michael and Peter Spierig, sold the script to Lionsgate in 2004, well beofre the first "Twilight" novel came out.

"Daybreakers" is a story in which vampires have completely taken over, spreading their bloodsucking nature to most of the world. But they have run into a major problem: they're running out of humans and therefore their life source. If humans go extinct, then so do vampires.

"I thought the approach was really fresh," he said in a recent MTV interview. "It's such a well-established genre that usually people are doing takes on it. 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 abou everything from sex to romance to power to colonialism to, you name it."

Dafoe plays a former vampire-turned human in a freak accident, and is the protagonist for the film. He works with the few other humans left to protect our race from becoming the next Slim-Fast liquid lunch brand.

"This isn't an apology, because obviously [Lionsgate] factored very big on when it was going to be released, but this was in development far before [Twilight]," Dafoe said about his new film.