Troubles in the Blood: The Irish Roots of Vampire Drama Sunrise

Supernatural horror Sunrise may be set in the Pacific Northwest, and director Andrew Baird may call it “a contemporary Western with a horror edge to it,” but it has a little secret. “It’s 95 percent an Irish movie,” he said.

In the dark and brooding tale of brutal revenge (out today on VOD from Lionsgate), Alex Pettyfer plays a mysterious man called Fallon who wanders into a rusting industrial rural community. This is a dying place, ruled by the capricious and violent hand of crime lord and de facto mayor John Reynolds. Newcomer Crystal Yu (Yan Loi) and her family are among the few who will stand up to Reynolds, even if it seems they will incur only his wrath and certain death. As for the stranger, his footprints stir up the local legend of the Redcoat, a vengeful spirit who feasts on both blood and fear.

“I asked him, ‘What is this movie about?’ and he said, ‘It’s about atonement.’ I didn’t really agree, because what is Fallon atoning for?”

It was legendary producer Mark Huffam (himself a huge advocate for Northern Irish production, and the man responsible for bringing Game of Thrones there) that first introduced Baird to the project. The original script was set, suitably enough, in scriptwriter Ronan Blaney’s native land of Northern Ireland and was informed by the peace process of the 1990s and its aftermath. Yet even after years of rewrites and the relocation of the story to the States, Baird quickly realized that the story and the tone was informed by the Troubles that he, as a son of Dublin, had watched across the border. “I could see that it had generated from the discord and the hatred and the separation in that region, and it was intense.” Moreover, its underlying themes, of the villainy of “small-minded, puritanical people with very specific, extreme thinking who are very afraid of anything outside of that,” transcended any one location.

However, he realized that he and Blaney saw the nature of the story in radically different fashions. The director saw elements of both Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark (another vampire movie that never uses the “v” word) and the king of modern Gothic revenge dramas, The Crow, but Blaney had a different read. “I asked him, ‘What is this movie about?’” Baird recalled, “and he said, ‘It’s about atonement.’ I didn’t really agree, because what is Fallon atoning for? What‘s he done? … He suffers great tragedy which puts him into this eternal purgatory where he becomes an addict, a blood addict, where he tries to avenge his wife’s death. It’s only when he meets this family who have moved into his home, and see the love that they have, especially this matriarch, and the spiritual faith that she has in standing in her ground, and being courageous against these oppressors, it retriggers his humanity.”

(Baird’s take won out. As he explained, while he was always respectful of the origin of the story, “I’m the final author of the piece. Film is a director’s medium, and that’s the responsibility I take. It rises and falls on me.”)

The same lack of need for atonement cannot be said of “the monster of the piece” – Joe Reynolds, the bigoted, sputtering, hate-fueled gang boss played by Guy Pearce. Baird said, “Reynolds was the most intense character I’ve ever read,” and he quickly realized that he was the embodiment of those original themes from the first version of how the Troubles sprung from those that sought to divide communities. Moreover, it re-enforced his belief that this is a spiritual, rather than religious, film, as it tackles “the fear of the other, and religion is a great way to separate people.”

Baird had previously worked with the L.A. Confidential star on 2021 sci fi thriller Zone 414, which also filmed in Northern Ireland, yet the two productions could not have been more different. Zone 414 was shot in urban Belfast, mostly on sets, and then Baird returned to Dublin for postproduction. But Sunrise was mostly shot on location, with the ancient woodlands of Portglenone filling in for the Pacific Northwest, followed by a lengthy editing process in Belfast, postproduction undertaken at Yellow Moon Post Production in Holywood on the banks of the Belfast Lough, and even scoring by Irish composer Andrew Simon McAllister. “It’s representative of what the region can do,” Baird said. While he considers himself more American than Irish now (having lived in the States for the last 18 years), “I’m really tickled … Northern Ireland was instrumental in starting my movie career.”

Sunrise is available on limited theatrical release and on VOD now.

This article appears in January 19 • 2024.

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