Vampires are never going to go out of fashion, and as history has shown on countless occasions, you can take the bloodsucking undead and parachute them into virtually any genre or situation. Netflix is the latest to shake things up, with the streaming service releasing the first trailer for airborne thriller Blood Red Sky, which is coming to the platform on July 23rd.
The bare bones of the plot follow a woman and her son traveling on a transatlantic overnight flight, only for their plane to be hijacked by a band of terrorists. Unfortunately for everyone else on board, it would appear as though the mysterious illness that actress Peri Baumeister’s character is suffering from tends to result in her sprouting fangs and draining blood for sustenance.
It broadly sounds like a hybrid of Kurt Russell’s 1996 actioner Executive Decision and Snakes on a Plane, except with vampires and a lot less intentional cheesiness, given the serious tone of the footage in the trailer above. That’s hardly the worst high concept pitch we’ve ever heard, and it presents plenty of opportunities for director and co-writer Peter Thorwarth to craft an original and inventive genre mashup at 30,000 feet that can balance thrills, scares and set pieces in equal measure, with some lashings of blood to go with it.
Low budget action veteran Dominic Purcell is no stranger to vampires, either, having played Dracula in the dismal Blade: Trinity, and while they aren’t glimpsed in the promo, Blood Red Sky also boasts a pair of reliable character actors in The Hobbit, Aquaman, Preacher and Outlander‘s Graham McTavish, as well as Roland Møller, who’s familiar with breaking bad in an actioner having previously shown up in Dwayne Johnson’s Skyscraper, Liam Neeson’s The Commuter and Charlize Theron’s Atomic Blonde.
