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Charles Bromley is the main antagonist in the 2009 film Daybreakers, and the namesake owner of the corporation known as Bromley Marks Pharmaceuticals, the largest worldwide provider of blood.
He was portrayed by Sam Neill, who also portrays Damien Thorn in The Omen III: The Final Conflict and Dr. William Weir in Event Horizon.
Biography[]
Infection[]
Prior to the events of the film, Bromley was diagnosed with sarcoma in 2008 and given only a few years to live; though he prayed for a miracle, the dying businessman knew that the reality of his situation was inescapable, and his daughter Allison would have to live with the heartbreak of losing him. However, at some point in 2009, an isolated viral outbreak exploded into a global pandemic, spread by infected vampire bats, and those infected by the plague transformed into vampires, dependent on blood, immune to human sicknesses, and effectively immortal.
Seeing this as the miracle he'd been waiting for, Bromley willingly infected himself, curing himself of terminal cancer and giving himself "all the time in the world" to be with his daughter. However, while Allison may have been grief-stricken by her father's imminent death, his transformation into a vampire horrified her, as did Bromley's insistence on making her a vampire as well: refusing to accept transformation and uninterested in her father's pro-vampire rhetoric, she ran away from home. Eventually, she fell in with a human resistance movement and effectively dropped off the radar.
As the plague spread, vampirism became the norm throughout the world, with humankind quickly being reduced to a dwindling minority, one that only dwindled further as the new global vampire society began hunting them for food as vampires can only consume human blood for sustenance as animal bloods are shown to be incapable of providing them the nutrition they need. Though this was primarily the job of the military, the work of actually farming and draining the captured humans went to private industry; among the first companies to take advantage, Bromley Marks Pharmaceuticals quickly became the largest supplier of blood to the vampire world, making Bromley one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet.
For good measure, he also became a provider of other necessities for vampires, including day-proof shelters: BMP employees were granted such housing as a benefits package, allowing them residency in suburbias controlled by Bromley Marks Estates. With such profitable businesses on hand, Bromley's stranglehold on the vampire world seemed inescapable.
Starvation[]
The film itself begins ten years following the initial outbreak: by this time, only five percent of the human population remains, and tests have proved that vampires deprived of human blood gradually degenerate into feral, bat-like monstrosities known as "Subsiders."
Having lionized his fellow vampires as "blessed" for many years, Bromley is unwilling to see the society he helped build collapse and unwilling to let another company take advantage of the gap in the market, so he authorizes hematologist Edward Dalton to begin testing a blood substitute. As he later explains to Edward, his goal is to keep the majority of the vampire population sated through synthetic blood while selling real blood as an expensive delicacy to the upper echelons of society - once the human population has had time to recover, of course.
However, Edward is deeply disheartened by this information: having been unwillingly transformed by his own brother, Frankie, he deplores the victimization of innocent beings and hoped that the synthetic blood would be used to end the cycle of hunting and farming. As such, Bromley's callousness only ends driving Edward out of the company and into cahoots with a human resistance movement attempting to find a cure for vampirism.
When Edward's betrayal is discovered, Bromley charges Frankie Dalton with recapturing the rogue scientist so he can be encouraged to continue his work on the blood substitute. Following raids on the resistance's convoys, however, Frankie returns with Allison in tow: though eager to reunite with his daughter, Bromley is once again rebuffed by Allison when he reveals that most of her friends have been harvested for blood. For good measure, he ends up getting stabbed in the chest with a letter opener, though his vampiric resilience allows him to recover very quickly from the supposedly mortal wound. However, Bromley is still determined to have his daughter by his side for all eternity, and manipulates Frankie into forcibly transforming her into a vampire; though the transformation is a success, Allison refusals to drink any of the blood given to her, ultimately resorting to feeding on herself - a guaranteed method of becoming a Subsider.
With the human population all but fully harvested and vampire society unwilling to tolerate any competition for the remaining blood, the military is deployed to capture Subsiders en mass for extermination. As Allison is now almost a fully-transformed Subsider, Bromley reluctantly has his own daughter condemned to death; tellingly, he is not there to watch as Allison and the other captive Subsiders are chained to a UV-proofed troop carrier and dragged into the sunlight.
Death[]
By this time, Edward has found a means of transforming himself back into a human and hopes to make this cure available to vampires throughout the world; to this end, he meets up with Christopher Caruso, a fellow scientist from BMP. However, Christopher betrays him to Bromley on the spot: in the ensuing raid, Audrey - one of Edward's fellow resistance fighters - ends up getting kidnapped. Later, when Edward surrenders and is brought to the BMP building's penthouse office, Bromley is found to have been draining Audrey's blood into a wine glass, enjoying the taste of her fear.
Feigning a panic attack, Edward begs to be transformed back into a vampire and allowed to continue his work on the blood substitute; however, Bromley smugly reveals that Christopher has already synthesized a stable blood substitute, and BMP factories around the world are already preparing to mass-produce it. In other words, the company no longer requires Edward's services. For a time, Bromley mocks his former employee for cowardice in failing to embrace vampirism and failing to "make it as a human"; however, Edward retorts by needling his boss for not having the stomach to transform Allison himself, prompting Bromley to lose his temper and feed on Edward in a fit of rage.
However, it's immediately revealed that this is a trap: Edward's blood has been isolated as a cure for vampirism, and by drinking it, Bromley has inadvertently transformed himself back into a human being. Now mortal, Bromley is tied to a chair and left in an elevator headed for the lobby: waiting for him are the security personnel he managed to call for while being cured, and because the blood substitute hasn't been released to the lower ranks yet, all of them are on the verge of becoming Subsiders. Bromley can only stare in horror as the starved soldiers charge the elevator and begin feeding on him en masse, ripping his head off in the process.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Even with the cure, Bromley can still make big bucks from the blood substitute since human still need blood substitute to cure blood loss but it is much more profitable to maintain the vampire population to sell it like grocery and enable him and his company to maintain a full grip on the population.