The Big Picture
- Netflix’s hit horror movie
Blood Red Sky
combines vampire lore with elements of Jodie Foster’s airplane thriller
Flightplan
. - Somber, claustrophobic, and emotionally grounded,
Blood Red Sky
pits Nadja, a woman infected with vampirism, against criminals who hijack her transatlantic flight. - Peri Baumeister’s compelling performance makes Nadja a selfless and tragic heroine who’s determined to protect her son and preserve her humanity.
Snakes on a plane? That’s old history. Netflix’s 2021 German-British co-production Blood Red Sky houses a ludicrous yet unbeatable premise: humans trapped on a transatlantic flight with free-roaming feral vampires. To that end, Blood Red Sky combines elements of Jodie Foster’s 2005 psychological thriller Flightplan with the monster-evading claustrophobia of Train to Busan. Viewers certainly turned into the supernatural horror-action-thriller hybrid upon its debut. Blood Red Sky scored over 50M global views in less than a month, making it the streamer’s most-watched German program ever (as of 2021). Iron-clad in its appeal, satisfactorily frightening, and surprisingly sad, Blood Red Sky does well by that “vampires on a plane” logline by rejecting satire. In the age of What We Do in the Shadows, the film is more somber than the conceit might suggest, its strengths lying in its build from a slow-burn psychological thriller into a gruesome bloodbath grounded by a mother’s love for her son — the latter achieved via leading lady Peri Baumeister‘s (The Last Kingdom and The Signal) spectacular performance.
What Inspired ‘Blood Red Sky’?
Peter Thorwarth, Blood Red Sky‘s director and co-writer alongside Stefan Holtz, had nursed the idea for almost 20 years. He told /Film during a 2021 interview that “when I was 13, I wanted to do horror movies, but I ended up doing comedies, without any intention. […] It was actually pretty hard for me to convince people that I could do something else [other than comedies]. It took me 16 years to get this movie financed.”
Thorwarth modeled the original tone after From Dusk Till Dawn, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino‘s violent camp classic. The bond between a mother and her child took precedence as Thorwarth fleshed out the story. Elaborating to /Film, he said:
“It began when I was on an overnight flight, looking out the window at the surface of the clouds, and I started to think if I were a vampire, I’d have to organize myself and book red eye flights. And if this gets hijacked, the hijackers would turn the plane around back toward the rising sun, I have a problem. And then I realized, no, it’s not me that would have the problem; it’s them that have the problem. I’m a vampire with certain skills that I can use like a superhero. […] My first draft of the script was a little bit more fun than the story is right now. As I got a little bit older and now I’m a father,
I thought maybe it needs a little bit more that just a cool pitch with punchline
s.”
Even though Thorwarth hasn’t cited Jodie Foster’s nail-biting thriller Flightplan as an influence, the frame of reference allows for a precise dissection of Blood Red Sky‘s structure. Released in 2005 and directed by Robert Schwentke, Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a new widow escorting her husband’s body from Germany to America. Accompanying the grieving Kyle is her 6-year-old daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston) — or so she hopes. When Julia disappears and a hijacker group seizes the plane, staff and kidnappers alike gaslight Kyle about her daughter’s existence. The emotionally vulnerable mother doubts herself before deducing the hijackers’ plan to scapegoat her for their crimes, and discovering they murdered her husband to initiate the scheme. Kyle, an aviation engineer who designed the plane they’re aboard, strikes back with her knowledge, naturally quick instincts, and protective parent fury.
What Is Netflix’s ‘Blood Red Sky’ About?
For Blood Red Sky, the mother in question is the widowed Nadja (Peri Baumeister). Flying from Germany to America with her young son Elias (Carl Koch), the loving pair hopes that an exclusive experimental treatment can cure Nadja’s illness. Her baldness, concealed in public with a wig, suggests cancer. Once the plane’s in the air, hijackers disguised as staff hold the passengers hostage. Literally gunning for ransom money and planning to frame the innocent Muslim passengers, these men have no qualms about killing anyone — as Nadja learns. Ordered to stay seated, she runs after Elias when he tries to hide. Despite her tearful pleas, the especially perverse Eightball (Alexander Scheer) unloads his pistol into Nadja’s chest as Elias watches.
The hijackers leave Nadja for dead in the cargo hold, unaware of her secret. Nadja’s illness is vampirism, a progressive infection she’s had since a bloodsucker killed her husband and bit Nadja when Elias was an infant. Nadja wears fake teeth and color-changing contacts to hide her sharp fangs and red eyes, respectively, and injects herself with clean blood. Untreated, her personality will be subsumed; the American specialists are her last hope. Unfortunately, Nadja’s fate becomes irreversible after she regains consciousness and drinks a hijacker’s blood. She kills him in defense, but does she feed because her growing compulsions overrule her judgment? Or are the consequences worthwhile they give her the strength to protect Elias? Blood Red Sky leaves the tragedy intentionally vague.
Related
This Modern Horror Classic Shows a Much Darker Child Vampire Than ‘Abigail’
And it’s all down to the intense character dynamics.
Either way, if you thought a mama bear was terrifying, wait until you meet a mama bear with vampire powers. Nadja didn’t design the plane like Kyle Pratt, but despite slowly losing the last shreds of her humanity, she’ll stop at nothing to protect her beloved son. When the hesitant woman in a wig becomes a snarling, leaping, and artery-tearing Nosferatu, it’s hard not to cheer. The vampire isn’t the threat of this “vampires on a plane” scenario; she’s the heroine.
‘Blood Red Sky’ Uses Claustrophobia To Raise The Stakes
Once the film unleashes its delicious twist in tandem with the boiling suspense pot overflowing, Blood Red Sky throttles into a sharp, emotional, and entertaining action-horror. Like Kyle Pratt and Die Hard‘s John McClane before her, Nadja outsmarts her captors by using her surroundings. An enemy locks himself in a car? She pours alcohol and a lit match down through a windshield crack. Supernatural strength can’t instantly overpower a large weaponized group, especially inside cramped quarters. Cinematographer Yoshi Heimrath emphasizes an airplane’s natural claustrophobia (seats, hallways, the cockpit), and that layout demands a specific kind of fighting. The action techniques favor believable brawling and contests of brute strength over intricate sophistication. Nadja slashes with her claws and teeth. Muscly men fling her into wall panelings and kick her face. No character is playing fair.
Every time Nadja cleverly adapts to her environment, a new disadvantage emerges. Nadja and Elias take refuge in the cockpit, but the criminals demand she unlock the door, and they rapidly execute random hostages as an incentive. With the pilots dead, who lands a massive aircraft? Once they fix the radio, how do they convince the authorities that murderous (and infectious) vampires are on board? And once Nadja’s vampirism spreads en masse, Blood Red Sky becomes a chaotic horror massacre, intensifying the stakes and demanding more last-ditch strategies. Tension enhances with each development, forcing Nadja to choose the “best” awful option available: a template Die Hard perfected and well-utilized by Flightplan‘s intellectual heroine capitalizing on her limited resources.
‘Blood Red Sky’ Gives Its Vampire Mom A Human Heart
Yet there’s one standout boon in Blood Red Sky‘s back pocket, and it’s Peri Baumeister. She delivers a beautifully committed creature performance, twisting and snarling like a reptile, while also tapping into a single mother’s raw grief and selfless love. By rejecting tongue-in-cheek, Baumeister makes Nadja real in an unreal world — the underlying genre requirement, and a colossal undertaking. We don’t need to know how Nadja provides for herself and Elias, or where her anti-vampire serum comes from. Blood Red Sky is about a tormented woman weeping as she tries to yank out her fangs, yelling in misplaced heartbreak at her crying baby, and risking everything — including everyone else — for her son’s survival. After losing her husband, Nadja stays alive because of Elias.
The devotion goes both ways. Elias knows about his mother’s condition. He guards her secret; they’re almost partners-in-crime. His determination to keep her safe is only thwarted by being a pre-teen boy. The more animalistic Nadja becomes, the only thing tethering her mind is her love for Elias. There’s fun to be had when the vampire WWE smackdowns happen, but nothing matters without Nadja and Elias’s relationship.
Speaking about Baumeister to /Film, Peter Thorwarth stated: “While we were shooting, Peri intentionally did everything right, so I didn’t have to direct her much. Even during the casting process, she did everything right. Then later on, she’d say, ‘I wasn’t good enough. Should I do it differently?’ and I said, ‘No, Peri. Relax. It was perfect.'”
This Netflix Vampire Movie Is About Love
Nadja might be a one-woman army, but unlike Flightplan, her resistance comes with many costs — death by a thousand cuts, if you will. Even though Blood Red Sky could benefit from a leaner pacing than 121 minutes, the overlapping twists create a mountain, and the flashbacks enhance the emotional stakes. What might otherwise be a riotous midnight B-movie, this “vampires on a plane” tale never loses sight of its tragic foundation, which is a tale as old as time: the immeasurable love shared by a mother and her child. This mom just happens to have real fangs.
Blood Red Sky is available to stream on Netflix.
Watch on Netflix
