We Are the Night

""If you don't want to be like everyone else, you've got two choices: You either get crushed in their world - or you build your own.""

Lena is a teenage girl who lives together with her mother in Berlin and tries to live of what little they have - and of what she can steal. All of a sudden, she attracts the attention of two very different parties: The Berlin police, especially the curious policeman Tom, for a particularly cheeky theft and a band of three vampiresses who discover her in an underground club. The eldest of the vampires, Louise, falls in love with Lena and bites her to make her a new companion.

While Lena reacts scared at first, the other vampires - Louise and her younger companions Charlotte and Nora - quickly introduce her to the positive aspects of her new "life": Supernatural powers, enhanced attractivity, endless parties and every luxury she can dream of. But while Louise does her best to make Lena love the existance as a vampire, both Charlotte and Nora let on hints to darker sides of it. And it all goes downhill when Tom and Lena take a liking to each other - and Louise, who waited centuries to find her perfect partner, is not amused about a mortal man standing in her way.

We are the Night is a German live action movie from the year 2010, and was released in US theaters in May 2011. Although the first version of the script was already finished in 1999, it was necessary for other vampire movies like Twilight to become popular for the author to be granted the necessary sponsoring to produce it. The author, by the way, being the same guy who is responsible for The Wave: Dennis Gansel.

The movie was received as a pleasant change from the freshly risen Twilight routine by the German audience, so the producers decided to release it in other countries as well. Up until now it has been released in France, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and the US.


 * Anti-Villain: Louise, Charlotte and Nora all count, since they show no remorse for killing most of their human victims, but Louise gets the cake: After her beloved Sire died, she had to live several centuries alone, desperately looking for a companion.
 * Anyone Can Die
 * Cute and Psycho: Nora. She acts very sweet and cheerful, but also happens to love her blood rushes. Deconstructed a little when she actually behaves rude towards someone and later explains to Lena that she does it to protect him from herself.
 * Discretion Shot: Although the vampiresses love themselves a little gorefest or two every now and then one will rarely see anything worse than flowing blood. The same goes for sex, which is implied, but never shown.
 * Eye Scream: Charlotte puts out her cigarette with her eye
 * Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Both played straight with Lena and subverted with Nora. While Nora always appears friendly and happy, she also enjoys killing mortals for blood. Lena on the other hand is having a real problem with anything that contains blood and is not a traditional drinking vessel.
 * Perky Goth: Nora is perhaps the archetype.
 * Grey and Gray Morality: Many different shades. Lena will steal money, but doesn't want to kill people, which can be an example of Even Evil Has Standards. Her initial struggle with Tom is White and Grey Morality. The vampires take on brutal Russian pimps and rapists, an example of Black and Gray Morality. Of course, they also kill completely innocent people, which can be White and Grey Morality or straight Black and White Morality, depending on your view. At one point Louise shows remorse for killing innocent people, but only because she promised Lena she wouldn't. If all four vampires are grey, Lena is certainly a lighter shade. Between all of this, plus the various moments of Pet the Dog, it's hard to say exactly how good or evil any of these characters are.
 * I Hate You, Vampire Dad: Charlotte to Louise. Nora occasionally seems to border this, too. And later in the movie, even Lena evolves to this.
 * I Love You, Vampire Son: Louise turned both Charlotte and Lena because she fell in love with them. While she accepts Charlotte's resistance after a while, she doesn't want to let go of Lena's heart.
 * Kick the Dog: The entrance scene shows the vampiresses in a plane full of corpses, probably mostly innocent people. It doesn't seem to bother them at all.
 * Later in the movie, Nora invokes a Kick the Dog moment right in front of Lena's eyes when the women lure two watchmen towards them and kill them although such harsh means were not necessarily justified. Needless to say, Lena doesn't take it very well.
 * Kuudere: Charlotte.
 * Lesbian Vampire: Louise definitely is, and Nora appears to be at least bi, but it's implied with both Lena and Charlotte that their "lesbianism" is somewhat forced upon them by Louise. When Louise first starts to kiss her Lena is noticeably uncomfortable, and it's implied that Charlotte's melancholy is partially to do with being ripped away from her husband and daughter when Louise turned her.
 * LesYay: Lots
 * One-Gender Race: vampires are all female, thanks to all of the male vampires having been exterminated for being too noticeable
 * Pet the Dog: Louise tries to do this when Lena freaks out over the injured watchmen.
 * Reincarnation Romance: When Louise talks about her own sire, she states that she was looking for someone with the same glint in her eyes, hinting at the wish to find a reincarnation of her former companion.
 * She Cleans Up Nicely: Louise gives Lena a bath which heals all of her various wounds, grows her hair longer and removes the black dye to show her natural auburn, and just generally makes her appear significantly more conventionally attractive. She looks so different it's almost as if she was a different person
 * Tsundere: Lena towards Tom and Nora towards a young man from the staff of their hotel. Both do it to protect the men and to keep up the Masquerade.
 * Training From Hell: To teach Lena how to be a vampire, Louise and the other two give her to Russian pimps, who try to beat and rape her, in order to trigger her natural defense mechanisms. The other three still have to step in to prevent Lean from being too badly beaten.
 * Vampire Bites Suck: It's obvious that the women know where the carotid is - almost every bite ends in a red puddle.
 * Yandere: - oh so much.
 * Your Vampires Suck: Slightly hinted at in a conversation between Lena and the other women. When Lena asks if there are male vampires too, Louise states that because they just were too noticeable. If that is no Shoutout to sparkling skin and bloody meals on stage, nothing is.