Netflix's 'Blood Red Sky’ Director Talks Film and Becoming the Streamer's Most Successful German Title

Blood Red Sky just hit Netflix on July 23, and is already set to be the streaming platform’s most successful German content to date. The film will have been viewed by more than 50 million households by next week. The vampire drama also saw an average of 90% of viewers watched the film in its entirety, and reached the top 10 in 93 countries according to sources for Deadline. Director Peter Thorwarth sat down with them to discuss how his film made such a bloody splash.

Blood Red Sky follows a mother, Nadja (Peri Baumeister) and son Elias (Carl Anton Koch) as they embark on a transatlantic plane ride from Germany to the US. As they follow the darkness across the ocean their flight becomes hijacked. However, the woman is fighting a mysterious illness which causes her to crave the blood of the living and, turns out to be the only way to save her son.

So why is this “vampire on a plane” film popular? Director Peter Thorwarth thinks it’s the genre bending story that has attracted the mass of viewers. “First of all, I think it’s a very catchy logline – a plane is hijacked and there’s a woman on board who doesn’t want to go into the sunlight. When people talk to each other, they say, ‘have you seen the movie with the vampires on a plane’. I know it’s catchy because I pitched the movie for years, and like a good joke, it had a punchline at the end.

I would tell people it was set on a plane that got highjacked – I could feel them getting bored – and then at the end I would explain that she (Peri Baumeister) is a vampire. That was surprising for them. I think that once you’ve seen the movie, you also see this emotional arc. It’s not a horror movie, it’s also an action drama, but then it has this strong bond between mother and son. I have noticed that viewers who don’t like horror movies kept watching it until the end because they were so touched by the story.”

He thought people would find the film interesting but was surprised by how many people found the film on the massive streaming platform. “I cannot explain it because we don’t have any stars in the movie,” Thorwarth said. “The awareness was there, the numbers were high from the beginning. My interpretation is that it’s because of the logline. It’s like ‘a skyscraper gets taken over by terrorists’. When it’s too complicated it’s harder to talk to other people about it.”

Blood Red Sky has reached the number one spot in the U.S., Brazil, Saudi Arabia and over 57 other countries. However it only reached the number two spot in its home country of Germany. Thorwarth believes that history has something to do with that. “It’s funny because so many types of genre movies were created in Germany. Nosferatu for horror, Metropolis for sci-fi, etc. But because of our fucked up history we lost all our talent, they all emigrated to the States.

“Since then genre movies had a hard time in Germany,” says Thorwarth. “Movies were misused by the Nazis for propaganda. After the Second World War everything was destroyed. We had these special films that were mostly very beautiful landscapes with no conflict and very cheesy stories – the people had seen too much violence.

As a reaction to that, very intellectual movies were made by guys like Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It has been pretty hard to do genre movies in Germany since then. And this movie [Blood Red Sky] seems to play better in the U.S. than in Germany. The Germans always have a problem with their own culture. We don’t have this confidence in our culture. German film tends to need to be very sophisticated.”

So what’s on the horizon for Thorwarth? “I’m writing something new. My next thing will have a bit more of my humor, though it’s a really tough story taking place in medieval times. It’s my swansong to chivalry. In Germany I have been compared to Guy Ritchie.”

You can check out the trailer for Thorwarth’s Blood Red Sky below and the film is now streaming only on Netflix. Be sure to follow ScaryNerd for more of all things horror, sci-fi and more. You can read Thorwarth’s full interview here.