Nadja and her son Elias are aboard a transatlantic overnight flight from Germany to New York. Nadja suffers from an illness that prevents her body from producing blood, forcing her to take regular medication, and is traveling to America to see a doctor who can treat her condition. Unfortunately, Nadja's flight is hijacked by a group of terrorists, and she gets shot while trying to protect her son. This, however, does not kill her... as it turns out that her "illness" is actually vampirism. Fully transformed into a vampire, Nadja now stalks the plane in order to take it back from the terrorists and save Elias.
The trailer can be viewed here
.
Tropes:
- Air-Vent Passageway: Elias is the only one small enough to crawl through a conduit to get to the cargo bay. Nadja tries to stop him going, but he forces her back with the UV flashlight and dives in.
- All for Nothing: Nadja's efforts to travel to America and cure her vampirism are ultimately fruitless, as not only does the hijacked plane end up landing in Scotland instead, but the movie ends with her being fully transformed into a mindless Feral Vampire who cannot recognize her own son as anything except food, thus forcing Elias to kill her.
- Amputation Stops Spread: When sealing off the cargo bay, Farid is bitten on the hand by one of the vampires. Nadja quickly amputates the hand with an axe before he could turn.
- Artistic License – Military: Several Humvees are seen at RAF Drybridge in Scotland, despite no service in the British armed forces using them in reality. Similarly, the special forces soldiers who board the plane at the end of the film are seen carrying B&T MP9 submachine guns, also not used by the British military in reality.
- Asshole Victim:
- Bill Morris, the arrogant and self-serving Scottish stockbroker. He tries to steal an oxygen mask off an old German lady, only to get severe internal injuries when a food trolley careens down the aisle into him as the plane dives to a lower altitude. In a desperate attempt to save his own life, he releases the vampires from the hold in the hope they will turn him, only to be killed by Eightball instead.
- When Nadja needs a lot of fresh blood to fight her way through the vampires to save her son, she kills Bastian (the pilot who was in league with the terrorists), after verifying Farid can land the plane by himself.
- Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: The terrorists trying to force their way into the cockpit when Nadja barricades herself inside promptly panic and run when she bursts out, revealing she's a vampire, tears out their ringleader's throat and savagely mauls a second man.
- Ax-Crazy: Eightball is so violently crazy he can barely look at someone without stabbing them, much to the other terrorists' chagrin. He is so crazy in fact, he extracts some of Nadja's blood and injects himself with it. He's basically a modern day Klaus Kinski/Helmut Berger-esque psychopathic villain (the former whose specialty is playing these types of psychotics and even before played a vampire).
- Baldness Means Sickness: Nadja's hair has fallen out because of her infection, forcing her to wear a wig.
- Bald of Evil: Berg, the terrorists' leader, is totally hairless.
- Beauty to Beast: Nadja was a fairly attractive woman when she was human. By the start of the film, her infection has already caused her hair to fall out. Her vampiric transformation speeds up considerably after she gets shot, and by the middle of the film, the other passengers are reacting to her more hideously monstrous appearance with horror. After her transformation into a vampire is complete at the end, she looks and acts totally unrecognizable from her human self.
- Big Bad: Berg, the leader of the hijackers. After his death halfway through the film, Eightball becomes the most prominent of the group and the main threat to Nadja, even more so after being turned into a vampire as well.
- Bilingual Backfire: When told to read a message in Arabic, Farid adds a line about being forced to read it. The leader then shoots a hostage and tells him, in Arabic, to read it correctly.
- Bittersweet Ending: Much more on the bitter side, bordering on Downer Ending. Everyone on the plane except Elias and Farid have either been killed or turned into vampires, and Nadja loses her humanity to the point that she no longer recognizes Elias, who is forced to kill her by blowing up the plane. On the positive side, there is no indication that any vampires survived, so the infection will not spread any further, and Colonel Drummond is finally convinced of Farid's innocence. Farid also keeps his promise to Nadja to take care of Elias after her death.
- Break His Heart to Save Him: A non-romantic example; after disposing of Eightball and being revived by Elias's blood, Nadja shoves her son away from her and into a patch of sunlight as Elias tries to hug her, knowing she's moments away from losing her humanity and will be tempted to attack him.
- Camp Gay: The flight attendant Robert, to the point that his female co-workers lampshade it. He's actually Eightball, and is implied to be acting like this deliberately as part of his cover; that, or he's a Depraved Bisexual.
- Cassandra Truth: Elias and Farid repeatedly tell Colonel Drummond that the plane is full of vampires and that Farid is innocent and is the sole survivor on board. Elias is dismissed as being in shock and Farid is assumed to be one of the hijackers. This costs the assault team their lives.
- Chekhov's Gun: The UV torch used by the hijackers to find the marked area where the planes blackbox is stored. It is later used against Nadja when they realise she is a vampire. It is later used by Elias to venture into the cargo hold.
- Chekhov's News: When Nadja is first introduced in her hotel room, a financial news segment playing on the TV in the background is discussing problems with oversaturation of the stock market, specifically in relation to airline shares. Later on in the film, the Scottish stockbroker theorises the terrorists intend to take advantage of this by blowing up the plane and shorting the stock market to make a fortune.
- Closed Circle: No escaping an airliner flying over the Atlantic at night. The hijackers were planning to parachute out and be picked up from the ocean, but the passengers regain control of the cockpit and change course, thus missing the pickup point.
- Continuous Decompression: Averted. When a window is broken by a stray gunshot, the plane depressurizes near-instantly and Eightball is pulled towards it, but the sucking quickly stops and with all the air gone, everyone is able to move normally to scramble for oxygen masks. Later when the cargo bay door is blown off, they are already flying low because of the earlier decompression, so it has little effect.
- Crash Course Landing: The movie opens with this trope, with Farid being talked through bringing down the aircraft safely. Unfortunately his troubles are not over.
- Cute Monster Girl: Subverted. While Nadja does look decently attractive at the beginning of the movie when her vampiric infection was being kept under control and she still looked mostly human (even despite being bald under her wig), as her transformation progresses further she Looks Like Orlok, and in the ending she cannot even pass as being remotely human in appearance or behavior.
- Death of a Child: Other than Elias, there is at least one other child onboard the plane, a little girl of similar age that Berg threatens to shoot if Nadja won't open the cockpit door. She gets turned into a vampire when they're set loose in the plane, and is ultimately killed when it later explodes.
- Defiant to the End: Carl's Last Words are to tell Eightball how ugly he looks now he's been turned into a vampire. Eightball slits his throat in response, so he won't turn when Eightball drinks his blood.
- Didn't Think This Through: The hijackers prepare to blow open the cargo door and jump out... leaving no one in the cockpit to resist the passengers with nothing to lose, two of whom the hijackers selected because they had flight training, from regaining control of the aircraft.
- They do set up Booby Trap cannisters of Deadly Gas, threatening to release them if anyone leaves their seat. However Nadja overhears them talking about how they are actually harmless cans of hairspray, so she has no problem doing so.
- "Die Hard" on an X: Specifically, Die Hard on a plane... with a vampire as John McClane. This mostly goes away in the second half, where it turns into From Dusk Till Dawn on a plane as the remaining survivors, among both the hijackers and the passengers, team up to survive.
- Disc-One Final Boss: Berg, the leader of the hijackers, is killed by Nadja halfway through the movie. Eightball, a particularly psychotic member of the group, assumes the role of Big Bad.
- Disney Villain Death: Eightball is initially pushed out of the blown-open cargo hatch but holds onto a net and climbs back in. Farid then turns the plane to expose him to the sun, causing him to fry and let go, falling to his death.
- Enemy Mine: Bastian teams up with Nadja and the remaining passengers once the vampires take over the plane. Nadja kills him once she realizes that he isn't necessary to land the plane, as she needs to drain him for a boost to take on Eightball and she'd rather not kill Farid.
- Even Evil Has Standards: All the other terrorists openly dislike Eightball and call him a maniac. Carl in particular hates him.
- Subverted with Berg. He may hate Eightball but that's just because he's acting like a rabid dog and thus putting their mission at risk.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: Everyone that boarded the plane except for Elias and Farid either become vampires or snacks for them. And then everyone except for these two are certainly dead when the plane explodes.
- Exact Words: When they first meet, Elias tells Farid that his mother is very sick, and they're going to America to see a doctor who can operate on her to give her healthy bone marrow. Farid naturally assumes this is a childish explanation for leukemia. When Nadja's vampirism is revealed, Farid accusingly says "your mother doesn't have leukemia!", and Elias protests that he never actually said she did.
- Eye Color Change: Nadja's eyes change color when the meds holding her vampirism at bay start to wear off.
- Fall Guy:
- Farid and Mohammed, both of whom are innocent Muslim men, are forced to read statements in Arabic that will make them seem to be Middle Eastern Terrorists, setting them up to take the fall for the plane's hijacking. They both have flight training and were lured onto the flight to attend a fake conference set up by the hijackers. There's also a white German Muslim convert who is a former associate of Egyptian radicals; his name is on a suspected terrorist watchlist, even though he insists that he no longer has anything to do with them.
- After Nadja kills the first hijacker, she releases a dog from its kennel so the others will think it ripped the man's throat out. One of his accomplices shoots the dog accordingly.
- False Flag Operation: The hijackers want to make the plane crash look like an Islamist terrorist attack. The reason why is never specified, though the passengers speculate that it might be to short the stock market or influence an election.
- Fantastic Drug: The serum Nadja uses to keep her transformation at bay, which is later revealed to be a variant of the chemotherapy drug Cytarabine. It suppresses her vampiric tendencies when taken frequently, but is very painful and not a long term solution.
- Faux Affably Evil: All the terrorists except Eightball are fairly polite and just want the job to go smoothly, particularly Hightower. However, they also have no qualms about shooting hostages to get what they want and plan to blow up the plane anyway.
- Feral Vampires: Anyone who gets turned into a vampire will either immediately or eventually lose all of their humanity, becoming little more than savage animalistic zombies driven by mindless bloodlust. Nadja is only able to stop this from happening to her by regularly taking medication, but when she loses access to that, she ultimately becomes a feral beast as well.
- Five Rounds Rapid: The assault team boards the plane and gets torn apart by vampires. Their submachine guns and assault rifles take down a few, but there are just too many.
- Foreshadowing: When Elias gets off the plane in the beginning, he's clutching a teddy bear for dear life and refuses to let go of it. But when the movie jumps back to Elias getting on the plane, he has no teddy bear. Because it's not his at all. He grabbed it out of the cargo hold and hid the detonator in it.
- Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Nadja is just a widowed single mom and a peaceful law-abiding citizen who really doesn't want to become a vampire, regularly taking medication to suppress the bloodthirst and halt the transformation for as long as possible. Even after circumstances during the airplane hijacking force her to transform further into a bloodthirsty mutant vampire, all she wants to do is fight against the terrorist hijackers in order to protect her son, and she also wants to help the other innocent passengers and crew members taken hostage. However, her frightening new appearance and behavior as a vampire unsurprisingly scares everyone around her.
- Genre Savvy: Once he discovers that Nadja had somehow survived getting shot in the chest, two of their own are killed by neck bites, and among her possessions is a journal containing times for sunrise and sunset, Eightball quickly concludes that she is a vampire and prepares appropriately with a UV flashlight and a wooden stake.
- Gorn: By the time the plane lands, it's an orgy of blood, dead bodies and vampires feeding on the first two.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Nadja offers to do this when it appears they'll have to detonate the bomb on the fuel tank manually, but Elias goes to look for the detonator himself.
- Farid later tries to do the same when the sun starts going down, but is stopped before he can reach it by the assault team.
- Heroic Willpower: Most vampires devolve into bloodthirsty, barely cognizant monsters not long after turning. Nadja, out of love for her son (and presumably with the help of medication she had been taking for years), retains most of her sanity and is able to fight off her urges for as long as possible, though they do eventually get the better of her.
- It's more like Villainous Willpower, but Eightball is the only other vampire aside from Nadja who seems to retain any human intelligence or personality after being turned, though he stops speaking like a human and acts even more Ax-Crazy as a vampire.
- Hope Spot: In the final scene, Elias approaches the plane just as the vampires are leaving it, led by a now-fully savage Nadja. She stops for a few seconds when she sees him, and appears to recognize her son. Those few seconds end with her screeching in delight and leading the charge of the vampires towards the kid and the smorgasbord of humans in the terminal. Now completely sure that Nadja's gone, Elias unhesitatingly blows up the plane and incinerates all of the vampires.
- How We Got Here: The film starts with the plane landing at an RAF base in Scotland, with Elias recalling the story of what happened on board. There are additional flashbacks of how Nadja became a vampire as well.
- I Just Want to Be Normal:
- The whole reason Nadja is flying to New York is to seek a cure for her vampirism.
- Igor, the elderly vampire who attacks Nadja when she returns to the farmhouse where she was turned. It is implied both him and his son (whom Nadja killed) were also involuntarily infected, and have been trying to synthesise a cure/suppressant in a makeshift laboratory in their basement. He tries to murder her not out of revenge for his son, but because he's given up hope of finding a cure and thinks they must die to prevent others from being 'cursed'.
- Incredibly Obvious Bomb: To keep the passengers corralled in the back of the plane, the hijackers set up nerve gas bombs with blinking lights. Just seconds afterward, they pat themselves on the back for making hairspray cans look the part. The actual bombs are plastic tubing with mixed chemicals hidden in shampoo bottles and attached to a cellphone.
- Inside Job: The co-pilot Bastian and flight attendant Robert a.k.a. Eightball are in on the hijacking plot. The location of the panel containing the transponder had also been marked with "Good luck, motherfuckers" in UV paint.
- It's All About Me: The entitled broker dooms just about everyone when he releases the vampires from the cargo hold so one will bite him, in order to survive the internal injuries which will soon kill him. The vampires think of him as one would a chicken nugget.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Berg, the leader of the terrorists, orders Eightball to bring him a hostage to kill if he's not allowed into the cockpit. Eightball brings him a little girl. Berg's first reaction appears to be shock. Then he simply takes the girl and prepares to shoot her anyway.
- Letterbox Arson: The Mercedes sedan in the cargo hold is equipped with strong bulletproof glass, protecting Eightball from a multitude of bullets fired by Nadja. However she damages the glass enough to pour flammable liquid through a hole and set him alight, only the fire suppression system is activated before Eightball burns to death.
- Looks Like Orlok: Becoming a vampire will either immediately or eventually make you look hideously and inhumanly monstrous. At the beginning of the film, Nadja (who had been taking medication for several years to stall her transformation) has already lost all her hair (she wears a wig to hide her baldness), and some sharp fangs have grown out of her gums (which she hides behind a set of false teeth). After losing her medicine and drinking blood from a dog, her transformation starts accelerating; such as gaining Pointy Ears, ghoulish eyes, an upturned nose, many more sharp fangs, and Femme Fatalons. Other people who get turned into vampires also have most of these features like pointy ears, creepy eyes, fangs and claws, though they don't lose their hair yet.
- No Communities Were Harmed: Part of the film takes place at the fictional RAF Drybridge air force base in Scotland.
- Mama Bear: Nadja gets shot trying to protect her son. This does not stop her one bit. The "Bear" part of this trope comes into play once she starts vamping out and ferociously mauling the terrorists.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Eightball and the other terrorists panic when Nadja emerges from the cockpit, tears out Berg's throat and eyes them up as a second course.
- This is also Colonel Drummond and his subordinates' reaction to live footage of vampires tearing apart the search and rescue team the British Army sends into the plane, as well to Elias blowing the plane up.
- Mauve Shirt: Fellow passengers Farid, Mohammed, Rainer (the old man with the moustache), the soldier in the blue shorts, the entitled rich guy, the doctor, and flight attendant Julia receive short bits of dialogue and screen time to flesh them out from the others. Out of all of them, only Farid makes it out alive.
- Militaries Are Useless: Colonel Drummond (the British officer in charge of the counterterrorist operation regarding the hijacked airliner that landed in the RAF base) sends out a special forces team to infiltrate the plane at night, having no clue that all the hijackers and most of the crew/passengers are already dead, and that the remaining people in the plane are all vampires now. All the soldiers inside the plane quickly get overwhelmed and massacred by the horde of hungry vampires.
- Mistaken for Terrorist: The hijackers attempt to frame Farid and two other innocent Muslim passengers by making them look like Islamist terrorists as part of a False Flag Operation. Because they forced Farid to state a threatening message in Arabic for this plan, the British military officer at the RAF airbase is skeptical of Farid's innocence and warnings about the plane being infested with "monsters".
- Monster Is a Mommy: Inverted. Nadja is a seemingly-human single mother who turns out to be a secret vampire.
- Monstrous Cannibalism: During the climactic fight between Nadja and Eightball, who have both become vampires, Eightball suddenly bites Nadja and starts feeding on her blood, until Elias distracts him to save her.
- Mugging the Monster: Just had to hijack the plane with the incognito vampire, didn't you?
- Multinational Team: The terrorists are comprised of two Americans, two Germans, a Dane and a Czech.
- My Car Hates Me: Nadja was infected because her husband Nikolai's car broke down in the woods on a snowy night, with a vampire killing Nikolai and biting Nadja before the sun rose to drive it off.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Eightball. Aside from being a sadistically violent psychopath who eagerly takes up any opportunity to murder or terrorize innocent people for fun, there's also his response after seeing Nadja revealing herself as a vampire by ripping out Berg's throat: he grabs a syringe and steals her infected blood so that he can make himself become another strong, fearsome monster just like her.
- The Nose Knows: Foreshadowing for The Reveal of Nadja's vampirism is when Eightball violently stabs the sky marshal to death, even though the murder is committed out of her sight her nose can be seen twitching in response. When a bloodstained Eightball gets too close to her later on she can barely restrain herself.
- Oceanic Airlines: The plane belongs to the fictional Transatlantic Airlines.
- Our Vampires Are Different: They are Feral Vampires who look like Orlok. They don't look or act very human, and are more like wild predatory animals that are always hungry for blood. They are somewhat faster and stronger than normal people; and while they're far from being Nigh-Invulnerable, they have a Healing Factor that allows them to survive gunshot wounds, especially after drinking enough blood to regenerate from their injuries.
- Vampirism also seems to be portrayed less supernaturally and more scientifically as The Virus, with Nadja regularly taking medication to suppress it, vampires "burning up" in the sun portrayed as severe photosensitivity to UV light resulting in sunburns, their reflections appearing in mirrors just fine (which allows Nadja to see how inhuman her infection has made her look), and the infection is transmitted through biting.
- It's not known for certain whether the vampires in this film are undead, as they seem to be more alive. It's also never discussed if vampires are immortal or at least live longer than normal humans; and aside from the aforementioned Super-Strength and Healing Factor, they do not really display any other noticeable superhuman or supernatural abilities.
- Outside-Genre Foe: None of the hijackers could have expected one of the passengers to be a vampire.
- Pointy Ears: Another symptom of vampirism; they are shown visibly twitching whenever the vampire is listening to something in particular.
- Plot Hole:
- Bastian explains not to press the big button on the detonator as it is connected to a bomb on the fuel tank. However, Elias hits it in the climax to breach the cargo hatch and again on the ground to detonate the fuel, with no indication of reprogramming or multiple detonators.
- Elias's hoodie inexplicably goes from gray to blue.
- Police Are Useless: The three German Bundespolizei sky marshals on the flight are taken out by the hijackers in a matter of minutes, and one even gives up the location of his third colleague in business class without much prompting.
- Poor Communication Kills: When the plane lands, Farid tries to tell the authorities what happened, but they mistake him for a hijacker and refuse to rescue him, thinking he is going to detonate the bomb if they try. The authorities have to rely on a traumatized Elias to tell them what happened on the plane, and they don't believe him until it's too late, which gets the search and rescue team killed.
- Practically Joker: Like The Joker, Eightball's an Ax-Crazy Large Ham threat who is in it for the fun.
- Pragmatic Villainy: After Eightball shoots and seemingly kills Nadja when she's helpless and at his mercy, Berg threatens to kill him, not out of moral disgust but because Eightball is endangering the mission. In fact, Berg and his team plan on murdering everyone on the plane anyway. But they need all the passengers to believe there's a chance to get off the plane alive so they'll stay quiet.
- Psycho for Hire: Eightball, a member of the mercenary team hijacking the plane, seems to be in it more for fun than money. He goes out of his way to hurt, kill or terrorize as many passengers as he can and even his fellow hijackers consider him a psychopath.
- Pull the Thread: Nadja is waiting for the terrorists to parachute off the plane, when Eightball discovers the serum container she dropped, and, realising the death of their colleague was not from the escaped dog, follows the Trail of Blood to where he left Nadja's body only to find she's Not Quite Dead.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Carl, who's just as ruthless as the other hijackers and is just as willing to let a plane full of innocent people die, but is more concerned with just doing his job and frequently objects to Eightball's sadistic actions.
- Scary Black Man: One of the terrorists hijacking the plane is a black man named Curtiz. He becomes more scary after Eightball attacks Curtiz and turns him into a vampire.
- Schmuck Bait: The hijacking is started by one of them starting a ruckus to draw out the sky marshals, who move to subdue the unruly passenger.
- Security Blanket: At the airbase, Elias is inseparable from a teddy bear. It happens to be concealing the detonator for the bombs on the plane.
- Self-Made Orphan: Elias is forced to blow up the plane and kill his mother when it's clear she's lost her mind to the transformation.
- Sexy Stewardess: Lampshaded when one of the passengers in first class hits on an attractive blonde flight attendant. She responds by telling Robert, her hunky, Camp Gay male co-worker, to serve him.
- Shoot the Dog: Nadja's first victim is a small dog in a cage in the cargo hold, whose blood she needs to recharge and fight her first hijacker. Later on, she, Farid, and Bastian lock the rest of the passengers out of the cockpit as vampires slaughter them all because if they let them in, they can't close the door again.
- Slashed Throat: Eightball kills Carl this way so he can drink his blood without turning him.
- Staking the Loved One: A variant. The film ends with Elias setting off the explosives and blowing up the plane, incinerating all of the vampires that were in it as well as his fully-turned mother.
- Sunglasses at Night: Nadja is seen wearing sunglasses at the airport due to the photosensitivity caused by her vampirism.
- Technically-Living Vampire: It's subtly implied that the vampires in this movie may all be living, breathing creatures with a pulse, instead of being undead reanimated corpses. It also seems that only people who survive being bitten by a vampire (like Nadja was) will turn into vampires; as Nadja's husband Nikolai was killed and drained of blood, but he never rose up as a vampire himself.
- Terrorists Without a Cause: The hijackers' exact political goals or motives are never outright revealed, and they behave more like apolitical criminal mercenaries hired for a job (they even discuss how their pay will be split after one of them is killed), instead of being ideologically-motivated militants who believe in any particular cause.
- This Banana is Armed: Robert/Eightball is introduced as a camp flight attendant who keeps a purple hairbrush in his pocket to groom his hair. Early on it is revealed to be hiding a blade in the handle, which he uses to help disarm and kill the sky marshals and threaten passengers.
- The Tooth Hurts: A flashback shows Nadja removing the fangs growing over her normal teeth with pliers, after she angrily hissed at her baby son and scared him, not wanting to risk biting him.
- Tragic Monster: Nadja is a widowed single mother who was infected with vampirism after being bitten by another vampire that also killed her husband, forcing her to raise their son alone while trying to suppress the symptoms and transformation through medication. Her initial goal in the beginning is to fly to New York in hopes of being cured by a doctor there. Not only does she ultimately fail, but she also ends up getting killed after she had finished turning into a fully Feral Vampire, losing all of her human emotions and memories too.
- Transhuman Treachery: When the Scottish investor is badly injured and the doctor on board tells him she can't perform the necessary surgery until they land, meaning he may die, he decides to try an Emergency Transformation and open the cargo bay doors and ask the newly vampirized Eightball to bite and turn him. Eightball just takes one look at him, slashes him to finish him off, and leaves him to be eaten by the vampires he turns later.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Elias is more resourceful in dire situations than his mother. He makes a run for the trap door to the cargo hold when the passengers are held at gunpoint, searches a dead body for weapons without a second thought, and volunteers to search for the detonator in the vampire-filled cargo hold. He later slits his own palm to revive his mother and knows to conceal the detonator inside a teddy bear, and later escapes an ambulance by pushing a sedative needle into a paramedic's leg.
- Undead Child: The little girl the hijackers used to threaten Nadja to open the cockpit becomes a vampire when the plane is overrun.
- Vampire Procreation Limit:
- Nadja tries to enforce this when, after biting Berg, she stabs him in the heart as he starts to turn, and when she tries to set Eightball on fire. Unfortunately, the plane's fire suppressant systems kick in before Eightball dies, and he infects the rest of the hijackers save for Bastian, who managed to escape.
- A flashback shows the father of the vampire who infected Nadja trying to shoot her and burn the body because he's become convinced there is no cure, so the only course is Murder-Suicide to prevent their 'evil' from spreading.
- Vampire Refugee: Nadja is traveling to New York in search of a treatment for her vampirism.
- Vegetarian Vampire: Nadja initially tries to function as such by only drinking the bare minimum amount of blood (presumably blood derived from raw animal meat, which she is seen sipping in a flashback) that she needs in order to just stay alive, though she looks weakly and malnourished. But after getting shot by Eightball, she kills and feeds on a helpless small dog to recover from her injuries, then moves on to hunting humans (though she tries her best to only eat the terrorist hijackers). As she continues consuming more blood, doing this ensures that her vampiric transformation accelerates until she is no longer mentally human, even eagerly running after her own son to hunt him in the ending.
- Villainous Cheekbones: Eightball, courtesy of Alexander Scheer (who in turn bears a Celebrity Resemblance to Klaus Kinski), making his psychopathic villainy all the more obvious.
- The Virus: Rather than an explicitly supernatural curse, vampirism is depicted as some sort of contagious disease that turns people into ferociously bloodthirsty mutant monsters, transmitted through bite wounds or exchange of body fluids. After Eightball intentionally injects himself with Nadja's infected blood to become a vampire, he immediately starts attacking and biting anyone around him, and soon multiple infected people are filling up the plane.
- Wham Line: When Elias takes off Nadja's sunglasses and sees her red eyes, he asks "Did you drink blood?", revealing he knows that the medicine isn't for a normal illness.
- Weakened by the Light: Vampires are extremely photosensitive to ultraviolet radiation, need to wear Sunglasses at Night, and suffer severe sunburns from even brief exposure to direct sunlight. The terrorists also figure out that a UV flashlight will painfully stun Nadja. In the climax, Farid exploits this by turning the plane perpendicular to the morning sun so that it shines in through a breached door, frying Eightball and sending him falling into the ocean.
- Western Terrorists: The hijackers all seem to be either American or European, and all of them (except for Curtiz) are white.
- White Shirt of Death: Eightball stabs a sky marshal to death, then proudly displays his bloodsplattered white steward's shirt to the passengers to intimidate them. When he gets too close to Nadja, she has to restrain herself from vamping out in response to the smell of blood. When Eightball shoots her, she's wearing a white jumper to make the bloodstains clear to the audience before she comes back to life.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
- Eightball has Nadja at his mercy, but is fascinated by her vampirism and gets a sample of her blood before going to stake her. This gives Elias time to intervene.
- Berg tells Carl to shoot Eightball if he steps out of line again, causing Carl to mutter that they should do that right away. He regrets not doing so.
- Wooden Stake: Eightball sharpens the handle of a wooden hockey stick into a spear to use against Nadja. It's shown that a knife to the heart works just as well, as when Nadja uses one to put down Berg as he turns, but Eightball had likely seen too many vampire movies. Or a knife works as long as you kill the person before they fully turn.
- Would Hurt a Child: Eightball doesn't hesitate to point a gun at Elias when he tries to make a run for it. When trying to regain control of the cockpit, he selects a little girl to threaten to kill. Berg is disgusted, but goes along with it without remorse.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Colonel Drummond thinks he's in a mundane airplane thriller like Non-Stop and dismisses the warnings to the contrary from both the wounded pilot, whom he thinks is the lead hijacker, and the sole escapee. However, he's actually in a vampire horror film. He waits for nightfall to assault the airliner, sending his team to their deaths and the vampires almost escape.
- You Have to Believe Me!: Naturally no-one believes Elias when he tries to warn them about vampires on the aircraft, and Farid (who doesn't bother to explain as he knows no-one will believe it) is unable to convince Drummond he's not a terrorist either.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
- One of the fall guys can't read Arabic, and so is shot by Berg when Farid tries to get clever.
- A rare heroic example. Nadja kills Bastian, the hijacking crew's pilot and their last surviving member, once he tells her that it's possible for Farid to make an emergency landing even with only one hand. Once she and Farid hear that, she realizes that he's no longer needed to land the plane, but his blood will help Nadja recover her strength, and his corpse will also make for good bait for the other vampires, so there's no more reason to keep up the Enemy Mine.
- You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Eightball relies on Elias' reluctance to kill to get close enough to knock the gun aside; however it discharges blowing out a window and decompressing the airliner, giving him something else to worry about.
