Neoliberalism and the undead gothic subject in Daybreakers

ABSTRACT

The vampire of classic gothic fiction has long been recognized as allegory for industrial capitalism of the late 1800s – an assertion influenced by Karl Marx’s apt description of capitalism as vampirish. Indeed, Dracula is a true monopolist – a rational entrepreneur who is driven to accumulate, expand, and suck the living of their toil. Accordingly, if this is the case, what does the vampire of modern economic practices and political strategies look like? This article examines how the politics of neoliberalism, economic globalization and the rise of financial capitalism are interwoven into vampire fiction of the twenty-first century focusing on Michael and Peter Spierig’s 2009 sci-fi horror film Daybreakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Daybreakers
• neoliberalism
• capitalism
• vampire
• Marx
• lumpenproletariat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the film, the subsiders are also referred to as ‘Class 4: Blood deprived citizens.’

2. Michel Foucault’s theories of Biopower and Technologies of the Self are highly relevant to neoliberal discourses of choice and self-policing. Foucault’s earlier work was interested mainly in governmentality – in technologies of domination and power. But later he became much more interested in technologies of individual domination – in modes of action that an individual exercizes upon themselves by means of what he calls: ‘Technologies of the Self.’ Technologies of the Self have to do with how people ‘take care’ of and ‘know’ of themselves. This requires ongoing forms of scrutiny, monitoring, regulation and modification of the self (people use what Foucault calls ‘truth games’ – created by institutions – to so this): ‘Technologies of the Self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, through thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality’ (Foucault 1988, 225).

3. In Near Dark the patriarch is the hero and saviour, not the predatory progenitor as is the case in The Lost Boys. This suggests that the film is optimistic about the restoration of traditional familial order, as opposed to many other horror films of the 1980s.

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Notes on contributors

Samantha Lindop

Samantha Lindop is a film, media, and cultural studies scholar at The University of Queensland, Australia. She is the author of Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema (Palgrave, 2015) and The Stepford Wives (Liverpool University Press, 2021). She has also published on the subject of the gothic, the uncanny, and representations of artificial intelligence in sci-fi film. Her current research explores gender and posthumanism with a special focus on social robots, virtual companions and holograms.