Following Paul Buhle's claims about the inherent utopianism of horror, this essay examines the popular film Daybreakers (2009) as a cultural response to the economic and biopolitical crises of the Great Recession. Ultimately retreating from the dark mirror of its compelling dystopian critique, the film executes its social crisis through the logic of vampiric speciology, immunizing the present against the threat of radical transformation and restoring a “natural” social order. However, the biopolitical writings of Roberto Esposito offer us a way to discern the ineradicable utopian horizon in even this strategy of containment and neutralization.
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2016
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