...Eric D. Smith 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...

... off an embankment. Her bloated corpse was discovered in the pale flush of daybreak, her veins blue- green glass under thin ribbons of light. Smoky clouds of tadpoles took refuge in her mouth, nostrils, ears. 5. Opening the Eyes and the Throat They erected a stone at the foot of the river, a smooth...

... in Buhle’s essay (to which Smith explicitly refers in his concluding paragraph) in a highly original reading of the 2009 dystopian vampire film Daybreak- ers. Smith focuses in particular on the film’s figuration of contempo- rary biopolitical and economic crises through its treatment of its three...

... of psychic vulnera- bility to imitation at play in what he disparagingly calls the herd or the crowd [Masse], which turns the modern ego into what he calls in Daybreak, a phantom of the ego [Phantom von Ego] (Nietzsche 1982: 61).5 I tried to show that this transformation of ego into a phantom...