Political interpretations
The reinvention of the vampire myth in the modern era is not without political overtones.[136] The aristocratic Count Dracula, alone in his castle apart from a few demented retainers, appearing only at night to feed on his peasantry, is symbolic of the parasitic Ancien regime. In his entry for "Vampires" in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), Voltaire notices how the end of the 18th century coincided with the decline of the folkloric belief in the existence of vampires but that now "there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces".[137]
Marx defined capital as "dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks".[138] Werner Herzog, in his Nosferatu the Vampyre, gives this political interpretation an extra ironic twist when protagonistJonathon Harker, a middle-class solicitor, becomes the next vampire; in this way the capitalist bourgeoisbecomes the next parasitic class.[139]
