Editing Vampire (section)

=== Political interpretations ===
[[File:The Irish Vampire - Punch (24 October 1885), 199 - BL.jpg|thumb|right|upright|[[Editorial cartoon|Political cartoon]] from 1885, depicting the [[Irish National League]] as the "Irish Vampire" preying on a sleeping woman|alt=See caption]]

The reinvention of the vampire myth in the modern era is not without political overtones.<ref>{{cite book|last=Glover|first=David|year=1996|title=Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction|publisher=Duke University Press|place=Durham, NC.|isbn=978-0-8223-1798-2 }}</ref> 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 régime]]''. In his entry for "Vampires" in the ''Dictionnaire philosophique'' (1764), Voltaire notices how the mid-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".<ref>{{cite web |url=http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/v/voltaire/dictionary/complete.html |title=Vampires. – Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire, Vol. VII (Philosophical Dictionary Part 5) (1764) |access-date=11 June 2019 |archive-date=18 March 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170318065646/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/v/voltaire/dictionary/complete.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>

[[Karl Marx]] defined capital as "dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks".{{efn|1=An extensive discussion of the different uses of the vampire metaphor in Marx's writings can be found in {{cite web |last=Policante |first=A. |url=http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Policante.pdf |title=Vampires of Capital: Gothic Reflections between horror and hope |year=2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120128025458/http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Policante.pdf |archive-date=28 January 2012 }} in [http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/2010.html Cultural Logic] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151206054043/http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/2010.html |date=6 December 2015 }}, 2010.}} [[Werner Herzog]], in his ''[[Nosferatu the Vampyre]]'', gives this political interpretation an extra ironic twist when protagonist [[Jonathan Harker]], a middle-class solicitor, becomes the next vampire; in this way the capitalist [[bourgeois]] becomes the next parasitic class.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Brass|first=Tom|journal=Dialectical Anthropology|volume=25|pages=205–237|year=2000|title=Nymphs, Shepherds, and Vampires: The Agrarian Myth on Film|doi=10.1023/A:1011615201664|issue=3/4|s2cid=141136948}}</ref>