Death, The Dead and Popular Culture by Ruth Penfold-Mounce

Author:Ruth Penfold-Mounce [Penfold-Mounce, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Death & Dying, Family & Relationships, Death; Grief; Bereavement, Popular Culture, Customs & Traditions
ISBN: 9781787430532
Google: sohcDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 40702655
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2018-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE UNDEAD AND MORBID SPACE

As reanimated corpses that are consumed as entertainment, the Undead allow morbid sensibility to be indulged by viewers, but significantly they allow for, and inspire, very different engagements with shared social and cultural anxieties. In the second half of this chapter, the relationship that morbid sensibility shares with morbid space (Penfold-Mounce, 2015) will be explored. The Undead create and exist within morbid space, and it is this morbid space which provides a habitation for morbid sensibility to be stimulated within viewers. Morbid space refers to a conceptualisation of space and how it is moved through, lived within and consumed; it is about boundaries surrounding mortality and how these can be crossed or reinforced. It exemplifies how corpses and death are far from taboo but are instead ordinary and normalised whilst also becoming popularised, eroticised and even at times celebrated alongside societal ambivalence (Penfold-Mounce, 2015: 11). Until now, morbid space has only been used in relation to crime drama (Penfold-Mounce, 2015); however, it is equally useful when applied to the horror-fantasy setting of the Undead, which is fantastical, horrific and credible. The Undead appear in morbid environments, such as a post-apocalyptic world that has been overwhelmed, or is in the process of being overwhelmed, by the reanimated dead or a time and place where they live out an existence in hiding from the living. Many of these tales involve a pursuit for a cure, survival in a changed world or how to make a relationship work between the Undead and the living. Consumers of the Undead unlock morbid sensibility within morbid space where possibilities are explored whilst being entertained. In the remainder of this chapter, it will be argued that the Undead as an embodiment of morbid sensibility exist within morbid space and are a catalyst for the formation of two particular types of morbid space: ‘safe’ and ‘provocative’. The following two sections within the chapter will consider how morbid sensibility through the vehicle of the Undead engages with questions about firstly the body and safe morbid space and, secondly, selfhood and provocative space.

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