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Abstract
Death may be exiled from the living room as we no longer keep parlors as dedicated space for ritual goodbyes and communion with our shrouded dead, but banished death has reappeared with a vengeance in our books, kindled and original paper, and channeled through our home entertainment centers, allowing us to once more meet our nemesis on common ground. We suggest that death is a root metaphor in horror fiction, and we highlight how fictional works about the undead allow us to face death and relate to it, as they move us to look more closely at the alliance between living and dead, provide us with a tangible adversary at end-of-life, and enable us to approach death with dialogic intimacy, acknowledgment, courage, and acceptance.
Notes
1This hospital excerpt was taken from field notes from an ethnographic research project at a children's hospital in a large southeastern city. Names and other identifying details have been changed.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christine S. Davis
Christine S. Davis is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at UNC-Charlotte. She publishes regularly on topics such as children's health, end-of-life communication, family disability, qualitative methods, and narrative ethnography and autoethnography.
Jonathan L. Crane
Jonathan L. Crane is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at UNC-Charlotte. He has written widely on genre and horror films and is the author of Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film (Sage, 1994).