ABSTRACT

This chapter demonstrates that while in some of the films explored some of the dead may appear (physically and therefore visibly) to some of the living, most do not. It also suggests that this is apparently not a problem for most filmmakers – that the dead are normally incorporeal (and therefore invisible to the living) entities – given that for the majority of film narratives it is represented that it is the mind which essentially constitutes the person and that the dead can engage with others without a body. There are, however, both scientists and philosophers for whom a mind-dependent world is an impossibility. And yet there are those who accept neither the materialist nor the dualist view of this matter but rather tend - as did the Stoics, Origen of Alexandria, and some contemporary philosophers - to regard all existence as necessarily corporeal but corporeal as suits the immediate environment.