ABSTRACT
The topic of death turns up in films the way it turns up in all of the arts. Death, of course, is the unfathomable mystery of existence; it is natural that the arts will be obsessed with it. Films have treated topics such as homicide, suicide, euthanasia, grief, burials, genocide, and the afterlife from every angle. In the early decades of filmmaking the scenes of killing and dying owed a great deal to the stage, especially nineteenth-century melodramas which in turn can be traced back to the scattered bodies of the dead in the last scenes of Renaissance tragedies. This chapter discusses the anxieties about the social consequences of graphic depictions of death in the quantities and with the casualness that contemporary films offer.
