ABSTRACT
If life and death are complementary parts of an elemental whole, as Georg Simmel posits, then the living dead—the undead—of horror fiction are found in the juncture between the two. Horror fictions make death sensible through brutally gripping narratives as they provide us with a tangible adversary at the end of life; teach us what it means to die; lead us to accept our eventual death; and help us make peace with our mortality.
