1st Edition
Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media Morality, Religion and Death
Introduction. Part 1 Descent into Darkness: Exploring Hell and the Underworld 1. Paradise Rejected: The Enduring Appeal of Hell from The Simpsons to American Horror Story, Siobhan Lyons 2. Moral Judgments: A thematic analysis of New Zealanders’ attitudes to Hell Pizza's advertising, Melissa L. Gould & Daniel Fastnedge 3. Overworlds and Underworlds, Zak Waipara Part 2 Eternal Connections: Relationships Beyond Death 4. Death is for the living: loss, grief and the afterlife in God of War, AD Narayan & Matthew Halliday 5. From Queer to Eternity: Representations of LGBTQIA+ Afterlife Couples, Gordon Alley-Young 6. Female Friendship, Rhetorical Feminism, and Moral Motivation in The Good Place , Juliette Holder 7. This Place Runs on Memories: Remembrance and The Cultural Economies of the Afterlife in Coco (2017), Sophia Staite & Lorna Piatti-Farnell 8. The Magical Morality of the Happy Dead: Streaming the Afterlife and Post-secular Gothic, Allison Craven 9. Finding Comfort with Death, Angela Asuncion & Matthew Guinibert Part 3 Beyond the Grave: Supernatural Horrors and the Afterlife 10. Haunting Spectralities, Transitional Spaces, and Ethical Prospects of the Afterlife in Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage, Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, and Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, Marta Miquel-Baldellou 11. The Peripatetic Priest of The Walking Dead: Gabriel as a Post-modern Sigil, Benjamin D. Crace 12. Ghosts, Gods, and Gadgets: How Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Shape Contemporary Views on the Afterlife, Angelique Nairn & Danielle Raethel 13. Horror, Holiness, and the Alterity of Death: Discerning Authenticity through Ambiguity in Midnight Mass, Brian Bajzek Part 4 Binary Afterlife: When Technology Meets Eternity 14. Upload: Navigating Privilege, Power & Perpetuity in Digital Afterlife, Deepti Bhargava 15. Westworld, morality and digital afterlives – Morality between Digital Heaven and Digital Earthly Hell, Joshua Hurtado Hurtado 16. State-Sponsored Digital Hells: Simulations of Damnations and Punishments in the Afterlife, Justin Matthews 17. Salvific Machine: Robotic Afterlife and Technological Nirvāṇa, Ruowen Xu
Biography
Angelique Nairn is an Associate Professor at Auckland University of Technology. Her research explores identity in public communication, media, and the creative industries, focusing on representations of gender, morality, and AI. She examines how individuals and groups construct meaning through popular culture and professional discourse.
