Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media

What lies beyond death? This book brings together a diverse collection of scholarly voices to explore how popular culture imagines-and reimagines-the afterlife. Drawing from film, television, video games, literature, advertising, and digital technologies, this book examines how narratives about Heaven and Hell, ghosts and gods, memory and immortality shape contemporary understandings of morality, death, and what may come after. From Pixar's Coco to The Good Place, Ghostbusters, Upload, and Westworld, these chapters interrogate the enduring power of afterlife narratives to provide existential comfort, moral guidance, and cultural critique. Whether through the lens of theology, philosophy, or secular imagination, contributors consider how popular media blurs the sacred and the profane, challenging dogma, reframing ethics, and offering new possibilities for how we remember the dead and live among the living. Spanning topics such as queer love in the afterlife, Indigenous cosmologies, digital resurrection, and the theological implications of robots, Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media: Morality, Religion and Death is a timely exploration of how the afterlife continues to haunt and inspire modern culture. Essential reading for scholars of media studies, religious studies, cultural theory, and anyone fascinated by humanity's oldest and most enduring question: what happens when we die?

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.

Introduction. Section 1 Descent into Darkness: Exploring Hell and the Underworld 1. Paradise Rejected: The Enduring Appeal of Hell from The Simpsons to American Horror Story 2. Moral Judgments: A thematic analysis of New Zealanders' attitudes to Hell Pizza's advertising 3. Overworlds and Underworld Section 2 Eternal Connections: Relationships Beyond Death 4. Death is for the living: loss, grief and the afterlife in God of War 5. From Queer to Eternity: Representations of LGBTQAI+ Afterlife Couples 6. Female Friendship, Rhetorical Feminism, and Moral Motivation in The Good Place 7. This Place Runs on Memories: Remembrance and The Cultural Economies of the Afterlife in Coco (2017) 8. The Magical Morality of the Happy Dead: Streaming the Afterlife and Post-secular Gothic 9. Finding Comfort with Death Section 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 11. The Peripatetic Priest of The Walking Dead: Gabriel as a Post-modern Sigil 12. Ghosts, Gods, and Gadgets: How Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Shape Contemporary Views on the Afterlife 13. Horror, Holiness, and the Alterity of Death: Discerning Authenticity through Ambiguity in Midnight Mass Section 4 Binary Afterlife: When Technology Meets Eternity 14. Upload: Navigating Privilege, Power & Perpetuity in Digital Afterlife 15. Westworld, morality and digital afterlives - Morality between Digital Heaven and Digital Earthly Hell 16. State-Sponsored Digital Hells: Simulations of Damnations and Punishments in the Afterlife, Justin Matthews 17. Salvific Machine: Robotic Afterlife and Technological Nirväa