There are three reasons people are typically buried alive. The first is a tragic accident: a person who seems to be dead but is not gets buried and awakens in the claustrophobic horror of a casket. The second is a criminal act: someone is purposely buried alive as torture or as a very slow and hideous method of execution. The final reason people are buried alive is the reason humans do most things: for fun and the ability to show off.

None of these reasons are good, just for the record.

Accidental burial is often rumored, in history and fiction, but only rarely documented. The New York Times reported in 1885 that a man named Jenkins who was disinterred a year after burial, found upside down in a coffin filled with scratch marks, most of his hair pulled out. In 1955, young Essie Dunbar was presumed dead following an epileptic seizure and nearly buried. Her sister asked to see her body one last time at the final moment, and Essie was saved. She lived another 47 years. In 1792, Duke Ferdinand of Braunschweig was so afraid of being buried alive that he commissioned the world’s first “safety coffin,” featuring holes for light and air to enter, and being fit with a lock instead of nailed shut. The keys to escape were buried with the duke, in the pockets of his robes. This is not, however, just a kooky idea that belongs in the past. In Macedonia in 2014, a woman was presumed dead of asphyxia and buried alive and only rescued because children playing near the cemetery could hear her screams.

Also among the accidentally buried, we must include the unknown and untold numbers of people buried by natural disasters: flood, landslide, and tsunamis have brought people to this terrible end at a rate even the most negligent funeral directors could never match.

Purposeful vivisepulture has been recorded historically as a means of punishment or a type of warfare in ancient China, Germany, England, Persia, Sweden, Denmark, and Rome. In the Netherlands during the centuries-long feuds between Catholic and Protestant dynasties, live burial was used to torture people on the wrong side of the Christian fence into converting, or to kill them if they refused. Aside from state violence, interpersonal behavior can sometimes culminate in live burial. Jessica Lunsford was nine years old in Florida when a sex offender raped her and buried her alive. Ashley Piccirilli of Massachusetts was in the wrong place at the wrong time, buried by a construction crew moving earth nearby where she had picnicked. (Hard to say this one is an accident, exactly. They meant to move that earth, she meant to be there.) Without supports or a structured trench, her odds of survival were quite low. Piccirilli said she survived because she didn’t think she could die. That’s mind over quite a lot of matter.

In the matter of being buried alive on purpose, Harry Houdini is the most famous case. An established escape artist who had made his name escaping chains and cages, he elected to be buried alive in 1919, to amaze his audience via his escape. The attempt was nearly fatal, and he had to be rescued. In 1990, California magician Joe Burrus decided to replicate the original Houdini attempt and have himself buried seven feet deep in a Plexiglass coffin. Tragically, Burrus instructed helpers to pour concrete into the hole, adding nearly seven tons of weight to the burial and destroying the coffin, killing him inside. Not to be outdone, stunt man Bill Shirk of Indiana replicated the deadly stunt one more time in 1992, on the same date that both Houdini and Burrus had attempted it. After previous escapist stunts involving interment with a python and tarantulas, Shirk must have figured that there was no place to go but down. In another Plexiglass coffin, Shirk was buried at the same depth and with the same dangerous choice of wet concrete poured into his grave. Like Burrus, Shirk suffered the splintering of his coffin and found himself in mortal dangers. Unlike Burrus, like Houdini decades before, Shirk survived thanks to quick intervention.

Despite a lot of high-profile stories to send shivers down our spines, most people buried alive will remain forever unknown to us. They died deep in culverts and the ditches beside highways, in basements and root cellars, in featureless patches of desert and deep in the woods. Many of them remain on lists of the missing, and many will never be found. We often assume a careful demeanor when walking in a graveyard, taking care to speak softly and show respect. But if you think about it too long, you might realize you should behave that way almost everywhere. The unmarked dead can be beneath our feet at any time—and some of them went that way with their eyes wide open.

I love when the private home of a very rich person finally passes out of the cycle of inheritance and the place gets turned into a museum that’s open to the public. I go with the brawling masses to see the unabashed plunder-horde of the super-rich, and it’s always worth it. Most recently, I did this at the Hilldale Estate in our nation’s benighted capitol. The robber barons who owned it filled it with Russian Imperial treasures and furniture sturdy enough to stage crucifixions on, but I went for the Dior show they were putting on: clothes that had been designed for and worn by Grace Kelly, and the silhouette that came to define mid-century elegance for women. However, the biggest surprise of the day was the long-dead mistress of the house’s dog cemetery.

Like a lot of rich people Marjorie Post had an enduring interest in and ability to bond only with pure-bred and fussy dogs, so a dozen of them are buried on the grounds of her estate. It’s beautiful tribute to the friends who define much of one’s life. Unlike human remains, animal remains can legally be buried on one’s private property. The experience made me wonder how many pet cemeteries there are (aside from the one imagined by Stephen King when he was deep in his appropriation period.)

There are well-known examples from antiquity of mankind burying pets with great reverence and love, and dogs have been buried with kind words and deep care for almost as long as they’ve been domesticated. The Romans in particular were known for their touching dog epitaphs: “If you happen to see this monument, laugh not, I pray, though it is a dog’s grave.” The Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques in a suburb of Paris is one of the oldest in Europe, being a fancy pet cemetery since the 19^th century and featuring sculpture and monuments dedicated to and depicting pets.

Nor is this custom limited to the west. Hiran Minar in Pakistan was built by a Mughal emperor in the 17^th century as a game reserve for his beloved antelope, but became a resting place to many more. Ashkelon National Park, just north of the Gaza strip, is the oldest known dog cemetery in the world. Beginning in the 5^th century BCE, people of various Semitic religions like the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Assyrians may have had religious relationships with their dogs resulting in this space where thousands of dogs (mostly puppies) were interred, but much of that period is lost to history and countless centuries of intervening bloodshed in fighting over that region.

But what of modern man’s best friend? If one is not as rich as a robber baron, is there hope for a dignified end for one’s faithful tabby cat without a private estate? As a matter of fact, some cemeteries allow for pets to be buried in the same place as their humans, including Aspin Hill Memorial Park in Montgomery County, Maryland. As a result of a 2011, New York State also allows for family burial: people where pets are, pets where people are. The famous Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, a woman asked to be laid to rest where her pets were, and the rest is legislative and funerary history.

As more and more people opt for a life without children, as home ownership becomes increasingly impossible, as many households come to regard pets as sacred, beloved personages who deserve all the honors of death, the idea of a pet cemetery only becomes more important. If the internet has taught us anything over the last twenty years it’s that we cannot let go of cats, even cats we’ve never met. We’d die for them, so digging a hole in the backyard isn’t going to cut it for most. For a landless generation, pet cremation can be an excellent choice and offer mementos if you lack the space for a proper monument like the one I saw at Hilldale.

Every time I bury a pet or help a friend bury theirs, my memory always returns to the first of these rituals that I can remember. My little brother and I got a pair of hamsters: one brown and one red. We named them Ricky and Lucy and kept them in a cage full of wood shavings in our shared bedroom. Ricky died within a year. Lucy, somehow, lived to be seven years old. No one understood how. My brother fed her fried chicken, and more than ones I saw her eat a live cricket. She bit savagely and ran like a champion on her little wheel. By her seventh year, I began to think she might live forever.

When we woke one day to find her cold and still, we devised the kind of burial that only very weird kids can come up with. One day I like to imagine that an archaeologist digging in what used to be a suburb will find the delicate little bones of a rodent who was wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy, put in a shoe as a sarcophagus, and surrounded with dried corn, sugar cubes, wild flowers, and a letter from a child who loved her very much buried beneath the metal skeleton of her exercise wheel. Perhaps that they will conclude that children formed meaningful attachments to cats and dogs and fish and snakes and guinea pigs and rabbits from the little holes we all learned to dig when we were just learning that death comes for us all. Even dogs.

Maybe they will look thousands of years of human history over and see that we have always loved our pets enough to lay them gently to rest.

Image by Dave Parker – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30408894

The last English monarch to be killed in battle was Richard III, end of the Plantagenets, killed in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth Field. In 2012, his remains were discovered and identified, buried in what used to be a churchyard belonging to some friars and since having become a carpark (as the Brits say; you might say “parking lot” on this side of the pond). His royal bones were then reburied with great ceremony in Leicester Cathedral, replete with a big marble plinth. Richard III might be the most famous example of the odd practice of exhumation and reburial.

Human history, all the way back to the start, is defined by the ways that we bury our dead. Our early ancestors buried their dead in ways that indicate cultural meaning: in the fetal position or laid out, with fellows and alone, with grave goods like tools and jewelry. Even Neanderthals had their own customs and actions around burial, with pollen from flowers showing up in the samples of their grave dirt. Catacombs, ossuaries, and other arrangements have been made for human remains, even making bones into the main decorative feature, as in the case of the famous Sedlec Ossuary.

However, the practice of unburying and reburying the dead is a relatively recent one, made possible by the methods of preservation applied to corpses from ancient Egypt onward, and hewing to specific requirements about repatriation, border disputes, and even status among the deceased. But not all bodies are unburied to put them in their right place. Some dead are brought out to worse purposes.

Pharoah Tutankhamun lay undisturbed in his grave for three thousand years before his rude awakening. His mummified corpse has toured the world, being put on display for the benefit of school children and tourists, as well as scores of scientists and researchers. Though touted as a discovery that electrified the world, these are after all the remains of a very young man who died a sudden death and is not allowed to rest, for the crime of being too interesting. He was returned to the land of his birth in 2011, but remains on display. Not all the dead get to go back to sleep.

Murder victims, who cannot always said to be resting in their graves, are sometimes exhumed to obtain or confirm additional evidence long after their deaths. Katherine Menendez, a 17-year-old girl who was killed just outside of Cleveland, OH, was dug up 30 years after the end of her life to see if there was anything under her fingernails. The so-called “Lady of the Dunes,” Ruth Marie Terry, was killed in 1974, but her body was not identified until it was exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013, and her husband was not named as her killer until 2023. Justice is often a long time coming, if she finds her blindfolded way at all.

Some bodies are exhumed for the purposes of disrespect, often by graverobbers. But some are singled out by people who figure that death simply let them off too easy. Oliver Cromwell, usurper of the British throne and statesman of the interregnum died in 1658 of (probably) sepsis, and left his son unable to carry on his work of keeping kings out of business. Despite this full defeat, the English were so determined to punish Cromwell for the loss of their monarchy (and possibly for his attempted genocide against the Irish) that they dug up his body out of its honored place in Westminster Abbey, and gave it a postmortem execution. Cromwell was hanged in chains, and his head was displayed at the palace of Westminster until it decayed too badly to stand, and what remained of him was subsequently reburied under humbler circumstances (and probably in a handful of places).

One of the most interesting exhumation and reburial events is the story of the Mercy Brown vampire incident in Rhode Island in 1892. In life, Mercy Brown was a nineteen year old girl who suffered a great deal of misfortune, including dying of tuberculosis along with most of the rest of her family. One of the other misfortunes was that tuberculosis or “consumption” as it was then known, was poorly understood. The people of New England at that time were superstitious and frightened, and believed that the persistence of the deadly illness could be blamed on the influence of the undead, or an indication of vampirism. Upon frenzied exhumation, Mercy’s body was found to be less decomposed than the diggers expected, and she still had blood in her heart. These signs made them feel even less scientific, so they burned her heart and liver, powdered the ash, and gave it to another tuberculosis sufferer to drink. He died. Mercy was reburied, after having been shown none.

Sometimes the dead are better off left alone. Some still have tales to tell. Most of us would prefer not to be forgotten beneath a carpark, but then again most of us aren’t a Plantagenet king…or an unlucky kid mistaken for a vampire. If we are lucky enough not to be murdered, if we have forethought enough to plan for own remains before the deadline, we might escape the final humiliation of being put on display for school kids at the Met. But just like exhumation, death can always take one by surprise.

Image by VeteranMP – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30408894

My dear friend Charlie died by suicide when he was just 18 years old. He was not the first person I knew who died young, or the first person to leave my life through that particular door. However, he was the first person I knew who died in the prime of his physical existence and thus represented a cornucopia of rich and strange gifts to the organ donors list.

I’ve been marking yes on the organ donation button since my very first driver’s license, believing that someone might benefit from my death and liking that idea very much. I’m not a smoker; take the lungs while they’re still pink. Everyone has thought of the heart in a cooler being delivered by helicopter to a person on the brink who needs help pumping blood and maybe will inherit my emotional connection to Star Trek. Poetic souls have made much of cornea and iris transplant; what is it to see through the eyes of someone else, incorporating the gift of vision from the dead. These aren’t simple operations; they represent highly sophisticated science that must be executed by skilled surgeons and technicians who train for this specialty in medicine. But it’s become normal to us. It’s part of the world we know: some people who need a liver or a kidney will get lucky enough for a living or nonliving donor to give them one.

But Charlie’s death taught me that there are more parts to it than we typically think about, or that even show up on television shows about this visceral drama. For example, most people don’t know that bones can be donated. Cadaver bone can be used in grafts and in surgeries to lengthen the bones of a person’s arms or legs. Skin can also be harvested from a recently deceased person and donated to burn victims for grafting. The idea of a grafted tattoo is compelling to the writer of this article, but there are requirements in all things: donated skin must be free of tattoos, scars, and stretch marks.

Quiet, patient people came for pieces of Charlie I didn’t know could be of use. Cerebrospinal fluid can be recovered from a body for testing and research that could benefit folks suffering from neurological diseases. Researchers in this field can also use brain tissue, pituitary glands, and the spinal cord itself. Blood, too, can be harvested for research, although scientists in Russia in the early 20^th century experimented with cadaveric blood transfusions to the living, as well.

Nor are reproductive organs exempt from this fascinating process. Uterine transplants have been tried over the last few years, with a successful live birth arising from some lucky recipients. Penile and scrotal transplants have been tried out on people recovering from combat-related injuries, restoring urinary and sexual function. However, transplanting ovaries or testicles raises a complication: gametes produced by the donor body will carry the donor’s DNA. The recipient of the transplant, if able to produce offspring, would be as unrelated to that child as a surrogate or a step. Legally and perhaps spiritually, we’re not sure what to do with that yet.

Faces, our most significant identifying feature and arguably our most personal possession, can be donated by a cadaver and transplanted to a new person’s body. This series of complex operations can be indicated after major trauma to the face, or to replace a genetically compromised facial structure. Whatever the reason, this process is incredibly delicate, involving thousands of minute nerves and rich blood supply. Think of all the things a face can do, every little twitch and quirk, every function of speaking and eating and kissing and spitting. Multiple surgical teams must coordinate to make this happen, but there are documented successes of swapping one face for another.

Even hands, those clever servants of the mind whose oppositional dexterity makes us different from all other apes and lets us play sonatas and stamp ravioli can be transplanted from one person to another. Following disfigurement through industrial accident or amputation, some people have been able to regain manual control of their lives through cadaver donation. Like facial transplant, this is an incredibly difficult process, involving multiple surgeries and not typically included on the list of acceptable donated tissues when someone just marks yes on a form at the DMV. The consent of the grieving family must be obtained to remove the hands from a body and attempt this wondrous act. But where that decision can be made, a virtual miracle can be wrought.

They came for Charlie’s hands. They came for his eyes and skin, his spinal fluid and his bones. I remember when it happened I kept thinking about whalefall. When a massive whale dies and falls to the seafloor, it breaks down and nourishes the life around it. Scavengers eat what they can, making their homes in the richness of the leviathan’s wake. Coral and limpet attach to the skeleton and grow strong off the free calcium. Charlie and the whale and of course, thinking about myself. I imagined dying one day, maybe biting the dust on my walk home, and thinking how much better it would be if I could signal to the people around me: take these groceries I just bought. Empty my wallet and take my boots—they’ve still got plenty of tread. Shave my head and make a wig for a drag queen. I said yes and I meant it; take everything from me that someone else might still use. Charlie said give it away now, and to my dying breath, I agree.

Every writer lives with the same terrible knowledge: that we’d better get these stories out while we can, because death is coming. Looking back on the heritage of other spooky writers who lived in poverty and precarity, I myself am always concerned that there isn’t time enough left to write and publish all the things I hope to. Cast your eyes upon the tombs of the greats and see that they probably had less time than they thought they would. Poe died at 40. Dickinson at 55. Fitzgerald at 44. Drama queen Lord Byron quite possibly takes the funeral cake at 36.

Is it any wonder, then, that some authors engage the conceit of telling a story in the voice of a dead protagonist? Tip your ear and hear the chorus of the dead. (Some spoilers follow, but none of these works are new.)

Ambrose Bierce in 1890 managed the literary feat of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Told in a chronological jumble, it’s a dreamlike story of a man who escapes execution and experiences the meaning of life through the narrow keyhole cast by the near-death experience. Or so it seems, anyhow. This inventive story swings between the universal human experience of wanting to live, and the almost incomprehensible human experience of not knowing what it means to live until life is almost gone. Filmmaker Robert Enrico adapted this tale in 1962 into a short film with almost no dialogue, which was later turned into an episode of the seminal Twilight Zone television series. Both the story and the adaptation are mortal time well spent.

In what became one of the biggest books of the early 2000s, Alice Sebold had the unusual idea to start with the prototypical raped and murdered sacrifice teenage girl after the action had taken place. In 2002’s The Lovely Bones, narrator Susie Salmon is already dead by the time she tells the reader (frankly, graphically, you have been warned) about the acts of violence that ended her life. Although the novel doesn’t skip the terrible moments, the majority of it is about coming to terms with the end of life, and the struggle being mostly the problem of those left behind. Pete Jackson adapted the book into film in 2009, carrying with it the elegiac mood of a young girl’s mourning for her own truncated existence in firm and confident hands.

The phrase “I am Providence” is famously emblazoned on the tombstone of horror author and noted racist H.P. Lovecraft. It is from that epitaph that Nick Mamatas takes the title of his 2016 novel I Am Providence, the story of a murder and subsequent investigation at a Lovecraft convention. This whodunnit-style sendup of convention culture is wry and fascinating, told in alternating chapters of close third person and first person from Panos Panossian, murdered writer and central corpse to the narrative. Mamatas is the kind of author who can’t just give us a body on a slab; instead we hear Panossian’s fleeting thoughts about the murder and the community in general, as well as his reaction to the physical decomposition of his specific body parts: skin, brains, liquefying organs, as the breakdown begins. Be warned: the book is a little bit of a roman à clef, if you read a lot of modern horror.

There are a handful of famous examples of this trope that you might be thinking of right now (The Book Thief, Thirteen Reasons Why, Our Town) that I haven’t included on this list. That’s because they are not good.

What’s good is Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders’ 2017 retelling of the death of one of Abraham Lincoln’s children and the president’s very public struggle to grieve. Bardo is told in a cacophony of voices, all of them denizens of the D.C. cemetery where Willie Lincoln, dead at 11 years old, is laid to rest. Saunders’ genius is not that he entertains the fame and legend of a short-lived president or the mourning customs of 19^th century America, but that he dwells in the voices and indignations and misapprehensions of the dead. Whether these folks are recently or centuries in their graves, each of them still struggles with what they assumed would happen, or with the petty gossip of the little neighborhood of tombs, or with all that they left behind. As gorgeous as it is unconventional, this novel is more familiar with the society of the dead than any other like it. Despite a famous family at its heart, this is a novel of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The final speaking dead person on this list must be Maali Almeida, hero of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Published in 2022 by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka after a Covid-related delay (pesky mass death!), it tells a romantic and heartbreaking story about personal tragedy and how it relates to a national tragedy. The deceased Maali, from the beginning of the book, has seven days (“moons”) to maintain his connection to the world of the living, and accomplish one last task after being murdered and dismembered as anonymously as any other dead person that has ever died. This last task keeps him tethered to the people he loved most and to his nation, of which he has exculpatory evidence that he knows will be important to his people’s history. Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, Seven Moons is a work of satire, wit, beauty, and tragedy in equal measure.

Every author knows there’s no way to cheat death. We’re all surrounded by supplements and yoga mats and plans to drink less and the hope that we’ll outlive our last good idea. But many of us can’t help but write a story that makes it seem as though maybe we have found one.

Much ink (and other various fluid) has been spilled over the meaning of Dave Eggers’ retread on F.W. Murnau’s retread of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but almost everyone has focused on sex. People are fascinated by the film’s treatment of gender, or fixated on what the producers seem to want to say about sexual assault and the nature of consent. All that is present, and yet it seems to me a distraction from what Dracula, Nosferatu, Blade, indeed all vampire stories are about: death.

Herr Knock (this version’s Renfield, Simon McBurney) in the first act of the film describes the vampire as a creature of two poles: desire and putrefaction. Though he comes in the guise of a bridegroom, this version of the bloodsucker does more damage than his predecessor. Whereas Dracula rolls into London and drains a few people, Orlok sweeps into Wisburg borne on a drift of plague rats. Death is loose in the streets, indiscriminate and unstoppable. Faced with pandemic-scale mortality, the moral centers of the film Dr. Von Franz (this tale’s Von Helsing, played by Willem Defoe) and the humble Thomas Hutter (aka Jonathan Harker, portrayed this time around by Nicholas Hoult) determine that the only course of action is to sacrifice a young woman to the bloodthirst of the eternal predator.

However, the decision is not theirs to make. Orlok himself (Bill Skarsgård) decrees that the woman he has chosen, Ellen Hutter (not Mina Harker, Lily-Rose Depp) must submit to him of her own free will. She must do this because she wants to; the pressure of the plague-ridden city and the threat against those she loves most is certainly applied but assumed to be secondary to desire, the monster’s main pole. Here we have arrived at his nature: that of appetite. He wants her, so he must have her. She must, in fact, want him in return.

So much of the figure of the vampire is made up of xenophobia. It is easy to dismiss the claims of Stoker or his heirs that he was plagiarized after his authorship of Dracula, because nearly all of what he wrote was taken from Romanian folklore, and built into a framework liberally borrowed from Wilkie Collin’s 1859 gothic novel, The Woman in White. Stoker’s use of a folklore not widely known in England at the time allowed him to do two things: seem original, and use racism to his advantage.

The classic construction of the vampire archetype is that he is a monster, possessed of wealth and often a title, holds lands and a castle, and is allowed to prey upon people he sees as subjects. These are the trappings of wealth and class, and the predation of the rich upon the poor enters easily into a Victorian Brit’s mind. They’re highly stratified by class, and class is conferred by birth. However, the vampire is also from a distant land. He speaks another language and carries with him a disconcerting history. This means that his ways are necessarily strange, his customs will almost certainly bring discomfort, and most importantly: he does not belong.

In Dracula and in Nosferatu, there is a sense of ethnonationalism in play: Dracula is not British, so he is invading London. Orlok is not German, so he is invading Wisburg. In the 2024 film, the emphasis on the foreigner bringing plague cannot be separated from five years of rhetoric following a global pandemic that blamed foreign contagion for the spread of a deadly disease. Following the election of 2024, an American audience cannot be said to be immune to the idea of ethnonationalism underpinning a narrative that draws its life from the fear of the Other; the foreigner who comes to prey upon the bodies of young women. Our own leaders have said it, plainly and without shame.

While the camera lingers on the sexual nature of this invasion, the hideous embrace between death and the maiden is not consummated in the usual way. While we do see Herr and Frau Hutter do their rutting on a sofa, it cannot be said that Orlok and Ellen ever get it on in the expected way. Instead, he brings a foreignness to that process as well, nursing on fresh blood from the breast of first the Herr and then the Frau. Orlok’s title makes it hard for Thomas to object, but his foreignness, his representation of death is what makes him irresistible to Ellen. She knows what she’s in for, and it isn’t anything she’s already had.

The terrible thinness of Count Orlok is based on the appearance of a preserved body nicknamed Ötzi the Ice Man found in the Alps. This makeup and prosthetic look is meant to evoke a long-mummified corpse, utterly devoid of moisture, seeking to suck wet life out of a living body. His flyblown flesh exposes muscle and bone, even as he mounts his bride. His thinness is echoed in the body of Depp, a frighteningly thin woman whose cheekbones cut the air in profile and whose wracked paroxysms of possession and fright only serve to accentuate the sinew and gristle of her fatless form. When at last she is nude beneath him, when at last his fangs penetrate, one has to wonder where she was keeping all that blood. She, too, has become foreign. She crosses over to be with him: no longer wife, no longer woman, and no longer German. Vampire by marriage, she leaves behind all that was living for a honeymoon six feet deep.

Desire and putrefaction are the two horses that pull the carriage of the dead. What we love will kill us, and when we come to the grave we are rotting already. They are the two driving forces of this most recent retelling of Nosferatu, but one of them is the clear winner.

The answer depends on where you die.

New York City has buried the unclaimed and indigent dead, including people who die while incarcerated on Hart Island for over a century. Bodies are buried at a rate of about 1,100 a year, with bumps around the time of Covid and AIDS, the latter prompting officials to dig graves extra deep given the then-unknown nature of the deadly disease. It’s also the final resting place of people too poor to afford burial, and stillborn babies whose parents lacked the resources to handle their death. Control of the island was passed to the parks department in 2021, with plans to develop and beautify the area to open it to the public and give the living a way to enjoy the space.

The city of Paris offers secular funerals with music and poems to people who die without provision. For the last twenty years, climate change across Europe has killed more and more elderly people, creating a need for government-funded burials for folks who couldn’t take the heat. Politicians have appeared at these burial rites, signaling that they can grieve for the dead, even if they refuse to take meaningful action to protect the living.

In San Francisco, where so many died of AIDS without family or anyone to claim them, there is a ritual and a custom for these lost souls. The city collects the remains of those who died alone and unclaimed and cremates them. The ashes are given to a ship called the Bravo, which is piloted out to the Golden Gate bridge. Poured out into the sea, the dead are sung out of this life by Louis Armstrong and offered a prayer by one of the people doing the job. The GPS coordinates of this burial are recorded, in case someone comes forward too late.

Customs around aging and dying vary throughout the world, but even nations with strong traditions of filial piety must decide what will become of the unloved dead. Municipalities across Japan hold these bodies with their information before defaulting to cremation and disposal. In 2023, there were 60,000 of these folks who had no one to see to their final arrangements.

In places where cities, states, or countries lack the funding to properly store or identify the unclaimed dead, the results can be very hard on people who are searching for the remains of the lost. In New Orleans, bureaucracy hindered by poverty has kept families from claiming their family members’ corpses until decomposition has rendered them unrecognizable. Why would that be? Well, keeping a dead body fresh requires a great deal of refrigeration, and identification takes paid hours. If a municipality is running short on either, the results can be grisly. Quick cremation seems a mercy, in light of failures like that.

In some places, the dead may have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Someone dear to me recently called to tell me that he’d paid for an unclaimed member of his community. He had reached out to try and find this man’s people, and, failing that, he’d done the work of the remains, as well.

He called me to ask, “Why did I do that?”

Death is one of those things that will elicit responses we didn’t know were in us. Our honor is deeply involved, our sense of responsibility to the people around us and our belief in what is proper may manifest from parts of our past or our morality with which we rarely converse. What we do in these moments always reveals something of who we are, and that revelation may be a surprise to everyone involved.

“It’s what we do,” I told him with all the compassion I could offer. “It’s what I hope someone would do for me, too.”

I am grateful for the folks who love the unloved dead.

Here are the six sexiest ghosts on film.

6. Francesca in Ghost Ship (2002)

Played by Francesca Rettondini, this spectral songstress introduces the film, crooning the Italian song “Senza Fine” before a terrible fate befalls the unlucky upon the sea. Vamping it up in a red satin evening gown and opera gloves, both Rettondini’s voice and look are smooth as hell—which is exactly where she’s taking you. Ironically, the actress was also on board the infamous ocean liner Costa Concordia when it capsized in 2012. Life imitates art!

5. Moira O’Hara in American Horror Story S1 (2011)

Frances Conroy and Alexandra Breckenridge split duty as this seductive and unjustly murdered young woman. Moira’s story is long and weaves through all the history of the “Murder House,” because she’s a tireless domestic servant. Literally tireless, because a ghost never needs to sleep. Using her looks and charm as a young woman to seduce less-than worthy men, she also uses the wisdom and invisibility she enjoys as an older woman to gather secrets. That’ll teach us to overlook people in hospitality.

4. Candyman in Candyman (1991)

Tony Todd brings this vengeful spirit to life with a soupy-slow horror elegance and smoldering gaze that cannot be denied. Taken from a Clive Barker short story where the creep in question is as waxy-yellow as a beehive, later writers and directors have made this a distinctly Black series of films and legends linked to the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago. Thematically, Candyman has been enriched with the true experiences of extrajudicial murder of Black folks by people in authority, and the silence and mystery that often surrounds it. Is it weird to be turned on by the hook-murdering villain of a story as upsetting as that? Very well then, us horror nerds are weird.

3. Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus (1967)

Any director would have a lot of nerve trying to get Elizabeth Taylor, the highest paid actress in the world at the time, to take on a non-speaking role as a purely decorative ghost of seduction in a dreary and cut-down production of Christopher Marlowe’s 16^th century devil-made-me-do-it play. But there she is, bejeweled and impossibly lovely, walking bridal-slow through a movie starring her fifth and sixth husband, Richard Burton. Someone must of talked her into it, and our money is on the smooth-talking Faustus himself, who in the end could charm anyone but the devil— or the critics of this flop. Suggestion: a cut of this movie that’s just Helen of Troy, strolling past her drooling co-star. No words need be spoken.  

2. The Maitlands in Beetlejuice (1988)

Young Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are so charming and recognizable in the opening of this madcap goth adventure that it’s hard to believe they have to die to make way for Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara to take over the plot. Davis and Baldwin have to really work at being terrifying, because in their natural state they’re two movie-star-gorgeous newlyweds and newlydeads we can’t tear our eyes off of. Fingers crossed for the sequel to bring us what we crave, though it will likely not involve the two original hotties from the hauntable house.

1. Sam Wheat in Ghost (1990)

This movie gives us so many gifts: an endlessly quotable Whoopi Goldberg as a medium, Demi Moore at a stage in life so beautiful as to render a terrible haircut powerless, and the unforgettable pottery scene that launched a thousand kiln purchases. But best of all that is Patrick Swazye in a starring role as Sam Wheat who must act from beyond the early grave to save the love of his life. Absolute heartthrob Swayze is the kind of ghost we root for to gain the power to move objects in the physical world mainly because we all want to be touched like that, by someone whose beauty makes their death (on and off screen) even more painful than the usual thing.

Ghosts can’t be lovers, but they can be loved. And these can crawl under the sheets and haunt our dreams any night of the week.  

[image: Paramount Pictures]

With that knowledge, a good example is key. If you haven’t had the displeasure of many live funerals in your life, there are great examples in cinema that can serve as instructions.

5. Guardians of the Galaxy 2

Following the death of Yondu, a space Fagan and violent step-father to bumbling human hero Star-Lord, a funeral happens in space. The surviving stepson must find a way to make the man who was his father when he had none, the man who showed him little mercy or comfort and nonetheless taught him how to be a man. When Yondu’s fellow Ravagers pay their final respects, even Rocket Raccoon must accept that the people Yondu had worked his whole life to alienate him loved him still. Star-Lord admits that his found father terrified him, beat him, and kept him on edge his whole life. And yet, he could also make peace with the old man:

“Yondu didn’t have a talking car but he did have a flying arrow. He didn’t have the beautiful voice of an angel but he did have the whistle of one. Both Yondu and David Hasselhoff went on kick-ass adventures and hooked up with hot women and fought robots. I guess David Hasselhoff did kind of end up being my dad after all, and it was you, Yondu. I had a pretty cool dad.”

Even someone we have complicated feelings about can be eulogized well.

4. Four Weddings and a Funeral

This one is a stone-cold tearjerker. Kicking off with calling a gay man’s lover his “close friend,” this is the Scots-accented eulogy to end them all. Matthew, the surviving man, tells stories about Gareth. “So very fat and so very rude,” the dead man is described, but also a great host with an enormous capacity for joy and drunkenness, as the “most splendid, replete, big-hearted and jolly bugger most of us ever met.”

Matthew reads from “Funeral Blues,” by W. H. Auden. If you need to make people cry with your words at a burial, this is a sure thing. It’s the kind of thing that makes us wonder what else is there, when love is gone.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

3. The Wrath of Khan

What love is there in the galaxy to rival that between James T. Kirk and Spock, his half-Vulcan science officer? Spock sacrifices himself to save the ship at the end of this epic saga of revenge and obsession. Starfleet is a space navy, after all, so the revels are kept brief.

Eulogizing Commander Spock as both his commanding officer and as a beloved friend, Kirk says of his fallen comrade: “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.” Spock is laid to rest with the sounds of Earth mourners: “Amazing Grace” is played on the bagpipes by his fellow officer, Montgomery Scott, and Spock’s body is fired out a torpedo tube.

Brevity does not take away from the deep feeling of this one, because it is built on that crucial knowledge. Kirk knows Spock, and we know them both from their five-year mission to seek out new life. A shared adventure has ended, and the next must begin.

2. My Girl

Nothing can be said at the funeral of a child. The tragedy is too large to be spoken, and the life to be spoken of wasn’t lived. The knowing that we bring to the eulogy is brief and unformed, and all that’s left to commemorate is the small hole where that person should be, making the hole a little bigger every day.

True to that impossibility, the funeral for Thomas J. Sennett (a name too grown-up for any character played by Macaulay Culkin at his zenith) is mostly made up of bible verses rather than any actual eulogy. Best friend Vada is the only one to speak for him, demanding his glasses and telling everyone that the kid in the box was gonna be an acrobat.

Better to be known for just the dreams of who we wanted to be than for nothing at all.

1. Big Fish

What we know of the dead might not be good. In Big Fish, a eulogy must account for a man who seems to have lied about everything he ever said or did. It’s a classic father and son tale: the son who has never gotten enough from a larger-than-life father must face all the hollow places inside the old man. He must accept the truth, even though he has known it all along.

It is that knowing that allows us to shape our lives and the lives of others into stories worth telling. It makes the mess of a life into something neat enough to fit into newspaper columns, something people can sit through without wailing or calling the speaker a liar to their face.

That’s the magic of it, in the knowing. Knowing the truth, knowing the lies. Knowing how to tell a story, at the moment it’s needed most.

So, is the sequel real?

The answer is: kind of. Constantine 2 is like a very early pregnancy; something might come of it, but it’s too early to send out notices.

• Peter Stormare, who played Lucifer in the 2005 film, said as recently as 2020 that a sequel was in the works. Stormare’s devil is only on screen for the last ten minutes of the original, but it’s a memorable performance that could be duplicated by absolutely no one else.
• In 2023, Warner Bros confirmed that Constantine shall rise again, sharing that J.J. Abrams and Hannah Minghella are signed on to produce.
• Akiva Goldsman (I am Legend, Batman Forever, Practical Magic) is listed as the project’s screenwriters on the IMDB page for the forthcoming film.
• Keanu Reeves is set to return as the lead, John Constantine, because he’s not aging in any normal human way, and the character is (spoiler!) given a second chance to live at the end of the 2005 film by a joint effort between God and the devil that is simultaneously touching, funny, and a clear illustration of how life is mostly suffering.

Here’s what we don’t know, because there’s no sonogram on this demon pregnancy: no trailer, no teaser, no poster to hang on the fridge.

• Co-star of the original film Rachel Weisz has made no statement as to whether she would return. As talented as she is, it’s hard to watch her play a cop.
• Apprentice to Constantine’s sorcerer Chas Kramer was played by Shia LaBeouf in the original but he (spoiler!) dies in the final fight. Though a post-credit scene shows Constantine observing the ghost of his fallen Robin after the meat-life has ended, it’s unlikely we’ll see this character again. This is especially dodgy considering LaBeouf’s ongoing personal and legal problems.
• In one of the greatest casting coups of all time, the angel Gabriel is played by Tilda Swinton in the 2005 action film. Swinton brings a gracile androgyny and simmering menace to the role of the double agent of heaven and hell and ends the film (spoiler! Angels fall sometimes!) defrocked, defanged, dewinged, and demented. It would be a shame to waste that arc, or to waste the unfathomable talent of Swinton.
• Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnite is another bright spot of the first film, running a nightclub for beings who are more or less than human. The character represents the balanced and unbiased parts of the underworld, and Hounsou offers both curses and prayers as a complex depiction of a fascinating side-player. He’s a corner pocket for exposition and hopefully Goldsman sinks that shot.
• Musician Gavin Rossdale tried out his acting legs as Balthazar, a demon who’s entirely unnecessary to the plot and forgettable as a performer. Audiences certainly aren’t clamoring for more, so hopefully he stays home and keeps everything zen.

We may not know when we’re going to see Constantine again, and we may be doomed to rewatch the original without a single sign of salvation. We’ll have to remember what the man himself told us: “Heaven and hell are right here, behind every wall, every window, the world behind the world. And we’re smack in the middle.”

Between a cult classic and a possible revival. Between a bad and brief TV show and a great, long-running comic book. Between Peter Stormare’s devil and a faceless, voiceless god.

Will Constantine come again?

Let us pray.