Abstract
The old conception of death has always been scary and morbid, a thing that has always been hard to accept, so that it had to be mysterious. Something that people would not want to talk about, that was considered as a taboo. Of course, it was the same as all the taboo subjects, like the cinema, as had the case been in the beginning of it; but especially during the late nineties, everybody became very interested in it. That is why we have a lot of horror movies with scary creatures like vampires, zombies and demons. It is no surprise that these movies were very popular because people were superstitious and these kinds of stories comforted them in their believes by exaggerating everything and presenting the situation as impossible.
So when considering the "Divine Comedy", we can compare this aspect to Dante's Hell, a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife.
First of all, I chose to talk about the late nineties' horror movies that had the image of death presented as bad and scary. Death is seen like a demonic character that hurts and tortures other people and not as an extension of life. We have in most of the movies, stories where people are possessed by evil and occupied by dead peoples' souls, etc.
We can cite a very popular movie which comes under the category of possessed child movies produced in the late sixties, "Rosemary's baby" by William Friedkin. The movie, as everyone knows, is the story of a young girl possessed by evil and that the mother tries to save her by calling a priest to exorcize her (to deliver her from evil), in other worlds, it is the battle of good against evil. Everything in this film is made to disturb the audience. The image and the sound are saturated: we have plenty of blood, crying and screaming people, insults, violence, etc. This saturation shows how terrified the people are about death and the inhuman efforts people take up to avoid it. Seeing her child in the border between life and death makes the mother crazy from sadness. The girl, who is possessed by evil, brings the dead peoples' world to ours and that is what scares everyone around her. In fact, it is very interesting to see that what really frightens us is not the idea of death but it is the idea of meeting of the two worlds, the combination of the two of it.
So we can say that, through Friedkin's eye (and most of the directors of that period), the frontier between life and death is as "lived" as real Hell, where we suffer and become demonic.
