Death as Entertainment: Young People and Death Awareness

This book explores the moral and representational issues associated with engaging young people with popular media depictions of death and dying.

Emotionally charged depictions of death play an important role in contemporary media directed toward teen and young adult audiences. Across creative works as diverse as interactive digital games, graphic novels, short form serial narratives, television and films, young people gain opportunities to engage with representations of death. In some cases, representations of death, dying, and the decision to end one’s own life have been subject to public outcry and criticism related to its perceived potential impact on impressionable audiences. Death in/as entertainment can also be fleeting, commonplace and used for humour making it trivial. The chapters in this volume particularly consider the types of engagement made possible through different contemporary creative mediums and the ways in which they might distinctively capture or arouse thoughts and feelings on the end and loss of a human life.

Death as Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students interested in new media and its cultural and psychological impact. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Mortality.

Gareth R. Schott is Professor in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa, New Zealand. As a media psychologist, he holds an interest in both the psychological impact of media but also the role of creative media in exploring human psychology and psychological knowledge.