At Anorak: Stairway to Heaven - Six Genre Films that Depict the After-Life.

My latest article is up at Anorak.  It is called "Stairway to Heaven: Six Genre Films that depict Life After Death."

Here's a snippet:

"THE greatest unanswered question of human life is, paradoxically, about death.

What follows our duration on this mortal coil?

Do we queue up for an eternity of torment and suffering, or for a span of joy and love?

Is our “final destination” simply oblivion, the blinking out of everything that we know and are? Or are we reincarnated here on Earth to go through it all again?

On a very basic level, all horror movies obsess upon the issue of death, or perhaps, more accurately, the struggle to avoid and evade death; to survive and endure in the face of serial killers, vampires, werewolves, aliens and other boogeymen.

But some horror movies also determinedly obsess on the nature of what might come next, on the Great Beyond. Such films imagine visions of what life beyond this mortal coil could look like, and these strange, imaginative phantasms run the gamut of possibilities

The following six films are organized below, in ascending order, from domains of suffering and pain to ones of cosmic transcendence.

In other words, if taken in this order, these half-dozen genre films depict a cinematic stairway to Heaven. Climb it at your own risk."

Click on over to Anorak to read the full list, and leave a comment if you are so inclined.  And here is the JKM archive at Anorak so far.