Death is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary Western culture. Corpses litter Hollywood film; vulnerability or violence propels most mainstream fictions; the recently recovered or slowly dying make bookshelves groan. But the pain or smell of death, the banality of physical, or undignified, decline, the dull ache of mourning, are rarely seen. Cemeteries move further from the city, approach obsolescence as well as capacity, and hospitals hold dying at bay and far from the public eye. Yet our film and television screens are steeped in death's dramatics: in spectacles of glorious sacrifice or bloody retribution, in the ecstasy of agony, but always in the promise of redemption. This book is about these dramatics or, more precisely, the staging of these dramatics in mainstream film, and the discrepancies that fuel them and are, by return, fuelled by them.

The foregrounding of discrepancy, of the gaps or inaccuracies that characterise death's mediation in its restless departure from lived experience, has always accompanied its sociocultural study. Since Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller of 1973 announced The Denial of Death – that the human condition is characterised by a fear of death which funds our actions but evades our consciousness – debates on the topic have negotiated this question of repression and of death's faux nowhere-ness in contemporary life. Philippe Ariès provided the historical context to this death denial in his groundbreaking study of 1975: Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present.