Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media

What lies beyond death? This book brings together a diverse collection of scholarly voices to explore how popular culture imagines—and reimagines—the afterlife. Drawing from film, television, video games, literature, advertising, and digital technologies, this book examines how narratives about Heaven and Hell, ghosts and gods, memory and immortality shape contemporary understandings of morality, death, and what may come after.

From Pixar’s Coco to The Good Place, Ghostbusters, Upload, and Westworld, these chapters interrogate the enduring power of afterlife narratives to provide existential comfort, moral guidance, and cultural critique. Whether through the lens of theology, philosophy, or secular imagination, contributors consider how popular media blurs the sacred and the profane—challenging dogma, reframing ethics, and offering new possibilities for how we remember the dead and live among the living.

Spanning topics such as queer love in the afterlife, Indigenous cosmologies, digital resurrection, and the theological implications of robots, Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media: Morality, Religion and Death is a timely exploration of how the afterlife continues to haunt and inspire modern culture.

Essential reading for scholars of media studies, religious studies, cultural theory, and anyone fascinated by humanity’s oldest and most enduring question: what happens when we die?