The Death

Happy Halloween! Actually, I don't particularly enjoy Halloween because I don't like scary things/ being scared. Well, too bad for me, because many of the materials I have viewed or read these past few weeks for my Humanities class have been a little eerie, suspensefeul and have a lot to do with scary things, like black magic and most of all, death.  Yikes :/

Why in the world does there seem to be so many of these themes present in Latin american culture and art?  When I read the Machado de Assis short story, The Fortune Teller  the sudden murder of Camillo was a little disturbing; In The Garden of Forking Paths (Jorge Luis Bourghes), the sinister plot to kill Dr. Albert was chilling (I was so jumpy that as I read the last paragraph, alone in my deathly silent apartment, I just about had a heart attack when someone knocked on the door!). While reading The Kingdom of This World, there was no way I COULDN'T feel creeped out and spooked with all the talk of voodoo, dark magic, and brutal deaths.  Any time "The Death" appeared in the film, "Black Orpheus", all of us in the room screamed or shouted, as if to try and warn Eurydice through the screen that she was about to go the way of the Dodo.  This lethal charater also reminded me of yet another piece of Latin American art by Diego Rivera that has the sense of death in it.

 "The Death" (from "Black Orpheus")

Dia de Muertos (Diego Rivera, 1924)

Interesting, no?  But the Latin American culture is not the only one that may have a bit of a fascination with death.  Mexico's Dia de los Muertos is comparable to our Halloween.  There are also plenty of books written, movies made, songs composed and paitings created that symbolize death or have that grim theme.  What would you make of this country music song?