Discover Top Posts Tagged with #premature burial

Heard something about a pickaxe, too.

https://goodmorningevildoers.com

#just saying #good morning evildoers #horror #podcast #premature burial

A Buddhist temple's manager said staff heard a faint knock coming from the coffin.

#premature burial

premature burial - repugnant

just picked this up from the post office and i am obsessed (especially the lyrics on the actual vinyl)

#repugnant #premature burial #mary goore #chems corner

Premature Burial; Repression and the Transgender Self

Antoine Wiertz, The Premature Burial, 1854.

Excerpt from The British Medical Journal, December 8, 1877, p. 819—

“BURIED ALIVE.”

“A correspondent at Naples states that the Appeal Court has had before it a case not likely to inspire confidence in the minds of those who look forward with horror to the possibility of being buried alive. It appeared from the evidence that some time ago a woman was interred with all the usual formalities, it being believed that she was dead, while she was only in a trance. Some days afterwards, the grave in which she had been placed being opened for the reception of another body, it was found that the clothes which covered the unfortunate woman were torn to pieces, and that she had even broken her limbs in attempting to extricate herself from the living tomb.”

Cases of premature burial like the example above were concerningly common throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This phenomenon was due to a myriad of reasons. The prevalence of plague and disease put pressure on the loved ones of the recently deceased (or thought to be so) to bury their dead quickly. Oftentimes the family and friends of the plausibly dead would declare death on their own with no input from a medical professional. Even if they did consult a doctor, the lack of scientific and medical knowledge made distiniting a state of death from near death, catalepsy, a coma, or someone who was just really really drunk, particularly difficult. The first documented use of chest compressions for resuscitation wasn’t even until 1891 when German surgeon Dr. Friedrich Maass thought, “maybe if I push on this dude’s chest super hard it’ll bring him back to life” (or something similar). The common practice up until then was to cross your fingers and turn someone from their back onto their side over and over until something happened. It was also common for physicians to hold a lit candle or mirror under a patient's nose to check if they were breathing. If the flame didn’t go out or the mirror didn’t fog, they’d assume there was nothing else to be done. With this in mind it is not hard to believe that premature burial was widely feared. There were hundreds of coffin prototypes proposed with safety measures in the case that one was buried alive. It became a not-uncommon practice to tie strings with bells to the hands and feet of the deceased. George Washington’s last request on his deathbed was that he would not be buried for three days after his death in case it was a false passing. Being the entrepreneur he was, Edgar A. Poe saw a chance to capitalize on this widespread paranoia and did just that. He wrote numerous stories about someone being buried alive, mistakenly or not; The Premature Burial, Legiea, The Black Cat, and The Casket of Amontillado, to name a few.

Devise for Indicating Life in Buried Persons – Patent No. 268,693. Dated Dec. 5,1882. Applied for by John G. Krichbaum, Youngstown, Ohio.

Now that medicine has advanced past holding a mirror or a candle to someone's mouth to confirm whether or not they are breathing, the possibility of accidentally being buried alive is no longer such a prevalent fear. Still, we see the trope emerge again and again in works of horror. The fear has become disconnected from the plausible reality that originally made it so terrifying, it has been retold so many times that we have learned to associate it with a feeling of horror. Obviously the hypothetical of being buried alive is still scary, but now that the root of the fear (the possibility that it could actually happen) is largely absent, the trigger evokes a fear that comes from a different place. Instead of being afraid of the possibility of being buried alive, you fear what it would be like. You fear the imagined experiences and feelings of being buried alive. Premature burial has become a trigger for associated fears. It’s the fear of being trapped, completely isolated from society and the people you love. Instead of triggering the direct fear of being mistaken as dead, it triggers the broader fear of people mistaking you for something you're not. It’s the fear of your body and your life being so greatly misunderstood that it results in your true self being buried six feet underground suffocating to death. When the premature burial is intentional, it represents a futile and dangerous attempt at a repression of the self. When understood like this, premature burial is very easy to read as allegorical to the transgender experience.

I Saw The Tv Glow 2024 dir. Jane Schoenbrun

In A24’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024) the premature burial that Isabel and Tara experience functions as a powerful manifestation of the repression that consumes both characters, externally and internally. The trope of being buried alive here is not just a physical event, it is a symbol of the characters' struggles with gender identity and dysphoria, isolation, and the pressure of social expectations to conform. For Isabel and Tara, being buried alive is a direct confrontation with being trapped in a body that is misunderstood and a world that refuses to recognize who they really are. Tara and Isabel are buried alive by Mr. Melancholy, an outside force that is representative of people in their lives trying to extinguish the parts of them that do not conform. In this case it is their gender identities that are being suppressed. The versions of themselves that present with ‘deviant’ gender expressions are buried alive, leaving them trapped underground with no agency and no way to truly connect with reality. After Tara is buried and sent to the Midnight Realm they, as Maddy, pay a kid to bury them alive. This shift from an unintentional to intentional burial shows the way that outside pressure can cause internal repression. In this case, the grave is not a metaphor for an external societal rejection, but rather an internal one; a deliberate attempt to bury one's true self and silence parts of one's identity that are deemed unacceptable or deviant. Much like the literal act of being buried alive, this repression is not a natural death but a violent, unnatural one that ultimately leads to psychological suffocation. Tara changes their mind. They claw their way out of their grave, “I was finally me again” they say. They try to convince Owen/Isabel to do the same, to accept her true self, but in the end Owen/Isabel can’t do it. She refuses and lives the rest of her life suffocating. This is, again, an intentional repression. It is a submission to external pressure, a fear of the self. Ultimately this is a futile attempt. As exemplified in the film by Owen/Isabel becoming increasingly distressed and short of breath as she allows her true self to suffocate underground, the more you try to repress who you really are, the more it will fester and the more asphyxiating and alienating the experience will become.

I Saw The Tv Glow 2024 dir. Jane Schoenbrun

The buried alive trope is not only allegorical to the transgender experience in contemporary media. Even stories that were written in the 1800’s with the intention of pulling from the popular anxiety around premature burial can be read through a queer lens. Take for example one of Edgar A. Poe’s most famous works, The Fall of the House of Usher. While it was likely not Poe’s intention, when viewed through a contemporary lens, The Fall of the House of Usher can easily be read as an allegory for being transgender- specifically as a transfeminine allegory. Through the fractured identities of characters’ Madeline and Roedrick, the narrative mirrors the psychological distress, repression, division, and distance from reality experienced by transgender people when the clash between one's true self and societal expectations leads to a breakdown of identity. The exclusively paternal Usher lineage can be seen as emblematic of social pressures to conform to patriarchal gender norms while The House of Usher itself serves as a symbol of an external gender presentation shaped and constricted by these norms. Madeline and Roderick, fractured doubles of each other, reflect the internal split caused by social pressures to repress feminine identity and conform to the externally-imposed masculine ideal. This repression is symbolized through Madeline’s attempts to escape her tomb while Roderick is driven crazy by the knowledge that she is still alive. Roderick being driven fully into insanity by the realization that the repression was unsuccessful mirrors the experience of a closested transgender person who has realized that they can no longer suppress their true identity, but remains unable to grapple with the implications of who they really are. Madeline claws her way out of her tomb, the vault it was placed in, through the tunnel, and up the stairs- “evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.” Despite all attempts at repression, the feminine self overpowers the facade of a male identity. Madeline collapses onto Roderick, and they both die. Finally accepted through a dual death, the split identities become whole, unrestricted by the patriarchy or gender norms. The House of Usher falls because it was an external identity built on patriarchal gender norms and sustained by the repression of femininity. Once the inner self is forced to accept that it cannot conform to these expectations of gender and embraces a feminine identity, the external self could no longer be sustained and it collapses. Madeline’s return from her premature burial highlights the futility of attempting to repress parts of oneself, while the eventual collapse of the House of Usher demonstrates the empowering liberation that comes with fully accepting one's identity.

The Fall Of The House Of Usher (Silent Movie) 1928 dir. James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber

Premature burial, once a fear rooted in medical uncertainty, has evolved into a powerful allegory for repression, one that is particularly powerful when read in the context of transgender identity. Instead of fearing the possibility of being buried alive, we now fear the experience itself–the feelings of isolation, repression, and being misunderstood to a violent extent.

#i saw the tv glow #transgender #writing horror #transgender allegory #premature burial #edgar allan poe #fall of the house of usher