Killing to Create: The Energetics of Corpse Magic in Folk Religion and Horror Cinema

In this paper, I will explore a theme we find expressed both in horror fiction and cinema and in folk religion from South America to Southeast Asia: the idea that torturing and killing a human victim creates a magical force that can be redirected by the killer. In this paper, I explore an aspect of haunting that is represented both in horror fiction/cinema and in folk religion from South America to Southeast Asia: the idea that torturing and killing a human victim creates a magical force that can be redirected by the killer. By comparing the way this theme is expressed in a variety of contexts, I will argue that its exemplary cases appear to rely on an earlier and widely shared conceptual framework. This framework, I argue, belongs to a cultural substrate in which supernatural forces are not understood as the impersonal energies hypothesized by 19th-century psychical researchers like William James. Instead, they are understood as active conscious agents that are most often identified as the spirits of victims that are both created and sustained by ritual killing.