Many of us experience anxiety about the inevitability of death. Particularly with the global situation as gruesome as it is, with pandemics and wars raging unchecked, our mortality might present itself as a crushing force, or a panicked sense of time running out, rather than as a peaceful exit off of the mortal coil.

Freud described the Death Drive as a kind of compulsive repetition, and Lacan understood it as the way our drives lead us on distracting detours, as we circle around the inevitable end-point of our demise. Yalom also spoke to developing more adaptive responses to life’s core existential dilemmas.

Video games tend to deal in death quite prominently, often employing it as a punishment for failure. True death in games is 100% completion, the mining of the narrative, the death of the experience. Nearing the end of a well-liked game, we demur; we outstay our welcome in that game’s world. Knowing that there is a finality only makes us cherish and more jealously guard these last morsels of experience.

Two games exploit this compulsive repetition: Save The Date, a game in which you cycle endlessly through the events of a blind date, trying in vain to prevent your date from meeting a catastrophic death before the day is over. And Hades, another cyclic game, in which your character attempts to escape the endless, inert existence of the afterlife and grab a brief taste of ordinary human mortality.

These games find a way out of the endless avoidant loop of the Death Drive. They teach us to understand our being as toward death, in the vein of Heidegger. We cannot escape death, or apocalypse, but we can make the time we spend on our way toward it more rewarding, more socially responsible, and more alive with meaning.

Attempting to justify the violent extraction of resources to the detriment of biodiversity and of the conditions rendering our planet welcoming of human life, Western societies uphold the idea that nature is voracious, unclean, chaotic, tamable, and dangerous, at worst an enemy that must be kept at bay, or a slave at best. At the other end of this dichotomy, progress for humanity is frequently portrayed as controlled, ascetic, linear, and individual. As the rhythms of everyday life become more alienated from the rhythms of nature, ecological anxiety springs back and is evidently present in contemporary pop culture.

To illustrate a psychoanalytic take on eco-horror films, two pieces will be discussed, Lars Von Trier film “The Antichrist” where a grieving couple retire to a cabin in “Eden” to try and process their pain, and the tv series “The Last of Us”, in which hoards of "infected" people have been co-opted by a fungal network intelligence that uses individuals as puppets. In both examples, we are confronted with different takes on Freud’s statement that “we are not the masters of our own house”, prompting the question: “who is us?”.

These contemporary media renditions of trying to survive in a natural world dominated by a pervasive evil that inhabits us, either in the form of an infection or of trauma, can be comprehended as collective attempts to mentalize our relation to a natural world that has been brought to extremes, through acknowledging the voracious and wild in us. Both offer an observation into how the repressed comes back at us, confronting us with the uncanny truth that nature is not our outside antagonist

In the series The Midnight Club, Mike Flanagan continues his exploration of how our internal demons become projected in ways that might haunt and scare us or, if we can face them, might help us more adaptively meet the challenges that living brings. What seems at first to be lodged in the supernatural realm of the haunted house becomes visible as aspects of the Real that are so feared that they seem to impinge rather than standing in their proper place. We see this most profoundly in the relationships between the characters with Death and with History.

Current ideas about the hauntings that occur across the generations help us understand our fascination with the haunted house as a repository of archival knowledge of a past that resonates forward across the generations. Those truths not faced by previous generations are actively lived out in the present. We see these types of legacies in groups that have suffered trauma collectively, whose identities are impacted by horrors that have left their marks. We also see these effects within individual families, as the unmet challenges of one generation create further obstacles for the next. Taking the Midnight Club as an allegory for our times, we will consider ways in which the story meets us at that intersection between the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, such that the holes provide information regarding what we may otherwise be blind to in our own life stories.