Momento Mori -CSI’s Fallen Idols episode

Last night’s episode of CSI, Fallen Idols, was a creepy one. The opening scene had a the piano opening of Evanescence’s Good Enough (of the Open Door album) with a basketball game being played. However the action stops and the camera moves in and around the players whilst this music goes on before the photographs of two of the protganists disappear. Its was a very Without a Trace but the emptiness of the action was quite unnerving. (Though there is a televison trailer at the moment that has a song about photographs [sort of sounds like Ladytron] which may have been a better music track.)

The episode focussed on the momento mori idea of photographs keeping the souls alive, beginning with Gil Grissom discussing primitive tribe’s fears of stolen souls to the final scene wth the dead people being continually captured on film. Definitely unsettling in its simplicity but strange in that our culture, despite rationalism and science, still gets unnerved at the thought of souls being in peril.

Does the anatomy of horror narratives play out at that deep level? Is that one of the reasons why, for example, Interview with the Vampire worked? It plays to those uncertainties and offers some solution (albeit one that does not exist but that’s beside the point between the covers).