The 'macabre', as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre - and more broadly, performance - for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.

AcknowledgementsContributorsIntroduction: I Made the Dance of Death - Meredith ContiPart I. Histories of the MacabreThe Mortification of Harvey Leach: Humour and Horror in Nineteenth-Century Theatre of Disability - Michael M. ChemersThe Horrors of the Great War on the London Stage: The Grand Guignol Season of 1915 - Helen E.M. BrooksPhantoms of the Stage: The History and Practice of Uncanny Apparitions - Richard J. HandPart II. Dramaturgies of the MacabreTime and Punishment: Gothic Maternal Bodies on the Contemporary British Stage - Kelly JonesThe Body Dismembered: Allegory and Modernity in German Trauerspiel - Magda RomanskaMacabre Children on the Australian Stage: Angela Betzien's Cycle of Crime Plays - Chris Hay and Stephen CarletonMartin McDonagh's Hangmen: Justice and Guilt in Public and Private Acts of Hanging - Michelle C. PaullFear of Death and Lyrical Flight: Mortality Salience Mediation in Fun Home - Christopher J. StaleyPart III. Staging the MacabreThe Severed Head on Stage - Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.Dancing Haunted Legacies: Diana Szeinblum's Alaska - Jeanmarie Higgins'To Die Over and Over Inside My Body': Three Deaths in Hijikata Tatsumi's Butoh - J. E. F. OoiPart IV. The Immersive Macabre'Black and Deep Desires': Sleep No More and the Immersive Macabre - Dan VenningThe Dark Ride Immersive and the Danse Macabre - David BisahaLiveness and Aliveness: Chasing the Uncanny in the Contemporary Haunt Industry - David NorrisAmerican Hells: Hell Houses, Abortion Frames, and Unsexed Women - Robyn Lee HornHaunting the Stage: Macabre Tourism, Lieux de Mémoire, and the Immortal Death of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre - Meredith ContiBibliographyIndex