On the essay "Charade"
Photo: Jeroen De Bodt
Hayden’s Ferry Review Contributor Spotlight
January 23, 2015
In Tim Burton’s film “Corpse Bride,” my favorite movie when I was sixteen, a young man accidentally proposes marriage to a dead woman. After a ceremony in a moonlit winter woods, he leaves his drab Victorian village and enters the land of the dead. In the end, he almost prefers what he finds to the lot of the living.
It was the land of the dead that I wanted to inhabit when I was sixteen. While the film’s living characters move through a world that is muted and hostile, the dead are vibrant. They wear bright clothes over pearly bones. The corpse bride herself is beautiful.