The Allure of the Macabre

Death Metal and Black Metal music, violent video games, graphic horror movies and even infant onesies decorated with skulls. Society is becoming more and more fixated on death as our world becomes ever more unpredictable and chaotic. Jeffrey Podoshen, a professor of marketing at Franklin and Marshall College, is one of the world's leading scholars on this very topic - death consumption. On this episode of The Human Condition with Lisa Gregory, part one of a three-part series discussing Podoshen's research not only on death consumption but on dark tourism, consumer behavior and materialism, he talks about our growing obsession with the macabre, and why it may not necessarily be a bad thing. After all, "Learning about death is learning about life," says Podoshen.