Spectral Crime Scenes: The Commodification and Marketization of Violence and Horror

• In Event: Carceral Cultures, Spaces and Knowledge

Abstract

The literature concerning carceral and dark tourism confronts the many ways in which the state’s power to punish helps to define certain spaces and architectures as sites of voyeurism and leisure. This work tends to focus upon former carceral spaces as sites for visitors to imagine how the state punishes and to ponder the crimes of former prisoners. There are however, as of yet unimagined or unidentified dark spaces imbued with the horror of violence and crime—what we describe here as spectral crime scenes—that engage many of the same cultural practices. Through a number of well-known violent crimes, this paper extends the carceral and dark tourism literature, by elaborating upon the ways in which the horror and spectrality of violent crime not only defines tourist sites, but are used to market private property for sale.

Authors

• Lindsey Upton, Tennessee Tech University

• Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University