By Natalia Gonzalez Blanco Serrano
Horror writer Michael McDowell was fascinated by death and the different practices and beliefs around it. As befitting the screenwriter of Beetlejuice, the 1988 blockbuster about a comically troublesome ghoul, McDowell collected an unparalleled assortment of funerary artifacts and memento mori over his lifetime that made his obsession manifest.
Upon the release of the sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, we reflect upon McDowell’s Death Collection, which resides in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives. To begin with … what even is a Death Collection?
“It has everything from an oil painting to suicide notes to photographs of dead people, locks of hair, song books about death,” said Scott Krafft, chief curator of Special Collections.
In 2013, the collection came to Northwestern, 14 years after McDowell’s death. It was offered to the University by director and historian Laurence Senelick ’64, who was life partner to McDowell.
“Ideas about death were central to McDowell. His dissertation was titled American Attitudes towards Death, 1825-1865,” Krafft said, “but he’d started thinking about collecting death-related things from a young age. He was always interested in the macabre.”
Items in the collection have been sought out for diverse reasons. A few of the “spirit photographs” — early double-exposure photography seemingly depicting interactions with spectral beings — were loaned for a major exhibit on intersections between death and art held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. One person even drove across the country from Texas to study a spirit board planchette (the central mechanism of a “Ouija” board) that belongs to the collection.
“Music historians would be interested in this collection: there’s many examples of sheet music of songs on all sorts of death-related topics, from the Johnstown flood to the assassination of President Garfield. There’s a great deal of material on the history of the funeral industry and embalming practices. One thing I learned from the collection is that practice of surrounding a dead body with floral tributes prior to burial is not just for the assuaging beauty of flowers, but to mask the smell of that body’s decay,” Krafft said.
There is so much to be learned from this extensive collection that spans as far back as the 16th century. From mourning jewelry to a child’s coffin, the collection commemorates anything related to death. Encountering the collection, one can share the captivation McDowell had for a topic that affects us all.
Natalia Gonzalez Blanco Serrano is a recent Medill School of Journalism graduate.