"It's Bloody Guide" - Fun, Fear and a Lighter Side of Dark Tourism at the Dungeon Visitor Attractions, UK

Philip Stone Dr, University of Central Lancashire

Abstract

This chapter explores the contemporary commodification of death and the macabre within the Dungeon visitor attractions. In so doing, the chapter suggests the Dungeons, within a framework of psychosocial connectivity, act as contemporaneous cultural spaces that offer nihilistic narratives of fear, death and horror which are (re)created and celebrated through mimesis, kitsch and pastiche representations. Ultimately, the Dungeon experience offers a potential emancipatory space for reassessment and self-reflexivity that allows for an optimistic reconfiguration of visitors' interpretative strategies of the past, present, and the future.