Popular Culture Review 30.2
ic proportion in the fictional Villefranche and that roughly correspond to a level of anxiety in the Western world that Villefranche symbolizes . For example , in the first episode , Laurene encounters in the perpetually darkened forest the corpse of rookie nurse Sandra Chevrier . Chevrier has been murdered , then hanged from a tree that bleeds . By the time Laurene and Teddy Bear find it , the corpse is barely ten hours old , its eyes already pecked out by the omnipresent crows , creatures that find their counterparts in Dante ’ s “ foul harpies ... that utter their laments on the strange trees ” ( Inferno , XIII , 10-15 ). The nurse ’ s defiled corpse thus becomes a grotesque symbol of ultimate abjection ( Creed 40 ); monstrous but dead , this woman has been cast off as so much detritus , is no longer recognizably human , the annihilation of her person bringing to the viewer ’ s mind an image of their own inevitable extinction This visual image of Sandra Chevrier is thus an example of “ the repressed familiar ” that Hogle refers to as the “[ terrifying ] annihilation of self ”( 14 ).
The story behind the nurse ’ s hanging reveals the grotesque , even damnable natures of those who participated in the murder and who , like most everyone else in Villefranche , are condemned to living out their lives in a village that , like the Inferno , no one ever seems to leave . In fact , the twisted story of what supposedly happened to Sandra Chevrier creates an ambivalence and ambiguity that , in turn , sustain the series ’ steadily building dread . Apparently , Sandra had recently assumed responsibility for taking care of her former boyfriend , the comatose and mute Bruno Walter , his unblinking , wideopen eyes possibly signaling a recognition of the horrors of living in this village and reinforcing Carol Clover ’ s emphasis on “ looking as the avenue of horror ” ( 167 ). Reduced to the level of the abject , Bruno is little more than a living corpse , one who has been kept barely alive in his parents ’ living
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