Capitalist ideology sustains the logic of labour-power, competition, accumulation, qualification and alienation. If the proletariat want money to get access to commodities, the market must be embraced, the whole working class becoming the victim of the continuing exploitation of wage labour. There is a “compelling parallel between a worker’s exploitation and alienation under capitalism and a victim’s exploitation and alienation at the market place,” since “workers must consider both the fruits of their labour and their labour itself as another man’s propriety” (Schwöbel-Patel 148). Not even retirement means the end of exploitation, as many senior people throughout the world must continue working to ensure economic survival after retirement from working at minimum wage. We came into this world to work, and only death stops the logic of being a cog in the machine of capitalism.

Horror fiction, however, can stage a scenario where the human continues labouring even after death, thus presenting a nightmarish version of the grand narrative of never-ending exploitation. Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm franchise (1979–98) revolves around a supernatural mortician known as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) who kills and reanimates the dead as his misshapen slaves. The films establish a mythology in which human corpses must work for the Tall Man as a labour force. Gary Sherman’s Dead and Buried (1981), opening just two years after the first Phantasm, stages a similar premise.