To the authors of such fantasies, it is an ecstatic agony, beautiful as the chance meeting, on a chopping block, of sex and death.

I can tell you as a citizen of this country, as well as a bereaved father, that if my son Sagi wants to be in this special unit, then I will support him and strengthen him. Many of them are plainly exaggerated - Sömmerring’s theories of retained consciousness for up to 15 minutes after decapitation [ 3] are as outlandish as the legend of the pirate Blackbeard’s headless body swimming around his ship after his death [ 25]. Yet, unlike a headless body or a severed limb, which evoke pity, grief, fear and horror at the sight of another human reduced to a broken doll, the head’s eternal status as the mind’s throne and the movie screen of the soul (via the face) make it not merely pitiable or dreadful (although it is those things, too) but powerfully mesmeric, an undead fetish whose fascinations are a witches’ brew of repulsion and attraction. They tried to make it seem that maybe the grenades or rockets disfigured him and that’s why he was missing a piece.In the next installment, the survivors of the Ghostface killings leave Woodsboro behind and start a fresh chapter in New York City. The doctor is left with this impression of a horrible experience, of a murderous vivisection, followed by a premature burial” [ 1].

I was not, then, dealing with a vague dull look, without any expression that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.

more like being strangled while having a bloody nose stuffed with tissue or the feeling you get when water goes up into your nose, sinuses, brain. But I have no idea what hormones/chemicals are being released in the brain at that point, for all we know it might be quite a euphoric experience.

To be sure, a Marcuse-ian critical distance was all that stood between me and the intellectual horrors of being mellowed to death, in the real-life Margaritaville of San Diego where I grew up. Decapitation, Saudi-style, is unquestionably more gory, but it’s also swifter, and closer to a painless end, than our more civilized methods of strangulation by hanging, asphyxiation by gas, death by firing squad, and, most notoriously, being fried alive in the electric chair.The historical accounts that are available to us remain frustratingly scant in evidence and are often closer to urban legends than actual scientific accounts.