Abstract
This chapter discusses two faux documentaries originally broadcast during Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives (2013) and Megalodon: The New Evidence (2014). The chapter demonstrates the ways in which these two faux documentaries exemplify an ontological shift in the relationship between human and non-human animals, as non-human animals are replaced by their digital duplicates. In the faux documentaries, the return of a prehistoric animal in digital form seems to offer hope for future human survival on a planet increasingly hostile to life due to the long-term effects of climate change. However, the chapter argues that the expulsion of actual animals into the digital domain anticipates the disappearance of humankind from the face of the Earth.
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Fuchs, M. (2020). Imagining the Becoming-Unextinct of Megalodon: Spectral Animals, Digital Resurrection, and the Vanishing of the Human. In: Heholt, R., Edmundson, M. (eds) Gothic Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_7
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