The theme of death is an essential component of film narrative, particularly in how it affects the hero. Filmmakers from different cultures and backgrounds have developed distinct yet archetypal perspectives on death and the protagonist’s response. Focusing on Western and Japanese period genre films, the author examines the work of John Ford (1894–1973), Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) and Sergio Leone (1929–1989) and finds similarities regarding death’s impact on the hero’s sense of morality.

What defines a hero? The cause you champion? A warm smile? A deep-rooted love of orphans and waifs?In the dark realm of Terra Primus, heroes are often not what they seem to be. After all, at what point does justice become revenge? Four individuals, caught up in the turbulent threads of fate, find themselves drawn together and forced to step outside their comfort zones. A crestfallen paladin, a drunken soldier, a renegade assassin, and a monk, all driven by their own vices and desires, inadvertently and unwillingly become part of something bigger than any of them.Terra Primus is truly no place for heroes.

It takes a graveyard to raise a child. Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family.