Cultural decline can be measured in a thousand different ways, but surely one of them is the way in which the figure of Death is personified in the movies. 

In 1957, Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal offered Death in the form of a blank-faced man who wears a flowing black robe, speaks in Swedish, and is proficient in the game of chess. This is an image of Death one can flee in fear from and have a certain measure of respect for. By contrast, the new British movie Tuesday gives us Death as inhabited by a shape-shifting talking macaw.