The paper uses insights from several Social Psychological theories to study the cultural artifacts of the Merry Cemetery (MC) of Sȃpânţa (Romania). In the first study we have content analysed the epitaphs written on the painted crosses of the MC and the results show that the epitaphs reflect personal as well as social identity (in which individuals are described as members of both the family and the community) and play two important roles for the community members: they serve as a message to the dear ones and as an external memory of the community's social norms and shared worldview. The second study explored the social representation of the MC in the local community. The results show that the social representation of the MC clusters around three main themes: its symbolic, economic and local identity value.

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"This paper aims to propose an exploration of the corporeality of witches insofar as it has been used as a medium or nexus for narratives, or as a symbolic sign in various artistic forms and arrangements. The starting point is the highlighting of an antithesis, which is permanently nuanced and overcome in the long evolution of culture, namely between the beauty of young witches and the ugliness of old ones. A first section of the article focuses on painting, looking at works by Baldung Grien, Salvator Rosa, Frans Francken, Luis Ricardo Falero. A second section looks at the corporeal duality that characterizes witchcraft and its resolution in synthesis in Vasile Voiculescu’s short story Magical Love. The last section is devoted to cinematographic works and how they have incorporated in their complex visual and textual narratives an ancient representational and iconographic tradition with roots in Renaissance and Baroque painting and in the literature of Greco-Latin Antiquity. Keywords: witches, body, narration, symbolic, visual arts, literature, cinema. "

Dario Argento and the Mother-Witch: Psychoanalysis of an Obsessive Image. This paper tries to present the complexity of the maternal figures in the work and biography of film director Dario Argento. The methods of interpretation are inspired by psychoanalysis, because Argento often referred to Freud’s writings in his films or in his recent autobiography, Fear, published in 2014. The criminal mothers depicted in some films signed by Dario Argento show, through violent narratives, the difficulties he had in dealing with the maternal imago. But the most striking embodiments of the maternal monstrosity are to be found in the figure of the mother-witch, in the trilogy composed by Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), La Terza Madre (2007). The mother-witch has, of course, biographical sources, but its presence in some classical fairy-tales or in fin-de-siècle decadent literature also inspired the film director.