Touched by fire

Since photographing the "burning steps" as part of my final project for the art foundation course, I've become more aware of the danger of fire - not that, with a house fire as part of the family history, I could ever escape from that awareness.
Consider Martin d'Orgeval's photos of the charred remnants of the Deyrolle taxidermy house in Paris, which suffered a fire in February 2008 (it rose from the ashes and reopened in September 2009). They've been published under the title "Touched by Fire" - which is also used to describe people with mood disorders, or a spiritual journey -- I thought that was irrelevant here, but found d'Orgeval's photos used to illustrate a blog post on the alchemical process as a metaphor for spiritual journey - nigredo, purification through fire (which Jung interpreted as the moment of maximum despair, the starting point of the journey, bringing the ego into contact with what it fears).
This seems like a lot of digression and time-wasting on the computer -- but "fortune favours the prepared mind" and this sort of image-related theorising fits right in with my current preoccupation, the final project for the art course. I'm happy with the upcoming installation, in itself, but part of the exercise is to make it fit conceptually into what I actually set out to do!
But back to the charred animals - why are the photos so disturbing? Is it because, having been resurrected by taxidermy into eternal life, the animals have undergone a second death? or is something else at work in our contemplation of their motionless beauty...