The Revolting Child In Horror Cinema

The monstrous child is the allegorical queer child in various formations of horror cinema: the child with a secret, the child 'possessed' by Otherness, the changeling child, the terrible gang. This book explores the possibilities of 'not growing up' as a model for a queer praxis that confronts the notion of heternormative maturity.

The monstrous child is the allegorical queer child in various formations of horror cinema: the child with a secret, the child 'possessed' by Otherness, the changeling child, the terrible gang. This book explores the possibilities of 'not growing up' as a model for a queer praxis that confronts the notion of heternormative maturity.

Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes. Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children's horror films, and identifies the 'horrific child' as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?

This book is a collection of 13 essays centering on supernatural serials such as television programs, video games, anime, and manga, featuring teen protagonists and marketed to teen audiences. These essays provide discussions of characters in teen supernatural serials who disrupt white, cisgender social narratives, and addresses possible ways that the on-screen depictions of these characters, who may be POC or LGBTQIA+, can lead to additional discussions of more accurate representations of the Other in the media. This collection explores depictions of characters of color and/or LGBTQ characters in teen supernatural serials who were/are marginalized and examines the possible issues that these depictions can raise on a social level and, possibly, a developmental level for audience members who belong to these communities. The essays included in this collection thoroughly examine these characters and their narratives while providing nuanced examinations of how the media chooses to represent teens of color and LGBTQIA+ teens.

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

This volume offers compelling analyses of children and childhood in non-Western films.

"Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child," explores the place of "revolting child," or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, "revolt" in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed "arrested" in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the "masked child" who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of "development" and "maturity" as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton.

This collection focuses on 1970s films from a variety of countries, and from the marginal to the mainstream, which, by tackling various 'difficult' subjects, have proved to be controversial in one way or another. It is not an uncritical celebration of the shocking and the subversive but an attempt to understand why this decade produced films which many found shocking, and what it was that made them shocking to certain audiences. To this end it includes not only films that shocked the conventionally minded, such as hard core pornography, but also those that outraged liberal opinion – for example, Death Wish and Dirty Harry. The book does not simply cast a critical light on a series of controversial films which have been variously maligned, misinterpreted or just plain ignored, but also assesses how their production values, narrative features and critical receptions can be linked to the wider historical and social forces that were dominant during this decade. Furthermore, it explores how these films resonate in our own historical moment – replete as it is with shocks of all kinds.