Examines the complexities and contradictions that arise when the monsters in the movies are children.
Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror’s most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan Mac Neil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches, including those of cinema studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors offers the first full-length study of these child monsters. In doing so, the book highlights horror as a topic of analysis that is especially pertinent socially and politically, exposing the genre as a site of deep ambivalence toward-and even hatred of-children.
Tabella dei contenuti
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Little Horrors: Introduction
1. Reaching the Age of Anxiety: The 1950s and the Horror of Youth
2. Spoiled Rotten: Horror’s Bourgeois Brats
3. A Scary Sight: The Looking Child
4. ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’: The Child Villain’s Malignant Mom
5. Vicious Videos, Missing Mothers: The Ring
6. Little Bastards: Patriarchy’s Errant Offspring in It’s Alive and The Omen
7. Past Incarnations: The Exorcist and the Tyranny of Childhood
8. All Fun and Games till Someone Gets Hurt: Hating Children’s Culture
9. Too Close for Comfort: Child Villainy and Pedophilic Desire in Hard Candy and Orphan
Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Circa l’autore
Dominic Lennard is Associate Lecturer at the University of Tasmania and the author of Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film, also published by SUNY Press.
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