The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular Culture

The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular Culture
Author: Karen J. Renner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317966740

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The 'evil child' has infiltrated the cultural imagination, taking on prominent roles in popular films, television shows and literature. This collection of essays from a global range of scholars examines a fascinating array of evil children and the cultural work that they perform, drawing upon sociohistorical, cinematic, and psychological approaches. The chapters explore a wide range of characters including Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter series, the possessed Regan in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, the monstrous Ben in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, the hostile fetuses of Rosemary’s Baby and Alien, and even the tiny terrors featured in the reality television series Supernanny. Contributors also analyse various themes and issues within film, literature and popular culture including ethics, representations of evil and critiques of society. This book was originally published as two special issues of Literature Interpretation Theory.

Evil Children in the Popular Imagination

Evil Children in the Popular Imagination
Author: Karen J. Renner
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137599634

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Focusing on narratives with supernatural components, Karen J. Renner argues that the recent proliferation of stories about evil children demonstrates not a declining faith in the innocence of childhood but a desire to preserve its purity. From novels to music videos, photography to video games, the evil child haunts a range of texts and comes in a variety of forms, including changelings, ferals, and monstrous newborns. In this book, Renner illustrates how each subtype offers a different explanation for the problem of the “evil” child and adapts to changing historical circumstances and ideologies.

Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures

Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures
Author: Monica Flegel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319722751

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This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.

Terrifying Texts

Terrifying Texts
Author: Cynthia J. Miller
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2018-08-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476671303

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From Faust (1926) to The Babadook (2014), books have been featured in horror films as warnings, gateways, prisons and manifestations of the monstrous. Ancient grimoires such as the Necronomicon serve as timeless vessels of knowledge beyond human comprehension, while runes, summoning diaries, and spell books offer their readers access to the powers of the supernatural--but at what cost? This collection of new essays examines nearly a century of genre horror in which on-screen texts drive and shape their narratives, sometimes unnoticed. The contributors explore American films like The Evil Dead (1981), The Prophecy (1995) and It Follows (2014), as well as such international films as Eric Valette's Malefique (2002), Paco Cabeza's The Appeared (2007) and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981).

Elder Horror

Elder Horror
Author: A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019-01-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476635072

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As baby boomers gray, cinematic depictions of aging and the aged are on the rise. In the horror genre, fears of growing old take on fantastic proportions. Elderly characters are portrayed as either eccentric harbingers of doom--the crone who stops at nothing to restore her youth, the ancient ancestor who haunts the living--or as frail victims. This collection of new essays explores how various filmic portrayals of aging, as an inescapable horror destined to overtake us all, reflect our complex attitudes toward growing old, along with its social, psychological and economic consequences.

War Gothic in Literature and Culture

War Gothic in Literature and Culture
Author: Steffen Hantke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2015-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317383249

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In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others," psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.

Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King

Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King
Author: Debbie Olson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793600139

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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.

Little Horrors

Little Horrors
Author: T.S. Kord
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2016-07-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476626669

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Zombies, werewolves and chainsaw-wielding maniacs are tried-and-true staples of horror films. But none can match the visceral dread evoked by a child with an innocent face and a diabolical stare. Cinema's evil children attack our cherished ideas of innocence and our innocent bystander status as the audience. A good horror film is a scary ride--a "devil child" movie is a guilt trip. This book examines 24 international films--with discussions of another 100--that in effect "indict" viewers for crimes of child abuse and abandonment, greed, social and ecological negligence, and political and war crimes, and for persistent denial of responsibility for them all. For 75 years evil children have ritually rebuked audiences and, in playing on our guilt, established a horror subgenre that might be described as a blood-spattered rampage on an ethical mission.

Horror Films for Children

Horror Films for Children
Author: Catherine Lester
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350135275

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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?

The Truths of Monsters

The Truths of Monsters
Author: Ildikó Limpár
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-03-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1476683484

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As monster theory highlights, monsters are cultural symbols, guarding the borders that society creates to protect its values and norms. Adolescence is the time when one explores and aims at crossing borders to learn the rules of the culture that one will fit into as an adult. Exploring the roles of monsters in coming-of-age narratives and the need to confront and understand the monstrous, this work explores recent developments in the presentation of monsters--such as the vampire, the zombie, and the man-made monster--in maturation narratives, then moves on to discuss monsters inhabiting the psychic landscapes of child characters. Finally, it touches on monsters in science fiction, in which facing the monstrous is a variation of the New World narrative. Discussions of novels by M. R. Carey, Suzanne Collins, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Daryl Gregory, Sarah Maria Griffin, Seanan McGuire, Stephenie Meyer, Patrick Ness, and Jon Skovron are complemented by analysis of television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Westworld.