Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema

Description

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? Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Children and horror: A contradiction of terms? Impossibility and absence: A new generation of horror Viewing as a horrific child: Approach and structure Defining children(’s horror) Chapter 1: Frankenstein to Frankenweenie: The evolution of children’s horror in Hollywood cinema Fun and fear: ‘Child-friendly’ horror in Code-era Hollywood Children’s horror in New Hollywood and beyond Identifying the ‘impossible’ Reanimation: The case of Frankenweenie Chapter 2: Children behaving badly: Representing and addressing the horrific child in Gremlins Reading the horrific child Suitable for children? Gremlins’ misleading paratexts ‘Children of the night’: Gremlins as carnivalesque pleasure Classifying Gizmo: Gremlins as ratings allegory Conclusion: Restoring the social order Chapter 3: No grown-ups allowed: The horrific ‘Crazyspace’ of The Monster Squad ‘We’re the Monster Squad’: Empowering the child by undermining the adult Old friends: Ignorance, intertextuality and monstrous allies De-sexing Dracula: The vampire as totalitarian authority Conclusion: The afterlife of Crazyspace Chapter 4: ‘As normal as it could be’: ParaNorman and the normalization of the horrific child Un-othering the uncanny child Freaks and geeks: ParaNorman’s ‘abnormal’ production and aesthetics Horror and monstrosity as catharsis Conclusion: Problematizing the new normal with Hotel Transylvania Chapter 5: A ‘child-friendly’ horror aesthetic: Challenging assumptions with Coraline The subversive uncanniness of stop-motion horror for children Children’s horror films; or, slashers without the slashing Conclusion: Gendering the horrific child Chapter 6: Man of the house: Gender, space and domestic violence in Monster House and The Hole Gender, domestic space and the horror genre Monster House: Becoming male by destroying the female The Hole: Being the bigger man Conclusion: Against ‘happily ever after’ Conclusion: Expansions and absences of children’s horror The horrific child at home The absent children of children’s horror Notes Works cited Index