1 Introduction

Notes 1 Introduction 1. It may be noted that, while the child is a relatively recent construction, the phase of life we think of as adolescence is even more recent. ‘It is as if,’ writes Ariès, ‘to every period in history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: “youth” is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twen- tieth’ (29). Marcel Danesi prefers to distinguish adolescence (a psychosocial and biological category) from teenagerhood (a socially constructed category having its origins in 1950s consumerism and the media) (3–6). 2. This is what Derrida would refer to as the ‘free play’ between Romanticism and Calvinism. In a key essay, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Derrida argues that the whole of Western thought is structured on the principle of a centre whose function ‘was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure … but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure’ (278). In giving rise to binary oppositions, this centre operates to deny, repress or marginalise other meanings, readings and possibilities. For example, Romantic views of the child in the nineteenth-century were privileged while Calvinist views of the child were repressed, marginalised. In deconstruction, Derrida seeks to reverse or decentre these oppositions to show how the term that is central may just as easily be marginal, and to demonstrate how the hierarchy is highly unstable, even arbitrary. However, rather than simply adopting this other term as the new centre Derrida urges us to surrender to the free play of opposites, so that we may see all possibilities. To varying degrees, this is what is being attempted in possessed child narratives, namely The Turn of the Screw which may be cited as a ‘postmodern’ text that, on more than one level, deconstructs itself. Thus this free play seems akin to an unresolved dialectic, yet Derrida, himself refusing to be centred, has perplexingly stated that this free play ‘determines in a manner that is still too antidialectical, hence too dialectical, that which resists binarity or even triplicity’ (Limited Inc 116). 3. Damien: Omen II, like The Good Son, John Farris’s The Fury (1976), Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and John Saul’s Suffer The Children (1977), plays out its struggle of good versus evil by employing the tried-and-tested doppelganger device of pairing a good with an evil child. 4. Although De Palma’s family background is Italian Catholic, he was baptised a Presbyterian and even attended a Quaker school. The fusion of these for- mative Catholic and Calvinist influences in De Palma’s colourful upbringing are accordingly reflected (consciously or otherwise) in Carrie. For an analysis of the specific influence of Catholicism in De Palma’s work, see Jesuit Richard A. Blake’s interesting chapter in Afterimage: The Incredible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers (2000). For Blake, ‘De Palma borrows 174 Notes 175 heavily from the Catholic tradition, even when he uses it for his own purposes, criticizes it, mocks it, and at times tries to destroy it. However, when one reads the images in Carrie, it is quite clear that De Palma cannot escape it despite his best efforts’ (235). 5. A variation on this theme is the child supernaturally gifted – or cursed – with preternatural insight or knowledge. In Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), for example, five-year-old Danny, who is psychically charged, is haunted by a big brother figure named Tony, who ‘shows’ him future and hidden events. When Danny and his parents move to the haunted Overlook Hotel, his visions become increasingly intense and terrifying, portending his possessed father’s descent into cabin fever madness. In M. Night Shyamalan’s more recent The Sixth Sense, young Cole makes the terrifying admission, ‘I see dead people.’ 6. Aside from possession of human beings, the horror film has given us possessed animals (Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978)), houses (The Haunting (1963), The Legend of Hell House (1973) and The Amityville Horror (1979)), dolls (Child’s Play (1988)) and evens cars (The Car (1977) and Christine (1983)). 7. I am using the term discourse in the Foucauldian sense to refer to the ‘social processes of making and reproducing meanings; not simply language, but meaning systems invested with power that circulate in society and constitute subjectivities [that is, subject positions]’ (Brook 159). For Foucault, power, which ‘excludes’, ‘censors’, ‘abstracts’, ‘conceals’ as well as ‘represses’, ‘produces domains of knowledge and rituals of truth’ (Discipline and Punish 194). In other words, power produces knowledge produces discourse. In its analysis of the historic cultural, as well as contemporary, underpinnings of the possessed and satanic child it may be seen that this book follows the Foucauldian discourse approach by using ‘history as a way of diagnosing the present’ (Kendall and Wickham 4). 8. In the American post-war years, between 1945 and 1965, ‘the total Catholic population increased by 90 percent, from 23.9 million to 45.6 million. The number of bishops and archbishops increased by 58 percent, clergy by 52 percent, women religious by 30 percent, and sem- inarians by 127 percent. One hundred and twenty-three new hospitals, 3,005 new Catholic elementary and high schools, and 94 new colleges were built. Enrollments in Catholic elementary and secondary schools increased by 3.1 million – more than 120 percent – and in Catholic colleges and universities … by a whopping 300 percent’ (Carey 93–4). 2 The New England Connection 1. Here I base my argument on Heather Scutter’s chapter on ‘wild things’ in her book Displaced Fictions (223–52). 2. We might want to compare Flora with the child protagonist of the title in James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), likewise constructed in her innocence as an empty vessel. Caught between her divorced parents’ bickering, the only link binding Maisie to her parents, we are told, is ‘the lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed’ (14). Similarly, the evil which Maisie’s parents ‘had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured into her 176 Notes little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle’ (20). Here, exposure to knowledge of harsh reality, not demonic influences, is the source of evil, which threatens the preservation of childhood innocence. 3. In his exemplary reading of The Turn of the Screw, Todorov notes that James’s novella sustains the ambiguity between the uncanny and the marvellous to the very end, that is, ‘even beyond the narrative itself’ (43). 4. Michael Winner’s The Nightcomers (1972), which details the moral corruption of Miles and Flora by Peter Quint (Marlon Brando) and Miss Jessel (Stephanie Beacham) prior to their becoming ghosts. It transpires that the children are in fact responsible for the deaths of the manservant and governess. When the new governess arrives at her post (the point in the story where James’s begins), Mrs Grose declares ironically: ‘You could not hope to meet in all your life more exquisite angels as our Miles and Flora.’ This adds yet another turn to James’s tale. 3 God is Dead 1. The twin brothers Holland and Niles in this highly subtle and literate tale are a study in good and evil. Holland the ‘other’ is dark, brooding and withdrawn, a Pandora’s box of secrets, while Niles is blond, affectionate and open. Niles is a ‘child of the air’; Holland a ‘child of the earth’ (46). When a series of mysterious murders occur in a small New England town in the 1930s it appears that Niles’s evil brother Holland is to blame. But in a plot twist that comes about two-thirds into the novel, we learn that Holland has been dead for all this time. It is difficult to ascertain whether the explanation for the events in the story is supernatural (that Niles is possessed by his dead brother or his brother has risen from the dead to haunt him) or psychological (that Niles has a split personality). Like The Turn of the Screw, The Other (which was filmed effectively by Robert Mulligan a year later) negotiates subtle tensions between Calvinist and Romantic ideologies which derive, in crucial part, from the tension between Todorov’s adjacent genres of the fantastic, the uncanny and the marvellous. In fact, The Other is a remarkably pure example of the fantastic, which sustains this tension between the uncanny and the marvellous to the very end, that is, beyond the narrative itself. In its composite representation of the principles of good and evil, innocence and corruption, in twin brothers, as well as its dark depiction of Americana, The Other is also indebted to Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). 2. Post-war Italian genre cinema has a particularly notorious reputation for making cheap imitations of commercial hits in America and Britain, from the James Bond films to Hammer horror to The Exorcist (Hunt 325). 3. ‘Contrary to some reports,’ reports journalist Gerard McManus, ‘the Vatican has never condemned the film despite many factual inaccuracies and exaggerations, as well as mistakes about religious rituals used’ (6). Incredibly, he also reports that the Vatican has in its possession copies of The Exorcist, which it employs as a teaching aid. 4. Both The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby contain a further Irish Catholic intersec- tion. While New England saw a small number of Irish Catholics, it was only Notes 177 in the second half of the nineteenth century that the influx of significant numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants led to Catholicism’s ascendancy in the United States (a state of affairs mirrored in England).

Load more