The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema Youth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship

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By Andrew Scahill

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First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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ISBN: 978-1-137-48850-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Scahill, Andrew, 1977– The revolting child in horror cinema : youth rebellion and queer spectatorship / by Andrew Scahill. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 978-1-137-48850-3 (alk. paper) 1. Horror films—History and criticism. 2. Children in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.H6S25 2015 791.43'6164—dc23 2015013957

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: October 2015

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

List of Tables ix Introduction 1 1 Revolting Children: A Taxonomy of Child Monstrosity 13 2 Malice in Wonderland: The Terrible Performativity of Childhood 31 3 Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Possession as Transgression 57 4 Raising Hell: Abuse, Rejection, and the Unwanted Queer Child 79 5 It Takes a Child to Raze a Village: Demonizing Youth Rebellion 113 6 Afterthoughts: Fear of a Queer Playground 143 Notes 149 Film Appendix 165 Works Cited 179 Index 189

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Introduction

n August 2009, I attended a screening of the horror film Orphan (2009), just before it slipped out of the movieplex and into that brief Iabyss between theatrical release and DVD reissue. My delinquency in seeing the film was a shock to my friends and colleagues, who had been emailing me images, articles, and reviews for weeks. Indeed, the poster design, with its black-ey ed neo-Victorian child looming large below the tagline “There’s something wrong with Ester” seemed the apotheosis of the research on monstrous childhood that had engaged me for several years. But I feared Orphan may have no place within my work—itself a problematic child with no home. The film follows a family’s nightmare after accepting a sullen young girl into their home—revealed in the final act to not be a girl at all, but a developmentally stunted, mentally unstable middle-aged woman posing as a child. Waiting for the film to begin, I noticed (or suspected) that the theater was unusually filled with gay men—I cannot be sure, of course, but the signs (the intimacy, the subtle cruising, and the coupled body language) along with the usual stereotypical markers told me that this film had a curi- ously queer clarion call. Now more attuned to the audience in the theater, I focused on those enunciations of anxiety, disgust, and pleasure that define the spectatorial relationship to the horror film.1 In the film’s final act, I witnessed cries of pleasure and release as the childlike monster (revealed to no longer be a child) was vanquished—but more intriguing was the film’s previous one hundred minutes, which courted sympathy for Ester as a misunderstood and mistreated outsider. Indeed, the audience was no less vociferous in their pleasure when Ester physically attacked her grade- school bully, leading at least one of my fellow spectators to yell “Get her!” as the would-be child monster pushed her tormentor off a balcony. Indeed,

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2 l The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema the yells from crowd seemed louder at those moments. The film’s advertis- ing campaign clearly positioned the spectator as antagonistic to the child, and yet the ostensibly queer audience—myself included—seemed to forge a relationship more protective, avuncular, even parental. Did Orphan have an unexpected home? I rehearse this story to state simply that revealing the subgenre’s practice of Othering the child to enable fantasies of child hatred tells us only part of the story. In “A Child Is Being Beaten,”2 Freud’s famous work on subjectivity and fantasy, he examined how a dream sequence involving an abused child enabled the dreamer to occupy multiple spectator positions at once: subject and object, child and abuser and observer. In the cinema of revolting childhood, a child is being beaten, and the spectator is encouraged to take up the role of the righteous abuser. The rest of the story—and the truly disavowed pleasure in the cinema of revolting childhood—is to adopt the place of the terrible child. This is a pleasure inherently more dangerous, more perverse, and more queer. Indeed, the cinema of revolting childhood creates a fantasy space wherein spectators can entertain a range of subject positions: against the child, with the child, with the mise-en- scène of desire. This work takes up the child as a figure of extreme cultural ambivalence. “The child,” says James Kincaid, “strikes us as both valuable and dangerous, familiar and strange. We are never sure whether to worship the child or spank it.”3 The cinema of revolting childhood allows us to have our child and beat it, too. Though many critics have engaged the horror genre and the figure of the monster, few have engaged the child monster as a figuration that has particular salience and relevance for the genre. Critics such as Neil Sin- yard, William Paul, and Robin Wood have characterized the subgenre as a pedophobic exercise that circumvents social taboos around child abuse to provide an outlet for child hatred.4 These films, they argue, provide a forum to entertain ideas about children and their alienness in a manner generally foreclosed by a cultural insistence on children’s ignorance, innocence, and dependence. I extend this argument to examine the manner in which the films evoke an ambivalent response—one marked by horror at the child’s “unchildlikeness” and indeed pleasure at that very transgression. To relegate these films as mere expressions of pedophobic loathing or to uncover only what is “wrong” about the texts seems to settle into what Eve Sedgwick has called the “paranoid” critical position.5 According to Sedgwick, paranoid reading seeks to uncover and expose hidden violences within the text and bring them to light. It arises from what Paul Ricoeur calls “a hermeneutics of suspicion,”6 in which all texts are potentially harmful and in need of

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Introduction l 3 uncovering. In this work, however, I want to move beyond the paranoid reading of the film, which focuses on the dominant reading, and take up what Eve Sedgwick has called the “reparative” mode of critical engagement, which moves “away from existing accounts of how ‘one’ should read, and back toward a grappling with the recalcitrant, fecund question of how one does.”7 It is this question—of how readers might, can, and do derive pleasure from these texts (and how the texts enable that pleasure)—that guides this analysis. The pleasure of the revolting child, I argue, is decidedly queer in its object and its aims, and it provides an inroad to examine the child as an avatar, rather than an antithesis, of antiheteronormative social praxis. This book takes spectatorship to be a varied, fluid, and often unruly affair. This is especially true of the horror film, which offers multiple sites and forms of pleasure, whether they are directed, oppositional, or some negotiated combination of either. Following the work of Elizabeth Cowie in “Fantasia,”8 this manuscript will argue that the cinema of the revolting child provides the phantasmagoric space wherein the child is being beaten, the child is beating, the spectator is the child, the spectator is the abuser, and the spectator is the dislocated subject. To simply suggest, then, that the revolting child presents a point of identification for the queer spectator to adopt is to oversimplify the multivalent pleasures of the texts. Rather, I claim these films present a mise-en-scène of desire, a fantasy space to circumnavigate emotive experiences of queerness: secrecy, rejection, rage, alienation, revolt, and community, to name a few. The films, their preoccupations, and their anxieties constitute a mise-en- scène of desire that comfortably accommo- dates queer subjectivity. In The Bad Seed (1956), for instance, masking and masquerade serve as the thematic point of identification. Indeed, the most salient metaphor for the queer spectator’s relationship to the monstrous child may be that of gay adoption. I chose this phrase pointedly, as its very usage redefines the family unit beyond simply bio- logical kinship. Recalling Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I would call “adoption” a type of avuncular identification9—with the child and dislocated from the child—not parental but related, pluripositioned, kept at a dis- tance. Adoption-as- spectatorship also provides something more nuanced than simply identification: I recognize the revolting child as not-me and yet me-as-I-once-was. As the revolting child navigates those experiences of secrecy, rejection, alienation, and rage, so too does the queer spectator. Gay adoption-as-spectatorship “fosters,” in both senses of the word: foster parents collect and protect these orphaned and troubled youths, and they

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4 l The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema acknowledge a kind of growth unaccounted for by the heterosexual mental narrative. It is the question of identification and pleasure that guides this work—in particular, when and how audiences derive pleasure (authorized or not) from the cinema of monstrous childhood and what forms those pleasures take. In Andrew Tudor’s book Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural His- tory of the Horror Film, he details the point in which the horror film gained blockbuster success in the United States. “Only occasionally,” he says, “has a horror movie transcended its specialization and attained real mass success. The Exorcist (1973) did so, as had Rosemary’s Baby (1968) before it and as would The Omen (1976) two years later.”10 One of the remarkable features of all three of these films is that the monstrosity at the center of each text is, in fact, a child. What does it mean for these movies, all about monstrous children, to achieve mass success? In what has become a seminal text in the study of horror cinema, Robin Wood claims in “An Introduction to American Horror” that the child as a figuration of the Other is one of the major tropes of the horror genre. Children are one of many oppressed groups, Wood states, which stand in for the eruption of chaos into a tenuous space of social order. The monster represents, then, those abjected elements of the self and society that must be denied or assimilated to ensure the coherency of hierarchical structures.11 Several of these “Othered” groups mentioned by Wood (the proletariat, women, nonwhite ethnicities, nonheteronormative sexuality) have been extensively examined within studies of the horror genre. Wood’s final group, however—that of children—has yet to be given substantial treatment in critical accounts of the genre. Rather than assume that the child-as- monster is merely a miniaturized version of more adult, more “real” monsters, this book argues for the singularity and the specificity of the child monster. The particularity and peculiarity of the child warrants an emotional ambivalence that alights in the fact that “the child” is a figuration we have all occupied, though one that seems alien or lost to us. The oppression of children is a means of fortifying the boundaries between adult and child (to be “not like” adults) while at the same time preparing them to recapitu- late the normative entry into adult sexuality (to become “like” adults). As Wood notes, the social order depends on our impulse toward repetition- compulsion, to foreclose “what the previous generation repressed in us, and what we, in turn, repress in our children, seeking to mold them into replicas of ourselves, perpetuators of a discredited tradition.”12 In our ambivalent libidinal investments in children, they are fashioned as both our antithesis

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Introduction l 5 and our doppelganger. The child monster is, then, one of the most uncanny of monsters. The child monster of which I speak comes in a number of forms, and I do not want to suggest that the figuration is a singular type. Indeed, the texts covered in this manuscript—The Bad Seed (1956), Village of the Damned (1960), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Night of the Living Dead (1968), It’s Alive (1974), The Omen (1976), Halloween (1978), Children of the Corn (1984), Firestarter (1984), The Good Son (1993), and Orphan (2009), to name a few—ar e quite varied in their portrayal of monstrosity. They cover a range of manifestations, all of which, however, are seen as incompatible with the body of the child. I employ the term revolting children13 to engender a sense of cohesion for these disparate texts. The term is useful for its dual-edged salience: these are figures that are “revolting,” which is to say, repellant. They are bodies that violate natural laws and order: adults living in children’s bodies, possessed or animalistic bodies, demonic offspring, zombified or spectral haunts, or supernaturally powerful catalysts. But these figures are also bodies in revolt: they traffic in the rhetoric and representational force of the youth movement and the nature of the “rebel,” a figure at once prized as distinctly American and yet vilified as disruptive and antithetic to the harmonious community. But perhaps the most disruptive quality of revolting children is that they have no need or desire to become replicas of their adult counterparts. They have found the discredited tradition that seeks to assimilate them and called it by name—lost boys (and girls) who have no interest in being found. In the words of Kathryn Bond Stockton, not all children grow “up” and com- plete the developmental narrative. Some, like the revolting children in this manuscript, “grow sideways,”14 accruing knowledge, power, and meaning without abandoning the uncanny liminality of childhood. If childhood is, indeed, set apart as a transient state of not-yet-becoming, then the horror of the revolting child is that he or she is locked in a liminal stasis predicated on contradiction: he or she is already-arriv ed, both-at-once, growing—but not growing up—in a land of never-never. The polymor- phous perversity offers no promise of cohesion and erasure. These are vagrant youths, setting up house where the signs say “no loitering.” Revolt- ing children are in a state of permanent impermanence.

Cinematic texts will be the foundation of this book, though the reader will see the occasional inclusion of other media, as it helps expand our under- standing of the revolting child. In doing so, I engage textual analysis from

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6 l The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema a structuralist perspective—pulling out recurring tropes, images, binaries, and narrative structures for analysis. As such, the organizing mode of this piece will be according to the taxonomy of childhood representations rather than a chronological survey of revolting child films. Since, as Jenkins argues, “we do not so much discard old conceptions of the child as accrue additional meanings around what remains one of our most culturally potent signifi- ers,”15 such a structure allows for an examination of how certain figurations (e.g., “the collective,” “the possessed child”) interact with past formations and historical contingencies that shape representation. In the interest of managing the expansiveness of the subject, this work will utilize one or two key texts per chapter as representative examples to stand in for a larger body of representation. Each chapter will attend to both the origins of a particular figuration as well as its most salient example. Some texts, such as Village of the Damned, form the basis for a number of recurring tropes, including the supernaturally powerful child, the changeling narrative, and the child as collective, and will be addressed in brief from multiple frameworks. In cases where the seminal text created a number of imitators, as is the case with The Exorcist, additional texts will be referenced only as their differences serve to nuance or complicate the central argument. In the interest of containing an expansive subject, this work will limit itself to Western notions of childhood and the representations contained therein. Further, almost all the films ana- lyzed are strictly American productions, with a few notable exceptions, such as Village of the Damned (an American/British joint production) and Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) from Spain. In these cases, my interest lies more in how these films establish conventions that contribute to the increasingly varied and fecund representation of revolting childhood. Like many works that employ queer theory, this book is textually pro- miscuous: it will flirt with many bodies of theory but ultimately not be married to any of them. This critical nonmonogamy is useful in examin- ing a figuration that touches so many areas, and this work will scavenge theoretically to provide a multidimensional portrait. Often, the text itself will dictate its theoretical approach: The Bad Seed involves a discussion of performativity and intersections of race and childhood, The Exorcist is bet- ter viewed through the lens of abjection and excess, and Children of the Corn through the deployment of Foucauldian examinations of power and surveillance. I imagine the manuscript’s collection of theory as a fascinating dinner party, where seemingly disparate guests (some theoretical giants, others not considered critics at all) are seated next to one another and placed in conversation. What would Maria Montessori say to Michael Warner?

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Introduction l 7

Judith Butler to Fredric Wertham? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Margaret Mead? D. W. Winnicott to Julia Kristeva? This work is especially interested in placing childhood studies and queer theory in conversation, as assump- tions over the simultaneous asexuality and heterosexuality of children have tended to bar critical intercourse. What assuredly links the chapters in this book is an overarching perspective grounded in queer theory and an abiding interest in the multivalent web of discourse around the figuration of the revolting child. As such, discourse analysis will also underpin much of this work—I engage the extratextual elements of several films, including marketing, critical reception, fan activity, news media reports, and industry documents. In doing so, this manuscript will analyze the cinematic revolting child within a broad range of varied negotiations and practices. Much of this work will be archival; I follow Nicholas Sammond’s book Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960 as a model for the type of multivalent work this book intends. The case study of The Bad Seed, for instance, involves both historical documents from the time of the film’s release and contemporary advertisements and interviews that elucidate the continuing practice of interpretation and textual renegotiation. The case study of The Exorcist, however, will draw on mainstream media reports and fan discourse, which evidence a multivalent approach to the film’s identifi- catory offerings. Chapter 1, “Revolting Children: A Taxonomy of Child Monstrosity,” goes into further detail concerning the child as heightened symbolic and offers a taxonomy of representation for the revolting child. It then argues that the child, in particular the revolting child, should be of central interest to queer theory’s current engagement with the developmental narrative, the politics of failure, and antifuturity. In Chapter 2, “Malice in Wonderland: The Terrible Performativity of Childhood,” I engage in a close reading of the originary revolting child text, The Bad Seed, and its extratextual discourse. In The Bad Seed, a young girl named Rhoda is slowly revealed to be a sociopath and commits several murders by the narrative’s close. More horrific than her crimes, however, is that she is able to escape suspicion by performing innocence so convinc- ingly that even her mother remains in doubt as to her “actual” monstrosity. As a progenitor, this film is notable for its categorization within the genre of family melodrama rather than horror. As such, it exists as a horrific hyper- bolization of the mother–daughter tensions in Mildred Pierce (1945) and is a film that predicts the formation (and, in fact, the narrative) of The Exorcist

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8 l The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema and the “family horror” film of the late 1960s. I will examine The Bad Seed’s portrayal of Rhoda’s opaque, unknowable nature as symptomatic of the 1950s confusion and anxiety over child-rearing practices, juvenile delinquency, and the particular nature of child psychology. More sinister yet is the text’s articulation of childhood innocence as a performable aesthetic that has little connection to actual, “natural” childhood innocence. That Hays Code censors sought to detract from the appeal of Rhoda by instituting a moralistic ending further underlines the degree to which the film offers more than simply pedophobic pleasures. The chapter closes with an examination of the text’s afterlife as a piece of camp and how queer communities have engaged the film’s supposed terrors with equal degrees of titillation and satire. In particular, Sadie Benning’s short “It Wasn’t Love” (1992), in which she sets an affectionate mother–daughter scene from the film against Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” is a queer renegotiation of the text that brings to light the film’s disavowed familial erotic subtext. This chapter will also engage the figure of Wednesday Addams (in various media, but largely the 1990s camp films) as a queer reception/reauthoring of Rhoda as an iconographic queer figure. Additionally, I will engage the numerous queer/ camp restagings of the theatrical version of The Bad Seed as a means of articulating how heteronormative anxieties coalesced around the child can be “camped” within queer reception practices and how the revolting child can become an avatar of an antiheteronormative social praxis. In Chapter 3, “Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Possession as Transgres- sion,” I examine the “bodily possession” cycle of revolting child cinema, which centers on the danger and liminality of the female adolescent body. The figuration finds its template in the sexualized adolescent body of Regan McNeil (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist, though this chapter will address a number of imitative texts such as To the Devil a Daughter (1976). This chapter focuses on the star image of Blair as a means of rereading the film text and examines the way in which Blair’s body served as a transfer point for anxieties about childhood, queerness, exploitation, pedophilia, and the film industry. Extratextually, critics elided character and role to ask whether the young actress had been damaged—her body, her innocence, and her heterosexuality all endangered by the film. Mainstream magazines recuperated Blair, telling readers that she was unharmed and ignorant of the words she spoke. Others “exorcize[d] the demon” out of Blair by giving her a femi- nine makeover. As I argue, these responses to Blair’s “endangerment” in fact reenact the very narrative of the film by rescuing her abjection, perversity, and queerness. At the same time, however, fan magazines spoke to an active,

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Introduction l 9 perverse, and even queer spectatorship that canonized Blair as transgres- sive figure. As opposed to mainstream obsession with recuperation and nor- malization, fans found pleasure in Blair’s perverse star persona, eroticizing and identifying with it. They also reveled in Blair’s legal trouble, calling her “devilish” for her latest drug “possession.” They even offered their young female readers “foxy Linda Blair and Exorcist pix.” A reading of the text from “outside” in, this chapter takes these fan pleasures to “reread” the film’s multiple sites of pleasure. Indeed, the text enables its own perverse reading, which inverts the film from a narrative of rescue from the demonic to one of revenge against (hetero)normative forces. In this way, the film shares vin- dictive terrain with Carrie (1976; as noted by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chainsaws).16 Chapter 4, “Raising Hell: Abuse, Rejection, and the Unwanted Queer Child,” examines a series of revolting child films in which Freud’s family romance plot is inverted, and parents unwittingly discover that the child in their custody is not their own. Instead, the family has been invaded by a foreign body through metaphysical, medical, or extraterrestrial means, and parents must weigh their paternal obligation against their desire for self- preservation. These films generally fall into two categories, which I am calling a “paternal” and “maternal gothic.” In the paternal gothic, the discovery of the alien child is made postutero, and the crisis is centered on the father’s encroaching doubt over the validity of his lineage. In this chapter, I begin with Village of the Damned as the figuration’s progenitor and then segue into a reading of The Omen series (1975–81). In both of these films, the horror is decidedly Oedipal, as each involves a son who must destroy his father to assume the mantle of world domination. Interestingly, both involve a mother who, though she gave birth to the son in question, is immediately evacuated from the narrative, through either death or disinterest. The paternal gothic is about the encroachment of the Oedipal, though interestingly The Omen stages this is queer terms. To assume the mantle of the Antichrist is indeed to submit to the patriarchal developmental narrative. To refuse that right, as Damien attempts, is to align himself with queerness. In the maternal gothic, perhaps epitomized by Rosemary’s Baby, the inva- sion centers on the prenatal stage and the horror of an independent alien organism growing inside of the female body. In this cycle, the teratologi- cal horror is directed at the womb as a site of monstrous gestation, as the specter of reproductive rights remaps the female body as contested terrain. Other examples, such as Demon Seed (1977) or The Unborn (1991), figure the scene of childbirth as the moment of monstrous emergence and often

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10 l The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema represent the paternal scientist as child protector. The mother, instead, must choose to welcome or abort the monstrosity in her womb. This chapter will analyze these films against the nonhorror film The Twilight of the Golds (1997), which discursively mimics the maternal gothic in dramatizing a heterosexual couple’s proposed abortion of their unborn gay child. Picking up a suggestion from Paul, I argue that these films provide an end-run around the social taboo against child abuse by making the child a foreign entity endangering the true, cohesive home (the womb so often figured as a child’s first “home”). Additionally, the monstrous children often endanger the true, natural children of the family as part of their path toward world domination. They are entirely alien, without even the conceit of possession to give them claim to the abuse taboo. As such, the films manufacture the central distinctive pleasure of the changeling narrative as the spectacle of seeing a child potentially beaten or destroyed. However, this chapter argues that these films require an investment in the parental/heterosexual/reproductive economy to achieve the impact of horror. The resonance of the changeling narrative for queer readers, whose sexuality places them outside of a compulsory reproductive economy, is rather that it provides an apt metaphor for feeling alienated within the family. This chapter will read the changeling films against the coming-out memoirs of adult queer subjects, including the biography of The Bad Seed author William March, to reread the films as a pleasurable renegotiation of queer childhood alienation. Finally, in Chapter 5, “It Takes a Child to Raze a Village: Demoniz- ing Youth Rebellion,” I examine those films in which the revolting child becomes pluralized. Village of the Damned is traced again as the origin of this figuration, but the majority of the chapter will focus on its more mod- ern manifestations: Who Can Kill a Child?, a largely unaddressed horror film; The Children (1980); and Children of the Corn. This chapter examines how youth rebellion is invoked and how child–adult relations are inverted, particularly in terms of power and surveillance. Indeed, the films can be read as monstrous invocations of the generation gap and the fear that the world held in store for the next generation will be taken by force before it is due. In these films, adults are continually infantilized, placed in a terrain in which they have no control over their own destinies, and they must endure a Frankensteinian retribution from a younger generation that holds them accountable for their own monstrous manufacture. While trafficking in the pervasive anxiety about juvenile delinquency and the danger of idle youths in groups, these films also carry a legacy of anxiety about child-rearing practices believed to be practiced by the enemy during the Cold War. In these

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Index

Abjection, 22–24, 60–72, 93, 99–100, Butler, Judith, 7, 24, 28, 34, 43, 65–66, 146–47 69–71 Abortion, 93, 96–98 ACT UP, 61 Camp, 33–35, 44, 51–56, 77–78, Addams Family, The (television 1964), 54 115–16, 129 Addams Family, The (1991), 54 CampBlood, 115–16 Addams Family Values (1993), 54 Carrie (1976), 9, 57–58, 60–65, 107, Adoption, 3–4, 90–91, 100, 104, 125 123, 136, 157 AIDS, 69, 134 Carroll, Noel, 22–24, 65 Alice in Wonderland, 15 Castle, Terry, 67 Alien, The, 83, 89, 95, 114, 133 Changeling, The (1980), 87–89 Antichrist, 103–11 Changeling fantasy, 10, 79, 82, 85–89 Aries, Phillipe, 13 Child abuse, 2–3, 10, 20, 23–25, 27, 70, 79–91, 99–103, 116–17, 138–39, Babuscio, Jack, 33–34 159 Bad Seed, The (novel), 10, 27, 32–36, 55 Child collective, 55, 103, 114–42 Bad Seed, The (1956), 22, 25–27, 31–56, Childhood, 2–7, 13–30, 32–33, 36–47, 70, 79–81, 94, 116 49–56, 59–61, 63, 91, 102–4, Bakhtin, M. H., 22, 132 113–14, 118–21, 126–31, 135–40, Benning, Sadie, 53–54 148 Benshoff, Harry, 24, 52, 67 Berlant, Lauren, 28 Child of Nature, The, 15–18, 68, 123 Bersani, Leo, 26, 82–84, 122 Child-rearing, 39, 67, 81, 120, 137, Best, Joel, 137 140–41 Beware: Children at Play (1989), 45, 115, Children, The (1980), 115–17, 126–30, 117, 121, 125–26, 137–39 132, 138–39 Bildungsroman, 60, 107–8 Children of the Corn (1984), 16, 115, Blair, Linda, 58–59, 73–78 121, 125, 130–32, 139–40 Bloody Birthday (1981), 45, 127 Children’s Decade, The, 113–14 Bradbury, Ray, 18 Child saving, 145 Braidotti, Rosi, 93–94 Child’s Play (1988), 81 Bronski, Michael, 35 Chuck & Buck (2000), 143–45 Brood, The (1979), 80, 92, 95, 123, 132, Clover, Carol, 9, 63, 136 141 Cobb, Michael, 27 Busch, Charles, 53 Cold War, 10, 18, 29, 40, 123–24, 137 Bussing, Sabine, 16, 20, 64, 124 Corber, Robert, 69

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190 l Index

Cowie, Elizabeth, 2–3, 33, 82, 114, 131, Feral Child, The, 15–17, 59–61, 68, 77, 145–47 94–95, 123 Creed, Barbara, 22, 59–67, 93, 121 Ferenczi, Sandor, 18, 35, 86, 151 Curse of the Cat People, The (1941), 18 Fetal imaging, 94–95 Cuteness, 19, 32–49, 39, 127, 154 Firestarter (1984), 58 Forlorn child, 87–90, 159 Dali, Salvador, 43–44 Foucault, Michel, 27, 38, 71, 119–20, Damien: Omen II (1978), 104, 107–8 129, 146 Death drive, 11, 28, 83, 115, 132, Frankenstein, 10, 48, 98–99, 122 146–47 Freaks, 54, 99, 134–35, 159–60 Demon, The, 15, 19–20, 40, 77 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 9, 20–22, 25, 39, 71, Demon Seed (1977), 84–85, 92–95, 97, 79, 86–87, 120, 151, 154, 157 122 Destroyer, The, 15, 17–18, 59, 77, 127 Futurity, 11, 19, 23, 27–30, 36, 47–51, Development, 5, 23–27, 33–39, 50–51, 65, 83–87, 90–99, 103–9, 113–40, 59–60, 74–77, 96, 105–11, 144–47, 152 114–20, 128–32, 143–46 Devil Times Five (1974), 45, 121, 125 Gender, 22–29, 32–36, 37–38, 40–43, Disidentification, 26, 60, 78, 97, 151 48–49, 51, 57–78, 92–99, 124, 160 Dixon, Wheeler, 103, 110 Genre, 2–4, 17–24, 30, 33, 44, 57, Dolls, 43, 54, 81 64–65, 78–81, 87–88, 92, 99, Doty, Alexander, 23–24, 52 133–36, 149, 159, 161 Douglas, Ann, 20, 86–87, 150 Gilbert, James, 119, 124 Douglas, Mary, 22, 65, 94 Good Son, The (1993), 19, 44–45, 81, Downs, Alan, 31–32 158 Dreamer, The, 15, 17–18, 59, 127 Greene, Graham, 43–44 Du Bois, W. E. B., 34 Grosz, Elizabeth, 65, 91, 159 Dyer, Richard, 25, 35, 102, 129 Grotesque, 14–19, 22–23, 31–44, 50–51, 55–59, 64–65, 67–71, 113, Edelman, Lee, 11, 28–30, 83–84, 105, 123, 130 108, 113–15, 123, 132, 145–47 Education, 13, 39–41, 57–58, 75, 101, Halberstam, Judith, 157 107, 120, 128–29, 137 Halloween (1978), 45, 105 Erikson, Erik, 118 Hanson, Ellis, 29, 58, 69–71, 134, 157 Eugenics, 50, 80–83, 95–96, 103, Heavenly Creatures (1994), 18 119–23, 159–60 Hebdige, Dick, 128 Evans, Caroline, 64, 78 Exorcisms, 62, 66, 68–72 Heffernan, Kevin, 20–21 Exorcist, The (1973), 4, 17–18, 20, 23, Hills, Matt, 68–69 38, 54, 57–78, 89, 117–18 Hitler Youth, 14, 82, 103, 107, 137, 140, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), 73–74 144 Extraterrestrials, 92, 101–3, 139 Holland, Patricia, 25, 36, 127–30, 135 Home Alone (1993), 19 Family horror, 8–9, 20–21, 33 Homosexuality, 2–3, 6–11, 23–30, 35, Family romance, 20, 86–87, 98 58, 67–68, 83, 96–97, 105–8, Farmer, Brett, 151 129–35, 146

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Index l 191

Horror film, 1–6, 20–24, 30, 32–34, 49, Maternity, 32–39, 46, 49, 59–69, 79–86, 63–64, 67, 80–81, 92, 99, 109–10, 91–97, 105–10, 122–23, 126 113, 133–38, 150, 154, 156 Matricide, 18 Hypnosis, 68, 79, 101, 134–36 Maturity, 26, 41, 74, 89, 107–8, 114, 128–30, 143–48 Incest, 54, 64, 67, 94 Ma Vie en Rose (1997), 17 Infanticide, 102, 108, 117, 121 Mayne, Judith, 23 Innocence, 2, 7–8, 13–18, 22–28, McCambridge, Mercedes, 67 32–41, 44–51, 64–69, 74–77, McCormack, Patty, 32, 43, 49, 54, 152 102–6, 123–30 McCullers, Carson, 134–34 Innocent, The, 15–16, 38, 90, 126, 136 Medovoi, Leerom, 29–30 Innocents, The (1961), 16, 18, 38, 45, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), 45 103 Member of the Wedding, A, 134–34 Inseminoid (1981), 92, 95 Menstruation, 63–64, 152 It Lives Again (1978), 160–61 Merrick, Lori, 127 It’s Alive (1974), 14, 84–85, 91–92, Miller, D. A., 110–11 95–100, 130 Mise-en-scène of desire, 2–3, 33, 82, It’s Alive II: Island of the Alive (1987), 114, 131, 145–47 Mizejewski, Linda, 55–56 130, 160–61 Momism, 80, 158 I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), 68 Monstrosity, 1–5, 14–29, 34–37, 39–42, 48–50, 60–71, 79–85, 91–99, Jackson, Chuck, 38, 42–44 120–27, 132–38, 159 Jackson, Kathy Merlock, 63 Montessori, Maria, 6, 36–37, 129 James, Alison, 14 Mulvey, Laura, 49–50 Jenkins, Henry, 6, 13–14, 121 Munoz, Jose Esteban, 147–48 Juvenile delinquency, 8–10, 118–29, 137 Murder, 20–23, 32, 40–45, 51–55, 87–90, 97–98, 104–10, 117, Kelleher, Paul, 26–28 122–28, 133, 137–39 Kincaid, James R., 2, 13–16, 41, 63, 121 Kinship, 3, 11, 86–91, 114–16, 120–23, Nature, 13, 15–17, 59, 68, 122–23, 130, 135–42, 147 132–34 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 22, 65, 93, 121 Neville, Richard, 126, 128–29

Labor, 15, 18, 39, 54, 86, 105–8, Oedipus complex, 87, 98, 103–8 126–29 Ohi, Kevin, 25, 151 Liminality, 5, 8, 21–26, 33, 63, 66, 94, Omen, The (1967), 4, 38, 45, 73, 84–85, 105, 118–19, 134 91, 102–11, 121, 161 Lord of the Flies, The (1963), 122–23, Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981), 104, 128 108–10, 121, 161 Love, Heather, 60 Orphan (2009), 1–2, 18, 81, 85 Orphanage, The (2007), 18, 88, 90–91 Makeover, 75–76 Other, The (1972), 16, 88 March, William, 10, 27, 32–36, 55 Mask of seemliness, 36–45, 129–30 Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), 17 Maternal gothic, 91–97 Paranoid reading, 2–3, 64, 146–47, 149

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192 l Index

Paternal gothic, 85, 97–111 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 2–3, 7, 50, 83, Paternity, 50, 65, 85, 97–111 146–47, 149 Patriarchy, 21–24, 29–30, 34, 48, 61–65, Shame, 18, 31–32, 83 70–72, 88–93, 99–100, 117–18, 140 Shining, The (1980), 18, 31–32, 38, 88 Paul, William, 2, 10, 22–23, 38–40, Shurlock, Geoffrey, 47, 155 48–49, 63–65, 80–82, 138, 150 Sideways growth, 5, 27–28, 36, 55–56, Pedophilia, 43, 137 76–77, 90, 108, 115–18, 132, 137, Pedophobia, 2, 8, 33, 63–64, 70, 81–83, 146 100, 108, 116–17, 124, 153 Simmons, Jerold, 47 Performance, 6–8, 15, 31–56, 76, Sinthomosexual, 108, 132, 147 126–27, 154 Sinyard, Neil, 2, 63 Permissive childrearing, 21 Sobchack, Vivian, 21–22, 99–100 Peter Pan, 15, 17–18, 25–26, 90, 143 Socioeconomic class, 21, 29, 40–42, 55, Peter Pan complex, 26, 143 92, 106–11, 124, 139–40 Pet Sematary (1989), 45 Sontag, Susan, 35, 51–52, 129 Pifer, Ellen, 14 Space Children, The (1958), 18, 124, 141, Play, 15, 18–20, 27, 31–49, 87, 114–18, 161 126–30, 143, 147–48 Spectatorship, 1–4, 9, 23–25, 33, 37–39, Poltergeist (1982), 17 49–65, 69–72, 77–78, 82–84, 96, Possession, 5, 38, 57–78, 83, 92, 98–99, 110, 114–15, 131, 138–40, 145–47 118, 139–40 Staiger, Janet, 58 Production Code Administration (PCA), Star image, 58, 76–78 32, 47–48, 155 Steedman, Carolyn, 83 Progeny (1988), 92 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 5, 26–28, 50–52, 60, 69, 117–18, 124, Race, 4, 6, 27–29, 33–37, 42–44, 50, 55, 133–34, 146 59, 68, 102–7, 110–11, 121–23, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), 51, 159 122–23, 130, 139, 161 Rai, Amit, 133–34 Surveillance, 29, 38–39, 90, 114, Rebellion, 5, 15, 21, 29–30, 34, 53, 78, 118–23, 129–30, 136 108, 113–42 Rechy, John, 60 Taboo, 2, 10, 22, 48, 58, 65–67, 89, 94, Rejection, 3, 24–25, 59–66, 79–90, 122, 138–39 97–99, 108, 116–17, 128–31, Temple, Shirley, 15, 19, 42–43, 54–55, 143–48 127, 154 Reparative reading, 3, 21, 61, 83, 146–48 Teratogens, 93–99, 159 Reproductive futurism, 28–30, 83–84, These Are the Damned (1963), 124–25, 105, 108–9, 115, 152 130, 141, 161 Riviere, Joan, 34 Tin Drum, The (1979), 143–48 Romanticism, 13–14, 16–17, 59, 68, Tinkcom, Matthew, 129 106–8, 123 Tobias, Andrew (John Reid), 31–32, 37, Rose, Jacqueline, 15, 25, 41, 121 56 Rosemary’s Baby (1968), 4–5, 91–97, 105 To the Devil a Daughter (1976), 58, 76 Trickster, The, 15, 19–20, 40, 89, 127 Sammond, Nicholas, 7, 47, 137 Tudor, Andrew, 4, 110, 133, 140 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 27–29 Turn of the Screw, The, 16

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Index l 193

Twilight of the Golds, The (1997), 85, Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), 6, 16, 45, 96–97 115, 117, 121–39 Twilight Zone, The (1959), 18 Williams, Linda, 135 Williams, Tony, 21 Unborn, The (1991), 84, 92–94, 97, 161 Wise Child, The, 15, 18–20, 83–89, 114, 136, 150–51 Victor of Aveyron, 17 Wood, Robin, 2, 4–5, 20–21, 105, 109, Victorianism, 1, 13–14, 16 115, 154 Village of the Damned (1960), 5–6, 14, Wylie, Phillip, 80, 158 19, 38, 84–85, 92, 101–3, 115–17, 123–24, 131–40, 161 Youth culture, 5, 15, 21, 29–30, 34, 53, 78, 108, 113–42 Warner, Michael, 6, 156 YouTube, 68 Watcher, The, 15–16, 38–39, 90, 104, 106, 114, 126, 130, 135–36 Ziolkowski, Eric, 121 Weston, Kath, 141–42 Zombies, 17, 117, 125–26, 139–40

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