The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema Youth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship

Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema Youth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship By Andrew Scahill Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 the revolting child in horror cinema Copyright © Andrew Scahill, 2015. All rights reserved. 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. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. 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—Histor y 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 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 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 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 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—r evealed 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, Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 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 dis- avowed 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 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 Copyrighted Material - 9781137488503 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.

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