2. the Uncanny Child of the Millennial Turn
2. The Uncanny Child of the Millennial Turn Abstract Chapter Two focuses on two American films released in 1999, The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan) and Stir of Echoes (David Koepp) to il- lustrate how, at the cusp of the millennium, the uncanny child character became a precisely realized embodiment of the adult protagonist’s personal trauma. These films engage with anxieties of the period: in 1999, the im- minent transition into the new century – and millennium – was a strongly felt condition that unsettled a naturalized sense of temporal, personal, and historical progression. The chapter then turns to a later amplification of this trend, Insidious (James Wan, 2010), in which the uncanny child’s imbrication with the adult patriarch’s trauma is self-reflexively addressed. Keywords: Uncanny, Childhood, Trauma, Secret, Millennial turn, The Sixth Sense The uncanny child cycle was reignited in the U.S. at the cusp of the mil- lennium by The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan) and Stir of Echoes (Koepp), released within months of each other in 1999. In particular, The Sixth Sense was the second highest-grossing film of the year, earning $293 million at the box office behind only the highly anticipated Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas) (Kendrick, 2010, 142). As James Kendrick points out, the horror genre had not produced a blockbuster of this cultural and financial magnitude since Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), and, prior to that, The Exorcist. He asserts that: the cycle of films that emerged in the wake of The Sixth Sense is particu- larly important and worthy of attention because, not only was it extremely concentrated, but it marked a decided shift in the horror genre as it was currently constituted, which served a dual function.
[Show full text]