The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

Balanzategui, Jessica

The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

In this Book

The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
Book
Jessica Balanzategui
2018
Published by: Amsterdam University Press

summary

The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema illustrates how global horror film depictions of children re-conceptualised childhood at the turn of the twenty-first century. By analysing an influential body of transnational horror films, largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and the US, Jessica Balanzategui shows how millennial uncanny child characters resist embodying growth and futurity, unravelling concepts to which the child's symbolic function is typically bound. The book proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in these potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. By demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties of these frightening visions of children who refuse to grow up, the book outlines the conceptual and aesthetic mechanisms by which long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.