The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema
Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
Jessica Balanzategui
9789462986510
340 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
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.
Author Bio
Dr. Jessica Balanzategui is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT, before which she was Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam UP, 2018), the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’ book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures.
