Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema

Description

Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes. Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children's horror films, and identifies the 'horrific child' as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?

Catherine Lester is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham, UK. Prior to this, she was a teaching assistant and PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. Her primary teaching and research interests include children's media, animation and the horror genre, both separately and the intersections between them.

Lester tackles a wide variety of sophisticated ideas steeped in critical theory and drawn from an extensive list of sources. Though her discourse is extremely academic, she consistently grounds the theoretical with clear examples from the movies being considered. * CHOICE * Catherine Lester's Horror Films for Children challenges traditional perceptions of horror as being unsuitable for kids and dares to consider how they speak to the child audience. It is insightful and nuanced in its analysis and will encourage readers to look at horror through the eyes of a child. -- Stacey Abbott, University of Roehamption, UK Are you afraid of the dark? You should be. Through analyses of films from Gremlins (1984) to The Witches (2020), Cat Lester expertly reveals the distinctions between industry and audience perceptions of horror's relationship to children's cinema, demarcating the tensions that lie, murkily, beneath them. -- Alison Peirse, University of Leeds, UK Through detailed textual analysis and critical skill, Lester explores the consistently (and fascinatingly) complex relations between horror and children. Horror Films for Children is an authoritative study of an under-appreciated genre, and a major contribution to the study of both horror and children's media. -- Kate Egan, Northumbria University, UK