Modern Ghost Melodramas
Michael Walker
- Title
- The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema
- Subtitle
- Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
- Author
- Jessica Balanzategui
- Price
- € 117,00 excl. VAT
- ISBN
- 9789462986510
- Format
- Hardback
- Number of pages
- 340
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 05 - 11 - 2018
- Dimensions
- 15.6 x 23.4 cm
- Open Access
- Download on Open Access Platform
- Discipline
- Film, Media, and Communication
- Preview
- Download Preview
- Also available as
- eBook PDF - € 0,00
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Child as Uncanny Other
Section One
Secrets and Hieroglyphs: The Uncanny Child in American Horror Film
Chapter One: The Child and Adult Trauma in American Horror of the 1980s
Chapter Two: The Uncanny Child of the Millennial Turn
Section Two
Insects Trapped in Amber: The Uncanny Child in Spanish Horror Film
Chapter Three: The Child and Spanish Historical Trauma
Chapter Four: The Child Seer and the Allegorical Moment in
Millennial Spanish Horror Cinema..
Section Three
Our Fear Has Taken on a Life of Its Own: The Uncanny Child in Japanese Horror Film
Chapter Five: The Child and Japanese National Trauma
Chapter Six: The Prosthetic Traumas of the Internal Alien in Millennial J-Horror
Section Four
Trauma’s Child: The Uncanny Child in Transnational Remakes and Co-productions
Chapter Seven: The Transnational Uncanny Child
Chapter Eight: Progress and Decay in the Twenty-first Century:
The Postmodern Uncanny Child in The Others
Chapter Nine: ‘Round and round, the world keeps spinning. When it stops, it’s just
beginning:’ Analogue Ghosts and Digital Phantoms in The Ring
Conclusion
Reviews and Features
"This is ambitious and thought-provoking film scholarship, poised at the crossroads of horror studies, childhood studies, and trauma studies. This crossdisciplinary range is enhanced by a rewarding transnational focus (moving across the U.S., Spain, and Japan) as well as an in-depth consideration of millennial horror (including such influential films as The Ring and The Others). Balanzategui’s approach is original, stimulating, and valuable for a diverse array of research areas."
- Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh
"I strongly recommend this excellent book. Given its strong scholarship, breadth and depth of inquiry, as well as the inclusion of diverse contexts of production and reception, the volume is certain to become an important resource for researchers on horror film, transnational cinema, and, more generally, film studies."
- Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, University of Kent
- Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh
"I strongly recommend this excellent book. Given its strong scholarship, breadth and depth of inquiry, as well as the inclusion of diverse contexts of production and reception, the volume is certain to become an important resource for researchers on horror film, transnational cinema, and, more generally, film studies."
- Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, University of Kent
Jessica Balanzategui
The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema
Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
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
Jessica Balanzategui
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.
