The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema
Title
The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema
Subtitle
Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
ISBN
9789048537792
Format
eBook PDF
Number of pages
312
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Also available as
Hardback - € 117,00
Table of Contents
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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

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.