School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Beware! Children at Play: A Carnivalesque Analysis of the Monster Child from Early Slapstick to the Nazified Children of Modern Horror
    Martin, Craig Alan Frederick ( 2020)
    Monster child narratives often use a formula in which normative power relations between adults and children are temporarily inverted as the child outsmarts the adult, leading to a rupture in the social order. Where children are ordinarily subordinate to adults, this relationship is reversed as the monster child exerts dominance over their elders. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory, this thesis argues that the monster child figure commonly thought of as a horror movie villain began its life on screen in early silent screen comedy. Through qualitative analysis of a range of case study films from the silent era through to the emergence of horror-themed monster child films produced in the mid-1950s, close comparative analysis of these texts is used to support the claim that the monster children in early silent comedies and later modern horror films have a shared heritage. Such a claim warrants the question, why did the monster child migrate from comedy to horror? The contention put forward in this thesis is that during World War II dark representations of Hitler Youth in Hollywood wartime propaganda films played a significant role in the child monster trope moving from comedy to horror. Although only a brief period, the cluster of Hitler Youth-themed films produced by Hollywood presented the Nazified child as a particularly heinous malfeasant. This new screen villain proved dynamic and durable, resurfacing after the war as a devious Aryan fiend in the horror-themed monster child films that began to emerge in cinema in the mid-1950s. The monster child seen in contemporary horror is a combination of the narrative formula of early silent comedies featuring child monsters playing pranks on unwary adults, and the dark villainy of the Hitler Youth. In tracing the trajectory of the child monster from comedy to horror, the thesis proposes that its carnivalesque character altered during World War II as it came to be associated with the anti-carnivalesque Hitler Youth. The anti-carnivalesque superficially engages with elements of the carnival so that where carnival is dialogic, celebrating an explosion of heteroglossia that embraces culture at the margins, the anti-carnivalesque is monologic and seeks to centralise and contain culture within a singular unified worldview. Following the war, the monster child returned to a carnivalesque state by undermining the social order just as it had in early cinema, however the character had radically transformed during the war so that in the postwar period it sported the Nordic physical features of the Hitler Youth and exhibited a sadism that would increase as the monster child moved further into the horror genre. Yet even as the postwar monster child became noticeably Nazified with its blond hair and contempt for adult authority, the comic origins of the monster child in silent cinema were also legible in its return to carnivalesque narratives in which the monster child overturns the social order.