School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Out of joint and in-between: the uncanny child in American, Spanish and Japanese horror film

Balanzategui, Jessica Kate ( 2015)

This project examines depictions of uncanny children in a body of supernatural horror films from America, Spain and Japan that emerged at the millennial turn. The project considers how these films are united and engage with each other via their child characters, and explores the interplay of culturally specific and globally resonant anxieties about childhood that these films as a body reveal. I suggest that, harnessing the temporal uncertainties associated with the liminal period of millennial transition, the uncanny child in these films functions as an embodiment of trauma. This figure aestheticises traumatic experience in a way that disrupts the linear strictures of temporal progress, to which traditional understandings of the child's symbolic function are typically bound.