The Terror of Childness in Modern Horror Cinema

The Terror of Childness in Modern Horror Cinema Max Bledstein (bio) Bohlmann, Markus P. J., and Sean Moreland, editors. Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors. McFarland, 2015. 278 pp. $35.00 pb. ISBN 9780786494798. In "An Introduction to the American Horror Film," Robin Wood argues that "the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses" (203). Given the predisposition of horror films to give a voice (albeit an often violent one) to marginalized people, repressed groups in Western society are a natural fit for the genre. As a result, women, people with disabilities, and, as is the subject of Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland's edited volume Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors, children, have been taking their cinematic revenge on the marginalizing forces of society throughout the history of the genre. Accordingly, Steven Bruhm states in the foreword of this volume that "[m]onstrous destruction restores fairness to an unfair world" (3). Yet such restoration need not exist solely within the horror genre, as Bohlmann and Moreland explain in their introduction. Rather than limit the focus to horror movies, Monstrous Children examines films "which reveal something generative and unsettling by (re)moving, at least momentarily, the two-faced mask (little devil, little angel) that the child in the popular imaginary is normally made to wear" (14). Although Bohlmann and Moreland are careful not to ascribe an overarching narrative to the work of their many contributors, the introduction uses the term "childness," as opposed to "childhood," arguing that the latter is "a term connoting membership in a group (children, as defined within a particular historical and cultural moment) and closely linked to a developmental periodization," meaning that it "is understood as [End Page 150] something one passes out of at a particular moment in one's life, or as something one must set aside in gaining maturity" (15). "Childness," by contrast, understands the child as being "defined through a kind of elusive quiddity, a spectral essence" (15–16). For the other main term in their volume, "monstrous" (and its various forms), Bohlmann and Moreland offer the following explanation: "Monsters are monstrous because they always escape human comprehension; they demonstrate what we do not know, and remonstrate against our presumption to know" (18). Monstrosity is thereby defined through its inaccessibility to human knowledge. In their volume on monstrosity and childness, Bohlmann and Moreland (somewhat counter-intuitively) resist the prescriptiveness of "childhood" by structuring the sections of their volume according to typical teleological benchmarks associated with coming of age. The authors refer to this structure as "a parodic engagement with the teleological developmental assumptions that have bound childness to 'the child'" (19). I emulate the volume's framework in the structure of this essay, in which I review not only the chapters in Bohlmann and Moreland's volume but also a selection of recent films not taken up in the volume that address the same themes. My filmic examples function as case studies that illustrate the strengths and limitations of the chapters, as well as their applicability to a broader understanding of the depiction of children in horror and other film genres. Bohlmann and Moreland tackle a rich topic, and their volume offers an important start to a discussion that can be extended ad infinitum. Baby Monsters "Look Who's Stalking," the opening section of Monstrous Children, covers the earliest stages of the life of a "monstrous child": conception and infancy. The first essay in this section, Karen J. Renner's "Monstrous Newborns and the Mothers Who Love Them: Critiques of Intensive Mothering in Twenty-First-Century Horror Films," examines films such as Josef Ruznak's remake of It's Alive (2009) and Paul Solet's Grace (2009), which depict a figure even more terrifying than an evil child: a monstrous intensive mother (32). Renner argues that these movies show mothers who become consumed by the act of raising infants who cause violent havoc and thereby "condemn these women as embodiments of a dangerous set of attitudes and practices" (28). The monstrous mothers addressed in Renner's essay take...

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