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.

Jessica Balanzategui is Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (AUP, 2018), and co-editor of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video special issue on Hannibal Lecter (2018).

Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Child as Uncanny Other Section OneSecrets and Hieroglyphs: The Uncanny Child in American Horror FilmChapter One: The Child and Adult Trauma in American Horror of the 1980s Chapter Two: The Uncanny Child of the Millennial Turn Section TwoInsects Trapped in Amber: The Uncanny Child in Spanish Horror FilmChapter Three: The Child and Spanish Historical Trauma Chapter Four: The Child Seer and the Allegorical Moment in Millennial Spanish Horror Cinema.. Section ThreeOur Fear Has Taken on a Life of Its Own: The Uncanny Child in Japanese Horror FilmChapter Five: The Child and Japanese National Trauma Chapter Six: The Prosthetic Traumas of the Internal Alien in Millennial J-Horror Section FourTrauma’s Child: The Uncanny Child in Transnational Remakes and Co-productionsChapter 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