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 beginning of the twenty-first century, and considers the cultural conditions surrounding their emergence. By analysing an influential body of transnational horror films, largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and America, Jessica Balanzategui shows how the child resists embodying growth and futurity, unravelling concepts to which its 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 these long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.