The uncanny child in transnational cinema : ghosts of futurity at the turn of the twenty-first century

Abstract

The introduction outlines the book’s focus on the cinematic uncanny child, a figure that challenges normalized ideologies of childhood by interrogating the child’s associations with both personal and historical time. While the uncanny child emerged as a significant presence in American horror films in the 1980s, this figure became one of the genre ́s key unifying tropes at the turn of the 21st century – not only in American films, but in films from around the globe, particularly from Japan and Spain. These uncanny child films are significant not just for their self-reflexive recalibration of a long-entrenched trope of the horror genre, but because they evidence a globally resonant shift in conceptualizations of childhood at the turn of the millennium.