Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Childrens Television

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Description

Horrifying Children examines weird and eerie childrens television and literature via critical analysis, memoir and autoethnography.

There has been an explosion of interest in the impact of childrens television and literature of the late twentieth century. In particular, the 1970s, 80s and 90s are seen as decades that shaped a great deal of the contemporary cultural landscape. Television of this period dominated the world of childhood entertainment, drawing freely upon literature and popular culture, like the Garbage Pail Kids and Stranger Things, and much of it continues to resonate powerfully with the generation of cultural producers (fiction writers, screenwriters, directors, musicians and artists) that grew up watching the weird, the eerie and the horrific: the essence of 21st-century Hauntology. In these terms this book is not about childrens television as it exists now, but rather as it features as a facet of memory in the 21st century.

As such it is the legacy of these television programmes that is at the core of Horrifying Children. The haunting of adults by what we have seen on the screen is crucial to the study. This collection directly addresses that which scared us in the past insomuch as there is a correlation between individual and collective cultural memory, with some chapters providing an opportunity for situating existing explorations and understandings of Gothic and Horror TV within a hauntological and experiential framework.

Reviews

Horrifying Children presents a fascinating and multifaceted analysis of five decades of gothic and supernatural British childrens television shows and discusses the hauntological effects of these shows in (re)presenting the pre-War nostalgia and Post-war anxieties of British culture. We learn how the liminal figure of the child within the original 60s and 70s television series haunted subsequent generations of children in the 80s, 90s and 00s when the series were re-broadcasted. Addressing specifically how mysterious, spooky and ghostly childrens television effects the collective cultural memory of adults, Horrifying Children enriches our understanding of the deep impact of the figure of the child in visual narrative for each generation that observes it. * Andre Seewood, Associate Instructor, Indiana University-Bloomington, USA *
This wide-ranging collection, taking us on a hauntological journey back to and through historical childrens television, is impressive in its breadth and depth. It offers the reader a thorough exploration of why childrens television has stayed with us, clinging to the dark recesses of our minds, remembered as an unsettling set of uncanny sounds and spectral images. What I particularly love about these essays in this book are the ways that the authors negotiate and examine their own mnemonic relationship to such a wide variety of programming. Scholars often reflect on how television makes meaning from a position of critical disengagement or detachment: this book shows that it is possible to write with clarity and critical insight while examining your own affective responses to programmes known of old and long familiar. * Helen Wheatley, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, UK *

Author Bio

Lauren Stephenson is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at York St. John University, UK. She specialises in teaching and researching on horror cinema, gender roles and representation in contemporary British and American cinema and American cinema and society. She has published on British Horror Television, the contemporary Gothic and women horror filmmakers.

Robert Edgar is Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the York Centre for Writing at York St John University, UK. He is currently leading MA, MFA and PhD programmes. His teaching specialisms are in scriptwriting, adaptation and genre fiction. He has published widely on screenwriting, film language, popular music adaptation and science-fiction.

John Marland is a Senior Lecturer in Literature Studies at York St John University, UK. He teaches gothic fiction, film adaptation and modern drama. His research interests include the use of silence on page, stage and screen. He has published on scriptwriting, visual semiotics and adaptation.