The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular

Culture

The 'evil child' has infiltrated the cultural imagination, taking on prominent roles in
popular films, television shows, and literature. This collection of essays from a global
range of scholars examines a fascinating array of evil children and the cultural work
that they perform, drawing upon sociohistorical, cinematic, and psychological approa-
ches. The chapters explore a wide range of characters including Tom Riddle in the
Harry Potter series, the possessed Regan in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, the
monstrous Ben in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, the hostile fetuses of Rosemary’s
Baby and Alien, and even the tiny terrors featured in the reality television series
Supernanny. Contributors also analyse various themes and issues within film, literature
and popular culture including ethics, representations of evil and critiques of society.
This book was originally published as two special issues of LIT:Literature Inter-
pretation Theory.

Karen J. Renner is a Lecturer in American Literature at Northern Arizona University,

USA. Her research interests include 19- and 20th-century American Literature, Popular
Culture, Childhood Studies, and Horror. She is currently working on two manuscripts:
Perverse Subjects: Drunks, Gamblers, and Prostitutes in Antebellum America and Bad
Seeds and Injured Innocents: The “Evil Child” in the Contemporary Imagination.
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The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and
Popular Culture

Edited by
Karen J. Renner
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Publisher’s Note
The publisher would like to make readers aware that the chapters in this book may be referred to as articles
as they are identical to the articles published in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any
inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.
Contents

Citation Information vii

Notes on Contributors ix
1. Evil Children in Film and Literature
Karen J. Renner 1
2. My Baby Ate the Dingo: The Visual Construction of the Monstrous Infant
in Horror Film
Steffen Hantke 28
3. Monstrous Children as Harbingers of Mortality: A Psychological Analysis
of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child
Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg 45
4. Spoil the Child: Unsettling Ethics and the Representation of Evil
William Wandless 66
5. Private Lessons from Dumbledore’s “Chamber of Secrets”: The Riddle of the
Evil Child in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Holly Blackford 87
6. Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent Bollywood
Cinema
Meheli Sen 108
7. “The Power of Christ Compels You”: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal
Psychodrama in The Exorcist
Sara Williams 129
8. How to See the Horror: The Hostile Fetus in Rosemary’s Baby and Alien
A. Robin Hoffman 150
9. Extreme Human Makeovers: Supernanny, the Unruly Child, and
Adulthood in Crisis
Catherine Fowler and Rebecca Kambuta 173

Index 188

v
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Citation Information

The following chapters were originally published in the journal LIT: Literature Inter-
pretation Theory. When citing this material, please use the original issue information
and page numbering for each article, as follows:

Chapter 2
My Baby Ate the Dingo: The Visual Construction of the Monstrous Infant in Horror
Film
Steffen Hantke
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 2 (2011), pp. 96-112

Chapter 3
Monstrous Children as Harbingers of Mortality: A Psychological Analysis of Doris
Lessing’s The Fifth Child
Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 2 (2011), pp. 113-33

Chapter 4
Spoil the Child: Unsettling Ethics and the Representation of Evil
William Wandless
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 2 (2011), pp. 134-54

Chapter 5
Private Lessons from Dumbledore’s “Chamber of Secrets”: The Riddle of the Evil
Child in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Holly Blackford
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 2 (2011), pp. 155-75

Chapter 6
Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent Bollywood
Cinema
Meheli Sen
LIT; Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 3 (2011), pp. 197-217

Chapter 7
“The Power of Christ Compels You”: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal Psy-
chodrama in The Exorcist

vii
 CITATION INFORMATION

Sara Williams
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 3 (2011), pp. 218-38

Chapter 8
How to See the Horror: The Hostile Fetus in Rosemary’s Baby and Alien
A. Robin Hoffman
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 3 (2011), pp. 239-61

Chapter 9
Extreme Human Makeovers: Supernanny, the Unruly Child, and Adulthood in Crisis
Catherine Fowler and Rebecca Kambuta
LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, volume 22, issue 3 (2011), pp. 262-76

viii
Notes on Contributors

Holly Blackford (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of American

and Children’s Literature at Rutgers University, Camden, USA. Recent books
include Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Traditions in Harper
Lee’s Novel, The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature, 100 Years of Anne
with an “e” (ed.), and Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls.
Catherine Fowler is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Otago University, New Zealand. She
is editor of The European Cinema Reader, co-editor of Representing the Rural:
Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land, and author of a monograph on
the British filmmaker Sally Potter.
Jeff Greenberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas, USA, in 1982. He
has co-authored two books, including In the Wake of 9-11: The Psychology of
Terror, co-edited two books, and published many research articles. He is currently
Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona, USA.
Steffen Hantke has written on contemporary literature, film, and culture. He is author
of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary Literature (1994), as well as editor of
Horror, a special topics issue of Paradoxa (2002), Horror: Creating and Marketing
Fear (2004), Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), with
Rudolphus Teeuwen, of Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers, and the Global Academic
Proletariat (2007), and American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Mil-
lennium (2010). He teaches at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea.
A. Robin Hoffman recently defended her dissertation, which traces the co-evolution of
constructions of literacy and childhood in Victorian alphabet books. Her research
more broadly addresses representations of childhood, word and image studies, and
British print culture in the long nineteenth century. After graduating from the Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh, USA, her teaching will focus on the history of illustrated
books.
Rebecca Kambuta is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Film, and Communications
Department at Otago University, New Zealand. Her doctoral dissertation traces the
figure of the unruly child through film, news media, and reality television. She has
also written on the makeover genre in her MA thesis, “Televising Transformation: A
Close Analysis of Extreme Makeover and The Swan.”

ix
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Karen J. Renner is a Lecturer in American Literature at Northern Arizona University,

USA. Her research interests include 19- and 20th-century American Literature,
Popular Culture, Childhood Studies, and Horror. She is currently working on two
manuscripts: Perverse Subjects: Drunks, Gamblers, and Prostitutes in Antebellum
America and Bad Seeds and Injured Innocents: The “Evil Child” in the Con-
temporary Imagination.
Meheli Sen is Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Program at Rutgers Uni-
versity, USA. Her research area is popular Hindi cinema, commonly referred to as
“Bollywood.” She is interested in how the filmic registers of genre, gender, and
sexuality resonate with specific moments in India’s troubled encounters with mod-
ernity and globalization.
Daniel Sullivan received bachelor’s degrees in psychology and German studies at the
University of Arizona, USA, in 2008. He is currently a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellow in the Social Psychology program at the University of
Kansas, USA.
William Wandless is Associate Professor of English at Central Michigan University,
USA, where he specializes in British fiction of the eighteenth century and teaches
courses in critical theory and American popular culture.
Sara Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of
Hull, UK. Her doctoral work concentrates on locating a tyrannical maternal gaze in
textual and visual modes of Gothic production from the nineteenth century to the
contemporary, and her wider research interests include cultural, feminist, and psy-
choanalytical (mis)constructions of motherhood and the epistemology of hysteria.

x
 Evil Children in Film and Literature

KAREN J. RENNER

In 2010, Meredith O’Hayre published a book entitled The Scream Queen’s Survival
Guide, which promised to teach us how, if suddenly plunged into a horror movie, we
could conquer its clichés and emerge if not unscathed, then at least alive. The subtitle
of the book offers three brief directives: to Avoid Machetes, Defeat Evil Children, and
Steer Clear of Bloody Dismemberment. That “evil children”—and I will discuss that
problematic term in a moment—are mentioned alongside machetes and dismember-
ment speaks to the serious and pervasive threat they have come to represent within the
horror genre. But this threat seems largely a contemporary one: we would be hard-
pressed, I think, to discover many instances of wicked youngsters in earlier literature,
even though plenty of examples existed in the real world. 1 However, during the second
half of the twentieth century, such figures began to possess the imaginations of a wide
number of writers and filmmakers. A number of scholars have examined the role of
children in literature and film, some even focusing upon evil children in particular, but
this pervasive plot convention has not been given adequate attention. 2 In fact, this
collection is the first book-length study devoted to the subject.

EVIL CHILDREN IN FILM AND LITERATURE: A BRIEF HISTORY

Stories about evil children began to first proliferate with serious regularity in the 1950s.
What is noteworthy about these early texts is their tendency to claim that evil children
are born bad. In Ray Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin” (1946), a newborn emerges with
the innate desire and ability to kill; while no motive or reason is confirmed, the baby’s
father, David, surmises that since “[i]nsects are born self-sufficient” and “most mam-
mals and birds adjust” in a few weeks, perhaps “a few babies out of all the millions
born are instantaneously able to move, see, hear, think” (383). Such a child, David
muses, would have the capacity to avenge all the perceived wrongs associated with its
removal from the womb where it had been “at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered” (384).
The implication is that all infants are enraged by their birth but most lack the ability to
enact their feelings of anger upon the figures they feel responsible: their parents. If they
did, many parents would experience the same vindictive acts of violence that David and
his wife suffer. Bradbury’s “The Veldt” (originally published as “The World the Chil-
dren Made” in 1950) explores similar themes but does so in a futuristic world in which

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

technology can transform playrooms into virtual reality spaces that are based upon
“the telepathic emanations” of whomever’s in the room (268). When the world made
by the story’s children—the suggestively named siblings Peter and Wendy—takes on a
menacing air, their father decides to disengage the room, but the children beg for one
last round of play, and he acquiesces. The children then conjure virtual lions to attack
and devour their parents. Although the story hints that the parents are much to blame
for their children’s lack of emotional attachment in that they have allowed many of the
gadgets of their futuristic world to take over their child-rearing duties, the overt refer-
ence to J. M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy (1911) also suggests that Bradbury may,
like Barrie, have considered children as naturally “gay and innocent and heartless,”
always “ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones” (emphasis mine, 148,
100).
Richard Matheson’s very short story “Born of Man and Woman” (1950) is narrated
by a monstrously deformed child who never clearly details its own appearance, but the
fact that it describes its own blood as an “ugly green,” refers at one point to “all my
legs,” and explains how it can “run on the walls” suggests it is a human-sized, spider-
like creature (514, 515, 515). The “child” is kept locked away in a basement, is beaten
regularly, and thus is an object of some pity. At the end of the story, however, the child
alludes to prior acts of aggression and hints that more are soon to come: “I have a bad
anger with mother and father. I will show them. . . . I will hang head down by all my
legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry” (515). While the creature is
incensed by its parents’ abuse, it seems to have been quite violent to begin with and
certainly born with the most monstrous of appearances.
The tendency to see evil children as inherently so continued to dominate later works
from the 1950s, such as Jerome Bixby’s short story “It’s a Good Life” (1953), William
Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954), and one of the most famous stories about an
evil child, William March’s The Bad Seed (1954), all of which were quickly adapted for
the screen.3 Anthony, the three-year-old terror in Bixby’s short story, can read the
minds of the adults around him, and if they or anything else displeases him, he pun-
ishes the perceived transgressor in whatever way he sees fit simply by thinking it so
(though on the suggestion of his father, he kindly teleports his victims out to a corn-
field, so that the sight of them will not upset the townspeople). In the opening scene of
the story, for example, Anthony is controlling a rat with his mind, “making it do
tricks” (523); by the end of the scene, the rat has “devoured half its belly, and . . . died
from pain” (525). Anthony’s abilities and tendency to act on his rage is inborn: “when
Anthony had crept from the womb and old Doc Bates . . . had screamed and dropped
him and tried to kill him, . . . Anthony had whined and done the thing” (541).
Obviously, baby Anthony was reacting in self-defense; however, throughout most of the
story, what we witness is a petulant three-year-old who has the magical ability to make
his deepest desires come true and who has not yet learned the empathy or self-control
to use his powers humanely. Similarly, Golding himself has claimed the boys in Lord of
the Flies descend into savagery not because of the trauma of being stranded on an
island but because they “are suffering from the terrible disease of being human” (Fable
89). In titling his novel The Bad Seed, March also implies that evil is a congenital
condition, and the book confirms this claim, for Rhoda Penmark, the child at the
center of the novel, seems to have inherited her penchant for murder from her grand-
mother, the accomplished serial killer Bessie Denker.

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

Interest in evil children continued into the 1960s, though with somewhat less ferocity.
During this decade, texts indicate less interest in children who are born bad but rather
in those who have been made so. Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’s 1898
novel The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (1961), adds details that make the children
far more flagrantly malevolent than in the novel but also makes it more obvious that
their abnormal behavior is due to their “possession” by the ghosts of former caretakers
who corrupted them. During the 1960s, several well known authors, among them
Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates, also turned their Gothic
eyes upon the subject of children. In Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the
Castle (1962)—the last she was to publish before her death in 1965—we discover that
the eighteen-year-old narrator murdered her parents, aunt, and younger brother six
years earlier by lacing the sugar bowl with arsenic. O’Connor’s short story “The Lame
Shall Enter First” (1965) features a street urchin named Rufus who convinces the son
of the man who kindly takes him in to hang himself, and Oates’s Expensive People
(1968) opens with the provocative line “I was a child murderer” (3), and the narrator,
Richard Everett, goes on to reveal that the act that earned him this designation was
committed at the tender age of eleven. Rather than looking to children endowed with
special abilities or deviant predilections from birth, these novels are far more interested
in how social conditions and adult influences might move a child to murder.
The decade then concluded with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), a story about
the most evil child of them all: the son of Satan himself. Roman Polanski adapted the
novel into a film the following year, and both received popular and critical acclaim.
While many narratives in the 1960s had scrutinized the psychological forces and
familial dynamics that might produce an evil child, Rosemary’s Baby took the
approach more popular in the previous decade, presenting the evil child as simply born
that way. Influenced by and perhaps hoping to capitalize upon the success of Rosem-
ary’s Baby, authors in the 1970s and early 1980s produced an enormous number of
texts about evil kids, many of which were instantly seared into cultural memory, and
directors were quick to offer their cinematic renditions. In fact, the 1970s produced so
many fictional evil children that one Newsweek editorial worried that the era was one
of “growing anti-child sentiment,” pointing to a recent poll of 10,000 mothers, 70% of
whom said that if given the choice again, they would opt not to have children (May-
nard 11).
Although Rosemary’s Baby steered the conception of the evil child in the direction of
the demonic, both types of evil child—the satanic and the psychologically deviant—
were explored. The most successful venture into the first category was The Exorcist.4
Indeed, William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel caused
such a stir that, according to Nick Cull, many viewers fainted and one even “charged
the screen in an attempt to kill the demon” (46). Friedkin’s film prompted many imi-
tations, even a Turkish scene-by-scene remake entitled Seytan (1974).5 Richard Don-
ner’s 1976 movie The Omen gave birth to yet another satanic threat with Damien,
whose name has become shorthand for any kind of monstrous youth. Thomas Tryon’s
bestselling novel The Other (1971) offered psychological rather than metaphysical
explanations for his evil child. In the book, eleven-year-old Niles commits a series of
disturbing and violent acts, which he attributes to his twin, Holland, whom we later
discover is dead. The Other received a cinematic tribute in 1972, and though neither are
well known today, Tryon’s focus on insanity rather than demonic possession helped set

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

the stage for later texts that would increasingly examine childhood manifestations of
dangerous derangements.
It was also during the 1970s that several writers who would later become virtuosos of
horror launched their careers with stories centering on evil children. Dean Koontz
started early, publishing Demon Child in 1971 under the pseudonym Deanna Dwyer.6
However, his first big success in the subgenre came with Demon Seed (1973), which tells
the story of a woman impregnated against her will by the computer that controls her
house, Proteus; the book was made into a 1977 film starring Julie Christie.7 In 1976,
Anne Rice published the first and most popular of her Vampire Chronicles, Interview
with the Vampire, a considerable portion of which is devoted to a girl vampire, Clau-
dia. The relish with which Claudia feeds—“I want some more,” Claudia says in a
petulant voice after feeding on her first human (93)—while all the while exuding the
charms of young girlhood is one of the most horrifying aspects of the novel. Stephen
King, too, first received serious attention after publishing his novel Carrie (1974), and
Brian De Palma’s 1976 cinematic adaptation only bolstered his reputation. King
promptly went on to write several other stories about evil children, including “Children
of the Corn” (1977), The Shining (1977), Firestarter (1980), and Pet Sematary (1983),
all of which were eventually made into movies. Indeed, the 1984 adaptation of Children
of the Corn has prompted an unrivalled franchise of evil children films, with six sequels
and a recent remake in 2009.
These early horror texts were largely responsible for moving horror from a peripheral
genre to a mainstream interest, making room for other lesser-known writers who, at
least momentarily, made a career out of books about evil children, including John Saul,
Andrew Neiderman, and Ruby Jean Jensen.8 As a result, the covers of novels from the
late 1970s to the early 1990s began to feature a veritable bevy of creepy kids, as Will
Errickson has shown in his blog Too Much Horror Fiction.9 Even canonical authors
called upon the trope of the evil child, such as Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987) and
Doris Lessing in The Fifth Child (1988). Even television proved eager to get in on the
action. Bart Simpson made his debut on the Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, and though
Bart is more errant than evil, he paved the way for one of the most despicable cartoon
children ever to make an appearance: Eric Cartman of South Park (1997–).10 Soon
after, the creators of Family Guy (1999-2002; 2005–) would offer their own animated
evil child in Stewie Griffin.
Nowadays, the evil child is almost a trite plot device. The International Movie
Database, imdb.com, lets you search for films using the keyword of “evil child,” and
Netflix allows you to cater your “Storylines” taste preferences to announce that you
“often” watch movies that feature “evil kids,” thus ensuring that Netflix will make
relevant recommendations for you in the future.11 The contributions of this century’s
filmmakers promise to quickly eclipse those of the prior century: of the approximately
three hundred films I have identified that portray some kind of evil child, over half have
been produced since the year 2000. Television has succumbed to the same phenom-
enon: it seems that every season of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit offers at least
one episode that centers upon a wicked adolescent of some kind, 12 and even reality
television has ventured into the genre in the US and the UK with Nanny 911 (2004–)
and Supernanny (2005–), both of which display a series of badly behaved (though ulti-
mately redeemable) youngsters. A prominent element of video games, 13 evil children
have even infiltrated children’s literature, most prominently in the form of Tom Riddle

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

in the Harry Potter series and in the children who fight to the death in Suzanne Col-
lins’s popular trilogy, The Hunger Games.14

A DISCLAIMER ABOUT TERMINOLOGY

By now, it has probably become obvious that the term “evil children” is far too sim-
plistic to account for the range and complexity of characters to whom I have applied it.
To be sure, both parts of the term are problematic. Defining the term “child” poses
difficulty since the laws that govern certain rights—voting, drinking alcohol, consenting
to sex—vary, each suggesting that a different age marks the boundary between adult
and child. And these laws differ again by nation and, within this country, sometimes
even by state. For the sake of simplicity, I will rely on markers of citizenship and define
a “child” as anyone under the age of 18. Even far more fraught is the word “evil.”
Problematic enough in its implications, the term becomes even more difficult to apply
to children who often lack the maturity and forethought necessary for moral decision-
making. Who, out of the crowd of children I’ve conjured, constitutes a truly evil child?
Is it The Bad Seed’s Rhoda Penmark, who at the age of eight bludgeons a classmate to
death with her tap shoes and burns alive a man she fears has evidence of the murder
she committed?15 Is it Damien from The Omen, the son of Satan, who, among other
evil deeds, wills his nanny to hang herself, pushes his adopted mother over a high bal-
cony, and at the end of the film smiles coyly into the camera to show us just how much
he’s enjoying himself ? Is it Jack and Emily Poe from the 2008 film Home Movie who
slaughter all of their pets—progressing from goldfish to frog to the family cat and dog
—and then butcher their parents? Certainly, each of these children seems to fit the bill
of “evil child” pretty straightforwardly.
But applying that label becomes harder when we consider less clear-cut examples.
What do we do, for example, with Regan in The Exorcist? When demon-possessed,
Regan hurls obscenities, violent blows, and pea-green vomit at her mother and the
priests who come to help her, but once exorcised, she turns back into the innocent
adolescent she was before her possession. Isn’t it more accurate to say that Regan is
temporarily corrupted rather than evil? Scalpel-wielding Gage of Pet Sematary is
similarly problematic, for he has returned from the dead and thus is more zombie than
boy. The children in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) are at least half
extraterrestrial, the triad of ten-year-old killers in Bloody Birthday (1981) have been
affected in some way by the solar eclipse during which they were born, and the homi-
cidal adolescents in both the 2006 film The Plague and the 2008 film The Children
appear to have been afflicted by some mysterious disease; all of these children are more
“infected” than inherently evil. And what about the carnivorous newborns featured in
such films as It’s Alive (1974) and the 2008 film Grace? These babies emerge from their
mother’s womb with a natural thirst for human blood, but we can’t really say that their
intentions are “evil” or even malicious. Like any other predator, they are just doing
what they need to do to survive.
While “evil children” is admittedly an inadequate catch-all phrase, these figures, I
would argue, play a similar role: they force us to consider the age-old question about
the nature of humankind. Is the evil child the result of an imperfect environment and
thus redeemable, or a sign of inherent corruption? Our understanding of the evil child
mirrors the way we view ourselves: is there evil in the world because we have gone

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

astray, or because we have a natural propensity for wickedness and cruelty? Because the
answers to these questions are culturally determined and shift throughout time, differ-
ent categories of evil child have emerged, each offering a response to suit the zeitgeist.
Even when the dominant type of evil children during a particular epoch cannot easily
be labeled “evil,” this fact alone tells us much about the predominant ideologies and
presumptions that prevent a more straightforward type of evil child from forming in
the cultural imagination. Throwing our net wide allows us to determine what sorts of
“evil” children prevailed during different eras and why their particular brand of evil
was so compelling. Unfortunately, space restrictions do not allow me to cover all of
these different categories, so I will focus on two particular types, the possessed child
and the feral child, two subtypes that, I will argue, are intimately linked. While the
possessed child narrative explores the unique psychological failures of a particular
family, the feral child narrative investigates broader social failures that affect children
in general.
Possessed children generate horror because they exhibit disturbing behavior—cruel,
violent, and, for girls, often sexually suggestive. Possessed child narratives necessarily
begin before the point of possession, spending considerable time developing the char-
acters of these victims and their families. As a result, we can see that the behavior the
child demonstrates while possessed differs considerably from his or her normal con-
duct, and therefore we typically transfer blame for the child’s wickedness to the
offending entity. While the family as a whole might seem like the hapless victims of a
supernatural presence, possessed child narratives, as I will show, frequently demon-
strate that the child has been made vulnerable because of breakdowns in the family
unit. Possession either draws the family back together (though change may not come
soon enough to save the child) or magnifies the issues that caused fracture in the first
place. Either way, the viewer bears witness to failures in the family that have allowed
the child to become the victim of evil forces. I argue that these forces symbolize other
nefarious influences commonly cited as taking hold of children when parents are not
properly vigilant, such as satanic song lyrics or violent video games. The possessed
child narrative thus relies on developing our attachments to particular characters and
then using our sympathies to drive home its ideologies about proper familial structures.
Feral child narratives construct a similar critique but on a broader scale. I define the
feral child as one for whom base instincts and appetites supersede personal relation-
ships. This subtype includes zombie and vampire children as well as those who have
been reared in a primitive or deviant culture in which the humanitarian values of our
supposedly civilized society have been discarded in favor of self-centered motives and
pleasures. Because feral children are given scant character development and usually
appear as part of a larger savage pack, they are rarely individualized enough for us to
develop any real sympathy for them. Furthermore, the stories generate revulsion for
these children by depicting the terrible acts of brutality, cannibalism, and rape that
they commit. These acts make feral children incapable of redemption and ease our
acceptance of their bloody annihilation, which typically concludes these narratives.
And yet in the background of these tales are hints that the so-called civilized world is
quite capable of equivalent forms of savagery. Feral children certainly generate disgust,
but as with zombies, with whom they are closely aligned, they are a faceless and
thoughtless mob unlike the denizens of the civilized world, whose capacity for fore-
thought and empathy should curtail their cruelties. These narratives often juxtapose the
atrocities committed by the enlightened with the mindless savagery of the feral child,

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with the result being that the civilized look all the more barbaric. In doing so, they
launch critiques of the adult world that parallel those of possessed child narratives but
which rely on a different emotional logic to impress their ideologies upon viewers.

THE POSSESSED CHILD

Stories of possession have a long history, dating at least as far back as the Bible.
However, possession narratives, as I define them, are not always situated within a reli-
gious context: although Satan or his minions are often the culprits, just as often the
spirits of former humans inhabit or influence the living. Sometimes, ghosts of the
wicked linger in order to further their evil reign: in Fallen (1998), for example, the spirit
of a serial killer lodges in living human beings in order to claim more victims, and in
Child’s Play (1988), the deceased murderer Charles Lee Ray takes up residence in a
Chucky doll for much the same reason (though to far more campy effect). But not all
possessing spirits have immoral intentions. Some simply seek justice for unpunished
wrongs they have suffered while others wish to direct the living to repressed or
unknown truths (i.e., that a lover is actually a murderer, as in What Lies Beneath
[2000]). As I am defining it, in a possession narrative, a supernatural entity of some
kind embodies or influences one of the living, compelling the victim to act in malicious,
disturbing, or at least uncharacteristic ways.
Children—especially young girls—are frequent victims of demonic possession, and
such stories often culminate in an exorcism which may or may not succeed. In other
cases, a child is not literally taken over by a spirit but naively falls under its influence,
never suspecting that it has insidious intentions. Such narratives play upon the
common supposition that children are naturally sensitive to such presences, becoming
aware of encroaching spirits long before they are made known to or accepted by adults.
Indeed, a standard plot device in horror films shows an innocent child befriending such
an entity, and his or her parents mistakenly believing at first that the new playmate is
merely a harmless, imaginary friend.
The possessed child narrative, I argue, performs important ideological work that has
less to do with the child—who in many ways remains an innocent figure taken advan-
tage of by a more powerful spirit—and more to do with his or her parents. In order to
understand the cultural function of the possessed child narrative, I wish to build upon
Carol Clover’s analysis of possession films in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in
the Modern Horror Film (1992). Clover argues that possession films actually contain
two narratives occurring in tandem. One is about the travails of the possessed character
—typically female. The other focuses on a man who is slowly converted from a purely
rational standpoint that scoffs at the existence of supernatural forces—what Clover
terms White Science—to a mystical perspective that Clover calls Black Magic, which is
commonly embraced by ethnic minorities, women, and “feminized” men, such as
creative types or folklorists who rely on emotion, intuition, and imagination. Support-
ing her claims by drawing upon The Exorcist (1973) and Witchboard (1987) primarily,
Clover argues that these two narrative strands are intertwined in such a fashion
because the possession plot is really a story of male crisis, an implicit call for a new
masculinity that was “part and parcel of the social changes from the late sixties on,
from feminism to the Vietnam experience and the new family” (100). “If action cinema

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mourns the passing of the ‘real man,’” Clover concludes, then horror “urges it along,
and occult films go so far as to imagine a new, revised edition” of masculinity (99).
Clover’s compelling argument certainly still holds true today, almost twenty years
later. The Last Exorcism (2010), for example, features a preacher named Cotton
Marcus—a name that recalls that of a prominent religious figure involved in the Salem
Witch Trials, Cotton Mather. Staged as a documentary meant to expose exorcisms as
shams, the film initially shows Marcus playfully boasting about the sway he holds over
his disciples and the unabashedly theatrical exorcisms he performs purely for personal
profit. However, his encounter with the possessed Nell causes him to rediscover his
faith and literally take up the cross to battle a demon. The movie ends up being more
about Cotton’s slow return to religious belief than it does the exorcism of a possessed
teenage girl.
If for Clover, the possession plot is a narrative of male crisis, I would argue that it is
also a narrative of parental crisis, a probing of the dynamics behind the failure of the
family and a proposal for remedy. Possession narratives act as cautionary tales that
warn us, in symbolic terms, that children are vulnerable to dangerous influences when
traditional family structures are damaged and parents are negligent in their duties. In
some cases, if parent figures reassume their proper roles, the child can be saved; other
times, it is simply too late.
Let me illustrate my argument by turning now to several literary and cinematic
examples. One of the earliest and well-known possession narratives is Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw (1898), a novella narrated mostly by an unnamed governess who
is hired by an attractive bachelor to care for his angelic and orphaned niece and
nephew, Flora and Miles, in whom he has little interest. Shortly after arriving at the
children’s home in the remote country estate, Bly, the governess begins seeing the
ghosts of two former servants—the last governess, Miss Jessel, and the uncle’s past
valet, Peter Quint—who are believed to have been involved in an illicit affair to which
the children were exposed. The governess suspects that the children are in secret con-
tact with the spirits, who wish to continue to corrupt and control the children from
beyond the grave. The story then traces what the governess believes is her heroic
struggle against the evil entities for the children’s souls, which ultimately results in
Flora’s hysterical illness and departure from Bly and Miles’s death. The Turn of the
Screw has generated a great deal of critical debate largely centering on the governess’s
reliability.16 Because she is the only person who actually sees the ghosts, many scholars
have approached the spirits as manifestations of her psychological instability, possibly
the result of repressed desire for the children’s uncle or her need as an inexperienced
young woman to prove her mettle by constructing for herself an epic battle against evil.
Defenders of a supernatural interpretation of the novel claim that our resistance to this
reading results from our skepticism regarding the existence of ghosts, a skepticism that
James and his original audience members would not have shared.17
My purpose here is not to take a side in this debate, for such a determination is
unnecessary to my point. Regardless of whether or not the ghosts are real, The Turn of
the Screw taps into fears about the potential damage that could be done to children
raised by hired help; after all, there is no debating that Jessel and Quint were immoral
guardians when alive and that they had a pernicious influence upon the children. It is
Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, who says that Quint was “definitely . . . bad” and “too
free” with both Miles and everyone else (51). When the governess surmises that Quint
was a “hound,” Mrs. Grose exclaims in response, “I’ve never seen one like him. He did

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what he wished” (58). It is also Mrs. Grose who insinuates that Miss Jessel left her
position because she was pregnant with Quint’s child. In addition, it is quite clear that
the children’s virtue has been tainted by exposure to the two servants. When Flora falls
ill, her language becomes so shocking that Mrs. Grose is driven nearly to collapse: she
reports that she heard “‘[f]rom that child—horrors. . . . On my honour, Miss, she says
things–!’ But at this evocation, she broke down; she dropped with a sudden cry upon
my sofa” (108). Similarly, Miles himself admits that he was expelled from school
because he “said things” that were “too bad” for the masters to repeat in their letter
announcing Miles’s dismissal (119). Even if the ghosts of Jessel and Quint are not real,
their living incarnations have possessed the children in terms of a moral degradation
that extends beyond the grave. And the children’s initial exposure to these sources of
corruption occurred because they lacked proper parental figures to protect them from
such influences.
James’s text remains ambiguous enough for critics to debate the reality of the ghosts,
but many other possession narratives offer definitive evidence that a supernatural entity
is indeed at work. For example, William Friedkin’s cinematic version of The Exorcist
gives us visual proof of Regan’s possession when her head turns a full 360° and she
levitates above her bed. In addition, we see the devil in its actual form during several
brief flashes in the film. If possession clearly arises from the presence of an evil spirit,
as in Friedkin’s film, it would seem difficult to attribute the child’s wicked behavior to
familial shortcomings. In fact, technically speaking Regan is not evil at all but merely
the temporary puppet of a malevolent force, so how could her parents be at fault?
Yet even a work as blatantly supernatural as The Exorcist still suggests that failed
family structures allow demons to sidle into the home. After all, Regan’s parents are
divorced, and her father has so shirked his paternal responsibilities that he doesn’t even
bother to call his daughter on her birthday. Regan’s mother, Chris, is a successful
actress who employs several people to care for Regan while she works, but it is clear
that the girl is often left somewhat unsupervised. Chris only belatedly discovers that
Regan has an imaginary friend, Captain Howdy, with whom she communicates via a
Ouija board and by then it seems too late: the demon has already gained access to the
vulnerable child. Paid childcare, it seems, is no substitute for the careful vigilance of a
parent. In the novel, Regan-as-demon even condemns Chris for putting her career
above caring for her child: “It is you who have done it! Yes, you with your career before
anything, your career before your husband, before her” (349). Apparently, the sins of a
single, successful working mother are worse than those of an almost entirely absent
father. Regan’s possession ultimately forces her mother to resume duties as a full-time,
stay-at-home mom, for her condition requires constant supervision and care. At the
end, Chris is “reformed,” having learned to put motherhood well ahead of Hollywood,
and Regan returns to a state of innocence, a transformation that by extension could
suggest that contamination can be removed if the child is given “proper” parental
attention in time to rescue him or her.18
Other more contemporary films about possession employ similar patterns, linking
the child’s vulnerability to possession to a disrupted or dysfunctional family. In The
Last Exorcism, the possessed Nell has lost her mother, whom she proclaims was her
best friend, leaving her at the mercy of her overprotective and alcoholic father (as well
as the local Satanists). In other films, children are influenced by spirits rather than
being literally possessed by them, but this development is still due to rifts in their
relationships with their parents. In The Others (2001), a film set in England just

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following World War II, a brother and sister begin communicating with what appears
to be the ghosts of former inhabitants of the house. The children seem particularly
vulnerable to this communication because they are unhappy in their home life. Both
are photosensitive and cannot go out during the day and spend most of their time
locked in dark rooms away from the rest of the world in their already isolated mansion.
Furthermore, their father has been lost in battle, and their mother, suffering from both
the loss of her husband and the strain of raising children alone under such difficult
circumstances, is distant and easily angered. Having no meaningful relationships, the
children seek company elsewhere.
Other examples abound. In Hide and Seek (2005), David Callaway tries to help his
daughter, Emily, cope with the recent suicide of her mother. However, Emily is distant
and disturbed, and David’s attempts to reach her continually fail. It is at this point that
Emily announces a new imaginary friend, Charlie, who is either responsible for a series
of increasingly violent acts or who influences Emily to commit them. In Shattered Lives
(2009), a young girl, Rachel, is neglected and verbally abused by her unhappily married
mother, who is having an affair and forcing Rachel to collude with her to keep it secret.
It is during such a period of familial strain that two of Rachel’s harlequin dolls begin
communicating with her, eventually convincing her to stab her mother to death. It is
never clear whether the dolls are actually demonic spirits masquerading as toys or if
Rachel is simply imagining the whole thing as some sort of coping mechanism, but, as
with The Turn of the Screw, I would argue that the truth is mostly moot. What is
important is that the child’s vulnerability to this influence, whether real or imagined, is
directly due to parental failure.19
Possession thus functions, I argue, as an analog for those bad influences that infil-
trate children’s lives when left unsupervised and which are frequently cited as causing
juvenile crime, such as satanic music and violent films and video games.20 For girls,
fears additionally center on sexual promiscuity, though the prime reason cited is much
the same: the media—music videos and lyrics, advertising, toys, and films—sexualizes
the adolescent girl, leading her to believe that her worth derives primarily from her
value as a sexual object for men. That possession narratives symbolize these other
forms of corruption seems obvious when we consider for a moment why the possessed
child is so horrible in the first place. Miles and Flora swear and while we are not privy
to their exact words, they are likely sexual in nature, considering that the children have
been exposed to a sexual affair. Regan becomes a physically repulsive creature who
secretes all kinds of bodily fluids, but even before that hideous transformation is com-
plete, her behavior disturbs in sexual and violent ways: she screams obscenities and
suggestive invitations at her male doctors, then later masturbates with a crucifix,
shoving her mother’s face into her bloody genitalia before slapping her across the room.
In The Last Exorcist, Nell, in the throes of possession, suggestively licks the shoulder
of a woman who tries to comfort her and shortly after cruelly bludgeons a cat into a
bloody mess, thus confirming that she is responsible for the slaughter of her father’s
livestock as well, whose carcasses had been found earlier. Possessed children exhibit
exactly the same type of unchecked aggression and sexuality we fear they would
develop if exposed to improper influences.
Possessed children are not always saved, but if the supernatural origins of the beha-
vior are confirmed, then the narrative is at least comforting in that it assures the audi-
ence that the child’s corruption is due to outside sources from which he or she could be
protected by dutiful parents. The problem is, in other words, preventable. The

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possession narrative thus argues that good parents have control over children’s fates
and that the moral degradation of children happens only in “those” families that have
failed.

THE FERAL CHILD

Tales of feral children have as long a lineage as possession narratives: after all, Romu-
lus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were supposedly suckled by a wolf. While the
most famous—and perhaps optimistic—versions of the feral tale focus on stories like
this in which children are raised by sympathetic animals, contemporary feral children
are more often the victims of shocking abuse and neglect. One of the more notorious
cases is that of Genie, who in 1970 was discovered to have been confined to a single
room for twelve years.21 To categorize such unfortunate children as “evil” would seem
the height of callousness, but within the horror genre, feral children are transformed
into savage creatures whose animalistic behavior—typically, brutal acts of murder,
cannibalism, and even rape—negates any capacity for pity.
The feral child of contemporary fiction and film thus demonstrates a far less opti-
mistic view of human nature than that held in previous eras. In the Romantic period,
human nature was considered by many to be naturally moral and civilization a con-
taminating influence that caused its inhabitants to deviate from original virtue. Under
such a belief system, the uncivilized child was exalted for its purity and was thought to
exhibit more integrity than the cultured, a kin to the so-called noble savage. In his 1841
essay “Self-Reliance,” for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed, “What pretty
oracles nature yields us . . . in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes!
. . . Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their
faces, we are disconcerted” (260). Subsequent authors invented a variety of boy char-
acters who would have received Emerson’s praise. Huck Finn, for example, suffers a
most degenerate upbringing under the “care” of his Pap—one that could certainly be
considered equivalent to that of contemporary feral children. And yet while Huck is
never quite as “sivilized” and educated as his companion Tom Sawyer, his capacity for
moral reasoning surpasses Tom’s and many of the supposedly more sophisticated fig-
ures in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel. Likewise, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 collection The
Jungle Book, Mowgli is depicted as inherently superior to the animals that raise him
and later proves to be more advanced than many of the humans with whom he
associates once he returns to civilization. Other characters who might fit the positive
mold of the feral child include Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (not Disney’s version of the
character) and the Lost Boys of Peter Pan.22 As long as human nature was believed to
be generally good, the feral child could prove a positive figure.23
Soon, the negative potential of the feral child would become the focus, reminding us
of the savagery lurking beneath the masks of humanity. Such is the case in Richard
Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), in which children raised in a supposedly
primitive Caribbean environment prove at times to be as barbaric as the pirates who
take them hostage. Even before their exposure to pirate culture, the children are
described as abusing the wildlife around their home, capturing birds and, with each
one, “deciding by ‘Eena, deena, dina, do,’ or some such rigmarole, whether to twist its
neck or let it go free” (9). And the narrator further tells us that their mother “meant
practically nothing to her children” and that they loved their father “a little more,”

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mostly because when he arrived on horseback, he allowed them “the ceremony of

riding home [with him] on his stirrups” (44, 45). Hughes’s novel suggests that savagery
just might be the natural state of childhood, which will run rampant if children are left
to their own devices.
Golding picked up where Hughes left off with Lord of the Flies (1954). The plot is
familiar to most: a group of schoolboys are stranded on a desert island and for a time
they manage to cooperate. However, soon a small band of self-designated hunters led
by a boy named Jack form a savage society and turn their aggression on those who
resist their authority, seducing or forcing all but two boys—Ralph, the former leader of
the entire group, and his self-appointed advisor, Piggy—into their clan. The result is the
accidental group murder of an innocent boy they mistook for a marauding beast, fol-
lowed by the purposeful killing of Piggy, culminating in a final hunt for Ralph, whose
head the boys intend to post on a pike. The brutal slaying of Ralph by the feral mob of
boys is only prevented by the timely arrival of the cavalry, in the form of the British
navy.
Since Golding’s novel, few feral child narratives have gained much notoriety. And yet
feral child narratives still comprise a considerable portion of the evil child genre.
Rarely, however, does the feral child appear alone, for the solitary feral child is not a
very intimidating enemy. While unsettling, he or she often poses little threat, bearing
some resemblance to a rabid Chihuahua. When the feral child does prove dangerous, it
is usually because adults do not expect attack from a supposed innocent and are hesi-
tant to retaliate, even after he or she reveals their murderous intentions. 24 For that
reason, feral children, as we will see, are often assembled into far more hazardous
hordes.
Feral children also have several incarnations, their defining feature being that their
appetites and beliefs supersede the pity and empathy that prevent the “civilized” from
operating according to similar desires. Sometimes they appear as animalistic creatures
driven purely by base hungers and instincts. Zombie and vampire children are common
examples of this type, perhaps one of the earliest examples being young Karen in Night
of the Living Dead (1968), who, after turning into a zombie, feeds on her dead father
and kills her mother with a trowel. In 30 Days of Night (2007), a small group of people
who have survived a vampire attack discover a little girl, pigtails tied up in blue rib-
bons, feeding on a corpse. She says, “I’m done playing with this one. You want to play
with me now?” before viciously attacking the group. Zombie or vampire children are so
dominated by their animalistic hungers that they will quite eagerly cannibalize their
loved ones or any adults who try to help, which is of course one of the prime reasons
why they—and feral children in general—are such disturbing monsters.25
Other films employ some unexplained disease or mysterious event in order to trans-
form children into single-mindedly bloodthirsty creatures. Such is the case in the
Spanish film Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), in which a British couple discover that
children have exterminated all of the adults on the island on which they are vacation-
ing. While the exact cause of their spontaneous homicidal impulses is not specified, it is
clear that the desire is contagious, for new children are brought into the pack simply
through contact with its current members. In The Children (1980), a busload of kids are
exposed to a toxic cloud that causes them to be able to burn any adult they encounter
into a crisp on contact, and they apparently enjoy this newfound ability a great deal. In
a 2008 film of the same name, two families sharing New Year’s Eve together discover
that their children all seem to have caught the same mysterious disease, causing them

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to vomit, cough up disturbing amounts of mucous (which special effects assures us is

simply teeming with bacteria), and finally to plot the vicious murders of their parents.
Likewise, in The Plague (2006), all children under the age of nine across the globe enter
into a deep catatonic state, only to awaken ten years later in a sort of zombie-like
trance, motivated solely by a desire to kill all adults.
Feral children are not always zombie-like creatures, though. Quite frequently, they
appear as the offspring of a “primitive” society, one whose system of values contrasts
sharply with our supposedly more civilized set that purports to value human life and
abhor cruelty. Perhaps the most infamous example is King’s 1977 short story “Children
of the Corn,” in which kids in a small town in Nebraska formulate their own religion,
which has one central mandate: no one over the age of eighteen is allowed to live. As a
result, adults who enter the town are quickly and gruesomely dispatched, most often
crucified. In addition, upon reaching their nineteenth birthday, the children willingly
forfeit their lives by walking into the cornfield, which is inhabited by a demonic crea-
ture that the children refer to simply as “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.” The chil-
dren’s religion, which has a decidedly Old Testament flavor, aligns them with other
primitive religions that relied on blood-sacrifices to appease the gods. 26
The feral child as primitive religious fanatic is the subject of the low-budget film
Beware! Children at Play (1989) as well. The film is set in a small town in New Jersey
where kids are being lured away to join a society of savage children in the forest,
known to the remaining kids as Woodies. The Woodies, under the leadership of an
older boy who refers to himself as Grendel, periodically attack the adults in town and
feed on their flesh. Grendel was once a normal boy named Glenn Randall, whose
transformation into the leader of this cannibalistic clan is detailed in the opening
scenes of the film. As a young boy, Glenn was on a camping trip with his father, whom
we later discover was a literary scholar. His father inadvertently stepped into a bear
trap from which he could not escape, and Glenn watched him die a slow and painful
death. His dying commandment to his son was, “You must do as I say,” and then, in
an apparent delirium, he recited the words, “Tear it to pieces. Bite through the bones.
Gulp the blood. Gobble the flesh.” Glenn apparently takes his father quite literally
because immediately after he dies, we see Glenn cut into his father’s stomach and
gleefully fondle his innards, repeating his father’s dying words, which then become the
mantra that all of the Woodies chant as they kill and devour their human prey. The
references to Beowulf make it clear that the children should be seen as a sort of ancient
tribe.27
Offspring (2009) contains a similar group, only this set consists of adults—or at least
two parent figures—as well as children. Based on Jack Ketchum’s 1991 novel of the
same name, itself a sequel to Ketchum’s 1980 Off Season, the film weaves its opening
credits with images of newspaper articles dating from the nineteenth century to the
present day. The articles detail various people who have gone missing, some whose
remains were discovered later, as well as the disappearances of several children. It
seems that a group of savages, descendants of a lighthouse keeper and his family who
went missing in 1848, are largely responsible. Dressed in costumes that could have been
pilfered from the set of Clan of the Cave Bear, the family randomly attack people,
chopping off and hauling away body parts that will serve as provisions. The film
depicts the family as communicating in a primitive tongue, and clearly they have some
sort of religious beliefs as well, for they see babies as a source of power. The children

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are as brutal as their parents, perfectly adapted to the culture in which they have been
reared.
Feral child narratives also include members of inbred families or so-called redneck
or hillbilly societies. In many cases, we see only the adult results of such upbringings
with the childhoods of such people only a shadowy innuendo, as in films like Spider
Baby (1968), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Mother’s
Day (1980), an episode of the X-Files entitled “Home” (1996), and Rob Zombie’s
House of 1,000 Corpses (2003) and the sequel The Devil’s Rejects (2005). Connected to
these types of plots are narratives involving “gangs” of children raised in violent or
abusive settings who mimic the aggression around them with little remorse for the pain
they cause. One of the more recent and disturbing examples of this type of narrative is
the British film Eden Lake (2008), which narrates the story of a young couple, Jenny
and Steve, who take a weekend holiday to a remote lake. Their idyllic getaway is
interrupted by a group of young hoodlums whose behavior becomes increasingly dis-
respectful and threatening. When they steal Steve’s car, he finally confronts them and is
almost stabbed but instead accidentally kills the beloved Rottweiler of the leader, Brett,
an act that escalates the gang’s violence to a shocking brutality. For the rest of the film,
the young teens stalk Jenny and Steve. Eden Lake has precedents in Anthony Burgess’s
1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, Devil Times Five (1974), and The New Kids (1985).
Thus, the category of evil child I am terming “feral” rarely resemble the stories of
abandoned children raised by animals or those prevented from being properly socia-
lized and nurtured due to extreme forms of neglect and abuse. Indeed, such unfortunate
children could not function as subjects for evil children stories. The reason is quite
simple: sympathy would interfere with the terror and disgust that the evil child incites
and impede our ability to support the violent measures protagonists often need to take
in order to survive their encounters with feral children. Within the evil child genre, feral
children are incapable of rehabilitation and can only be dealt with through a brutality
equivalent to their own.
And yet, at the same time, the feral child narrative does hearken back to these tra-
ditional tales by depicting children as reduced to savagery rather than embracing it of
their own accord. If feral children can be deemed evil, they do not willingly decide to
be so. As horrific as these packs of feral youth are, many of the texts in which they
appear suggest that the children ultimately are not culpable for their actions but rather
have been corrupted by exposure to adult cruelty. After all, lurking in the background
of Lord of the Flies is a civilization ravaged by atomic warfare. Similarly, Who Can Kill
a Child? opens with shocking footage documenting the atrocities done to children
during such horrific events as the Holocaust, the Civil War between India and Paki-
stan, and the Korean War; the implication is that the children are not inherently evil
but merely are striking back against a society that has long abused them. 28 And as at
least one critic has noted, King’s short story is infused with references to the Vietnam
War, thus implying that the conflict in Southeast Asia has influenced the children to
engage in their own forms of violence; that the children sacrifice themselves to their
corn god when they turn nineteen—the average age of the Vietnam soldier—only
cements this suggestion.29 Is it any surprise that the offspring of such a society turn
against it? If the feral or savage child represents the basest potential of human nature,
these narratives also suggest that children imitate their elders. If adults would learn to
treat each other civilly, then perhaps children would follow suit. 30

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Ultimately, feral children are horrifying because they remind us of the animalistic
nature that all humans share and would be reduced to if placed in similar circum-
stances. But what is even more grotesque is witnessing human acts of savagery com-
mitted by one as supposedly innocent as a child, a savagery so appalling that it is
beyond redemption. It is for this reason—and the fact that the feral child often appears
in a horde and thus is not individualized to an extent that promotes much sympathy—
that so many narratives can kill off feral children without causing much moral quand-
ary on the part of the viewer. As Tom Shankland, director of the 2008 The Children,
noted about his own film, “In society we’re not supposed to harm children, but in the
movie, by the second half, everyone seems to get a little bloodthirsty towards them
because of how evil they are” (“Tom Shankland Talks”). His description holds true for
feral children in general. The offenses they commit are just too repulsive, too inhuman,
for forgiveness to be an option, and thus the texts can glory in providing readers or
viewers with the catharsis of bloody retribution but not before planting some haunting
suspicions about the role the adult world plays in creating such monsters.
Ultimately, though, there is something relatively simple and safe about the message
behind the feral child narrative. After all, it’s not too hard to accept that societal fail-
ings—war, careless pollution, adult violence—create roving packs of “savage” children.
And we must wonder, too, if the social critique proffered is sincere or merely included
in an attempt to elevate a film marked by graphic atrocities to one with a moral pur-
pose. At the same time, the possessed child narrative seems in many ways more insi-
dious, conjuring demons to punish families for not adhering to culturally dominant (i.
e., white, middle-class) ideologies of parenting. What is remarkable is that both types of
narratives depict evil children who are the unfortunate products of a faulty family or
society and so, in the end, are not really so evil after all.

THE ESSAYS
Space has not allowed me to examine other important subtypes of evil children, which
include psychics and superkids, monstrous newborns, and child killers. Nor have I been
able to give much attention to the ways in which gender, race, nationality, and class
figure into the conventions of the subtype and the genre as a whole. Fortunately, many
of the topics that I am unable to cover in my introduction have been taken up by the
contributors to this collection.
In “My Baby Ate the Dingo: The Visual Construction of the Monstrous Infant in
Horror Film,” Steffen Hantke explores a technique he terms visual reticence—a direc-
tor’s refusal, for at least most of the film, to provide viewers with a clear visual image
of the creature (a technique used to its fullest potential in The Blair Witch Project
[1999]). Hantke argues against the common perception that visual reticence is a more
sophisticated and effective means of creating terror and instead examines other factors
that influence its deployment, using Rosemary’s Baby and It’s Alive to illustrate his
points. Rosemary’s Baby, Hantke argues, is more interested in exploring the pressures
of motherhood and the delusions it may cause the isolated and possibly hysterical
Rosemary than it is in the physical being of the antichrist, and this partly explains
Polanski’s decision to withhold a final visual disclosure of the eponymous child. By
contrast, Cohen’s It’s Alive, which features a lethal newborn, is more interested in the
way that society responds to monsters that actually exist; therefore, the creature must

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be displayed. CGI has become refined and inexpensive enough today to be used within
even relatively low-budget films, and Hantke concludes his essay by considering the
developments that may occur within the monstrous infant subgenre as a result by
analyzing two recent films, a 2008 remake of It’s Alive by Joseph Rusnak and Vincenzo
Natali’s Splice (2009).
If Hantke is interested in the factors that affect how (and if) a monstrous infant is
displayed in film, in “Monstrous Children as Harbingers of Mortality: A Psychological
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child,” Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg are
more concerned with why certain infants are perceived as monstrous in the first place.
In the novel, Ben, the fifth child of Harriet and David Lovatt, seems more animal than
human, not only in his appearance and eating habits, but also in his tendency to inflict
harm on those around him. To understand why Ben’s particular characteristics prove
especially disturbing, both to readers and to his family, Sullivan and Greenberg take an
approach informed by their backgrounds in psychology: terror management theory
(TMT). A theory that has been validated empirically by experiments, TMT holds that
humans are motivated to transcend their mortal limits via various types of “immor-
tality striving”; the two most pertinent to The Fifth Child, Sullivan and Greenberg
claim, are the biological mode—a drive to produce offspring who will preserve not only
their parents’ genes and deepest held values—and the cultural mode, a desire to achieve
immortality through culturally-validated accomplishments, such as a legacy of artistic
achievements or philanthropic deeds. The Lovatts’ need to produce a large family—
they had aimed to have six children until Ben arrived—in spite of their inability to
financially and emotionally handle such a horde and in the face of family disapproval,
demonstrates their rejection of the cultural mode of immortality striving in favor of the
biological. According to Sullivan and Greenberg, Ben is monstrous because he points
out that the Lovatts’ immortality striving is ultimately a doomed venture. Not only
does Ben’s “creatureliness” remind the Lovatts and readers that, like all animals, we
will one day die, but he also demolishes his parents’ hopes to achieve symbolic
immortality through the biological mode: he breaks up their immediate family, disrupts
their ties with their extended family, and refuses to function as a vehicle through which
the Lovatts could transmit their moral values and beliefs into the future, finding
instead a more suitable set of companions in a local biker gang. Thus, Sullivan and
Greenberg conclude, Ben is monstrous because, in these various ways, he represents the
doomed nature of immortality striving.
Sullivan and Greenberg offer a psychological explanation for why a savage and
inassimilable child like Ben could prove monstrous. By contrast, the evil children that
William Wandless studies in “Spoil the Child: Unsettling Ethics and the Representation
of Evil” are far different in nature. Strange, certainly, but hardly sub-human, the chil-
dren in the films Wandless scrutinizes—Rob Zombie’s 2007 adaptation of John Car-
penter’s Halloween (1978), Joshua (2007), Home Movie (2008), and Orphan (2009)—are
psychological and moral abominations whose brand of “evil” frustrates facile psycho-
logical explanations. The four movies Wandless considers all offer potential explana-
tions that help viewers dismiss the distressing possibility that an evil child could emerge
from “normal” and “healthy” situations, but those provided by Joshua and Home
Movie offer only a modicum of comfort. Zombie’s decision to give Michael Myers a
dysfunctional childhood seems to suggest that the seemingly random acts of violence
we know he will later commit as an adult are legible psychological responses to his
early experiences. Not all of the murders Michael commits as an adult, though, can be

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explained as resulting from Michael’s childhood experiences: as Wandless points out,

Michael kills people whom—according to the film’s psychological logic—he should
have no desire to murder. However, the brutalities Michael commits as a child are
extenuated to a large degree, thus making Zombie’s film perhaps “the second most
comforting film of the new millennium,” according to Wandless. Likewise, the movie
Joshua initially seems to establish family dynamics that, while different from that of
Michael Myers, still promise to account for the title character’s bizarre and malicious
behavior. A cold, distant, and yet uncannily mature child, nine-year-old Joshua appears
to get pleasure (or at least satisfaction) from the fact that his new baby sister, Lily—
once the apple of her parents’ eyes—has become a cantankerous infant, much as he
was as a child; there is even evidence that Joshua is inciting Lily’s discontent. Even
though Joshua proves abnormally devious and cruel—responsible for his mother’s des-
cent into madness, his grandmother’s death, and his father’s false imprisonment for
child abuse—viewers initially assume that Joshua’s behavior is an extreme version of
sibling rivalry And yet at the end of film, what we find is that Joshua actually has been
arranging matters so that he can end up with his beloved uncle. That he has a motive
at all is comforting; that he also commands the powers of manipulation necessary to
get his way is not.
As my earlier description of the children in Home Movie made clear, Jack and
Emily Poe are much more disturbing figures, killing numerous animals and ultimately
murdering and likely cannibalizing their parents. In stark contrast to their gregarious
parents, the twins are, even from the beginning, almost entirely devoid of affect and
affection except for a brief interlude during which they seem miraculously healed and
freely gambol with their parents, behavior later revealed to be a ruse. But while we
could diagnose the Poe children as sociopaths and thus attribute their alarming aber-
rations to psychological disorder, Wandless shows that the film provides reason to
believe that their appetite for human flesh may have been inspired by various stimuli to
which they were exposed by their parents, especially a bedtime story featuring a dragon
who earns the trust of children only to devour them. 31 Even if we decide to attribute
their penchant for human fare to misinterpreted cues, we ultimately cannot forget the
“performative self-awareness” that the children demonstrated. Wandless concludes his
essay with a discussion of Orphan, which, he claims, incites none of the anxiety
prompted by Joshua or the Poe children, for its evil child Esther is revealed to be a 33-
year-old homicidal woman named Lena, a fact that explains away her strange behavior,
her sexual interest in her adoptive father, and her hostility toward her mother. In
addition, since she is adult, Lena is entirely accountable for her actions, and thus we
can cheer for her death at the end of the film without any reservation. For these rea-
sons, Orphan is the most reassuring of the four films and perhaps even, as Wandless
declares, “the most comforting film of the new millennium.”
We might expect evil children to appear in horror films such as those that Wandless
studies, but they also have invaded children’s literature, as Holly Blackford makes clear
in her essay entitled “Private Lessons from Dumbledore’s ‘Chamber of Secrets’: The
Riddle of the Evil Child in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Blackford focuses
on Tom Riddle, who, as the child precursor of the evil Lord Voldemort, is defined by
many of the wizard adults as innately evil. However, Blackford demonstrates that in
many ways Tom is merely a reflection of a “hidden curriculum” that Hogwarts School
of Witchcraft and Wizardry refuses to acknowledge. Blackford demonstrates that
Tom’s tendency to hoard objects, to assemble a questionable group of peers, and to

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manipulate could all be seen as behaviors encouraged at the school. Tom is thus the
embodiment of unacknowledged lessons at Hogwarts that its officials wish to deny; in
labeling Tom as evil, teachers and administrators can avoid culpability for the demonic
figure he became. Blackford also calls upon queer theory to further explain Tom’s
development. Noting that Harry displays many of the same characteristics as Tom, she
asks why Harry’s story is one of success and Tom’s that of moral failure. Blackford
concludes that the best way to approach Half-Blood Prince is to view Tom’s narrative
as a failed coming-out story that creates “a very closeted monster.”
Meheli Sen’s “Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent
Bollywood Cinema” reminds us that interpretations of evil children narratives must
take into consideration the conventions of the genre within which the text is situated as
well as the status of children within the culture from which the story arises. For that
very reason, Sen begins her essay with a brief history of Hindi horror and Bollywood’s
recent engagement with the genre. Sen takes as her texts three films—Vaastu Shastra
(2004), Phoonk (2008), and Gauri (2007). While these films may appear to support the
“modern, metropolitan ethos” to which their targeted viewers likely adhere, Sen claims
that instead they dismantle it, and children are the site upon which these ideological
critiques are constructed. An exemplary possessed child narrative, Vaastu Shastra
implicitly condemns modern evolutions in the family that leave the child vulnerable to
the presence of nefarious forces. In the film, traditional gender roles are reversed: the
mother, Dr. Jhilmil Rao, and her live-in sister, Radz, leave the home to work while
father, Viraag, acts as primary caretaker to their son, Rohan. By the end of the film,
Radz and Viraag are dead and—worse—have become members of the undead horde
that haunts the house. While Jhilmil and Rohan survive the onslaught, Rohan’s final
smile into the camera at the film’s conclusion, reminiscent of Damien’s smirk at the end
of The Omen, lets us know that Rohan remains a minion of evil, forever damaged by
the lack of traditional family structures.
If Vaastu Shastra is ultimately a tragic film, Phoonk proves much more optimistic.
Phoonk precisely illustrates Clover’s theory that possession films contain two entwined
narratives: the story of the possession and the story of male conversion from White
Science to Black Magic. This transformation is exemplified by father and husband,
Rajiv, whose daughter’s possession forces him to embrace more mystical aspects of his
culture which he has hitherto rejected. Of all three films, Gauri is the most con-
servative. The film charts the return of married couple, Sudeep and Roshni, and their
daughter, Shivani, to the home in which they lived before Shivani’s birth, where they
conceived and later decided to abort their first child. Upon arriving at the home, the
couple discovers that it is haunted by the ghost of their unborn daughter, who attacks
the family and possesses Shivani, whom she threatens to kill. In the end, however,
Gauri relents when the family promises to give her the love that the film suggests she
rightly deserves. As with Vaastu Shastra and Phoonk, then, Gauri undermines a
modern ethos in its anti-abortion stance.
Sara Williams traces similar themes in a more well-known Western text in “‘The
Power of Christ Compels You’: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal Psychodrama in
The Exorcist.” Her subject is not the infamous Friedkin film which overtly attributes
Regan’s possession to a supernatural entity but Blatty’s original novel, which, Williams
claims, purposefully links Regan’s condition to the history of hysteria and the Freudian
concept of the Oedipus complex. Williams starts by tracing the study of hysteria from
Jean-Martin Charcot’s work with his patient Augustine to Sigmund Freud and Josef

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Breuer’s interactions with Dora and Anna O., respectively. Williams demonstrates that
the behavior of Regan while possessed—her unnatural bodily contortions, her sexually-
suggestive behavior—bear an uncanny resemblance to those hysterical patients who
came before her. But if Regan has deluded herself into believing she is possessed, she is
certainly not the only character in the novel who does. Her mother, for one, embraces
the supernatural explanation. Williams argues that Chris’s beliefs can be explained as
an instance of Shared Psychotic Disorder, or Folie à Deux. The other priests involved
in the case, Merrin and Karras, also have good reason to invest in the idea that Regan
is possessed: Merrin has made the defeat of Pazuzu, the specific demon supposedly
inhabiting Regan, his life’s work, and Karras is having a crisis of faith. Thus, a case of
Folie à Deux becomes one of Folie à Plusieurs, a mass hysteria that seems to have
spread to audience members of the film as well, for whom the film, in the words of one
critic, “scared” back to church in droves.
As the title of Robin Hoffman’s essay “How to See the Horror: The Hostile Fetus in
Rosemary’s Baby and Alien” makes clear, her piece shifts us away from the possessed
child and toward another significant type: the monstrous unborn. According to Hoff-
man, in the years surrounding these two films, technological advancements dramati-
cally altered society’s sense of the fetus. In 1965, just a few years prior to the release of
Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Life magazine published Lennart Nilsson’s famous in vitro
photography series “Drama of Life before Birth.” Although this technology would not
become available to the average pregnant woman for some time, the event fore-
shadowed developments in her treatment to come: specifically, her increased subjuga-
tion to both her fetus and to the medical professionals who controlled the technology
that would increasingly be seen as necessary to ensuring the fetus’s wellbeing. The
decade leading up to Alien (1979) saw the passing of Roe v. Wade (1973), the increas-
ing availability of ultrasound technology, and also the birth of the world’s first test-tube
baby in 1978—thus, even the zygote had become visible, constructed under the eyes of
laboratory technicians rather in the womb. Although Rosemary’s Baby arrived when
the prospect of visibility was still an innovation, Alien appeared when such technology
had become a familiar aspect of life. Hoffman argues that both films address complex
reactions to the availability of this new medical technology.
Catherine Fowler and Rebecca Kambuta’s essay “Extreme Human Makeovers:
Supernanny, the Unruly Child, and Adulthood in Crisis” brings us back to a more
familiar domestic space. Though the children in Supernanny are not as wicked as those
we find in quintessential evil child narratives and certainly not supernaturally so, one
can hardly deny that they are, as Fowler and Kambuta put it, “tiny terrors.” Fowler
and Kambuta begin by discussing Supernanny’s place within the genre of makeover
television. They argue that Supernanny, with its supposed focus on family dynamics,
appears to differ from other makeover shows more concerned with amending surface
appearances—unshapely noses, unflattering wardrobes, or unsuitable home décor—in
order to improve people’s lives. However, as Fowler and Kambuta point out, Super-
nanny also remains on the surface, fixing children’s behavior rather than investigating
the root causes of it. This characteristic, among others, makes Supernanny very much a
member of the makeover genre, the originary show of a third wave of makeover tele-
vision that Fowler and Kambuta say focuses on renovating relationships via the help of
allegedly more knowledgeable authorities, such as the star of Supernanny, Jo Frost.
Fowler and Kambuta demonstrate that ultimately Supernanny proclaims that it is not
so much the misbehaving children who need to be madeover but rather their guardians,

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who have relinquished their parental authority and, in the process, become like children
themselves. Bizarrely, Supernanny in many ways resembles a possessed child narrative:
a terrible force has been allowed to take over the household because of parental
shortcomings, but instead of inviting an exorcist, the family consults Jo Frost. Judging
by online reviews of the show, though, it seems that some viewers would prefer to
struggle with Satan than to face the judgments of a smug British nanny.

CONCLUSION: A NEW TURN TO THE GENRE?

The title of the 1976 film about a pack of homicidal youngsters asked a provocative
question, Who Can Kill A Child? The question at first seemed rhetorical: by inter-
weaving opening credits accompanied by the eerie sound of children singing with
shocking footage documenting a variety of wartime atrocities done to children, the
movie supplies an obvious answer—well, apparently lots of adults can. However, the
movie also shows that outside of the world of war, killing a child, regardless of how evil
and dangerous he or she may be, is no easy undertaking. In one scene, for example, a
father allows his tearful daughter to lead him off by the hand toward the horde of her
savage compatriots, even though he is well aware that they have killed all the adults on
the island and that he will certainly face the same fate, he simply cannot resist the tug
of paternal protectiveness. Violence against children is difficult for both the fictional
characters who face this prospect and the audience members who witness the con-
sequences of their decisions. Certainly one of the most dangerous weapons that evil
children wield are our presumptions of their innocence and reluctance to deal them a
fatal blow.32
But the protagonists of Who Can Kill a Child?—Tom and his pregnant wife, Evelyn
—learn from the devoted father’s mistake: when a young child threatens to kill Evelyn,
Tom shoots him without hesitation. Although both husband and wife are appalled by
what Tom has done, the gang of children threatening them temporarily disbands.
“Nobody dared to attack a child, to kill one of them,” Tom says. “That’s why they
weren’t afraid, but now they are.” Other protagonists also kill off the evil children who
plague them. In It Lives Again (1978), Cohen’s sequel to It’s Alive, parents decide that
they must shoot their monstrous newborn when they see him slaughter yet another
person. In The Good Son (1993), a mother has the choice to save either the nephew she
knows to be good or the son she knows to be evil and opts to save her nephew. And in
Pet Sematary, the father gives his son Gage a lethal injection, even though it was his
overwhelming grief over Gage’s death that led him to bury the child in the supernatural
cemetery in the first place, thereby enabling his unnatural resurrection.
Contemporary films express far greater hesitation about punishing even the vilest
child with death. The subtitle of O’Hayre’s book, which I mentioned at the beginning
of this introduction, tells us, after all, to “defeat evil children,” a word carefully swab-
bed clean of all bloody implications. And yet directors have found ways to have their
cake and eat it, too. As Wandless’s essay demonstrates, Orphan sanctions the pleasure
viewers get from watching adopted mother Kate kick Esther in the face and send her
to her death by reassuring them that Esther is, in fact, a woman. But Isabelle Fuhrman,
the actress who played Esther, was just twelve when the movie premiered, and regard-
less of how hard the film tries to convince us that she’s a grown woman, what we wit-
ness is an adult attacking a child.

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Other more recent films have found similar ways for us to savor the fatal punish-
ments inflicted on children without any pangs of conscience. In Case 39 (2010), the
main character, Emily kills her villainous foster daughter, Lilith, but her actions are
endorsed because Lilith is not really a little girl at all but some sort of demon.
Throughout most of the film, however, the demon cloaks itself in Lilith’s body, and it is
a little girl we see Emily try to kill, and we root her on. The New Daughter (2009)
unfolds according to a similar logic, but in this film, the daughter, Louisa, is not a
demon but rather has been selected to become the queen of a hive of all male, human-
sized creatures. Unable to help, all her father, John, can do is watch her descend into
stranger and more hostile behavior. In the middle of the film, John encounters another
man, Roger Wayne, whose granddaughter suffered a similar fate. Rather than stand
idly by, Roger killed the child, he says, because “[s]he wasn’t my granddaughter any-
more. I had to do it. So will you. . . . A father will do anything for his daughter, even
the worst thing.” Roger’s prediction comes true: John causes an explosion that destroys
the hive, Louisa, and himself. Although a very brief moment of CGI confirms that
Louisa indeed has become one of the creatures, what we actually see for the bulk of the
film is a young girl who becomes so evil that the only choice left is to kill her. Films
like Case 39 and The New Daughter operate according to the logic that even though it
looks like a child, talks like a child, and acts like a child, it really isn’t a child at all,
and thus violence is warranted. What strikes me as further noteworthy about Case 39
and The New Daughter is that both feature very familiar faces: Renee Zellweger takes
on the role of Emily, and Kevin Costner plays the part of John James. Both actors have
a history of playing relatively likeable and trustworthy characters and their squeaky
clean appearances lend a special authority to the executions they carry out.
Interestingly, these films mirror a conflict embedded in our justice system. Recent
Supreme Court decisions that ruled death penalties and life sentences for minors
unconstitutional suggest that United States policy toward juvenile criminals, at least at
the most official levels, is moving away from punishment and toward rehabilitation. 33
While these decisions may indicate a shift toward leniency, one cannot assume that
they reflect public opinion or the attitudes of judges and juries. Jeffrey Fagan, for
example, has shown that the number of juveniles serving time in adult jails between
1990 and 2004 rose 208 percent even though juvenile crime decreased dramatically
during that time (95). That more minors ended up in jail though fewer were commit-
ting crimes can only indicate an increased tendency to punish minors with stricter
sentences than juvenile courts allow. Likewise, recent films about evil children have
found ways to dispatch them without any qualms. Lilith and Louisa may be unwitting
vessels for external sources of evil, but nevertheless these films imply that once the child
is corrupted (or has committed a crime), she cannot be redeemed. Death, not rehabi-
litation, is the only option, and the fictional contrivances of the films allow us to wit-
ness the acting out of this belief with an entirely clean conscience. Perhaps in an era so
entirely child- and family-focused, resentment is being secretly harbored about the
expectations that children require never-ending devotion and bring complete fulfill-
ment, and perhaps these films are expressing it.

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NOTES
1 In 1874, for example, Jesse Pomeroy was convicted of killing a ten-year-old girl and four-
year-old boy; he was 14 at the time of the murders. For discussion of British child murderers,
see Loretta Loach’s The Devil’s Children.
2 Numerous articles have been written about the major works in the genre, but I’ve not yet
discovered a book-length study on specifically evil children. Some noteworthy single-author
studies that contain important discussions include Sabine Büssing’s Aliens in the Home: The
Child in Horror Fiction (1987), Ellen Pifer’s Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Con-
temporary Writing and Culture (2000), and Lynn Schofield Clark’s From Angels to Aliens:
Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (2003), but as their titles suggest, these authors
examine child as both demon and doll, angel and alien. Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-
Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993) also focuses on other matters than evil
children, as the title suggests, but her book does examine several important films in the genre,
including Alien (a film about monstrous births if there ever was one), The Exorcist (1973),
The Brood (1979), and Carrie (1974). Evil children also are discussed at some length
throughout the introduction of David J. Hogan’s Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film
(1986) and within his chapter entitled “Turgid Teens,” pp. 122–37; in a chapter entitled “It’s
Alive, I’m Afraid” in David J. Skal’s The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993),
pp. 287–306; and in William Paul’s Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and
Comedy (1994), pp. 255–380. Various edited collections, such as Gary Westfahl and George
Slusser’s Nursery Realms: Children in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
(1999) and Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley’s Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children
(2004), contain relevant work as well.
3 Bixby’s short story became a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone; Golding’s novel led to a
1963 movie; and stage and screen versions of The Bad Seed appeared in 1954 and 1956,
respectively, and the latter was nominated for four Academy Awards. All of these would be
revisited again in later years as well: “It’s a Good Life” resurfaced in Twilight Zone: The
Movie (1983) and a sequel entitled “It’s Still a Good Life” was included in the first season of
a new Twilight Zone series (2002–2003); Golding’s novel would be adapted again in 1990; and
a made-for-television version of The Bad Seed starring Lynn Redgrave and David Carradine
aired in 1985. That all of these texts have seen multiple film adaptations suggests that these
narratives—and the evil children they involve—struck a resounding chord that has reverber-
ated across time.
4 While Rosemary’s Baby was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Ruth Gordon
received an Oscar for her supporting role as Minnie Castevet, The Exorcist easily surpassed
that success with eight nominations and two Academy Awards.
5 I have yet to view it for myself, but the description on Netflix, which remarks that Seytan’s
“highlights include the green-vomit scene, which has been transformed to a mustard-spitting
sequence, and a demonic voice that sounds more like a drunken pirate than Satan,” suggests
that this film is hardly a flattering homage.
6 The book is out of print and hard to find, but the cover proclaims that the story is about “a
child accursed” who summons the protagonist to “a house of terror—and an appointment
with death!”
7 In the 1980s, Koontz penned Twilight (1984), later re-released as The Servants of Twilight
(1990) and made into a film the next year. The novel and film portray a child suspected of
being the antichrist.
8 Featuring children who are both victims of and portals for evil, Saul’s almost annual con-
tributions during this period include Suffer the Children (1977), Punish the Sinners (1978),
Cry for the Strangers (1979), Comes the Blind Fury (1980), When the Wind Blows (1981), The
God Project (1982), Nathaniel (1984), Brainchild (1985), The Unwanted (1987), and Second
Child (1990). The titles of Neiderman’s novels—Brainchild (1981), Child’s Play (1985), Imp
(1985), Perfect Little Angels (1989), Playmates (1987), Teacher’s Pet (1986), Surrogate Child
(1988), Unholy Birth (2007)—proclaim his similar interests. Though Ruby Jean Jensen began
her prolific writing career in the 1970s, her most notable works in this genre are Hear the
Children Cry (1981), Such a Good Baby (1982), Best Friends (1985), Jump Rope (1988),
Vampire Child (1990), Lost and Found (1990), The Reckoning (1992), and The Living Evil

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(1993). Jensen is also responsible for contributions to the “evil doll” genre, which became
popular during this time and which bears an obvious connection to evil children. Jensen’s
Mama (1983), Annabelle (1987), Victoria (1990), and Baby Dolly (1991) likely inspired such
films as Dolly Dearest (1992), Demonic Toys (1992), and, of course, a series of films featuring
the most famous evil doll of all—Chucky. Since Child’s Play’s appearance in 1988, four
sequels have been produced, and there have been rumours of a remake.
9 See, for example, Errickson’s entries entitled “Pin by Andrew Neiderman (1981): The Kids
Want Something to Do,” “Tricycle by Russell Rhodes (1983): Out of His Way, Mister, You
Best Keep,” “William W. Johnstone: The Paperback Covers,” “Ruby Jean Jensen: The
Paperback Covers,” and “The Next by Bob Randall (1981): Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill
Tonight?” The URL for Errickson’s blog is http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/.
10 In one particularly memorable episode, “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” Cartman takes revenge
on the title character, who throughout the episode has humiliated him in various ways.
Cartman ultimately wins the duel between them by killing Scott’s parents and mixing their
corpses in with a vat of chili, a portion of which he offers to Scott. When Scott begins to eat,
Cartman asks, “Do you like it? Do you like it, Scott? I call it, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Tenorman
Chili.’” Scott paws through the bowl, only to find a finger with his mother’s wedding ring still
on it. Realizing what Cartman has done, Scott breaks down into hysterical tears, and Cart-
man begins licking the tears from Scott’s face, exclaiming, “Oh, let me taste your tears, Scott.
Mmm. Your tears are so yummy and sweet.”
11 Thanks to Gregory Colón Semenza for pointing this out.
12 See, for example, “Prodigy” (Season 3, Episode 13, 8 Jan. 2002), “Juvenile” (Season 4, Epi-
sode 9, 22 Nov. 2002), “Damaged” (Season 4, Episode 11, 10 Jan. 2003), “Soulless” (Season
4, Episode 25, 16 May 2003), “Mean” (Season 5, Episode 17, 24 Feb. 2004), “Sick” (Season
5, Episode 19, 30 Mar. 2004), “Conscience” (Season 6, Episode 6, 9 Nov. 2004), “Game”
(Season 6, Episode 14, 8 Feb. 2005), “Web” (Season 7, Episode 21, 9 May 2006), and
“Unorthodox” (Season 9, Episode 13, 15 Jan. 2008).
13 The examples are endless. The first of the six Silent Hill games, which appeared in 1999,
features “grey children,” child-like monsters who carry small knives and attack the player’s
avatar, and one possible ending to the game involves a monstrous, demonic birth. American
McGee’s Alice (2000) transforms Lewis Carroll’s character into a young girl wielding a
butcher knife, whose apron is splattered with blood. The covers of F.E.A.R. (2005) and F.E.
A.R. 2: Project Origin (2009) display a creepy little girl with dark hair hanging in her face;
this character, Alma, menaces players throughout the game. In Bioshock (2007) and Bioshock
II (2010), players must decide whether to “harvest” or rescue the Little Sisters they encounter,
genetically-altered little girls who have been trained to extract a valuable substance called
ADAM from corpses and who are guarded by destructive Big Daddies, humans in armored
diving suits. A third video game in the series is scheduled for 2013. A society of girls named
the Red Crayon Aristocrats terrorizes players in Rule of Rose (2006), and in Limbo (2010),
small shadowy children take inventive measures to try to kill the main character as he navi-
gates through a series of dangerous and puzzling obstacles.
14 Collins’s trilogy consists of The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay
(2010). See also, for example, Lynn Reid Banks’s Angela and Diabola (1997) and Nancy
Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion (2002).
15 Later in the novel, we discover that these are not Rhoda’s first murders. Not only did she
push a puppy out her window when caring for it interfered with playtime, but she also shoved
an elderly woman down the stairs in order to claim the opal pendant that the woman has
promised her in her will.
16 For a succinct and helpful overview of criticism on The Turn of the Screw, see “A Critical
History of The Turn of the Screw” in the most recent Bedford edition of the novella, edited by
Peter G. Beidler.
17 Such critics point out that at the time of the novel’s publication, ghosts were taken so ser-
iously that formal societies had been formed to study the phenomenon systematically. James’s
preface to the 1908 edition of the story alludes to these “factual” reports of ghosts and
describes the ghostly characters of his tale as supernatural rather than psychological entities.
The pervasive belief in ghosts was not merely a background cultural influence for James: his
brother William, the eminent psychologist, was an active participant in the field.

23
 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

18 For these reasons, Gary Hoppenstand has argued that Regan functions “as a type of moral
symbol warning of the dire consequences of an evolving family structure” resulting from a
“rising divorce rate and the [putative] drawbacks of single-parent household” (38).
19 I have simplified the storylines of these films considerably in order to avoid giving away cer-
tain plot twists, but the general point still remains.
20 See Buckingham for discussion of the blame placed upon the film Child’s Play 3 for insti-
gating ten-year olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables to kill two-year-old James Bulger in
1993. In 1996, the death metal band Slayer was sued by the parents of murder victim Elyse
Pahler after one of the killers claimed that Elyse’s “sacrifice” was inspired by one of Slayer’s
songs; see Weiner. See Leavy for an explanation of how and why the Columbine shootings in
1999 were linked to, among other factors, singer Marilyn Manson, the video game Doom,
and the movie The Matrix (1999). The video game Grand Theft Auto has also been impli-
cated in the trials of several child murderers; see Leung.
21 For a history of Genie and feral children in general, see Michael Newton’s Savage Boys and
Wild Girls. For discussion of one of the more recent discoveries of a feral child, see Lane
DeGregory’s article on Danielle Crockett.
22 In Collodi’s novel, Pinocchio is much more mean-spirited, at least until he learns how to be a
“real” boy. In fact, when the Cricket tells Pinocchio that he needs to go to school to learn a
trade, Pinocchio retorts that the only trade that fancies him is “[t]o eat, drink, sleep, and
amuse [him]self, and to lead a vagabond life from morning to night” (27). The Cricket then
says that he pities him for having a wooden head, and Pinocchio throws a hammer at him.
Collodi’s following description allows for the act to have been accidental, but stresses its
brutality as well: “Perhaps he never meant to hit him; but unfortunately it struck him exactly
on the head . . ., and then he remained dried up and flattened against the wall” (27). Yet by
the end of the book, Pinocchio has successfully transformed into a good boy, suggesting that
savagery is a natural part of child development, a claim that would be affirmed by psychol-
ogist G. Stanley Hall in Adolescence (1904).
23 This was true only for white boys from the West, of course. Tarzan, who sounded his first
barbaric yawp in 1912, affirmed author Edgar Rice Burrough’s sense that the civilized races
were naturally superior to all others: as Gail Bederman has made clear, it was because Tarzan
was originally an “aristocratic Anglo-Saxon [that he] always triumphs over beasts and savage
black Africans” (222). See also Kenneth Kidd’s Making American Boys: Boyology and the
Feral Tale.
24 In 28 Days Later, the protagonist fends off and then only reluctantly kills a frenzied boy
zombie. A similar scene occurs in the Spanish film REC (2007) and its faithful American
adaptation, Quarantine (2008), when a young girl, clearly infected with a mutated rabies virus
that reduces people into a zombie-like condition, bites her mother’s face and runs upstairs.
When she is discovered, the police officer leading the group still approaches her as if she is an
innocent child. His inability to view her as anything other than a sweet girl allows her to
attack him viciously.
25 This is not to say that all vampire children fit the mold of the feral child. Claudia in Interview
with the Vampire, for example, kills in a very controlled manner and is civilized enough to fit
into polite society even when still a young vampire. Similarly, Eli, the vampire in Let the
Right One In (2008) and the American rendition Let Me In (2010), very successfully acts the
part of the twelve-year-old girl she appears to be – unless she hasn’ t fed in several days or is in
the presence of blood – solving a Rubik’s cube and leaving affectionate notes that incorporate
Shakespearean references. Both characters are also developed in a way that is uncharacteristic
of the feral child.
26 In fact, as the protagonist of the story Burt discovers, most of the New Testament has been
expurgated from the Bible the children use, but “the Old Testament was intact” (267). In
addition, the children’s church includes a portrait of Christ that “looked like a comic-strip
mural done by a gifted child—an Old Testament Christ, or a pagan Christ that might
slaughter his sheep for sacrifice instead of leading them” (266).
27 Through a ludicrous plot contrivance, this mantra leads the main characters of the film to
discover the origins of Grendel, the leader, for one recognizes in the chant the device of
Anglo-Saxon alliteration and directs the investigators to Beowulf. The chant also obviously

24
 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

bears a close resemblance to that used in the most famous feral child narrative, Lord of the
Flies, in which the hunters intone, “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” (135).
28 The Plague explicitly connects the condition of its zombie children to adult perfidy. At the
end of the film, as the protagonist and his ex-wife face a hostile gang of the children, he
realizes that the corruption of the adult world is ultimately responsible for their condition
—“It’s not just what we say and do. . . . It’s everything we are. Everything we think and feel.
That’s what they take from us,” he tells her—and willingly offers himself up as a sacrifice. As
a result, the children allow her to live.
29 See Tony Magistrale’s “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children” and “Stephen
King’s Viet Nam Allegory: An Interpretation of ‘The Children of the Corn.’”
30 At the end of Beware! Children at Play, a group of vigilantes from town shoot all of the
Woodies, regardless of age, without much hesitation, even though such an action is protested
by the protagonist. As with the ending of Night of the Living Dead, this conclusion seems to
suggest that the Woodies are no more horrible than the adults. In Offspring, the cruelty of the
savage clan is juxtaposed with that of a “civilized” character, Stephen, who is willing to offer
up his ex-wife and children to save his own skin. Eden Lake also shows that the members of
the young gang are from households in which violence and abuse is common. The French
film Them (2006) is perhaps one exception to this rule. Like The Strangers (2008), it features a
group of youths who terrorize a couple simply because they seem to enjoy doing so, though
Them is considerably more disturbing since the children are markedly younger.
31 Of course, in doing so, the viewer must assume that the story inspired their cannibalistic
tendencies, not that it appealed because it reflected their already deepest desires and instincts.
32 In The Omen, Damien’s adopted father, Robert Thorn, is just about to kill the adopted son he
knows to be the antichrist, but the sight of the boy squirming and begging for his life causes
him to hesitate long enough for the police to shoot him before he can complete his mission to
save the world. As a result, Damien continues his reign of terror for two more sequels,
whereupon his daughter Delia takes over in Omen IV: The Awakening, and in 2006, Damien
was resurrected for a remake and started all over again. One can only wish that Robert would
have been more decisive. At the end of the French film Them (2006), the female protagonist
refuses to smash a boy’s head with a rock, even though his gang has been terrorizing her and
her husband for an entire night; in fact, she just witnessed this particular boy cause her hus-
band’s death. However, when the boy covers his face with his hands and exclaims, “Don’t hit
me! I didn’t do anything! We just want to play,” she drops the rock and instead tries to
escape. She fails.
33 Roper v. Simmons (2005) banned death sentences and Graham v. Florida (2010) life sentences
for crimes committed by juveniles.

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Gardens. Ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Penguin, 2004.
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States, 1880–1917. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.
Beidler, Peter G. “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw.” The Turn of the Screw. Case
Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Peter G. Beidler. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.
Print.
Beware! Children at Play. Dir. Mik Cribben. 1989. Troma, 1998. DVD.
Bixby, Jerome. “It’s a Good Life.” 1953. Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Greatest Science
Fiction Stories of all Time. Ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Avon, 1970. 523–42. Print.
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Bradbury, Ray. “The Small Assassin.” 1946. The Stories of Ray Bradbury. New York: Knopf,
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——. “The Veldt.” 1950. American Gothic Tales. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Plume, 1996.
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Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.
Buckingham, David. “Child’s Play: Beyond Moral Panics.” Moving Images: Understanding
Children’s Emotional Responses to Television. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. 19–56. Print.
Büssing, Sabine. Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction. Contributions to the Study of
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Case 39. Dir. Christian Alvert. 2010. Paramount, 2011. DVD.
Clark, Lynn Schofield. From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural. New
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Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.
Collodi, Carlo. Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet. 1883. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1914.
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Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routle-
dge, 1993. Print.
Cull, Nick. “The Exorcist.” History Today 50.5 (May 2000): 46–51. PDF File.
DeGregory, Lane. “The Girl in the Window.” Tampabay.com. St. Petersburg Times, 31 July
2008. Web. 31 May 2011.
Eden Lake. Dir. James Watkins. 2008. Weinstein Company, 2009. DVD.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” 1841. Emerson: Essays and Lectures. New York:
Library of America, 1983. 257–82. Print.
Errickson, Will. “The Next by Bob Randall (1981): Mommy, Can I Got Out and Kill Tonight?”
Too Much Horror Fiction. 7 June 2010. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
——. “Pin by Andrew Neiderman (1981): The Kids Want Something to Do.” Too Much Horror
Fiction. 18 Nov. 2010. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
——. “Ruby Jean Jensen: The Paperback Covers.” Too Much Horror Fiction. 16 Aug. 2010.
Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
——. “Tricycle by Russell Rhodes (1983): Out of His Way, Mister, You Best Keep.” Too Much
Horror Fiction. 26 Oct. 2010. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
——. “William W. Johnstone: The Paperback Covers.” Too Much Horror Fiction. 23 Sept. 2010.
Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
Fagan, Jeffrey. “Juvenile Crime and Criminal Justice: Resolving Border Disputes.” The Future of
Children 18 (Fall 2008): 81–118. JSTOR. Web. 31 Dec. 2010.
Golding, William. “Fable.” The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces. New York: Harcourt,
1966. 85–101. Print.
——. Lord of the Flies. 1954. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print.
Hogan, David J. Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film. Jefferson: McFarland, 1986. Print.
Hoppenstand, Gary. “Exorcising the Devil Babies: Images of Children and Adolescents in the
Best-Selling Horror Novel.” Images of the Child. Ed. Harry Edwin Eiss. Bowling Green, OH:
Bowling Green U Popular P, 1994. 35–58. Print.
Hughes, Richard. A High Wind in Jamaica. 1929. New York: New York Review of Books, 1999.
Print.
The Innocents. Dir. Jack Clayon. 1961. Twentieth Century Fox, 2005. DVD.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. 1898. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. 22–120. Print.
Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2004. Print.
King, Stephen. “Children of the Corn.” 1977. Night Shift. New York: Signet, 1979. 250–78.
Print.
Leavy, Patricia. Iconic Events: Media, Politics, and Power in Retelling History. Lexington Books,
2007. Print.
Leung, Rebecca. “Can a Video Game Lead to Murder?” CBSnews.com. CBS Interactive, 11 Feb.
2009. Web. 31 May 2010.

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Loach, Loretta. The Devil’s Children: A History of Childhood and Murder. London: Icon, 2009.
Print.
Magistrale, Tony. “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King’s Terrible Children.” Extrapolation 26 (1985):
43–49. Print.
——. “Stephen King’s Viet Nam Allegory: An Interpretation of ‘The Children of the Corn.’”
Cuyahoga Review 2 (1984): 61–66. Print.
Matheson, Richard. “Born of Man and Woman.” The Dark Descent. Ed. David G. Hartwell.
New York: Tor, 1987. 513–15. Print.
Maynard, Joyce. “The Monster Children.” Newsweek 26 July 1976: 10–11. PDF File.
The New Daughter. Dir. Luis Berdejo. 2009. Anchor Bay, 2010. DVD.
Newton, Michael. Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. 2002. New York:
Picador, 2004. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Expensive People. 1968: New York: Modern Library, 2006. Print.
Offspring. Dir. Andrew van den Houten. Lionsgate, 2009. DVD.
O’Hayre, Meredith. The Scream Queen’s Survival Guide: Avoid Machetes, Defeat Evil Children,
Steer Clear of Bloody Dismemberment, and Conquer Other Horror Movie Clichés. Avon, MA:
F+W Media, 2010. Print.
Paul, William. Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York:
Columbia UP, 1994. Print.
Pifer, Ellen. Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. Charlot-
tesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Print.
The Plague. Dir. Hal Masonberg. Sony, 2006. DVD.
Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. 1976. New York: Ballantine, 1997. Print.
“Scott Tenorman Must Die.” South Park. Comedy Central. 11 July 2001. Television.
“Seytan.” Netflix. Web. 8 Mar. 2011.
Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Norton, 1993. Print.
Them. Dir. David Moreau and Xavier Palud. 2006. Dark Sky Films, 2008. DVD.
Thirty Days of Night. Dir. David Slade. 2007. Sony, 2008. DVD.
“Tom Shankland Talks the Children.” Dreadcentral.com. Dread Central Media, 6 Oct. 2009.
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Weiner, Allison Hope. “Facing the Music.” EW.com. Entertainment Weekly, 24 Aug. 2001. Web.
18 May 2011.
Westfahl, Gary, and George Slusser, eds. Nursery Realms: Children in the Worlds of Science
Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1999. Print.
Who Can Kill a Child? Dir. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. 1976. Dark Sky Films, 2007. DVD.

27
 My Baby Ate the Dingo: The Visual
Construction of the Monstrous Infant
in Horror Film

STEFFEN HANTKE

INTRODUCTION: MAGGIE, STEWIE, AND OTHER

PREPOSTEROUS MONSTROUS INFANTS

Among the many horror films that feature ‘‘evil children,’’ a small cycle of
films deal specifically with monstrous, murderous, carnivorous, predatory
infants—babies that, rather than being eaten by the proverbial dingo, turn
the tables on a harsh and hostile world by preying on those who convention-
ally prey on them. While the larger cycle of films with a child in the role of
the monster has produced numerous horror classics—highly respected films
even outside the genre, ranging from Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1954)
and Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960), to Jack Clayton’s The Inno-
cents (1961), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t
Look Now (1973), Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), David Cronenberg’s
The Brood (1979), and, more recently, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One
in (2008) and Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2009)—the smaller sub-cycle of
horror films about monstrous newborns has remained as limited in size as
in reputation. With the notable exception of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s
Baby (1968), the other entries in the cycle are decidedly marginal in terms
of budget and prestige: Donald Cammel’s Demon Seed (1977), Larry Cohen’s
It’s Alive (1974), with its two sequels (1978, 1987) and a recent remake direc-
ted by Josef Rusnak (2008), and Rodman Flender’s The Unborn (1991).1 As a
thematic adjunct to these few films, which form the core of the subgenre, we
should also consider the sizable body of horror films in which aspects of

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

procreative sexuality—from conception, pregnancy, and childbirth to early

parenthood—are used figuratively, as visual or topical metaphors of mon-
strosity; one might think of the elaborate procreative mythology developed
throughout the films in the Alien franchise, with their perverse oral insemina-
tions and explosively lethal births. Films that deal directly and literally with
monstrous babies, however, are few and far between.2
At first glance, this is surprising. To the same degree that horror films
succeed in transforming children of all ages into frightening creatures, why
would films dealing with newborns rather than, say, five-year-olds, perform
this task so much less successfully? From Christian doctrines of natural
depravity, which suspect the newborn in its cradle to be ‘‘seething with
sin,’’ to Freud’s view of ‘‘the newborn as a ‘seething cauldron’—an inherently
selfish creature’’ (Shaffer 39), cultural conventions have laid an ideological
foundation for understanding early infancy that plays into the hands of the
horror genre, especially if one considers the degree of surplus repression
by which infants have been sentimentally transformed, concurrently, into
paragons of innocence and cordoned-off sites of extreme anxiety.3 Dominant
contemporary conceptions of the infant’s body privilege it as a site upon
which external forces impinge, a passive, docile, inert object, incapable of
action yet constantly acted upon. Horror films reverse this conception—in
fact, monstrous infants in horror films command alarming degrees of agency.
In the reversal, they liberate the repressed archaic notions of the infant as a
seething cauldron of aggression, selfishness, and sin—a notion which, like
everything we pride ourselves on having ‘‘overcome’’ and cast off, returns
in frightening, demonic guise.4
Nonetheless, within the public consciousness, films about monstrous
infants are often indistinguishable from their own parodies. For a variety of
reasons, there seems to be something inherently ridiculous about a baby
as monster. Take, for instance, the episode of The Simpsons, entitled ‘‘A
Streetcar Named Marge,’’ in which baby Maggie has led an uprising of infants
at her daycare center, heroically retrieving everyone’s pacifiers from a grou-
chy attendant (Season 4, Episode 2). When Homer arrives to pick her up, he
discovers that the babies have taken over the facility. He must tread carefully
in between scores of impassive infants, the sucking sounds of their pacifiers
grotesquely enhanced against a backdrop of ominous silence; on one
occasion, a baby weakly paws at his shoe when nudged as if to suggest
the potential infant fury waiting to be unleashed. By way of the intertextual
projection of the final sequence of Hitchcock’s The Birds onto a group of
infants, the humor in the scene derives from the lack of proportionality
between the ominous threat of predatory animals before the moment of
attack on the one hand and a group of toddlers happily sucking on their
binkies on the other.5
While the satire in The Simpsons is relatively gentle and largely a matter
of limited intertextual play, Seth McFarlane’s animated series Family Guy

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

(Fox, 1999-), with its recurring character Stewie Griffin, goes to much greater
lengths to explore the comedic potential inherent in the figure of the mon-
strous baby. Cleverly depicting Stewie as alternating between infantile and
fully adult characteristics, the show’s writers frequently depart into intertex-
tual asides during which he is cast as a serial killer, a Chicago mobster, a
member of the Brat Pack, a science fiction mutant, and so on. Unlike Maggie
Simpson, who is turned into an uncanny creature by way of intertextual
superimposition, Stewie Griffin functions as a fully conscious engine of cul-
tural disambiguation. Those negative concepts about early infancy which
might have been moved into the collective cultural unconscious (e.g., the
infant’s aggression and sexual fixation on its mother, its polymorphously
perverse sexuality, its anti-social selfishness, etc.) are constantly and
explicitly articulated in the show’s surface text. Stewie Griffin provides a form
of satire that demystifies the cultural dynamics of the monstrous infant to the
degree that it shares the show’s general approach to sublimation, i.e., to
shock or startle by saying out loud the very thing that, when concealed by
genuine repression or merely by decorum, retains the charisma of the
dangerous and illicit.6 Consequently, when it comes to Stewie, Family Guy
undermines the uncanny effect the monstrous infant possesses by articulat-
ing openly why Stewie wants what he wants. Family Guy’s approach to early
infancy depends upon and, in equal measure, generates and confirms a
sense that the monstrous infant is ultimately a preposterous figure—a subject
for satire rather than horror films.
While this explanation may sound persuasive in its broader application,
it fails to account for the fact that, among the few films that constitute the
cycle about monstrous infants, only Rosemary’s Baby—a well respected
canonical horror film if there ever was one—seems to have transcended
the debilitating yet inescapable inherent preposterousness of its subject mat-
ter. While Cammel’s Demon Seed, Cohen’s It’s Alive, and Flender’s The
Unborn are, by and large, dismissed as camp and banished to the margins
of the genre’s cinematic canon, Polanski’s film commands respect even out-
side the horror film community. Rosemary’s Baby raises a number of ques-
tions: are all horror films about monstrous infants preposterous and thus
doomed to a shadowy existence in the cultural margins? Or is the success
or failure of a horror film about monstrous infants a matter of intelligence
and skillful execution? In order to untangle these questions, I would like
to take a closer look at the core texts within this small sub-cycle of films,
especially at the cinematic iconography they mobilize and the ways in which
they visualize the infant body, a body densely encoded through cultural
interdictions and taboos. A critical examination of the visual strategies
brought into play during the cinematic representation of this body will, I
hope, provide insights into the larger representational politics at work when
horror film takes on a subject matter that is, simultaneously, as serious and
preposterous as the monstrous, predatory infant. The most efficient way into

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

the minutiae of these films is to look at the climactic closing scene in the
key film of the cycle—the final few minutes of Polanski’s Rosemary’s
Baby—released to great popular and critical acclaim in 1968.7

‘‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIS EYES?’’:

SEEING IS BELIEVING

In this closing sequence of the film, Mia Farrow’s eponymous character,

alerted to the presence of an infant in the neighboring apartment, enters a
room in which all those who have conspired to have her impregnated with
the devil’s own child are gathered. In an alcove by the window, fussed over
by a viciously protective elderly woman, stands a cradle draped in black from
which the crying of a fussy baby emanates. Rosemary goes over and peeks
inside, only to be startled by a sight Polanski decides to withhold from his
audience. Instead of a reverse-angle shot or a downward camera tilt, which
would reveal what Rosemary sees, the film provides a medium close-up of
Rosemary backing away from the cradle in horror asking, ‘‘What have you
done to his eyes?’’ Having raised the audience’s curiosity with this conspicu-
ous visual ellipsis—we want to see what causes this paroxysm of fear—
Polanski follows the moment with a lengthy sequence of shots in which
the assembled group of Satanists reassures the distraught mother that ‘‘He
has his father’s eyes,’’ that is to say, yes, the child is not her husband’s but
that of the devil himself. ‘‘Look at his hands,’’ one of them prompts. ‘‘Or at
his feet,’’ another chimes in. Disregarding these visual prompts (‘‘Look
at . . . ’’), the camera instead follows Rosemary, observing her mounting hys-
teria as she staggers around the room in a state of shock. Finally, in a medium
frontal shot, Farrow raises her hands to her eyes, and only then does Polanski
provide a superimposed image which shows, in a blurry extreme close-up
double exposure, the same pair of yellow eyes, surrounded by mottled
grayish skin that were visible during the sequence in which Rosemary barely
registers, in a drug-induced haze, that she is being raped by the demonic
creature in the guise of her husband that is to be the father of her child.8
The most striking feature of this scene is the curious visual restraint
Polanski exercises when he withholds the sight of the monstrous infant the
audience has been anticipating for most of the film. After all, the sight of this
baby would let us determine whether Rosemary is delusional or whether
there really is a Satanist conspiracy. While the decision to never let the audi-
ence see Rosemary’s eponymous baby is a deliberate attempt to frustrate
expectations, the visual ellipsis also functions paradoxically as a confirmation
of the crucial significance of the (withheld) visual experience. In other
words, the most important thing is what we do not see. It is this conspicuous
visual gap in the fabric of the diegesis on which the entire narrative ultimately
hinges—a fact driven home by the curious overdetermination of the scene,

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 THE 'EVIL CHILD' IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POPULAR CULTURE

the densely layered presence of a variety of discourses that all converge upon
this crucial moment.9
The most obvious explanation for why Polanski never allows the audi-
ence to see Rosemary’s baby is a straightforward diegetic one. What Polanski
substitutes for an unobstructed shot of the monstrous infant—visualizing
what we already know as his abnormal eyes, hands, and feet—is a repetition
of the superimposition we see during the earlier scene in which the child is
conceived. Significantly enough, the repeated use of the image at this
moment fails, in the final instance, to disambiguate the events mimetically;
just as the Satanists may simply be a group of deluded eccentrics, Rosemary’s
rape fantasies, as well as her abhorrence of what she perceives as the infant’s
physical abnormality, may simply be the product of a heightened state of
hysteria, which the film reproduces on a visual level, marking the images
as subjective by their lack of clarity and persistence and their unmooring
from the diegesis. In other words, whatever bodily abnormality the film
shows exists in Rosemary’s mind; we never see the monstrous infant because
there is no monstrous infant.
This cognitive dimension of the film is also reiterated in Rosemary’s
panicky prompt, ‘‘What have you done to his eyes?’’ It is hardly difficult to
see this statement as a self-reflexive move on Polanski’s part. To the degree
that the film is concerned with the difference between the empirical veracity
of events as distinct from their subjective perception and interpretation—a
difference which translates into the paranoid plot that asks the audience to
decide whether Rosemary really is the target of a satanic conspiracy or
whether her imagination is getting the better of her—it asks its viewers to
examine the visual evidence placed before them. As we test the boundaries
of our own credulity, Polanski asks us to indulge, to one degree or another,
in the same hysterical hyper-interpretive mode as Rosemary herself.
This explanation, grounded pragmatically in the narrative and thematic
logic of the film, fits in with considerations of Polanski as auteurist filmmaker.
To the degree that Rosemary’s Baby is ultimately the story of an isolated sin-
gle protagonist sequestered in an apartment in which she quietly yet inexor-
ably goes insane, the film reiterates a thematic constant Polanski has been
pursuing in other films, most notably Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant
(1976). Both films explore just this central thematic conceit—the individual
isolated within the larger community of the apartment building and the city
surrounding it—suggesting that the domestic space is especially confining
and debilitating to women.10 In the context of these overarching concerns
in Polanski’s work, it would appear that the film’s psychologizing of
Rosemary’s troubled marriage to her husband Guy, as well as her ambiv-
alence toward her pregnancy, transfers the child’s demonic nature and
monstrous appearance from empirical truth to neurotic=hysterical symptom.
The very fact that we never see the monstrous infant allows us to determine,
as observers outside the grasp of Rosemary’s distorting hysteria, the state of

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her troubled mind, by way of recognizing the cause of her rejection of the
infant in the sexual trauma that occurs during the act of conception.
But then again, as idiosyncratic as Polanski’s reasons as an auteurist film-
maker might be in withholding the sight of Rosemary’s baby from the viewer,
they are also perfectly attuned to the conventions of the horror film. This
applies not only to the baby only making an appearance within the final
few minutes of the narrative, the lion’s share of which is devoted to the preg-
nancy and the period preceding it during which Guy and Rosemary are trying
to conceive. It also applies to the broader use of visual strategies that withhold
the monster from the audience’s view. Rosemary’s Baby is a perfect example
of what Noël Carroll has called the ‘‘complex discovery plot’’ underlying many
horror films—a narrative model in which a lengthy period of intense paranoia
(driven by, on the one hand, the cognitive uncertainty whether a threat exists
or not and, on the other hand, the delayed collective social confirmation of the
lone protagonist’s suspicion that, yes, the threat does exist) leads up to a cru-
cial scene in which, in a moment of open confrontation with the monster, its
very existence is finally and undeniably confirmed.11 Bluntly put, horror films
tend to make us wait for the monster, just as they tend to grow less and less
coy about displaying the monster. Even though the monster in Rosemary’s
Baby is Rosemary’s baby, Polanski’s film abides by the rules of its chosen
genre, treating the infant in the same manner James Whale treats Boris Karloff
in Frankenstein and Elsa Lancaster in The Bride of Frankenstein, Ishiro Honda
treats Godzilla, Steven Spielberg treats the shark in Jaws, or Jan DeBont treats
CGI tornadoes in Twister (a monster if there ever was one).
For further discussion, it is important to note here that the horror film’s
idiosyncrasy of making the audience wait for the monster stems from a dia-
lectic of practical expediency and deliberate ideology. For example, as the
Universal horror films from the 1930s demonstrate, the classic Hollywood
style demands full visibility, fetishizing the monster within the overarching
discourse of stardom, the product of both actors like Karloff, Lugosi, or
Chaney and make-up designers like Jack Pierce. Overdetermined by this
discourse, the monster’s entry into the film became a matter of strategic delay
early on. Aside from the monster’s ‘‘star entrance,’’ however, visual reticence—
a term that will figure prominently in the discussion to come—is also
grounded in the practical inability to showcase a monster convincing enough
to match audience expectations inflated by prolonged periods of anticipation.
The best example here might be Val Lewton’s series of classic horror films
produced for RKO in the 1940s, which are frequently cited as having made
a stylistic virtue of their minuscule budgets by keeping the monsters they
had no money to manufacture almost entirely invisible. Cognitive uncertainty
can be but does not have to be a thematic corollary of this strategy. Visual
reticence as it appears within the dynamics of post-classical horror films, like
the ones discussed here, must be understood as the complex product of
expedience, ideology, and tradition.

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Nonetheless, common wisdom about horror films has it that films which
refuse to show the monster tend to terrorize their audiences more effectively
than films that do. Our imaginations, so the story goes, conjure up monsters
far more frightening us than any creature that writers, directors, and special
effects wizards could possibly create. What have they done to the child’s
eyes, we are asked to wonder; what could one do to a child’s eyes so that
its mother would be this horrified? Affectively speaking, then, Polanski’s
refusal to grant us full view of the monstrous child increases the (self-
induced) horror of the scene (and keeps the film on the safe side of an
R-rating at the same time).
Obviously, there is an element of playful but masterly audience manipu-
lation in Polanski’s handling of the scene. But then the same considerations
for the effectiveness of the film’s affective aesthetic—that is, the ones that
motivate the decision never to point the camera into the black crib in the
closing scene (and to substitute a far more ambiguous image instead of the
conventional ‘‘money shot’’ of horror cinema)—may also be at work when
Polanski decides to place the scene at the very end of the film. Thematically
speaking, the scene articulates the social horrors about motherhood and
pregnancy that the film has been exploring all along—loss of individual
agency and self-determination. In facing and accepting her baby, one might
say that Rosemary completes the transformation from being Rosemary into
being ‘‘Rosemary’s baby’s mother,’’ a social entity re-defined by its relation-
ship to its progeny. The horror of the film lies not in the sight of a grotesquely
anomalous infant body. It lies in this reversal—from having the infant be the
adjunct to her own body as its grounding biological and ideological reality, to
becoming an adjunct to the infant as her grounding reality, turning her from
an autonomous person into ‘‘the baby’s mother.’’

PREPOSTEROUS PREMISES: BARING THE PROSTHETICS

While Rosemary’s Baby may come across, in turn, as a fairly conventional

horror film and an original, deliberately overdetermined, and highly ambigu-
ous piece of auteurist filmmaking, its significance as a film about a monstrous
infant becomes visible only in comparison to other films in the same genre.
In order to situate the film within that cycle, let me retrace some of my earlier
arguments in the light of Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974), a film with marked
differences to Polanski’s. Most notably, Cohen has the birth of the monstrous
infant occur within the first third of the narrative, which is then followed by a
lengthy sequence in which the child’s father—not the mother—must come to
terms with the fact that it is his very own offspring which is, police in pursuit,
prowling the streets of Los Angeles, claiming one bloody victim after another.
As much as the shift from female paranoia in Polanski’s film to the male
experience of early parenthood marks a move away from what one might

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call the feminist agenda of Rosemary’s Baby, it is the adjustment of the nar-
rative trajectory—from the birth as the culmination of the plot to the birth as
the point of departure of the plot—that makes all the difference. The earlier
in the story the birth occurs, the more opportunities the film has to grant its
audience a glimpse of the monstrous infant—opportunities which, as their
number increases, start amounting to an imperative to pay up or shut up,
so to speak. Polanski’s maneuvering to keep the monster out of sight would
be exceedingly difficult for Cohen to emulate, given the structure of his
film’s plot.
Surprisingly enough, Cohen pursues the same strategy of visual reti-
cence as Polanski. Scattered throughout the film are scenes in which the
monstrous infant, lurking in the bushes or the undergrowth, watches adults
going about their daily business. Throughout, Cohen is exceedingly fond of
the shaky and imperfect fluidity of movement accomplished by the subjec-
tive camera, commonly associated with the 1970s slasher films, beginning
with Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, released the same year as It’s Alive, and
later popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Cohen often substi-
tutes the movement of plant life or inanimate objects as physical markers of
the baby’s presence. The strategy also extends to the scenes in which the
baby goes on the attack: carefully staged stalk-and-slash set pieces, first of
animals and pets, then of random passers-by, eventually menacing members
of its own family and immediate social circle. Together with the conspicuous
absence of that same reverse-angle shot anticipated yet omitted from
Rosemary’s Baby, fast editing and subjective camera angles help to create
an infant monster more agile and aggressive than Rosemary’s baby, though
no less invisible.
Cohen abandons the visual reticence prized by Polanski because his
thematic interests are different. Just as he shifts the point of view from that
of the mother to that of the father, he also moves away from those delibera-
tions about individual psychology so important to Polanski—whether
Rosemary is sane or not, and, hence, whether the infant really is monstrous
or not—so that it can function as a sociological meditation on parental
responsibility, the ambiguous allegiances between family and community,
and the hardships that occur when children alienate parents from the larger
community rather than entrenching them more deeply within it. Moving the
story from psychological interiority further out into the world of social, econ-
omic, and political relations, Cohen also inserts into the dialogue references
to the role of environmental pollution and pharmaceutical experimentation
as possible, albeit unconfirmed, explanations for the infant’s monstrosity.
Cohen’s decision to link these social issues with a masculine point of view
moves the film further away from Polanski’s feminist agenda than does his
choice to write the mother out of the narrative after she has given birth.12
In order to carry this thematic burden, there can be no doubt, no cognitive
ambivalence, about whether the infant is an empirical reality. Consequently,

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Cohen makes relatively little of the conventional uncertainty, listed by

Carroll’s ‘‘complex discovery plot’’ under the rubric of ‘‘onset,’’ which tends
to accompany the first subtle manifestations of the threat in horror films.
From the moment the infant enters the world—during a gory scene in the
delivery room that leaves all medical staff in attendance of the birth in a pool
of their own blood—its existence is not in question.
Given the narrative pressures that result from the monster’s early entry
into the narrative, as well as the thematic conceptualization of the infant as an
empirical reality, it is hardly surprising that most viewers will remember It’s
Alive less for Cohen’s indulgence in visual reticence than for showing them
what Polanski wouldn’t. Over a sequence of scenes designed incrementally
to increase the visibility of the infant, Cohen reveals a creature produced lar-
gely by special effects. For a series of extreme close-ups, he uses an adult
mouth, made up and equipped with a pair of prosthetic fangs. In medium
shots, he alternates between what looks like a dummy, which allows him
to handle the body roughly and put on display the infant’s veined, dispropor-
tionately enlarged head, and a genuine human infant, which allows him to
generate a certain degree of visual verisimilitude as long as the shot is not
sustained for too long.
Cohen’s move toward the visualization of the monstrous infant does not
contradict my earlier assertion that It’s Alive functions basically within the
same regime of visual restraint as Rosemary’s Baby. As both representational
strategies align themselves with each other throughout the film, an intermedi-
ate strategy emerges that stands in sharp contrast to the full visualization of
the monster in horror films as a moment of visual spectacle. Though Cohen
gradually reveals the monstrous infant, there is no single climactic moment in
the film comparable to, for example, the revelation of the monster’s bride in
James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein or the revelation of Nola Carveth’s
monstrous external womb in David Cronenberg’s The Brood. Even at the very
end of It’s Alive, which culminates with a long sequence in which the LAPD
chases the baby through the storm drains and sewer tunnels underneath the
city, Cohen has the infant covered in a blanket when its father discovers it,
tries to carry it to safety, and is cornered by the police who unload a barrage
of gunfire into the barely animated bundle of blankets. By and large, long
and medium shots of this bundle prevail throughout the scene.
Given Cohen’s willingness to show the infant throughout the film, this
final scene is puzzling but points to yet another reason why both Polanski
and Cohen might have resorted to visual reticence: the state of special effects
at the time both films were shot. Like Polanski, Cohen must have wondered
how exactly to translate the concept of the monstrous infant into a concrete
visual signifier, even if he had at his disposal the then yet unknown special
effects wizard Rick Baker, who, in the course of a long and distinguished
career (with groundbreaking work on such horror film classics as John
Landis’s An American Werewolf in London [1981] and David Cronenberg’s

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Videodrome [1983]), was to become a star comparable to Frank Pierce—a

detail that, more than anything else about It’s Alive, might draw horror fans
to Cohen’s film. Respectively, in 1968 and in 1974, body effects consisted
primarily of make-up altering skin tone and surface morphology of the body,
of prosthetics altering the size of the actor’s body and the proportionality of
its parts in relation to each other and their environment. Camera work and
editing supplemented these physical transformations. By the late 1960s,
molded latex casts also became increasingly available, which combined
effects of both body surface and proportion. Aside from the actor’s own body
movements, this prosthetic assemblage had to remain largely static, oriented
primarily toward the camera rather than its direct physical environment or, at
best, discouraged sudden or expansive movement, lest they betray their pres-
ence to the camera. Digital effects—so-called CGI—were not, needless to
say, anywhere on the horizon quite yet.
Since Polanski forgoes body effects almost completely and Cohen indulges
in them only to a limited extent, the earlier question about the effectiveness of
either showing or not showing the monster resurfaces in this context. Instead of
comparing the affective impact of confronting viewers with the sight of the
monster to letting viewers fill in the visual ellipsis, it is more helpful to consider
each approach as based upon a fundamentally different aesthetic model, each
eliciting a different set of viewer emotions, interpellating viewers into a radically
different interactive and interpretive relationship with the image in front of
them. The common wisdom that conceives that the elliptical approach is more
effective—and, conversely, that opting for full visibility is less aesthetically
refined, more bluntly direct, and less sophisticated—translates, at best, into a
reflection of class prejudice; in other words, sophisticated auteurist psychologi-
cal drama leaves its audience to imagine the monster—lowbrow splatter films
leave little or less to their audience’s atrophied imagination.13
While Rosemary’s Baby occupies a far more exalted position within the
cinematic canon than Cohen’s It’s Alive, I would like to argue that the differ-
ence in both films’ respective treatment of the problem of visualization is a
representational strategy consistent with the theme of each film. While
Polanski is interested in a cognitive uncertainty and diegetic ambiguity aris-
ing from the monstrous infant as a potential manifestation of Rosemary’s
mental state, Cohen focuses on the social consequences that come with
being the parent of a monstrous infant; consequently, little of the narrative
dwells upon Carroll’s ‘‘onset’’ stage, in which cognitive uncertainty triggers
paranoia in a protagonist isolated from the community by being the only
one aware of the rising threat. Most of It’s Alive is devoted to the public panic
over the rampaging monstrous infant and the authorities’ ensuing ‘‘man
hunt’’ for it, as well as to the devastating social consequences for the father
who first cannot deny that the baby is his but who later embraces his role as
parent. For these issues to gain credibility, there must be no doubt that the
infant is real.

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Both films, one could argue, are interested in the infant as the reification
of a larger issue; that is to say, like all well-made monsters that have made a
lasting impact on the popular imagination, Polanski’s and Cohen’s monstrous
infants are, first and foremost, metaphors. Given the weight that these meta-
phors must carry, it is important that the concrete reification of the metaphor,
the material signifier of the abstract signified, is both empirically convincing
and poetically fertile enough to carry this weight. The cinematic monster’s
prosthetically enhanced body, as a material signifier of the abstract ideas it
represents, tends to elicit an evaluative response from the audience geared
primarily toward its empirical, and not its poetic, persuasiveness; in other
words, the more a film foregrounds the concrete materiality of the signifier,
the more it predisposes the audience toward an evaluation of what the mon-
ster looks like or how it moves than of what it represents. Though the
relationship between the actor’s concrete material body, prosthetically
enhanced, and the themes it symbolizes is essentially no different than the
relationship between the monster conjured up in the viewer’s imagination
and the abstract idea it represents, bad special effects are more likely to sever
this relationship than a limited imagination. They reduce audiences to laugh-
ter even, or especially, when they try for pathos; they make willing suspen-
sion of disbelief impossible; with devastating effect, they—to quote the
Russian formalists—‘‘bare the device.’’
The anxiety that the affective and ideological structure of a horror film
might collapse because of the insufficiency of its representational apparatus
seems all the more urgent when it comes to monstrous infants in horror films:
while incredulity, as Carroll argues, is a necessary condition of the traditional
horror film plot, its complete and utter refutation is, too. Both contravening,
complementary movements within the text must at the time of their occur-
rence be so convincing as to override the audience’s awareness that the
premise of the text is fundamentally preposterous. While the audacity of
the horror film premise might be relatively easy to overlook when the crea-
ture is of overpowering size, speed, and strength, it moves right to the fore-
front when the opposite is true—as in the case of the monstrous infant,
which is one of the most preposterous monsters in horror film.
Polanski never needs to confront this problem fully because of his focus
on subjective experience and cognitive uncertainty: of course, the very idea
of Rosemary giving birth to a satanic spawn is preposterous—this is exactly
why nobody would want to believe her in the first place. Hence, with the
sight of the monstrous infant meticulously withheld, there is little the film
has to be apologetic about. Cohen, however, has a fairly unconvincing spe-
cial effects creature to account for, not to mention the far-fetched visualiza-
tions of this infant attacking and brutalizing anything from the family cat to
the obstetrician and his crew who aid the mother in the birth. Cohen is no
less aware than Polanski that his mutant baby, cobbled together from diverse
special effects, is, in the final instance, an untenable cinematic construction.

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Cohen inserts a few key scenes in which the film pre-emptively signals its
awareness of how preposterous its own premise really is. In one scene, a
heavily armed police unit surrounds a suburban home and then, with ruth-
lessly efficient paramilitary moves, storms the building’s back yard—only
to discover a normal toddler playing on a blanket staring at the intruders with
big, uncomprehending eyes. From those eyes, Cohen cuts to a reverse-angle
shot straight into the barrels of a dozen or so guns pointed at the hapless
infant, visually exploiting the discrepancy between threat and response for
all its comical potential as a moment of camp.14
What makes the issue of camp so difficult to decide, however, is that in
the final instance, It’s Alive is at the core a deeply serious film, and its visua-
lization of the monstrous infant matches its ambitions. To the same degree
that psychology demands an immaterial, invisible, internal manner of rep-
resentation, the sociological dimension of monstrosity Cohen takes measure
of calls for a monster that represents, in its essential nature, the materiality of
the social world. Cobbled together in a collaborative effort by designer Rick
Baker, with the help of cinematographer Fenton Hamilton and editor Peter
Honess, the monster represents exactly that materiality which tends to under-
mine the mimetic seamlessness of the film—very much in the same manner
in which the monstrous infant within the diegesis has the uncanny power
to tear open the seemingly seamless social fabric of upper-middle-class
suburban Los Angeles. In other words, the materiality of the monster is its
very point.

CONCLUSION: CGI AND THE FUTURE OF THE

MONSTROUS INFANT

The further development of this subgenre will undoubtedly be influenced by

the revolutionary changes that computer-generated imagery has brought to
creature effects in horror film. Because budget no longer determines the
deployment of this technology—its application occurs in post-production
and thus does not affect the costliest aspects of production—even small inde-
pendent films have the ability to render a wider variety of effects with the
highest degree of mimetic verisimilitude.15 The two films I would like to
introduce briefly are examples of how new technology might affect the
representational strategies of horror films about monstrous infants.
First, there is the 2008 remake of It’s Alive. Director Josef Rusnak shifts
the narrative back from the male point of view to the female; the film’s pro-
tagonist is the monstrous infant’s mother. The film tracks her development
from accepting the child and covering up the havoc that it wreaks, to her
final insight that she and her child, in the famous words of Karloff in The
Bride of Frankenstein, ‘‘belong dead.’’ Accordingly, she and the infant exit
the film in the fire that destroys her house in the film’s closing scene. That

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this house happens to be located on at the edge of the woods, far removed
from the nearest small town, forecloses the social dimension in which the
original film was so interested and returns it instead to the intense psycho-
logical interiority of Rosemary’s Baby, albeit an interiority lacking, as Cohen’s
original would have it, the paranoia pervading Polanski’s film.
Given the wide availability of digital effects, Rusnak’s refusal to make
use of them except in one particular scene—a digitally modulated infant
hand creeping up over her mother’s shoulder as she hugs the child—is
clearly a deliberate strategy. Assuming that it was the camp status of It’s Alive
that attracted investors to the idea of producing a remake, it is not very likely
that Rusnak decided to rely more heavily on the visual concealment of the
monstrous infant out of respect for Cohen’s original film; the radical change
of location, from urban California to rural New Mexico (doubled unconvin-
cingly by Rumania), and of social milieu from (middle-aged) upper-middle
class to (late teenage) lower-middle class, bordering on working class, also
point in that direction. Instead, it seems like Rusnak is acting out of the unex-
amined conviction that he can elevate the film by using the elliptical
approach, make it ‘‘classier’’ somehow than its campy original. However,
because all the changes to the original script eliminate the opportunity for
retaining social relevance, the stylistic choice remains just that—a matter of
style over substance. As a result, the film thematically never comes into focus,
displaying exactly that uncertainty Cohen knew to avoid.
In the final instance, one might argue that, despite having the means for
visualizing the monstrous infant at his disposal, Rusnak decides to eschew
such visualization because he is ultimately more interested in his female pro-
tagonist’s inner life than the social consequences of the monstrous infant. To
the degree that Rusnak actually moves the remake in its ideological concerns
further away from Cohen’s original and more closely toward those embraced
by Rosemary’s Baby, one might conclude that the film’s intends to refocus
upon Polanski’s gender politics (even if the element of cognitive ambiguity,
which is so crucial to Rosemary’s Baby, is entirely absent from the remake of
It’s Alive). With the female perspective replacing the male one, Rusnak’s film
arrives at exactly the same final plot twist as Polanski’s, which may be the
expression of a specifically male horror in the face of maternity—that the
mother of the monstrous infant will embrace her hideous progeny despite
its monstrous nature and heinous acts (an act more horrifying than that of
Rosemary’s husband Guy, who chooses to become an accomplice in the
demonic conspiracy against his own wife because it furthers his professional
advancement; maternal love lacks such immediately pragmatic motivation).
The difference between how both films end—Polanski’s ends with a shot that
shows Rosemary and her child disappearing into the anonymity of the mod-
ern metropolis, while Rusnak’s concludes with the willing self-destruction of
the mother who, in accepting the monstrous nature of her child, accepts that
she, like it, must not be allowed to live—marks the difference between

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Polanski’s ironic deconstruction of maternity as an essentially immoral force and

Rusnak’s serious imposition of a tragic morality which confirms, albeit without
James Whale’s sarcastic overstatement, that all monsters ‘‘belong dead.’’
The long shadow of James Whale also falls over the second recent
horror film about a monstrous infant, Vincenzo Natali’s Splice (2009). Like
It’s Alive, which, after all, takes its title from Colin Clive’s hysterically elated
line in Whale’s film, Splice also makes reference to Frankenstein and The
Bride of Frankenstein, featuring a couple of scientists named, tongue-in-
cheek, Clive (as in Colin Clive) and Elsa (as in Elsa Lancaster). Both create
a human infant whose DNA has been interspliced with that of a variety of
other species, producing a creature, nicknamed Dren, who undergoes
infancy, childhood, adolescence, and maturity within a matter of weeks,
revealing along the way unsuspected bodily traits which are, in turn, sublime
and horrific.
Unlike Rusnak’s remake of It’s Alive, Natali decides to go all out on digi-
tal body effects. Though the creature in its older incarnations is played by an
actress—Delphine Chaneac, her body worked over in post-production with
digital enhancements—its early infant self is entirely a product of computer-
generated imagery, combining avian, mammalian, and human traits in an
unsettling manner. The result is a creature that looks like a rabbit combined
with a plucked uncooked chicken, whose agility, mobility, and three-
dimensional plasticity are excessively on display. As with some recent pro-
ductions that rely heavily on CGI, there is a vague sense that the technology
itself is on display, celebrated or even fetishized. However, the risk of this
re-directing of the film’s visual attention into self-referentiality, which is then
often dismissed as a form of authorial or industrial self-indulgence, hardly
applies to a film of such modest dimensions. Unlike the excesses of, for
example, a James Cameron production, Natali has other intentions. As Clive
and, especially, Elsa encounter the monstrous infant, the film is firmly rooted
in their perspective, alternating between interactions between Dren and Elsa
in the role of its mother (as observed by Clive), and vice versa—a dynamic
that illuminates both human characters and their relationship to each other
through the catalyst of their collaborative project. Against this interpersonal
dynamic, and more in keeping with Mary Shelley’s original novel, the film
follows the arc of a Bildungsroman, if seen from the monster’s point of view.
From Clive’s and Elsa’s point of view, however, it offers a surface onto which
both can project their own complex and conflicted parental experiences,
which, especially in Elsa’s case, suggest that Splice is a film in which parent-
hood and family are not the solution but the problem. The darkest enact-
ments of Freudian family romance are played out when Elsa repeats
physical and psychological abuse upon Dren that used to be inflicted upon
her by her own mother, while Clive increasingly drifts toward incestuous sce-
narios as Dren moves from early infancy toward sexual maturity in leaps and
bounds. What matters to Natali’s film, however, is that the surface upon

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which both characters project their psychodrama is not an inert, passive

object lacking in agency but, as a concrete material body, the engine that
drives the film’s tragic vision. To have the audience see the infant act upon
its parents and its environment, while being acted upon by the social forces
of family and the apparatus of technoscience, is the most compelling aspect
of Natali’s film.
That neither Rusnak’s nor Natali’s film manage to extricate themselves
entirely from the aesthetics of visibility and=or visual reticence which domi-
nated their predecessors suggests that horror films about monstrous infants
have not been substantially affected by the availability of new and improved
technologies for visualizing these monstrous creatures. Whatever the rep-
resentative tricks up the filmmaker’s sleeve, it seems as if nothing will dispel
the suspicion that films about monstrous infants are, at their very core, pre-
posterous. And yet, technological progress does not seem to alter the basic
fact that monsters in horror films are, essentially, metaphors requiring from
their audiences the conceptual leap from the image to what it signifies. As
with technologies predating the arrival of CGI, that leap can be made easier
or harder by how visually arresting, compelling, or persuasive the material
representation of that metaphor happens to be. In other words, CGI itself will
not decide which horror films get away with the premise of the monstrous
infant, but the difference between good and bad CGI surely will—as will
the weight that each film’s metaphor carries.
What remains, thus, as a measure of each film’s sense of relevance or
even urgency is the historical context that gives weight to the metaphor of
the monstrous infant. Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Cohen’s It’s Alive were
released on the heels of events that focused public attention upon matters of
reproductive technology and its social consequences: the birth control pill
became available in the United States during the early 1960s; the sedative
Thalidomide was withdrawn from the market around the same time after it
was revealed to cause severe birth defects; and the Supreme Court ruling
on Roe vs. Wade in January of 1973 increased women’s control over their
own bodies in matters of reproduction. That these events took place within
the larger context of the women’s movement added that undercurrent of
male paranoia that runs so strongly through Rosemary’s Baby and It’s Alive.
Even a horror film with the most preposterous premise could claim a certain
sense of urgency against this historical background.
While feminist discourse may not be preoccupied with exactly the same
issues in 2008 and 2009, Rusnak’s and Natali’s films suggest that matters of
reproductive technology have lost none of their urgency. Fears of monstrous
offspring induced by a drug like Thalidomide and anxieties about procreat-
ive processes detached from the traditional social contexts of parenthood
and family have realigned themselves with the ongoing debate about human
cloning and, more specifically, the controversy regarding human stem cell
research played out to great media effect by the Bush administration during

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its second term. More broadly speaking, economic anxieties triggered by the
most recent cycle of boom and bust comport themselves readily with horror
film scenarios in which procreation is not a source of social stability but its
opposite. Under these conditions, cinematic technologies might advance, just
as genre conventions might change, but monstrous infants will most certainly
continue to show up in horror films to come.

NOTES

1. Though not a remake, the 2009 film by David Goyer under the same title also happens to feature a
demonic infant.
2. In his discussion of The Exorcist, Kendall Phillips determines that the common theme in all of
these films is ‘‘a fear of children themselves,’’ which he attributes, somewhat too broadly, to ‘‘the rebellious
nature of the children of the sixties and an underlying concern that the next generation might wreak even
more cultural destruction’’ (109–10).
3. The mid-1980s saw the most recent upsurge of this phenomenon, in the tidal wave of ‘‘recovered
memory’’ cases, which invariably featured early childhood abuse, often with themes borrowed directly
from the generic inventory of horror film: satanic worship, ritual human sacrifice, and so on. Discourse
surrounding recovered memories frequently condensed concepts of early infancy as both a site of
innocence, vulnerability, and victimhood, and a site of danger, contamination, and corruption. For
further information, see Jon Trott, ‘‘Interview with Sherill Mulhern,’’ and Hollida Wakefield and Ralph
Underwager, ‘‘Recovered memories of alleged sexual abuse: Lawsuits against parents.’’
4. An argument made persuasively by Freud in his essay on ‘‘The Uncanny.’’
5. The reference is reinforced by a cameo of Hitchcock himself, walking two lapdogs, glimpsed
briefly when Homer steps outside the daycare center with Maggie on his arm. A similar intertextual
nod to The Birds also appears in James Cameron’s Aliens, when the film’s heroine discovers that she
has unwittingly stumbled into the monster’s nursery, demonic offspring being the connecting theme of
each reference.
6. At their most effective, these moments of desublimation fail to shock and startle and instead flatten
out affect as only a ‘‘bad’’ or ‘‘lame’’ joke can because Family Guy suggests that repression and=or
decorum do not conceal the illicit but, in fact, produce it.
7. To focus, as I will in the course of my discussion, on canonical horror films only—that is, on films
well-known and associated most strongly with the theme of the demonic child—may not be particularly
original; neither may it take properly into account the critical, subversive, or revisionist responses issued
by lesser known films in response to the canonical power of these ‘‘classics.’’ But then this discussion is
concerned with a basic typology, an organizing principle behind the visual conventions within the genre,
and in this regard, it is, without doubt, the canonical films that have helped to establish and entrench these
conventions.
8. Or, doubting the veracity of her perceptions, she is seeing her husband, as a sexually repressed
Catholic girl would, transformed by lust into a demonic creature availing himself with impunity of her
body for the fathering of his child. This reading is supported by the fact that, in the same scene, she also
envisions herself on a yacht where John F. Kennedy may or may not be the seducer.
9. It is important to note, though, that the reference in the scene to the (invisible) infant’s eyes,
hands, and feet still point to the body as the site where monstrosity manifests itself—a fact embraced
and even celebrated, for example, by Cohen’s It’s Alive. Monstrosity, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘‘never
really leaves the body as its preferred site of manifestation, though it may become detached from any
particular bodily characteristic’’ (35). In the absence of such bodily markers of monstrosity, most narratives
resort to action as an index of monstrosity, a category that remains useless in the case of infants without
significant bodily agency. As a last resort, horror films construe the very absence of all markers of overt
monstrosity, bodily and behavioral, as pathological. While horror films like The Omen or The Bad Seed
resort to this strategy, scrutinizing their child protagonists incessantly and suspiciously for a slipping of
the mask, I have not been able to discover a single horror film about a monstrous infant which pursues
this option: all films about monstrous infant, in other words, sooner or later refer back to the baby’s body

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as a site of abjection. For a full discussion of these representational patterns, see Steffen Hantke,
‘‘Monstrosity without a Body.’’
10. Though the central character in The Tenant is male—played, incidentally, by Polanski himself—
his descent into insanity leads him to assume, by way of clothing and wig, the identity of the previous
tenant of his apartment, a woman who had tried to commit suicide by jumping out her window. Like
Repulsion, The Tenant features scenes that exquisitely render the character’s mental state as distortions
of the material world around him.
11. For the full discussion, see Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, pp. 97–128.
12. It is important to note here that the film does not treat the mother’s erasure from the narrative as
the result of social formations, which would thematize her exclusion as a social phenomenon, but simply
asserts the father’s dominance over the narrative by authorial fiat.
13. One category that must be mentioned here—because it is strongly connected to taste as an
expression of social class and because it has the ability to transcend the absolute claim verisimilitude tends
to exercise upon these films and their affective impact—is that of camp. As a specific viewer attitude, camp
would redeem, so to speak, Cohen’s badly, bluntly, inelegantly visualized infant monster from being dis-
missed as B-movie fodder. To the extent that Cohen seems to have intended his film to be camp—that is,
to the extent that viewers would not freely chose to perceive it as camp but be lead toward that conclusion
by the film itself—issues of social class recur not only on the side of the audience but also as deliberate
choices on the part of the filmmaker in terms of how the film is positioned.
14. See note 12.
15. Though their price has decreased considerably over the past twenty years, CGI are still more
expensive than conventional prosthetic effects. This is especially true for effects designed to be highly vis-
ible, to be visible for prolonged on-screen visibility, and=or to be visible in highly complex interactions
with other elements of the mise en scene; examples of how low-quality CGI lends itself to newly adapted
forms of camp would be Global Asylum’s 2010 Mega Piranha, which, in all its glorious awfulness, pro-
vides a tongue-in-cheek commentary upon Alexandre Aja’s glossy, CGI-heavy remake of Piranha from
the same year.

WORKS CITED

Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York:
Routledge, 1990. Print.
Hantke, Steffen. ‘‘Monstrosity without a body: Representational strategies in the
popular serial killer film.’’ PostScript 22.2 (2003): 34–54. Print.
It’s Alive. Dir. Larry Cohen. Perf. John P. Ryan and Sharon Farrell. Warner Bros.,
1974. Film.
It’s Alive. Dir. Josef Rusnak. Perf. Bijou Philips and James Murray. Alive=Amicus,
2008. Film.
Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2005. Print.
Rosemary’s Baby. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Ruth
Gordon. Paramount, 1968. Film.
Shaffer, David R. Social and Personality Development. 2005. Sixth Ed. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 2009. Print.
‘‘A Streetcar Named Marge.’’ The Simpsons. Fox. 1 Oct. 1992. Television.
Splice. Dir. Vincenzo Natali. Perf. Adian Brody and Sarah Polley. Gaumont=Dark
Castle, 2009. Film.
Trott, John. ‘‘Interview with Sherill Mulhern.’’ Cornerstone 20.96 (1991): 8, 20, 26. Print.
Wakefield, Hollida, and Ralph Underwager. ‘‘Recovered memories of alleged sexual
abuse: Awsuits against parents.’’ Behavioral Sciences & the Law 10.4 (Fall 1992):
483–507. Print.

44
 Monstrous Children as Harbingers of
Mortality: A Psychological Analysis of
Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

DANIEL SULLIVAN
JEFF GREENBERG

She woke to see Ben standing silently there in the half dark, staring at
them. The shadows from the garden moved on the ceiling, the spaces
of the big room emptied into obscurity, and there stood this goblin child,
half visible. The pressure of those inhuman eyes of his had entered her
sleep and woken her.
—Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

Images of deformed or malevolent children have a particular power to dis-

turb us. To understand why this is the case, we must first acknowledge the
popular view of children as innocent and good. This conception of children
is a social construction that has grown in popularity in recent history. Since
the eighteenth century, the rise of Enlightenment philosophies of education,
as epitomized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s E´mile, along with the blank-slate
hypothesis of the British empiricists have generated idyllic images of children
as dependent, uncorrupted, and precious in industrialized societies, a trend
documented by Chris Jenks and Peter N. Stearns. The prototypic child of
‘‘Western’’ modernity is the opposite of evil.
The contradiction between the evil child and the prototypic innocent
child of modernity suggests that aversion to monstrous children can be
accounted for partly by theories such as those of Noël Carroll and Julia
Kristeva which trace horror to ambiguous stimuli that cannot be placed into
clear, natural categories. In the context of the modern cultural understanding

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of childhood, children who exhibit tendencies towards cruelty or subversive

self-assertion represent a category violation that turns conventional knowl-
edge of human behavior on its head. As Eric Ziolkowski has shown, images
of evil children have had a place in culture since Antiquity, but they are an
extreme departure from the Post-Enlightenment view of the innocent child
that is popular in modernity. The contradiction between the evil child and
the Post-Enlightenment prototype may help explain the relative explosion
of examples of monstrous children in literature and film that has occurred
in the past half-century, noted by such diverse thinkers as anthropologist
George Boas and author Joyce Carol Oates. Increasingly, the modern view
of the child as innocent is accompanied by the sinister archetype of its
opposite: the child who is thoroughly evil.
The fact that monstrous children are an affront to a modern under-
standing of what childhood should be cannot entirely account for their
unique power as horrific figures. Many ambiguous creatures and sources
of malevolence have the power to frighten. Monstrous children stand out
among the rest in the uncanny disturbance they generate, as if they arouse
a more primordial terror than that of expectancy violation or anxiety at the
subversion of innocence. Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny, which
argues that we are uniquely disturbed by entities that are simultaneously
familiar and unfamiliar, captures something of the feeling but fails to
adequately explain the source of the modern aversion to evil children. What
is required to explain this aversion is a post-Freudian account of the impor-
tance of children in our symbolic lives. We propose that one such account is
offered by terror management theory, an empirically supported social
psychological theory of human behavior formulated by Sheldon Solomon,
Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski (TMT; see Greenberg, Solomon, and
Arndt, 2008). TMT argues that fear of personal mortality is a primary motiv-
ating force behind human behavior. From this perspective, children have a
special importance for their parents and the preceding generation as guar-
antors of a form of what Robert Jay Lifton called symbolic immortality: the
sense that one will leave behind some kind of legacy after death. Children
thus provide psychological equanimity in the face of the potential for paral-
yzing death anxiety. According to TMT, then, fear of monstrous children is
inseparable from fear of mortality and the breakdown of cultural strategies
for repressing this fear.
To demonstrate the applicability of TMT to the case of monstrous chil-
dren in the horror genre, we will use the theory to analyze Doris Lessing’s
novel The Fifth Child (1988). We argue that the horror manifested by the
novel’s evil child, Ben, has two sources, both of which are rendered psycho-
logically explicable by TMT. First, the birth and development of the mon-
strously ambiguous Ben acts as a potent reminder of human creatureliness.
Because animals are mortal, humans prefer not to think of themselves as
animals and instead seek refuge in symbolic constructions. A child such as

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Ben who is animalistic in both appearance and behavior makes it difficult for
his parents to deny their animality and therefore their mortality. Second,
Ben’s status as the fifth child of parents psychologically committed to obtain-
ing symbolic immortality through their offspring makes both his perversity
and his dangerousness symbols of the ultimate failure of our strivings to over-
come death. By highlighting these two aspects of the horror of monstrous
children—the deformed child as symbol of human creatureliness and the
corrupt child as a subversion of the use of children to secure symbolic
immortality—Lessing’s work serves as an apt demonstration of the unique
terror engendered by such children, a point made clear by applying TMT
to the text.
Before turning to a brief presentation of TMT and our application of the
theory to The Fifth Child, we must acknowledge that this theory (like any
other) is necessarily limited in its explanatory scope and that there are other
post-Freudian accounts which also help illuminate the psychological import
of the monstrous child. One such perspective may be found in the writings of
Julia Kristeva on abjection, which, in contrast to TMT, is more closely rooted
in both traditional Freudian ideas and the aforementioned claim that horror’s
essence lies in ambiguity. In order to clarify both the limitations and the
potential unique contribution of a TMT account, we will foreground our
analysis with a short discursion into Kristeva’s theory, which offers an
interpretation of monstrous children that both diverges from and comple-
ments the present TMT analysis. We hope that by comparing these two
theories throughout this essay, we will shed light on the complexity of the
monstrous child as a symbolic figure as well as the richness of Lessing’s
novel.

A THEORY OF ABJECTION

In her essay Powers of Horror, Kristeva argues that many of the figures that
terrify (and captivate) us in life and art can best be understood in terms of
the process of abjection.1 Abject things are interstitial entities that do not
present themselves as true ‘‘objects’’ for the individual in the psychoanalytic
sense of object-relations because they exist in the boundaries and margins
between conventional categories (Kristeva 1–4, 15–17). Although these enti-
ties are generally repellent to us in our lives as enculturated beings, Kristeva
proposes that the process of abjection—positing abject elements outside the
self—marks a crucial and primal step in the establishment of one’s ego.
The infant defines herself over and against the abject before she develops
the cognitive ability to grasp true objects through the schemas provided by
language and symbolic self-awareness. Thus, echoing Otto Rank’s reformula-
tion of Freudian theory in The Trauma of Birth, Kristeva argues that the pro-
totypic site of all abjection is the mother-child dyad, and the mother’s body is

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the first abject thing against which the individual defines herself in the initial
act of separation at birth (12–14, 61–63). Importantly, the abjected mother
both repels and compels the individual, who learns to define herself in oppo-
sition to the mother (and all abjected material) but nevertheless retains a
desire to return to the undifferentiated state of ‘‘egoless-ness’’ experienced
in the womb (see Sara Beardsworth’s informative, extended discussion of this
point).
Kristeva argues that concepts of the abject—especially the abjected
maternal—have had a marked influence on human cultural history. She
asserts with Freud that understanding a culture means understanding those
acts and ideas that are most strongly forbidden by it and follows him further
by acknowledging that the two taboos present at the origins of human
society are those against killing and incest. As Rank has noted in Psychology
and the Soul, the taboo against killing posited by Freud can be interpreted as
a consequence of, and an attempt to control, the fear of mortality. Kristeva
seems to share this interpretation (57–58). While Freud builds his theory of
the origins of repressive culture around this taboo and its connection to
the murder of the ‘‘father of the primal horde,’’ Kristeva focuses instead on
the dread of incest. She contends that extreme dread of mother-son incest,
manifested in the form of a taboo, is the cultural analogue of the individual’s
abjection of the mother (61–64). The incest taboo symbolizes each
individual’s necessary separation from their mother and the fact that patriar-
chal culture forbids any return to the ‘‘primary narcissism’’ of a fetal, pre-
individuated state. At the same time, the taboo reflects a fear of the ‘‘archaic
mother’’—of the generative power of women, which is both vital to and
potentially disruptive of the patriarchal order—and this fear in turn reinforces
the motivated abjection of women.
Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides a possible explanation of the
power of monstrous children as symbolic figures, an explanation rooted in
the importance of gender, sexuality, and uncertainty as characteristics of
our psychological experience. Not only are monstrous children themselves
abject and ambiguous (a point we will explore in more detail later in this
paper; see also Barbara Creed’s analysis), but they also may be seen as an
incarnation of the abjection of the mother, a concretization (in reverse) of
the psychological process of separation from the mother. The abject infant
lays bare the typical process, operating at both the individual and societal
level, of the mother’s abjection. In this way, the monstrous child exposes
typically hidden aspects of individual repression (the need to psychologically
distance from one’s mother) and of societal oppression (of the generative
power of women). Just as scholars from Antiquity through the Renaissance
interpreted deformed children as a direct consequence of their mother’s
untoward and powerful desires (a body of literature reviewed by Marie
Hélène Huet), a Kristevan reading suggests that monstrous children represent
fear of the ambiguous power of the archaic mother.

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This approach provides a useful framework for understanding novels

such as The Fifth Child. Ruth Robbins, for example, has directly applied
Kristevan ideas to an analysis of the novel. We do not wish to deny the
unique insights offered by such an analysis; indeed, as should become appar-
ent throughout this paper, there are many points of convergence between a
Kristevan and a terror management analysis of monstrous children, driven by
their mutual roots in Freudian thought. Nevertheless, we hope to show in the
remainder of this paper that a full understanding of the power of both stories
of monstrous children in general and The Fifth Child in particular requires
recognition of the role played by awareness of mortality in human psy-
chology. In other words, while Kristeva develops her cultural theory from
a focus on the incest taboo discussed by Freud, we will instead return to
the other primary taboo—that against death—to show that a doomed desire
to overcome mortal limits motivates the characters in The Fifth Child and
fuels the terror of the monstrous child at the novel’s center. But before
elaborating on this analysis of Lessing’s novel, it is necessary to first briefly
introduce the theoretical perspective that will serve as its foundation.

TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY

TMT is an empirically supported social psychological theory that has roots in

the works of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (such as The Denial of
Death), who in turn took inspiration from the post-Freudian psychoanalysis
of Rank. The theory posits that humans share with other animals strong bio-
logical predispositions for continued survival but, unlike other animals, are
burdened with an understanding of their own inevitable mortality. This
awareness of death conflicts with a basic drive towards continued survival.
As a result of this basic conflict, humans have a unique capacity to experi-
ence terror at the mere thought that their existence will end. Despite this,
the majority of humans seem to function without being constantly paralyzed
by fear of death. TMT offers an explanation for how this is possible. The
theory posits that humans deny the reality of death as an insurmountable
problem by imbuing the world with symbolic webs of meaning referred to
as cultural worldviews. Worldviews such as the Christian faith, Stoic philo-
sophy, and logical positivism serve many purposes, but from the perspective
of TMT, two of their most important functions are to allow us to deny our
animal (and therefore mortal) nature and to provide us with routes to sym-
bolic immortality.
Lifton has identified a set of primary modes of what he calls immortality
striving, which is the pursuit of symbolic immortality through culturally sup-
ported philosophies and life projects. The most basic mode, perhaps, is the
literal immortality strategy encoded in the majority of the world’s religious
faiths: the reassuring metaphysical belief that death is not, in fact, the end

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of existence. Two other modes are the ‘‘creative’’ or cultural-symbolic mode

and the ‘‘biological’’ mode. In the cultural-symbolic mode of immortality
striving, individuals shield themselves from the threat of death by accruing
culturally validated accomplishments that will (hopefully) be honored after
their demise. Authors seek publications, politicians strive to make
world-changing decisions during their terms, business executives gain fame
and respect by rising up the corporate ladder before immortalizing their
names in the form of philanthropic endowments, and so on. Alternatively,
in the biological mode, individuals seek a sense of immortality through their
offspring. Parents know that, upon death, they will leave behind one or more
individuals who will not only carry on their memory and family name but
who will also (given the proper socialization) transmit their most cherished
beliefs and values to subsequent generations.
Terror management research has demonstrated the appeal of these stra-
tegies as symbolic defenses against thoughts of death. In support of the
cultural-symbolic mode, over 400 empirical studies conducted in such coun-
tries as China, India, Israel, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United
States have shown that concerns with death partly underlie our adherence to
cultural worldviews and our proclivity to behave in ways that will guarantee
our symbolic immortality (for recent reviews of this work, see Greenberg,
Solomon, and Arndt; see also Greenberg and Arndt). In one line of support-
ive experiments, participants asked to reflect on their death (as opposed to a
variety of other topics, many of them aversive) engage in more rigorous
defense of their national culture or exhibit greater effort on tasks relevant
to their sense of self-worth. For example, Greenberg, Kosloff, and colleagues
demonstrated that writing about thoughts associated with one’s death (rela-
tive to another aversive topic) leads individuals to report greater desires to be
famous. Supporting the biological mode, Immo Fritsche, and colleagues
showed that induced thoughts of death increase reported desire to have
offspring in both men and women.
In addition, such experimentally-induced reminders of death increase
efforts to psychologically distance ourselves from other animals and to deny
or sublimate our animal and sexual nature. For example, participants who
are asked to contemplate death subsequently show a greater tendency to
conceptualize sex in less physical and more romantic terms. Thoughts of
death also lead to stronger disgust reactions to animals and animal-
like human behaviors (such as excretion; for a review of this research, see
Goldenberg, Kosloff, and Greenberg). In addition, as these studies demon-
strated, the effects of death reminders operate outside of conscious aware-
ness. In other words, participants are not explicitly aware that thoughts of
death are causing them to cling more rigidly to their worldviews or to
become more averse to the thought that humans are animals. Finally, several
studies, which were recently reviewed by Hayes, Schimel, Arndt, and
Faucher, have shown that threatening people’s faith in their worldview or

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their self-worth or reminding them of their animal nature all bring thoughts
of death to the fringes of consciousness.
While traditional Freudian psychoanalysis has received mixed empirical
support, TMT is an empirically validated theory that stands to enhance our
understanding of common existential themes in literature and art, and
themes of horror or tragedy in particular.2 TMT posits that much of human
behavior and cultural creation reflects a non-conscious desire to transcend
our animal and mortal limitations by imbuing our lives with a broader sense
of social connectivity and purpose. From this perspective, children play an
important role in the psychological lives of adults as symbols of immortality:
they bear our genes, names, memory, and culture into the future. It is little
wonder that their corruption elicits reactions of horror, for evil and mon-
strous children represent both a reminder of our own physical animal nature
and a failure in our attempts to overcome death through the next generation.
Consequently, they are potent symbols of our mortality. We begin our TMT
analysis of The Fifth Child with a discussion of the significance of the
monstrous child and particularly the evil fetus or infant as an ambiguously
powerful symbol of disturbing human creatureliness.

THE ABJECT CHILD AND HUMAN CREATURELINESS

Doris Lessing is a prolific author whose oeuvre spans a number of themes

and genres. She is perhaps best known for her 1962 novel The Golden Note-
book, which has been both positively and critically received as a major work
of twentieth-century feminism (see, for example, Mona Knapp’s discussion of
the novel). Louise Yelin has observed that child characters do not figure
prominently in some of Lessing’s early realist and semi-autobiographic
works, such as The Golden Notebook and In Pursuit of the English (1960),
despite the works’ centering around female protagonists who have children.
Yelin interprets Lessing’s reluctance to bring children to the fore in these
realist works as a kind of resistance to patriarchal expectations.
Interestingly, however, as Roberta Rubenstein has noted, abject children
have figured continually in Lessing’s more fantastic works. The Four-Gated
City (1969) features an island of children who are gifted with unusual psychic
powers; The Memoirs of a Survivor (1976) depicts feral, violent children who
roam a post-apocalyptic city. Lessing understands the simultaneously com-
pelling and repelling nature of the abject child and weaves this source of
ambivalence into the heart of many of her science fiction novels. Because
the narrative of The Fifth Child—monstrous children excepted—operates
within the boundaries of everyday reality (the novel might well be character-
ized as magical realist), it stands out among Lessing’s depictions of abject
children as an attempt to work out the meaning of these figures for our
own lives. Indeed, while Rubenstein notes that Lessing’s fantastic child

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characters often call into question conventional understandings of reality for

both their fellow protagonists and her readers (72), we will argue that the
monstrous Fifth Child, Ben, instead functions to highlight the harsh realities
of human animality and mortality.
In the novel, the conservative, family-oriented British couple Harriet and
David Lovatt plan to have a bevy of children and an ideal household full of
life, despite meager financial resources and their relatives’ skepticism. They
buy a very large house, have four children in quick succession, and are seem-
ingly well on their way to the life they envisioned. Then Harriet gets pregnant
again, this time unintentionally, and eventually gives birth to the monstrous
Ben. Ben has a sinister, violent nature that defies conventional modern asso-
ciations of infants with innocence. Even while he is in her womb, Harriet is
overwhelmed with the feeling that Ben is an enemy figure with whom she
is locked in a physical struggle (42–47). Not only is Ben a sinister presence,
but once he is born, he is also physically abnormal. Ben has an alien,
‘‘gnome’’-like (71) appearance and enough physical strength to strangle a
dog within months of his birth. Almost from the moment of his conception,
Ben is described as an ambiguous creature who is not entirely human. While
discussing her child with a doctor, Harriet suggests that Ben might be a
‘‘throwback’’ to an earlier stage of human evolution, a member of a more
animalistic subspecies whose genes somehow survived hidden in the human
pool (106). While pregnant with Ben (a pregnancy that causes her tremen-
dous discomfort), Harriet imagines herself the victim of some botched scien-
tific experiment mixing ‘‘the products of a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little
spaniel; a lion and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger and a
goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh,
sometimes claws’’ (41).
In Kristevan terms, Ben is a perfect example of the abject as he blurs the
line between existing natural categories and brings disorder into the highly
ordered system of the Lovatt’s household. The abject child as a source and
symbol of horror has been chronicled in the beliefs of both industrial and
pre-industrial peoples by anthropologist Mary Douglas. Douglas observed
that in many cultures even normally developing children become symbols
of potential power and danger, to be feared and avoided, when they are tran-
sitioning to different stages of life. In the frameworks of Douglas and Kristeva,
people associate undefined or interstitial others with broader sources of dis-
order that threaten to undermine their worldviews, which are based on the
coherent structuring of reality. For example, the Nyakyusa and Lele peoples
of Africa have traditionally associated fetuses with the power to bring about
suffering, because of their ambiguous, undetermined state (for instance, their
gender is not yet known). Similarly, developing children are often viewed as
possessing dangerous powers traceable to their protean condition.
Part of the terror of the monstrous child, then, lies in its existence in
transitional life-phases already charged with the anxiety of the abject. The

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character of Ben blurs and deviates from expected developmental stages. His
delivery is induced at eight months, and yet he is already at birth muscled
and almost able to stand on his own, like a much older child; in later child-
hood, he is described as being much older than he appears (113). Though
even normal fetuses and children may represent transitional figures about
whom we feel a certain ambivalence, the disturbing ambiguity of evil chil-
dren is reinforced by their deviation from cultural norms of youthful inno-
cence. Thus, Ben’s uncanny appearance is made all the more disturbing by
the monstrous acts he undertakes, which mimic the dangerous powers asso-
ciated with transitional figures in the superstitions chronicled by Douglas.
The Nyakyusa people do not allow pregnant women to stand near store-
houses of grain, for fear that the hungry fetus inside will cause the grain to
disappear. Similarly, while inside his mother, Ben forces Harriet to devour
food with an untiring voracity (43).
Once out of the womb, Ben continues to eat voraciously, so much so
that he bruises Harriet’s breasts, prompting her to quickly abandon
breast-feeding. Throughout the novel, Ben is portrayed as devouring food
with little or no conformity to civilized rules of etiquette. Consider this parti-
cularly vivid example:

Harriet had come down one morning . . . to see Ben squatting on the big
table, with an uncooked chicken he had taken from the refrigerator,
which stood open, its contents spilled all over the floor. Ben had raided
it in some savage fit he could not control. Grunting with satisfaction, he
tore the raw chicken apart with teeth and hands, pulsing with barbaric
strength. He had looked up over the partly shredded and dismembered
carcass at Harriet, at his siblings, and snarled. (97)

In short, to use a popular expression, Ben eats ‘‘like an animal.’’

From a TMT standpoint, Ben’s physical ambiguity and his animalistic
nature are inseparable. TMT asserts that reminders of human animality are
disturbing because they imply our ultimate sameness with all other mortal
creatures on the earth. Douglas gives many examples of feared ambiguous
entities that make it difficult to deny our animality. For instance, menstruation
is commonly reviled because menstrual blood represents a paradoxical being
that is dead without ever having lived. Menstruation also implies our com-
monality with other fluid-secreting, physically limited beings, a stark contrast
to the symbolic beings inhabiting worlds rich with meaning that we imagine
ourselves to be. Similarly, Ben’s abject nature reinforces the connection
between humanity and other forms of organic life. As a ‘‘throwback’’ to an
earlier evolutionary phase, Ben is a disturbing reminder that all humans
are animals at base, evolved in a world of violence and death.3
Ben is not the only abject child who serves as a reminder of human
creatureliness in The Fifth Child. One of the most impactful and horrifying

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sequences in the novel occurs when Harriet arrives at an institution for dis-
abled children in which Ben has been placed. She unwittingly enters a ward
of the institution, only ‘‘to see that every bed or cot held an infant or small
child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, some-
times horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head
on a stalk of a body . . . then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging
eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs’’ (81). Fetuses and infants are
inherently associated with the animalistic act of procreation. When they
develop normally, these transitional beings do not typically arouse
death-related anxiety; rather, as symbols of our transcendence of death
through the creation of new generations, they can help us cope with mor-
tality concerns. Yet evil or deformed children, and monstrous infants like
Ben in particular, seem to pervert this process, corrupting our wish for
immortality into a reminder of our doomed nature as procreating animals.
Robbins has interpreted The Fifth Child as a parable exposing the darker
side of fertility. Drawing on Douglas and Kristeva, Robbins highlights Lessing’s
attention to the painful aspects of Harriet’s pregnancy with Ben, concluding
that the novel serves in many ways as a corrective to culturally sanctioned nar-
ratives of the birthing process. In such narratives, human procreation is often
cast as a route to immortality, with children providing the salvation of their
mortal parents. But such reassuringly symbolic stories are counteracted by
the animalistic aspects of pregnancy: blood, milk, the swollen belly, unbear-
able pain, and the umbilical cord. Harriet’s physical pain, as well as her feel-
ings of isolation and animosity during her pregnancy, undermine
conventional narratives of the ‘‘miracle’’ of birth and externalize the typically
hidden process of the mother’s abjection noted by Kristeva. Furthermore,
because the physical aspects of pregnancy highlight humanity’s condition as
a procreative animal species, they can serve as a psychologically problematic
reminder of mortality and thereby elicit negative reactions. This contention is
supported by the experimental work of Goldenberg and colleagues, which
shows that reminding people of the similarity between humans and animals
induces more negative attitudes towards pregnant women and bodily fluids
and brings death-related concerns to the fore. By making our animality salient,
Harriet’s brutally physical pregnancy with Ben transforms procreation from a
symbolic victory over death to a concrete reminder of mortality.
It is important to note that neither a TMT nor a Kristevan perspective on
the potential ambivalence of pregnancy justifies or excuses the abjection
of the mother’s body. As feminist scholars like Jane M. Ussher have noted,
the (pregnant) female body is not inherently abject; rather, it has been
positioned as such in different cultures at different times in history. The
association of pregnancy with death and animality is largely culturally
conditioned and part of a repressive ideological link between death and
sexuality that is stronger in certain epochs than others (for more on this
association, see, for example, Phillipe Ariés 369–81). Furthermore, TMT

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suggests that any reminder of human animality has the potential to trigger
unconscious death anxiety: this is as true of male ejaculate as it is of female
menstruation. Pregnancy is neither uniquely nor inherently associated with
fear of death according to the theory, and, as we have mentioned, it often
stands as a symbol of victory over death. Indeed (and possibly for this rea-
son), the pregnant female body was the first human form commonly repre-
sented in some of humanity’s earliest artifacts (or so some scholars have
argued; for a review of this work, see Peter Watson 53–73). It is quite poss-
ible, as suggested by Ussher (7–8), that the positioning of pregnancy as an
abject state in later periods of history has stemmed partly from male envy
of female generative power. Regardless, our intention in applying a terror
management analysis to Lessing’s portrayal of Harriet’s pregnancy is not to
frame aversive reactions to pregnancy as natural, but rather to illuminate
one dimension of the powerful symbolic role played by the birthing process
in cultural thought. When pregnancy is problematized as a biological event
(as it is in the novel), the unease that results is due in part to the general
double-edged potentiality of human sexual nature, which serves as both a
route to immortality and a reminder of our mortal biology.
This mixed potential for sexuality to be both a problematic reminder of
and (when properly sublimated) a symbolic means of overcoming death is
apparent in Harriet’s ambivalent attitudes about sex, described early in The
Fifth Child. For Harriet, the sexual act has an inherent association with death:
when she and David first engage in intercourse, their bedroom becomes ‘‘a
black cave that had no end’’ with ‘‘a smell of cold rainy earth’’ (10). Yet she
is able to overcome the fear of mortality implied by sex by embracing the
notion that her children will become her life’s transcendent purpose: she sub-
limates David’s sexual advances by considering them ‘‘his taking possession of
the future in her’’ (10). Harriet’s sublimation of sex as procreation brings us to
the core of the unique contribution offered by a TMT account of the problem
of monstrous children. While the Kristevan and TMT perspectives largely con-
verge on the power of the monstrous child as a symbol of animality and the
psychological ambivalence generated by pregnancy, a TMT account goes
further in its insistence on the importance of the child as a symbol of the par-
ents’ immortality. We will now examine the motivation and psychology of the
parental figures in The Fifth Child, as well as its numerous references to mor-
tality and its socio-historical context in an attempt to show that the monstrous
child is always, among other things, a denied bid for immortality.

THE CHILD AS DOUBLE AND THE HUBRIS

OF IMMORTALITY STRIVING

Born in Persia, raised in Rhodesia, yet a self-declared ‘‘English writer,’’ Doris

Lessing has a multifaceted sense of personal identity and, as Yelin has

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observed, many of her novels portray characters attempting to fashion a

coherent identity out of the conflicting ideologies available in globalized
(post-)modernity. The Fifth Child can also be understood as a narrative
about conflicting worldviews or, from a TMT perspective, about a conflict
of opposing routes to symbolic immortality. As previously mentioned,
Lifton distinguishes between, among other modes of immortality striving,
the cultural-symbolic mode, through which immortality is secured by accru-
ing culturally sanctioned accomplishments for oneself, and the biological
mode, whereby one achieves immortality through one’s children. The Fifth
Child can be read as the story of two individuals who reject the
cultural-symbolic (arguably the favored mode of the modern, largely secu-
lar ‘‘Western’’ milieu) in favor of the biological mode and the consequences
of doing so.4
The Lovatts are alienated from the dominant cultural beliefs of their gen-
eration (that of the radical 1960s) and are not interested in pursuing the
routes to accomplishment and happiness collectively endorsed by that gen-
eration, namely, self-expressionistic careers and a sexually liberated, hedon-
istic lifestyle. Lessing begins the novel with a description of the protagonists’
feelings of alienation from the cultural worldview in which they are
immersed: ‘‘They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which
was that they were ordinary and in the right of it, should not be criticized
for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness’’ (3). Indeed, Robbins has
pointed out that Harriet, who longs for a life of simple domesticity during
the height of the second-wave feminist movement, is in many ways as anach-
ronistic as Ben, the evolutionary throwback. Similarly, David also rejects
what he perceives to be the normative goals of his radical generation. He
actively deviates from the career-oriented life of his wealthy father, choosing
an obscure existence marked by financial insecurity over the temptation of
culturally validated personal success. Instead of embracing the cultural-
symbolic mode of immortality striving through work and achievement, the
Lovatts pursue the biological mode, investing their savings and energy in
‘‘the dream’’ of six prospective children.
Throughout the opening pages of the novel, this plan to deviate from
the cultural norm and sacrifice career interests for an idyllic family life is per-
ceived by both the Lovatts and those around them as a kind of selfish rebel-
lion. When they purchase a large house beyond their means to accommodate
the planned family, Harriet and David are concerned that their parents will
disapprove. This pattern is repeated with each of Harriet’s pregnancies up
until Ben’s conception, which follow one another in rapid succession (five
children are born in seven years; 25, 31). With each new pregnancy, the
Lovatts fear that their friends and relations (who gather at the house annually
for holiday parties) will chastise them for expanding their family despite
David’s inadequate salary and Harriet’s struggle to adequately tend to the
present children. Such criticism is repeatedly voiced, to the extent that Harriet

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begins to consider herself ‘‘a criminal’’ on account of her desire for continu-
ous propagation (25).
The Lovatts’ transgression lies in their defiance of the normative mode
for immortality striving of their epoch, their rejection of the cultural-symbolic
in favor of the biological mode. The conflict between these modes is
expressed in Lessing’s description of a remark made by David’s mother in
criticism of an exclusive family orientation: ‘‘she [David’s mother] was stand-
ing up for a life where domesticity was kept in its place, a background to
what was important’’ (27). Refusing to give the career life pride of place,
the Lovatts pursue biological immortality with defiant zeal. This pursuit is
characterized by those around them as thoughtless and arrogant. The nega-
tive reaction on the part of their family and friends to Harriet and David’s
‘‘alternative’’ lifestyle fits well with many of the TMT studies summarized
by Greenberg, Solomon, and Arndt which show that people are threatened
by and respond negatively to others who choose paths to immortality
discrepant with their own.
There are multiple possible interpretations of Lessing’s emphasis on the
conflict between career-oriented and family-oriented worldviews in the
novel. From a Kristevan perspective, this emphasis can be taken to suggest
that the ritualized abjection of the mother is most pronounced in cultural set-
tings where procreation is only minimally necessary and largely discouraged
(Kristeva 78). In relatively affluent, established societies where the number of
offspring required to sustain the community has been reduced, the abject
maternal is less tolerated and monstrous children become a symbol of warn-
ing and taboo against female generative power.
Alternatively, one can understand the worldview conflict in The Fifth
Child as a commentary by Lessing on the cultural tensions present in Britain
at the time of the novel’s publication (1988). Yelin and Susan Watkins have
noted the significance of the fact that Lessing wrote the novel during
Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister. The ‘‘return to family values,’’
for which the Lovatts yearn, was also an ideological aspect of Thatcher-era
conservatism and the popular reaction of the 1980s against 1960s radicalism.
In this reading, Ben (and his family’s reactions to him) can be alternately seen
as supporting and problematizing a return to conservative politics. For
example, through its portrayal of the treatment Ben and Harriet receive at
the hands of various social institutions, The Fifth Child highlights issues made
prominent by the political initiatives of the Thatcher era. On the one hand,
Harriet is horrified by the inadequate (even cruel) treatment Ben receives
during his brief stay in the hospital for abnormal children. As John Mohan
pointed out in a review of the privatization of health care in 1980s England,
Thatcher’s administration often relied on such portrayals of mental health
and senior care facilities as inferior and inhumane to marshal support for
the ‘‘Care in the Community’’ policy, which was designed to cut spending
on public care for long-stay patients. At the same time, several passages in

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the novel that depict Harriet feeling like she is being held personally respon-
sible for Ben’s problematic nature by experts (doctors and teachers; Lessing
99–101, 103–104) call to mind the conservative rhetoric of individual culpa-
bility in healthcare matters that was part of the Thatcherian agenda. Rather
than offering a clear solution to the political debate on care for the elderly
and mentally disordered, the novel touches on the conflicts surrounding this
issue while also questioning whether either institutional or family-based,
private care is sufficient in as extreme a case as Ben’s.
TMT offers an additional interpretation of the novel which builds on and
moves beyond a historically situated clash of worldviews. In a more univer-
sally applicable sense, the monstrous child also symbolizes punishment for
(counternormative) biological immortality striving. Several references to mor-
tality in the first section of the novel suggest that the Lovatts are pursuing their
procreative dream as a defense against insecurity and death. In response to the
news that David will need three decades to pay off the house in which he and
Harriet plan to make their dream home, David’s father replies, ‘‘I’ll be dead by
then’’ (14). Later, Harriet’s mother accuses the couple of acting rashly by hav-
ing children so early in their married life, saying, ‘‘You two go on as if you
believe if you don’t grab everything, then you’ll lose it’’ (15). David replies
strangely and with conviction: ‘‘Everything could very well be taken away’’
(16), while news of death and chaos in the wider world blares from a radio
in the background. The Lovatts’ general understanding of the world ‘‘outside
their fortress, their kingdom, in which . . . precious children were nurtured’’ as
it is conveyed through news media is of a hostile place full of ‘‘wars and riots;
killings and hijackings; murders’’ (107). In this mortal and dangerous world,
the Lovatts are pursuing constancy, security, and ultimately immortality
through their children. This is made clear when Lessing describes their
planned offspring as their ‘‘demands on the future’’ (8), language that
parallels Harriet’s sublimation of sex as a procreative act.
The symbolism of the child (and the son in particular) overcoming the
mortality of the parent is perhaps universal and has had a particular signifi-
cance in the Christian worldview, as noted by Rank in his discussion of the
common theme of the Double. In Psychology and the Soul, Rank amassed
several examples from the anthropological literature to demonstrate that,
across cultures and time, people have commonly believed in a Double or
Doppelgänger, which is essentially a second self that transcends individual
mortality by existing beyond the self’s physical decay. In the early stages
of human cultural evolution, Rank argues, the idea of the Double was prim-
arily conveyed through soul-concepts or in the special reverence given to
twins in many cultures. However, with the decline in animism and the rise
of sexual awareness that has occurred over the course of cultural history,
Rank asserts that increasingly the child has come to serve as the Double of
the parent in cultural texts. The story of Jesus Christ is only one of many such
allegories connecting the figure of the son with the promise of immortality.

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Thus, in the modern era, many people (like the participants in the afore-
mentioned empirical study by Fritsche and colleagues) have dealt with the
threat of death by psychologically investing in biological children who serve
as Doubles, guaranteeing the Self’s immortality.5 Rank noted that the rise of
the biological mode of immortality striving brought about an important
change in the power of the child as a symbol. In his cultural studies, Rank
observed that a common theme in world literature, perhaps best epitomized
in the Greek tragedies, is that striving after personal immortality is doomed.
In ‘‘animistic’’ or pre-industrial societies, folk stories often depict personal
death as the punishment warranted by hubristic pursuit of immortality. How-
ever, with the elevated importance of the child as Double in the modern era,
Rank argues that modern literature contains far more numerous examples of
the child’s destruction or perversion as the penalty incurred by the parent’s
desire to transcend mortal fate.
In Beyond Psychology, Rank highlights the moralistic use of the Double
motif in modern literature to warn against the desire for immortal life—
particularly when that desire manifests in a mode of immortality striving
that runs counter to that of the mainstream worldview. Thus in the nine-
teenth-century European cultural milieu, when, according to Ariés, dom-
estic life, romantic relationships, and procreation reached the zenith of
their symbolic value as paths to immortality, Gothic characters like Victor
Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll reject domesticity and instead strive cre-
atively to overcome death by ‘‘birthing’’ fiendish Doubles characterized to
varying degrees as the ‘‘children’’ of their creators. In the following century,
in the anti-domestic radical 1960s, Harriet and David’s rebellious pursuit of
biological immortality is punished through the corruption of their fifth
child: the monstrous Double, Ben. Isabel Gamallo has commented on the
Gothic style and structure of The Fifth Child, and Watkins also character-
ized the work as ‘‘urban Gothic’’; these stylistic elements underscore its kin-
ship with past works in which the Double heralds death for those who
transgress against the dominant worldview in pursuit of their own immor-
tality. While the Double initially made its way into culture as a sign of
immortality (e.g., the ideology of the soul), the monstrous Double-child
of modern literature is an image of inescapable mortality.
As in the ancient stories chronicled by Rank, the Lovatts defy their mortal
condition and the cultural norms of their era by investing their lives in the
promise of biological immortality. But their efforts are brought to an end by
Ben, who emerges as a symbol of the Lovatts’ mortality. Ben brings mortality
to the fore with his deadly actions, uncontrollable fits, teeth-baring snarls, and
fearsome stares. He kills a dog and a cat and becomes such a threat while still a
toddler that the Lovatts have their other children, who live in fear of their
savage brother, locked safely in their rooms at night. As Ben grows up, the
Lovatts age with unnatural celerity, and they begin to look much older than
they are physically, suggesting that Ben is a harbinger of their demise.

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There are other, subtler ways in which Lessing’s writing suggests an

inherent association between Ben and mortality. For one, Harriet frequently
imagines and even longs for Ben’s death (63). Yet she cannot bring herself to
kill him or allow her own child, the central biological basis of her immortality
striving, to die. So she rescues Ben from the institution where he had been hid-
den away by her husband and where he certainly would have soon died. She
picks up his cold, drugged body and suddenly realizes the meaning of the
expression ‘‘a dead weight’’ (84). Each mutant child in the institution stands
for the mortality of its parent, patently denied by sequestering the disturbing
creatures away in a hospital. In the prison for perverse children, Lessing fashions
a metaphor for the modern ‘‘institutionalization’’ of death. As Ariés explains, in
modern industrial societies, the experience of death has become increasingly
remote and mediated: though we are exposed to plenty of safe media images
of death, the deaths of those around us occur primarily in hospitals, removed
from the immediate experience of all but a few caretakers and experts. Similarly,
the monstrous Double-children that represent the mortality of their parents are
locked away from society and never seen again in Lessing’s novel.
Ben embodies not only the Lovatts’ physical death but, more impor-
tantly, the destruction of its symbolic cure: he kills their dream of conquer-
ing mortality. The presence of Ben has ‘‘dealt the family a mortal wound’’
(93). After returning with Ben from the institution, Harriet’s relationship to
her husband and other children is irrevocably altered. When the Lovatts
make love, it is now as if ‘‘the ghosts of young Harriet and young David
entwined and kissed’’ (112). There is no question of further procreation,
despite the fact that they originally planned for six (rather than only five)
children. The Lovatts begin using ‘‘the Pill,’’ which was once for them a
despicable symbol of the modern attitude toward domesticity they shunned
(92). Ben’s siblings grow emotionally distant and distrustful of their mother,
spending increasingly more time away from home with relatives (when
they are at home, Harriet’s sense of alienation from them is increased by
the fact that they must be locked in their rooms for safety; 95). Ben’s destruc-
tion of the Lovatts’ dream is no better conveyed than in the sequence, con-
tained in the final pages of the novel (128–29), in which an aging Harriet
stares into the glossy surface of the large dining room table in her now life-
less home and sees idyllic images of her other children gathered around
when they were young, before a dark vision of Ben overshadows the tab-
leau and all other pictures vanish.
It is not only Ben’s ambiguous animal nature and violent potential that
puts an end to the Lovatts’ bid for immortality, but also his attraction and ulti-
mate conversion to a symbolic worldview that is the antithesis of their own.
Ben’s status as cultural Other—of a foreign worldview connected to both
immigration and deviance—becomes a central idea of the novel’s third act.
As Ben grows older, he ingratiates himself with the local biker gang the Lovatts
always associated with the hostile world beyond their cocoon of domesticity.

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By the time Ben reaches adolescence, with all her other children preferring
boarding school to their ruined home, Harriet is often left alone in the house
with Ben and his hooligan compatriots, who stay uninvited between raids on
local stores and riots at seaside towns. The youths do little to hide the joy they
take in violence and commonly speak of the day when they will rise in
‘‘revolution’’ against the Lovatts and the rest of their generation (124).
Though the Lovatts hoped to raise children in whom they could instill
their conservative love of domesticity and traditional English values, Ben’s
rejection of this worldview in favor of its deviant antithesis is clear. It extends
even to the gang’s preferred cuisine: Ben and his friends litter the Lovatts’
suburban English home with exotic take-out of every variety, Chinese,
Mexican, Turkish (128). As his life begins to center around the gang, Ben’s
systematic destruction of his parents’ traditional dream reaches its final stage.
He has discovered a sense of belonging his parents could never give him
among the ‘‘outsiders’’ (the immigrant and criminal groups) they had always
feared and from whom they had tried to shelter their family. As scholars such
as Gamallo and Yelin have noted, the ultimate identification of Ben with
foreign, deviant forces characterizes The Fifth Child as a product of
Thatcher-era Britain, when an ideological push towards reviving the old
values and virility of the Empire was accompanied by ever-increasing con-
cerns with unemployment, immigration, and crime.
To summarize, Ben symbolizes the mortality of his parents in three ways
illuminated by TMT. First, his physical ambiguity, blurring the line between
humanity and animality, serves as a reminder of the Lovatts’ status as mortal
creatures. Second, he destroys the Lovatts’ relationship with their other chil-
dren, their primary basis for symbolic immortality. Third, his conversion to a
deviant worldview implies the futility of the Lovatts’ bid for symbolic immor-
tality. Parents invest in their children as vehicles for projecting themselves
into the future and thus overcoming death. But children, of course, do not
always passively assimilate to their parents’ cultural beliefs. Even biologically
normal children, like the other members of Ben’s biker gang, are not guaran-
teed to become vessels for the transmission of their parents’ cherished values.
In these ways, the dream of immortality through children, which the Lovatts
hubristically pursued in defiance of contemporary cultural conventions, was
destroyed by the birth of the monstrous child, a potent instantiation of the
mortal Double.

CONCLUSION

Throughout this paper, we have attempted to demonstrate how a TMT

analysis uniquely contributes to an understanding of the symbolic signifi-
cance of monstrous children by bringing parental desire for immortality into
focus. At the same time, we have pointed to some common ground, and

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some divergences, between TMT and more conventional contemporary

approaches to literary analysis—Kristeva’s theory of abjection in particular.
There are doubtless aspects of The Fifth Child which a Kristevan perspective
is better suited than TMT to explain. For example, the concept of the abjected
mother is useful in understanding Lessing’s relative prioritization of Harriet’s
point of view over that of any of the other characters. Throughout the novel,
we are encouraged to sympathize with Harriet as she is made to feel like a
‘‘criminal’’ by those around her: firstly, for having children at all; secondly,
for feeling like something is wrong with Ben when doctors and educators ref-
use to acknowledge his ambiguous status; and finally for keeping Ben alive
at the cost of her family’s happiness. Harriet’s experience as the mother of an
abject child is outside the scope of a TMT analysis but is revealed as a rich
literary exploration of the socially conditioned nature of maternity when
viewed through Kristeva’s lens (an example of this type of approach may
be found in Robbins’s writing on the novel).
Although TMT does not provide the only framework for understanding
monstrous children in modern literature, Lessing’s emphasis on Ben’s animal
nature and the Lovatts’ dream of immortality support the importance of
incorporating the problem of death into a complete explanation of this
phenomenon. By exposing the monstrous child as a symbol of punishment
for doomed immortality striving, the present analysis illuminates the persist-
ence in the modern era of the common cultural belief that abnormal children
are the outcome of parental sins. This theme is expressed early in The Fifth
Child when Harriet tells David she believes her niece’s Down Syndrome to
be the result of an unhappy marriage: ‘‘Sarah and William’s unhappiness,
their quarreling, had probably attracted the mongol child’’ (22). The fact that
the deformed Ben will be the Lovatts’ own genetic retribution for their relent-
less propagation is presaged by an early description of their first four children
as four ‘‘challenges to destiny’’ (27). Towards the end of the novel, Harriet
even acknowledges her feeling that Ben was their punishment for desiring
too much for themselves: ‘‘We are being punished, that’s all . . . . For presum-
ing. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would
be’’ (117).
Lessing’s focus on the counternormativity of the Lovatts’ zeal for bio-
logical immortality foregrounds a work in which the monstrous Double-
child warns against the hubris of death defiance. Simultaneously, her atten-
tion to Ben’s physical ambiguity highlights the evil child’s power to disturb
by reminding us of our animal, and thus mortal, nature. An application of
TMT to The Fifth Child allows us to combine these important strains in the
novel in a coherent framework, which yields the insight that monstrous
children are a particularly disturbing source of terror because they trans-
form what is normally a basis of parents’ striving for immortality into an
incarnate symbol of the mortality of the parents, and by implication, of
us all.

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NOTES

The authors wish to thank Guest Editor Karen J. Renner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments
on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank Leah L. Kapa and Tara Harney-Mahajan for
proofreading the final manuscript.

1. Kristeva’s theory of abjection has yielded many different interpretations and has been used in a
variety of different ways. We fully acknowledge that ours is only one possible reading of her nuanced
writings, which offer alternate interpretations. Our reading has been largely influenced by Sara
Beardsworth’s Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity.
2. For example, Daniel Sullivan, Jeff Greenberg, and Mark J. Landau have recently used the theory to
analyze horror and ultraviolent films.
3. In her article ‘‘Reproduction, Genetics, and Eugenics in the Fiction of Doris Lessing,’’ Clare Hanson
discusses Ben as a symbol of the link between humans and animals and explores the possibility that this
link is disturbing and typically repressed. However, her account differs from a TMT perspective insofar as
it suggests that repression of the connection between humans and other species is a phenomenon unique
to modern societies, rather than a longstanding aspect of human culture designed to mitigate the psycho-
logical threat of death. It should be noted that Kristeva also suggests that the abject is inherently connected
to fear of our animality and distancing from the body (12–13, 77–79).
4. It is interesting that Lessing wrote a novel about a couple rejecting the cultural-symbolic to embrace
the biological mode of immortality striving, given that one could interpret Lessing’s biography as an
example of the opposite: a woman who pursued the cultural-symbolic path of the writer in an era
(1950s England) when women were highly encouraged to embrace the biological mode. As noted, a more
in-depth discussion of Lessing’s relationship as an author to issues of maternity and patriarchy is provided
by Yelin.
5. Jenks’s sociological work also shows that children increasingly have come to serve as symbols of
their parents’ ‘‘futurity’’ (immortality), particularly in the last century and in industrialized nations. He
writes of the modern era: ‘‘The dreams and the promise embedded in our children, was to reach for
the stars, to control more and more of the wantonness of the cosmos, and to produce human culture
as the triumph of finitude over infinity’’ (102–03). Jenks traces this tendency to, among other factors,
the decline of traditional religious beliefs as guarantors of immortality, the diminished importance of com-
munity and the rise of ideological individualism, the accompanying elevated belief in historical progress,
and the decline in birth rate in modern societies.

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Ariés, Phillipe. The Hour of our Death. New York: Knopf, 1981. Print.
Beardsworth, Sara. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. Albany, NY: State
U of New York P, 2004. Print.
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973. Print.
Boas, George. The Cult of Childhood. London: Warburg Institute, 1966. Print.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York:
Routledge, 1990. Print.
Creed, Barbara. ‘‘Baby Bitches from Hell: Monstrous Little Women in Film.’’ Paper
delivered at the Scary Women Symposium. UCLA: January, 1994. Print.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘Das Unheimliche.’’ Das Unheimliche: Aufsätze zur Literatur.
Hamburg: Fischer, 1963. Print.
Fritsche, Immo, Eva Jonas, Peter Fischer, Nicolas Koranyi, Nicole Berger, and
Beatrice Fleischmann. ‘‘Mortality Salience and the Desire for Offspring.’’ Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology 43.5 (2006): 753–62. Print.

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Gamallo, Isabel C. Anievas. ‘‘Motherhood and the Fear of the Other: Magic, Fable,
and the Gothic in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child.’’ Theme Parks, Rainforests
and Sprouting Wastelands: European Essays on Theory and Performance in
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Rodopi, 2000. 113–24. Print.
Goldenberg, Jamie L., Spee Kosloff, and Jeff Greenberg. ‘‘Existential Underpinnings
of Approach and Avoidance of the Physical Body.’’ Motivation and Emotion
30.2 (2006): 127–34. Print.
Goldenberg, Jamie L., Joanna Goplen, Cathy R. Cox, and Jamie Arndt. ‘‘ ‘Viewing’
Pregnancy as an Existential Threat: The Effects of Creatureliness on Reactions
to Media Depictions of the Pregnant Body.’’ Media Psychology 10.2 (2007):
211–30. Print.
Greenberg, Jeff, and Jamie Arndt. ‘‘Terror Management Theory.’’ Handbook of
Theories of Social Psychology. Eds. Arie Kruglanski, Edward Tory Higgins, and
Paul A. M. Van Lange. London: Sage P, 2011. In Press. Print.
Greenberg, Jeff, Spee Koslof, Sheldon Solomon, Florette Cohen, and Mark J. Landau.
‘‘Toward Understanding the Fame Game: The Effect of Mortality Salience on the
Appeal of Fame.’’ Self and Identity 9.1 (2010): 1–18. Print.
Greenberg, Jeff, Sheldon Solomon, and Jamie Arndt. ‘‘A Basic, but Uniquely Human
Motivation: Terror Management.’’ Handbook of Motivation Science. Eds. James
Y. Shaw and Wendi L. Gardner. New York: Guilford, 2008. 114–34. Print.
Hanson, Clare. ‘‘Reproduction, Genetics, and Eugenics in the Fiction of Doris
Lessing.’’ Contemporary Women’s Writing 1.1=2 (2007): 171–84. Print.
Hayes, Joseph, Jeff Schimel, Jamie Arndt, and Erik H. Faucher. ‘‘A Theoretical and
Empirical Review of the Death-Thought Accessibility Concept in Terror
Management Research.’’ Psychological Bulletin 136.5 (2010): 699–739. Print.
Huet, Marie Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.
Jenks, Chris. Childhood. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Knapp, Mona. ‘‘The Golden Notebook: A Feminist Context for the Classroom.’’
Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Ed. Carey Kaplan
and Ellen Cronan Rose. New York: MLA, 1989. 108–14. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982. Print.
Lessing, Doris. The Fifth Child. London: Jonathan Cape, 1988. Print.
———. The Four-Gated City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Print.
———. The Golden Notebook. London: Grafton Books, 1973. Print.
———. The Memoirs of a Survivor. New York: Bantam, 1976. Print.
———. In Pursuit of the English. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. Print.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese
Cultural Revolution. New York: Random House, 1968. Print.
Mohan, John. ‘‘Restructuring, Privatization, and the Geography of Health Care
Provision in England, 1983–1987.’’ Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 13.4 (1988): 449–65. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. ‘‘Killer Kids.’’ The New York Review 6 Nov. 1997: 17–20. Print.
Rank, Otto. Beyond Psychology. New York: Dover, 1958. Print.
———. Psychology and the Soul. Trans. Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Print.

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———. The Trauma of Birth. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1993. Print.

Robbins, Ruth. ‘‘(Not Such) Great Expectations: Unmaking Maternal Ideals in The Fifth
Child and We Need to Talk about Kevin.’’ Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Eds.
Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins. New York: Continuum, 2009. 92–106. Print.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. E´mile. New York: Dutton, 1943. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. ‘‘Doris Lessing’s Fantastic Children.’’ Doris Lessing: Border
Crossings. Eds. Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins. New York: Continuum, 2009.
61–74. Print.
Stearns, Peter N. Childhood in World History. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Sullivan, Daniel, Jeff Greenberg, and Mark J. Landau. ‘‘Toward a New Understanding
of Two Films from the Dark Side: Applying Terror Management Theory to
Rosemary’s Baby and Straw Dogs.’’ Journal of Popular Film and Television
37.4 (2009): 189–98. Print.
Ussher, Jane M. Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive
Body. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Watkins, Susan. ‘‘Writing in a Minor Key: Doris Lessing’s Late-Twentieth-Century
Fiction.’’ Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times. Eds. Debrah Raschke, Phyllis
Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010. 149–64.
Print.
Watson, Peter. Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud. New
York: Harper Collins, 2005. Print.
Yelin, Louise. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine
Gordimer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998. Print.
Ziolkowski, Eric. Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art. New York: Palgrave,
2001. Print.

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 Spoil the Child: Unsettling Ethics and the
Representation of Evil

WILLIAM WANDLESS

For the seasoned viewer, horror tends to be a commonsensical genre. One

does not need many screenings to grasp conventional prohibitions (good
things seldom come, for example, to those who enter the woods or the base-
ment), and contemporary fare like Scream (1996) and its sequels have
nudged formulae to the fore, where they may be subjected to ironic vivisec-
tion. Evil routinely appears in recognizable guises, and in some cases the pri-
mary responsibility of the audience is to flinch on cue. When one presses
past clichés and commonplaces, however, one is apt to discern a second
set of indications and intimations that require thoughtful response. The Exor-
cist (1973), for instance, shocks and appalls as a sacrilegious spectacle, yet it
also confronts viewers with a weightier obligation, calling for circumspect
evaluation of the dynamics depicted and choices made. As Cynthia A. Free-
land notes, representations of horror engage viewers in robust interpretive
activity: ‘‘We are thinking as we follow features of the film that guide our
emotional response: We make judgments and evaluations as we watch, react,
and listen. We may experience standard or predictable emotions . . . but then
we also reflect on why and whether it is right to do so’’ (3). At its most chal-
lenging, cinematic horror appeals to the full array of spectatorial faculties as it
raises disquieting questions about the world in which we live. Depictions of
evil children dependably number among such provocative offerings, as they
implicate viewers in an unsettling analytical, essentially ethical, exchange
from which they cannot turn away.
A film like The Exorcist, centered on the possession of a twelve-year-old
girl, spares the audience certain kinds of interpretive effort by turning
explanatory emphasis away from the child and toward the presence inhabit-
ing her. Offerings like The Ring (2002), Godsend (2004), and Grace (2009)
likewise shift evaluative emphasis away from children and toward the para-
normal abilities, congenital conditions, or unearthly entities they incarnate.

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When horror productions involve evil enacted by children with their own
methods and motives, however, they task viewers with appraising iniquity
of a different order. If supernatural reckonings are tabled, if the behavior
of wicked children originates in their volition and abilities, then viewers must
account for evils derived, at least in part, from families, institutions, and cir-
cumstances not unlike their own. The representation of such children in
credible domestic contexts accordingly elicits an uneasy explanatory effort,
one that seeks to remedy an agitation inspired by recognition of situational
similarities. Depictions of developmental difference may offer conditional
relief, but if the maturational arc appears indeterminate, the audience is
obliged to look elsewhere for an impetus that could explain the child’s mal-
evolence. Characterological analysis of the child also may expose oddities
associated with iniquity, as may a survey of siblings, parents, and influential
authority figures. Some films nevertheless frustrate the search for catalysts
even then, denying viewers recourse to unambiguous environmental triggers
that would explain the child’s deviltry. Such productions, devoid of diegetic
cues that might easily explicate evil, spoil the child for the audience, fouling
the comforts that come with interpretive certainty. As I will demonstrate,
however, those same offerings afford the audience compensatory consola-
tions, the findings of a critical gaze turned back upon itself.
That I might address these prospects in detail, I will focus on four films:
Halloween (2007), Joshua (2007), Home Movie (2008), and, by way of con-
clusion, Orphan (2009). These films epitomize a constellation of concerns
about the slippery status of the child, and they brace these matters in anal-
ogous terms. Joshua and Orphan examine evil in the shape of precocious
nine-year-olds; Halloween and Home Movie represent the unrest caused by
ten-year-old terrors. All four films feature children who possess an uncanny
aptitude for malice, yet that uncanniness speaks not to superhuman endow-
ment but rather to the contrapuntal quality of the evil child: the coexistence
of the sweet and the subversive in a play of surfaces and depths. Psychoana-
lytic criticism offers one valuable means of wrangling with this correlation,
yet the extent to which pop psychology pervades the orthodoxies of the
genre and our diagnostic parlance suggests the need for an alternative, less
deterministic approach to the discrepancy between seeming and being,
one that accounts for the fraught relationship of cinematic representation
and audience response. To connect the indexical and the ethical—to account
for the way depictions of evil children attest to essentially unknowable
depths that nevertheless call for characterological explication—I propose a
dialectic that addresses the discomfiting incongruity embodied by such
children and the interpretive enterprise required to appraise their strangeness,
an anxious effort that implicates children, their parents, and the audience.
In children, we find much to be nurtured, much to be feared. The idea
of the child elicits a response that, according to Emmanuel Levinas, exceeds
love and assumes a transcendent form in fecundity, the self-perpetuating

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‘‘goodness of goodness’’ (Totality 267–69). At the same time, the sign of the
child comprises an antisocial egotism and implacability, a distillation of dif-
ference that occurs as ‘‘crude otherness, hard otherness’’ and that belongs
to ‘‘childhood, lunacy, [and] death,’’ as Jean Baudrillard suggests (124,
128). Cinematic representations of children regularly balance these forces
in suspension, their magnetism and meanness capable of inciting tenderness
or trepidation. A variety of films depend on this representational fluidity,
yoking innocence and affecting vulnerability to recalcitrance and a propen-
sity for lashing out. Such eruptions, of course, do not a monster make. A tan-
trum is not commensurate to malice aforethought, and even sophisticated
ideation might be mitigated by a childlike sense of outcomes. The attribution
of elemental evil obliges viewers to proceed warily. When dealing with the
handiwork of a seemingly evil child, the viewer must ascertain the com-
petence of the culprit. As Claire Elise Katz implies in her Levinasian appraisal
of Cain, the audience must weigh matters of responsibility, situational aware-
ness, and moral education in light of a desire to assign guilt (220–22); if a
child is ‘‘not yet a fully developed ethical subject,’’ evaluative emphasis
changes (223). In horror films we often witness unequivocal iniquity, the
work of seasoned ethical agents capable of awful calculation, individuals
who grasp the implications of their acts and commit them anyway. The mal-
evolence of such knowing offenders allows for a full array of evaluative
options; we may deem them evil and trust the sign has been equitably
applied. Wickedness committed by children, however, does not release or
relieve the audience so readily. Their acts rouse a hunger for judgment,
but questions of consciousness, development, and environment alter the
complexion of what may justly be judged.
In the discussion of Halloween, Joshua, Home Movie, and Orphan that
follows, I will demonstrate how depictions of evidently evil children depend
on a pattern of indicative interplay, one that exploits, gratifies, and undercuts
the desire for evaluative support and interpretive certainty. Reassurance in
these films occurs as a superabundance of signs, telling gestures that facilitate
the recognition of villainy and the assignment of a loaded label we are at
pains to apply to a child. To deem Michael Myers, Joshua Cairn, Jack and
Emily Poe, and Esther Coleman evil—to find them confirmed in iniquity at
the age of nine or ten—the audience requires substantiation sufficient to
overcome reservations about their ethical aptitude and to distance these chil-
dren developmentally and characterologically from ordinary others. More
importantly, to yield meaningful relief, the telling gestures must be percep-
tible and intelligible: comprehensible evidence must correspond to conse-
quent pathology, or else the heightened anxiety that comes with the
depiction of wicked children persists undiminished. When behavior seem-
ingly arises from a logical, conventional prompt (the Oedipal complex, for
example), the audience may complete the portrait of pathology intuitively,
finalizing a diagnosis implied by symptoms in the child or triggers in her

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environment. A correlation of causes and effects confers comfort, as it implies

that developmental deviations might have been avoided and character
defects recognized. When the representation of the evil child denies viewers
a plausible correlation, however, they must come to terms with increased
interpretive pressure. That pressure may be answered with a rational default,
the expedient verdict of unmotivated madness, or it may be addressed with
an earnest search, a speculative, self-reflexive survey of formative forces that
might yield evil. Such scrutiny, conducted when obvious interpretive pro-
spects are exhausted, brings the audience’s own ethical sensibilities into
focus as they are defined and tried in light of the dynamics onscreen. In
the absence of those comforts that come with effortless legibility, this trial
of the viewer, this attempt to make ethical sense of the unsettling represen-
tation of the evil child, compensates for interpretive uncertainties with con-
scientious consolations of its own.

HALLOWEEN: DETERMINISTIC DENSITY

Horror films embrace derangement, and the management of the monstrous

sometimes requires little more than a glancing allusion to madness. Insanity
serves as a formal shorthand, for example, in cases as disparate as those of
Rhoda Penmark and Jason Voorhees: her wickedness in The Bad Seed
(1956) appears as a tendency inherited from a murderous grandmother,
while his mayhem in the Friday the 13th series (commencing in the second
installment of 1981) arises in response to the decapitation of his mother. No
further delving is required to grasp what these children will become or why.
Such efficient explanations simplify the interpretive efforts of the viewer,
who may forego the work of inferring motives. Recent films like The Cell
(2000), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), and Hannibal
Rising (2007) elaborate on this explanatory theme, as they epitomize a fasci-
nation with the origination of evil in childhood. These films connect popular
psychology and pathology explicitly, yet they also disengage the audience to
a meaningful degree. In The Bad Seed and Friday the 13th uncommon causes
yield terrible effects; in these new offerings we behold singular, inimitable
catalysts (a baptism synchronized with a seizure in The Cell, for example,
or traumatic witness to cannibalism in the case of young Hannibal Lecter)
that give rise to elaborate pathologies and locate evil beyond the pale of
all but the most appalling domestic situations. Circumstantial rarities limit
the implication of the audience, and while viewers might derive many plea-
sures from the spectatorial experience, an occasion for self-appraisal is lost. A
merger of representational modes—the subjection of less exotic formative
moments to more meticulous scrutiny—casts emergent evil in a decidedly
different light, a stark illumination that unsettles the viewer but makes
available compensatory consolations.

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Viewed in this light, the second most comforting film of the new millen-
nium may be Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007). It is not, of course, a comfort-
able film. Rendered with the same grittiness emphasized in his earlier
directorial efforts, Zombie’s update of the John Carpenter classic proceeds
as an homage to and radical revision of the 1978 original. The film retraces
the steps of Michael Myers, the iconic killer, who escapes from Smith’s Grove
Sanitarium, returns to Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, and
menaces the heroine, Laurie Strode, slaughtering all who would impede
his pursuit. Where the film departs most provocatively from its source, how-
ever, is in the depiction of the developmental throes of the ten-year-old
Michael. Comfort comes in the form of legibility, of a manifest ethical pro-
gression that relieves the viewer of the most fretful, uncertain interpretive
work.
The opening of the film features distilled domestic dysfunction, a cluster
of cues that builds causal, catalytic momentum. Ronnie, the abusive boy-
friend of Deborah Myers, Michael’s mother, refers to the boy as ‘‘a little bitch’’
and contends that ‘‘he’s probably a queer.’’ Michael’s sister, Judith, taunts her
brother in a similar vein, telling him to ‘‘stop jerking off’’ in the bathroom and
simulating masturbation when accusing him of ‘‘stroking’’ his pet rat to death.
Against this backdrop, of course, viewers already know that Michael has
butchered the rat with a penknife—he is washing blood from his hands at
the moment his sister first mocks him—and a later scene will reveal evidence
of violence against other animals that even Ronnie reads as a mode of com-
pensatory empowerment. In the midst of this belittlement, Michael’s affec-
tionate exchanges with his mother serve as an opposing force and a point
of origin from which a rote Oedipal dynamic unfolds. This trajectory
becomes overt at school, when Michael confronts a bully named Daryl. He
endures Daryl’s abuse of Judith in glowering silence, but when his tormentor
produces a newspaper clipping featuring a photo of Michael’s mother, who
dances at a gentlemen’s club, and details his plans to exploit her sexually,
Michael responds with wild violence. The principal separates the boys and
calls Deborah, but by then the stage has been set for an ethical descent view-
ers can easily anticipate.
It comes as little surprise that Daryl proves to be Michael’s first victim.
Wearing a clown mask, Michael batters the bully to death, pausing only to
claim the clipping from Daryl’s pocket. Convinced of the import of Michael’s
behavior by Dr. Loomis, a consulting psychiatrist, Deborah (unaware of the
extent and escalation of his bloodlust) confronts her son but indulgently
grants him a night of trick-or-treating while she is at work. The film answers
any uncertainties about the orthodox Freudian character of the boy’s
maternal attachment in the subsequent scene, which crosscuts images of a
disconsolate Michael with Deborah’s performance. The boy sits sullenly on
the curb, ruefully watching passers-by, while his mother dances to the tune
of Nazareth’s ‘‘Love Hurts.’’ Following the parallel sequence, Michael acts on

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his dejection. He murders his mother’s boyfriend in the living room, Judith’s
boyfriend in the kitchen, and finally Judith herself in her bedroom. He con-
siders her upturned bottom in an unhurried point-of-view shot before trading
his childish mask for the expressionless latex face formerly worn by her
lover; he then caresses his sister’s thigh and, following an altercation, stabs
her in the stomach. The change of masks implies an untimely coming of
age, a maturation that coincides with Michael’s annihilation of all challenges
to his sexuality and disposal of all perceived competitors for his mother’s
attention. The second act of Halloween finds Dr. Loomis delving into the
boy’s troubled psyche, but the first furnishes the viewer with all the gestures
necessary to apprehend the essence of his adult character.
Zombie’s efforts yield a psychological origin story: the audience, almost
certainly familiar with John Carpenter’s iconic creation, witnesses incidents
that give rise to the mind that inhabits the mask. Michael’s ethical destiny
serves as the overriding interpretive term, and the 2007 film retrofits the orig-
inal narrative with a prefatory arc designed to illuminate that characterologi-
cal consequence. By the time Dr. Loomis closes out his sessions with the
boy—‘‘The child christened Michael Myers has become a sort of ghost,’’ he
concedes in a voiceover—prevalent Freudian tropes allow viewers to reach
the same foregone conclusion about the maladjusted man: an explicit yet
unvoiced desire for the mother, a sealed system of Oedipal issues, built
pressure in a crucible of abuse and exploded. As Philip Simpson suggests,
a double-edged advantage comes with such determined derivation: recourse
to ‘‘one or two easily identified scapegoats as root causes of the violence’’
tends to ‘‘provoke and reassure’’ the audience by confirming its deeply held
beliefs, even if those beliefs amount to paranoia, prejudice, or oversimplifica-
tion (18). Armed with a trebled awareness—of what the child seems to be,
what he is, and what he will become—viewers may take comfort in the
developmental differences that make a Michael Myers possible. If catalysts
like Oedipal obsession and abuse generate interpretive confidence yet sum-
mon compassion for the boy inside the beast, however, Halloween offers
brutal reassurance to the audience that the condemnation of the adult
Michael is ultimately warranted. Viewers might consider the demise of figures
like Daryl and Ronnie as intelligible juvenile retribution, but when Michael in
his mid-twenties savages janitors, orderlies, guards, and teens indiscrimi-
nately, the audience is absolved of uneasy claims to empathy. Carpenter
briskly strips his creation of humanity, while Zombie gradually assimilates
the boy into the boogeyman. Both directors supply viewers with a secure
interpretive purchase that conceives of the child as a palimpsest, discernible
yet scarcely legible beneath the boldfaced text of the murderous man.
In Zombie’s Halloween, evil has an origin, history, and destiny. The
development of Michael Myers can be understood and anticipated as it trends
toward a logical, inescapable conclusion. This reasoning depends on repre-
sentational selectivity and interpretive oversimplification, yet the comfort it

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confers is no less gratifying. Armed with the requisite psychological supposi-

tions, the audience enjoys the illusion of ethical expertise: the origins of evil
are made appealingly plain, and cursory self-assessment will find most view-
ers innocent enough should they reflect on their own behavior and relation-
ships. The familial dynamic that spawns Michael Myers reveals and reassures;
it offers viewers a glimpse into a credible domestic situation and sends them
away uplifted by a fiction ‘‘which produces the deviant subjectivities
opposite which the normal, the healthy and the pure can be known’’
(Halberstam 2). Michael’s mature malevolence eclipses those formative
moments that might otherwise give the audience pause. In the absence of
such forward-looking finality, however, viewers must contend with thornier
questions, the likes of which are posed in Joshua.

JOSHUA: EVIL AND EXCESS

A temporal shift in Halloween lets viewers know that little changes for
Michael despite the passage of fifteen years: his character remains determ-
ined by the onset of violence. His adulthood echoes his origins, and his pur-
suit of Laurie Strode, the baby sister he adored as a boy, emphasizes the
rigidity and finitude of his fixation and the limit of the viewer’s evaluative
responsibility. Even if Michael’s mayhem remains a source of interest, charac-
ter and motive recede as points of necessary reference. In contrast, the evil
child proper—in the midst of ethical development, as a source of interest
in his own right—changes the shape and nature of audience response.
Resorting to madness as a shorthand explanation for pathological behavior
becomes more difficult, as the culpable subject is no longer a finished pro-
duct but a work in progress. Psychoanalytical sensibilities may help viewers
apprehend developmental events, but the audience cannot perform a facile,
finalized diagnosis when faced with inexplicable and inchoate wickedness.
The evil child inspires different activity, a search for indicative differences
that compensate for comforts lost. Joshua offers such solace, but not without
undercutting expectations and waking apprehensions of its own.
Joshua originates in a domestic dynamic that instantly solicits sympathy.
Although the title implies the centrality of the eponymous nine-year-old, the
director, George Ratliff, aligns the progress of the film with the maturation of
Joshua’s sister, Lily. At ‘‘19 Days Old’’ we find the Cairn family—mother
Abby, grandmother Hazel, and grandfather Joe—huddled around the new-
born as Brad, the father, records their interactions. Joshua opens the scene
playing the piano with his uncle Ned but soon loses his companion to the
party fawning over the baby. He continues to play even after his mother
requests an intermission, but his disobedience does not strike the assembled
Cairns as inordinately willful. Only a subsequent visceral reaction—Joshua
vomits as the family serenades Lily—signals the presence of an undefined

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undercurrent. The scene is strewn with allusions to Abby’s depression

following Joshua’s birth, yet no subtext seems prominent enough to threaten
the welfare of the family. In the absence of other indications, initial circum-
stances in Joshua suggest little more than a boy’s understandable fear of
displacement.
Subsequent scenes, however, introduce a strangeness into the house-
hold. Joshua, in a conversation with his father, inaugurates an equivocal dis-
tance. ‘‘Do you ever feel weird about me, your weird son?’’ he asks. Brad
reassures Joshua every time this line of inquiry recurs, but his reactions reveal
increasing uneasiness. Brad acknowledges the call to responsibility elicited
by his son, but he struggles to discover a resemblance on which he might
found a more settled relation. As Levinas suggests, fatherhood alone does
not instate such a correspondence:

Paternity is the relationship with a stranger who, entirely while being

Other, is myself, the relationship of the ego with a myself who is none-
theless a stranger to me . . . . Then again, the son is not any event whatso-
ever that happens to me . . . . The son is an ego, a person. Lastly, the
alterity of the son is not that of an alter ego. Paternity is not a sympathy
through which I can put myself in the son’s place. (Time 91)

‘‘We’re so different,’’ Brad later concedes to Joshua’s teacher, epitomizing the

boy’s alterity and his own inability to establish empathy. He struggles with his
son’s extraordinary intellect, his esoteric interests (such as Egyptology), and
his idiosyncratic behavior, although he makes regular attempts to find com-
mon ground. Brad dramatizes the potential for frustration in the Levinasian
‘‘face-to-face relation,’’ a critical enactment of ethical exchange (Time
78–79; cf. Hand 63); something about Joshua remains unfathomable to his
father, and only Ned seems to possess the intuition needed to appreciate
the boy’s idiosyncrasies. Joshua’s aloofness occurs as a puzzle, but Brad
determinedly works to meet his son’s perceived emotional needs.
Abby also recognizes Joshua’s difference but is more engrossed in the
care of Lily, who cries incessantly in a way that recalls Joshua’s infantile
implacability. Under pressure to pacify Lily, she conveniently converts
Joshua’s strange behavior into proof of his preternatural maturity. She off-
handedly allows him to donate his toys to charity (‘‘I’m starting over,’’ he
informs Brad, before preparing a stuffed panda for embalming), and later,
when he asks for permission to deliver another donation, she grants it
immediately, allowing him to go unattended despite Ned’s concerns about
his age. ‘‘Oh, come on,’’ she sighs, ‘‘does he seem like your typical nine-year-
old?’’ At this point viewers already have some sense of how shiftily atypical
Joshua is: he is hiding nearby when Abby first responds to Lily’s cries, and his
screening of a videotape of his own first weeks of life suggests he might be
irritating Lily to reestablish his mother’s former exasperation. Joshua’s

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motives are obscure, but his willingness to victimize his mother and his sister
reveals concerted coldness. In the absence of any clear objective, however,
his cruelty exceeds the prompt, a fear of displacement, that ostensibly
inspires it. Symptoms of Joshua’s difference proliferate, but they resist and
defer interpretation.
Despite the persistence with which Joshua executes his plan, Ratliff
offers few cues that might illuminate his intentions. While his efforts speak
to his tenacity, neither affect nor dialogue suggests that the boy’s measures
are meant to be punitive, vindictive, or conducive to any end the audience
can foresee with certainty. With only two exceptions, in fact, Joshua does
not show emotion to any degree that is entirely intelligible. As Lily’s cries
and Abby’s depression take their toll on every facet of the family dynamic,
Joshua’s absence of affect becomes a telling index of his difference. Viewers
cannot determine if he is satisfied or disappointed, or if he finds the plight of
his mother delicious or sickening. Like Rhoda Penmark, Joshua exists in what
Chuck Jackson calls ‘‘an eerie emotional vacuum’’ (69); even when his
mother steps on broken glass and dreamily smears blood on her calf, Joshua
simply looks on, expressionless. What seems even more chilling is Joshua’s
recognition that failure to display emotion might be a liability. Shortly after
Abby’s accident, the family dog, Buster, dies. A heartbroken Brad searches
for a cause (Buster’s demise suggestively recalls the fate that befell animals
tended by Joshua’s class), yet none can be discovered. Distraught, Brad
drops to his knees, hugs Buster, and chokes down tears to offer words of
parting to his beloved pet. In the midst of this spontaneous grieving, Joshua
falls to his own knees, embraces the body, and delivers the same lines with
the same intonation. Brad recoils, and his reaction suggests that he has
reached a new understanding of Joshua’s stilted performance of childishness
(cf. Jackson 70–72). While he hesitates to think ill of his son, whose ‘‘weird-
ness’’ suffices as an explanation for most behavior, the scene carries the
viewer to increasingly unambiguous indices of Joshua’s monstrous oddity.
A decisive shift occurs when a panhandler approaches Joshua at the
park. In response to his solicitation, Joshua makes an offer: ‘‘I’ll give you five
dollars if I can throw a rock at you.’’ The viewer alone witnesses the disclos-
ure of this straightforwardly sadistic dimension of his character, and the
scene anticipates an escalation. Shortly thereafter, Joshua persuades Abby
to join him in a game of hide-and-seek. She thoroughly searches the house
on crutches, only stopping when she discovers Lily is gone from her crib.
Her foot bleeding freely, Abby climbs to the penthouse above the Cairns’
apartment and collapses; Brad later carries her home, showing her that Lily
is safely asleep with Joshua watching over her. With mock petulance, Joshua
whines, ‘‘Did you even look for me, Mommy?’’ and Abby’s appreciation of his
malice sends her into a frenzy. Within the milieu of the film, she alone under-
stands that Joshua spirited Lily away; the ferocity of her reaction implies her
realization that he has conducted a siege against her sanity. Brad, who has

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witnessed only Abby’s behavioral unevenness, commends her to psychiatric

care. The audience, however, knows that Lily’s disappearance was not a pro-
duct of addled imagination. Although they enjoy the advantage of knowing
she searched earnestly, viewers have no way of determining if the removal of
Abby represents a means or an end. Joshua’s cruelty remains illegible, leav-
ing the audience to grapple with questions of intent.
Fuller revelation of Joshua’s ambitions emerges, albeit unclearly. Brad
quits his job to mind the children, and he returns home to learn that Hazel
has taken Joshua to the museum. Feeling nostalgic, he plays the video of
Lily’s arrival, only to discover the recording has been taped over. At the close
of the new sequence, the camera hovers over Lily’s face and a voice whis-
pers, ‘‘Nobody will ever love you.’’ The baby cries, and a final shot reveals
Joshua hiding in the nursery closet, his expression illegible as ever. Disturbed
by the footage and aware of the provocation that produced his daughter’s
misery and his wife’s breakdown, Brad races to the museum. He seemingly
arrives just in time: Joshua stands with Lily’s carriage at the edge of a flight of
stairs, and Brad’s presence prompts the boy to linger long enough for Hazel
to catch up with her grandson. Brad bears the stroller to safety, but moments
later Hazel—after taking Joshua’s hand—tumbles after Brad. When he looks
up to Joshua, the son impassively considers the father before feigning con-
cern and hastening down. The scene is perplexing: what seems like a scheme
thwarted, a plan to end competition with Lily by engineering her demise,
gives way to what appears to be the impulsive murder of Hazel, and this
assumes the audience, like Brad, believes Joshua pushed his grandmother.
The seeming ease with which Joshua shifts between equally eligible atroci-
ties further frustrates the search for an intelligible motive.
Given recent experience, Brad surmises that Joshua plans to dispose of
Lily and takes steps to protect her. He concedes the limits of his understand-
ing—‘‘I know what you’re doing, Josh,’’ he maintains, ‘‘I don’t know why
you’re doing it, but I’m on to you’’—and Joshua claims not to understand,
although he finds the apartment Joshua-proofed. This impasse continues until
a psychologist visits at Brad’s behest. Brad loves his son despite his suspicions,
and he hopes diagnosis will show him a way Joshua might be recovered.
Those hopes, however, are dashed when Joshua produces a drawing that
strikes the psychologist as textbook evidence of abuse. Disconcerted by the
doctor’s insinuation, Brad announces plans to send Joshua to boarding school.
Joshua runs away and reappears with a huge bruise, convincing Brad he really
has suffered abuse at unknown hands. The boy’s entreaties earn him entry into
his parents’ bedroom, a space Brad had denied him. Joshua turns his father’s
affection against him, using the subtlety Baudrillard describes as the special
province of the child, a strategy by which ‘‘children . . . let adults believe that
they, the children, are children’’ and exploit the assumption to infiltrate and
effect ‘‘the eventual destruction of the superior—adult—world that surrounds
them’’ (168–69). A second subterfuge occurs the following morning, when

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Brad finds Joshua and Lily missing. His relief at discovering them safe, the
brother tenderly feeding his sister, saps Brad’s resistance, and he submits
when Joshua requests a trip to the park. As a result, Brad ventures unwittingly
onto a stage Joshua has prepared, the site of an endgame he apparently had in
mind all along. That endgame begets an unsettling act of unmasking—of the
father, the son, and the audience as well.
The machinery of the decisive scene is appallingly mundane. Joshua fid-
dles with Lily’s carriage and runs away; Lily wails, and Brad discovers that her
pacifier is missing. Convinced that Joshua has taken it, he commands the boy
to return. Joshua mimics him instead, refusing to come back and obliging his
father to catch him, acting very much like a nine-year-old. The mockery con-
tinues even then, and at last Brad slaps his son. The blow elicits a feral grin
from Joshua, who hisses the words he whispered to Lily: ‘‘Nobody will ever
love you.’’ The taunt incenses Brad, and he assails Joshua with such fury that
two nearby fathers must pull him away. Brad is arrested, and Joshua claims a
history of abuse to the police. The lie delivers him into the custody of Ned,
and Joshua unselfconsciously reveals his feelings about the new arrange-
ment: ‘‘Ned, I’m glad you’re here. I mean you, me—this feels right, doesn’t
it?’’ Seated at the piano, Joshua sings an impromptu in which he implies that
his parents ‘‘should’ve saved themselves.’’ During the last bars of the song,
the film cuts back and forth between the piano and Joshua’s room, where
movers encounter evidence even viewers have not yet seen: a rubber glove,
drawings that reveal Joshua’s bloody sensibilities, and a dead gerbil with its
belly sewn shut. Back at the bench, Joshua beams at his new guardian, finish-
ing his song with the line ‘‘I only ever really wanted to be with you.’’ Judging
by his expression, Ned seems to appreciate the mendacious nature of his
nephew, and though it affords them little relief, viewers do as well.
Joshua offers a modicum of closural comfort: intentions are revealed,
and the sinister son is delivered to a more knowledgeable guardian. The
viewer’s position at the conclusion of the film, however, begs a battery of
retrospective, self-reflexive questions. The completion of Joshua’s design
reveals deep premeditation; his methods are sophisticated, involving a per-
fect understanding of domestic and societal dynamics. As an awful prodigy
who orchestrates his liberation by manipulating the adults around him,
Joshua belongs to an order of conniving creatures viewers will find reassur-
ingly rare. Nevertheless, his machinations raise troubling questions about
ethical maturity, as the reconstitution of the family with himself at the center
occurs as an objective fit for a nine-year-old boy. Moreover, disclosure of this
motive obliges viewers to abandon a viable hypothesis, an account of beha-
vior that proposes the punishment of the mother and destruction of the rival
as understandable ambitions. Such a shift erodes interpretive confidence, and
a surplus of evidence (the scene with the panhandler, the deaths of Buster
and the classroom animals, and the eviscerated gerbil) urges viewers to press
further, to conceive of pathologies darker than the central scheme implies.

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The emergence of an intelligible motive allays some anxieties, but Joshua

embodies an evil that exceeds inclusive explication.
That such excess might arise in an unremarkable, even healthy, family
confronts the audience with a second source of discomfort. While most view-
ers have neither suffered nor perpetrated the abuses featured in Halloween,
they are likely to reflect on Abby’s understandable distraction with mingled
censure and sympathy and on Brad’s thrashing of Joshua with a distress lea-
vened by cathartic satisfaction. However, Joshua’s plot lays bare the manipu-
lative tactics in which most children are versed and, given the consequences
that attend intimations of abuse, the asymmetry of the parent-child relation-
ship in the eyes of ethics and the law. Joshua offers a disquieting reminder of
a lopsidedness that places adults at the mercy of subversive children, and it
confronts viewers with the terrible dependency at the heart of the family. The
film features a discomfiting disclosure, what Philip J. Nickel calls ‘‘a sudden
tearing-away of the intellectual trust that stands behind our actions,’’ a rend-
ing that exposes ‘‘our vulnerabilities in relying on the world and on other
people’’ (28). Viewers may feel some pleasure in being thus undeceived,
but the film unkindly reminds us how much we depend on deception.
Nickel approaches such revelation in sanguine terms: the tearing-away
viewers experience reminds them of the ‘‘epistemological choice’’ on which
the illusion of security depends (17), and he reassures them that such comfort-
ing constructions are indispensable (28–30). As I have suggested, however, the
suspension of soothing convictions, especially as a result of the encounter with
the evil child, yields ethical repercussions that persist after threats have been dis-
closed or dispelled. The representational strategies used in Joshua speed the
resumption of trust, but they do not leave the viewer’s universe undisturbed.
In addition to exposing the motives and machinations of the young and remind-
ing adults of their vulnerability, horrific depictions of children call into question
efforts to realize positive, predictable developmental outcomes that correlate to
responsible parenting. We may find ways to manage or mitigate the risks that
come with the existence of children, helpless as we are to evade them. We
may also try to foster creativity, model morality, and cultivate virtue. As Brad’s
example implies, however, the dangers we pose to ourselves and to others as
a result of our impulses, assumptions, and attitudes cannot be so easily
exhumed and forgotten. The extent of our knowledge and imagination, the faith
we repose in our institutions and relationships, and our reliance on the tools we
use to identify and remedy illness and iniquity may also be challenged and ulti-
mately shaken. These are the matters Home Movie explores.

HOME MOVIE: ACCIDENTAL DRAGONS

Home Movie unfolds as a faux documentary, a chronicle of life in the Poe

family. David, the father, is a pastor, one who hams it up before the camera

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and jokes impishly behind it. Clare, the mother, is a child psychiatrist who
treats the camera as a professional tool but indulgently yields to her hus-
band’s cinematic caprices. They are the parents of twins, Jack and Emily,
and the narrative proper begins with footage of their tenth birthday party
on Halloween night. David and Clare caper around the dining room in high
spirits; Jack and Emily, however, sit silent and unmoving, wearing stylized
dragon masks. As with Joshua, conflict emerges immediately, if enigmati-
cally: when the children realize their father decorated their cake with inex-
tinguishable novelty candles, Jack douses it with water. The film cuts to
the family playing hide-and-seek in a basement maze; at the rear of the cellar,
the children find a dragon puppet. At the close of the scene, as the camera
fixes on the exit at the end of the darkened hallway, Clare exclaims, ‘‘Did
you just bite me?’’ The addressee is never identified, yet themes introduced
in the sequence—dragons, masks, and biting—eventually resurface and offer
unsettling responses to the unanswered question.
Despite their participation in the game of hide-and-seek, the children
seem reluctant to engage with their parents. Their sullenness contrasts starkly
with the exuberance of David and Clare, who tirelessly exert themselves to
engage Jack and Emily. The director, Christopher Denham, tasks the audi-
ence with reconciling the dispositions of the elder and younger Poes, but
the morbid sensibilities of the children resist assimilation to the parental
dynamic. As Colette Balmain suggests, ‘‘in the contemporary monstrous-child
horror film, the family unit itself is figured as innocent,’’ and the children
occur as products of ‘‘another irreducibly different world’’ (136). For the
majority of the film, the children inhabit that world; they do not speak to their
parents at all. Strategic editing omits the dialogue of Jack and Emily when-
ever it would occur; missing footage and scrolling videotape yields uncanny
silence broken only by gibberish exchanged between the twins in the middle
of the film. ‘‘It’s like their own language,’’ Clare complains, and she scolds the
children for keeping secrets though David encourages them to do so. Those
secrets, however, become inflected with menace as a result of the children’s
rebellious behavior. While malice emerges gradually in Joshua, leaving view-
ers to guess the extent of Joshua’s implication in the anguish of the family,
Jack and Emily express mutinous animosity in every gesture. Their malevol-
ence is legible, even though their intentions are not.
The gulf widens after the birthday party, as a session of batting practice
ends with Jack hurling a rock at his father. Clare, in search of a lost baseball,
encounters her daughter drawing outside the children’s playhouse. A sign
outside reads ‘‘Jack and Emily’s Clubhouse—No Parents Allowed,’’ and Emily
denies her mother entry before grudgingly consenting to be wheeled to the
backyard in a wagon, eyes closed and arms folded. David punishes Jack with
yard work, but the boy finds a dead insect that engrosses his attention. His
father urges him to throw the bug away (‘‘Dead things go in trash bags,’’
he explains), but the scene ends before Jack complies. Almost every attempt

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at bonding, discipline, or dialogue ends in some failure to connect, disrupt-

ing a dynamic characterized primarily by parental attentiveness. Only the tell-
ing of a bedtime story, ‘‘the most vastly inappropriate fairy tale I’ve ever
heard,’’ according to Clare, yields some semblance of togetherness, although
the composition of the shot, featuring all four Poes huddled in bed, seems
like a parental contrivance. The story describes the trickery employed by a
two-headed dragon to earn the trust of children; he dons a paper-bag mask,
impersonates a child, and then devours his new peers. Jack and Emily find
the story riveting, and the viewer soon learns that the tale anticipates their
own growing appetites.
The earliest manifestation of this hunger occurs when Clare allows Jack
to make his own lunch. She tries to guess what he has concocted, yet the
key ingredient proves to be a goldfish. What might initially be understood
as ghastly error, however, soon yields to blatant cruelty. Emily crushes a
frog in a vise, and on Christmas morning David finds the family cat cruci-
fied. For interpretive purposes the crucifixion is pivotal: that callousness
cannot be dismissed as accidental, and it occurs to Clare as a symptom with
an unknown cause. ‘‘My children need help,’’ she concedes, and many
viewers will recognize the abuse of animals (as was the case with Michael
Myers, an age-mate of the twins) as a token of additional pathological pro-
spects. As their indifference to animals implies, something is lacking in Jack
and Emily. In Levinasian terms, as Katz explains, that lack occurs as an
incipient evil, ‘‘the inability to be attuned to the other’’ (215). Clare balks
at the recognition of such coldness, yet she sets out in search of a source
and finds an eligible origin instantly: her husband’s drinking. The connec-
tion between David’s dependency and the insensitivity of the children at
first seems tenuous; the notion gains traction, however, when Clare dis-
covers an inebriated David in bed with both children, their bodies gouged
with bites. The children blame ‘‘the man in the closet,’’ but the film allows
the viewer to entertain the possibility that David is guilty. Clare reveals that
David was abused as a child, and her account is cross-cut with shots of him
swilling whiskey. ‘‘There’s a lot I don’t know about my husband,’’ she
admits, but by the end of the scene she turns to bedrock fact: ‘‘The man
in the closet is not real. The bite marks are.’’ The audience likewise has evi-
dence from which a hypothesis might be derived, reference to the familiar
trope that links pathological practice explicitly to a precedent catalyst. The
inclinations of Jack and Emily accordingly might be explained away by
David’s drunken transgressions.
Circumstances soon reveal the culprits, but not before marital tensions
complicate the viewer’s interpretive work. On Valentine’s Day, Clare pre-
pares to take Jack and Emily to her mother’s house, away from David. In
response, David fumes, ‘‘Our kids are not normal,’’ and he indicates that
Clare’s normalizing design, ‘‘to move into the middle of nowhere and raise
them in a Norman Rockwell home,’’ simply ‘‘didn’t work.’’ He rehearses their

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misconduct and concludes with new information: ‘‘I saw them eating raw
meat.’’ The film juxtaposes that surprise with a later recording made by Clare.
She reveals that the children have been expelled for cornering and biting a
boy named Christian; David then discovers a drawing that indicates they
planned the attack. In an effort to understand the incident, Clare administers
a Rorschach test to Jack, while David has a tête-à-tête with Emily. Counseling
and confession, however, prove ineffectual, and their inability to fathom the
intentions of their children prompts Clare and David to counter radical other-
ness with radical measures: Clare medicates Jack and Emily, and David
attempts an ersatz exorcism. The sequence ends with all four Poes whimper-
ing and spent. When the footage resumes, however, Clare declares victory:
‘‘Two months have passed. I’m happy to report that since my last report Jack
and Emily’s antisocial behavior has surceased.’’ As David hides Easter eggs,
Clare offers a self-satisfied statement of faith: ‘‘There is no good child; there
is no bad child. There is only diagnosis, and with the diagnosis, treatment. I
have treated my children.’’ The viewer, of course, has good reason to doubt
her success, since Clare has silenced symptoms without addressing underly-
ing causes. The third episode of biting, intimations of an unspecified trouble
that spurred the family to relocate, the abuse of animals, and the disquieting
appetites of the twins reveal the insufficiency of prior efforts to explain away
their behavior vis-à-vis David’s drinking. Clare’s conviction provides a
momentary respite, yet generic expectations brace the viewer for an upend-
ing of that confidence.
Prior to the egg hunt, Jack and Emily are giggly and loving. They speak
intelligibly for the first time and express affection openly. They have also
befriended Christian, which Clare takes as proof of the virtues of her treat-
ment. That certainty, however, is short-lived, and panic ensues when the par-
ents discover that all three children have slipped from the bedroom. In a
frenetic scene shot by David as he sprints to the clubhouse, the viewer learns
that Jack and Emily have butchered the family dog (his head is mounted on a
stake); have rejected their parents altogether (the camera pans across a photo
with the faces of Clare and David scratched out); have resumed their cruelty
(their walls are adorned with gutted frogs); and have stuffed Christian in a
trash bag, tied him to a table, and—as evidenced by the utensils Jack
brandishes—turned to cannibalism. The script then takes advantage of a nar-
rative contrivance to keep the children at home (Jack and Emily are
remanded to the custody of their parents due to the holiday), and their deten-
tion yields a confrontation that shatters any illusion of a cure. ‘‘The Jack and
Emily Show’’ follows, with Emily manning the camera as brother and sister
prepare snares for their parents. The trap is sprung, incapacitating both
mother and father, and the recording eventually concludes with David and
Clare stuffed in plastic bags themselves, tied to the dining room table, flanked
by their children in paper-bag masks, forks and knives in hand. The ending
transforms the viewing experience, as it implies that the children produced

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the final cut of the faux documentary. The staging of those closing scenes
further complicates the work of interpretation, as it imbues the iniquity of
the children over the course of the entire production with a measure of per-
formative self-awareness. Moreover, the months-long ‘‘surcease’’ of symp-
toms and consequent simulation of childishness is exposed as a
preternatural pretense. Such a conclusion sets viewers adrift, leaving them
with provocative yet partial explanations of pathology and fresh sources of
distress.
In response to Clare’s claim that the tale of the dragon and the
paper-bag mask was dreadfully inappropriate, David alleges that the story
has an obvious moral: ‘‘Don’t trust strangers.’’ That those strangers might
assume such an innocuous guise yet express such an appalling pathology
is the greatest of the ironies Home Movie entertains. The prospect that the
children have turned to cannibalism—an appetite inspired by birthday
masks, a puppet, and a bedtime story—alters the complexion of the viewer’s
interpretive work as well. While Joshua’s machinations might be understood
as products of a deep design hatched in an atmosphere of parental inatten-
tion, the games of Jack and Emily encourage the audience to find the care of
David and Clare itself blameworthy. The alternative is to locate blame
beyond the pale of the family, to account for the malevolence of such chil-
dren via madness, inherency, or the influence of diabolical forces (cf. Hantke
9, Jackson 66, and Sobchack 150). The genre makes such prospects possible,
yet resorting to them represents an abdication of the viewer’s most significant
responsive opportunity. As Martin F. Norden suggests, horror filmmakers
routinely employ the image of the Other as a figure that viewers can inscribe
with intolerable content (xxviii; cf. Halberstam 85, Santilli 176); in the case of
evil children (the masked Michael, the expressionless Joshua, the unfathom-
able Jack and Emily), viewers find especially eligible opacities, surfaces on
which they can imprint a variety of motives, appetites, and inclinations. Such
inscription, however, represents only half the input that filmmakers spur
viewers to contribute. If the children wear masks, literally and figuratively,
on which viewers must write desire, formulating explanations that speak
to inscrutable iniquity, the adults around those children serve as screens
on which viewers must project themselves. The self-reflexive ethical assess-
ment that attends the consideration of bare and masquerading faces—what
Levinas describes as the way the face of the Other ‘‘summons me . . . recalls
my responsibility, and calls me into question’’ (‘‘Ethics’’ 83)—asks the audi-
ence to appraise methods and intentions, attitudes and practices, and frailties
and failings in an effort to make sense of what might seem senseless. That
occasion for observation and critical self-articulation is the principal positive
term that the depiction of the evil child makes available to the audience.
Even a cursory appraisal of the collapses that occur in the midst of
such creative ethical engagement is sobering. As my earlier reference to
Nickel hints, encounters with evil children rob viewers of the illusion of

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safety—‘‘there is no resolution to our fears,’’ he contends, ‘‘except to go

on’’ (20). Going on, I would argue, is irrevocably altered by that face-to-
face exchange. In Joshua and Home Movie, husbands learn to doubt
wives, wives to mistrust their husbands; psychology fails, and faith foun-
ders; the law stands idly by or villainizes victims. Adults reliably underesti-
mate what Baudrillard calls ‘‘the intelligence of evil’’ (86); they lack the
imagination to contend with that against which there is no acceptable
defense. If the child-as-monster serves a cultural function by policing
normative borders, making audiences mindful of what dwells beyond
the preserve of the permissible (cf. Cohen 12–16, Creed 10–11), it also
insists there are traitors among us, outsiders hiding in plain sight. If the
image of the killer, as Stephen Hantke proposes, promotes a proliferation
of efforts by which we might grasp and answer evil (11), evil children sti-
fle such efforts, calling the authority, integrity, and sanity of their accusers
into question. If viewers are perpetually threatened by the return of evils
ostensibly vanquished (cf. Kristeva 4, Santilli 185), the persistence of the
evil child reminds us that these monsters are often homegrown. The invi-
tation to inscription, which prompts the audience to appraise the childlike
faces of evil and spurs viewers to turn the same critical, ethical gaze on
themselves, offers a kind of consolation for our otherwise insupportable
condition, the inescapable anxiety that attends the ubiquity of children.

ORPHAN: SOOTHING CONCLUSIONS

In light of that anxiety, the most comforting film of the new millennium may
be Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, which improves on the representational
relief provided by Halloween. The narrative presents viewers with telling
incongruities that make Esther, the titular orphan, reassuringly singular. From
the beginning, when prospective parents Kate and John Coleman discover
the lonely girl, evidence of her eccentricity occurs unremittingly. Esther is
Russian and dresses exclusively in frocks. According to Sister Abigail, director
of the orphanage, Esther is ‘‘very mature for her age’’; she wears ribbons
around her wrists and neck, and attempts to remove them (per the nun) have
met with vehement resistance. When asked why she is not playing with her
peers, Esther remarks, ‘‘I guess I’m different.’’ Difference surfaces in increas-
ingly obvious ways when Esther enters her new environment. She locks the
bathroom door when she bathes despite guarantees of privacy; she shrieks
when a classmate snatches at the ribbon around her neck; she coolly crushes
a dove her brother, Daniel, has wounded with a paintball gun. Kate and
John, obliged to reckon strangeness along with the audience, account for
their new daughter’s behavior via the ‘‘discourse of difference,’’ and they
approach her as an innocent alien, one who must be ‘‘understood, liberated,
coddled, and recognized’’ (Baudrillard 125, 128). Intimations of Esther’s

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otherness become comprehensible, even quaint, when attuned to their

expectations of a precocious nine-year-old.
What seems explicable given Esther’s origin and the pressures of adjust-
ment, however, quickly becomes sinister. When she shoves the offending
classmate from a slide, the audience must sit in judgment: can the incident
be understood as impulsive retribution, or is it an index of an inward con-
dition? Although her new sister, Max, proclaims Esther’s innocence, the film
supports the second prospect, hewing close to stock Freudian logic. While
Esther cultivates an affectionate rapport with her father, she resists her
mother’s attempts to connect. Kate soon becomes suspicious of Esther’s
performance: ‘‘She’s always on her best behavior with you,’’ she complains
to John; ‘‘she’s completely different with me.’’ Sister Abigail later seconds
Kate’s opinion, and Esther confirms all suspicions soon thereafter, bashing
the nun with a hammer. Unaware of the murder, Kate nevertheless delves
into the mystery of Esther, while John remains willfully benighted. The
audience, in contrast, bears witness to a clandestine escalation. Esther,
who suspects that Daniel might have witnessed the assault, accosts him with
a knife; she throws a tantrum in secret, releasing rage she concealed when
meeting with Kate’s therapist; she switches the black light in her aquarium
on and off, revealing a ghastly gallery of fluorescent images superimposed
over her cheery paintings. In keeping with the theme of analytical insuf-
ficiency, Kate’s therapist finds nothing wrong with Esther. Kate ironically
performs a more incisive diagnosis via the Internet, but John rejects her find-
ings and questions her motives. After an affront that recalls Joshua’s mockery
of Brad, Kate’s authority is undone in an altercation with the conniving child:
she grabs the girl by the arm, and Esther, exhibiting uncanny resolve, later
snaps the limb in a vise. A confrontation follows, and Esther, fully aware
of her power over her ‘‘abusive’’ mother, razes the illusion of innocence. Kate
asserts her parental prerogative and tries to send the girl to bed, to which
Esther replies ‘‘Honestly, we’re past that now, aren’t we?’’ And Kate, in a
manner that mirrors the viewer’s inability to account for the duplicity and
audacity of this wicked little girl, helplessly concedes.
The filmmakers heighten anxiety in subsequent scenes, exposing the
potential for evil that abides in every child. Threatened by Daniel’s attempt
to recover evidence of the murder, Esther sets his tree house ablaze with
him inside. Later, at the hospital, she cunningly manages to smother him,
only to see him resuscitated by the medical staff. Kate, enraged, strikes the
girl, and orderlies sedate Kate just as she receives a call from the Saarne Insti-
tute, a hospital she contacted in an earlier effort to unearth Esther’s past. As
she drifts into unconsciousness, an exasperated John announces plans to
take the children home. The following scene concludes the narrative trajec-
tory the audience has been encouraged to anticipate, an attempted consum-
mation of the Electra complex: in a dress stolen from her mother, Esther
mingles childlike and adult gestures in an unnerving effort to seduce her

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father. Her forwardness prompts him to recoil and rebuff her, and only then
is the audience relieved of the evaluative anxieties inspired by Esther’s
unsettling presence.
In the hospital, Kate connects with the Saarne Institute and learns
that Esther is not a nine-year-old Russian girl: she is Leena Klammer, a
33-year-old Estonian whose hypopituitarism has allowed her to pass as a
child. Cutting back and forth between the hospital and Esther’s bedroom,
the viewer learns that the ribbons she wears hide scars from the straitjacket
she once wore, that wrappings conceal the curvature of her body, and that
she killed seven people prior to her flight to the United States. Kate calls the
police and races home, but she arrives too late to save John; Leena springs
from the shadows and savages the man who spurned her advances. Using
his gun, Leena shoots Kate, but despite her wound Kate incapacitates Leena
and escapes. A second skirmish finds the pair fallen through the ice at a
nearby pond; Kate clutches the edge of the broken surface, and Leena
clings to her. With a knife behind her back, Leena, assuming the guise of
Esther once more, pleads with Kate: ‘‘Please don’t let me die, Mommy!’’
she cries. Kate, fully aware of the nature of her ‘‘daughter,’’ responds with
an imprecation—‘‘I’m not your fucking Mommy!’’—and delivers a vicious
kick that breaks Leena’s neck. With that muscular denunciation, Kate exor-
cizes the deceptions and dependencies embodied by the figure of the evil
child on behalf of the viewer.
The anxious interpretive work that attends the evaluation and con-
demnation of an immature ethical agent and her hateful behavior yields
to the effortless indictment of Leena Klammer, a mature murderess. She
replicates the strangeness of a boy like Joshua, yet her physical difference,
seemingly prodigious intellect, and behavioral idiosyncrasies are readily
explicable. Her performance of childishness surpasses that of Jack and
Emily, yet the film deepens the gulf between the player and her persona,
endows the actress with a lifetime of practice, and treats the role of
‘‘Esther’’ as a consummate act of passing. Her discomfiting desire for pos-
session of the father, a mirror image of the formative forces that drive the
monstrosity of Michael Myers, becomes a legible expression of frustrated
adult lust. In addition, vivid symptoms like her shocking self-injury smack
of settled insanity, a madness that predates the events of the film and
absolves viewers of interpretive accountability. Hers is not an equivocal
iniquity, not an ‘‘insipid simulation,’’ as Baudrillard might say (124), but
a species of unqualified evil that completely answers the ambivalence of
the audience, the reluctance to condemn the child and thereby scrutinize
our idea of childhood, our families, our institutions, and our own ethical
selves. With clean consciences, with a certainty and righteousness denied
to us in our dealings with representations of legitimate children, evil and
otherwise, the audience, like Kate, can send the threat that Esther repre-
sents drifting down into the dark.

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WORK CITED

Balmain, Colette. ‘‘The Enemy Within: The Child as Terrorist in the Contemporary
American Horror Film.’’ Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of
Enduring Evil. Ed. Niall Scott. New York: Rodopi, 2007. 133–47. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. New
York: Verso, 1993. Print.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses).’’ Monster Theory: Reading
Culture. Ed. Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3–25. Print.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New
York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror.
Boulder, CO: Westview P, 2000. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Print.
Halloween. Dir. John Carpenter. Perf. Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis. Starz=
Anchor Bay, 2001. DVD.
Halloween. Dir. Rob Zombie. Perf. Malcolm McDowell and Tyler Mane. Weinstein
Company, 2007. DVD.
Hand, Seán. ‘‘Shadowing Ethics: Levinas’s View of Art and Aesthetics.’’ Facing the
Other: The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Hand. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon
P, 1996. 63–89. Print.
Hantke, Stephen. ‘‘Monstrosity without a Body: Representational Strategies in the
Popular Serial Killer Film.’’ Post Script 22.2 (Winter-Spring 2003). Web. 16
August 2010.
Home Movie. Dir. Christopher Denham. Perf. Adrian Pasdar and Cady McClain. MPI
Home Video, 2009. DVD.
Jackson, Chuck. ‘‘Little, Violent, White: The Bad Seed and the Matter of Children.’’
The Journal of Popular Film and Television 28.2 (Summer 2000): 64–73. Print.
Joshua. Dir. George Ratliff. Perf. Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga. 20th Century Fox,
2008. DVD.
Katz, Claire Elise. ‘‘Raising Cain: The Problem of Evil and the Question of Responsi-
bility.’’ Cross Currents 55.2 (Summer 2005): 215–33. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New
York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. ‘‘Ethics as First Philosophy.’’ The Levinas Reader. Eds. Seán
Hand. Trans. Hand and Michael Temple. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1989. 75–87.
Print.
———. Time and the Other and Additional Essays. Trans. Richard A. Cohen.
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2008. Print.
———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1969. Print.
Nickel, Philip J. ‘‘Horror and the Idea of Everyday Life: On Skeptical Threats in
Psycho and The Birds.’’ The Philosophy of Horror. Ed. Thomas Fahy. Lexington:
UP of Kentucky, 2010. 14–32. Print.
Norden, Martin F. Introduction. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television.
Ed. Norden. New York: Rodopi, 2007. xi–xxi. Print.

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Orphan. Dir. Jaume Collet-Serra. Perf. Vera Farmiga and Isabelle Fuhrman. Warner
Home Video, 2009. DVD.
Santilli, Paul. ‘‘Culture, Evil, and Horror.’’ American Journal of Economics and
Sociology 66.1 (2007): 173–93. Print.
Simpson, Philip L. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary
American Film and Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. Print.
Sobchack, Vivian. ‘‘Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic
Exchange.’’ The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry
Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 143–63. Print.

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 Private Lessons from Dumbledore’s
‘‘Chamber of Secrets’’: The Riddle of the
Evil Child in Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince

HOLLY BLACKFORD

‘‘No book would have given [Tom Riddle] that information.’’

—Dumbledore, Half-Blood Prince

The penultimate novel in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Harry Potter

and the Half-Blood Prince grapples with the fundamental challenge of unco-
vering the conditions under which a child can be understood as evil. By
‘‘evil,’’ I mean not a simple binary of good versus evil, as charged by critic
Jennifer Sattaur, but a complicated, motivated evil arising from the deepest
unmet longings of childhood. In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore gives Harry
private lessons in which he pieces together a history of Lord Voldemort’s
deprived childhood and development as the orphan Tom Riddle, effectively
acting the part of a Freudian analyst who seeks an explanatory reminiscence
to account for and ultimately erase his institution’s—and his own—
culpability in fostering the dark lord’s education. Looking at Tom’s past
through the Pensieve, a container of people’s memories in liquid form,
Dumbledore identifies disturbing elements in Tom’s character that, he
asserts, were present from their first meeting. Dumbledore thus parses out
nature from environmental training, particularly the complex role that the
school might have played in Tom’s development. This is very much what
adults do when a delinquent is brought to trial, sorting out blame and look-
ing at one another to determine responsibility, reifying the governing
assumption of John Locke’s tabula rasa.1 In particular, Dumbledore, who
first admitted Tom to Hogwarts, seeks to avoid sole culpability. By initiating

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Harry into his memories, Dumbledore seems to wish for verification of his
analysis of Tom’s inherently evil nature. Dumbledore’s private lessons with
Harry display an educator’s need to deflect responsibility for the deprived
child who embarks on a life of crime.
Dumbledore declares that his memories at least are completely and
satisfyingly ‘‘accurate,’’ but this is ironic because if the Pensieve teaches any-
thing, it teaches that memory is at worst a product of tampering and at best a
product of a particular point of view. The owner of the memory clearly
affects the telling, and, as Karin Westman notes, some of the memories are
the result of persuasion and therefore dubious, just as the Pensieve violates
privacy and boundaries. However, throughout Half-Blood Prince, Harry
takes an opposing view to Dumbledore’s, viewing his own childhood as
all too similar to Tom’s. Harry thus provides us with an alternative inter-
pretation to the illuminating Pensieve, revealing that the very qualities
Dumbledore blindly attributes to early deprivations and flaws in Tom
Riddle’s nature and family are embedded in the curriculum of Hogwarts.
For example, Dumbledore focuses on Tom’s early need for trophies and
valuable objects without recognizing how the school’s culture places value
on such trophies and objects. Additionally, Dumbledore points out Tom’s
‘‘ ‘obvious instincts for cruelty, secrecy, and domination’’’ (Half-Blood Prince
276) and distaste for commonness without recognizing how the school incul-
cates competition and the drive for dominance in the students through houses,
sports, point systems, hierarchies, and favoritism of particular students, not to
mention the overriding division between ‘‘a socially superior and elite caste of
wizards and witches, against the socially inferior and less important muggles’’
(Sattaur 2–3). The school places special value on students who possess impor-
tant lineage and who achieve high status such as Prefect, Head Boy, Outstand-
ing O.W.L. or N.E.W.T. status, and Quidditch player. Yet the internalization of
the desire for prestige is viewed, in Tom, as evil.
Half-Blood Prince is a rewriting of Chamber of Secrets in that both con-
cern the discovery of old, unauthorized books that corrupt the ‘‘innocent’’
children who find and use them—and who, like Dumbledore, ultimately
erase their own blame, conveniently externalizing ‘‘the nature’’ of evil as
‘‘other.’’ In Chamber, Tom Riddle ‘‘comes out’’ of his old diary, which Ginny
Weasley, the younger sister of Harry’s best friend, Ron, has come to possess.
By writing her own discontents in the margins of Tom’s childhood diary,
Ginny unknowingly opens the school’s ‘‘chamber of secrets’’ and brings
Tom Riddle back to life. Her re-birthing of sixteen-year-old Tom unleashes
horrors upon the school, but in Half-Blood Prince the uncovering of the child
Tom Riddle is a means to knowledge for Harry. In Half-Blood Prince, Harry
similarly finds an old book which conveys knowledge in hand-written mar-
gins, knowledge that allows him to succeed by reading ‘‘between the lines’’
of the official curriculum. Rowling encourages us to consider the two novels
together, emphasizing that the potions book is fifty years old, just as the

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chamber of secrets was last opened fifty years before Harry’s second year.
Comparing the stories is instructive because it clarifies the double-voiced dis-
course about what it takes to succeed at Hogwarts—one authorized and one
unauthorized but nevertheless implicit in school culture. As a rewriting of
Chamber, Half-Blood Prince asks us to read Tom as the unacknowledged
child in the margins of Hogwarts education. The child who internalizes
unauthorized school lessons—about needing pedigree, winning, and
dominating—is symbolically the ‘‘secret’’ chamber embedded in the very
walls and chambers of the school. Tom is a monstrous creation of school
culture that, in the paradigm of Frankenstein’s monster, Dumbledore does
not wish to acknowledge.
Dumbledore’s need to mentor Harry implies a subtle recognition of his
guilt in contributing to Tom’s path by denying him a way to voice his own
shame, a guilt he wishes to rectify by nurturing Harry’s development. I say
‘‘nurturing’’ with a critical eye, for nurturing involves modeling domination,
a quality so feared in Tom. I will investigate the imagery of penetration in
Dumbledore’s lessons and how those lessons make Harry feel obedient
but invaded, along with how the final scene in the cave reverses the power
structure of the lessons by figuring the cave as a replication of Dumbledore’s
office. In the cave scene, Harry forces Dumbledore to drink Tom’s poison; in
doing so, Harry experiences the pleasure of dominance that Dumbledore’s
intimate lessons have modeled. The queer imagery surrounding Harry,
Tom, and Dumbledore, all of whom seek to dominate and penetrate one
another in various ways, ultimately speaks to the embedded violence of a
classically based educational system in which select boys are equated with
nobility and penetrated by wise older men.
I interpret Harry’s similarity to Tom Riddle in light of other critics, such
as Michael Bronski, Tison Pugh and David Wallace, and Catherine Tosenberger,
who have noted analogies between Harry’s ‘‘coming out’’ as a wizard to the
queer child’s experience. This understanding allows us, in turn, to regard the
story of Tom Riddle in Half-Blood Prince as an unsuccessful coming-out
story. If Harry’s story in the series follows the paradigm of the coming-out
story, and if Harry recognizes the similarities between his story and Tom’s,
then we have to ask why Tom’s story is an aborted coming-out story in which
a child is cast as a closeted monster that the school cannot exorcise. Tom’s
story is that of a neglected child aware of his ‘‘difference’’ and left with little
guidance for negotiating inherent messages in the school about who and
what are valuable. A discourse of shame, analogous to the shame of sexual
difference, surrounds Tom’s feelings about his background—lack of purity,
family, belonging, and accouterments—and this shame sets in motion Tom’s
intense absorption of many Hogwarts lessons that school officials prefer not
to acknowledge. This seems to be why it is Tom’s poison that Dumbledore
must drink in the end. This poison embodies an educator’s failure and indi-
vidualist perspective, the poison of seeing Tom as a flawed individual and

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refusing a broader structural or cultural lens on ‘‘the capitalist and consumer-

ist culture’’ (Sattaur 1) of school. Half-Blood Prince ultimately shows how a
school prefers potters to riddles for their malleability, but inevitably creates
monstrous riddles.

THE IMPENETRABLE RIDDLE: THE HIDDEN

CURRICULUM AT HOGWARTS

In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore presents the memory of Tom hoarding

the possessions of other orphans and analyzes this as part of Tom’s character:
‘‘ ‘the young Tom Riddle liked to collect trophies. You saw the box of stolen
articles he had hidden in his room. These were taken from victims of his
bullying behavior, souvenirs, if you will, of particularly unpleasant bits of
magic. Bear in mind his magpie-like tendency, for this, particularly, will be
important later’ ’’ (277). However, readers familiar with the series might well
feel that what Dumbledore views as a ‘‘magpie-like tendency’’ is a pervasive
aspect of wizard culture, with its numerous trophies and cups, its hierarchies
and conspicuous consumption, its investment in magical objects (such as the
power given to the Sorting Hat, which magically determines to which house
a student should be assigned), and the value it places on high-quality broom-
sticks like the Nimbus Two Thousand or Firebolt.2 Furthermore, it is evident
that students and faculty notice when people sport shabby robes and second-
hand books,3 and riches and prestigious titles—not to mention broom-
sticks—command respect, for Harry’s money immediately earns him status
in the first novel, and his expenditures somewhat compensate for his lack
of knowledge about Hogwarts, wizards, and family. The very fact that the
school founders have special, valuable objects and heirlooms—so coveted
by Tom—conveys the founding structure of capital and rare objects to the
school. Dumbledore analyzes Tom’s attachment to material possessions as
unique to Tom’s desires, yet the novel conveys the value of those objects
to everyone.
In many ways, the child who covets trophies and the prestige they
convey only heightens the general atmosphere of the capitalistic display per-
vasive in the school’s culture, which Half-Blood Prince particularly acknowl-
edges when Harry stumbles upon the Room of Requirement and its massive
stash of tokens and objects:

[H]e could not help but be overawed by what he was looking at. He was
standing in a room the size of a large cathedral, whose high windows
were sending shafts of light down upon what looked like a city with
towering walls, built of what Harry knew must be objects hidden by gen-
erations of Hogwarts inhabitants. There were alleyways and roads bor-
dered by teetering piles of broken and damaged furniture, stowed
away, perhaps, to hide evidence of mishandled magic, or else hidden

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by castle-proud house-elves. There were thousands and thousands of

books, no doubt banned or graffitied or stolen. There were winged cat-
apults and Fanged Frisbees, some still with enough life in them to hover
halfheartedly over the mountains of other forbidden items; there were
chipped bottles of congealed potions, hats, jewels, cloaks; there were
what looked like dragon eggshells, corked battles whose contents still
shimmered evilly . . . . Harry hurried forward into one of the many alley-
ways between all this hidden treasure. (526)

It is no accident that this room of stashed objects becomes the very room
through which Voldemort’s minions, the Death Eaters, invade Hogwarts. It
contains the Vanishing Cabinet that is the twin of one found in Borgin and
Burkes, the sleazy shop that sells dark objects. The school’s propensity to
clutch and invest in objects is symbolically a match to the designs of the com-
mercial store. This room of objects is the seat of entry between school and
broader capitalism, with all its attendant waste and wreckage. The room is
described as a vanished city, akin to an Atlantis, a non-navigable heap of cul-
tural refuse. It is not a place that exists for school officials. In other words,
Hogwarts pretends to be, but is not, sheltered from the broader capitalism
of the world. Dumbledore would have Harry believe that a magpie-like tend-
ency was a unique element of Tom Riddle, but the Room of Requirement
reveals a consumer wasteland, a mirror of the ‘‘chamber of secrets’’ that
the school wishes to repress or deny.4 The analogy to a ‘‘large cathedral’’
conveys the sacred quality of consumed goods to those who have made a
pilgrimage to this room.5
The portrait that Dumbledore paints of Tom Riddle is of a child deprived
early in life of security and stability, who then sought compensation through
the desperate accumulation of valuable objects. Quite literally, these objects
are acquired to support the soul, which seems to have been diminished by
Tom’s very conditions at birth. Dumbledore spends time conveying memor-
ies of Merope’s (Tom’s mother’s) abusive and dilapidated household, as if
these deprivations explain the depraved tendencies of Tom. However, it is
Harry, who, in the memory of the orphanage, seems to be the focalizer in
the line, ‘‘there was no denying that this was a grim place in which to grow
up’’ (Half-Blood Prince 268), an observation that a sparse, impoverished
environment might well result in an insatiable desire for things. The desire
for trophies and collections is, of course, not foreign to childhood in general,
as shown earlier in the series when the impoverished Ron introduces Harry
to wizard trading cards (comparable to celebrity baseball cards that children
collect and trade), which tellingly bear the face of Dumbledore upon them,
acknowledging his celebrity status in mass-produced objects. And clearly
Tom is not the only student who becomes attached to things that increase
prestige. The book of potions that Harry discovers allows him to outshine
even Hermione in potions class, and because of its tip that bezoar can act
as antidote to poison, he rescues Ron and achieves yet another feather in

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his cap for saving members of the Weasley family, a family in which he
enjoys honorary membership. Harry begins to sleep with this book, hoarding
it and seeking it out as a friend, mentor, or parent. Strikingly, the ‘‘official’’
directions of the old potions book set the children up to fail at the concoc-
tions (telling them, for example, to cut an ingredient when it cannot be
cut). To make an assigned potion, Harry must follow the owner’s hand-
written changes. The book is a corrupting force insofar as it makes Harry’s
achievements dishonest and fuels his ability to impress potions-master
Slughorn, yet seems like fair play in a curriculum that refuses to provide
the students with all the information they need.
Similarly, Dumbledore analyzes Tom’s ability to gather around him a
group of peers as a negative and suspicious trait and views them as forerun-
ners to the Death Eaters. However, the formation of consistent peer groups is
of great value to the school and explicitly encouraged by the division of stu-
dents into houses and classes that define their primary friendships. As Pro-
fessor McGonagall explains in Sorcerer’s Stone, the houses are to be
regarded as a student’s family. Allegiances to houses do indeed run in fam-
ilies, and the organizational principle of houses reigns until the very end
of Deathly Hallows when, for a brief moment, everyone sits together
rather than in houses. However, in the postscript we find that the next
generation of students is equally concerned with house admission. It is only
the uniting of ‘‘misfits’’ and ‘‘loners’’ that scares the teachers. Harry’s private
and isolating lessons enable Dumbledore’s strategic control, for Dumbledore
continually emphasizes secrecy about the lessons but authorizes Harry to tell
only Hermione and Ron, hand-selecting and reifying a manageable peer
group in a way he wishes he had for Tom.
Furthermore, in the memory Dumbledore presents of Tom acquiring
objects for Borgin and Burkes, the sinister and sleazy store that specializes
in dangerous objects, Dumbledore highlights Tom’s sly and wily ways, but
readers of the series know that all the characters in the wizarding world
are masters of these skills. In a similar manner, Westman argues, wizards
manipulate Muggle minds for their own convenience (157–58), but skilled
Legilimens Voldemort, Snape, and Dumbledore ‘‘don’t broadcast this talent’’
(159) because of the incredible power and unethical manipulation inherent
in such skills. As a container of people’s memories, the Pensieve, housed
in Dumbledore’s office, symbolizes the headmaster’s power to collect,
assemble, shape, and present the minds of others at will. Furthermore,
Dumbledore uses Harry to ensnare Slughorn into accepting the position of
potions master so that Dumbledore can extract memories of Tom from
him. The implicit lesson of how to ‘‘play’’ people—especially teachers against
one another—is symbolized also by Harry’s newly acquired potions book,
which teaches that success is dependent not on following established rules
but exploring possibilities in the margins. In fact, not only does the potions
book give Harry unauthorized knowledge, but Dumbledore also commands

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him to ‘‘play’’ Slughorn for the retrieval of the true memory of what exactly
unfolded between Slughorn and Tom when Tom sought instruction on how
to make Horcruxes (the memory in the Pensieve has been altered to hide
Slughorn’s true answer). When Harry finally obtains the memory, he appreci-
ates Tom’s ability to manipulate Slughorn because Harry, too, knows how to
play people: ‘‘It was very well done, thought Harry, the hesitancy, the casual
tone, the careful flattery, none of it overdone. He, Harry, had had too much
experience of trying to wheedle information out of reluctant people not to
recognize a master at work’’ (496–97). Playing a social game is as much a part
of the Hogwarts’ curriculum as anything else, yet somehow it is seen exclus-
ively as the province of the evil Tom Riddle. If recipes for success are embed-
ded in the margins of official curricula and in secret chambers, then Tom
Riddle is simply the hidden curricula that schools do not acknowledge.
Perhaps this is why we first meet Tom in Secret Chamber, in which the very
existence of the secret chamber has been denied by Hogwarts staff for fifty
years.
Dumbledore also describes Tom’s supposed obsession with his parent-
age and his desperate search to find evidence of his father’s wizardry as
desires that slide into depravity once the fruitlessness of the search becomes
apparent. The reader cannot help thinking of Harry’s desire to learn more
about his wizard parents, a parallel Tom draws in Chamber of Secrets as well.
But implicit observations of lineage and connection occur all the time at Hog-
warts. Snape, the Head of Slytherin, a house whose founder prized blood
above all else, continually attributes Harry’s (irritating) audacity and
rule-breaking to the influence of James Potter, the father Harry has never
known. Similarly, Professor Slughorn, the newly reinstated potions master
who taught not only Tom but the generation including Harry’s parents, is
convinced Harry has the gift of his mother’s nature because Harry, like his
mother before him, seems to excel at the subject. Slughorn’s privileging of
nature is a telling instance of the ways in which the school certainly does
value lineage even though it officially frowns upon discriminatory practices
favored by the original Slytherin, the founder who felt that only pure-blood
wizards were worthy of Hogwarts admission. Slytherin’s prejudice is distaste-
ful to the school even though this ‘‘blood will out’’ interpretation of a child is
an operative theme in many personal interactions with teachers.
It is not surprising that a child like Tom, who lacks family, should want
to embed his soul in founder objects as Horcruxes. Horcruxes are objects into
which wizards can embed their souls and thereby earn immortality, but they
can only do so by murdering another person. While Tom’s desire to make
Horcruxes is thus seen as one of the most damning pieces of evidence of
Tom’s evil nature, Half-Blood Prince offers another interpretation. Although
it turns out that Tom does have a bloodline to Slytherin and a ‘‘specialness’’
(difference from children in the orphanage) that has a name (wizard) and
purpose (command of magic), he does not initially know this. But from

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the moment he arrives, he sees Hogwarts as a pseudo-family and thus has a

particular desire to insinuate himself in the four families or lineages of the
school and adopt the founders as his own parents. Tom’s need to turn foun-
der objects into his Horcruxes is an attempt at adoption by not one but four
families, a ‘‘magpie’’ desire to hoard family and its special heirlooms.
Fearing that the lines between good and evil are not all that distinct,
Harry repeatedly compares himself to Tom Riddle throughout the series,
but in Half-Blood Prince he notes detailed similarities in their feelings and
backgrounds. For example, when Harry learns that Merope (Tom’s mother)
died because she gave up rather than protect a son that needed her, Harry
immediately compares and contrasts his own mother and similar loss
(262), even though Dumbledore sources Merope’s failure to an innate flaw
in her character, claiming she never had the courage of Harry’s mother.
Further, Dumbledore shows Harry memories of rejecting Tom’s application
for teaching at Hogwarts, without considering the impact of such an action,
even though Dumbledore himself has analyzed Hogwarts as the only place
to which Tom feels a sense of belonging. When Dumbledore admits,
‘‘ ‘Hogwarts was where [Tom] had been happiest; the first and only place
he had felt at home,’’’ ‘‘Harry felt slightly uncomfortable at these words,
for this was exactly how he felt about Hogwarts too’’ (Half-Blood Prince
431). This discomfort suggests not only Harry’s uneasiness at the psychic
similarity between him and Tom, but also—more subtly—his anxiety that
early conditioning, rather than free choice, might lead him into darkness as
well. Harry’s worries about becoming more like Tom seem well founded.
Harry has felt and feared his connection to the dark lord throughout the ser-
ies, but in Half-Blood Prince the connections between their childhoods make
his fears particularly intimate because childhood is imagined as the core of
adult personality, a theory of self evident in Dumbledore’s lessons.
Harry’s perception of his similarity to Tom is nothing new; indeed, he
has been taught to view himself that way. Teachers compare the two based
on their natural wizarding gifts and disrespect of the rules; even in the first
book, the wand-seller Ollivander equates the two wizards when he sells
Harry a wand with a Phoenix feather that has only one twin in Voldemort’s
wand. In the second book, Tom himself draws parallels between him and
Harry, which are, at that point, a little jarring, because the dashing, brilliant
Tom hardly seems to resemble Harry. Dumbledore implicitly furthers the
comparative exercise by explaining in Half-Blood Prince that Tom was
Harry’s age when he began making himself immortal. Yet Harry’s tendency
to compare himself to Tom and to give credence to the prophecy that Harry
is ‘‘the chosen one’’ who will defeat the dark lord or die ultimately frustrates
Dumbledore because Dumbledore believes that one makes one’s destiny:
‘‘ ‘It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our
abilities’’’ (Sorcerer’s Stone 333); in Half-Blood Prince, he makes an
impassioned plea that Harry understand his choices rather than obsess about

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the prophecy, which, to Dumbledore, means nothing. In some sense, this is

what Dumbledore, whom Rowling presents as an admirable educator, must
believe; educators stand for the Enlightenment mind that governs itself with
the rational choices of a free agent. However, in championing free will,
Dumbledore transfers responsibility for Harry’s present and future choices
squarely onto Harry rather than on the institution molding him, even though
in prior books, actions Dumbledore took that were beyond Harry’s control
had grave consequences for Harry.6
Dumbledore’s firm belief in free agency makes it all the more ironic that
Dumbledore reads Tom’s path as the unfolding of a flawed nature. His belief
that Tom’s evil nature is innate is symbolized when he observes the potion
in Tom’s cave. We can understand the potion as representing Tom’s child-
hood since the cave was an important place for the young orphan Tom.
Dumbledore says of the potion, ‘‘ ‘But how to reach it? This potion cannot
be penetrated by hand, Vanished, parted, scooped up, or siphoned away,
nor can it be Transfigured, Charmed, or otherwise made to change its nat-
ure’’’ (Half-Blood Prince 568). Both literally and symbolically, this passage
demonstrates Dumbledore’s uncertainty about reaching, understanding,
and penetrating Tom’s soul. Dumbledore’s list of methods for changing natu-
ral elements fails in truly reaching Tom. Yet Half-Blood Prince embeds clues
about Dumbledore’s blind spots, in preparation for a fuller explanation of
the headmaster’s complexity in Deathly Hallows, when Harry worries that
Dumbledore may have groomed Harry to die for the purpose of defeating
the dark lord: Harry is revealed to be one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes, and
these Horcruxes must be destroyed before the dark lord can be defeated.
Dumbledore’s council on free will and choices, then, seems deeply ironic
and suspect, a Foucaultian pretense in which Harry, an orphan who might
threaten the state if not assimilated, successfully imbibes national values.7
Toward the end of the novel, the very gaze of Dumbledore makes Harry feel
‘‘the usual sensation that he was being X-rayed’’ (428), the adjective ‘‘usual’’
demonstrating how successful Hogwarts has been at inculcating Michel
Foucault’s model of discipline through institutional technologies and interna-
lized surveillance. Harry increasingly wishes to please Dumbledore and feels
shame if he does not: ‘‘A hot, prickly feeling of shame spread from the top of
Harry’s head all the way down his body. Dumbledore had not raised his
voice, he did not even sound angry, but Harry would have preferred him
to yell; this cold disappointment was worse than anything’’ (428). Tom repre-
sents the particularly poignant threat of the unassimilated orphan for whom
panoptic techniques have failed, despite Dumbledore’s vow to keep an eye
upon him.
In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore appears to read Tom according to a
deeply Biblical view that ‘‘evil’’ is the antithesis of everything good and
moral. No teaching can redeem this sort of evil. Like the savage (uncon-
scious) childhood that was born again in Freudian theory (as historicized

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by Carolyn Steedman), Tom’s brand of evil can ‘‘be kept at bay, though never
quite eradicated’’ (Half-Blood Prince 645). Dumbledore’s view of evil echoes
that of Snape, the sinister teacher and head of Slytherin whom Harry despises
and who, in turn, despises Harry. Snape defines the dark arts as a monster
that grows new heads every time you cut off one, a speech Harry views as
disturbingly sexual and therefore inappropriately affectionate: ‘‘Harry stared
at Snape. It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous
enemy, another to speak of them, as Snape was doing, with a loving caress
in his voice?’’ (178).8 This admiration of evil from a Byronic hero at once sug-
gests the heroic call and futility of the teacher battling the dark arts and
resembles Dumbledore’s seductive lessons to Harry about the charismatic
and Byronic Tom Riddle. Dumbledore is thus not so different from the less
virtuous Snape. And Harry, who sees himself as Dumbledore’s pupil, is
incapable of recognizing that his own admiration of Tom later in the novel
also sounds very reminiscent of Snape’s affection for darkness.
Dumbledore must pay an extreme price for failing Tom in Half-Blood
Prince; the novel culminates in what seems to be his murder at the hands
of Professor Snape, although later in the series we learn that Snape’s actions
are not exactly his ‘‘choices.’’ As the school learns of Snape’s supposed
allegiance to the Death Eaters, Professor Slughorn exclaims, ‘‘ ‘Snape! I taught
him! I thought I knew him!’’’ (627), a precise echo of Dumbledore’s relation
to Tom, ‘‘ ‘I taught Tom Riddle. I know his style’ ’’ (563), thus revealing that
teachers’ influence on students is of paramount importance in Half-Blood
Prince. How can a teacher know a student’s style but claim not to have
shaped that style? How can a teacher claim such intimate knowledge of a
student’s ‘‘evil’’ and be so astonished at an ‘‘evil’’ turn of events? We are
subtly given a message about Dumbledore’s ironic position of interpreting
Tom in the context of his theory that evil is unteachable. By asserting that
no book could have given Tom information on how to split his soul into
Horcruxes, Dumbledore ironically exposes the central role of the teacher,
which is indeed the major plot revelation, for Slughorn has given Tom this
illegal information. In turn, Slughorn gives the reader much more infor-
mation about what teachers prize and what values they inspire, and Harry’s
courting of Slughorn for the true memory of Tom only reifies the power of
‘‘private’’ lessons at Hogwarts. This power is perversely inscribed by Dumbledore
as well and is therefore a lesson that recurs ‘‘across the curriculum.’’

THE PENETRABLE POTTER: HIDDEN CURRICULUM

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

It is meaningful that Slughorn’s words about knowing Snape echo Dumbledore’s

about knowing Tom. Hardly a positive character, Slughorn attaches himself
to students he believes will prove to be good connections. Slughorn is

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strongly reminiscent of Gilderoy Lockhart in Chamber of Secrets, a professor

who falsely purports to have done all the amazing things published in his
books. Professor Slughorn is introduced in Half-Blood Prince as a foil to
the worthy Dumbledore, yet both teachers are major forces in Tom’s life. This
doubling is a purposeful replication since Half-Blood Prince is a conscious
rewriting of Chamber, both in revisiting the dark lord as a child and in focus-
ing on an old book as a dangerous discovery. These coinciding dangers of
corruption by dark lords and old books reveal Rowling’s emphasis on what
children discover in the ‘‘secret chambers’’ of schools. Even though Harry
finds the old potions book at the bottom of Slughorn’s cabinet, exposing
Slughorn’s own hidden agenda, Slughorn’s hoarding of truth comprises the
Hogwarts curriculum as much as Dumbledore’s. Snape, who has finally
achieved his desired post of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, is the
‘‘true’’ voice or memory embodied by the old potions book (it was his book
and the marginalia are his); therefore, both Slughorn and Snape represent the
sinister roots of the school’s heritage, which children learn only in marginalia
and private lessons.
Ginny is understandably concerned in Half-Blood Prince about Harry’s
use of the potions textbook. After all, she herself experienced great trauma in
Chamber of Secrets due to her discovery of an old book, the dark lord’s diary.
Ginny claims to have found the diary amongst the old texts given to her by
her mother, sourcing unauthorized female activity as well as subtly blaming
the grown-ups, just as Harry blames the half-blood Prince for the murderous
spell he casts on Malfoy (Snape saves Malfoy, which is only fair since the evil
spell was his invention in the first place). And yet the repercussions of the
unauthorized texts are far different for Ginny than Harry. Ginny’s discovered
book causes her to withdraw from peers and face sexual trauma. Ginny’s
descent into the chamber as she voices her complaints in Tom Riddle’s diary
is steeped in sexual imagery. The book is dangerous both to her and the
school, serving as a symbol of female rage (the complaints in her diary),
emotions, and desire (one of her complaints is that her crush on Harry is
not returned). Certainly, Chamber is concerned with Harry’s sexuality as
well. Alice Mills makes the case that the secrets of Chamber of Secrets con-
cern girls; the chamber is accessed through the girls’ bathroom, where a
sexually aroused female lives (Moaning Myrtle). However, Mills’s reading
of ‘‘the terrors of the toilet’’ as anal imagery could equally well imply that
other sexual secrets lurk behind the girls’ bathroom—secrets fundamental
to the tradition of boys boarding-school literature, as argued by Pugh and
Wallace. Tom Riddle presents himself as an older, sexually mature Harry,
and Myrtle, an older teen, invites Harry to share her toilet. Tom’s chamber
and Myrtle’s toilet represent two possible sexual pathways for Harry. Cham-
ber reveals that Harry is not ready for any such notions. However, Half Blood
Prince is quite preoccupied with the newly born ‘‘creature’’ or monster
within Harry, the creature that desires Ginny (286–87, 423, 534), hardly an

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uncomplicated heterosexuality since these urges can also be understood as

his desire for the Weasley family and all its members. Throughout Half-Blood
Prince, Harry is afraid to express his feelings toward Ginny because he fears
losing Ron as his mate.
But while Ginny’s book acts like a sexual predator, Harry’s book is a
male mentor that helps him earn respect. The old potions book embeds
knowledge of spells and instructions that initially earn him accolades and a
relationship with Snape that Harry cannot enjoy in life because he is so pre-
judiced against Snape. As horrific as Snape is, he carries knowledge that
Harry needs. Harry’s book increases his social stature, whereas Ginny’s book
isolates her. Likewise, although Dumbledore’s weighty lessons in Half-Blood
Prince isolate Harry, too, they make him feel not victimized but chosen. This
difference in gender can be understood in the context of Amy Billone’s
argument about Harry Potter as the privileged male character who, like Peter
Pan, can cross worlds and feel at home in fantasyland in a way that female
characters, such as Carroll’s Alice, cannot. For Ginny to tap into unauthorized
Hogwarts lessons about power, social savvy, and capitalism is dangerous;
should she catch on, she might challenge the status quo. For Harry this same
knowledge is an intentional curriculum on the part of the headmaster, who,
after his failure with Tom, perhaps recognizes the necessity for different
pedagogical approaches.
In contrast to Ginny’s immersion in a diary in Chamber, Harry’s attach-
ment to the old book enables his rise. Yet Half-Blood Prince eventually
reveals the old potions book as the horror that Ginny and Hermione fear it
is when Harry casts the spell that almost kills Malfoy. Although Harry blames
the unknown owner for the creation of such a spell, it is apparent that Harry
does not recognize how much he himself is responsible for experimenting
with the book without reflection. Why might this be? One answer is that
while Dumbledore and various teachers have repeatedly insisted that stu-
dents follow the rules, they have repeatedly violated their words by reward-
ing points for experimentation and action without thought, as observed by
Torbjørn Knutsen in ‘‘Dumbledore’s Pedagogy: Knowledge and Virtue at
Hogwarts’’ (204–05). Indeed the points system itself is a sign of an arbitrary
economy based on nothing but the powers and personal sentiments of the
faculty; faculty members are free to award or take away five or fifty points
for whatever action they feel merits points. There is no written guide to this
system that might demystify the equivalence of actions and value.
The penetrations of Harry by Dumbledore’s silvery stock of memories in
Half-Blood Prince are treated as far gentler and benevolent lessons than the
violent power struggles he has with Snape in Order of the Phoenix, yet
Half-Blood Prince draws a fascinating parallel between Dumbledore’s les-
sons and the lessons Harry enthusiastically drinks from Snape’s old potions
book. Although Tom’s pleasure in domination is seen by Dumbledore as
something distastefully unique to Tom, the structure of relations between

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teacher and student in Dumbledore’s private lessons involves a similar struc-

ture of dominance. Harry’s penetrability by various male instructors, among
whom Voldemort must be ranked with Snape and Dumbledore, must be
analyzed as a queer structure as well as the conveyance of queer curriculum.
It is tempting to read Dumbledore as a homosexual given Rowling’s
later outing, but, as critics have noted, there is very little indication of
Dumbledore’s sexual orientation in the novels. In fact, same-sex pairings
are never discussed in Harry Potter’s world, making it resemble a much older
novel, oddly in conflict with its wide-ranging cast of characters and types,
many of whom experience prejudice for different reasons. John Cloud, for
one, declares of Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore, ‘‘Shouldn’t I be happy
to learn that he’s gay? Yes, except. Why couldn’t he tell us himself? The Potter
books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies . . . yet
Rowling couldn’t spare two of those words to help define a central charac-
ter’s emotional identity: ‘I’m gay.’ We can only conclude that Dumbledore
saw his homosexuality as shameful’’ (Cloud 2). And yet the fact that chil-
dren’s literature rarely focuses on the emotional complexities of adults may
contextualize Dumbledore’s closeting, and certainly some clues do exist.
From Half-Blood Prince’s beginning scene in which Dumbledore appears
at the Dursley home to begin private lessons with Harry, he is figured as
an odd sort of suitor. The Dursleys are shocked by his appearance, and their
discomfort with his presence is strongly reminiscent of their response to the
entire wizarding world as ‘‘abnormal’’—‘‘that sort’’ they do not wish to be
seen around. Critics Bronski, Wallace and Pugh, and Tosenberger have read
this as analogous to the unseen, closeted gay world that ‘‘normal’’ Muggles
intuit and, in embarrassment, choose not to see or acknowledge. Harry feels
‘‘distinctly awkward’’ being alone with Dumbledore as they first set out (57),
and Dumbledore asks Harry to take his arm, rather like an escort. The result-
ing ‘‘apparition’’ (magical travel) feels ‘‘as though [Harry] had just been forced
through a very tight rubber tube’’ (58) and results in dizziness, feelings that
could be viewed as analogous to sexual initiations.
In a similarly suggestive manner, the memories in the Pensieve,
described as neither liquid nor gas, bear a resemblance to semen, particularly
in the way the substance becomes exchanged between the two during a
shared intimate experience: ‘‘Harry bent forward, took a deep breath, and
plunged his face into the silvery substance. He felt his feet leave the office
floor; he was falling, falling through whirling darkness and then, quite sud-
denly, he was blinking in dazzling sunlight. Before his eyes had adjusted,
Dumbledore landed beside him’’ (199). Harry undergoes isolation and alter-
ation from these experiences. Dumbledore subsequently has the power to
summon him, and Harry never knows when, where, or how he might be
called upon by Dumbledore. Harry begins to obsess about when messages
will come: ‘‘Where was Dumbledore, and what was he doing? . . . Had
Dumbledore forgotten the lessons he was supposed to be giving

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Harry? . . . Harry had felt bolstered, comforted, and now he felt slightly aban-
doned’’ (237). Harry feels selected and made special by these excursions,
much as a young teen might obsess over a new love interest. Over time,
Harry becomes used to the foreign feeling of ‘‘apparating’’ by touching
Dumbledore, and, after practice, his descent into the ‘‘swirling, pearly mem-
ory’’ of the Pensieve becomes compulsory: ‘‘Harry stepped up to the stone
basin and bowed obediently until his face sank through the surface’’ (363).
The relationship takes on the unwritten codes of pederasty, which makes
it seem relevant that at the very moment Dumbledore freezes Harry before
he dies, Harry first sees Greyback, a werewolf who bites children in order
to reproduce his species.
On one level, these scenes of penetration are the conveyance of wisdom
into the ‘‘vessel’’ of youth, movement from innocence to experience or
knowledge, but on another level, they reveal the deepest desires of educa-
tors to reproduce themselves through shaping young men. Harry has been
commanded to secrecy about these visits, analogous to the many uncomfort-
able private lessons or punishments that he has been subjected to before in
the series—lessons in which he often passed out. These excursions to
Dumbledore’s office certainly evoke a queer reading, however disturbingly
pederastic, as observed by John Cloud in his article, ‘‘Outing Dumbledore’’
(2). Dumbledore needs Harry as a receiver of his semen-like substances. This
need seems to take visible form in Dumbledore’s wounded hand; he cannot
open the memory vials with his own hands, indicating the passing of his
prowess. And while these liquid exchanges can be understood as symbolic
penetration of Harry, a theme of mind-penetration that continually emerges
throughout the series, it can also be understood as a vision of education, a
field in which a word like ‘‘seminar’’ shares roots with semen and knowledge
deposited and exchanged by older and younger men through a shared canon
to which not everyone is privy.9 But it is not only the relationship between
Harry and Dumbledore that is queerly figured. The triangle of Dumble-
dore-Harry-Tom is constructed around issues of penetration and dominance,
mistrust and unconditional obedience. Harry’s dizzying physical experiences
with Dumbledore reinvoke Harry’s experience of Tom’s diary in Chamber, in
which he descends into the diary only after it (or Tom) asks his consent. And
Tom’s ‘‘coming out’’ (words used in the novel) of the diary, to meet Harry,
implies a queer scene: Tom admits that he used Ginny, so that he could
get to Harry. Ginny is literally unconscious in the chamber and therefore
merely an object ‘‘between men,’’ to use Eve Sedgwick’s phrase for how
women function as objects between men in the English novel. Further, Tom’s
many observations about how he and Harry look alike and share similar
backgrounds throw Harry into crisis until he pulls the Gryffindor sword from
the Sorting Hat (only a true Gryffindor can do so). Tom clearly represents a
part of Harry that would question whether he is ‘‘true’’ Gryffindor or whether
he is shameful.

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All of these issues culminate in the cave. The cave signifies a fantasy
inversion of Dumbledore’s office and power seat, which has showcased
Harry repeatedly ‘‘drinking in’’ liquid memories in intimate experiences
throughout Half-Blood Prince. It is perhaps no surprise that Harry sees in
the cave a vision of the headmaster’s power, which enables him to decode
a power struggle between Tom and headmaster that he perhaps shares:

The island was no larger than Dumbledore’s office, an expanse of flat

dark stone on which stood nothing but the source of that greenish light,
which looked much brighter when viewed close to. Harry squinted at it;
at first, he thought it was a lamp of some kind, but then he saw that the
light was coming from a stone basin rather like the Pensieve, which was
set on top of a pedestal.
Dumbledore approached the basin and Harry followed. Side by side,
they looked down into it. (567)

The scene represents the passing of the torch from age to youth, as
Dumbledore’s prowess gets them there and Harry’s strength allows them
to leave. Dumbledore’s blood opens the door, while Harry’s blood allows
them exit. The basin of poison, reminiscent of the Pensieve, is first on a ‘‘ped-
estal,’’ signifying the loftiness of the headmaster, but this shifts as Harry and
Dumbledore become ‘‘side by side.’’ In the past, Dumbledore’s stature as a
great wizard has been articulated by many and by his supporters, especially
Hagrid, but not self-articulated. Throughout Half-Blood Prince, Dumble-
dore’s comments about his own amazing brain become crassly and strikingly
articulated, far beyond everyday rules of etiquette, as if he is holding onto
something others no longer believe. Harry’s increasing discomfort with his
own unquestioning obedience throughout Half-Blood Prince prepares him
for subsequent individuation from Dumbledore.10 Harry becomes increas-
ingly frustrated by what he views as Dumbledore’s blind trust and tendency
to see the good in everyone; however, it is not so much that Harry is right—
in Tom’s case, the reverse is true. Half-Blood Prince can be regarded as Dum-
bledore’s last stand in shaping the main character, and it is fascinating that
this relationship centers on a boy who mirrors Harry and who did not receive
the same attention. But then favoritism of a particular student is permissible
at Hogwarts, just as earlier books have made the point that professors
(especially Snape) favor students in their own houses.
But what also occurs in this rather warped scene is Harry’s ‘‘obedient’’
action to force Dumbledore to drink what Dumbledore has identified as a
piece of Tom’s soul. On the one hand, this scene involves the inevitable out-
come of Dumbledore’s Freudian philosophy: by interpreting Tom according
to both natural and familial deprivations solidified in early infancy and child-
hood, which no educational means can penetrate, Dumbledore is forced to
drink in the unchangeable, unmalleable nature of Tom’s evil soul. It is poison

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that ‘‘ ‘I cannot touch . . . I cannot approach,’ ’’ says Dumbledore, poison

that cannot be ‘‘ ‘made to change its nature’ ’’ (568). On the other hand,
Dumbledore is forced to drink it on his own command, or perhaps as pun-
ishment for his own blind ignorance of how Hogwarts and the culture of the
school might have contributed to Tom’s lust for power, dominance, and the
overvaluation of objects.
Dumbledore’s regret about Tom’s outcome subtly reveals some guilt
about whether he could have done more or facilitated an intimacy as he
has with the orphan Harry.11 Dumbledore claims that Tom was always
guarded after their initial meeting. It remains unclear how a child guards
himself from a skilled Legilimens, but it is certainly in Dumbledore’s interest
to claim ignorance of Tom’s early darkness. If Dumbledore’s claim that Tom
was guarded after their initial meeting is accurate, we can ask why Tom
might have been wary of the professor. Dumbledore proves to Tom that
he is a wizard by making his wardrobe flame, and Dumbledore observes,
‘‘ ‘I think there is something trying to get out of your wardrobe’ ’’ (272).
Although there is understanding, sympathy, and likeness implied, there is
also judgment, as Dumbledore constructs him in this scene as a thief.
The very moment he admitted Tom to school, Dumbledore warned Tom
that thievery is not tolerated at Hogwarts, showing immediate distrust.
(Those familiar with the series know that in prior books, especially Order
of the Phoenix, Dumbledore similarly distanced himself from Harry and that
Harry both noticed and felt wounded by this treatment.) This moment
between Dumbledore and Tom is the most intimate scene they ever share,
and continued support of Tom is trumped by suspicion and alienation. In
this case, nondisclosure to students (like Tom) who feel shameful about
their backgrounds for various reasons—class, religion, race, sexual orien-
tation, sexual abuse, an alcoholic or violent parent—has serious conse-
quences.
Half-Blood Prince places a scrutinizing gaze upon Tom’s nature as ‘‘dif-
ferent.’’ Slughorn describes the making of Horcruxes as the product of
unnatural activity, a buzzword for historical prejudice against homosexuals
who choose ‘‘improper’’ love objects. Slughorn says it is an act against nature
to split the soul, a reading that could also yield anxiety about those who do
not choose monogamy (there are seven Horcruxes). Tom’s distaste for
‘‘Mudbloods,’’ when he is half-Muggle himself, is a denial of his ‘‘half blood’’
nature, a value judgment stemming from cultural conditioning, which could
be read as analogous to a history of gay shame and closeting, as traced and
theorized by Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet. The initial presen-
tation of the dark lord as He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named seems akin to the sin
‘‘which dare not speak its name.’’ Assuming this resonance with coming-out
is purposeful, we can regard Half-Blood Prince as a coming-out story that
fails and creates a very closeted monster, traditionally a trope for homo-
sexuals in popular film and literature.12

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I do not mean to suggest that we limit ourselves to a reading of Tom’s

evil as tapping into a history of gay shame, but I mean to read this familiar
theme of closeting as a way to understand Dumbledore’s lessons. They are
really lessons in what happens when repressed ‘‘monsters,’’ or feelings of
shame (whatever the source of shame), are not expressed, shared, and
discussed. Rowling uses the language of gay shame not to indicate homo-
sexuality per se, but merely the sort of shame that might create a monster like
Tom. The coordination of the two plots—Tom’s unsupported, unaired shame
and Harry’s reticence to completely vilify Tom—suggests flaws in the
school’s refusal to address the emotional realities of students beyond the
classroom.13 The shame associated with a particular background—whatever
the nature of that shame—becomes for Tom a layer on which values of
school culture (for prestige, objects) are cemented. In a very broad way,
then, Tom is literally the school’s closet, its chamber, its soul that cannot
be exorcised because it is everywhere. He exemplifies the dangers of
refusing children support for all their issues.

CONCLUSION

If we view Half-Blood Prince as the story of Harry’s preparation in becoming

the man who must overcome the dark lord and therefore experiment with
penetration and dominance, then we can easily read Half-Blood Prince as
a transfer of the seed of power to Harry. Harry’s own sexual awakening with
Ginny is both instrumental to his manhood and an impediment to his queer
connection with the dark lord; he must express his desire for Ginny in
Half-Blood Prince and then channel this energy into tracking Tom’s soul
(Horcruxes) in Deathly Hallows, in which he learns to use and somewhat
control mental penetration by Voldemort. However, throughout Half-Blood
Prince, Harry’s views of Tom Riddle provide penetrating insight beyond
the Pensieve. Dumbledore makes the same mistake with which cultural
critics continually charge Freudians: not taking into account the complexity
of culture and looking instead at the individual mind and experiences for for-
mative influences. Tom is evil because his family was evil, violent, and
obsessed with the purity of blood rather than values; Tom is evil because
his mother was beaten down and lacked the courage to stay alive for him;
Tom is evil because he was rejected by his father and landed in an austere,
impoverished orphanage that could not support him or his special abilities.
He was left to his own streetwise devices, and the school—always good—
could not change these things. Dumbledore renders memories of Tom
applying twice to teach at Hogwarts, admitting that it replaced his sense of
family and belonging, but he never questions whether those rejections were
formative experiences. It is too convenient to believe that neurons and

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personalities are solidified in early life. In one memory, Dumbledore says

Tom should go into politics, and Tom sarcastically says he does not have
the connections. Families and connections are continually important in the
series; doors open for Harry because everyone knows his name, not to men-
tion his eyes—his mother’s eyes. Slughorn opens his door for this reason and
because Harry dishonestly presents himself as a prodigy in the tradition of his
mother.
The way in which the ‘‘evil’’ child is a synecdoche for cultural condition-
ing is too complicated for the analyst or courts to handle; thus he is treated as
an individual with pathological tendencies and ‘‘instincts.’’ This assessment
makes the adults feel better, not only because it erases their culpability but
because it protects them from recognizing that they, too, lack power over
the broader world and culture of which they are a part. Who wants to admit
how much capitalism, reflected in the Room of Requirements, shapes inter-
actions, desires, and goals of students? However much a force he is, Dumble-
dore did not found the school or its broader class culture. Half-Blood Prince
emphasizes prior headmasters to make the point that Dumbledore did not
create the universe, as much as he is equated with a god. And thus even
Dumbledore cannot read Tom as the cultural unconscious that all shared
texts represent, as Fredric Jameson claims. Tom Riddle is ultimately a shared
text that no one wants to name. That is why Tom’s soul is everywhere div-
ided, into objects far and wide. Not all the Horcruxes belong to the school,
of course, but a good portion of them do. Rowling has drawn for us a sense
of proportion in determining who is responsible for an unsupported child:
several objects belong to the school founders, founders no longer alive but
nevertheless still shaping the very structure of school culture. Tom is ulti-
mately a riddled text that teachers refuse to read and print for their students.
Tom’s adoption of Hogwarts as a family that cares deeply about lineage,
class, trophies, brilliance, winning, and dominance is both legible and under-
standable. Deathly Hallows further reveals that Dumbledore’s reading of Tom
in Half-Blood Prince is essentially a reading of himself as a youth, for
Dumbledore fears the lust for power that he distrusts in himself. Freud would
have called this countertransference. In denying Tom as a Hogwarts textbook
in Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore has revealed a deeply hidden curriculum,
which is the most powerful lesson of all.

NOTES

1. I am not suggesting that the concept of tabula rasa governs Harry Potter, however. The series’
insistence on Harry’s natural purity and love, not to mention the overriding battles between good children
fighting evil adults in the Ministry and in Lord Voldemort’s Death Eaters, is more properly romantic. Even
wizarding skill is somewhat in-born; Harry’s magical gifts, such as flying, are part of his nature, and
wizards can be born to non-wizard parents. Hermione, born to Muggles (non-wizards), however, seizes
scholarship as a means to knowledge; the series’ uneasy characterization of whether children’s gifts are
natural or not makes an examination of Tom Riddle all the more pressing, calling into question the

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relationship between nature and training and setting up Lord Voldemort’s ideas about blood as possibly
only a perverse exaggeration of socially accepted ideologies (for example, when Professor McGonagall,
head of Gryffindor, selects Harry as Quidditch Seeker for his natural skill, she reassures Harry that his
father was a good player as well). I would point out, however, that even Locke’s tabula rasa, for which
he is known, was never absolute; he advised parents to observe the inborn temperament of their children
and adjust accordingly.
2. Indeed, an entire book is devoted to the Triwizard Tournament, in which students compete for
the Triwizard Cup, which symbolically makes the school vulnerable to penetration by the dark lord.
3. For example, the shabby robes of Professor Lupin in Azkaban draw even Harry’s judgmental atten-
tion. In Chamber of Secrets, Ginny, too, is only too aware of the importance of class. She has secondhand
books because her family has little money and her brothers need new texts. Ginny complains about her sec-
ondhand robes and books in Tom’s diary, demonstrating her knowledge of being a second-class citizen.
4. The chamber embarrasses the school not only because a girl (Moaning Myrtle) died when it last
opened but because it reveals one of the school founder’s (Slytherin’s) distaste for wizards who are not
descended from pure-blood wizards.
5. The room has opened for Harry so he can hide his precious potions book there. It could be
argued that the room is a children’s space; however, an earlier scene in which we learn that Madame
Trelawny stashes her empty sherry bottles there explains the underground quality of consumption in
the entire school, inclusive of pupils and teachers.
6. Throughout Order of the Phoenix, Harry experiences in dreams exactly what Voldemort is experi-
encing; sensing that Harry’s and the dark lord’s minds are dangerously linked, Dumbledore distances
Harry and the Order refuses to include him in information-sharing. This solution only endangers every-
one, since Voldemort eventually figures out the link and stages a scene that lures Harry to the Ministry
of Magic, where he is attacked. At the end of the novel, Dumbledore realizes his mistake.
7. Critics such as Susan Reynolds and Alicia Willson-Metzger have analyzed the manipulative charac-
ter of Dumbledore in light of his consequentialism and his role as schoolmaster of a neo-Victorian orphan
novel, in which an orphan is typically watched until he has internalized mechanisms of surveillance.
8. John Killinger claims that this view of eternal evil is deeply Biblical and Christian. Alternately,
Aida Patient and Kori Street have demonstrated that the Harry Potter series taps into the trope of Hitler
as the ultimate in monstrous evil, citing the many parallels between Nazi policy of racial cleansing
and Voldemort’s obsession with racial purity, complete with the attenuated irony that he himself is
not pure-blood, just as Hitler was hardly Aryan. While critics such as Thomas Hibbs would disagree,
Sattaur charges that the unquestioned division between good and evil throughout Harry Potter is a
problematic replay of contemporary wars on terrorism, the discourse of which identifies ‘‘the evil
other’’ as uncomplicated villain.
9. Dumbledore’s pooling of memories and need for Harry to receive them are strongly reminiscent of a
novel that most young readers would know and that Rowling might have used: Lois Lowry’s 1993 The Giver,
winner of the 1994 Newberry Award. In it, a boy named Jonas is selected to be the next Receiver of Memory for
the community. He must slowly and painfully receive memories from a male mentor (the Giver) to learn about
the darker forces of life, which his community has forgotten. In The Giver, Jonas’s receiving of memories from
the alienated wizard-like figure is figured as a loss of virginity and innocence. The translation of the memories
has a similar physicality; Jonas must lie down and receive the Giver’s bare hands upon him, and although the
Giver fears giving Jonas pain, the giving of memories, such as a broken limb or war, is a requirement for Jonas
to grow. Young readers of The Giver are trained to see the selection of a memory receptacle as a great honor
and way to change the future, but they are not trained to read the sub-text of the penetration as a model of
educational violence that underscores models of ‘‘noble’’ education as conceived in classical texts.
10. Pugh and Wallace have noted that Harry’s reference to himself as ‘‘Dumbledore’s man’’ ‘‘high-
light[s] that Harry is not yet his own man’’ (275), and Dumbledore’s death becomes necessary in the series’
paradigm of normative heroic masculinity, an ideology in which only one male character gets to become
the hero and individuate. Harry is literally paralyzed by Dumbledore in the ending scene with Malfoy and
Death Eaters, and he is only able to move again when Dumbledore has died and the spell—seen symbo-
lically as Dumbledore’s mental penetration of him—broken. Even the best-intentioned adults can
communicate problematic power structures and paralyze when they mean to empower or protect.
11. The film of Half-Blood Prince presses the scene of Tom and Dumbledore’s first meeting to draw
connections between Dumbledore and Tom that do not occur in the novel. In the film, Dumbledore
responds to Tom’s line ‘‘ ‘I knew I was different’ ’’ with ‘‘ ‘I’m like you, Tom. I’m different.’ ’’ This line does
not occur in the book; in fact, Dumbledore does not seek connection, and only after Tom asks, upon first

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meeting him, whether he is a wizard does Dumbledore say he is, and he insists upon his title as Professor
or Sir, drawing distance.
12. See Henry Benshoff’s Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film for discussions of
the queer sub-texts of characters perceived as monstrous.
13. In fact, Half-Blood Prince draws a newly sympathetic Malfoy, who seems a troubled youth and whom
Moaning Myrtle has witnessed crying in bathrooms; drawn as a suicidal (ghost) teen throughout the series, Moan-
ing Myrtle—here paired with Malfoy—attests to the marginalization of troubled or suicidal youth in schools.

WORK CITED

Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Print.
Billone, Amy. ‘‘The Boy Who Lived: From Carroll’s Alice and Barrie’s Peter Pan to
Rowling’s Harry Potter.’’ Children’s Literature 32 (2004): 178–202. Print.
Bronski, Michael. ‘‘Queering Harry Potter.’’ Z Magazine (Sept. 2003): 1–5. Web. 9 Sept. 2010.
Cloud, John. ‘‘Outing Dumbledore.’’ Time 25 Oct. 2007: 1–4. Time Magazine Online.
Web. 14 Sept. 2009.
Hibbs, Thomas. ‘‘Virtue, Vice, and the Harry Potter Universe.’’ The Changing Face
of Evil in Film and Television. Ed. Martin F. Norden. New York: Rodopi,
2007. 89–100. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Killinger, John. The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Harry Potter. Macon, GA:
Mercer UP, 2009. Print.
Knutsen, Torbjørn L. ‘‘Dumbledore’s Pedagogy: Knowledge and Virtue at
Hogwarts.’’ Harry Potter and International Relations. Ed. Daniel H. Nexon
and Iver B. Neumann. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 197–212. Print.
Mills, Alice. ‘‘Harry Potter and the Terrors of the Toilet.’’ Children’s Literature in
Education 37.1 (March 2006): 1–13. Print.
Patient, Aida, and Kori Street. ‘‘Holocaust History Amongst the Hallows—
Understanding Evil in Harry Potter.’’ Harry Potter’s World Wide Influence. Ed.
Diana Patterson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 201–28. Print.
Pugh, Tison, and David Wallace. ‘‘Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the
School Story in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series.’’ Children’s Literature Associ-
ation Quarterly 31.3 (2006): 260–81. Print.
Reynolds, Susan. ‘‘Dumbledore in the Watchtower: Harry Potter as a Neo-Victorian
Narrative.’’ Harry Potter’s World Wide Influence. Ed. Diana Patterson.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 271–92. Print.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic, 2000. Print.
———. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. New York: Scholastic, 2005. Print.
Sattaur, Jennifer. ‘‘Harry Potter: A World of Fear.’’ Journal of Children’s Literature
Studies 3.1 (March 2006): 1–14. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New
York: Columbia UP, 1985. Print.
———. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Print.
Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human
Interiority, 1780–1930. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

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Tosenberger, Catherine. ‘‘Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash

Fanfiction.’’ Children’s Literature 36 (2008): 185–207. Print.
Westman, Karin E. ‘‘Perspective, Memory, and Moral Authority: The Legacy of Jane
Austen in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.’’ Children’s Literature 35 (2007): 145–65.
Print.
Willson-Metzger, Alicia. ‘‘The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore: The Ethics of Infor-
mation Sharing and Concealment in the Harry Potter Novels.’’ Harry Potter’s
World Wide Influence. Ed. Diana Patterson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars,
2009. 293–304. Print.

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 Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing
Modernity in Recent Bollywood Cinema

MEHELI SEN

Compared with western children, an Indian child is encouraged to

continue to live in a mythical, magical world for a long time. In this
world, objects, events and other persons do not have an existence of
their own, but are intimately related to the self and its mysterious moods.
Thus, objective everyday realities loom or disappear, are good or bad,
threatening or rewarding, helpful or cruel, depending on the child’s
affective state . . . . Animistic and magical thinking persists, somewhat
diluted, among many Indians well into adulthood.
—Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic
Study of Childhood and Society in India

Since the mid-1990s, following the liberalization of the Indian economy and
the prodigious expansion of the South Asian diaspora, Bollywood cinema
has come to be a ubiquitous formation in the global market, incorporating
not just cinema but an entire culture industry.1 Ashish Rajadhyaksha has per-
suasively argued that what is today understood as Bollywood includes much
more than just the filmic output of India: ‘‘Bollywood admittedly occupies a
space analogous to the film industry but might best be seen as a more diffuse
cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption
activities from websites to music cassettes, from cable to radio’’ (116).
Although hydra-headed Bollywood continues to grow and absorb myriad
creative and commercial attractions, the scholarship on Indian cinema has
the challenging task of playing catch-up.
I will approach the Bollywood conglomerate through a rarely studied
genre—horror. Here, I interrogate Bollywood’s recent romance with the hor-
ror genre especially in terms of the figuration of nuclear families, children,
and teenagers. Globally, horror has generated intense debates about

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morality—public and private, aesthetics, the politics of taste, and the effects
of violence and sensationalism. In regard to Hindi film, these debates have
been largely absent; horror is not discussed very often, either in academic
circles or in journalistic ones—a measure of its marginal, low-brow status.
Hindi cinema’s most sustained engagement with horror began in the
1970s when the rambunctious Ramsay brothers—seven siblings, each of
whom handled a distinct aspect of the production process—produced a ser-
ies of low-budget hits, including Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972), Purana
Mandir (1984), Veerana (1988), and Bandh Darwaza (1990). Bordering on
pornography in their tacky exploitation of female bodies and featuring
low-brow stars and threadbare plots, these films came to be identified with
the smuttiness of the genre in this era. In fact, the Ramsay horror film can
be understood as a genre unto itself—a hybrid iteration that combines copi-
ous quantities of sex, violence, and western motifs, with local idioms and
homegrown tales of horror and the supernatural. The divorce between hor-
ror and a certain idea of ‘‘respectability’’ thus comes to be firmly entrenched
at this time. In the hands of the Ramsay brothers, the screen became awash
with lurid fake blood and inhabited by a series of bizarrely monstrous
creatures—amorous monster women, predatory werewolves, and lustful
male and female vampires. The content was excessive and subversive in
its economy of representation as well as its address to a certain kind of spec-
tatorship; the Ramsay film’s determined rejection of bourgeois trappings and
standards of taste, I would argue, makes it a radical iteration of horror in
South Asian cinema.2 And appropriately, as Kartik Nair points out, the
Ramsay film made most of its earnings in semi-urban and rural sectors, an
indicator of its marginal—non-metropolitan, non-bourgeois—status.
After a brief hiatus in the 1990s—at least in terms of noteworthy films—
horror has staged a recent comeback within the Bollywood framework. Film-
makers like Ram Gopal Varma and Vikram Bhatt have ‘‘rescued’’ the genre,
as it were, from its low-brow habitations and circuits of dispersal. Recent hor-
ror cinema—especially the films I discuss below—is very much about the
bourgeoisie as well as made for metropolitan, bourgeois spectators. This
rehabilitation involves relatively bigger budgets and a general glossiness of
production values that the Ramsay product never realized or, one might
argue, even aspired to.3 The sanitization of the genre—its embourgeoise-
ment, if you will—has drained the genre of not only the outlandish, excessive
components but also of any subversive potential it had in the 1970s and
1980s.
In this essay, I argue that recent Bollywood horror films function as
excellent barometers for India’s post-economic liberalization anxieties. As
trade pundits laud India’s spectacular growth rates and the meteoric expan-
sion of the middle class, it is the critically neglected, obscure horror genre
that registers most powerfully the less celebratory aspects of the nation’s
determined efforts to participate as an economic and cultural force on the

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global market. Bollywood itself has come to be emblematic of a marginal

form’s obdurate and successful resistance of the Hollywood behemoth, at
least within South Asia. Horror, I argue, allows us a point of entry into the
underbelly of this much-hyped success story; the genre articulates the under-
tow of the large transformative processes brought about by globalization via
the depiction of fear, resentment, vulnerability, and disempowerment. Not
surprisingly, Hindi horror cinema has not become a globally popular genre;
nightmarish tales of the undead, dispossessed, and vengeful ghosts and spir-
its have not garnered audiences beyond the political boundaries of the
Indian subcontinent. Having said that, however, some of these films have
been commercial successes nationally. Partially, these box-office returns
are the result of relatively modest production budgets, but I would argue
that, in fact, these horror films inscribe into their plots a backlash against
the success story described above. The sheer number of recent horror films
and the regularity with which they are made resonates with all that is left by
the wayside—un-attended to—in the story of globalization.
But Bollywood’s romance with horror must be contextualized within the
genre’s global dispersal in recent years: from the spectacular success of
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) which has spawned a series of sequels and
Hollywood remakes to Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on franchise, horror films from
Asia trumped all other contributions to the genre over the last decade or so.
Startlingly, and for my purposes, crucially, children, pre-teens, and teenagers
occupy the narrative and affective core of recent Asian horror cinema.4
Bollywood has come to respond to this phenomenal global success not only
by often mimicking the styles and technologies of these films, but also by
incorporating children and young adults into its own narratives of terror
and the supernatural.
For Hollywood, the trend started in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s with
films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976), The
Omen (1976), Amityville Horror (1979), and The Shining (1980), all of which
focus on terrifying tots or monstrous adolescents. Slasher films of the 1980s
and beyond continued to feature imperiled teens and young adults. Scholars
such as Vivian Sobchak and Lucy Fischer have persuasively argued that these
films articulate the anxieties that beset post-Vietnam and post-Women’s
Movement America, resonating with the shifting roles of women and the
changing structure of families in U.S. culture. Are similar fears now plaguing
Asian cinemas? Most scholars of recent Japanese cinema, such as Jay McRoy
and Lindsey Nelson, seem to think so and read the predominance of children
in films like Ringu, Dark Water (2002), and Ju-on (2002), among many
others, to the shifting economic and social landscape in Japan and its impact
on gender roles and the institution of the family. Interestingly, most of
the Japanese texts feature fractured families and single parents, an indica-
tion of the foundational upheavals that have transformed both social and
cinematic terrains.

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I argue that recent Hindi horror films resonate with not only the current
obsession with children in East and South East Asian films but also Holly-
wood’s 1970s concerns with families under siege. However, as Ashis Nandy
has pointed out, children and childhood do not harness the same meanings
in every culture: ‘‘Childhood is culturally defined and created. . . . There are
as many childhoods as there are families and cultures, and the consciousness
of childhood is as much a cultural datum as patterns of child-rearing and the
social role of the child’’ (56). Thus, having noted Bollywood’s indebtedness
to global cinemas, it is important to underscore the fact that a range of mean-
ings gather around children and childhood that are specific to the Indian
sub-continent, both within cinema and without.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: HAUNTED

CHILDREN, HAUNTED FAMILIES

Children in the subcontinent bear markers of caste and community in their

names.5 For the massive number of children who live amidst poverty in
the subcontinent, public discourses echo welfare policies undertaken by
the state, involving basic health, care-giving, and education. Although infant
mortality rates have decreased dramatically in recent decades, they are
nowhere near the standards demanded by organizations such as UNICEF
(Infant Mortality Rate). In India, child labor laws are openly flouted, and a
large number of these children also participate in unorganized sectors such
as domestic labor and in hotels, spas, small-scale restaurants, tea-shops,
and so on (Gathia, Pandey). Children of middle and affluent classes are bur-
dened in a different sense: as India pursues its global economic policies
aggressively, children come to be seen as baton bearers for the nation’s shin-
ing future. This fervent ambition translates into brutal school curriculums and
sadistically demanding institutions of higher education. Academic expecta-
tions from children of the middle classes are so excessive that almost every
year thousands of children commit suicide under parental and social press-
ure for scholastic excellence (‘‘Growing Trend’’).
Hindi popular cinema, for the most part, has remained indifferent to
these predicaments.6 Children feature as symbols of happy families as well
as unhappy, incomplete, dismembered ones.7 Siblings get separated by cruel
circumstances in childhood and are united miraculously as adults. Scores of
films take refuge in the melodramatic modality of coincidence in order to
enable this re-union at the dénouement. Most often, children fall victims to
corrupt villains and cruel gangsters who bring them up as criminals like
themselves—the worst blow to befall any upright, virtuous family within
Hindi cinema’s moral economy. However, apart from the horror genre,
Bollywood has rarely represented children as malevolent forces; thus, the
representational idiom I am engaging with here is something of a novelty.

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Hindi film’s primary generic modality is melodrama; thus, families and

familial relations form the narrative and ideological crux of this cinema. As
noted by film theorists such as Thomas Elsaesser and Christine Gledhill,
the melodramatic mode understands, inscribes, and inflects all large
socio-political and economic conflicts into the realm of the familial. Indeed,
this is perhaps the most important ideological task performed by the melo-
dramatic mode—a relentless translation of all questions into the language
of the personal. The relationship between the horror genre and its familial
allegiances has also been theorized: Robin Wood’s now classic essay ‘‘An
Introduction to the American Horror Film’’ identifies the modern family as
horror’s ‘‘true milieu.’’ Given Bollywood’s textual hybridity, the horror film
remains unconcerned with the incursion of the melodramatic mode; in fact,
melodrama’s favorite stomping ground—the family—becomes, almost
exclusively, the site for the eruption and elaboration of the horrific. The three
films I analyze at length here, Vaastu Shastra (2004), Phoonk (2008), and
Gauri (2007), were all made after the liberalization of the Indian economy
in the early 1990s. As such, all of these texts feature the modern nuclear fam-
ily unit and the upper-middle class consumer ethos that liberalization not
only brought into being but also made visible and viable in the last two dec-
ades.8 This is the class that is at the vanguard of the ‘‘progress’’ that is bandied
about endlessly in the global media vis-à-vis India’s coming of age as an
emergent powerhouse in the global arena. The films under discussion offer
intermittent glimpses into the fissures that rupture—at least sporadically—the
deceptive plenitude of that story.
All three films under discussion here can be grouped under the rubric of
‘‘multiplex cinema,’’ films made for affluent audiences and smaller theatres
that have mushroomed across cities in India in recent years.9 Apart from
offering the spectator an immersion in variegated spaces of consumption
and entertainment—many of these theatres are housed within swanky,
up-market shopping malls—the films in question also target the spectators
as metropolitan consumers.10 In other words, a new kind of cinema is being
crafted to appeal to a new kind of spectator—the upwardly mobile, confi-
dently bourgeois subject described above. Multiplex films, in popular par-
lance, typically feature tight scripts, shorter durations, and often abjure
song and dance sequences that Hindi films have traditionally included. When
songs are present—as is the case with Gauri—they are more snugly inte-
grated into narrative situations, rather than functioning as spectacular inter-
ruptions.11 Themes, too, have come to be more varied and ‘‘off-beat,’’ as
the middle-class audience is understood to have become savvier in its cine-
matic tastes. The recent visibility of horror, I would argue, should be situated
within this new context of industry-audience relations and the perceived
desire for novelty.
Vaastu, Phoonk, and Gauri all fulfill the criteria for multiplex films,
especially because all of them, at least at first glance, appear to affirm a

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determinedly modern, metropolitan ethos. However, in the following dis-

cussion, I argue that all three films, in distinct ways, elaborate a dismantling
of what might be understood as the multiplex dispensation—discourses that
attend to modern subjectivities and formations in a globalized world. The fig-
ure of the child enables this dissolution of modernity in each of the three
films discussed below. The children in question are not ‘‘evil’’ in a traditional
sense; however, the films situate pernicious energies within children, rather
instrumentally, in order to mount critiques of the larger ideological terrains
they inhabit.

VAASTU SHASTRA: I MISSED YOU, MOMMY!

Vaastu Shastra was not a commercial success in India, which is hardly

surprising as this was Saurabh Narang’s first directorial venture; moreover,
the film does not boast any of the A-list stars considered necessary for boost-
ing box-office earnings. The fact that it was clearly marketed as a horror film
may not have helped matters either, because the audience for this sort of cin-
ema was unevenly emerging at the time. Vaastu Shastra features an urban
nuclear family: Dr. Jhilmil Rao and her husband, Viraag, a professional writer,
purchase a sprawling bungalow away from the city of Pune in order to
escape the chaos and vicissitudes of metropolitan existence. Soon after they
move into their new home with Jhil’s teenage sister, Radz, the couple’s little
son, Rohan, starts displaying strange behavior and claiming to have invisible
friends, two in particular, whom he refers to as Manish and Jyoti. Meanwhile,
a madman pursues Jhil everyday and attempts to tell her something about her
new home, episodes that make her understandably nervous. The negative
energies that plague the new home seem connected to a dead banyan tree
in the yard, to which Rohan develops an unhealthy attachment. Since Viraag,
the child’s primary caregiver, is unable to juggle childcare duties with his
writing, the family employs a maid, Rukma, to keep Rohan company. Rohan,
however, dislikes Rukma and accuses her of being a thief; in turn, Rukma
traumatizes the child and threatens to kill him. Soon after, Rukma is mysteri-
ously killed in what appears to be a hit-and-run incident, and the police con-
firm Rohan’s version of the woman’s dishonesty. Initially amused by the
child’s imaginative potential, the parents get anxious when Rohan’s visions
of a ‘‘bad man’’ and some other angry spirits living in their home become
more strident. Since none of the adults are able to see the ghosts yet, Rohan
is diagnosed with a psychological disorder accompanied by visual and aural
hallucinations. However, once Radz is brutally and inexplicably murdered,
the madman is finally able to communicate to Jhil the truth of the evil tree
that kills everyone who inhabits its home, but not in time to save Radz
and Viraag, who fall victim to these evil forces as well. After a protracted
struggle with the malevolent undead that now includes both Viraag and

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Radz, the tree is destroyed, and Jhil is able to save her son. The evil force,
however, continues to live within the child.
Vaastu expends considerable time and narrative energy establishing the
modern worldviews of the couple and their family. Although they move
away from the city, the couple brings their modern metropolitan ideologies
to the wilderness. The family’s non-traditional living arrangements are under-
scored by the presence of Radz, Jhil’s sister, who is included in the family unit
and the fact that Jhil is the professional breadwinner while Viraag stays at
home writing and serving as the primary caregiver to Rohan. Soon after
the family moves into the new home, spectators witness the unorthodox
domestic arrangements when Jhil and Radz leave for the hospital and college
respectively, while Viraag is left at home to cook, clean, and look after the
child. We are expected to note the liberal and liberated politics of the family
via these expository sequences.
I argue that in Vaastu, the child Rohan is used strategically in order to
mount a stringent critique of the discourses of neo-liberal modernity that
the couple embodies, for the film makes apparent Viraag’s inability to pro-
vide the child with the company he clearly craves. In a key sequence, Rohan
unsuccessfully tries to draw Viraag’s attention to his ball that mysteriously
gets suspended in mid-air. The mise-en-scene, particularly the blocking of
actors, alerts the spectator to Rohan’s plight, since for much of the scene
he remains in the foreground trying to make sense of the haunted ball while
Viraag is placed in the deep background, with his back facing his son and the
audience. In other words, the placement of actors in space demonstrates
Viraag’s inattention, as his child encounters supernatural forces in plain sight.
After being gently shepherded away by his father, Rohan ventures into the
shed in their backyard where he meets his new ‘‘friends’’ (presumably for
the first time). While Viraag seems oblivious to his son’s loneliness, Jhil’s guilt
over abandoning her child for her profession is immediately apparent—an
early indication of the film’s rhetorical allegiances—as she frantically
searches for Rohan as soon as she comes home from work and eventually
locates him in the ramshackle shed. It is instructive to note the length of time
the adults in the film spend hunting for an elusive Rohan; the implication is
that the child would not be missing in the first place, if properly looked after.
Rohan’s behavior becomes increasingly more bizarre as he insists on the
real-ness of his new friends. The very next day, Viraag finds him gone once
again and finally sees him talking to his invisible friends, Manish and Jyoti,
under the banyan tree that is the repository of malefic forces in the film.
Initially amused by Rohan’s imaginative explorations, his parents become
understandably alarmed when they find him missing from his bed at night
and perched on top of the banyan tree, after yet another protracted panicky
search. As Rohan continues to try to convince his parents unsuccessfully of
the existence of his new friends, Jhil and Viraag speculate that the child is
perhaps not able to handle the new space and his new environs.

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Rohan is the narrative fulcrum of Vaastu, and while the child does not
embody evil on his own, the spiteful supernatural forces in the film use him
as a conduit for terror. The film deploys a cornucopia of stylistic techniques
to alert viewers to the evil that resides in the new home.12 One of the most
effective devices used are crane shots that simulate the point-of-view of the
dead=dreadful tree; the audience is optically aligned with the tree during
these ‘‘looks’’ at the hapless abode, via birds-eye-view shots that dwarf the
home and render it vulnerable. The cinematography, more generally, is
absolutely crucial in generating terror in Vaastu: a restless, mobile camera
constantly ‘‘stalks’’ the characters, while weird, canted frames render spaces
and people out of kilter. The sound track combines ominous music with a
plethora of disturbing noises, including, inexplicably, the loud buzzing of
insects and high-pitched sounds of children giggling. All of these sonic com-
ponents coalesce to create the disturbing aural universe of the film, a perfect
foil for the unsettling visuals.
It is the absence of family members—extended family members—that
propels the family into crisis; the film implies, I would argue, that it is the
non-traditional familial situation to which Rohan falls victim. Vaastu subtly cri-
ticizes not only Viraag’s care-giving skills but also Jhil’s professional commit-
ments which keep her away from home and child. It comes to be a critique
of modernity—of the modern nuclear family, of the modern companionate
couple, modern professional femininity, and even modern parenting. Again,
I would argue that Rohan—and by extension the rest of the family—is haunted
by big empty spaces; there is so much space between characters in their new
home that Manish, Jyoti, and the other undead are easily able to inhabit it. The
uncanny, the unhomely, very easily erupts into domestic space that is left
empty and unattended. It is the lack of ‘‘real’’ people that forces Rohan to
befriend the spectral children; the film wants us to believe that his far-too-
modern parents create the situation that imperils him.
The crisis reaches a fever pitch when Jhil and Viraag employ Rukma,
an ersatz parental figure to look after Rohan and provide him companion-
ship. Again, we are made aware of the lack of genuine familial care.
Rukma’s ‘‘care’’ for Rohan turns out to be not just inadequate but, in fact,
pernicious. In a disturbing take on class and domestic labor, Rukma is por-
trayed as a deceitful thief and a verbally and physically abusive person who
threatens to throw Rohan under a speeding truck. When Rohan complains
to his parents about Rukma having pinched items from their home, they—
in typical, liberal employer fashion—not only dismiss his tale, but also
wonder if the child’s disturbed psyche demands psychiatric intervention.
Vaastu’s ideological propensities congeal around this event. Meanwhile
Manish, Jyoti, and other ghostly inhabitants murder Rukma, and Rohan’s
version of events is vindicated once the police come to report her death
and return the stolen items. The police inspector also reports that a truck
driver had witnessed Rukma threatening to toss Rohan under its wheels,

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a horrible revelation that sends Jhil into paroxysms of remorse for having
doubted her son.
The unearthly undead grow increasingly more assertive after Rukma’s
death; Rohan is able to see not only the dead children but also the malefic
adult ghosts who walk about freely through the home. Until this point in
the film, we had only seen the ghostly inhabitants fleetingly, but now they
appear to us as solid, corporeal beings that wander about unafraid and even
gaze silently at the family members as they sleep. Physically, they look more
or less human, except for their unusual pallor and darkly shadowed eyes.13
In Rukma’s absence, the spaces between the other characters seem to grow
and expand, filling up with the angry undead. Rohan clearly articulates this
to Radz, telling her that Manish and Jyoti are no longer his friends because
the ghosts are now very angry with the family. The cause of their anger,
however, remains unclear.
The climax of the film involves Radz’s steamy tryst with her boyfriend,
Murli, which eventually leads to her brutal death. Echoing countless
American slasher films, Radz seems to be punished for her promiscuity,
but we do not see exactly how she is killed. After Murli disappears in the
middle of their sexual encounter, Radz walks downstairs to look for him in
what she perceives to be a game of erotic hide-and-seek. Something horrific
accosts her soon after, but her terrified look off-screen is all we are privy to.
An abrupt, disjointed cut transitions us into the next sequence, as Jhil, Viraag,
and Rohan return home after an evening out. Jhil—to her abject horror—
discovers Murli’s mutilated corpse on Radz’s bed and her sister’s body strung
up on the banyan tree. On the final day, a distraught Jhil leaves Rohan at
home with Viraag, creating the necessary conditions for the climactic series
of attacks. She will become the target of ghostly assault upon her return.
The madman who had been uttering garbled warnings from the very
beginning manages to draw Jhil’s attention at her hospital on this day, but
his explanation of the haunted home and murderous tree and their wicked
inhabitants remains as incomplete and incoherent as Rohan’s understanding
of the ghosts’ angry energy. I would argue that this incoherence at the very
heart of Vaastu lays bare its political propensities—we never quite find out
what transpired in the site of the home. Our knowledge of past events and
past violence—arguably crucial to our understanding of any horror film that
invokes past events—remain vague intimations and inchoate ramblings from
a madman and a terrified child. In other words, the foundational reason for
the hauntings remains unarticulated, decidedly unclear, indeed, incompre-
hensible. Likewise, the attack on Viraag is implied by his horrified look at
something off-screen, but like Radz’s death, the specifics of the violence
remain unseen by spectators. I would argue that it is this silence that enables
us to unravel the specters that plague the family; it is in resonance with this
informational vacuum that Viraag’s final attack on Jhil comes to be meaning-
ful. When Jhil rushes back to the house, terrified for her husband and child,

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she is finally confronted by the monumental canker that has been slowly but
surely eating away at her home—a crowd of silent, angry undead including
Rukma, Radz, and, worse, her now (un)dead husband, Viraag. Finally the
empty spaces of the home are full of bodies and energies that it has seemed
to have lacked from the beginning.
Viraag’s attack on Jhil is immediate, horrific, and inexplicable. He throt-
tles her repeatedly and flings her across the room in a show of immense
strength and profound rage. The audience does not echo Jhil’s astonishment
at this instance because we realize that the film has come full circle—the
dénouement is a decisive blow to the discourses of modernity that Jhil has
so confidently inhabited so far. Viraag’s feelings of inadequacy and impo-
tence finally boil over—he is not, after all, as comfortable assuming the fem-
inizing role of homemaker=caregiver as he had deluded himself into
believing. The non-traditional family unit, the lack of patriarchal=feudal
supervision, the unorthodox organization of professional and domestic
duties, finally prove too much for Viraag. He is emasculated, rendered obsol-
ete in this much too modern household.
Vaastu finally makes its ideological allegiances obvious: it is a caution-
ary tale about being or becoming modern. Wealth, education, and bourgeois
discourses of consumption and coupledom can be endorsed only up to a
point: when traditional gender roles are subverted, the family taps into a
fountainhead of rage that requires no naming or explanation. At the closure,
Jhil—the confident, articulate professional woman—is rendered completely
silent and on the verge of psychological implosion. She finally realizes the
sheer fragility of her modern existence and the extent of her self-deception.
It is moreover no accident that Rohan—the male heir—remains the bearer of
the last look and the last laugh. The last look, which Rohan casts over Jhil’s
shoulder as she holds him, situates the source of evil within Rohan via his
now hypnotically gleaming eyes. Somehow, unseen by us, the evil energy
has been transferred to the child.14 The malevolent force that has destroyed
his family lives on in him, a warning of things to come.

PHOONK: THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF RATIONALISTS

Phoonk was a significant box-office success India, alerting us to the horror

genre’s newfound popularity in the subcontinent. This success was undoubt-
edly buttressed by director Ram Gopal Varma’s reputation as a horror auteur,
who has delivered remarkable horror films in the past, such as Raat (1992),
Bhoot (2003), and Darna Mana Hai (2006). Phoonk is both similar to and dis-
tinct from Vaastu in that here, the disassembling of modernity is channeled
through the re-education of a rational technocratic ethos. Phoonk revolves
around Rajiv, Arati, and their daughter, Raksha, who becomes the victim of
black magic unleashed by Madhu, Rajiv’s female business associate, who is

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fired for embezzlement early in the film. Madhu is accompanied by her hus-
band, Anshuman, on her quest for revenge. The family also includes their
young son, Rohan, Rajiv’s mother, Amma, and a bevy of help. Rajeev works
on a construction site, and part of the film’s action also takes place in this
non-domestic space peopled by urban laborers. It is here that a rock bearing
the features of Lord Ganesha, the god of luck and prosperity, appears, and
the laborers demand a shrine for it. Rajiv, however, refuses to pander to what
he considers an irrational request until the very end. Meanwhile, psychiatrist
Seema Walke diagnoses Raksha’s condition—seemingly uncontrollable fits—
as the psychological malaise Dissociative Personality Disorder and orders a
series of tests. As Raksha’s affliction worsens and doctors and medical science
remain largely ineffectual, Rajiv capitulates and approaches a blind seer,
Manja, for help. Manja apprehends the culprit, removes the curse, and kills
Madhu, thereby ensuring a happy ending. Initially unable or unwilling to
accept the ‘‘superstitious’’ and fantastic notion of black magic, Rajiv finally
comes to accept the limits of his knowledge as a rational, modern subject.
In this film, the figure of the child is deployed in order to stage a process
of ‘‘re-enchantment’’ for its male protagonist, Rajiv. Raksha, the child who
unwittingly becomes the victim of adult machinations, is not evil per se.
However, as the embodiment and conduit of Madhu’s malevolent, enraged
curse, she functions as the cause for the instability and terror experienced
by the family.
The film’s affective universe is divided between the rational and the
irrational along strictly gendered lines: Rajiv is the bearer of an absolute,
obdurate, technocratic rationality, accompanied by the doctors. On the other
side—the realm of the credulous, the imaginative, the irrational, the hysteric
and, crucially, the childlike—are the women, the children, and the witch
doctors: Amma, Arati, Madhu, Manja, and, of course, Raksha who becomes
a victim of demonic possession. The laborers at the construction site belong
to the second group, infantilized by their obstinate faith in the deity of
Ganesha, as I explain below. Phoonk carefully arranges the principal char-
acters on either side of the divide before bringing them into conflict.15
The fact that Madhu chooses Raksha as the instrument of her revenge
against Rajiv is not accidental; she is clearly delineated as Rajiv’s favorite off-
spring. The connections between Madhu and the child are established early
on—as Raksha’s rudeness toward the woman is returned by Madhu’s appar-
ent affection.16 Rajiv, too, understands Madhu’s strangeness, but he views it
as a result of her ‘‘childishness,’’ evidenced by her high-pitched giggle and
generally odd behavior. Madhu singles Raksha out as the object of her vin-
dictive rage not simply because she is Rajiv’s favorite but also, I would argue,
because she recognizes in the little girl her own mirror image. Madhu seeks
revenge for the humiliation she undergoes at the hands of Rajiv after he dis-
covers the couples’ embezzlement; however, the extent of her rage comes to
be incomprehensible in the light of the fact that Rajiv’s feelings of betrayal are

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entirely justified. In other words, Madhu’s desire for revenge remains mean-
ingful only if we engage with her as a willful, irrational, hysterical, malevol-
ent child—and the film underscores these qualities repeatedly.17 Rajiv’s
professional decision to fire Anshuman and Madhu is also, of course,
personal—we learn, early on, that the trio not only collaborate professionally
but have been close friends. In the light of their personal relationship,
Madhu’s attack on Rajiv’s life via his favorite child makes sense. In this sense,
the home and the construction site—the private and the public spaces—
come to be co-extensive, both equally vulnerable to Madhu’s monumental
wrath.
Phoonk is not only about adults and children, the rational and the
irrational, but also about transforming the former into the latter—the narra-
tive is one of re-educating Rajiv via his induction into the realm of the
irrational. For the purposes of my argument here, Phoonk is foundationally
a text of re-enchantment and, if you will, one of infantilization—of transform-
ing adult disbelief into childlike faith. Rajiv’s rational skepticism is harnessed
not only to masculinity, but also to his identity as a technocrat, a class that the
economic liberalization of India has made immensely vocal. Secure in his
faith in the realm of reason, Rajiv initially gently refuses and later angrily
dismisses the workers’ request for a shrine on the construction site. In fact,
he refuses to comply with this simple demand on at least three different
occasions, despite entreaties from friends, colleagues, and even Arati. The
construction site—Rajiv’s favorite terrain for the exercise of his faith in
reason—thus remains unsanctified.
Interestingly, the film does not rest on this evidence: Phoonk continues
to expend considerable narrative energy in buttressing Ravi’s pigheaded,
intractable—almost irredeemably masculinist—rationality. When cursed
fetish objects—animal bones, lemons, vermilion, etc.—are found in the yard,
Rajiv ignores the entire family’s requests and tosses them out with the trash.
Predictably, he turns a deaf ear to all of Amma’s warnings and Arati’s con-
cerns regarding the possibility of black magic afflicting their home. Preceding
this material evidence of things going awry, Raksha mysteriously disappears
from home and is finally located in the vicinity of a park seemingly unaware
of her surroundings. Arati, who locates her, is relieved to note that the child
seems physically unharmed; however, she is puzzled at her daughter’s
inability to explain how she arrived at that location. Also disquieting is
Raksha’s interest in a crow; insistent shot reverse shot editing shows her
apparently in deep communion with the bird. Crows function as bearers of
evil in Phoonk; each time Raksha is attacked or possessed by the evil spirit,
she is shown exchanging looks with a crow, usually perched on a tree in the
vicinity.
Following the disappearance, Raksha complains of hearing strange
noises and also claims that someone has cut off some of her hair, complaints
that are brushed aside by Rajiv. Raksha’s first major ‘‘episode’’ occurs when

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she is at school. Soon after she enters the school, the steadycam performs the
role of the predatory spirit in pursuit, circling and following Raksha into the
building. Once again, just before she enters her classroom—where she
eventually will laugh maniacally, frightening her teacher and classmates
before passing out—she exchanges a series of glances with a crow. In this
sequence, close-ups of the crow alternate with extreme close-ups of Raksha’s
chillingly expressionless face and eyes. In the series of these attacks that fol-
low the initial episode, she speaks in a guttural, manly voice and becomes
violent. The violence is primarily directed at adults who try to attend to
her, especially at a distraught Rajiv. The child also acquires enormous physi-
cal strength during the fits of possession and is able to shove adults away
from her bedside, a fact that astonishes the family doctor. In one particularly
terrifying instance, Raksha recites nursery rhymes in this alien voice, in a
seemingly catatonic state. Amidst all of these disturbances, a crow maintains
a stubborn vigil outside Raksha’s bedroom window, casting a watchful eye
on proceedings; the soundtrack also incorporates the cawing of the birds.
Once again Amma tries to intervene, only to be lectured about her super-
stitious television programs. Rajiv’s response to the crisis is to summon
doctors and rush Raksha to the hospital.
The entry of psychiatrist Seema Walke is important, not only because
she diagnoses Raksha with Dissociative Personality Disorder—medicalese
that Rajiv gratefully hangs his rationality on—but also because the film stages
one of the most crucial battles between the realm of the scientific and the ter-
rain of faith via a conversation between the doctor and Amma. Desperate to
help the suffering child, the elderly woman eventually brings her request to
Seema. The latter’s response is more generous than Rajiv’s—she concedes
that what plagues Raksha can indeed be called a ghost or an evil spirit but
remains adamant about the psychological nature of the problem. Crucially,
Seema finally blames Amma’s homespun wisdom—i.e., her superstitious
nature—and her ‘‘fantastic stories’’ of ghosts and demons for Raksha’s ‘‘deep
psychological trauma’’; according to her medical expertise, it is the effect of
being exposed to these, in conjunction with objects in the yard, that push the
child into a state of fear and distress.
Meanwhile, Amma summons a Shaman to exorcize the evil spirit
that she believes is haunting their home and her grandchild. Predictably,
when Rajiv discovers the shaman performing the rites of purification, he
flies into a rage and evicts the mystic from the house. Following this alter-
cation, Raksha’s situation worsens—she actually begins to levitate close to
the ceiling in absolute defiance of the rules of gravity. As Raksha shrieks
and flails about uncontrollably, the terrified parents rush her back to the
hospital. The medical personnel promptly restrain the child and begin their
scientific ministrations. It is this final attack and a confrontation with the
truly incredible that finally bring about Rajiv’s transformation. Raksha’s
immense suffering forces him to capitulate to the suggestion of his friend

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and self-proclaimed religious opportunist, Vinay, that they find an ‘‘alterna-

tive solution.’’
Vinay takes Rajiv to Manja, a blind mystic who immediately seems to
have knowledge of Rajiv’s plight. It is Manja’s wisdom that brings about
the foundational changes in Rajiv’s belief system. Unable to scoff at Manja’s
methods of investigation—which involve divination with iron spikes—he
witnesses, instead, the mystic’s superior powers. Manja bluntly tells Rajiv that
his daughter will die unless the couple casting the black spells is stopped
immediately. On the way to Anshuman and Madhu’s, Rajiv gives the order
for the Ganesha shrine to be built on the construction site—the final evi-
dence of Manja’s transformative powers. What follows is the climactic strug-
gle between good and evil—polarities that are now both firmly grounded in
the realm of the irrational. Madhu is dismembered and destroyed, as are her
evil designs on Raksha. Ironically, when Rajiv embraces his now healed
daughter, Arati is convinced that it is the doctors and medical science that
have saved the child’s life. This ironic reversal of roles between believers
and skeptics closes Phoonk.
Phoonk remains a typical melodramatic conflict between opposing
forces; the film neatly arranges the rational and irrational on either side of its
central battle between good and evil. What makes the film especially interest-
ing, as mentioned above, is that the final apocalyptic clash of bipolar ideolo-
gies are aligned to the realm of the modern, rational, scientific on the one
end and the supernatural, the non-rational, and the child-like on the other.
When Rajiv sheds his skepticism, he also sheds his rationality and, in a sense,
his masculine obduracy; he enters the realm of the women and the children,
the realm of the irrational and the magical. Phoonk gives us a glimpse of the
re-enchantment that not only saves Rajiv’s family but also by extension,
redeems his soul. Phoonk allows for the voices of the marginalized to be heard
above the din of a ruthlessly commonsensical technocratic rationality that has
accompanied India’s love-story with globalization; Manja’s victory is, above all,
an affirmation of an ‘‘unofficial’’ spiritual domain, one that is not aligned to any
dominant religious formation in the subcontinent. Rajiv’s final capitulation is
the film’s endorsement of these universes—of faith, spiritualism, child-like
belief, and magic—that have fallen by the wayside in recent decades.

GAURI: THE REVENGE OF THE FETUS

Gauri, like Vaastu, was not a commercial success and for similar reasons.
Director Aku Akbar is primarily a Malayalam-language filmmaker, and Gauri
was his first foray into the Hindi-language industry. The lack of stars and its
relatively low budget ensured that the film went largely unnoticed by main-
stream audiences. However, reviewers commented on the film’s innovative
visual effects as well as its ‘‘socially relevant message.’’18

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When married couple Sudeep and Roshni decide to go on vacation, their

young daughter, Shivani, insists that the family return to their old home in the
wilds of Neelgiri. Initially resistant, the parents eventually capitulate, and the
family travels back to the place where Sudeep and Roshni had spent the early
years of their marriage. Soon after returning to this old home, the couple rea-
lizes that some terrifying force is haunting their house and also Shivani. This
ghost turns out to be Gauri, the spirit of a female fetus they had aborted early
on in their marriage. Gauri, now inhabiting Shivani’s body, delivers a dreadful
ultimatum: she declares that after three days of subjecting the couple to acute
terror and suffering, she will kill Shivani to avenge the termination of her own
life. Sudeep and Roshni plead with Gauri but to no avail. However, the ghost
frees Shivani at the end of the stipulated period once she realizes that the par-
ents are genuinely regretful of her ‘‘murder.’’ The family in turn embraces
Gauri as a spirit-daughter to assuage her pain and their guilt.
Gauri is a frightening film in many respects—not the least of which is an
unrelenting sentimentalization of the hugely important issue of reproductive
rights which so many women are still struggling for. Interestingly, the film
makes no distinction between the appearances of Gauri and Shivani which
would enable us as well as the parents to tell them apart; we encounter Gauri
only in Shivani’s body, rendering the victimized child monstrous as well. I
read Gauri as an especially troubling text, which deftly blurs the lines
between the selective abortion of female fetuses with the larger issue of
reproductive rights and freedoms; in doing so, the film disavows the very
notions of modern coupledom and conjugality by prohibiting them from
deciding if and when to have a child.
The issue of abortion is a hugely contested one in India, with implica-
tions that are considerably different from controversies in the West. Given
the bugbear of population explosion in the subcontinent, the right to abor-
tion is a given; it is legally available to all citizens as the state’s intervention
into population control. However, this ‘‘progressive’’ right continues to be
widely deployed all over the country for the selective abortion of female
fetuses after sex determination tests, thus raising vexed issues for feminist
activists who support the right of women to keep control over their bodies
but simultaneously oppose the termination of female fetuses on ethical
grounds (Menon). While Gauri does not invoke the public or policy debates
surrounding abortion, I would argue that the specter of female feticide does
haunt the margins of the text; the film simply relocates this rhetoric within the
private ambit of the family. In other words, the fact that the aborted fetus is
female remains consequential in the larger discourses with which the film
resonates.19
Sudeep, Roshni, and Shivani present a perfect picture of the modern,
affluent nuclear family in the opening sequences of Gauri. The couple is also
liberal in parenting techniques, as witnessed in their indulgence of Shivani’s
every wish and the relative absence of disciplining measures. It is Shivani

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who insists that they vacation in the family’s old home, instead of Mauritius,
the more suitable holiday destination that Roshni suggests. The child—
presumably already possessed by the spirit of Gauri—brings the couple
back to the scene of the crime, where Gauri had been conceived and the
couple had made the decision to terminate the pregnancy. Once Sudeep
and Roshni realize that Gauri has returned to exact revenge—Shivani gives
them details of the abortion that she cannot possibly know—the film takes
an ominous turn.
Via flashbacks, we learn of the early days of their marriage and of
Roshni’s desire to name their future child Gauri—a mythic name for the
goddess Durga or Shakti, the symbol of female power within the Hindu
pantheon.20 We also learn that while Sudeep had been firm in his opinion
about terminating the pregnancy (he felt unprepared to be a parent at the
particular stage in life and career), Roshni vacillated widely in her decision
about the pregnancy, and it had caused her considerable distress. Finally,
however, she relented to Sudeep’s wish, and the couple moved on with their
lives. It was Sudeep’s elderly father (unnamed) who struck a crucial note of
dissonance in the midst of all this: once informed of the decision, he deliv-
ered a lengthy diatribe against the present generation’s ‘‘selfishness and irres-
ponsibility’’ and shunned the couple thereafter. His speech included, among
other quasi-religious discourses, a description of the ‘‘magical moment of
conception when a life miraculously takes birth in the womb,’’ which echoes
exactly the rhetoric of right-wing, conservative, pro-life groups everywhere.
Once Sudeep and Roshni discover the horrific nature of their predica-
ment, Gauri delivers her ultimatum to the hapless parents via Shivani: just
as she had awaited in dread the moment of her death in the womb, she will
now terrorize the couple for three days after which she will kill Shivani as
retribution for her own ‘‘murder.’’ The terrified couple initially tries to escape
with their child and then pleads in desperation, but to no avail. Gauri glee-
fully executes a series of attacks on the terrified, cowering parents, which
range from spectral knives thrown at Roshni to an unbearable medley of
weeping infants who keep the couple awake at night.
Gauri is essentially a neo-traditionalist, pro-life text that disregards the
entire discourse of free will and individual rights. It does so particularly effec-
tively by sentimentalizing the trope of home. As mentioned above, the
demonic fetus not only brings the parents back home but also brings home
to them the implications of their decision to undergo the abortion. In the pro-
cess of attributing blame and culpability, the very topos of their house comes
to be haunted and terrifying, since Gauri stubbornly claims it as her own
home and continues to assert that the family belongs there. Beyond this hos-
tile takeover of domestic space, Gauri also relentlessly lectures the parents on
the womb as a metaphoric home: it is the womb in which a ‘‘baby’’ is sup-
posed to feel most secure and loved, and yet she was brutally murdered in
the very space of supposed sanctuary. We read Roshni’s pregnant body

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retrospectively as colonized terrain in a sense, while Gauri’s sermons

simultaneously imbue the fetus with vindictive consciousness.
On the final night of their three-day period of terror, the film takes us
into a virtuoso display of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) to drive home
the monumental nature of Gauri’s wrath: luminous, ghostly fetuses descend
from the night sky and literally besiege Sudeep and Roshni’s home. Another
horrific scene follows when glass shards rain on the unprotected Shivani, and
the helpless parents cower in abject terror.21 This attack presumably
re-creates Gauri’s experience of the termination of her life with sharp instru-
ments. Thus, the latter half of the film is a long-drawn phase of epiphany for
the couple, as they are driven to paroxysms of guilt and suffering and finally
to the dreadful realization that their only child will be murdered by vengeful
the ghost-fetus, Gauri. Gauri finally relinquishes her rage but not until she
extracts a crucial promise from her ‘‘parents’’ that she will find solace in their
home and family whenever she feels alone, insecure or threatened. The final
images show a vastly chastened Roshni making room on their bed for the
spectral form of Gauri, now rendered as luminous orbs of light, and finally
lavishing on her the love that the film tries to convince us she deserves.
Needless to say, as the ageist counterpart to Gauri’s rhetoric, Sudeep’s
father returns to the scene in a key moment in the latter half of the film.
As the unheeded patriarch whose homespun wisdom was spurned by the
much too modern couple, the dénouement is as much his vindication as it
is Gauri’s. The fetus=ghost tells him that she has missed him, and he holds
her in his arms in affection and regret for the life lost; clearly, for him, Gauri
is not simply a vindictive ghost but a child who could=should have been. The
obscenity of the moment when grandpa and Gauri embrace in profound
communion is unmistakable: the unborn fetus and the feudal patriarch
reserve the right to pass judgment on the irrelevance of reproductive rights
and, by extension, comment on the ethics of companionate coupledom,
conjugality, and procreation.
Gauri is a horrifying text in many ways, not least because it conflates the
issue of abortion with the selective termination of female fetuses, which con-
tinues to plague a rapidly globalizing India. In referring to Gauri as ‘‘she,’’ my
analysis, too, risks bestowing personhood=gender on the fetus; in embody-
ing the fetus as a little girl, the film manages this canny sleight of hand
whereby we can no longer refer Gauri as ‘‘it.’’ Gauri systematically and
horrifically dismantles the very notion of the modern couple in allowing
not only the feudal patriarch—Sudeep’s father—but also the unborn zygote
to articulate their opinions on the matter of reproductive rights and planning
parenthood. Finally, it affirms their rhetoric—a rhetoric of miraculous birth
that brings the past (grandpa) and the potential future (Gauri) together in
a curious but efficacious indictment of modernity. The overdetermined ter-
rain of parental love and nurture is deployed, I would argue, in a dissolution
of modernity itself.

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CONCLUSION

As demonstrated in my readings of recent films, the horror genre in Bolly-

wood offers us a valuable optic into the dissonant, disruptive, and disturbing
aspects of the triumphant narrative of globalization. As mainstream Bombay
cinema participates wholeheartedly in the rhetoric of progress, globality, and
consumption that supposedly accompanies India’s entry into late modernity,
it falls on the much-derided horror genre to register the voices of discontent
and dissent.
We can engage this dissonance in several ways, some of which are more
sobering than others. As foundational transformations attend to the Indian
socio-cultural and economic fabric, chasms yawn between classes, women
contribute in increasing numbers to urban workforce, divorce rates sky-
rocket, and families come to be imperiled more than ever before. The horror
film responds to these changes in several ways: first, the genre imbibes the
rhetoric of backlash, a reactionary, conservative discourse that holds late
modernity, especially modern women and couples, culpable for all the ills
plaguing Indian society. In this respect, the horror film abets and indeed
resonates the neo-traditionalist rhetoric of Hindu nationalists and other
right-wing formations. Most troubling perhaps is the instrumental use of
the figure of the child—innocent, vulnerable, in need of nurture—in buttres-
sing this regressive ideological terrain. Vaastu Shastra and Gauri remain
exemplary films in this context.
Phoonk intervenes into this tug and pull of the modern and the
non-modern in a way that remains, I suggest, more compelling. It calls for
a re-enchantment of private and public domains that have come to be
entirely disenchanted in the wake of industrial and post-industrial modernity.
In this reading, Phoonk, and other films of its ilk generate a desire for a
re-inscription of the magical, the mystical, the feminine, the childlike, and
the irrational into a world that has relentlessly marginalized these nodes of
experience. The figure of the child, however privileged, then serves as a
stand-in for an abject subaltern; the child articulates all that is lacking and
is ruthlessly marginalized and silenced in the story of India’s triumphant
and celebrated romance with globalization.

NOTES

1. For a discussion of the implications and valences of the label ‘‘Bollywood,’’ see Prasad.
2. The Ramsay films are finally receiving much-deserved critical attention from cult cinema fans as
well as film scholars. See, for example, Tombs.
3. Although this newer crop of films were certainly made and circulated in a transformed industrial
environment, filmmakers, especially Varma, continue to cite and pay homage to the Ramsay films through
mise-en-scene and iconography.
4. Examples abound and including Dark Water (2002), Whispering Corridors (2003), A Tale of Two
Sisters (2003), and Acacia (2003).

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5. First and especially last names in South Asia clearly indicate what caste, community, and religion
an individual belongs to. It is virtually impossible to disguise these markers of social belonging once a
person has been officially named.
6. Exceptions to the rule: Mrinal Sen’s Kharij (1983) represented the exploitation of young rural chil-
dren as domestic workers and Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par (2007) invokes a different kind of child
labor—the enormous burden put on children by the arguably harsh scholastic systems in India.
7. Although male children are most often represented, curiously, many of the actors playing little
boys are actually girls—a tendency that has fallen somewhat out of vogue in recent years.
8. Much scholarly work has recently focused on the emerging middle classes in pre- and
post-liberalization India. See, for example, Fernandes.
9. For a discussion of the Multiplex boom and attendant transformations in distribution and exhi-
bition of films, see Sharma.
10. This immersion within a larger space of consumption is so crucial to understanding the specta-
torial experience of the viewer that Amit Rai has coined the term ‘‘Malltiplex’’ to describe the textured
and sensate world of the urban multiplex.
11. For a theorization of Indian cinema through the trope of interruptions, see Gopalan.
12. Style in Vaastu—and the other films discussed here—remains highly self-conscious. The film-
makers clearly speak to an audience that is competent in reading, or is at least relatively familiar with, for-
mal conventions typically deployed by the horror genre in Hollywood and beyond. It is this ‘‘knowing’’
spectatorship that Philip Brophy gestured towards when he wrote, ‘‘The contemporary Horror film knows
that you’ve seen it before; it knows that you know what is about to happen; and it knows that you know
it knows you know. And none of it means a thing, as the cheapest trick in the book will still tense your
muscles, quicken your heart and jangle your nerves.’’
13. The undead in Vaastu look very similar to those in Takashi Shimizu’s global hit Ju-on; the children
in particular seem to have been modeled on those in the earlier film. The emphasis on a cursed home
where inhabitants die mysteriously is also resonant with the plot of the Japanese film.
14. One possible explanation for Vaastu’s open-ended closure is that the producers may have had
plans for future sequels. The director’s untimely death in 2010, however, makes this possibility unlikely.
15. This division—and particularly Rajiv’s claim to adult rationality in the film—is resonant with
Nandy’s reading of modern childhood, in that it resonates powerfully with the adult anxiety of
regression: ‘‘childhood has become a major dystopia for the modern world. The fear of being childish
dogs the steps of every psychologically insecure adult and of every culture that uses the metaphor of
childhood to define mental illness, primitivism, abnormality, underdevelopment, non-creativity and
traditionalism’’ (65).
16. When Anshuman and Madhu visit the family, Raksha clearly states, ‘‘I don’t like her,’’ prompting
an immediate demand for an apology from an embarrassed Rajiv. At the fateful party, Madhu pinches
Raksha’s cheek cooing, ‘‘She doesn’t like me. But I love her!’’ Madhu’s sinister energy is signposted most
clearly in her interactions with the little girl.
17. Especially in the party sequence, Madhu’s defiant screaming even after having been discovered—
her lack of remorse and her aggression—alert us to the insane, irrational child within. Her reaction to their
humiliation is a childish covering of her eyes and wailing—hardly, I would suggest, the response of an
adult. What I would like to emphasize here is that Madhu’s baroque anger is linked to her child-likeness,
which eventually becomes pathologically vindictive.
18. See Taran Adarsh’s review.
19. Even user reviews on IMDB mention female feticide in relation to the film’s take on abortion.
20. Interestingly, the name ‘‘Shivani’’ also refers to the same goddess, another technique by which the
film equates the child and the fetus.
21. As an aside, it is interesting to note that in many of these films CGI—a modern technological inno-
vation that has irrevocably transformed the cinema in recent years—is deployed in aid of elaborating and
often buttressing a non-modern, traditionalist ideology.

WORKS CITED

Adarsh, Taran. Rev. of Gauri, The Unborn. One India Entertainment. Greynium
Information Technologies, n.d. Web.17 Apr. 2011.

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Brophy, Philip. ‘‘Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.’’ 1983.

Philip Brophy.com. Web. 21 May 2011.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family
Melodrama.’’ Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas
P, 1995. 350–80. Print.
Fernandes, Leela. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Econ-
omic Reform. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print.
Fischer, Lucy. ‘‘Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby.’’ The
Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin:
U of Texas P, 1996. 412–31. Print.
Gathia, Joseph. ‘‘Child Labour in India.’’ Merinews.com. Bizsol Advisors, 19 June
2008. Web. 9 Oct. 2010.
Gauri. Dir. Aku Akbar. Adlabs, 2007. DVD.
Gledhill, Christine. ‘‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.’’ Home is Where the
Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Ed. Christine Gledhill.
London: BFI, 1987. 5–69. Print.
Gopalan, Lalitha. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian
Cinema. London: BFI, 2008. Print.
‘‘Growing Trend in Child and Student Suicides in India.’’ PRLog. 24 Jan. 2010. Web.
10 Oct. 2010.
‘‘Infant Mortality Rate.’’ World Bank, World Development Indicators. Google Public
Data. Google, 2009. Web. 10 Oct. 2010.
Kakar, Sudhir. The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society
in India. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
McRoy, Jay. ‘‘Ghosts of the Present, Specters of the Past: The kaidan and the
Haunted Family in the Cinema of Nakata Hideo and Shimizu Takashi.’’ Night-
mare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007. 75–102. Print.
Menon, Nivedita. ‘‘Abortion and the Law: Questions for Feminism.’’ Canadian Jour-
nal of Women and the Law 6 (1993): 103–18. Print.
Nair, Kartik. ‘‘Run For Your Lives: Remembering the Ramsay Brothers.’’ The Many
Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror. Ed. Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson.
Oxford: Interdisciplinary P, 2009. PDF File.
Nandy, Ashis. ‘‘Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood.’’
Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. New Delhi:
Oxford UP, 1987. 56–76. Print.
Nelson, Lindsey. ‘‘Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children and
Cotemporary Japanese Horror Cinema.’’ Cinemascope: Independent Film
Journal 5.13 (2009): 1–14. Print.
Pandey, Geeta. ‘‘India Tightens Child Labour Laws.’’ BBC News. BBC, 10 Oct. 2006.
Web. 9 Oct. 2010.
Phoonk. Dir. Ram Gopal Varma. Junglee Music, 2008.
Prasad, Madhava. ‘‘This Thing Called Bollywood.’’ Unsettling Cinema: A Symposium
on the Place of Cinema in India 525 (May 2003): n. pag. Web. 17 Apr. 2011.
Rai, Amit S. Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage.
Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

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Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. ‘‘The ‘Bollywoodization’ of Indian Cinema: Cultural National-

ism in the Global Arena.’’ City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience.
Ed. Preben Kaarsholm. Calcutta: Seagull P, 2004. 113–39. Print.
Sharma, Aparna. ‘‘India’s Experience with the Multiplex.’’ Seminar 525 (May 2003):
n. pag. Web. 17 Apr. 2011.
Sobchak, Vivian. ‘‘Bringing it All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic
Exchange.’’ The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry
Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 143–63. Print.
Tombs, Pete. ‘‘The Beast from Bollywood: A History of the Indian Horror Film.’’ Fear
Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe. Ed. Steven Jay Schneider.
Surrey Place: Fab P, 2003. 243–53. Print.
Vaastu Shastra. Dir. Saurab Narang. Spark, 2004.
Wood, Robin. ‘‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film.’’ Movies and Methods:
An Anthology. Volume 2. Ed. Bill Nichols. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993.
195–220. Print.

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 ‘‘The Power of Christ Compels You’’: Holy
Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal
Psychodrama in The Exorcist

SARA WILLIAMS

Though made forty years ago, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1971) remains
a shocking film, as scenes of Regan’s bodily contortions and convulsions,
explicit acts of masturbation, and sexual abuse of her mother destroys the
construct of the innocent child society holds dear. The film, however, restores
some sense of innocence through its interpretation of the novel as an incon-
testable narrative of possession: Regan cannot be held responsible for the
murders of Dennings, Merrick, and Karras because it is not she who kills them
but rather the demon using her body as a vessel in the material realm. Regan
emerges from the ordeal an innocent victim, with little recollection of what
she has experienced or indeed what she has done. The scenes in which she
performs physically impossible movements—scuttling down the stairs in a
spider-walk, levitating, moving furniture telekinetically, and most infamously
twisting her head around 360 —become empirical proof of her body’s pos-
session and confirm The Exorcist as unambiguously supernatural.
Even though William Peter Blatty penned the original novel upon which
the film was based as well as the screenplay, the two differ considerably.
While the film opts for a supernatural explanation—Regan is possessed by
the Babylonian devil Pazuzu—Blatty’s novel consistently questions the auth-
enticity of Regan’s possession by providing an alternate explanation for her
behavior: hysteria. As Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston have discussed,
it is the abandonment of the text’s psychological realism that makes Friedkin’s
film a deeply conservative one which ‘‘presents us with data for a psychologi-
cal interpretation . . . then rejects it in favor of a phenomenological Devil’’ (45).
This article will show how the original text presents a psychological diagnosis
of hysteria that precedes and challenges the metaphysical explanation of

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Regan’s behavior which has been accepted culturally due to the enduring
popularity and notoriety of the film.
Based loosely on the reported exorcism of a young boy known as
‘‘Robbie Manheim’’ in 1949 (Kermode 11–22), Blatty’s novel articulates the
tensions between the scientific and superstitious Catholic discourses which
both desire to ‘‘save’’ the child through the characterization of Father Damien
Karras, a priest and a psychiatrist struggling with his faith who has researched
the occult ‘‘from the psychiatric side’’ (77). As Ann Douglas comments, the
novel inaugurates the ‘‘family horror’’ genre which articulated late twentieth-
century middle-class anxieties about the ‘‘splitting of the atom of the nuclear
family,’’ with Regan, Chris and the absent father Howard ‘‘constitut[ing] the
postmodern familiar cluster in fission’’ (294). For Douglas, family horror
novels are ‘‘post-Freudian case studies’’ which ‘‘narrate a crisis, a moment
of traumatic disturbance in the external and internal life of a single character
or cluster of characters, member[s] of a nuclear or self-involved, self consti-
tuted family’’ (304). Within this context, Douglas reads Regan’s possession
as ‘‘an extreme version of Bertha Pappenheim’s acute hysteria of a century
earlier, which Freud and Josef Breuer immortalized as the illness and recov-
ery of Anna O.’’ (ibid.). Expanding on Douglas’s contention that Regan finds
a precursor in Anna O., I will demonstrate how the novel can be read as a
specifically Oedipal hysteria narrative through which Regan-as-demon
expresses both sexual desire for the absent father and a violent rejection of
the mother.
Although Freud’s thinking on the Oedipus conflict was complex and
changeable,1 throughout my argument I use the terminology ‘‘Oedipal’’ to
refer to the process of ego formation wherein the child desires the parent
of the opposite sex and so rejects the parent of the same sex, with whom they
eventually identify in order to disavow their unconscious incestuous desires
and become a socialized subject. In earlier articulations, Freud considered
the Oedipus complex in girls to be analogous to that of boys, but in its final
stage he reformulated a female Oedipus complex which has a ‘‘prehistory,’’
where the girl’s first love object is her mother (‘‘Psychical Consequences’’
675). This pre-Oedipal stage ends when the girl, having come to understand
that she and her mother lack a penis, blames her mother for this lack, and
rejects her in favor of the father, for whom she wishes to provide a child
as a penis-substitute; thus, the Oedipal phase commences (675–76). How-
ever, while boys destroy the Oedipus complex in the face of the threat of
castration presented by the mother’s body and the vengeful father, as Freud
explains, ‘‘[i]n girls the motive for the demolition of the Oedipus complex is
lacking’’ (677). It is this persistence of the female Oedipus complex which I
see as articulated by Regan’s hysterical ‘‘possession.’’ Juliet Mitchell seminally
remarked that ‘‘hysteria was, and is . . . the daughter’s disease: a child’s fantasy
about her parents’’ (Women 308), and recent feminist scholarship has recast
hysteria as symptomatic of the yearning for the pre-Oedipal maternal dyad.

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Barbara Creed understands the film version of The Exorcist, in which the close
relationship between Regan and Chris is visualized and emphasized, as a
violent reconciliation with the abject pre-Oedipal maternal. While these
interpretations necessarily challenge the phallocentricism of Freud’s model,
this article reads the original novel in its socio-cultural context of post-Freud,
but not yet pre-Oedipal, conservative, bourgeois America. I argue that Regan’s
fixation on her father and failure to resolve her Oedipal conflict can be just as
damaging to patriarchy as the reunion with the pre-Oedipal mother which
Creeds contends is performed through possession in the film.
Freud developed his psychoanalytical theories on unconscious and
repressed desires through his early work in the 1890s with female hysterics.2
The Oedipus complex thus originated from the psychodramas of Freud and
Breuer’s female patients, and Blatty’s text appeared when the cultural
construction of the Oedipal concept of hysteria remained embedded in this
Freudian precedent. This is evidenced frequently by the text, such as when
Chris notices how Regan’s abnormal behavior first emerges after not hearing
from her father on her birthday, a recognition that establishes the Oedipal
context of the desired but unattainable father:

Beginning on the day after Regan’s birthday—and following Howard’s

failure to call—[Chris] had noticed a sudden and dramatic change in
her daughter’s behavior and disposition. Insomnia. Quarrelsome. Fits
of temper. Kicked things. Threw things. Screamed. Wouldn’t eat. In
addition, her energy seemed abnormal. She was constantly moving,
touching and turning; tapping; running and jumping about. Doing poorly
with schoolwork. Fantasy playmate. Eccentric attention tactics. (57)

The narrative follows the diagnostic history of hysteria as Dr. Klein,3 Regan’s
psychiatrist, first offers the neurological possibility of a scar on Regan’s
temporal lobe, echoing the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot’s diagnosis of demonic possession as the psychosomatic result of a
trauma to the brain (101). Indeed, Freud and Jung are name-dropped period-
ically throughout the text by both Klein and Karras, and Freud’s theories of
unconscious desires are offered as an explanation for Regan’s behavior. For
example, Klein explains to Chris that ‘‘hysteria . . . is a form of neurosis in
which emotional disturbances are converted into bodily disorders’’ and
suggests that Regan could be suffering from ‘‘what Freud used to call the
‘conversion’ form of hysteria,’’ that ‘‘grows from unconscious guilt and the
need to be punished. Dissociation is the paramount feature here, even
multiple personality. And the syndrome might also include epileptoid-like
convulsions; hallucinations; abnormal motor excitement’’ (127, 128). Klein
further suggests that her parents’ divorce would produce unconscious feelings
of guilt and stress in Regan which could manifest bodily as ‘‘rage and intense
frustration’’ (128), and a ‘‘noted neuropsychiatrist’’ is called in, in the tradition

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of Charcot and Freud, to question Regan under hypnosis (120). This session
ends abruptly when Regan objects to the interrogation by ‘‘squeezing his scro-
tum with a hand that had gripped him like an iron talon’’ (125), a sexually
aggressive response which signals the violent intensity of her Oedipal desire,
as provoked by male psychiatric probing.
Within this context then, descriptions of Regan ‘‘shrieking hysterically’’
or ‘‘hysterical[ly] screaming’’ (83, 108) explicitly connote her neurosis. The
text is well versed in the epistemology of hysteria and clearly provides a
psychiatric explanation for Regan’s condition. Somatizing her libidinal
outrage at being separated from her father by the divorce, the text implies
that she converts the unconscious trauma of paternal loss into a demon
which occupies her body and compels its deterioration. Yet, while the diag-
nosis of hysteria continues to be implied throughout the text, the deepest and
most disturbing cause of her neurosis is left unidentified, that is, her Oedipal
desire for her father. Regan’s possession continues, and the psychiatric expla-
nation is dismissed in favor of more desperate religious measures. Reading
the novel in this way exposes the film as a reductive and conservative
interpretation which, in assuming the metaphysical explanation over the
psychological, re-establishes and asserts the patriarchal Christian moral order
as Regan’s savior.

‘‘MY DEAR, THERE ARE LUNATIC ASYLUMS ALL OVER

THE WORLD FILLED WITH PEOPLE WHO DABBLED IN
THE OCCULT’’: THE HYSTERICAL PRECEDENT AND
THE DEMONIC OEDIPAL PRECEDENT

The concept of hysteria has a long history dating back to Plato,4 but it was
Charcot who understood the condition as a visual performance and at his
hospital la Salpeˆtrie`re he exhibited patients for a hungry audience. A favorite
subject was Augustine, an icon of hysteria who was admitted to the asylum in
1875 at the age of fifteen for ‘‘ ‘paralysis of sensation in the right arm’ and for
contractures or anaesthesias which affected the organs on the right side of
her body’’ (Didi-Huberman quoting Bournville 100). Charcot had Augustine’s
convulsions sketched and photographed for the collections Iconographie
photographique de la Salpeˆtrie`re (1876–1880) and Les De´moniaques dans
l’art (1887), and in response she played the part of hysteric, in return for
his attention (Showalter 154). Prefiguring Freud and Breuer’s hysteria case
studies, Augustine was the daughter=patient to Charcot’s masterful father=
doctor. Consequently, hysteria was established simultaneously as a medical
condition and the performance of one—a result of, and a response to,
paternal authority. Freud later developed Charcot’s idea of physical trauma
into a psychodynamic one, and his phallocentric model re-inscribed the
disease as a neurosis centered on the daughter’s Oedipal desire for the father.

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In 1895, Freud and Josef Breuer co-authored Studies on Hysteria, which

documented the analysis and treatment of their hysterical subjects through
the ‘‘talking cure,’’ a term coined by Breuer’s most famous patient ‘‘Anna O.’’
to describe the cathartic process (34). As will be discussed, it is this absence
of catharsis which proves most problematic for Regan.
Freud and Breuer’s cases discuss adolescent girls who had extreme
psychosomatic responses to the literal or emotional loss of their father, and
thus the Oedipal drama as the etiology of hysteria was established. Breuer
treated ‘‘Anna O.’’ (Bertha Pappenheim) for symptoms of hysteria including
‘‘paralysing contractures, complete paralysis in the upper right and both
lower extremities, partial paralysis in the upper left extremity,’’ as well as a
squint and disturbances of vision, hearing and speech, hallucinations, split
personality, and loss of consciousness which he diagnosed as the somatic
response to caring for her ill father ‘‘whom she idolized’’ and who eventually
died (Freud and Breuer 26, 29). Similarly, in ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria,’’ Freud diagnosed ‘‘Dora’’ (Ida Bauer) as suffering from
hysterical loss of voice in response to her father’s affair with ‘‘Frau K,’’ for
whom she babysat, and her husband ‘‘Herr K’s’’ own advances towards
her. Both analysts became embroiled in the Oedipal fantasies with which
they had diagnosed their patients, as both girls exhibited symptoms of hys-
terical pregnancy, with the paternity of the phantom babies being attributed
to their respective analysts (Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas 67, 68).
Consequently, the advent of the psychoanalytic explanation enabled
doctors and historians to diagnose cases of hysteria which were understood
at the time to be evidence of demonic possession. In Les De´moniaques,
Charcot and co-author Richer, through their method of medicine retrospec-
tive, pathologically bound religiosity to neurosis when they argued that med-
ieval saints, stigmatics, and ecstatics should be classified as hysterical in the
same manner as those thought to be demonically possessed (Mazzoni 27;
Midelfort 204). In ‘‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’’
(1922), Freud extrapolated psychoanalytically on Charcot’s contention that
what was considered evidence of demonic possession in the middle ages
was symptomatic of a neurological disorder. He translated the demon in
terms of psychiatry, explaining that ‘‘the demons are bad and reprehensible
wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and
repressed’’ (72). Within this Freudian model, Regan’s demonic transformation
embodies the eruption of her Oedipal desires, the once repressed ‘‘bad and
reprehensible wishes’’ which surfaced following her parents’ divorce and her
geographical and emotional separation from her father. Despite the melo-
dramatic veneer of demonic possession, Regan’s behavior closely echoes
the Oedipal etiology of the archetypal case studies of Freudian hysteria, Dora
and Anna O., and before them Charcot’s Augustine.
Consequently, Regan’s sexually aggressive possession becomes a form
of rape fantasy wish-fulfillment as she submits to a powerful masculine force,

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which she unconsciously interprets as having the father-as-Devil physically

‘‘inside’’ her. As such, Regan shares much in common with other historical
cases of demonic possession. Lyndal Roper, for example, has shown in her
study of medieval witchcraft how women’s communion with the Devil fitted
the Oedipal theme and discusses the case of Regina Bartholome, who in 1670
confessed to living with the Devil, fantasizing that she fulfilled the Oedipal
triad of daughter=lover=wife (227).5 Like Regina before her, Regan’s com-
munion with the Devil enables her to express her forbidden desires towards
her father by proxy.6 Thus, Regan’s hysterical manifestation of the Oedipal
drama has a precedent in both psychoanalysis and the cultural unconscious,
which Karras affirms when he cites Freud’s ‘‘Demonological Neurosis’’ which
discusses a case of male hysteria-as-demonic possession that makes explicit
the symbolic role of the Devil as father-substitute (208).7 Through her
(self-)possession Regan attempts a sexual union with the father; because
her body houses both herself and the demon, her acts of masturbation
become symbolic paternal penetration.
Furthermore, it appears that Regan herself is well-versed in this history.
We learn that she has prior knowledge of demonic possession from clandes-
tinely reading a book leant to her mother called A Study of Devil Worship and
Related Occult Phenomena that contains a chapter ‘‘States of Possession’’
which mentions ‘‘quasi-possession—those cases that are ultimately reducible
to fraud, paranoia and hysteria’’ (166). Thus, Regan is not only aware of the
signs of demonic possession, she has also read that the body itself can mani-
fest such signs factitiously. As with Karras’s intertextual nods to Freud, this
textual self-referentiality reveals the often-overlooked complexity of The
Exorcist as a novel which engages with the tensions between demonological
and medical discourses of possession.

‘‘THERE‘S NOTHING SUPERNATURAL ABOUT IT’’:

REGAN AS HYSTERIC

Like the hysterics at la Salpeˆtrie`re, Regan is subject to numerous diagnostic

tests before Chris rejects a medical explanation in favor of possession. The
description of these tests and Regan’s reactions follow the structure of
Charcot’s performance-as-diagnosis plot in which the subject would respond
to his probing in an extreme manner so as to confirm her hysteria through
the act of spectacle (Didi-Huberman 83–279). Regan is uncannily like Augus-
tine in her hysterical attacks: like Regan, Charcot’s patient would ‘‘vociferate,
laugh, and vomit, all at once’’ (Didi-Huberman 261), and after having X-rays
taken, Regan exhibits her most extreme symptoms of hysteria, including the
acquisition of a previously unknown language, the uncharacteristic use
of obscene language, the performance of bodily convulsions and contrac-
tures, and public displays of masturbation. Echoing Augustine’s hysterical

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paroxysms, Regan’s demonic Oedipal psychodrama reads as an example of

textbook hysteria:

Shrieking hysterically, [Regan] was flailing her arms as her body seemed
to fling itself horizontally into the air above her bed and then slammed
down savagely onto the mattress . . . . She would lift about a foot each
time and then fall with a wrenching of her breath, as if unseen hands
had picked her up and thrown her down . . . . The up and down move-
ments ceased abruptly and the girl twisted feverishly from side to side
with her eyes rolled upward into their sockets so that only the whites
were exposed . . . . Still twisting and jerking, Regan arched her head back,
disclosing a swollen, bulging throat. She began to mutter something
incomprehensible in an oddly guttural tone.
‘‘. . . nowonmai . . . nowonmai . . .’’
. . . A yelping laugh gushed up from her throat, and then she fell on
her back as if someone had pushed her. She pulled up her nightgown
exposing her genitals. ‘‘Fuck me! Fuck me!’’ she screamed at the doctors,
and with both hands began masturbating frantically. (109–11)

Furthermore, the obstruction in Regan’s throat, which she implies is

caused by the demon inside her body—‘‘Please, stop him! It hurts! Make
him stop! Make him stop! I can’t breathe!’’ (110)—echoes the symptom globus
hystericus from which ‘‘Dora’’ suffered, a sensation of choking which, as Plato
suggested, indicated that the empty womb was rising up through the body
and suffocating the subject. The symptoms Regan manifests symbolize her
Oedipal desire to provide her father with a child, as represented by her
lamenting womb wandering around her body. This episode culminates in a
violent bodily contortion that evokes the arc de cercle (Didi-Huberman
Figure 106, 267), a pose which the ‘‘possessed’’ Loudun nuns8 and many of
Charcot’s patients, including Augustine, were purported to have made during
attacks of grande hyste´rie: ‘‘[Regan] started to arch her body upward into an
impossible position, bending it backward like a bow until the brow of her
head had touched her feet. She was screaming in pain. The doctors eyed each
other with questioning surmise. Then Klein gave a signal to the neurologist.
But before the consultant could seizer her, Regan fell limp and wet the
bed’’ (110). Regan later repeats the arc when she ‘‘[glides], spiderlike,
rapidly . . . her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching
her feet . . . her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she
hissed sibilantly like a serpent’’ (119); here, Regan also echoes the image of
Augustine with her tongue stuck out during fits (Didi-Huberman Figure 105,
260). Charcot defined such contractures as attitudes passionnelles, poses that
re-enacted past incidents of the patient’s life and to which in Iconographies he
gave subtitles such as ‘‘amorous supplication,’’ ‘‘ecstasy’’ and ‘‘eroticism,’’
which Elaine Showalter points out ‘‘suggest Charcot’s interpretation of
hysteria as linked to female sexuality, despite his disclaimers’’ (150).

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Freud would later make explicit the implication that hysterical subjects
were repeating past sexual trauma or desire with his theory of the Oedipal
etiology of hysteria. Regan communicates her desire through her bodily
manipulations as she lifts her groin up and places it as the highest point of
her form, presenting herself, as Freud explained, ‘‘in the posture of a body
that is suitable for sexual intercourse’’ (‘‘Hysterical Attacks’’ 230). Indeed,
the entire episode of possession constellates around Regan’s bed as the site
of her unfulfilled desires. Augustine’s attitudes were described in a similarly
sexual nature and interpreted as the call to an imaginary lover: ‘‘She closes
her eyes, her physiognomy denoting possession and satisfied desire . . . then
then come the little cries, smiles, movements of the pelvis, words of desire or
encouragement’’ (Bournville qtd. in Didi-Huberman 144). If, as Charcot
attested, the attitudes played out past experiences which contributed to
the patient’s hysteria, then Augustine’s imaginary lover may well be her
employer and mother’s lover who attempted to rape her and who is associa-
ted with her own father in her hysterical flashbacks: ‘‘Pig! Pig! I’ll tell
papa . . . . Pig! How heavy you are!’’ (qtd. in Didi-Huberman 160). Trapped
in the Oedipal dynamic, Augustine is in a state of ‘‘possession,’’ at the mercy
of the father figure as she replays her trauma in an ‘‘incessant deliria of rape’’
(160). Father is to be desired, revered, and feared, and we see Regan
articulating this tension in her own hysterical seizures and contractures.
Regan’s arc is translated infamously to monstrous effect on screen when,
arched over backwards like a spider, she scurries fiendishly down a flight of
stairs, hissing and bleeding profusely from her mouth. It is testament to both
the special effects and the original description of Regan’s contortion that this
scene, despite its relative crudeness, remains so viscerally inassimilable, and
yet it is not, as deceptively suggested by the text, ‘‘an impossible position.’’
During attacks of grande hyste´rie, Charcot’s patients would regularly contort
and convulse in a tetanic manner which attested to the ability of the hysteric’s
body to be ‘‘articulated at will, endowed as it was with an incredible plastic
submission’’ (see Figures 46–8 in Didi-Huberman, 192). Charcot’s beloved
Augustine in her attitudes struck the archetypal poses of hysteria and shows
that, possessed by hysteria, the adolescent female body was capable of things
considered alien and unknown to itself: ‘‘The whole body became rigid; the
arms stiffened, sometimes executing more or less perfect circumduction; then
they would often approach each other on the median line, the wrists touching
each other on the dorsal side’’ (Didi-Huberman quoting Bournville and
Régnard 123). Regan’s ability to move her bed from the floor during her
seizures (83, 285) also echoes Augustine’s attacks, as Didi-Huberman describes
how she would be straitjacketed ‘‘on a bed that she would have turned upside
down if she had not been fettered’’ (113). Scholars since have identified such
seizures as female orgasms (see Maines), and so within the Oedipal framework
Regan’s fits are the climax to her sexual communion with the Devil-as-father
who she believes is literally inside her.

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Even the welts on Regan’s chest, ‘‘bas-relief script rising up in clear

letters of blood-red skin. Two words: help me’’ (262), which appear to have
been written from inside her body as though the real Regan is trapped
inside herself, find a physiological explanation in the medical condition
dermatographic urticara, in which the skin becomes raised and inflamed
in response to touch. As Janet Beizer has discussed, this was translated as
a symptom of hysteria by Charcot and others, evidence of the hysteric’s body
as impressionable, hypersensitive and hyperexpressive (20). Beizer mentions
how doctors ‘‘fascinated by dermatographism often used the sign of the Devil
in their writing experiments’’ and reproduces a photograph of a woman’s
back which has SATAN inscribed in large welts above her shoulder blades
(Figure 3, 25). Regan’s dermatography thus inscribes hysteria on her
body in the same manner as the wounds of Christ do with stigmatics (see
Littlewood and Bartocci 598), but at the same time it also evidences her
own visceral belief in her possession. The confirmation of Regan’s pos-
session as performance comes from her reaction to being doused with
unblessed tap water, which Karras tells her is holy water: ‘‘Immediately the
demon was cringing, writhing, bellowing in terror and in pain: ‘It burns it
burns! Ahh, stop it! Cease, priest bastard, cease!’ Expressionless, Karras
stopped sprinkling. Hysteria. Suggestion. She did read the book’’ (227). Karras
sets up this deceit as a test to expose Regan’s possession as a masquerade,
and it works, but he ultimately rejects this evidence and instead pursues
the possession route to its fatal conclusion in order to reaffirm his faith.
Regan’s hysteria is a performance in which all actors must take their parts
for it to play out successfully, and in this sense the masquerade of demonic
possession can never fully be exposed.9 By omitting the text’s Freudian
references in the film’s adaptations of these episodes, the psychological
interpretation, originally emphasized in the novel, is suppressed in the film.
As Charcot and his spectators had invested in the diagnosis of hysteria
and desired visual proof in the form of performances and photographs, so
did audiences of The Exorcist want evidence of Regan’s demonic possession.
Seeing was believing, and both Augustine’s and Regan’s bodies were sub-
jected to scrutiny and interpretation, and in Regan’s case the translation from
text to film is especially reductive. The most shocking scene of the film
graphically depicts Regan’s head spinning 360 and this scene thus offers
empirical evidence of possession, as the special effects show Regan’s body
contorting into a physiological impossibility. Crucially, however, in Blatty’s
original text, this contortion is only viewed by Chris, who is deeply emotion-
ally and psychologically disturbed following her oral abuse at the hands of
her daughter:

Chris crumpled to the floor in a daze of horror, in a swirling of images,

sounds in the room, as her vision spun madly, blurring, unfocused, her
ears ringing loud with chaotic distortions as she tried to raise herself,

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was too weak, faltered, then looked toward the still-blurred bed . . . .
Then she cringed, shrinking back in incredulous terror as she thought
she saw hazily, in a swimming fog, her daughter’s head turning slowly
around on a motionless torso, rotating monstrously, inexorably, until at
last it seemed facing backward. (184)

The film’s literal translation is repeated during the scene of the exorcism,
where Linda Blair’s head rotates a complete 360 , thus eliminating the
ambiguity of the text which is not so explicit. In the novel, by contrast, Regan’s
contortions can be read as the hysteric’s orgasmic seizure, her apparently
anatomically impossible head-spinning finding a precursor in Augustine’s
‘‘fantastic’’ contractures during which ‘‘her neck would suddenly twist so
violently that her chin would pass her shoulder and touch her shoulder blade’’
(Didi-Huberman 122). Furthermore, Chris’s reliability as a witness is question-
able. Earlier in the text, Chris had mentioned, ‘‘I thought I saw someone levi-
tate once. In Bhutan’’ (68), indicating both a belief in psychokinesis and an
implicit doubt in the reality of the spectacle, and her witnessing of the contor-
tion is characterized by the same visual uncertainty; her vision is spinning,
blurred, ‘‘unfocused’’ when she ‘‘thought she saw, hazily, in a swimming
fog’’ Regan’s head spin. Chris needs to believe a malevolent influence is mak-
ing her daughter behave in such a grotesque manner because the alternative,
that Regan’s own psychosis is responsible, is too much to bear. This is evi-
denced by Chris’s conversation with Karras about Regan killing Dennings,
as Karras tries to persuade Chris she imagined the contortion: ‘‘ ‘But the head
turned around’ said Chris. ‘You’d hit your own head pretty hard against the
wall’ Karras answered. ‘You were also in shock. You imagined it.’ ‘She told
me she did it,’ Chris intoned without expression’’ (242). Chris would rather
believe that her daughter is possessed and in this state has committed murder,
rather than consider the possibility that her daughter might be rejecting her.

‘‘YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL’’: THE OEDIPAL

REJECTION OF THE PRE-OEDIPAL MATERNAL

In her discussion of Friedkin’s film, Creed argues that Regan’s possession

expresses the pre-Oedipal bond shared between mother and daughter before
the intervention of paternal authority and that her obscene outbursts and bra-
zen excretions ‘‘[construct] monstrosity’s source as the failure of paternal order
to ensure the break, the separation of mother and child’’ (38). Creed translates
this failure of the paternal into ‘‘a refusal of the mother and child to recognize
the paternal order’’ which rearticulates Regan’s possession as a protest that
returns her to a pre-Oedipal maternal state, and certainly the film does empha-
size the closeness of the mother-daughter relationship (40). Regan’s body, in
its disgusting carnivalesque display, represents for Creed what mothers would

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be if not tempered by paternal rule: ‘‘The deep bond between mother and
daughter is reinforced . . . at a number of different levels: Mother’s swearing
becomes Regan’s obscenities; Mother’s sexual frustrations become Regan’s
lewd suggestions; Mother’s anger becomes Regan’s power’’ (39). Thus, for
Creed, the Devil inside Regan ‘‘may well be female’’ (32).
Although Creed’s argument is rewarding in that it rearticulates the
demonic possession narrative into a psychosomatic one, it does not account
for the subtleties of Regan’s rejection of paternal rule. Although Regan vio-
lently abjects herself in front of both priests by vomiting, she also implores
them, as Fathers, to have intercourse with her—‘‘Do you want to fuck her?
Loose the straps and I will let you go at it!’’—while to the male doctors
who visit her she commands, ‘‘Fuck me. Fuck me!’’ and ‘‘with both her hands
began masturbating frantically’’ (197, 109). The crucifix masturbation scene
further confirms Regan’s unconscious desire to have sex with her father, as
she uses Christ on the Cross, God’s representative on earth, to penetrate her-
self. This scene does not depict the demon’s desire to corrupt the body of an
innocent through a sacrilegious act but instead expresses Regan’s wish to
have sex with the (Holy) Father, whom Freud identified as interchangeable
with both the Devil and the biological father (‘‘Demonological Neurosis’’ 86).
Rather than simply forbidding paternal intervention, as Creed argues,
Regan seduces men who desire to cure her into her room, then dispatches
them if they prove a threat to the absent father she desires. This is evidenced
most acutely through the murder of Chris’s friend and director Dennings,
whom Regan identifies as possible heir to her father’s position crucially
before she is in the throes of her apparent possession. At one point, she sul-
lenly states, ‘‘[Y]ou’re going to marry him, Mommy, aren’t you?’’; when Chris
says no, Regan then asks, ‘‘[Y]ou don’t like him like Daddy?’’ (47). Clearly,
what is important to Regan is not the threat to her own place in her mother’s
affections but the possibility that her father could be so easily replaced.
Dennings’s horrendous death—Regan breaks his neck and twists his head
round before throwing him out of her window—thus becomes her disavowal
of his threat through a symbolic decapitation=castration and his expulsion
from the family home.
In the same conversation, Chris asserts, ‘‘I love your daddy, honey; I’ll
always love your daddy’’; whether a white lie or the truth, Chris has set
herself up in opposition to Regan’s desire for her father. Their divorce does
not void the Oedipal dynamic but instead ‘‘reinterprets and rearranges . . .
what Freud called the ‘family romance’ for a post-nuclear family generation’’
(Douglas 302). Evidently, your parents don’t have to be married for you to
feel the Oedipal tension. Furthermore, Regan’s rejection of male scrutiny
can also been understood as her projection of the jealousy she wishes her
father would feel in response to other men examining her. Ventriloquizing
the father-as-Devil, her warning to Klein to keep his ‘‘goddamned fingers
away from [my] cunt’’ (61) and the assault on the neuropsychiatrist are the

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threats Regan hopes her father-as-lover would make to rivals of his own
objectifying gaze. Through her possession, Regan expresses a desire for
her absent father’s possessiveness.
The Exorcist thus presents an extreme consequence of severing the
Oedipal bond before its potential resolution, for Regan solicits then violently
rejects all other possible father figures whom she sees as replacing the original
father’s place in the family unit; tellingly Karl, Chris’s handyman, who is mar-
ried to Willie the housekeeper and embroiled in his own filial drama, is not
dispatched as she does not perceive him as a threat.10 Similarly, the married
Lieutenant Kinderman who investigates Dennings’s death is safe, as he never
enters Regan’s room or comes into direct contact with her. So, though Creed
does identify that ‘‘Regan is ‘possessed’ with an incestuous longing’’ (41), she
continues to attribute this longing for mother. Yet, though Regan does engage
in a sexual act with her mother, the graphic oral rape which leaves Chris
covered in the blood of her daughter’s lacerated vagina is not an extreme
expression of erotic desire to reunite with her but a vicious mockery and
rejection of her maternal authority, as symbolized by Regan’s literal and
violent pushing away of Chris after the act: ‘‘ ‘Lick me, lick me! Aahhhhhh!’
Then the hand that was holding Chris’s head down jerked it upward while
the other arm smashed her a blow across the chest that sent Chris reeling
across the room and crashing to a wall with stunning force while Regan
laughed with bellowing spite’’ (183). This scene figures Regan’s bleeding as
both menstrual and sexual, as her ‘‘vagina gushed blood onto sheets with
her hymen, the tissues ripped’’ (183). While her penetration with the crucifix
means she has lost her virginity to the symbolic father and locates her body as
a site of sexual desire for him, the notion of menstrual blood signifies her
womb’s desire, and failure, to bear him a child. Just as Augustine’s periods
started when she entered la Salpeˆtrie`re, where ‘‘under the very eyes and ten-
der concern of her physicians . . . she ‘became a woman’’’ (Didi-Huberman
quoting Bournville 117), so, too, does Regan’s menstruation correlate with
her hysterical manifestation of the desire to please her father.
This hostility toward the mother is present in the text even before Regan
is fully possessed, as evidenced by her refusal to let Chris play with the Ouija
board because she is not pretty enough (45–46). This attack is articulated
through Regan’s imaginary friend Captain Howdy, a figure of patriarchal auth-
ority that Chris recognizes is modeled after Regan’s father, Howard: ‘‘A fantasy
playmate. It didn’t sound healthy. Why ‘Howdy’? For Howard? Pretty close’’
(45). Despite Howard’s absence in the text, it is Chris who embodies abandon-
ment. At the height of her exorcism, Regan-as-demon reveals that she blames
Chris for the disintegration of her family, the loss of her father, and her own
psychosis: ‘‘ ‘Ah, yes, come see your handiwork, sow-mother! Come! . . . See
the puke! See the murderous bitch! . . . Are you pleased? It is you who have
done it! Yes, you with your career before anything, your career before your
husband, before her, before . . . your divorce!’ ’’ (291). Desiring the absent

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biological father’s love, Regan continues to fulfill the Oedipal pattern through
her rejection of the mother whom she blames for his departure. As Creed’s
pre-Oedipal reading demonstrates, psychoanalytical theory has evolved
beyond Freud’s phallocentric model of the Oedipal conflict, and the psycho-
analytical and cultural epistemologies of hysteria are at a distinctly
post-Freudian point.11 However, Blatty’s novel, written before the feminist
post-structuralist concept of l‘ecriture feminine re-appropriated the figure
of the hysteric, is still bound up in the incestuous father=daughter, doctor=
patient dynamic which Charcot established with Augustine and Freud and
Breuer continued with Dora and Anna O. Regan repeats this dynamic with
her doctors and then her priests, all of whom subject her to scrutiny to which
she responds with sexually aggressive hysterical outbursts. That Regan ulti-
mately rejects the attention of these men serves to underpin the severity of
her originary Oedipal conflict: no one will do but her father. Initially, Chris,
versed in pop-Freudianism, is not blind to the possibility of this type of
neurosis, for she interprets Captain Howdy as Regan’s father Howard, reads
Howdy’s rejection of her as ‘‘unconscious hostility’’ (46), and anticipates the
psychiatric diagnosis of hysteria brought about as a reaction to the trauma
of divorce (241). Chris is clearly aware of the psychological possibilities,
but it is more comforting to accept that her daughter is possessed and thus
maintain an emotional connection with her, albeit a distressing one, rather
than accept that her daughter’s anguish is caused by a deep affection for
the estranged father which would implicitly devalue her own parental status.

‘‘THAT THING UPSTAIRS ISN‘T MY DAUGHTER!’’: FOLIE À DEUX

Because Chris accepts Regan’s hysterical performance of demonic possession

as reality, she not only encourages the psychosis but perpetuates it. This
dynamic is symptomatic of Shared Psychotic Disorder, or Folie à Deux, first
reported in 1877 by Ernest-Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret, which the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines as ‘‘a delusion
that develops in an individual who is involved in a close relationship with
another person (sometimes termed the ‘inducer’ or ‘the primary case’) who
already has a Psychotic Disorder with prominent delusions’’ (305). Karras
overtly diagnoses the mother as herself hysterical, ‘‘that’s just what it is: hys-
terical imagining’’ (243), and so there is implicitly a lingering sense of her-
edity surrounding Regan’s condition which echoes the nineteenth-century
belief that hysteria was passed down the maternal line; in the narrative, it
is Chris who first hears=hallucinates the rapping sounds which are later asso-
ciated with the demon (21). She is described elsewhere as being ‘‘on the brim
of hysteria’’ (107) and, as an actress, she fits Charcot’s hysterical model of
performing a melodramatic part for an audience. Freud argued that the
daughter’s mimicry of hysterical symptoms ‘‘signifies a hostile desire on the

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girl’s part to take the mother’s place, and . . . expresses her object-love
towards her father’’ (Group Psychology 38). If Chris is predisposed to hysteria,
Regan’s condition is a jealous response which replicates and betters it in
order to supersede her rival.
S. J. Kiraly discusses a case of Folie à Deux between mother and daughter
in which both parties were convinced they were being spoken to and influ-
enced by the Devil. Like Regan, the daughter experienced familial tensions:
her father (like Anna O.’s) was ill and both she and her mother, who like Chris
is described as ‘‘very theatrical’’ and ‘‘giving her history with a hysterical fla-
vour,’’ were involved in his convalescence (224). With the father absented
through his illness, the mother-daughter dynamic is established, and Kiraly
interprets their shared psychosis of possession as the manifestation of the
daughter’s unconscious guilt towards the father and hostility towards the
mother, which the mother identifies with ‘‘in order to rescue the relationship’’
(227). Chris’s conviction fulfills the same function; having lost a young son,
Jamie, several years ago to the failure of medicine, Chris harbors a ‘‘deep
distrust of doctors and nurses’’ (115) and so rejects the logical psychiatric diag-
nosis that Regan is hysterical, instead pursuing the supernatural explanation
of possession in an attempt to re-possess and lay claim to her daughter.
This is confirmed by her refusal to tell Regan’s father about his daugh-
ter’s condition despite Karras’s encouragement: ‘‘ ‘I’ve asked you to drive a
demon out, goddammit, not ask another one in!’ she cried at Karras in sud-
den hysteria . . . . ‘[W]hat in the hell do I want with Howard? . . . [W]hat the hell
good is Howard right now? What’s the good?’’’ (241). Via his psychiatric back-
ground, Karras identifies the source of Regan’s illness and starts to suggest to
Chris that ‘‘there’s a strong possibility that [her] disorder is rooted in a guilt
over—’’ but she anticipates his reasoning and cuts him off: ‘‘Guilt over
what? . . . Over the divorce? All that psychiatric bullshit?’’ (241). Regan’s separ-
ation from her father and the severing of the Oedipal structure that under-
pinned the family unit, triggered by Chris’s rejection of Howard through
divorce, is the trauma to which Regan has reacted so violently through her
hysterical performance of possession.
Yet Chris refuses to accept that a reunion with the father would help,
instead figuring him as a malevolent force just as damaging as the demon
inside her daughter, denying that their divorce is the cause of the trauma
and so implicitly exonerating herself of any blame. Indeed, Chris would rather
believe that Regan is possessed than concede that her father’s involvement
would be beneficial. The possibility of hysteria as a response to the Oedipal
dynamic is unbearable for Chris as it displaces her primacy as mother and
instead positions Regan’s father at the center of her desire; as Karras identifies,
Chris is ‘‘worried that her daughter is not possessed!’’ (233). Left a single
mother by an acrimonious divorce, she would rather lose possession of her
daughter to the Devil than to the biological father. In this sense, then, Regan’s
hysteria becomes an act of self-possession as she establishes a subject position

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which is not answerable to mother and which allows her to express her taboo
unconscious desires. What is problematic, and what remains open and unac-
knowledged at the end of the text, is that these desires are not sufficiently
tempered as Regan is still locked in the Oedipal psychodrama, which Freud
prophesized as female destiny: ‘‘Girls remain in it for an indeterminate length
of time; they demolish it late and even so, incompletely’’ (‘‘Femininity’’ 129).
Perhaps this is also why both Sharon, Regan’s nanny, and Chris find Father
Karras so attractive (76, 290).
This Folie à Deux proves infectious, evolving into a case of Folie à
Plusieurs (like the Loudun nuns), as more characters submit to the demonic
possession explanation in order to assuage their own anxieties. While Chris
must participate in Regan’s hysterical charade to reject the possibility that her
daughter harbors incestuous desires for the father, Merrin needs to believe it
is Pazuzu who inhabits Regan as its defeat has been his raison d‘eˆtre. Simi-
larly, Karras, who initially asserts the psychiatric diagnosis, invests in the
Devil inside Regan which he mimics through his own possession in order
to triumph over his crisis of faith and atone for the death of his mother
who he feels he neglected when she was admitted to a state-run psychiatric
hospital. This sense of neurotic contagion continues beyond the text through
the film’s effect on audiences, who reacted with similar hysterical symptoms
of fainting and vomiting, which James C. Bozzuto interestingly argues is
related to viewers’ own parental loss.12 Evidently, not diagnosing Regan’s
Oedipal hysteria within the text has succeeded in perpetuating psychosis
beyond it.

‘‘AND, YE FATHERS, PROVOKE NOT YOUR CHILDREN TO

WRATH: BUT BRING THEM UP IN THE NURTURE AND
ADMONITION OF THE LORD’’ (EPHESIANS 6:4):
REPRESSION AND REBELLION

As Regan’s ‘‘possession’’ plays out in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., the

center of the Nixon administration, her behavior exposes the fallibility of
the traditional conservative emblem of the patriarchal family unit and fore-
casts the shattering of the American Dream. As Douglas and Hoppenstand
have discussed, Regan’s adolescent body becomes the battleground on
which the fight between propriety and rebellion is waged and, in the film,
a vessel for the eventual reestablishment of order; like Anna O., she remem-
bers very little. Regan’s possession and salvation thus offers comfort to a
Western lay-Christian audience, as the existence of the Devil must necessarily
confirm that of the ultimately more powerful God.
If read as a supernatural narrative of possession, not despite but because
of its demonic content, The Exorcist is a profoundly religious tale with a rela-
tively happy ending which reassures its readership by restoring order through

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the triumph of good over evil.13 Perhaps this explains why Blatty,
‘‘conservatively-inclined’’ and ‘‘deeply Catholic’’ (Cull 47), omitted the ambi-
guity from the original screenplay. Colleen McDannell argues that through
the film, ‘‘Blatty sought to bring to the screen his real theological concerns
and answers,’’ and thus ‘‘The Exorcist then is not merely a horror film; it is a
Catholic horror film. And, more specifically, it is a Jesuit horror film’’ (198–
99). Similarly, Nick Cull writes that in the wake of the Cold War and the threat
of Communist opposition both overseas and in America, Blatty ‘‘wrote The
Exorcist and produced it as a motion picture to scare a new generation of
Americans back into church. [He] was quite open about this aim. He called
his novel ‘an apostolic work’ ’’ (47). If taken at face-value as an uncomplicated
tale of demonic possession, the film’s (mis)interpretation of the novel
reinforces the hegemony and so ultimately does not undercut, but rather
underpins, values of Western conservatism.
However, while Blatty’s moral intentions are clear, the text nonetheless
supports a psychological reading, and interpreted as a hysteria narrative, it
ends with the deaths of three men at the hands of a young girl, whose psy-
chosis has hoodwinked not only those around her but also readers and critics
into believing she is an innocent victim. Hoppenstand, for example, reads the
text much like McDannell views the film: as a possession narrative which
articulates Blatty’s concerns about ‘‘the efficacy of the Church in the modern,
pragmatic world’’ (36) and which uses the possessed body of ‘‘an innocent
adolescent girl,’’ ‘‘the child as victim’’ as a metaphor (36, 37, my emphasis).
As a response to the trauma of divorce, the failure of the family unit, and
the absent father whom she desires, Regan’s hysteria articulates anxieties
about the implosion of the traditional nuclear family with the innocent and
well-mannered child at its core, yet does not allay these anxieties through
the eventual re-establishment of a moral force. If Regan’s behavior is read as
evidence of repression and psychosis as opposed to possession, The Exorcist
becomes unsettling for entirely different reasons, for blame cannot be shifted
from the child and apportioned to the demon. Thus, all Regan’s obscene and
sacrilegious actions, the masturbation with the crucifix, the oral rape of her
mother, the murders of three men including two priests, are performed not
through her but by her, and no one else.
Within the Freudian model of hysteria, the root cause of the neurosis, that
is, the Oedipal trauma, must be diagnosed, discussed, and disavowed in order
that the patient is cured. It is this act of catharsis which provided Freud and
Breuer with their case studies, as Julia Borossa summarizes: ‘‘Hysterics’ symp-
toms made sense, inasmuch as they were a response to a psychic (as opposed
to physical) trauma . . . . [T]his trauma had to do with libidinal impulses which
had been thwarted’’ and required ‘‘a cure, of a cathartic nature, depended on
the remembrance and expression of that trauma in narrative form, within the
context of a therapeutic relationship’’ (32). However, because the potential
diagnosis of hysteria is rejected in favor of the supernatural explanation of

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demonic possession, Regan is not given the opportunity to talk through her
anxieties surrounding her absent father, and thus her neurosis, undiagnosed
and unabated, transforms into psychosis. Regan’s true anxiety, her ‘‘Ur-text’’
as Douglas defines it, ‘‘alone can validate its authenticity and existence’’ but
remains ‘‘forever inaccessible’’ (304) and at the end of both novel and film
she ‘‘is lost, latent again, not expressed: the narrative closes over her’’ (298).
Repressed and not possessed, inevitably Regan’s hysteria erupts again, this
time in the movie sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), in which psychiatrist
Dr. Tuskin discovers that ‘‘the demon’’ still lurks within her. Clearly, not
diagnosing and curing hysteria has its commercial advantages
The novel The Exorcist confirms the Oedipal conflict as the driving
force behind Regan’s condition. Her father pervades the text by his very
absence; his presence echoes around the house through his daughter’s
longing for him. The very title evokes the Catholic Father and places the
figure of the patriarch as the epicenter of the text around which all trauma
orbits. Regan is the modern-day Augustine, Dora, Anna O., expressing the
Oedipal tensions of the hysteria narrative which has been embedded in the
Western cultural (un)conscious since the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Her body performs the script of the father=daughter=doctor=patient
dynamic in which the female hysteric repeatedly finds herself locked and
from which she cannot escape. Regan remains trapped in her hysteria as
Chris’s unwavering belief in her daughter’s possession attempts to remove
the psychosomatic possibility that her body is capable of its own grotesque
transformation and the murders of three men, while audience responses to
the text and its filmic adaptation have concentrated on the supernatural
element and so exonerated Regan by rejecting the notion of psychosis.
Even Creed’s insightful interpretation neglects Oedipal hysteria, the role
of the father and the daughter’s desire for him. So, it seems, the demonic
is more permissible than the neurotic, and The Exorcist ultimately demo-
nizes hysteria.
Consequently, The Exorcist as a good versus evil tale of demonic pos-
session has become a cultural given, and to offer an alternative reading
seems sacrilegious. The demonic possibility is so seductive and possessive
that while the novel suggests that our repressed anxieties and desires can
potentially have a catastrophic effect on the social and moral order, the film’s
interpretation of literal demonic possession through the fetishization of
Regan’s abused body as cipher for such neuroses undoes this suggestion.
Although perhaps not as satisfying to post-Freudians as a pre-Oedipal read-
ing, considering The Exorcist as a case study of Oedipal hysteria exposes how
the phallocentric model can be potentially ruinous for the patriarchal society
it underpins. It is precisely because Regan has not sublimated her desire,
because it remains so potent beneath her innocent surface that through the
masquerade of demonic possession this ‘‘angel’’ (24) can murder three
men, yet escape blame or punishment.

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NOTES

1. See Bennett Simon and Rachel B. Blass (1991) for a concise overview of the evolution of Freud’s
theories on the Oedipus complex. Jung coined ‘‘Electra complex’’ (which Freud rejected) to define the
female Oedipus complex (154), but for reasons of clarity and concision I will not be using the term.
2. Hendrika C. Freud emphasises the causality between the Oedipus complex and hysteria,
explaining that ‘‘in psychoanalysis, hysteria and the Oedipus complex were for a long time more or less
synonymous’’ (159).
3. Dr. Klein could be a reference to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, a contemporary of Freud and
pioneer of object relations theory.
4. The classical definition of hysteria, derived from the Greek hysteron, womb, fashioned the con-
dition as a female preserve by locating its origins in the reproductive system. The womb was considered
a volatile organ which if left empty would migrate around the woman’s body in search of a child, blocking
the respiratory passages and ‘‘by not allowing her to breathe, throws her into extreme emergencies, and
visits all sorts of other illnesses upon her’’ (Plato 87, 91c). The empty womb as mechanism of hysteria was
expanded by Freud whose Oedipal model of the neurosis, with the desire to have sex with the father and
provide him with a child at its core, located a paternal trauma as the root cause of his patients’ symptoms.
Freud studied under Charcot, promoter of hystero-epilepsy as a neurological condition, the diagnosis
Regan’s doctor Klein originally offers before suggesting the Freudian alternative of conversion hysteria.
5. Regina’s behavior betrayed her Oedipal desires which she fulfilled vicariously when she signed a
diabolical pact where she had ‘‘forsworn God and the Trinity, and she had taken the Devil—her lover—as
her father in God’s stead’’ (226). As such, Regina enters into a relationship with the Devil in which he takes
the place of both fathers, biological and holy, and in her confession she explained how ‘‘she had even
imagined the possibility of giving him children,’’ which ‘‘allowed her to develop the Oedipal narrative
yet further so that she might in imagination provide her father with the phallic compensation of children’’
(234).
6. Regan’s condition also finds a precedent in the mass ‘‘possessions’’ of the Ursuline nuns at the
French convent of Loudun between 1632 and 1640, where ‘‘hysteria was the devil’s ventriloquist’’ (Beizer
47). In the Loudun case, the ‘‘young girl’’ Sister Clara prefigures Regan with her ‘‘strange convulsions,
blaspheming, rolling on the ground, exposing her person in the most indecent manner . . . with foul
and lascivious expressions and actions’’ while the collectively ‘‘possessed’’ nuns are an example of Folie
à Plusieurs, or group hysteria (des Niau 2: 31).
7. In ‘‘Demonological Neurosis,’’ Freud discusses how Christoph Haizmann made a pact with the
Devil to improve his business and nine years later began to experience terrible seizures. When he signed
the pact, Christoph’s father had recently died, and as such the Devil becomes a replacement for the absent
father. Freud makes this explicit by drawing on the correlation between the Devil and God as the ultimate
imago of the ‘‘exalted father’’: ‘‘Thus the father, it seems, is the individual prototype of both God and the
Devil’’ (85, 86). As the Oedipal model is predicated on heterosexuality for Freud, he could not explicitly
diagnose Christoph as a hysteric but conceded that his delusions are the return of his repressed ‘‘feminine
attitude to [the father] which culminates in a phantasy of bearing him a child’’ (90).
8. The nuns performed erotically charged attitudes passionnelles similar in description to Augustine’s
and Regan’s head spinning and arc de cercle: ‘‘[They] struck their chests and backs into their heads, as if
they had their necks broken, and with inconceivable rapidity . . . . They threw themselves back till their
heads touched their feet, and walked in this position with wonderful rapidity, and for a long time . . . . They
made use of expressions so indecent as to shame the most debauched of men (des Niau 2: 31, 37–34, 44).
Regan’s hysterical onslaught of sexual violence thus finds a genealogy in both Augustine and the Loudun
nuns, whose repressed desires were also aimed at the Father, the handsome and corrupt priest Urbain
Grandier about whom the nuns had purportedly had illicit dreams and who was accused of, and executed
for, invoking their possessions (see de Certeau).
9. In ‘‘La Foi qui gúerit’’ (‘‘Faith Healing’’), Charcot conceded that the idea of a miraculous cure could
be just as potent as a medical one; as such, Regan can be ‘‘saved’’ because her possession-as-hysteria
demands it, and within the context of auto-suggestion her belief in the possession requires an equally
potent faith—that of Father Merrin in Jesus Christ—to cure her. As Didi-Huberman summarizes, ‘‘healing
is not a cure but a symptom—a hysterical symptom’’ (242).
10. Karl’s drug addict daughter Elvira is an interesting counterpoint to Regan, as while Elvira’s
rejection of her parents disavows the Oedipal family drama which still traumatizes Regan, she fulfils a

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similar function in the text as the rebellious daughter destroying the family unit, and by association society,
with her bad behavior (see Hoppenstand 37). Tellingly, this subplot, which services the psychological
narrative over the supernatural, is completely omitted from the film.
11. Feminist scholars such as Elisabeth Bronfen (1998) and Hendrika C. Freud (2011) have refigured
hysteria engagingly to show how it can be read as the response to the first trauma we all experience, that
of separation from the maternal body, while work on shell shock and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has
dispelled the notion that hysteria is a female preserve (Showalter 167–94).
12. Bozzuto cements the notion of Devil-as-parent and suggests that for his subjects the film precipi-
tated a psychotic reaction because it tapped into their own trauma regarding parental loss and ‘‘forced
them to experience anger and hostility’’ toward the lost parent which ‘‘resulted in these fears of identifi-
cation with the Devil, or in concerns over possession’’ (47).
13. The film was commended by Father Kenneth Jadoff in the Catholic News as ‘‘deeply spiritual’’
(Kermode 10).

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Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century
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Bernheimer, Charles, and Claire Kahane, Eds. In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-
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Blatty, William Peter. The Exorcist. 1971. London: Corgi, 1974. Print.
Borossa, Julia. Hysteria. Cambridge: Icon, 2007. Print.
Bozzuto, James C. ‘‘Cinematic Neurosis following The Exorcist: Report of
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Bronfen, Elisabeth. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents. Princeton:
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Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis.
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Cull, Nick. ‘‘The Exorcist.’’ History Today 50.5 (May 2000): 46–51. Print.
de Certeau, Michel. The Possession at Loudun. Trans. Michael and B. Smith. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 2000. Print.
des Niau. The History of the Devils of Loudun: The Alleged Possession of the Ursuline
Nuns, and the Trial and Execution of Urbain Grandier, Told by an Eye-Witness.
Trans. Edmund Goldsmid. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1887. Print.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpeˆtrie`re. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003. Print.
Douglas, Ann. ‘‘The Dream of the Wise Child: Freud’s ‘Family Romance’ Revisited in
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The Exorcist. Dir. William Friedkin. Warner Bros., 1973.
Exorcist II: The Heretic. Dir. John Boorman. Warner Bros., 1977.

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Freud, Hendrika C. Electra vs. Oedipus: The Drama of the Mother-Daughter

Relationship. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
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———. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921. New York: Norton,
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———. ‘‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.’’ 1922. Strachey 19:
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———. ‘‘Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks.’’ 1909. Strachey 9: 227–34.
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———. ‘‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between
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Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Print.
Hoppenstand, Gary. ‘‘Exorcising Devil Babies: Images of Children and Adolescents
in the Best-Selling Horror Novel.’’ Images of the Child. Ed. Harry Eiss. Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1994. 35–58. Print.
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Kinder, Marsha, and Beverle Houston. ‘‘Seeing is Believing: The Exorcist and Don’t
Look Now.’’ American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Ed.
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Kiraly, S. J. ‘‘Folie à Deux: A Case of ‘Demonic Possession’ Involving Mother
and Daughter.’’ Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 20.3 (April 1975):
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Littlewood, Ronald, and Goffredo Bartocci. ‘‘Religious Stigmata, Magnetic Fluids
and Conversion Hysteria: One Survival of ‘Vital Force’ Theories in Scientific
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Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1999. Print.
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Psychoanalysis. London: Virago, 1984. Print.
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Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,
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 How to See the Horror: The Hostile Fetus in
Rosemary’s Baby and Alien

A. ROBIN HOFFMAN

Despite the many aspects of style, narrative, and of course chronology that
distinguish Rosemary’s Baby from Alien, these films share an interest in
humans’ potential to incubate, literally, their own destruction. Perhaps more
importantly, in both cases curiosity about latent=fetal power manifests itself
partly through cinematic interrogation of the limits of human vision. Thus,
when at the conclusion of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) Rosemary cries out at
the sight of her eponymous offspring ‘‘What have you done to its eyes?’’
the viewer is not granted access to what Rosemary sees; the camera remains
trained on the mother rather than revealing the bassinet’s contents. This con-
spicuous denial results in frustration mixed with relief: we want to see
whether her fetus was physiognomically doomed or redeemed, but we also
want to avoid the shock of seeing marks of evil in the flesh.1
A similarly suspenseful approach to gestation, with corresponding
pressure on the visual, also characterizes Ridley Scott’s science fiction film
Alien (1979). However, in Alien, we are in unfamiliar territory (even more
so than was the case with the ominously labyrinthine New York City apart-
ment building where the drama of Rosemary’s Baby unfolds) as we are float-
ing in outer space with inhabitants of the future who approach intergalactic
errands with casual boredom. Such dislocations allow science fiction to
probe the logical limits and potential disasters of ever-more-complex tech-
nology. And with its exploration of dark human interiors, both physical
and emotional, Alien anticipates films like Innerspace (1987), which not-so-
subtly implied that the human body is the real ‘‘final frontier.’’ In this meta-
phor of outer=inner space, the fetus becomes the potentially hostile new life
for humanity to encounter (Cobbs 201). Alien simply represents this real-life
threat analogically, with a literal alien rather than a pregnant human who
might compare her experience to alien invasion.

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Stimulated by America’s need to confront the fraught effect of visual

access on the social power of fetuses in the 1960s and 1970s, these two
horror films counter the rhetorical and technological triumphs of medical
imaging with warnings about the irrevocable consequences of revealing
what lies hidden. Before fiber optics, this human ‘‘innerspace’’ would have
been destroyed by the dissection necessary to make it visible, but by the
1960s and 1970s the womb could be illuminated intact by photographers like
Lennart Nilsson and by ultrasound. In less than fifteen years, fetuses went
from being invisible, both literally and politically, to practically unavoidable.2
Literal or symbolic fetuses began appearing in horror films, and their shock-
ing appearances—by which I mean both their mere presence and their visual
characteristics—register what must have been done to viewers’ eyes by the
process of gaining access to fetuses in utero.
Many post-mid-century American horror movies have featured terrifying
offspring, and although individual films have attracted a significant amount
of attention from scholars, the phenomenon as a whole remains understu-
died.3 Furthermore, the films themselves tend to gloss over gestation and
forge ahead to the appearance of the demon-child. The Bad Seed (1956),
It’s Alive! (1973), The Omen (1976), and other films mining the demon-child
vein follow this course. However, while films about specifically fetal threats
are comparatively rare, those that do exist have achieved high profiles
according to both critical and commercial indicators: Rosemary’s Baby was
one of the first of the ‘‘evil offspring’’ films to garner the level of acclaim sug-
gested by its recognition at the Academy Awards, while Alien’s staying power
was demonstrated by its 2003 theatrical re-release and profitable sequels.4
Perhaps more importantly, threatening and powerful images of fetuses, along
with fetuses in general, have received an impressive amount of attention,
especially from feminist critics. The many studies on representations of the
human fetus published in recent years—spurred primarily by legal debates
over civil rights and the increasingly medicalized experience of pregnancy—
describe the ways in which fetal imagery has been used to ‘‘humanize’’ fetuses
and grant them subjectivity, often with corollary threats to women’s rights. For
instance, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky’s landmark analysis of ‘‘The Power of
Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction’’ notes that for antiabortion
activists, ‘‘a picture of a dead fetus is worth a thousand words’’ (263). Mean-
while, some feminist critics of film have also noticed the appearance of benign
fetal characters in movies like Look Who’s Talking, released in 1989 (Mehaffy
178).
Uniting film criticism and a feminist view of cultural history, I follow the
path suggested by Ernest Larsen, who rightly notes that ‘‘Hollywood horror
narratives in which women give birth to monsters’’ would naturally lead to
films dealing with the horror of ‘‘fetality’’ itself because ‘‘every fetus’’ is ‘‘a
potential monster’’ (italics in original, 240–41).5 It is my contention that both
Rosemary’s Baby and Alien are social documents of the growing horror of

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pregnancy experienced by both women and sympathetic men from the

1960s up to the 1980s, as reproductive technology and legal actions colluded
to empower the fetus at the expense of the previously sacrosanct pregnant
woman. I thus align myself with film scholars like Paul Wells who claim that
we cannot understand what is horrifying about a horror movie without
understanding the contemporaneous fears and concerns that penetrated both
its production and the viewing public who first screened it, however uncon-
scious the correspondence.6 The release of Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, not
long after the publication of Nilsson’s famous in vitro photography series
‘‘Drama of Life Before Birth’’ in Life in 1965, obviously coincides with wide-
spread and various forms of social upheaval that dominated the 1960s
(including civil rights and women’s movements) as well as with the new
and increasing availability of ultrasound technology.7 Likewise, Roe v. Wade
(1973) and the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, on July 25,
1978, were closely followed by the release of Ridley Scott’s Alien in 1979.
It was also at this point in time that the fetus began to separate from the
pregnant woman carrying it; in 1970, the state of California first added the
word ‘‘fetus’’ to its Penal Code’s description of potential murder victims. This
paved the way for fetuses to acquire a perhaps disproportionate level of
agency, as we have been subject to what Susan Squier describes as ‘‘the
growing presence of a hypostatized fetal voice, speaking to us from the mar-
gins within’’ (17).8 At the very least, women’s authority over their own preg-
nancies has been erased in favor of laboratory tests, and physicians ‘‘know’’
that a woman is pregnant before she does (Farquhar 163). It is no coinci-
dence that both of the films I discuss feature representatives of the medical
industry who are belatedly exposed as villains, controlling—and thus cap-
able of thwarting—individuals’ efforts to monitor their own condition. The
‘‘other’’ side of the legal debates about fetuses naturally revolves around
the rights of the pregnant woman=nascent mother, but the physical difficulty
of choosing sides in this situation effectively demonstrates the potentially
tangled character of social, emotional, and political concerns. Related trends
have continued into the 1990s and beyond so that, ‘‘increasingly, the
maternal, or more precisely the potentially maternal, body is no longer con-
ceived of as a discrete entity under the control of the mother. . . . Rather, it is
seen as a being that colonizes another marginal and oppressed being, the
fetus’’ (Squier 17). The name of the National Right to Life Committee,
founded in Detroit in 1973, concisely evokes the stance that developed dur-
ing a time of heightened awareness about the fraught legal status of fetuses.
The ‘‘Right to Life’’ perspective has since been adopted by many Americans
and remains a potent means of framing political discussion about how to
apportion rights to both maternal and fetal bodies.
Different forms of visual access to horrifying fetuses in these two
films—suppressed in Rosemary’s Baby and technologically invasive in
Alien—suggest that pregnancy offers a particularly visceral way of figuring

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ambivalent power relationships mediated by the possibility of visual contact.

Together, the two films manifest the rising anxiety about fetal personhood
generated by fetuses’ increasing visibility; independently, each confirms that
whether a particular fetus is visible or not at a given moment is ultimately less
important (or threatening) than the status all fetuses gained in the mid-1960s
as potentially visible. Even more specifically, these films emphasize the cru-
cial role that the possibility of visual access played in bringing fetal threats
into individual and social consciousness. The hostile, monstrous fetus in hor-
ror is a powerful figurative backlash against the inundation of purportedly
helpless fetuses and the potentially oppressive ripple effects of their ‘‘silent
screams.’’9 As such, it provides viewers with a narrative, lexical, and visual
framework in which their fears about physical colonization and the medical
industry’s invasion of reproductive processes can be articulated.

A PREAMBLE ABOUT CONTEXT: AMERICAN CONCEPTIONS OF

FETUSES AND PREGNANT WOMEN IN THE 1960S AND 1970S

In her feminist history of pregnancy, Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi describes the

experience as ‘‘much like a socially constructed initiation rite,’’ during which
women gradually assimilate motherhood into their identities (54). Partici-
pants and observers of the American version of that ‘‘initiation rite’’ during the
latter half of the twentieth century noted the ways in which women experi-
enced pregnancy as being at times horrifying, even when the child was
wanted. In her classic commentary on the experience of motherhood, Of
Woman Born (first published in 1976), Adrienne Rich admitted that ‘‘without
doubt, in certain situations the child in one’s body can only feel like a foreign
body introduced from without: an alien’’ (64). In a similar rhetorical move
made two years later, Sheila Kitzinger compared pregnancy to ‘‘possession’’
or ‘‘being taken over by an unknown and even hostile stranger’’ (78). Myra
Leifer’s study of the psychology of pregnancy, conducted toward the end
of the 1970s, found that many women were cataloguing the possible defor-
mities of their unborn children (47). One mid-1980s pregnancy manual urged
women to ‘‘be free of fear and full of confidence,’’ presumably because that
state may not have come naturally (Curtis and Caroles 4). Feminist accounts
of pregnancy in the last quarter of the twentieth century thus countered the
insistently upbeat approaches of parent and pregnancy guides by admitting
that denial may be a woman’s first response, particularly if she does not want
to become pregnant (Rabuzzi 55). She may experience ongoing ambivalence
about the fetus, granting it subjectivity and withdrawing it as her comfort
level permits (Rabuzzi 59). Most important for my purposes is what Rabuzzi
describes as ‘‘the sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating play of the
imagination’’ during pregnancy, when fears about monstrous and dead
fetuses often are expressed as nightmares (62–63). These documented

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experiences of gestational horror powerfully testify to a real-world resonance

embedded in their cinematic representation.
For the women who helped form the original audiences of Rosemary’s
Baby and Alien, such visceral fears could be exacerbated by more abstract
yet extremely pressing legal concerns. Increasingly sophisticated technolo-
gies granted doctors, lawyers, judges, and people in general—although not
pregnant women, whose access to their fetuses is presumably already as inti-
mate as possible—greater access to fetuses and a stronger sense of their
potential personhood, with sometimes oppressive effects for pregnant
women. We may, as Robyn Rowland does, recognize a correlation between
the feminist movement of the late 1960s and the increasing pressure on
women to hand over care of their fetuses to external agents:

It is no accident of history that the emphasis on the fetus as a patient with

‘‘rights’’ comes at the time when women are demanding more control
over pregnancy and birth, many of them moving outside the Western
medical tradition to home birth and to women’s health centres. The tech-
nologies developed to monitor, save, ‘‘improve’’ or discard the fetus
endanger this control. All the technologies affect the mother, yet the fetus
is named as the central character. By giving the fetus rights, medicine
ends up giving it greater rights than a woman. (122)10

In Nilsson’s pictures and similar ones disseminated by right-to-life groups,

the fetus is most often portrayed as a smaller, redder, and strangely lumi-
nescent newborn; in fact, the fetus’s resemblance to a fully formed baby
often is insisted upon where it may not be apparent (Farquhar 165).11 In this
way, such groups implicitly respond to or undermine pro-abortionists who
would pre-empt a fetal claim to civil rights by denying human ones. But in
all cases, the fetus’s vulnerability and reliance upon external assistance must
remain unquestioned in order for there to be a debate about how much
power it should be granted. Fetuses actually offer a logical extension or
amplification of an affective mechanism described by Sabine Büssing, who
suggests that unusual powers of intellect or strength are part of the recipe
for ‘‘horrific children.’’12 If powerful children are horrifying and unnatural
because they defy expectations of helplessness and dependency, then
fetuses in possession of personal agency would constitute an even more
horrifying contrast.
Many critics have relied on a psychoanalytic approach when discussing
cinematic representations of horror, including the specific evil fetuses of
Rosemary’s Baby and Alien. As, for instance, when Barbara Creed brings Julia
Kristeva’s abject mother to bear on her exploration of the ‘‘monstrous-
feminine’’ in Alien, these perspectives are primarily concerned with relation-
ships between mothers and children, and usually in a way that demonizes
the mother. The demonization of the mother may be encouraged by the

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medium of film itself; E. Ann Kaplan suggests that ‘‘film is perhaps more
guilty than other art forms of literalizing and reducing Freudian motherhood
theory’’ (128). The primary drawback of the psychoanalytic approach is that
even the phenomenon of birth trauma fails to recognize the full experience
of pregnant women and their relationships with their unborn offspring by
focusing on the postpartum human. Kristeva’s allusions to the horrors of ‘‘a
border’’ (9) or what Creed interprets as ‘‘the undifferentiated’’ (48) thus far
have failed to be identified with the fetus’s literally undifferentiated cells. I
list these shortcomings primarily to bolster my effort, inspired by Kaplan,
to keep the ‘‘historical’’ and the ‘‘psychic’’ mother separate (138). I also
wish to maintain some distinction, however fuzzy, between a pregnant
woman and a mother, as well as between the social and personal experi-
ences of pregnancy and motherhood. Although psychoanalytical approaches
undoubtedly tap into the subconscious reactions of a viewing audience, they
dismiss more literal readings of the ways in which horror films like Alien and
Rosemary’s Baby utilize a highly visual medium in order to explore, enact,
and even exploit real fears predicated by visual representations of fetuses
circulated widely in contemporary media.
Like Barbara Duden, I favor a historicist reading of the coincidence of
reproductive monitoring technologies, civil rights for fetuses, and women’s
increasing personal autonomy. Duden insists that the fetus ‘‘as conceptua-
lized today, is not a creature of God or a natural fact, but an engineered con-
struct of modern society’’ (4). Technology’s gradual absorption of the fetus
separates it from its mother, lends it an aura of subjectivity and, in a number
of cases, the right to an attorney, and can plunge women into (perhaps
unwanted) sensations of motherhood or place the ‘‘diagnosis’’ of mother-
hood in medically licensed hands (Duden 28). Such technologies offer the
promise of early diagnosis, better prenatal care, and even ‘‘bonding’’
between the fetus and the world outside the womb. But Petchesky convinc-
ingly has likened the fascination with fetal images to a ‘‘fetishization’’ that
eclipses their purported medical functions and almost inevitably fosters
women’s subjugation to the fetuses they carry (277).13
Thus, during a period of heightened anxiety about the corollaries of
fetal personhood, we find cinematic representations of fetuses that register
their disproportionate—and increasing—power as a form of monstrosity.
More importantly, the films share a thematic preoccupation with vision that
I will explore in greater detail below and which plays out in what the char-
acters can or cannot see (especially regarding the visual marks of fetal mon-
strosity) and whether or not they can trust what they do see. These cinematic
power struggles dramatize the real-world consequences of visual access. At
the moment when fetuses suddenly became visible, politically relevant,
and even capable of indirect legal compulsion, they also became candidates
for horror villainy. Rosemary’s Baby and Alien cast the hostile fetus in a nar-
rative struggle between good and evil, corralling the audience’s unfocused

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fears into moral parameters that validate them. Indeed, in the case of Alien,
we encounter a symbolic fetus in the form of the titular creature, rather than a
literally pregnant human, which allows the filmmakers to more clearly mark
hostility through monstrous physiognomy. Ultimately, the fetus’s status as a
potential threat becomes downright self-evident when translated to contem-
porary reality by way of such cinematic representations.

ROSEMARY’S BABY AND THE SUSPENSE OF THE HIDDEN

I begin with Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, primarily

because the hostile fetus is not only central to the plot but—with Rosemary’s
swelling belly serving as a proxy—frequently in the visual center of each shot
as well. The relationship between the camera and audience perspective
introduces a significant variable for interrogating the status of the unborn
as it relates to visibility. Closely based on the novel of the same title by Ira
Levin, the film’s basic narrative survives adaptation: through the collusion
of her husband Guy and the well-meaning Satanists next door, Minnie and
Roman Castevet, Rosemary is apparently raped by Satan during a drug-
induced half-dream. When she becomes pregnant, those closest to her con-
clude that she is bearing Satan’s offspring, but Rosemary only gradually
becomes aware of her status as the prospective mother of the Antichrist.
Her ignorance is overshadowed by both a physically trying pregnancy and
a growing sense of betrayal and deception. However, the film differs signifi-
cantly from the novel in its refusal to confirm or deny the infant’s status as the
Antichrist. As I suggested at the outset, the ambivalence of the film’s conclud-
ing scene is anchored in the visual. Although Rosemary herself must spend
the film untangling the truth of her experience (with the viewers following
her through the process), Rosemary’s Baby is misleading in an important
respect from the very beginning: it promises a film about a baby and then
does not provide a single frame in which a baby appears.14 We never receive
direct visual confirmation of the child’s moral status. But the evocation of
ominous potential was certainly effective; in the years since its release, the
film’s title has come to serve as a flexible cultural reference for fetuses or
other gestating human ‘‘conceptions’’ with perverted origins and potentially
disastrous destinies.
Since the future mother is not nearly as warped as the fetus threatens to
be, nor is she actually a mother until the film’s concluding scene, frequent
slippage between motherhood and its prologue—at least nominally—is a
surprising thread running through critical discussions of Rosemary’s Baby.
Büssing, for instance, insists that ‘‘it is the perversion of motherhood which
evokes the ultimate impression of horror within the spectator’’ (149). But this
language implies that the enactment of motherhood is warped in this film;
that is, that Rosemary is a horrifying, or at least unorthodox, mother. Quite

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the opposite is true, in fact, as it is Rosemary’s desire for a baby and concern
for her unborn child that lands her in the trap set by Guy and the Castevets.
As Lucy Fischer points out, many of Rosemary’s anxieties would likely
encourage audience identification or sympathy since they are common
among women pregnant with normal fetuses (422–23). Rosemary’s selfless
concern for her child prompts her to reject her husband, set out alone on
a dangerous escape, and finally venture into a roomful of apparently sincere
Satanists and threaten them physically; her terrified yet determined resistance
provides the dramatic thrust of the film. Even though she suspects her child
to be condemned (either to damnation or to a life irrevocably damaged by
early trauma), Rosemary wants to care for him rather than abandon him to
people who would not only care for but worship him. Rosemary’s final
choice to stay and mother the (devil’s?) child is presumably the ‘‘perversion
of motherhood’’ to which Büssing refers, and yet it occupies a small fraction
of the film. Rhona Berenstein comes closer to the mark when she suggests
that Rosemary’s Baby is ‘‘centrally concerned with motherhood’’ (59). But
in so doing, she implicitly conflates pregnancy with motherhood and col-
lapses distinctions between the already-born and the not-yet-born. This is
the same logic underlying the notion of ‘‘fetal personhood’’ that emerged
partly from images like Nilsson’s, which routinely frame fetuses as entities
independent of the women carrying them (Petchesky 268). By maintaining
a crucial distinction between pregnancy and parenthood, we can recognize
that Rosemary’s Baby horrifies us with the potential perversion of the unborn
rather than the visible ‘‘perversion of motherhood.’’
Fischer more helpfully describes the film as ‘‘a skewed ‘documentary’ of
the societal and personal turmoil that has regularly attended female repro-
duction’’ (412). By ‘‘turmoil’’ Fischer presumably means that a woman’s
announcement of pregnancy tends to demand her submission to the atten-
tions of well-meaning friends, relatives, and the medical community. As the
fetus’s needs augment and even potentially compete with the pregnant
woman’s, these attentions are just as often, if not more, focused on the former.
Though Sharon Marcus refers to the novel, her suggestion that Rosemary’s
Baby ‘‘construes pregnancy as a hyperbolic invasion of Rosemary’s
privacy—the result of a rape, the pretext for constant surveillance by her
husband, neighbors, and doctor, and an ongoing invasion of her body by a
predatory, parasitical fetus,’’ holds true for the movie as well (131). The key
word here is ‘‘hyperbolic’’ though, since feeling the mother’s stomach or draw-
ing her blood were routine ‘‘invasions of privacy’’ committed by doctors in the
1960s in the name of fetal surveillance. Furthermore, all of these invasions are,
at least on some level or at some point in the film, welcome: Rosemary
explicitly and audibly wishes for children, she is glad to receive special atten-
tion from the highly regarded obstetrician Dr. Sapirstein, and she initially (and
accurately) takes the Castevets’ proffered nutritious drinks and solicitous
attention as an indication of concern for her health and that of her prospective

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baby. Such behavior is clearly perceived by Rosemary to be unassailably

normal. The abnormality lies entirely within Rosemary’s body in the form of
a purported demon-fetus and her constant, debilitating pain. Thus, she must
accept the burden of suffering or adopt the (socially untenable) position that
the fetus itself is part of the invasion.
Rosemary has difficulty sorting her friends from her enemies because
she is preoccupied with the fetus’s health—she laments at one point, ‘‘I’m
afraid the baby’s going to die’’—and because her enemies-in-disguise chan-
nel their efforts through her fear. But Rosemary’s vision is clouded also by
the fact that her fetus was conceived during a half-waking nightmare. After
swallowing some of the ‘‘chocolate mouse’’ presented by Minnie Castevet,
Rosemary falls into a drugged stupor that mixes her own guilt about her
lapsed Catholicism with an apparent experience of being raped by Satan
himself. One of the more horrifying moments of the film is when she cries
out in fear and pain, ‘‘This is no dream! This is really happening!’’ The con-
ception scene significantly relies on alternating visual perspectives and their
unstable relationship with reality to frame Rosemary’s fetus as a potential
threat. While Rosemary must reach some conclusion about whether to trust
her vision of Satan or not, the viewer must choose whether to trust the
camera: when it presents Satan’s face from Rosemary’s perspective, it could
be showing the film’s reality or Rosemary’s skewed perception. Dr. Hill later
diagnoses Rosemary with hysteria, but the viewer’s initial, visual access to
her interior world makes it difficult to share his benevolent disregard for
her anxiety. As Wells points out, ‘‘Rosemary’s Baby playfully engages with
empathy and identification in the sense that we are offered Rosemary’s
perspective’’ (83), in multiple senses. That is to say, the camera adopts
Rosemary’s viewpoint at crucial moments in the film: during the nightmare=
rape, when Rosemary rearranges the Scrabble tiles to reveal Roman’s true
identity, and when Rosemary, knife in hand, invades the Castevets’ apart-
ment. As a result, her concern for her baby becomes the audience’s concern,
and we also struggle, reluctantly, to accept the reality of both Satanists and
conspiracy within the film.
Proceeding from this significant engagement with audience perspective,
I concur with Fischer, Berenstein, and others who perceive a strong affect
generated by how Rosemary’s Baby portrays a pregnant woman as suscep-
tible to manipulation by not just medical personnel, but also friends and
family. As Berenstein suggests, Rosemary’s lack of control over her preg-
nancy is a significant contributor to the film’s nightmare-like effects (59)
and may have prompted one contemporary reviewer to describe the viewing
experience as being ‘‘like having someone else’s nightmare’’ (Sweeney 6).
Having witnessed her dreams and shared their destabilizing effect, the audi-
ence also experiences Rosemary’s pregnant vulnerability, including the ways
in which it silences her. She is even made vulnerable by her desire to become
pregnant since her husband uses it as leverage to make a Faustian deal with

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the Castevets, to mask her drugging with a romantic evening, and then to
explain away the injuries from her rape. As a result, we may be inclined to
see the Satan-worshippers as ‘‘enemies.’’ But Rosemary also is represented
as carrying the monstrous fetus that plagues pregnant women’s nightmares,
so our sympathies are conflicted. Focusing entirely on Rosemary’s experi-
ence would suggest that women alone are the target of this film’s warning
against empowered fetuses when in fact, this fetus’s nominal destiny is to
subjugate the entire world to Satan, whose ‘‘power is stronger than stronger’’
and whose ‘‘might shall last longer than longer,’’ according to the Satanists’
leader. If we cheer for Rosemary to survive and=or escape, we also poten-
tially cheer for the survival of the hostile fetus. Its tremendous evil potential
poses the widest threat in Rosemary’s Baby.
Significantly, the film presents this dilemma against a cultural backdrop
of developing medical imaging technology and imminent visual access to the
womb. Images of fetuses had circulated widely in mainstream media at the
time of the film’s release, and the film draws on the emotional power of
the visual that undergirds emerging notions of fetal personhood. But the
technology for imaging fetuses in utero was far too rare and=or expensive
to be a diagnostic tool. Cruelly, Rosemary cannot exploit any imaging tech-
nology that would reveal her fetus’s true nature, though the prospect of vis-
ual confirmation hovers tantalizingly over Rosemary’s belly: her own body
either protecting the Antichrist or casting suspicion on an innocent and
much-desired human fetus. The viewer is left with the sense that Rosemary
is paralyzed by her condition and her ignorance about it. If only she knew
the truth about her fetus, she would surely take steps to neutralize a con-
firmed threat, as did the Castevets’ first victim, the suicidal Terry Gionoffrio.
(We get the sense that Terry was aware of the plot when Rosemary overhears
Minnie telling Roman, ‘‘I told you not to tell her in advance. I told you she
wouldn’t be open-minded.’’) But Rosemary is chronically reliant upon others
for information about her own body, which reinforces her subordination to
the contents of her womb: she needs Guy to inform her that her period is
late; she needs doctors to confirm her pregnancy and assess her condition;
and she needs friends to tell her that her constant pain is a health hazard.
This scenario is undoubtedly familiar to many women who endure highly
medicalized but normal pregnancies, particularly first-timers experiencing
brand-new sensations. Rosemary’s ignorance of her complicity with a mal-
evolent plot is ensured by her ignorance about pregnancy, which leads
her to surrender herself to Dr. Sapirstein. When he tells her, ‘‘Don’t read
books. Don’t listen to your friends, either,’’ Rosemary takes his advice and
largely isolates herself with the enemy. The profound vulnerability of a
pregnant woman is most painfully apparent when Rosemary seeks the aid
of her first doctor, Dr. Hill, only to be delivered by him back into the hands
of her enemies. The medical industry controls and then thwarts her efforts to
learn more about her condition and the fetus within, even though it had

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previously promised diagnosis and information, albeit via blood tests instead
of visual access.
Behind the interventions from ‘‘friends’’ and doctors, however, the
being to whom (or to which) Rosemary is most vulnerable, and to whom
we watch her submit herself, is the fetus she carries. The movie focuses on
an embattled rather than a mothering Rosemary because the image of her
bulging abdomen, pregnant with both potential evil and potential child,
emphasizes her subordination to her unseen fetus and its external agents.
Everyone who sees her comments on her wasted appearance, which sug-
gests that the fetus really is a parasite that is consuming her—or as Karyn
Valerius suggests, that the fetus has been cast into ‘‘the role of vampire,
the traditional parasite of literary and cinematic horror’’ (131). The delivery
scene reiterates Rosemary’s subjugation to her fetus as well, a horrifying
aspect overlooked by Fischer’s consideration of ‘‘Parturition and Horror in
Rosemary’s Baby.’’ Fischer describes how the delivery scene ‘‘subjectively
replicates woman’s experience of traditional hospital birth—of being physi-
cally restrained, anesthetized, and summarily separated from her baby’’
(424). However, focusing on how the film demonizes the medical industry
in this scene deflects attention from this particular pregnant woman’s
demanding and potentially demonic fetus, to which she has already ascribed
personhood by naming it. That anticipatory act of identification subtly
reveals that despite the suspicions Rosemary has been harboring about her
neighbors, doctors, and husband, she has already submitted to incredible
social pressure to acknowledge her fetus as a separate entity, with needs
and even perhaps a will of its own. As Rosemary is tied down for delivery,
she calls for help and then fades into unconsciousness with the words,
‘‘Oh Andy, Andy or Jenny, I’m sorry my little darling. Forgive me!’’ This beg-
ging for forgiveness echoes her earlier dream-state request for absolution
from the Pope, whose authority has apparently been surmounted, or at least
equaled, by that of the fetus. Rosemary’s change in allegiance, from the
Pope to the fetus, significantly widens the threat posed by a purported fetal
Antichrist. If she has indeed switched moral sides at that level, Rosemary her-
self is just the launching pad for a much larger campaign of destruction. At
any rate, Rosemary seems to feel that she has failed to meet the fetus’s
demands. By the very end of the film, Rosemary’s involuntary submission
to its needs, predicated by its presence in her body and her ignorance about
its nature, has been transformed into voluntary alliance with the destiny
assigned to it by a Satanic cult. This choice is new to her precisely because
the conditions of her pregnancy rendered her utterly dependent on the
medical community but incapable of communicating with its members.
Rosemary’s voice is restored by parturition, however, and she delivers
our first clue to the baby’s monstrous appearance when she wails, ‘‘What
have you done to its eyes?’’ The heretofore-deferred authority of vision is reit-
erated by Minnie, who offers to show off his hands and feet, which are also

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presumably deformed. Rosemary finally, literally, sees how the inchoate

fetus has resolved into the truth of her baby’s situation. Then, as the Satanists
stand aside, Rosemary chooses to mother rather than being forced to do so.
However, the mere fact that she can choose is more important than the
choice made. The novelty of options contrasts sharply with the previous
lack of them since both Rosemary and the Satanists—she unwittingly and
involuntarily, they by choice—were subjugated so intensely by this tiny,
apparently helpless but (potentially) awesomely powerful baby while it
was still in the womb. We in the audience are denied more than Rosemary’s
perspective—we are also left to ponder the moral valence of a choice based
on visual access.

ALIEN AND THE DUBIOUS VALUE OF SEEING

David J. Skal comments that ‘‘[a]fter Rosemary had her baby, virtually all
births in the popular media would be monstrous or demonic’’ (294) and
identifies Ridley Scott’s Alien as an heir to this tradition of exploiting
‘‘reproductive anxieties’’ (301). In the eleven years between the two films,
reproductive technology developed quickly and produced correspondingly
dramatic shifts in perceptions of fetal personhood and the cinematic reson-
ance of represented fetuses. By the late 1970s, medical imaging technology
had become accessible enough to lessen the awe originally associated with
images of fetuses. But the result of these technological advances was a kind
of media saturation, so that visible fetuses retreated from the realm of art into
the less glorious and more ominous realm of the medical.
In Alien, the conspicuous visual lacunae of Rosemary’s Baby are
replaced by an insistence on the potential dangers of visual contact and a
warning against pursuing access to fetal environments. Multiple scholars
have recognized ‘‘the film’s pervasive gynecological imagery,’’ as John Cobbs
put it, and he has even suggested that ‘‘the nature of the life-threatening,
interior ‘other’ in Alien is of a particular sort: it is fetal’’ (201). I would like
to reiterate the ways in which the film carefully characterizes the threat as
specifically fetal, but I also would like to draw attention to the significance
of transferring that threat to a future time and place. During a long-distance
haul, the crew members of the spaceship Nostromo are sidetracked by unex-
plored territory, and their obligatory investigation of the new planet includes
a disastrous encounter with alien eggs. Over the protests of Officer Ripley
(played by Sigourney Weaver), the medical officer Ash allows crewmember
Kane, smothering beneath a large ‘‘face-hugger’’ parasite expelled by one of
the eggs, to reboard the ship. This breach in protocol sets in motion a horrify-
ing chain of events—including the famous scene in which a larvae-like alien
‘‘bursts’’ from Kane’s chest—as the alien grows with supernatural speed and
kills nearly every human who crosses its path. Ripley emerges as the sole

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survivor after she initiates the Nostromo’s self-destruct mechanism via a cen-
tral computer ironically nicknamed ‘‘Mother’’; in the dramatic final confron-
tation, she manages to expel the huge creature from her escape pod by
daring to open the airlock. While Cobbs quite explicitly characterizes Alien
as an ‘‘Abortion Parable,‘‘15 I would suggest that the film presents a fetal
threat in ways that connote not only the abortion debate—nominally
‘‘resolved’’ by Roe v. Wade a mere six years prior to the film’s release—but
also the experiences of reproductive monitoring technology that so heavily
influenced it.
This insistence upon a historicist reading is, I realize, an implicit rejec-
tion of the psychoanalytic readings that have dominated much analysis of
horror in general and Alien in particular. A large part of my reluctance to
employ a psychoanalytic approach to Alien is simply that I see no need to
replicate the work that many have already accomplished, particularly that
achieved by Creed in her landmark essay, ‘‘Horror and the Monstrous-
Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection.’’ Even there, however, direct references
to the fetus-as-subject are limited to Creed’s connection between Kane’s
invasion of the alien nest and ‘‘Freud’s reference to an extreme primal scene
fantasy where the subject imagines traveling back inside the womb to watch
his=her parents having sexual intercourse, perhaps to watch her=himself
being conceived’’ (57). I am motivated even more by the sheer confusion
of fetal imagery offered by Alien, which—as many conflicting critical opi-
nions would suggest—resists dissection and categorization. There is simply
too much going on in terms of (‘‘)mothers(’’), gestation, wombs, and fetuses
to extract a one-to-one allegorical correspondence to any discussion of
Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis without resorting to either distortion
(of theory or of the film) or self-contradiction. At the very least, as Catherine
Constable has pointed out, in Alien ‘‘the use of the womb as a key reference
point clearly provides a break from the Freudian system in which the mother
is encoded in relation to a phallic standard’’ (177). This is not to say that
psychoanalytical approaches are not without considerable value; to the con-
trary, they surely offer as much insight into the film as they do into the minds
of the viewing audience. The confusion of imagery in Alien seems, however,
to reflect underlying social confusion and fear about gestation and fetuses, as
well as an inability to articulate these concerns in conventional terms of sex
and gender.
Even when focused on representing the unavoidably (female) physical
human experience of pregnancy, science fiction can exploit the flexibility of
an unknown future in order to explore horrific fears about bodily integrity,
invasion, and rape in a way that decouples biological sex from reproductive
roles. The film’s success in this endeavor is manifested by critics’ continuing
disagreement about how to read the representations of sex and gender in
Alien. Creed expounds at length on the monstrous-feminine in the guise
of the ‘‘oral-sadistic mother’’ and ‘‘the phallus of the negative mother’’

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(138–39) while others insist upon the phallic qualities of the creature that
inseminates Kane (Hermann 37), the chest-bursting infant alien (Hermann
39), and the alien’s protruding and penetrating mouth (Cobbs 201). The alien
is not assigned a sex during any phrase of its development, so its phallic ima-
gery can be attributed to either a masculine or a feminine subject. A comp-
lementary bounty of womb-like spaces also have been identified by critics,
with at least one male and several inorganic incubators further complicating
the dynamic exchange between gender and embodiment.16 The following
chart not only summarizes some of the fetal and gestational imagery that pre-
vious commentators have identified in Alien, but provides a quick estimation
of which impressions predominate:

Mothers=Fetal carriers Wombs=Pregnant bodies Fetuses

Mother (Nostromo) Sleeping chambers Crew

Mess Hall Crew
Nostromo as a whole Crew, alien
Ripley’s escape pod Ripley, alien
Alien edifice Nest=eggs Aliens
Crewmember Kane Self=torso Alien

In the midst of these wombs-within-wombs, we easily can see that the alien
is being incubated most often—unwillingly and=or unwittingly—by a series
of host bodies, and this fetal alien is the most threatening entity in the film, in
the sense of being a representation of potential, rather than fully unleashed,
aggression and hostility. This is in significant contrast with the sequels, which
inevitably incorporate Ripley’s concrete awareness of the alien’s destructive
powers and also are much less invested in representing gestation because
the cultural context had shifted in the interim.17
Precisely because she could not see her fetus and visually confirm its
humanity, Rosemary was vulnerable to the machinations of medical profes-
sionals and neighbors channeled through her unborn child. In Alien, we
see a similar imbalance of power registered by the female crewmembers’ vul-
nerability to male crewmembers’ curiosity about and authority over a danger-
ous alien fetus. In fact, the threat posed by embryonic inhabitants of the alien
world is perceived by the female crewmembers first even though they do not
serve as fetal carriers—Susan Jeffords points out that Lambert and Ripley are
‘‘the only crewmembers to show suspicion of the alien’’ as they ‘‘recognize
before the men do the signs of reproduction’’ (77). The women intuitively
react with resistance, exemplified by Lambert’s repeatedly stated desire to
‘‘get out of here’’ while she and Kane explore the alien planet. Later, Ripley
insists that the stricken Kane not be let aboard Nostromo without a regulation
quarantine period; her command is overridden by the medical officer, who is
actually a robot operating on behalf of their employers, a shadowy organiza-
tion known simply as ‘‘The Company.’’ He has been charged with bringing
back alien life-forms at any cost of human life. To accomplish this end, he

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has been planted in a privileged site: the infirmary, where the physically vul-
nerable seek aid and medical authority trumps all others. Just as Rosemary’s
doctor could summarily dismiss her pregnancy-related anxieties to support
the Satanists’ campaign, the Nostromo’s medical officer can insist on bringing
the alien-bearing Kane on board under the cover of compassion. His pivotal
power over the main computer, ‘‘Mother,’’ is similarly bound up in his role as
her guardian. Mother had been surrendered to the care of Ash, the man of
science, in much the same way that pregnant women routinely surrender
themselves to their obstetricians. The computer can only blindly follow
orders; after Ash’s status as a Company ‘‘mole’’ is revealed and he is decom-
missioned, the computer is unable to resist Ripley’s decision to initiate a
self-destruction sequence. Ultimately, Mother merely serves as another
example of how males, including a robotic medical professional literally
made male by technology, consistently dictate access to the threatening
entity.
Perhaps ironically, males’ control over medical and imaging technology
in Alien renders them more, not less, vulnerable. It is men who first literally
see the alien=fetus, first when Kane invades the egg-strewn nest and then
later when the medically trained crewmembers Ash and Dallas investigate
the stricken Kane; this visual access is both a sign of and a channel for their
power to unleash the fetal threat. Kane shines his headlamp onto a single egg
to reveal pulsing movement within, and the shell refracts the light to make
the incubating alien appear backlit, almost haloed. It is an act of visual pen-
etration that bears an uncanny resemblance to those perpetrated by Nilsson
and which also evokes the mixture of curious awe and vague unease asso-
ciated with those first images of human fetuses in utero. The subsequent
scene of Kane’s ‘‘impregnation’’ clearly characterizes visual contact as a form
of invasion or aggression in its own right, deserving of retaliation. Nor does
he gain any informational power for his pains. In fact, imaging technology
usually fails to augment human vision in Alien. When Ash and Dallas scan
Kane with a futuristic x-ray, they cannot explain why Kane is still alive, much
less use the visual information to deduce the creature’s designs on his body.
Later, Dallas succumbs to an alien attack when the crew’s tracking device
cannot register three-dimensional movement on a two-dimensional screen.
Although Kane absorbs the most immediate counterattack, the entire human
crew is implicitly punished for shining a light into a dark place of growth.
The ways in which the crewmembers actually ‘‘see’’ alien life, i.e., with
the egg illuminated by Kane’s headlamp, inside Kane’s body via fluoroscope,
and with motion-based sensing and tracking devices, strongly resembles the
way in which people must rely on ultrasound to establish a (one-way) visual
connection with a fetus that looks more amphibian than human. The crew’s
experiences with imaging technology encourage corresponding skepticism
about the benefits of real-life counterparts, especially since sonograms and
fetal photographs often present interpretive challenges as well. More simply,

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an ‘‘alien,’’ particularly one with the sleek armor-like skin and acidic blood of
a machine, serves as an excellent metaphor for the real difficulties that
humans have confronted when making judgments about personhood.
Fetuses, unlike babies who have evolved to pander to our most basic biologi-
cal weaknesses, have an alien quality to their appearance that has drawn
forth compensatory rhetoric to frame their images.18 The film’s substitution
of fetus-like alien for fetal human undermines the rhetoric conventionally
used to rehabilitate alien-looking images of human fetuses and recasts visual
strangeness as a kind of physiognomic warning about aggression. And the
fetus-alien is horrifying in large part because it is an unclassifiable potential
of destruction, without natural boundaries. The Company knows this and
is no doubt courting hubris in their plan to harness that potential for their
weapons division.
As if to confirm the infectious power of its hostility, the fetus-alien actu-
ally brings out the hostile-fetus quality of the crew, which turns on the alien,
the Company’s robot emissary, and finally Mother. The film encourages us to
draw parallels between their behavior and that of the alien (as my chart
above demonstrates) by alternately positioning the crewmembers as fetuses.
At no point in the movie does the crew fully abandon the womb-like
space(s). Nor does the death of one fetal carrier eliminate the threats posed
by the fetus(es) it once carried (loosely defined). At the same time that the
alien threatens the crew, standing as the most obvious ‘‘fetus-as-bogeyman’’
(Skal 301), the crewmembers occupy fetus-like positions and threaten
each other. Eventually, fetal-Ripley proves to be a lethal threat to Mother.
It is Mother who implicitly allows Ripley to destroy the Nostromo since it
is through Mother that Ripley learns that the Company has prioritized the
alien’s return to Earth over the crew’s and deputized Ash to guard their
interests. Indeed, Mother is ultimately subject to the autonomy of the fetuses
within; shifts in the balance of power between them neither liberate Mother
nor introduce new forms of subjugation since Ripley merely initiates irrevers-
ible processes of auto-destruction that were already programmed. And once
Ripley is the sole survivor aboard the Nostromo, she still takes refuge in a
womb-like escape pod and unwittingly brings the fetal threat of the alien
with her. She finally beds down again in a yet another womb-like sleeping
pod, and James Cameron’s Aliens continues the theme with Ripley’s (liter-
ally) nightmarish realization that the alien eggs have been incubating the
entire time.
The nightmarish quality of the movie’s fetal imagery is reinforced by the
fact that the narrative begins and ends with sleep (Creed 140). We first see
the crew as they emerge from their sleeping pods, and the final shot is of
Ripley peacefully sleeping. The implication is that it might all have been a
terrible dream, specifically a dream about futuristic reproduction gone
wrong. The claustrophobic and metallic environment of the Nostromo, in
which a computer named ‘‘Mother’’ governs life-support systems, frames

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both the alien and the crewmembers as fetal cyborgs, suggesting that humans
are being overwhelmed by technology from without and within. Contempor-
ary technological interventions may have been seen as producing more
babies than ever while simultaneously turning fetuses into lab experiments
and pregnant women into incubators.19 This delicate relationship with tech-
nology at the time of Alien’s release is informed further by the recent advent
of in vitro fertilization, heralded by the birth of the first ‘‘test-tube’’ baby in
1978. While Berenstein believes that Alien is ‘‘about a contemporary patriar-
chal dilemma, i.e., no matter how hard patriarchal culture tries, it still can’t
reproduce without mothers’’ (60), I would suggest the opposite: Alien
expresses the fears that technology is assisting the fetus in rapidly gaining
far too much autonomy and that men may also eventually serve as mothers,
fodder for an invasive fetus=parasite.20 As its encore presentation of traitor-
ous medical practice would suggest, Alien’s reliance on fetal imagery capita-
lizes on a pre-existing fear of physical invasion rather than creating one.
Moreover, it insinuates that the threat of unnatural impregnation is not lim-
ited to women since the alien’s first victim is a male host and the movie is
riddled with contradictory sexual imagery and deviations or omissions from
conventional gender roles. Neither Alien nor Rosemary’s Baby rely entirely
upon female audiences for their continuing success, nor do I think we can
assume that men viewing these movies are horrified or stimulated only by
gore, Satan worship, or Sigourney Weaver in her underwear. Rather, the fear
of being inhabited, i.e., raped and=or impregnated, is surely accessible
to men for very much the same reasons that it frightens women: a state of
submission with an unfortunate resemblance to demonic possession, it is
an unfamiliar experience that distorts one’s body and produces pain. How-
ever, in the real world, the battle is necessarily fought within a woman’s
body, as she submits to or resists the medical intrusion of reproductive
and imaging technology. The movie’s popularization of figures like the
fetus-as-alien or the womb-as-spaceship dovetails with an available narrative
and lexicon for discussing pregnant women’s situations while making it
possible for males to imaginatively experience their social and physical
liabilities as well.21

CONCLUSION: PEEK-A-BOO TURNS GRIM

As a number of horror films have profitably suggested, a child’s potential to

cause harm is limited apparently (if not actually) by its visible physical
boundaries. Cinematic representations of fetuses, on the other hand, suggest
that their physical outlines are vague enough to stymie a sense of pro-
portional power. In Alien, this anxiety about undefined borders translates
into an alien that is larger-than-human-sized and subject to constant
surveillance—but can still sneak up on its victims. In Rosemary’s Baby, the

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amorphous threat is a literal fetus stowed in Rosemary’s burgeoning belly for

ninety percent of the film—and from this position, it still manages to draw
upon enough human resources to overwhelm Rosemary’s resistance. The
growing visibility of the fetus generates more horrifying sights for the audi-
ence instead of vicarious opportunities to reassert control. This blatant cine-
matic focus on the gestation of hostile fetuses dramatizes the very specific
fears of pregnant women besieged by the oppressive ‘‘options’’ of repro-
ductive technology and by the privileging of fetal civil rights over pregnant
women’s, crucially reinforced by timing. Emphasizing the important role that
visual access to fetuses has played as an ambivalent fulcrum of power, these
movies bring into view the potential horror of a pregnant woman’s situation
at this particular point in history. As Duden also concludes, a pregnant
woman who wants to retain primary agency must confront ‘‘the series of
powerful suggestions that stamp her as the reproducer of a life’’ (54). Even
preliminary interactions with the medical community may be a form of sub-
mission because mere contact naturalizes ‘‘social responsibility for the future
of the life within her,’’ and the momentum of ‘‘prenatal testing and the
biotechnological care and management of her insides’’ inexorably guides
pregnant women toward ‘‘the scientifically guided care of a modern infant’’
(Duden 54). Both films translate this empowerment of the fetus into settings
that are somehow distanced from everyday reality: Alien propels us into the
future and Rosemary’s Baby invokes the supernatural. But rather than voiding
the implied warning, these settings ground a dramatically resonant exag-
geration of fetal agency. That is to say, by prioritizing the representation of
emotion over realism, they can more vividly illustrate the consequences of
empowering the unseen, critique the technology that renders it visible, and
implicate all those who participate in such efforts.
We need not resort to psychoanalytic readings of sex and gender to con-
cede that the most immediate threats, and the ones that remain unconquered,
are those represented by fetuses throughout both films. Rosemary’s fetus
subjects her to demands from both inside and out, as the Castevets fore-
shadow the semi-voluntary intrusion of technology on pregnancy by invad-
ing Rosemary’s personal space in all ways possible, feeding her chemicals
and even dictating her medical care via Dr. Sapirstein. In Alien, the crew’s
clumsy invasion of the alien nest results in a reciprocal intrusion; they, too,
invite a hostile fetus into their midst and provide its sustenance (unwittingly
on all parts but that of Ash). By the ends of the respective films, Rosemary’s
baby has secured her devotion along with that of the coven, and although
one alien has been banished, scores of them continue to incubate on the
unknown planet. These films only nominally restore order at their conclu-
sions by translating the fetus into a vulnerable and fully perceptible infant.
The one time the alien can be clearly seen is when it clings desperately to
an umbilical cord-like harpoon before being expelled into space. Similarly,
Rosemary’s baby is vulnerable to rejection only once it has been visibly

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exposed. But when framed by movies that acknowledge their visual slip-
periness, hostile fetuses become identifiable threats to which women in
the audience can cathartically respond. The films’ portrayals of pregnant
and typical adult bodies endangered by powerful fetuses and the responses
to that threat—whether brave or submissive—are surely potent images for
women who feel responsible for the fetuses they carry but also resent the
ways in which social, political, and medical forces can turn their responsi-
bility into servility.
Real horror stories abound in which courts have ordered women to
submit their own bodies to the perceived health demands of their fetuses,
for instance with coerced caesarian sections.22 In her 1970 polemic The
Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone called for ‘‘the freeing of women from
the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available, and
the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a
whole’’ (270). It was implied that technology would be one of these potential
‘‘means available,’’ which indeed has offered motherhood to some who
struggle toward pregnancy and preserved lives that otherwise might have
been lost. In addition to freeing women, however, it also has spawned a fetus
that is, as Ash describes the alien, ‘‘a survivor . . . unclouded by conscience,
remorse, or delusions of morality.’’ Advances in reproductive and imaging
technology between 1965 and 1980 allowed for greater access to the fetus
but also invited the projection of moral and legal debates into a space that
had previously been relatively ‘‘unclouded.’’ Thus, Rosemary’s Baby and
Alien respond to the increasing pressures on women to heed the voice of
the fetus and subordinate their own bodies to its demands by recasting the
helpless unborn baby as a power-hungry, dangerous, and barely human
force biding its time behind a shield of human flesh. In an environment
where the invisible and insatiable fetus has more power than the body it
inhabits, women may find pregnancy just as unnatural or invasive as men
would, and the hostile fetus becomes a far more potent cinematic image.
More importantly, it gives an accessible form to fears that might otherwise
remain undefined and unchallenged. Like Ripley in Alien, we are reasonable
to maintain skepticism about humanity’s ability—even that of remorseless
and deceptive Company executives—to harness the destructive power of
the alien(s) to their own ends. The fact remains that the fetuses themselves
have no apparent thought but for their own survival. Shining light into
the womb brings the fetus into view but does not necessarily diffuse the
darkness that surrounds it.

NOTES

I am grateful to Dr. Greg Semenza for feedback on an early version of this

essay.

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1. I would argue that this is the case regardless of whether the child has ‘‘his father’s eyes’’ because
his father is Satan or because the Satanists have disfigured a normal infant—the film prevents its audience
from confirming either possibility by withholding visual access.
2. In this respect, my interrogation in many ways complements Karyn Valerius’s sociohistorical
approach to the representation of fetal personhood in Rosemary’s Baby.
3. As the need for this collection on ‘‘Evil Children in Film and Literature’’ demonstrates, critical
attention to the popular image of horrifying offspring has lagged behind public consumption. When
Sabine Büssing’s Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction was published in 1987, it could rightly
claim to be ‘‘the only study of its kind’’ in terms of both breadth and depth. Even though she relegates
‘‘The Child in the Horror Film’’ to an Appendix, Büssing offers a still-rare instance of commentary
on the frequent appearance of children in horror movies. Robin Wood and Gary Hoppenstand are per-
haps other notable exceptions, but Wood’s discussion of ‘‘the Terrible Child’’ in horror films stalls with
identification of the ‘‘recurrent motif’’ and links it to a ‘‘unifying master figure: The Family’’ (83), while
Hoppenstand’s ‘‘Exorcising the Devil Babies’’ is a single article.
4. Ray Narducy usefully has pointed out that Rosemary’s Baby ‘‘was influential in causing the horror
genre to focus on the child as evil’’ (402) since it predates a rash of films with a similar theme, but accounts
for the film as merely ‘‘a cultural reaction to the radical, protesting ‘children’ of the 1960s’’ (402–03). As
many others have noted, The Exorcist might be seen as the culmination of a trend in representations of
evil offspring initiated by Rosemary’s Baby.
5. Larsen also briefly notes that scientific imaging would contribute to ‘‘anxiety’’ about the potential
monstrosity of fetuses but declines to pursue a historical reading of this phenomenon (241). For a more
recent discussion of ‘‘fetal monstrosity’’ that is similarly tangential in its approach to the cinematic rep-
resentation thereof, see Andrew Scahill, ‘‘Deviled Eggs: Teratogenesis and the Gynecological Gothic in
the Cinema of Monstrous Birth."
6. As Wells cogently points out, ‘‘The history of the horror film is essentially a history of anxiety in
the twentieth century. . . . Arguably, more than any other genre, it has interrogated the deep-seated effects
of change and responded to the newly determined grand narratives of social, scientific, and philosophical
thought’’ (3).
7. Janelle Taylor’s history The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram discusses the pivotal role played by
medical imaging technology in motivating pro-life political campaigns.
8. The issue remains pertinent in the specific context of fetal homicide laws; the Unborn Victims of
Violence Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush on April 1, 2004. Pro-choice advocates like
the National Organization of Women have continued to voice concerns about the need to distinguish
between legal abortion and fetal homicide, fearing that such laws may be used as leverage to overturn
Roe v. Wade.
9. The Silent Scream (1984) presents a sonogram image reacting to its helpless position and obvi-
ously relies heavily upon both technological ‘‘insight’’ and its ability to grant the fetus subjectivity. I would
argue that The Silent Scream capitalizes on a pre-existing and growing acceptance of such imagery at the
same time that it furthers it.
10. See also Chapter 7, ‘‘Prenatal Technologies: Ultrasound and Amniocentesis’’ in Farquhar’s The
Other Machine, pp. 161–77, and Cheryl L. Meyer’s The Wandering Uterus.
11. For more on the rhetorical strategies that work to promote fetal personhood, see Newman,
pp. 7–27, and Hartouni, pp. 1–66.
12. See particularly Chapter 4, ‘‘The Evil Innocent,’’ especially ‘‘The Possessed Child,’’ pp. 101–05, and
Chapter 5, ‘‘The Monster,’’ pp. 110–36.
13. Rabuzzi is particularly concerned with the unnatural quality of women’s ‘‘prebirth visual encoun-
ter[s] with the fetus’’ via ultrasound: ‘‘Instead of the almost unconscious unity of the baby invisibly resting
inside the body, this is a sudden dislocation. Now what has seemed part of one’s self, albeit a new part, is
suddenly ‘other,’ separate, before its natural time for separation’’ (65).
14. It is true that an extradiegetic projection of reptilian skin and yellow eyes appears onscreen. This
image could be interpreted as a kind of ‘‘flashback’’ to her first glimpse of the baby. However, it could also
be a flashback to her experience of conceiving the child, which included visions of Satan, and—in my
opinion—does not settle the question either way. Instead, it reiterates our dependency on Rosemary’s
unreliable visual experience to draw such conclusions.
15. I would agree with his claim that the ‘‘final vacuum expulsion’’ of the alien strongly suggests a
reference to abortion (201), but it seems to me that Cobbs stops short of acknowledging the ways that fetal
threats loom throughout the film and broaden the scope of its social warning.

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16. For example: ‘‘a womb-like chamber where the crew of seven are woken up from their protracted
sleep’’ (Creed 129); ‘‘she expels the creature from the body of her spacepod’’ (Cobbs 201); ‘‘the gigantic
womb-like chamber in which rows of eggs are hatching’’ (Creed 130); Nostromo as womb=mother-ship
(Creed 130 and Skal 301); ‘‘the cozy womb-like atmosphere of the mess hall’’ (Bell-Metereau 15); ‘‘the
dominant motif of [Nostromo] is the interior of the human body—the windings and curvings of organs
and glands’’ (Cobbs 201); Kane as womb (Bell-Metereau 15 and Cobbs 201).
17. I am indebted to Dr. Karen Renner for pointing this out to me.
18. For an excellent reading of Nilsson’s Life photographs and the rhetorical strategy of their captions,
see Newman, pp. 10–16.
19. See Rowland, Farquhar, and Gena Corea’s The Mother Machine.
20. Skal suggests that ‘‘the chest-bursting scene . . . became the seventies’ surpassing evocation of
reproduction as unnatural parasitism’’ (301).
21. Rowland testified to the currency of outer space metaphors prior to Alien’s release with her char-
acterization of ‘‘the [medicalized] treatment of the fetus as both person and patient’’: ‘‘It is accompanied by
the alienation of women, who now become merely the ‘capsule’ for the fetus, a container or spaceship to
which the fetus is attached by a ‘maternal supply line’’’ (121).
22. For additional discussion of such conditions, see ‘‘Woman as a Dissolving Capsule: The Challenge
of Fetal Personhood’’ in Rowland’s Living Laboratories, pp. 118–55, and ‘‘Reproductive Interventions’’ in
Meyer, pp. 164–91.

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Hartouni, Valerie. Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the

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 Extreme Human Makeovers: Supernanny, the
Unruly Child, and Adulthood in Crisis

CATHERINE FOWLER
REBECCA KAMBUTA

In the cinema, there is little redemption for the evil child. As the perpetrator
of crimes ranging from selfishness and bullying to wanton destruction and
murder, the evil child threatens our belief in childhood innocence and good-
ness and is therefore made into a monstrous aberration. As sociologist Chris
Jenks argues, children who do not display the appropriate characteristics
(i.e., innocence, goodness, and sexual naivety) are symbolically expelled
from the category of childhood (128).1 Accordingly, since the evil children
in such films as The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy 1956), Village of the Damned
(Rilla Wolf 1960), and The Good Son (Joseph Ruben 1993) show no remorse
or ability to change, they must be destroyed at the end of the narrative.
Fortunately, when it comes to television, redemption is more easy to come
by; indeed, since 2004, thanks to the UK production company Ricochet
and Mary Poppins wanna-be Jo Frost, the business of redeeming evil
children, or tiny terrors, has become prime-time viewing material in the
series Supernanny. While fictional evil children are often too evil to be
redeemed, Supernanny insists that real tiny terrors can be changed—or, in
reality TV speak, ‘‘madeover’’—into little darlings.
In this essay, we explore the ways in which Supernanny accomplishes
the redemption of the bad child through three easy steps. First, filtered
through the conventions of makeover TV, badness is ‘‘converted’’ to unruli-
ness; second, blame is passed from the children to the parents through an
intricate structure built around five stages that establish Jo as our point of

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view and defer self-reflection (on the part of the parents) until the very end;
and third—and underpinning steps one and two—via references to mythic
notions of the child as innocent and good, Supernanny reinforces romantic
views that badness is not innate and can be cured.2
The makeover format of Supernanny is crucial to each of these three
steps, but the program also has to negotiate some areas of difference to
earlier makeover shows. As we will see, Supernanny channels ‘‘crisis,’’
pitting everyday expert Jo against the parents so as to involve us in its
new kind of ‘‘extreme human makeovers’’ [our emphasis]. We borrow this
phrase from journalist Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser, who coined it to express
concern about what happens on the teenage bad behavior show Brat Camp
(C4 2005). Werthan Buttenwieser argues that in airing personal problems
for the audience’s entertainment, Brat Camp is exploitative and ultimately
‘‘robs what is personal from unsuspecting minors for other’s consumption.’’
Furthermore, Werthan Buttenwieser contends that the show actually under-
mines the potentially positive effects of the therapy conducted at the ranch
by turning the teenagers into celebrity brats.
Supernanny, we will argue, attempts to soothe any concerns that may be
raised about the making over of children (particularly around the use of
non-consenting minors in the program) by giving equal focus to the adults.
Unlike in Brat Camp then, where the bad behavior, tantrums, swearing,
and violence of damaged teenagers is center stage, in Supernanny the equal
emphasis placed upon both Jo’s strategies for teaching the parents and the
adults’ crises of authority is meant to displace any objections we might
otherwise have to the making over of minors. One consequence of this
displacement is that both the parents and the children are madeover. The
double-makeover that Supernanny undertakes is executed by both drawing
from and extending the well-established formulae of makeover television.
Visualized as disorder, rowdiness, boisterousness, and disruptiveness, unruli-
ness can easily be tamed, the show claims, by a few simple lessons in com-
petent parenting from Jo Frost.3 Therefore, as well as attempting to displace
concerns about the exploitation of minors, Supernanny also dismisses
suggestions that the children Jo has come to help are in any way related to
the monstrous evil children found in the cinema.

EXTREME HUMAN MAKEOVERS

Whether transforming our bodies (Extreme Makeover ABC 2002–2007; The

Biggest Loser NBC 2004–; The Swan Fox 2004), our homes (Changing Rooms
BBC 1996–2004; Extreme Makeover Home Edition ABC 2003–), our wardrobes
(What Not to Wear BBC 2001–2007; Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Bravo
2003–2007; How to Look Good Naked UK Channel 4 2006–), our gardens
(Ground Force BBC 1997–2005), or even our cars (Pimp My Ride MTV

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2004–2007), ‘‘making over’’ predominantly involves cosmetic improvements

to appearances, be it surgery to reduce a large nose, or carpentry to increase
the size of a room, the right style of clothing to flatter one’s body shape, or the
use of landscaping to revive a tired-looking backyard. The spread of make-
over TV testifies to its appeal to audiences; however, for critics this spread
has not been unproblematic. June Deery and Misha Kavka highlight the
slippage that has occurred as home improvement programs have developed
into self-improvement programs. Precisely because The Swan follows the
formula set out for homes, Deery argues that the show ‘‘makes being (e.g.,
unattractive) more equivalent to having (e.g., an unattractive room)’’ (162).
In other words, for Deery, The Swan seems to imply that one is not born
attractive or unattractive; one is made so by one’s cosmetic choices. Mean-
while, in an essay that traces the development of makeover shows, Kavka
makes a similar point when she observes that ‘‘a distinction can be made
between an emphasis on doing and on being, between madeover subjects . . .
and the madeover self’’ (215).
This particular emphasis sets makeover TV aside from straight docu-
mentaries, in which people’s problems are interrogated, and talk shows,
through which people confess their sins, shame, and sorrow. In makeover
TV, then, change happens with little contextualization of, or interest in,
underlying problems. Deery acknowledges the surface tendency of make-
over TV when she comments on the plastic surgery show The Swan that
‘‘while psychological therapy is offered to participants, this kind of alteration
is hard to detect on film and is therefore largely ignored’’ (166). Deery’s
comment explains the production choices taken in the makeover genre to
prioritize changes that can be seen over changes that are below the surface,
whether psychological, emotional, ethical, behavioral, or attitudinal. It is not
so much that makeover TV precludes the latter kinds of changes, but more
that its conventions construct the changes we can see as more fascinating
and more significant than changes that we can’t. Even on Extreme Make-
Over: Home Edition, in which the families chosen for the program’s benev-
olent acts of home-building are given more back-story, the articulation of that
story happens in a fragmented manner in and around the real business of
building them a new home. It is clear from this prioritization that the series
is not really about the family; it is about the transformation of a house into
a spectacular home. By remaining on the surface and avoiding analysis of
causes, the makeover genre is staunch in its belief that what the chosen sub-
jects need is not counseling or the talking cure but rather to consume, to
shop, and to be made better, ‘‘betterness’’ being measured in terms of the
lavishing of ‘‘improvements’’ upon their surface environments.
At first glance, Supernanny would seem a very different type of make-
over show in both form and content. For one, the series is far more complex
in structure than most makeover television. Deery articulates that the typical
‘‘dramatic process’’ (162) of these other programs occurs over three stages,

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beginning with the ‘‘cataloguing and display of problems and inadequacies,’’

followed by the ‘‘dramatic intervention and transformation,’’ and then closing
with the ‘‘before-and-after revelations displaying the new’’ (162). By contrast,
Supernanny has an intricate structure built around five stages. First, in a
direct address to the camera, the parents describe the problems they are
having. These descriptions (sometimes, but not always, drawn from their
audition tape) are accompanied by shots of the offending behavior. Once
the family has been introduced to the viewers at home, Jo travels to the fam-
ily home (in the U.S. version she watches clips of the family on her portable
DVD player while being chauffeured around in an English black cab), ready
to begin her ‘‘rescue mission.’’ In stage two, Jo arrives and instructs the par-
ents to ‘‘carry on as normal’’ so that she can observe the household dynamics
and in her own words ‘‘take mental notes’’ about the issues that need address-
ing. Jo’s observation period (usually a couple of days) is followed by stage
three, in which she sits down with the parents, talks through what she has
observed, and advises them on how to address their problems. Jo then teaches
them new techniques and remains with the family during the parents’ initial
implementation of her parenting plan. In stage four, Jo leaves the family alone
to continue the implementation of her advice. Finally, in stage five she returns,
shows the parents footage of stage four on her laptop, discusses where they
are still going wrong, provides further advice, and then leaves again. The
program closes with a shot of the family together, madeover and happy.
Supernanny’s extension to the tri-part formula typical of most makeover
TV is produced to cope with the problem of the ‘‘human turn’’ which, again,
Werthan Buttenwieser’s concerns might be said to address. With its
dedication to the transformation of familial dynamics, involving changes in
attitudes, beliefs, emotional connection, and expression that manifest them-
selves in more harmonious behavior, it would seem that Supernanny poses a
challenge to the superficiality of the makeover format. With this in mind, we
want to suggest that Supernanny has initiated a third wave of makeover pro-
grams. While the first wave madeover our living spaces and the second wave
our bodies, this third wave turns its corrective lens to our social=familial
interactions. Programs in this third wave include: Brat Camp (UK Channel
4 2005–2007; USA ABC 2004–), Nanny 911 (Fox 2004–), Demons to Darlings
(BBC 2004), The House of Tiny Tearaways (BBC 2004–), Little Angels (BBC 3
2004–2006), Bad Behaviour (UK Channel 4 2005), Ladette to Lady (ITV 2005–)
Driving Mum and Dad Mad (ITV1 2005–2006), Redemption Hill (NZ Channel
2 2005–2006), and The World’s Strictest Parents (BBC 2008–2009). It is not our
intention to discuss these programs here. Rather, we include this list to indi-
cate the necessity for further engagement with the makeover genre’s ‘‘human
turn’’ that might follow from our own analysis of Supernanny, the originating
show.
The third wave of makeover TV serves competing demands. On the one
hand, it provides new opportunities for reflection and learning while, on the

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other, it sustains the entertaining and enticing attractions of the first two
waves. To illustrate the new emphasis cited above, compared to many make-
over series, Supernanny is rigorous in the opportunities it gives the subjects
and the viewers to reflect on what needs to change and how the changes
might happen. As if to acknowledge that working with children and famil-
ies requires more care and consideration than other makeover shows,
Supernanny devotes more time to the teaching and learning process. How-
ever, as much as this difference might seem to separate Supernanny from
other makeover shows, the series still incorporates many of the features that
have made the first two waves so successful with audiences. For example,
because the focus is on making over family relationships, there is even more
justification for the invasion of private lives that has been so central to the
appeal of the makeover genre. For, as with most makeover TV, in Super-
nanny we are given complete ‘‘scopic access’’ (Deery 169) to the subjects,
in this case family life in the home. In stage one, for example, we witness
shocking scenes that titillate and grab both our and Jo’s attention.
Furthermore, for all its focus on rehabilitation, Supernanny ultimately
does not allow for the sort of deeper psychological explorations that such
changes would necessitate. For one, it focuses on the behavior of the
children rather than any root causes of their behavior, thereby discarding
psychological explanations for their conduct. The emphasis on unruliness
rather than psychological issues works to the program’s advantage, for unruli-
ness suggests actions, deeds, and performance patterns, surface features that
can be corrected. In addition, the structure of the show is such that any
self-reflection on the part of the parents is deferred until the end. In this
way, Supernanny closely resembles The Swan, in which, as Derry has noted,
subjects are not allowed to look in mirrors or have family members around
them while they are undergoing their procedures. Instead, it is Jo who com-
ments on and guides us through this initial judgment. As we discuss later, the
elongated structure of the program is designed to ensure that it is not until par-
ents see themselves on Jo’s laptop that they realize that she is right and they
are wrong. This delay in self-reflection on the part of the parents means that
Jo’s insights and facial expressions become our main point of identification:
we see the family through her eyes and judge them through her words. Echo-
ing makeover television’s growing ‘‘dependence on outside . . . agencies’’
(Deery 161), it makes ‘‘expert’’ Jo’s role pivotal to successful change. Jo
becomes charged with identifying and eliminating surface disorder rather
than diagnosing and treating emotional and psychological problems.
Jo’s role here is significant, for it allows the series to produce a ‘‘quick fix’’
that can be easily accomplished within the pre-set, one-hour format. Systems
of point of view are crucial in convincing us that transformation has occurred.
First, our relationship to Jo is established in the sequences in which she
comments upon the opening scenes of family disorder, then, we observe
the family once they are left alone, and finally we watch video footage with

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the parents and witness how their change of perspective leads to the
figurative ‘‘reveal’’ we have come to expect from makeover TV. Similar to
the denials of personal reflection (in both senses of the word), Supernanny
saves the moment of revelation for the camera. More importantly, it also uni-
versalizes the family’s problems and invites engagement from viewers who
may be experiencing the same challenges with disorder, disobedience, and
discord. This emphasis on a journey toward rehabilitation enables the series
to act as a teaching tool for viewers, who in some episodes are able to follow
tips that appear on the screen.
The quick fix is crucial if the makeover is to keep viewers’ attention. It is
also a further example of the visual rather than verbal nature of the makeover
format and its mediated nature, as we need to see rather than be told of the
transformation that occurs in family dynamics. Just as how in The Swan, it is
crucial that revelation happens ‘‘on camera’’ and is ‘‘seen’’ by viewers at
home, Supernanny uses its expert figure, Jo Frost, to both foreground and
delay the mediation of the process of making over. Similarly, Supernanny
delays the moment of revelation in order to keep viewers engaged until
the end of the program. These delaying tactics re-confirm that the entertain-
ment values of makeover TV remain a priority for Supernanny. Turning to
some concrete examples from the program, we will also see how the double
makeover (of both children and adults) comes about.

FROM UNRULY CHILDREN TO UNRULY ADULTS:

ADULTHOOD IN CRISIS

Stage one of Supernanny performs various important maneuvers. The family

is introduced, and we are given visual images of the children. We see them
kick, scream, bite, punch, swear, jump on the furniture, rip the wallpaper,
and generally refuse to do what they are told. The parents then give their
views on what they think are their problems. It is important that we hear
the parents’ perspective on their children because the language they use
establishes their belief in badness rather than unruliness. Their opening
words conjure up a familiar image of the Dionysian child, who is devilish
and self-centered and wreaks havoc wherever s=he goes. According to Jenks,
this image ‘‘rests on the assumption of an initial evil or corruption within the
child—Dionysus being the prince of wine, revelry and nature. . . . The child is
Dionysian in as much as it loves pleasure, it celebrates self-gratification’’ (62).
The Dionysian image owes much to the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of original
sin and was popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The fear of
hell and eternal damnation for the child gave rise to a particular model of
parenting, one that was harsh and often cruel. As Jenks puts it, ‘‘in the
tradition of this image, a severe view of the child is sustained, one that
saw socialization as almost a battle but certainly a form of combat where

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the headstrong and stubborn subject had to be ‘broken,’ but all for its own
good’’ (63).
The language used by the parents on Supernanny to describe the
problems they are having with their children echoes Jenks’s language, for
it suggests that childrearing is a battle of equals in which the child, rather
than the parent, has the power. For example, in one episode, Wendy tells
us that her daughter Maryanne is ‘‘like a bomb waiting to explode’’ and that
her ‘‘tantrums are getting worse.’’ Wendy is shown cowering in a corner
while her seven-year-old daughter hurls abuse at her, calling her a ‘‘fat bitch’’
(‘‘Agate’’). Likewise, Tami tells us that dressing her four-year-old daughter
Maile in the morning is ‘‘impossible’’ and that it often ‘‘takes up to two hours
to win the battle’’ (‘‘Keilen’’). In another episode, dad Alex tells us that meal-
time ‘‘is like a war’’ and that he would ‘‘rather stick needles in [his] eyes’’ than
endure another one (‘‘Bixley’’). The language used by these parents evokes a
powerful image of warfare.
If the parents talk about their children as if they were warriors who have
waged battle against them, the images show the parents basically surrender-
ing. These purposely shocking images are followed by the parents’ verbal
expressions of desperation. Most of the parents on Supernanny admit they
have ‘‘given up’’ or ‘‘given in’’ to their children rather than enforce any type
of discipline. Kelly, a twenty-five-year-old single mother, tells Jo that she
‘‘can’t be bothered’’ with discipline because the constant fighting between
her two children Sophie (five) and Callum (four) has worn her down. For
Kelly, just making it through each day is hard enough: ‘‘I don’t know how
much attention they think I can give both of them. You know, there’s other
things I’m trying to do. Even like if I’m cooking dinner they’ll play up. Just
day to day things I have to do’’ (‘‘Steer’’). Giving up is often likened by the
parents to defeat in battle. In another episode, Shaun and Tami tell Jo that
when it comes to their four children, they have ‘‘conceded defeat,’’ they have
‘‘waved the white flag.’’ Tami reveals that she often gives in to four-year-old
Maile ‘‘so that everybody else can have a better day,’’ despite the fact that this
strategy is clearly not working (‘‘Keilen’’). Karen, mother to four energetic
children, expresses similar sentiments, revealing to the camera that ‘‘over
time [the children’s bad behavior] has sort of drained me. I feel like I’ve
got no energy to kind of fight and argue with them. So it’s easier to give in
to them most of the time’’ (‘‘Collins’’). Clearly, the language chosen by the
parents in Supernanny echoes Jenks’s, and opening sequences are edited
to underscore this view, in preparation for the change that will occur in both
the parents’ attitudes and the children’s behavior by the end of the program.
Indeed, returning to our opening point, the parents could be said to adhere
to the cinematic view of the evil child as beyond redemption.
The time given over to the parents’ enunciation of the destruction
perpetrated by the child upon the household in the opening sequences
assumes extra weight once we consider our earlier observation that unlike

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documentaries or talk shows, makeover television does not privilege

explanation and confession. Typically, in Supernanny talk and reflection
are largely Jo’s domain (although as we will see later they are also gifts that
she bestows on the parents in stage five, when she invites them to view foot-
age of their first failed attempts to implement her rules and techniques). Stage
one thus provides the first step toward an implementation of the ideological
view of the child that underpins the program, that is, that children are not
devils (as the parents see them) but are instead, at heart, angels.
A tension is set up between the parents and Jo in terms of differing beliefs
in the child as innately good or bad, and Jo is established as a key point of
identification for viewers. In stage one, the parents despair at the unchange-
able deviltry of their children. According to the parents, this behavior is
beyond their control, but according to Jo, it is not. It is very clear from the lan-
guage Jo uses and the visuals chosen that she does not endorse the Dionysian
view of the child; rather, her advice and practice seems to stem from quite the
opposite end of the spectrum: the Apollonian child. Drawing from Jenks’s
work once more, we can see how the Apollonian child is to goodness as
the Dionysian is to badness. Apollonian children are ‘‘angelic, innocent and
untainted by the world which they have recently entered,’’ and they possess
‘‘a natural goodness.’’ Accordingly, models of parenting that embrace such a
belief are also conceived of differently: ‘‘within this model . . . we honour and
celebrate the child and dedicate ourselves to reveal its newness and unique-
ness’’ (Jenks 65). The Apollonian view of the child rejects the doctrine of orig-
inal sin and, as Jenks points out, is associated with the work of Jean Jacques
Rousseau and other Romantic novelists=poets. In this model, ‘‘children . . . are
not curbed nor beaten into submission; they are encouraged, enabled, facili-
tated’’ (Jenks 65). Jo’s view of the child as essentially Apollonian and therefore
deserving of encouragement and nurturing as well as order and boundaries
creates the tension that drives the series. It sits in contrast to the view of the
parents that their child is innately bad and that consequently there is nothing
that they can do to curb bad behavior. What is more, and leading us to stage
two of redemption, the opening sequences make it apparent that Supernanny
features not one protagonist to be madeover but two: the children and the
parents, for it is the parents, not the children, who are responsible for the
chaotic state of the family.
Camera, editing, and dialogue throughout Jo’s observation period in
stage two and the advice session in stage three swiftly pass the blame for
the unruliness of the child to the parents. The importance of Jo’s point of
view is established during the observation period. Despite the implication
of her chosen word ‘‘observation’’ that she will be an unobtrusive fly on
the wall, Jo actually comments directly to the camera as well as pulling faces,
allowing the viewer to gain insight into what she is thinking and reinforcing
her dominant view of the unruliness of the children and ineffectiveness of
the parents. After observing a chaotic breakfast time at the Jeans’ house, Jo

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says disgustedly, ‘‘Jessie this morning had chips for breakfast. Leah did not
have anything’’ (‘‘Jean’’). On another occasion, having witnessed a typical
meal-time in the Bixley household that ends with seven-year-old Brandon
running away from the dinner table screaming, Jo steps out for a breath of
fresh air. She shares her thoughts with the viewer: ‘‘I can’t believe the drama
that went on over dinner time. They’d all lost control. We have a little boy
who’s screaming and freaking out, because he was being forced fed by a
sausage being jammed in his face. It was absolutely disgusting’’ (‘‘Bixley’’).
Finally, while watching Debbie, a single mother of three, struggle to maintain
control over her three young daughters in a busy car-park, Jo remarks, ‘‘This
is absolutely crazy. This mother knows what’s going on here—she is totally
out of control when it comes to her children being in public and something
needs to be done ASAP’’ (‘‘Seniors’’).
This theme of children and adults needing to be put back in their proper
places extends into stages three and four. At a family meeting, for example,
Jo informs Steve and Lucy that their two-and-a-half-year-old son controls the
household: ‘‘What Charlie says goes. He’s running the household. This little
boy is doing what he wants, when he wants and not being told any-
thing . . . for how he’s behaving.’’ The evening prior to the meeting provides
a snapshot of his controlling behavior: Charlie refuses to eat his dinner (he
eats Smarties later in the evening), he turns the television off while his older
brother Billy is watching it and then throws a tantrum when Billy tries to turn
it back on, and after a two-hour struggle to get him into his pajamas, he
refuses to go to bed. Jo tells the Woods that she’s been a nanny for fifteen
years and has ‘‘never seen a boy run riot and control his Mum and Dad . . .
like [she] has in this household.’’ According to Jo, Steve and Lucy have lost
sight of their ‘‘proper’’ roles as parents: ‘‘I don’t see a Mum and I don’t see
a Dad. I see mates and one little chief and four Indians’’ (‘‘Woods’’). In
another episode, Jo tells Chris and Colleen to ‘‘grow up’’ and recognize their
responsibilities as parents: ‘‘You guys are the parents here and when they’re
misbehaving you act like teenagers. . . . I suggest the pair of you grow up right
now and get real with the responsibilities you have in front of your face’’
(‘‘Christiansen’’). In another episode, Jo tells Debbie that she needs to disci-
pline her own children rather than running next door to her Dad’s house
whenever the girls misbehave: ‘‘Every time you call Dad you undermine
yourself and become one of the kids’’ (‘‘Seniors’’).
Several parents even readily admit they have relinquished power to their
children. This issue of parents behaving like children resurfaces when parents
acknowledge that they have lost control of their children. David, father of
three young girls, admits, ‘‘I’d like to be the boss [but] I don’t feel that I am
right now or that I have ever been.’’ David is shown struggling to get his
four-year-old daughter strapped into her car seat—she has lost her Care Bear
book and is screaming at the top of her lungs (‘‘Jean’’). Likewise Kevin, also a
father of three, tells us, ‘‘I’m sick of being pushed around by the kids.’’ Like

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most other nights, all three of Kevin’s children have climbed into their parents’
bed, causing mayhem and disrupting sleep (‘‘Charles’’). In all of these exam-
ples, the problem to be remedied is the loss of parental control. Supernanny
links familial disruption to a problematic reversal of the parent=child roles. In
the examples provided above, the adults are acting childishly, scared of their
children, while the children have too much power over the adults.
Jo’s solution to this problem is to prompt the parents to use their ‘‘auth-
ority.’’ In order to take back control of their households, Jo believes parents
must learn to take responsibility for their actions and their children. In every
episode, Jo implements a strict new household routine and system of disci-
pline designed to help the parents reassert control. Whether tackling how
to control the household, ward off chaos, offer structure and organization,
achieve a work=home balance, deal with conflicting parenting styles, foster
effective communication, provide a healthy diet, or institute one-on-one time
or fun activities to make the family work together, everything comes back to
restoring children and adults to their proper places. In stages three and four,
then, blame is passed from the children to the adults, who continue to fail in
their duties, and Jo’s expertise is put into action. In stage four in particular,
we see much evidence of the crisis of adulthood as the parents try to take
back control. We might suggest, then, that the opening sequences of Super-
nanny accomplish what Jenks terms a ‘‘conceptual eviction’’ (128) of adult-
hood that has to be righted by Jo, who will restore adults and children to
their proper places, a solution that is meant to benefit both the children
and the adults.
Jo’s carefully chosen words above make it very clear that, though she
may judge the families, she also sympathizes with their despair. This typically
occurs at moments in which Jo’s incisive vision allows her to see what lies
behind the parents’ ‘‘brave faces.’’ Thus, in one episode she tells Carolyn
Pandit, mother of four, highly independent children:

. . . how you haven’t already had a breakdown, I do not know. But

because you put on a brave face, because you want to do the best you
can, because you’re a Mum and you love your children it makes you
carry on every day. (‘‘Pandit’’)

Similarly, Jo tells forty-three-year-old Barbara, mother of three, that the lack

of discipline and the resulting chaos in the household is visible in her demea-
nor: ‘‘I see a Barbara who’s emotionally drained, that actually wants to be
Barbara and not Mum 24=7’’ (‘‘Jean’’). Jo is also not fooled by Lorraine’s
performance. She tells viewers ‘‘The first thing I noticed about Lorraine
was this great big smile that she had painted on her face. But it was fake
and I could see right through that’’ (‘‘Amaral’’). In Supernanny, the parents’
‘‘makeover’’ is shown to be beneficial not only for themselves but also for
their children.

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In stage five, Jo provides the final apparatus of reflection: the DVD

footage of the family when left alone. After witnessing a variety of footage
(both good and bad), Jo returns to the family home to show the parents where
they are still going wrong. According to Jo, the DVD footage plays a crucial
part in the transformation process, as it allows the parents to ‘‘see with their
own eyes the mistakes they have made’’ (‘‘Wischmeyer’’).4 Rather than leave
it up to the parents to evaluate their ‘‘performances,’’ Jo stops the footage at
particular moments to point out when they fail to use the techniques correctly.
Jo effectively acts as a parent, both to the children involved in the program
and to their caregivers who have failed in their duties. While watching the
DVD footage, many of the parents cover their heads in shame or embarrass-
ment. Jenn tells the viewers that she was ‘‘really surprised at how many times
[they] messed up, ‘‘cause [she] really thought things were going much better’’
(‘‘Ririe’’). Likewise, Joanne also says, ‘‘Watching the DVD was a real eye-
opener. Some of the things that Jo told us before we were still doing’’
(‘‘Burnett’’). Finally, Deirdre realizes that she only sees the bad things her
daughters do. She tells Jo that she is ‘‘ashamed of [herself] for . . . putting blin-
ders on . . . to their good behavior and just focusing on the bad’’ (‘‘Facente’’).
Thus, the DVD footage provides the tool for self-reflection.
It would be easy to see this ritual of viewing the footage as just another
way of implementing the makeover’s tendency for the unmediated to
become not just ‘‘mediated but mediatized’’ that is, to translate unmediated
reality into ‘‘media-worthy . . . media image[s]’’(Deery 160). Yet there seems
to be more going on here. The footage is the last in a number of apparatuses
for reflection that begins with Jo’s facial expressions and asides to the camera
and continues with her first sit-down session with the family and her advice
as they try to implement strategies in her presence. Jo’s commentary through-
out the show situates her as an ‘‘expert eye’’ that sees exactly what is wrong.
Her on-screen persona is such that viewers are encouraged to frown with her
at the noise and mess created by the unruly child and stare open-mouthed at
the incompetence of their parents. Jo’s commentary gives her an authority
that she otherwise would not deserve. After all, Jo has no formal qualifica-
tions and doesn’t arrive complete with theories about how the family might
be improved. Instead, she relies on her nineteen years of experience working
with children. She watches, comments on what she sees, and then draws
from tried and tested strategies (tried and tested on the various episodes of
Supernanny as much as in her nannying career) that are appropriate for
the needs of each family. Also, as more than one reviewer of the show has
pointed out, she has no children of her own. Jo’s inexperience has been cited
often by those who disapprove of her methods: one respondent to an online
forum wrote, ‘‘I have seen some 6–7 episodes and I’m disgusted by this
show. Putting people’s problems in front of a camera where a woman
who [doesn’t] even know what it’s like to be a mother is just making money
[out of] people’s problems’’ (‘‘Forums’’). Clearly, Jo’s persona does not work

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for this viewer, and we might see the acts of looking and listening that Jo
undertakes as an attempt to win over those who don’t immediately warm
to her.

CONCLUSION

In Supernanny, as in much makeover television, we watch as the parents

‘‘capitulate . . . to the rule of the expert’’ (Deery 169).5 The breach between
Jo and the parents is evident in the opening sequences, but it is not
far-fetched to suggest, as we do, that this breach can also be thought of in
terms of how Jo and the parents position themselves in relation to the
Apollonian to Dionysian spectrum of the child. In common conceptions of
adulthood, the child is seen as being incomplete and adulthood as the
much-desired state.6 With its emphasis on the teaching and learning of
parenting, however, Supernanny would seem to imply that adulthood is a
state one might learn. As the narrator of the US version tells us, ‘‘children
don’t come with instruction manuals!’’ the implication being that this knowl-
edge is exactly what Jo will provide.
For if Supernanny emerges out of current thinking on child-raising to be
found in books such as Diana Loomans’s What all Children Want their
Parents to Know (2005) and E. D. Hill’s I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Parent
(2008), then this literature is in turn informed by centuries of debate about the
boundaries between the child and the adult and the roles of children and
parents in functional society. Over the previous five centuries, the concept
of the child underwent a radical transformation: once thought of as little more
than chattel (with virtually no legal protection), children are now seen as an
investment in the future, one that must be vigilantly guarded and expertly
tended if it is to yield a good result.7 Today, childhood continues to be strictly
policed with various government strategies designed to curb juvenile delin-
quency and other social problems, such as child obesity, youth drinking, teen
pregnancy, and child abuse. Children are seen as worthwhile investments,
with parents spending significant amounts of time and money on their
children’s education and other pursuits. Families today are child-centered
whereas in the past children were largely invisible.
Supernanny intervenes in this history and these debates over child-rearing
by conceptualizing the unruly adult as well as the unruly child. Although much
discussion has taken place about childhood and the child being in crisis, less
has occurred about adulthood in crisis. If in Supernanny, children are unruly
when they stop acting like Apollonian angels, adults are unruly until they start
acting like a very specific sort of parent. Essentially, then, Supernanny pivots
on a common assumption—that childhood and adulthood are so intimately
linked that, as Jenks argues, we cannot understand one without the other:
‘‘the child . . . cannot be imagined except in relation to a conception of the

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adult, but essentially it becomes impossible to generate a well-defined sense of

the adult and indeed adult society, without first positioning the child’’ (Jenks 3).
Jenks’s assertion that the child must be and more usually is positioned ‘‘first’’
before the adult can be defined perhaps explains the need for the double
makeover in Supernanny. Therefore, just as it is not possible to define the adult
without first defining the child (since theory dictates that the adult is what the
child ‘‘becomes’’), so it is not possible to makeover the child without also
making over the adult: the two are so entangled as to be interdependent and
mutually supporting.
Yet Supernanny’s redemption of the bad child is accomplished not only
through shifting blame to the adults but also thanks to an expansion of the
makeover’s tri-part structure. Supernanny’s intricate five-stage structure
delays the parents’ self-reflection until the very end of the show. Jo Frost
provides the dramatic arc to this journey. She acts as our eyes and ears, sym-
pathizing and criticizing, supporting and cajoling, reinforcing Apollonian
rather than Dionysian views of the child, and ultimately restoring children
and adults to their proper places. These underlying references to mythic
notions of the child as good or bad help us to understand both the dramatic
arc of the program and its ideological underpinnings.
At the end of the reinforcement period, Jo leaves the family for the final
time, but not before she has had her chance to sum up the changes that have
taken place. Standing outside one home, Jo remarks: ‘‘I’m really proud of the
family. I mean, just over three weeks ago, everyone was in tears, including
myself, but now I feel like crying for the opposite reason. You know it’s
priceless to see the changes—it’s overwhelming!’’ (‘‘Ball’’). On many levels,
Jo is right. It is overwhelming to see the changes that happen to family
dynamics, largely because they happen so relatively quickly and easily.
Having redeemed not just unruly children but also unruly parents, Jo Frost
moves on to her next family. But the makeover television genre and the evil
child on television will never be the same again. The former has undertaken
a ‘‘human’’ turn that has challenged the overly superficial nature of trans-
formation upon which it has relied for its success, and although Supernanny
does not quite manage to probe the emotional or psychological reasons for
the family crises it examines (we may have to wait for a fourth wave for that),
it does provide new opportunities for reflection and learning (as opposed to
mere consuming). Meanwhile, the evil child is redeemed. Downgraded to
unruliness, the child’s problems are recognized as stemming from the adult
ineptitude, and although this maneuver suggests a crisis in adulthood, the
parents in question seem to emerge from the experience with more insight
and understanding. Supernanny’s biggest reveal of all, then, is not the mak-
ing over of Dionysian devils into Apollonian angels or of childish parents into
responsible adults. Instead, it is the transformation of reality television into a
space for entertainment, drama, crisis, and a superficial place of teaching
and learning.

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NOTES

1. Karen Corteen and Phil Scraton argue that the notion of childhood is inherently flawed: ‘‘No issue
reveals the contradictions within the politics of childhood as starkly as that of sexuality, its definition and
regulation. As ‘non-adults,’ children are assumed to be asexual. While they are socialized into gender-
appropriate roles from birth, a universal feature of patriarchal societies, they are expected to retain a
sexual naivety. Yet the images which surround them, implicit and explicit, of hegemonic=dominant
masculinity and emphasized=subordinate femininity are all pervasive and all persuasive. The daily
experiences of children and young people are contextualized by constructions of masculinity and feminin-
ity which are both gendered and sexualized’’ (76).
2. Because of the large number of episodes broadcast, we examine only seasons one and two of
Supernanny (both the UK and U.S. versions). These seasons were chosen largely for their availability:
US seasons one and two are available on DVD. The UK episodes were purchased directly from Ricochet.
Please note: the episodes contained on the DVDs may differ from those broadcast on television.
3. Here we draw upon Ron Becker’s observation that ‘‘regardless of the family, all problems are
rooted in incompetent parenting’’ (184).
4. The U.S. version utilizes split screens so that the viewers are able to see the parents’ reactions as
they watch the footage.
5. Deery argues that the participants of makeover television ‘‘capitulate . . . to the rule of the expert
and the power of the camera.’’ We will discuss the latter when we turn to the shifts in point of view that
underpin the learning journey of Supernanny.
6. See Hoyles, Postman, and Jenks.
7. See Zelizer, Hays, and Stearns.

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‘‘Bixley Family.’’ Supernanny. Season 2. UK. Ricochet, 2009. DVD.
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Deery, June. ‘‘Interior Design: Commodifying Self and Place in Extreme Makeover,
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Macmillan, 2006. 159–74. Print.
‘‘Facente Family.’’ Supernanny: US Season 2. Roadshow Entertainment, 2005. DVD.
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Hill, E. D. I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Parent: Set the Boundaries they Need and
Really Want. Nashville: Nelson Thomas, 2008. Print.
Hoyles, Martin. The Politics of Childhood. London: Journeyman, 1989. Print.
‘‘Jean Family.’’ Supernanny: Season 1. US. Ventura Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.
Jenks, Chris. Childhood. London: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Kavka, Misha. ‘‘Changing Properties: the Makeover Show Crosses the Atlantic.’’ The
Great American Makeover—Television, History, Nation. Ed. Dana Heller.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 211–29. Print.
‘‘Keilen Family.’’ Supernanny: Season 2. US. Roadshow Entertainment, 2005. DVD.
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Successful Parenting. Tiburon, CA: New World Library, 2005. Print.
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‘‘Ririe Family.’’ Supernanny: Season 1. US. Ventura Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.
Scraton, Phil. ‘Childhood’ in ‘Crisis’? London: UCL Press, 1997. Print.
‘‘Seniors Family.’’ Supernanny. Season 2. UK. Ricochet, 2009. DVD.
Stearns, Peter. Childhood in World History. London: Taylor and Francis, 2005. Print.
‘‘Steer Family.’’ Supernanny. Season 1. UK. Ricochet, 2009. DVD
‘‘Forums: Supernanny: She Doesn’t Even Have Her Own Kids!’’ TV.com. CBS
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‘‘Wischmeyer Family.’’ Supernanny: Season 1. US. Ventura Home Entertainment,
2005. DVD.
Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless: The Changing Social Value of Children. 2nd
ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Print.

187
 Index

Academy Awards: Rosemary’s Baby 151 Creed, Barbara 131, 138–9, 154–5
Alien 161–8; “Abortion Parable”, as 162;
dangers of visual contact 161; everyday Deery, June 175–6
reality, distance from 67; fetuses 163–168 Dionysus; Supernanny, and 178, 185
see also fetuses; Freud, and 162; hostile- Douglas, Ann 130
fetus 165; human interiors 150; male Duden, Barbara 155
vulnerability 164–6; Mother 164; Dumbledore; avoidance of sole culpability
psychoanalytic approach 162; sex and 87–8; blind spots of 95; cave, and 101;
gender, disagreement over 162; test-tube closeting of 99; Death Eaters, and 92;
baby, and 166; undefined borders, anxiety educator, as 94–5; evil, views on 95–6;
of 166 Freud, and 104; homosexual, as 99;
intelligence of 101; Katz, lesson of 89;
Bad Seed, The 2, 5, 69, 151, 173 manipulation, and 92–3; Merope, and 94;
Baker, Rick 36–7 methods and motives of 67; murder of 96;
Becker, Ernest 49 pederast, as 100; poison, and 89–90; regret
Bixby, Jerome 2 of 102; Riddle, Tom see Tom Riddle;
Blatty, William Peter 129–30, 144 theory of evil, and 96; wizard culture 90
Bradbury, Ray 1–2
Brat Camp 174 Electra complex 83–4
Baudrillard, Jean 68 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 11
Berenstein, Rhona 166 ethics 66–84; Exorcist, The 66; Halloween 69–
Bollywood 108–125; barometer for India’s 72 see also Halloween; Home Movie and
economy 109–10; Gauri 121–5 see also 77–82 see also Home Movie; interpretation
Gauri; Hindi cinema, 109–11 see also Hindi of 69; Joshua 72–7 see also Joshua; Orphan
cinema; horror, and 108–125; liberalization 82–4 see also Orphan; reassurance, and 68–
of India’s economy, and 108; Phoonk 117– 9
21 see also Phoonk; Ringu, and 110; textual Exorcist, The 129–45; arc, and 136;
hybridity, and 112 Augustine 134–5, 141; Bollywood, and 110;
Bozzuto, James C. 143 Cold War, and 144; demonological and
Breuer, Josef 132–3 medical discourses, tensions between 134;
Büssing, Sabine 154 dissociation, and 131–2; ethics 66; female
Buttenwieser, Sarah Werthan 174 orgasms, and 136; film vs book,
comparison of 138; Folie à Deux 141–3 see
CGI (computer-generated imagery); infants also Folie à Deux; Freud 130–1 see also
39–43; metaphor, and 42; new and Freud, Sigmund; good vs evil, as 141;
improved technology 42; Splice, and 41–2 history, and 3; infants, and 28; Oedipal
Charcot, Jean-Martin 131, 135–7 conflict 130,132, 145; omissions of film
Children of the Corn; feral children 13 137; Ouija board, and 140; political
Cloud, John 100 interest, and 134; possession 9; reaction of
Clover, Carol 7–8 3; rebellion, and 143–4; rejection of male
Cobbs, John 161 scrutiny 139; shock value of 129; textbook
Cohen, Larry 34–9 hysteria 135
Constable, Catherine 162

188
 INDEX

Family Guy 29–30 Halloween; evil, and 71–2; Freud, and 70–71;
female audiences; Alien, and 166 implication of the audience 69; Joshua, and
female vulnerability; Alien, and 153 72, 77; Orphan, The 82–4; origin story, as
feral children 11–15; animalistic nature of 14– 71; update of original, as 70
15; Beware! Children at Play 13; disease or Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 87–
mysterious event 12–13; A High Wind in 104; book of potions 91–2, 98; capitalism,
Jamaica 11–12; Lord of the Flies, and 12, and 104; cave, and 101; Chambers of
14; Offspring, and 13–14; redneck or Secrets, and 88–9; coming out story, as 102;
hillbilly societies 14; terminology,6–7; Freud, and 87; Hogwarts, and 89–91, 104
zombie and vampire children 12 see also Hogwarts; memory, and 88;
fetuses; Alien, and 154–5, 163, 165–6 see also nurturing, and 89; “queer child”
Alien; California Penal Code, and 152; experience, as 89–90; Riddle, Tom and 87–
hostile nature of 167; individual and social 8 see also Riddle, Tom; Room of
consciousness 153; invasion of 168; photos Requirement 90–1; Slughorn, and 92, 96–7,
of 151; Rosemary’s Baby 155–61 see also 102; shame, and 103; unacknowledged
Rosemary’s Baby; test-tube baby, and 165; child, and 88–9
vulnerability of 167–8 Hindi cinema; commercial success of 110;
The Fifth Child 45, 47, 49, 50–52; animalistic indifference to social issues 111;
nature, and 53; cultural tensions 57–8; melodrama, and 112; song and dance, and
Freud, and 48; history of 62; immortality 112; Vaastu Shastra, and 113–17 see also
striving 55–61; Kristeva, Julia 47–9 see also Vaastu Shastra
Kristeva, Julia; Lessing, Doris, and 37, 46– History of evil children in film and literature
7, 51–5, 62 see also Lessing, Doris; Lovatts, 1–4; Bad Seed, the 2; Exorcist, the 3; The
and 56–7; mortality, and 49; The “Other” Internet Movie Database 4; Omen, The 3;
60–1; sex, and 55; Terror Management Rosemary’s Baby 3; Small, Assassin The 1;
Theory (TMT) 46–7,49–51, 53–6, 61 see television; Too Much Horror Fiction 4;
also TMT Velvet, The 1–2; Turn of the Screw 3
Firestone, Shulamith 168 Hogwarts; Horcruxes, and 104; invasion of
Fischer, Lucy 157 91; pseudo-family, and 93–4; Riddle, Tom
Folie à Deux 141–3; The Exorcist, and 141–3; and 93–4,103–4 see also Riddle, Tom;
Folie à Plusieurs 143; Oedipus, and 142–3; school officials, and 89–90
Shared Psychotic Disorder 141 Home Movie 77–82; blame 81; cannibalism,
Freud, Sigmund; “A Seventeenth-Century in 80–1; catalyst, in 79; child-as-monster
Demonological Neurosis” 133; Alien, and 82; crucifixion in 79; failure to connect 78–
162; Dumbledore, and 101–2, 104; The 9; Joshua, and 82; The “Other”, and 81;
Exorcist, and 129–31, 137, 144–5 see also parental dynamic, resistance of 78; style of
Exorcist, The; female hysteria, and 131; 77–8; transformation of viewing experience
Halloween, and 70–1; Harry Potter and the 80–1
Half-Blood Prince 87; hysteria, and 132;
monstrous children, and; Oedipus conflict India; abortion, and 122; child labor laws,
129–30; Orphan, The 83; phallocentric and 111; Civil War 14,20; filmic output of
model, and 141; Riddle, Tom and 95–6; 108, 112; Gauri, and 122–125; growth rates
sexual trauma or desire 136; Splice 41–2; of 109–10; liberalization of economy 108–
Terror Management Theory 51 9, 112; Phoonk, 117–121; political
Friedkin, William; Exorcist, The see Exorcist, boundaries of 110; Vaastu Shastra, and 113
The; conservative, as 129; reaction of 3 infants 28–43; CGI, and 39–43 see also CGI;
Frost, Jo 173–85 credulity of 38; enraged by birth 1;
Exorcist, The 28; innocence, and 52; It’s
Gauri 121–5; abortion, and 122–5; CGI, and Alive 34–39 see also It’s Alive; monstrous,
124; derangement, and 69; domestic as 16; new and improved technologies 42;
dysfunction, and 70; ethics, and 69–72 see parodies of 29; procreation, and 54;
also ethics; India, and 122, 125; meaning of prosthetics, and 34–9; Rosemary’s Baby
name 123; modernity, and 124; neo- 30–8 see also Rosemary’s Baby;
traditionalist, as 123–4; nuclear family, and sentimentality, and 29; Simpsons, The 29;
122; patriarchy, and 124 Splice 41–2
It’s Alive; camp status of 40; films, and 151;
incredulity of 38–9; metaphor, movement

189
 INDEX

of inanimate objects 35; prosthetics, and Oedipus 132; Catholic Father, and 145;
34–39; remake of 39–41; Rosemary’s Baby, Exorcist, The 130–45 see also Exorcist,
and 35–8; social consequences of 37–8; The; origins of 131; paternal intervention,
special effects of 36–7; thematic interests and 139; phallocentric model 132; severing
35–6; visibility of 36–7, 39 of the bond 140; sexual trauma or desire
136
Jenks, Chris 173, 180, 184–5 Orphan, The 82–84; accountability 83;
Joshua 72–7; dynamic of 72–3; ethical analytical insufficiency 83; Baudrillard, and
maturity of 76; Halloween, and 72,77; 84; deceptions of 84; “discourse of
Home Movie, and 82; infantile difference” 82; Esther, and 82–4; Freud,
implacability 73–4; interpretation of 73–4; and 83; Halloween, and 82–4;
look of emotion 74; motive, and 75; interpretation of 84; Joshua, and 84
Orphan, The 84; representational strategy
77; strangeness of 73; subversive children, Phoonk 117–21; box office success of 117;
and 77; unmasking of 76 crows, and 119–20; gender, and 118; India,
and 121; re-inscription of the magical 125;
Katz, Claire Elise 68 reversal of roles, in 121; rudeness, and 118–
killing; Who Can Kill a Child? 20; 19; science vs faith 120; transformation of
contemporary films, and 20–1; feral scepticism in 119
children, and 13–14; The New Daughter 21; Plato; The Exorcist, and 135
Supreme Court decision 21 Polanski, Roman; auteur, as 33; direction of
King, Stephen 4 30–4, 37, 156; feminist agenda of 35. 40–1;
Kiraly, S.J. 142 metaphors 38; reproductive technology,
Kitzinger, Sheila 153–4 and 42; Rosemary’s Baby 3, 15, 28, 30–8,
Koontz, Dean 4 40; special effects, and 36, 38
Kristeva, Julia 47–9; Freud, and 48 Last possession 7–10; Child’s Play 7; Exorcist, The
Exorcism, The 9–10; Robbins, Ruth 49; 9; Hide and Seek 10; lack of supervisions,
theory of objection, and 48; The Trauma of and 10; Last Exorcism, The 9, 10; outside
Birth 47–8 sources, and 10; terminology, and 6; Turn
of the Screw, and 8–9
Larsen, Ernest 151 Potter, Harry; book of potions 88–92, 98;
Lessing, Doris; mortality, and 60; Terror Dumbledore, and see Dumbledore;
Management Theory, and 56 see also Horcrux 95; influence of parents 93–4;
Terror Management Theory money 90; privileged male character, as 98;
Levinas, Emmanuel 67, 73 queer theory, and 99–101; Riddle, Tom see
Lifton, Robert Jay 46, 49–50 Riddle, Tom; sexual awakening of 103;
Slughorn, and 92–3, 96–7, 104; Snape, and
makeover TV 175–178; capitulation to the 96
expert 84; Extreme-Make Over: Home pregnancy; Aliens, and 162; hostile nature of
Edition 175; quick fix 178; Supernanny, and 168
175–8; third wave of 176–7; tri-part
formula of 176 Rabuzzi, Kathryn Allen 153
Manheim, Robbie 130 Rank, Otto 48, 49, 58–9
Marcus, Sharon 157 reproductive technology; Rosemary’s Baby 42
Matherson, Richard 2 Rice, Anne 4
monstrous children; Fifth Child, and 45–6 see Riddle, Tom 87–104 see also Harry Potter
also The Fifth Child; Freud 46; Terror and the Half-Blood Prince; attachment to
Management Theory, and 46–7; unique material possessions 90; complexity of
power of 46 culture, and 103; deprivation of 91;
Dumbledore, and 97–96 see also
Nair, Kartik 109 Dumbledore; Freud, and 95–6; group of
National Right to Life Committee 152 peers 92; Horcruxes 93–4, 102; lack of
Nickel, Phillip J. 77 support 103; Merope, and 94; Potter, Harry
Nilsson, Lennart 151–2, 154 and 94–5, 100–101; queer structure, and
Norden Martin F. 81 98–99; soul of 101
Robbins, Ruth 54
Oates, Joyce Carol 3, 46 Roper, Lyndal 134

190
 INDEX

Rosemary’s Baby 3; aesthetic, and 34; terminology 5–7; Bad Seed, The 5; feral
Bollywood, and 110; CGI, and 40; choice, children 6–7; Midwich Cuckoos, The 5;
and 161; conventions of horror films, and nature of humankind 5–6; Pet Sematary 5;
33; credulity of 32, 38–9; cultural backdrop possessed 6
of 159; cultural reference of 136; everyday Terror Management Theory (TMT) 49–51;
reality, distance from 167; fetuses 167–8; animalistic nature of 53; Christianity, and
female audience 166; human vision, and 58–9; fertility, darker side of 54; Fifth
130; hysteria, and 32–3; imagination, and Child, and 53–6, 61–2 see also The Fifth
34; infants, and 28, 30–4; manipulation of Child; Freud, and 51; Lessing, Doris 56;
pregnant women 158–159; misleading of monstrous children, and 46–7, 62; mortal
156; monster, fetishizing of 33; perspectives creatures 61; reflection on death,
of 158; Polanski, Roman and see Polanski, experiments on 50; symbolic defences
Roman; Pope, and 160; rape 156–7; Roe vs. against death 50
Wade, and 42; threat, and 167; visual gap, Turn of the Screw, The; history, and 3;
and 30–1; visual restraint 31; vulnerability possession, and 8–9
of pregnant women 159–60
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 180 Ussher, Jane M. 54–5
Rowland, Robyn 154
Rusnak, Josef 39–40 Vaastu Shastra 113–17; cinematography, and
115; commercial success, lack of 113;
Shankland, Tom 15 critique of neo-liberal modernity, as 114;
Splice; feminist discourse, and 42–3; CGI 40– incoherence of 116; mise-en scene 114;
1; Freudian family romance, and 41–2 modern views of 114; modernity, and 117;
Sun, The 176 non-traditional family unit, and 117;
Supernanny 173–85; authority, and 182; Rohan, and 114–15; Rukma, and 115–16;
changes, summation of 183; child-raising spaces, and 115, 116
books 184; children in society 184;
conversion process 173–174; DVD footage, Weasley, Ginny 97–8
and 183; exploitation of minors, and 174; Weasley, Ron 88
invasion of private lives 177; lack of Whale, James 41
qualification 183–4; makeover TV, and Who Can Kill a Child?; feral children, and 14;
175–8 see also makeover TV; observation killing 20; possession, and 12
period 180–1; original sin 178–9; Wyndham, John 5
psychological explanation of 177; “quick
fix” 177; redemption of evil, and 173, 185; Ziolkowski, Eric 46
relinquishment of power 182–3; structure Zombie, Rob; Devil’s Rejects, The 14;
of 176; Swan, The 177–8; sympathy of 182; Halloween, and 16–17; 70–2 see also
unruly adult 184 visual image of children Halloween; House of 1,000 Corpses 14;
178

191