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The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema
Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
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Book Presentation:
The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema illustrates how global horror film depictions of children re-conceptualised childhood at the turn of the twenty-first century. By analysing an influential body of transnational horror films, largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and the US, Jessica Balanzategui shows how millennial uncanny child characters resist embodying growth and futurity, unravelling concepts to which the child's symbolic function is typically bound. The book proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in these potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. By demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties of these frightening visions of children who refuse to grow up, the book outlines the conceptual and aesthetic mechanisms by which long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.
About the Author:
Dr. Jessica Balanzategui is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT, before which she was Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam UP, 2018), the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’ book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures.
Press Reviews:
This is ambitious and thought-provoking film scholarship, poised at the crossroads of horror studies, childhood studies, and trauma studies. This crossdisciplinary range is enhanced by a rewarding transnational focus (moving across the U.S., Spain, and Japan) as well as an in-depth consideration of millennial horror (including such influential films as The Ring and The Others). Balanzategui’s approach is original, stimulating, and valuable for a diverse array of research areas."
- Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh
"I strongly recommend this excellent book. Given its strong scholarship, breadth and depth of inquiry, as well as the inclusion of diverse contexts of production and reception, the volume is certain to become an important resource for researchers on horror film, transnational cinema, and, more generally, film studies."
- Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, University of Kent
See the publisher website: Amsterdam University Press
> From the same author:
Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing (2024)
Family Watch Together TV
by Djoymi Baker, Jessica Balanzategui and Diana Sandars
Subject: Sociology
> On a related topic:
Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors (2015)
The Child Villains of Horror Film
Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters (2015)
Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors
Dir. Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland
The Post-Zombie (2025)
Essays on the Evolving Undead
Dir. C. Wylie Lenz, Angela Tenga and Kyle William Bishop
Sixties Shockers (2025)
A Critical Filmography of Horror Cinema, 1960-1969
by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
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