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Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors
The Child Villains of Horror Film
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Book Presentation:
Examines the complexities and contradictions that arise when the monsters in the movies are children.
Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror's most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches, including those of cinema studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors offers the first full-length study of these child monsters. In doing so, the book highlights horror as a topic of analysis that is especially pertinent socially and politically, exposing the genre as a site of deep ambivalence toward—and even hatred of—children.
About the Author:
Dominic Lennard is Associate Lecturer in the Centre for University Pathways and Partnerships at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
Press Reviews:
"Adding unique insights while revising well-trodden critical ground, the value of Lennard's book is in its eloquent and well-researched consolidation of existing scholarship in the field, making it a useful introductory text for researchers and students. " — Screening the Past
"Deftly organized, elegantly written, and graced throughout with numerous stills and frame blowups, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors has something to offer both the lay reader and the scholar. " — CHOICE
"This is impeccably well researched and presented. It holds its own at the top of film studies scholarship. Sprightly in its survey across key areas of cultural anxiety and able to draw on a range of lucid examples, Lennard produces sophisticated and complex extended analyses where necessary. A pleasure to read. " — Linda Ruth Williams, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
See the publisher website: State University of New York Press
> From the same author:
The Other Hollywood Renaissance (2020)
Dir. Dominic Lennard, R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
Subject: Countries > United States
> On a related topic:
The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (2018)
Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
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
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