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Bohlmann, Markus P. J. and Sean Moreland, eds. Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2015. 288pp. Softcover. ISBN 978-07864-9479-8. $40.00.
Monstrous Children is a collection of essays that might be of interest to film scholars working on aspects of monstrosity, abjection, and motherhood, as well as on issues related to childhood and adolescence. The main premise of the editors, as expressed in their Introduction, is that "the child has served as both repository and emblem of our aspirations and our fears, our dreams and our nightmares" (11), thus becoming a popular, "fecund trope" (10) in Western cinema. Furthermore, although not all the essays here contained engage on this proposal, the editors favor the term "childness" over "childlike" and "childish" "to suggest both that the child is always defined through a kind of elusive quiddity, a spectral essence" (15-16). The contributors to the book emphasize this elusiveness of childhood.
Besides the editors' introduction, the volume is prefaced by two brief forewords. The first foreword, by Steven Bruhm, offers a succinct and brilliant commentary on the contents of the volume. James R. Kincaid, now an emeritus professor, writes the second foreword highlighting that these essays allow their readers "to see, in so many forms, the child we are maneuvering cruelly and selfishly" (8). The book itself is divided into five parts-mostly composed of three essays-more or less organized according to the chronological development of children toward adolescence. In parallel with the two forewords, Monstrous Children ends with two afterwords, the first of which-by Kathryn Bond Stockton-deals with monstrosity, pleasure, and cinematographic adaptations where pleasure can be queer, and sexuality monstrous or criminal. Harry M. Benshoffs afterword, in contrast, serves as an addendum as it looks into The Visitor and Extant, two films not included in the volume, though profoundly related to the themes addressed in it.
Part one of Monstrous Children, titled "Look Who's Stalking," relates to procreation, pregnancy, and mothering in horror films as monstrous occurrences. Karen J. Renner's "Monstrous Newborns and the Mothers Who Love Them: Critiques of Intensive Mothering in Twenty-First-Century Horror Films" initiates the set looking at "intensive mothering"-a term coined by Sharon Hays-as depicted in two monstrous newborn narratives: It's Alive and...