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These days, when you leave the theatre after a fright-movie, you can't go home again - not because you've lost your innocence, as the adage suggests, but because you're afraid that your child will kill you. Children wielding knives, communing with ghosts, portending Satan or Armageddon: such is the stuff of Hollywood mega-marketing, as if it were tapping into our culture's imperative to bear children so that it might punish us for agreeing to comply. The Gothic has traditionally transferred the home, that mythical site of comfort and safety, into a fantastical and phantasmatic slaughterhouse, portraying it as a microcosm of the political, social, and religious tyrannies of (usually) fathers. This is no less true of today's Gothic, but now there seems to be a startling emphasis on children as the bearers of death - from Stephen King's novels to mainline media's 'kids who kill'.1 The history of Gothic fiction has taught us that what we most love is also what we most fear, but why children? And why now, at the turn of a new millennium when hope should be in the wind? Why have the comforts of home (heimlich) been transformed into something frightening, strange, uncanny (das Unheimliche), and why do children lead the way to our envisioned destruction?
My preliminary answer: because the twentieth century has inherited - or invented - far too many contradictions in its theories about children. Let's begin with the most heimlich, the most grandfatherly, of these theorists, Benjamin Spock. In his now legendary book, Baby and Child Care, Spock asserts that people inevitably learn to parent from the way they were raised as children: 'We all end up at least somewhat like our parents, especially in the way we deal with our children'.2 From this it follows that a loving, nurturing family is the best way to ensure a loving, nurturing child who, in Spock's vision, will grow up to be a loving, nurturing parent. A few pages later, though, Spock will undercut his utopianism by asking,
What happens if the child you've got differs from the kind of child you thought you wanted? . . . Some by nature seem active and outgoing, others are quiet and shy. Some are easy to raise and others are...