Figures
1.1Fabric image used to perform a curse
1.2Woodland at Huntroyde where Edmund Hartlay performed his circle ritual
1.4The Seal of God from The Sworn Book
1.5A belief in contact with spirits was an essential part of magic
2.1The house inhabited by Family A
4.1Kaspar Hauser, not wild anymore?
4.2Has any other feral child ever been honoured with a monument?
4.3Two adolescent microcephalic boys made up as the last surviving Aztecs
4.4In remembrance of the smallest ladies duet in the world
9.1A man collecting a mandrake root with the help of a dog
Table
12.1Tabulation of FBI uniform crime report, 2012
It has been something of an odyssey to get the important work of the authors involved in this project out into the light of day, and many thanks to those that have helped and encouraged along the way. The most important of these is my always amazing Mrs Mine and our own two little monsters, Seba and Majki, and not least the support of Mam i Tata Bronk.
Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie
The linkage between children and horror, or ‘horror-full’ children, would seem an almost natural connection to make given its popularity in contemporary horror films and novels. However, the intersection between the two categories has a long history going back beyond the more obvious Gothic reimaginings of the nineteenth century with its underage ghostly terrors revealing that the idea of the ‘little horror’ is seemingly an inherent demarcation within society between adults and those that are viewed as ‘not adults’. Beginning from the sixteenth century, this collection will consider examples of description and interpretation of little horrors from real life and popular culture to show the construction and consolidation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child which views it as being monstrous, dangerous and just plain evil.
Horror films, literature, games and graphic novels abound with evil babies, children and adolescents, so much so that Steven Bruhm notes, ‘These days, when you leave the theatre after a fright-movie you can’t go home again […] because you’re afraid that your child will kill you.’1 While this is about twenty-first century horror film, it rather fittingly captures something of the otherness of children even in an age when the ‘rights’ of the child are, arguably, more defined and children themselves more protected, recognized and listened to than in any other historical period. Somewhat contrarily, it seems that although the child and the associated categories of ‘youth’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘young adult’ are ever more controlled and provided with more scope for agency and self-determination in society, popular culture often sees them constructed as being ‘quintessentially inimical to the adult and adulthood, [signifying] “alien” and “absolute separateness”’.2 This obviously relates to more sensational expressions of youth in popular culture, particularly the horror, Gothic and fantasy genres, but all of which can be seen to be the expression of a deeper cultural anxiety around children, their place in our current historical moment and what kind of future they might embody. But it also points to a certain ambiguity and liminality within the construction of the child as a nexus of many conflicting terms and ideals imposed upon it by adults, from an idyllic (nostalgic) innocence to be cherished and protected to a manipulative, consuming predator to be exploited and broken.
The ongoing ambiguity in the attempts to define and regulate the child is partly seen in what might be termed the medicalization of the child’s body in terms of biological and mental growth and educational and development goals. Yet even this does not collapse the all-enveloping air of an unregulatable designation as the age one stops being considered a child is continually being reassessed with more recent studies identifying the upper limit as being 24 or even 29 years.3 The resultant anxiety caused by this resistance to categorization is, in part, due to the problem of trying to fit the child, and more specifically the problematic child, in a world meant for adults. Here, the youth or adolescent is defined by the qualities that make a ‘non-adult’, with the latter being the signifier of prudence, responsibility and accountability, that is, legal signifiers of being part of society (within patriarchy, part of the society of men). Consequently, childhood, and even more so adolescence, is a liminal space where the occupants are on their way to being adults – some closer than others at least age-wise – and so attempt to occupy both categories; they look and act like an adult but are not legally accountable in the same way. In a sense they are figures, ‘blanks’, as James Kincaid calls them, that are haunted by the adults they will become; at times innocent, inexperienced and naive and at others possessed, manipulated and traumatized.4
The child then becomes a nexus of positivity and hope but equally one of negativity and danger; the embrace of a past that will never grow old and a future that will destroy and consume the old. This makes them prime material within the popular imagination to be configured as problematic, naughty, deceitful and/or the agents of darker forces. While the cultural imagination is most likely to express itself via cultural artefacts such as film, novels and so on, it can also apply to real world, therapeutic and legal, often reinforcing the same tropes and revealing how much such associations have become entrenched in Western, and indeed other, societies. More interestingly, as seen in some examples given in this collection, specifically from sixteenth-century England, this has occurred in societies before the idea of children as a separate category was largely conceived. While class and/or wealth has always played a large part in the upbringing of those not old enough to be considered adults, children were generally allowed (forced) to work as soon as they were physically able to. However, from the 1800s, something of this began to change, and as noted by the historian Phillipe
