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Evil Children in Film and Literature II: Notes Toward a Taxonomy

2011; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2011.596381

1545-5866

Karen J. Renner,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For a succinct and helpful overview of criticism on The Turn of the Screw, see “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw” in the most recent Bedford edition of the novella, edited by Peter G. Beidler. Such critics point out that at the time of the novel's publication, ghosts were taken so seriously that formal societies had been formed to study the phenomenon systematically. James's preface to the 1908 edition of the story alludes to these “factual” reports of ghosts and describes the ghostly characters of his tale as supernatural rather than psychological entities. The pervasive belief in ghosts was not merely a background cultural influence for James: his brother William, the eminent psychologist, was an active participant in the field. For these reasons, Gary Hoppenstand has argued that Regan functions “as a type of moral symbol warning of the dire consequences of an evolving family structure” resulting from a “rising divorce rate and the [putative] drawbacks of single-parent household” (38). I have simplified the storylines of these films considerably in order to avoid giving away certain plot twists, but the general point still remains. See Buckingham for discussion of the blame placed upon the film Child's Play 3 for instigating ten-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables to kill two-year-old James Bulger in 1993. In 1996 Buckingham , David. “Child's Play: Beyond Moral Panics.” Moving Images: Understanding Children's Emotional Responses to Television . Manchester : Manchester UP , 1996 . 19 – 56 . Print. [Google Scholar], the death metal band Slayer was sued by the parents of murder victim Elyse Pahler after one of the killers claimed that Elyse's “sacrifice” was inspired by one of Slayer's songs; see Weiner. See Leavy for an explanation of how and why the Columbine shootings in 1999 were linked to, among other factors, singer Marilyn Manson, the video game Doom, and the movie The Matrix (1999). The video game Grand Theft Auto has also been implicated in the trials of several child murderers; see Leung. For a history of Genie and feral children in general, see Michael Newton's Savage Boys and Wild Girls. For discussion of one of the more recent discoveries of a feral child, see Lane DeGregory's article on Danielle Crockett. In Collodi's novel, Pinocchio is much more mean-spirited, at least until he learns how to be a “real” boy. In fact, when the Cricket tells Pinocchio that he needs to go to school to learn a trade, Pinocchio retorts that the only trade that fancies him is “[t]o eat, drink, sleep, and amuse [him]self, and to lead a vagabond life from morning to night” (27). The Cricket then says that he pities him for having a wooden head, and Pinocchio throws a hammer at him. Collodi's following description allows for the act to have been accidental, but stresses its brutality as well: “Perhaps he never meant to hit him; but unfortunately it struck him exactly on the head …, and then he remained dried up and flattened against the wall” (27). This was true only for white boys from the West, of course. Tarzan, who sounded his first barbaric yawp in 1912, affirmed his author, Edgar Rice Burrough's, sense that the civilized races were naturally superior to all others: as Gail Bederman has made clear, it was because Tarzan was originally an “aristocratic Anglo-Saxon [that he] always triumphs over beasts and savage black Africans” (222). See also Kenneth Kidd's Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. In 28 Days Later, the protagonist fends off and then only reluctantly kills a frenzied boy zombie. A similar scene occurs in the Spanish film REC (2007) and its faithful American adaptation Quarantine (2008) when a young girl, clearly infected with a mutated rabies virus that reduces people to a zombie-like condition, bites her mother's face and runs upstairs. When she is discovered, the police officer leading the group still approaches her as if she is an innocent child. His inability to view her as anything other than a sweet girl allows her to attack him viciously. This is not to say that all vampire children fit the mold of the feral child. Claudia in Interview with the Vampire, for example, kills in a very controlled manner and is civilized enough to fit into polite society even when still a young vampire. Similarly, Eli, the vampire in Let the Right One In (2008) and the American rendition Let Me In (2010), very successfully acts the part of the twelve-year-old girl she appears to be unless she hasn't fed in several days or is in the presence of blood, solving a Rubik's cube and leaving affectionate notes that incorporate Shakespearean references. Both characters are also developed in a way that is uncharacteristic of the feral child. In fact, as the protagonist of the story, Burt, discovers, most of the New Testament has been expurgated from the Bible the children use, but “the Old Testament was intact” (267). In addition, the children's church includes a portrait of Christ that “looked like a comic-strip mural done by a gifted child—an Old Testament Christ, or a pagan Christ that might slaughter his sheep for sacrifice instead of leading them” (266). Through a ludicrous plot contrivance, this mantra leads the main characters of the film to discover the origins of Grendel, the leader, for one recognizes in the chant the device of Anglo-Saxon alliteration and directs the investigators to Beowulf. The chant also obviously bears a close resemblance to that used in most famous feral child narrative, Lord of the Flies, in which the hunters intone, “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” (135). The Plague explicitly connects the condition of its zombie children to adult perfidy. At the end of the film, as the protagonist and his ex-wife face a hostile gang of the children, he realizes that the corruption of the adult world is ultimately responsible for their condition—“It's not just what we say and do …. It's everything we are. Everything we think and feel. That's what they take from us,” he tells her—and willingly offers himself up as a sacrifice. As a result, the children allow her to live. See Tony Magistrale's “Inherited Haunts: Stephen King's Terrible Children” and “Stephen King's Viet Nam Allegory: An Interpretation of ‘The Children of the Corn.' ” At the end of Beware! Children at Play, a group of vigilantes from town shoot all of the Woodies, regardless of age, without much hesitation, even though such an action is protested by the protagonist. As with the ending of Night of the Living Dead, this conclusion seems to suggest that the Woodies are no more horrible than the adults. In Offspring, the cruelty of the savage clan is juxtaposed with that of a “civilized” character, Stephen, who is willing to offer up his ex-wife and child to save his own skin. Eden Lake also shows that the members of the young gang are from households in which violence and abuse is common. The French film Them (2006) is perhaps one exception to this rule. Like The Strangers (2008), it features a group of youths who terrorize a couple simply because they seem to enjoy doing so, though Them is considerably more disturbing since the children are markedly younger. And as Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg made clear in their essay on Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child in the first part of this special issue, being reminded of our kinship with animals also dredges up fears of our own mortality, which could account for another reason why the feral child is such a consistent source of horror. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKaren J. RennerKaren J. Renner is Lecturer of American Literature at Northern Arizona University. An excerpted portion of her dissertation, Perverse Subjects: Drunks, Gamblers, Prostitutes, and Murderers, recently appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature, and she is currently revising the manuscript for publication while working on a second book tentatively titled Bad Seeds and Injured Innocents: The Evil Child in the Contemporary Imagination.