Evil Children in the Popular Imagination PDF
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Evil Children in the Popular Imagination Karen J. Renner Evil Children in the Popular Imagination Karen J. Renner Evil Children in the Popular Imagination Karen J. Renner Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, Arizona, USA ISBN 978-1-137-60321-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59963-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59963-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955705 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: Day of the Dead girl over toys, July 2011 © Brit Bentine, Locked Illusions Photography Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. A CKNOWLEDGMENTS A big, huge thank you goes out to the following: Gina Barreca and Margaret Mitchell, for giving me the opportunity to guest-edit a special issue on this topic for L it: Literature Interpretation Theory , and Tara Harney-Mahajan, who oversaw the whole process from start to fi nish. Gina, I know the topic of evil children came out of a conversation that we had in your offi ce; for the life of me, I can’t remember a word of it, but it must have been a good one—as our con- versations always are. This book wouldn’t exist without you; Bob Baronas, who has patiently sat by my side and watched enough bad horror movies in the past fi ve years to last a lifetime; my brother, Michael Renner, who got me into horror in the fi rst place, and my Mom and Dad, who always support my weirdness; Kristen Gregory, who enrolled in the fi rst evil children class I ever taught and then taught me endlessly about the subject and read over the manuscript; Scot Carpenter, who also read the whole damn thing, and Jan Carpenter, who never hesitated to talk about the subject; all of the amazing students at NAU who enrolled in “Evil” Children in Literature and Film or sent me references, especially Stormi De Silva, Lenore Hipsher, Jack McKever, Jessie Gardner, and Ben Wake; colleagues and friends who have been especially generous with their sup- port over the years: Peter Baldwin, Jeff Berglund, Richard Bleiler, Monica Brown, Anna Mae Duane, Angela Hansen, Steffen Hantke, Susanne Kord, Mara Reisman, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Greg Semenza, v vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Kate Capshaw Smith, Hans Staats, Erin Stalcup, Chris Vials, and Nicole Walker; Brit Bentine, the genius behind Locked Illusions Photography, who was kind enough to donate the coolest photograph EVER for the cover, Kairi, the model in that cool photograph, and Kairi’s cool mom, Jennifer; so many supportive folk in the English department and the College of Arts and Letters at NAU; and the staff in Document Delivery Services at NAU, who must surely think I’m certifi able by now but haven’t (yet) alerted the authorities. C ONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Monstrous Births 15 3 Gifted Children 43 4 Ghost Children 6 9 5 Possessed Children 9 5 6 Ferals 127 7 Changelings 153 Selected Primary Sources 177 Works Cited 189 Index 209 vii CHAPTER 1 Introduction In 2010, I was invited to guest-edit a special issue of the journal L it: Literature Interpretation Theory . My only instructions were to pick a “sexy” topic that would appeal to a broad readership. I don’t exactly recall how I came up with the idea of “Evil Children in Film and Literature,” but it was at least partly due to the fact that I grew up reading horror, especially the works of Stephen King, for whom the genre seems inex- tricably tied to youth. Certain that the subject had already been done to death, I did some preliminary research and found that there was actually very little written on the topic. Meanwhile, around me, evil children were popping up everywhere, not only in literature and fi lm, but also on tele- vision, in video games, and even in music videos. Since the publication of the two-part special issue of L it in 2011, subsequently published by Routledge in 2013 as T he ‘Evil Child’ in Literature , Film and Popular Culture , evil children have spawned across all realms of popular culture. In 2011, I had identifi ed 200 fi lms that portrayed some kind of arguably evil child, over 100 of which had been produced since the year 2000; by my last count, that number is closer to 600, with almost 400 made in the new millennium. And that’s only fi lm. Television has also capitalized on the subject. News broadcasts repeatedly latch onto stories about child criminals, a subject of signifi cant enough interest to earn its own documentary series Killer Kids (2012–) on the Lifetime Network. Evil children have also made a foray into fi ctional television programming, appearing frequently as felons on L aw and Order: Special Victims Unit (1999–) or C riminal © The Author(s) 2016 1 K.J. Renner, Evil Children in the Popular Imagination, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59963-6_1 2 K.J. RENNER Minds (2005–) or as supernatural adversaries in paranormal-t hemed shows such as T he X-Files (1993–2002) or S upernatural (2005–). Reality tele- vision offers viewers an intimate look at misbehaving youth on Nanny 911 (2004–), Supernanny (2005), Toddlers & Tiaras (2009–), and B eyond Scared Straight (2011–). Neither can one ignore related developments in animated television sitcoms, such as the mischievous Bart on T he Simpsons (1989–), the downright nasty Eric Cartman on S outh Park (1997–), or the maniacal Stewie Griffi n in Family Guy (1999–). Evil children are a prominent element of video games as well, appearing in multiple installments of the S ilent Hill , Bioshock, and F.E.A.R . series. Rule of Rose (2006) contains some shocking instances of child violence and cruelty, and the 2010 game L ucius actually allows you to play as a child antichrist. A merican McGee’s Alice (2000) and its sequel Alice: Madness Returns (2011) turn Wonderland into a dangerous landscape and arm your player character—Lewis Carroll’s iconic protagonist—with a butcher knife. Nor is Alice the only character from children’s literature to have undergone a menacing makeover: both Red Riding Hood and Peter Pan, for example, have been transformed into ominous fi gures in a variety of texts, only some of which are intended for adults. Evil children have become familiar faces in young adult (YA) literature, too; one need only think of Tom Riddle in the H arry Potter series and the children who fi ght to the death in Suzanne Collins’s popular trilogy, T he Hunger Games . The appearance of evil children in video games and YA literature is especially striking since both often target audiences who could be the age-mates of these terrifying youth. That evil children appear as both avatars and adversaries suggests that the fi gure has become a poten- tial source of empowerment for kids as well as a fi gure against which they can defi ne their own identities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Brit Bentine, the photographic genius behind Locked Illusions Photography, of which the cover to this book is an example. The children she photographs choose to dress up like bloodthirsty zombie ballerinas and murderous mermaids or take on the identity of some terrifying mon- sters, such as the creepy nurses in Silent Hill , Pinhead from Hellraiser, or Billy the puppet from S aw . But perhaps the strongest evidence that evil children are now a perma- nent fi xture in the popular imagination is that they’ve become a fi tting subject for satire. Both H ell Baby (2013) and C ooties (2014) spoof the genre. Furthermore, in 2013, College Humor posted a short video on their YouTube channel entitled “Horror Movie Daycare,” which has since INTRODUCTION 3 earned almost 4.5 million views. In less than three minutes, the clip makes references to T he Shining , Village of the Damned , Children of the Corn , Let Me In , The Omen, The Ring, and The Exorcist , and the viewer needs to get these references in order for the video to be funny. The video thus presumes that a general knowledge of iconic evil children has become commonplace. As expansive as the genre may be today, stories about evil children have a relatively short history. Although one can fi nd earlier examples—“Cruel Frederick” in Henrich Hoffman’s D er Struwwelpeter (1845), for example, or Miles and Flora in Henry James’s T he Turn of the Screw (1898)—it wasn’t until the 1950s that evil children fi rst appeared with any serious regularity in popular culture. During this decade, a variety of infl uences came together to create a new focus on and fear of youth. To explain, George Ochoa focuses on the simple fact of demographics: “The horror- fi lm ethical rule about being wary of young people only came into exis- tence when there were a great deal of young people around: during and after the baby boom of about 1946–1964, a period that saw a great rise in the birth rate” (2011, 67). The 1950s also saw juvenile crime double, and both the mass media and popular culture picked up on the theme, heightening anxieties about teenagers (Young and Young 2004, 32). This was also the era in which teen culture fi rst rose to prominence, dethroning the adult world that had held center stage (Owram 1996, 144–146) and likely earning its enmity in the process. In addition, new forms of mass entertainment, such as radio, television, rock music, and comic books, raised fears about dangerous infl uences that could corrupt young minds. Many of the evil child texts that fi rst appeared were short stories, such as Ray Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin” (1946) and “The World the Children Made” (1950), later known as “The Veldt”; Richard Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman” (1950); and Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a G ood Life” (1953), later adapted for an episode of T he Twilight Zone in 1961. Some novel- length treatments popped up as well, including Agatha Christie’s C rooked House (1949), William Golding’s T he Lord of the Flies (1954), William March’s The Bad Seed (1954), and John Wyndham’s T he Midwich Cuckoos (1957); all but the fi rst were promptly adapted into fi lms. During the 1960s, several well-known authors, among them Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates, also focused their Gothic lenses upon the subject of children in W e Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), “The Lame Shall Enter First” (1965), and E xpensive People (1968), respectively. But it was Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and
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