Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Television

Horrifying Children examines weird and eerie children’s television and literature via critical analysis, memoir and autoethnography.

There has been an explosion of interest in the impact of children’s television and literature of the late twentieth century. In particular, the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s are seen as decades that shaped a great deal of the contemporary cultural landscape. Television of this period dominated the world of childhood entertainment, drawing freely upon literature and popular culture, like the Garbage Pail Kids and Stranger Things, and much of it continues to resonate powerfully with the generation of cultural producers (fiction writers, screenwriters, directors, musicians and artists) that grew up watching the weird, the eerie and the horrific: the essence of 21st-century Hauntology. In these terms this book is not about children’s television as it exists now, but rather as it features as a facet of memory in the 21st century.

As such it is the legacy of these television programmes that is at the core of Horrifying Children. The ’haunting’ of adults by what we have seen on the screen is crucial to the study. This collection directly addresses that which ’scared us’ in the past insomuch as there is a correlation between individual and collective cultural memory, with some chapters providing an opportunity for situating existing explorations and understandings of Gothic and Horror TV within a hauntological and experiential framework.

Lauren Stephenson is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at York St. John University, UK. She specialises in teaching and researching on horror cinema, gender roles and representation in contemporary British and American cinema and American cinema and society. She has published on British Horror Television, the contemporary Gothic and women horror filmmakers.

Robert Edgar is Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the York Centre for Writing at York St John University, UK. He is currently leading MA, MFA and PhD programmes. His teaching specialisms are in scriptwriting, adaptation and genre fiction. He has published widely on screenwriting, film language, popular music adaptation and science-fiction.

John Marland is a Senior Lecturer in Literature Studies at York St John University, UK. He teaches gothic fiction, film adaptation and modern drama. His research interests include the use of silence on page, stage and screen. He has published on scriptwriting, visual semiotics and adaptation.