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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.
Horrifying Children presents a fascinating and multifaceted analysis of five decades of gothic and supernatural British children’s television shows and discusses the hauntological effects of these shows in (re)presenting the pre-War nostalgia and Post-war anxieties of British culture. We learn how the liminal figure of the child within the original 60’s and 70’s television series “haunted” subsequent generations of children in the 80s, 90s and 00s when the series were re-broadcasted. Addressing specifically how mysterious, spooky and ghostly children’s television effects the collective cultural memory of adults, Horrifying Children enriches our understanding of the deep impact of the figure of the child in visual narrative for each generation that observes it. * Andre Seewood, Associate Instructor, Indiana University-Bloomington, USA * This wide-ranging collection, taking us on a hauntological journey back to and through historical children’s television, is impressive in its breadth and depth. It offers the reader a thorough exploration of why children’s television has stayed with us, clinging to the dark recesses of our minds, remembered as an unsettling set of uncanny sounds and spectral images. What I particularly love about these essays in this book are the ways that the authors negotiate and examine their own mnemonic relationship to such a wide variety of programming. Scholars often reflect on how television makes meaning from a position of critical disengagement or detachment: this book shows that it is possible to write with clarity and critical insight while examining your own affective responses to programmes known of old and long familiar. * Helen Wheatley, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, UK *
