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Horror Films for Children
Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema
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Book Presentation:
Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre’s most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes. Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children’s horror films, and identifies the ‘horrific child’ as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?
About the Author:
Catherine Lester is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research centres on the intersections between the horror genre and children's culture. She is the author of the monograph Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021), as well as chapters and articles on Disney Princess films, animated horror and children's horror television.
Press Reviews:
"Lester tackles a wide variety of sophisticated ideas steeped in critical theory and drawn from an extensive list of sources. Though her discourse is extremely academic, she consistently grounds the theoretical with clear examples from the movies being considered." ―CHOICE
"Catherine Lester's Horror Films for Children challenges traditional perceptions of horror as being unsuitable for kids and dares to consider how they speak to the child audience. It is insightful and nuanced in its analysis and will encourage readers to look at horror through the eyes of a child." ―Stacey Abbott, University of Roehamption, UK
"Are you afraid of the dark? You should be. Through analyses of films from Gremlins (1984) to The Witches (2020), Cat Lester expertly reveals the distinctions between industry and audience perceptions of horror's relationship to children's cinema, demarcating the tensions that lie, murkily, beneath them." ―Alison Peirse, University of Leeds, UK
"By covering almost a century of children's horror films, this book makes for an insightful and entertaining examination of the horrific child and the cathartic nature of the genre." ―Cinema Retro
"Through detailed textual analysis and critical skill, Lester explores the consistently (and fascinatingly) complex relations between horror and children. Horror Films for Children is an authoritative study of an under-appreciated genre, and a major contribution to the study of both horror and children's media." ―Kate Egan, Northumbria University, UK
"[Lester's] work sutures together the paradox [of children and horror] with logical clarity and close reading in conversation with extensive research … This volume is an excellent contribution." ―Journal of American Culture
See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic
> From the same author:
Watership Down (2024)
Perspectives On and Beyond Animated Violence
Dir. Catherine Lester
Subject: One Film > Watership Down
> On a related topic:
The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (2018)
Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors (2015)
The Child Villains of Horror Film
Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters (2015)
Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors
Dir. Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland
Sixties Shockers (2025)
A Critical Filmography of Horror Cinema, 1960-1969
by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
The Politics of Monstrous Figures in Contemporary Cinema (2025)
Witches, Zombies, and Cyborgs Re-enchanting the Ends of the World
The Post-Zombie (2025)
Essays on the Evolving Undead
Dir. C. Wylie Lenz, Angela Tenga and Kyle William Bishop
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