Jessica Balanzategui

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The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema illustrates how global horror film depictions of children re-conceptualised childhood at the turn of the twenty-first century. By analysing an influential body of transnational horror films, largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and the US, Jessica Balanzategui shows how millennial uncanny child characters resist embodying growth and futurity, unravelling concepts to which the child's symbolic function is typically bound. The book proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in these potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. By demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties of these frightening visions of children who refuse to grow up, the book outlines the conceptual and aesthetic mechanisms by which long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The horror genre is a particularly fraught category in academic and mainstream critical discourse about Australian film genres. Australian horror films are often framed as either ‘Australian Gothic’ or ‘Ozploitation,’ terms that prioritise issues of national identity, class and taste rather than genre. The oppositional relationship of these terms presents an obstacle to the widespread acceptance – both scholarly and popular – of local horror films. This is illuminated by a comparison of two recent Australian horror releases and their domestic receptions, Wolf Creek 2 (McLean, Greg. 2014. Wolf Creek 2. Film. Adelaide: Duo Art Productions and Emu Creek Pictures) and The Babadook (Kent, Jennifer. 2014. The Babadook. Blu-Ray DVD. Melbourne: Umbrella Entertainment). Wolf Creek 2 was one of the most lucrative Australian films of 2014, however it was critically panned in large part due to its perceived commercialism and low-genre status. By contrast, The Babadook was the most critically praised Australian film of 2014, however the film received a limited domestic release. This paper explores how both The Babadook’s meagre domestic release and its near-universal critical praise can be related to its association with the high-art Australian Gothic tradition. Yet the film unsettles firmly entrenched art/genre, nationalism/commercialism dichotomies.

The horror genre is in large part defined by a distinctive use of sound, which facilitates the effects by which it is defined. The genre is unique in its creative deployment of sound to activate and intensify dread and shock, and to launch what Peter Hutchings describes as ‘comprehensive assaults upon the senses’. This assaultive use of sound is central to the genre’s characteristic provocation of feelings of entrapment and peril, for, unlike the image, sound resists the viewer’s attempts at momentary escape. The recent supernatural horror film Sinister (Derrickson, 2012) powerfully illustrates the complex associations between sound and image upon which the horror genre relies to conjure its effects. Much of the thematic and aesthetic intensity of Sinister emerges from deeply unsettling interactions between sound and image created by the ambiguous layering of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. Echoing earlier haunted media films such as The Ring (Verbinski, 2002), Derrickson’s film revolves around Super 8 film reels that house a malevolent supernatural being. This article examines the augmentation of analogue aesthetics in Sinister, and argues that sound is central to the film’s simultaneous evocation and troubling of Super 8’s conventional nostalgic connotations. To achieve this, Derrickson pairs macabre Super 8 imagery with the eerie sounds of hauntology, a form of experimental electronic music that emerged around the turn of the millennium and takes troubled nostalgia as its core theme. The hauntological soundscape of Sinister accompanies the Super 8 footage not only to enhance the sonic textures of technological obsolescence, but to incite conflicted feelings of nostalgia-gone-wrong. As a result, the soundscape of Sinister not only foments the film’s most potent affects, but develops much of its subtext.

159 rapacious expansionism – makes it, in the context of a gendered violence epidemic, an extremely important site for the analysis of media images and their contexts as when these players misbehave, they make waves far beyond their acts. With Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculine Identity and Ethics, Rob Cover has made an indispensible contribution to understanding these phenomena over the last decade. While there is plenty of lurid detail, ranging from sex scandals and rape, it is not merely an analysis of what has been, but what could be. As the title suggests, Cover draws deeply and inventively on Judith Butler's work in ethics and vulnerability in scaffolding the normative frameworks of behaviours – enshrined and unspoken – and how they could be conceived otherwise. The frame here is of the millennial iteration of the scandal complex: news breaking, reportage, PR, apologies, confessions, the discourses of self-help, psychology and mateship. The analysis centres around humanity rather than restriction: who is taken to be human and how, and vulnerable, and how organisations and media frames proceed from there to produce impressions and narratives that reflect these constructions. Specifically, Cover blends thematic and event-based case studies: the St Kilda Schoolgirl, homophobia, the demons of drugs, gambling and alcohol, and the spectre of rape and group sex. Much of the analytical purchase comes from how, throughout these disparate addictions, crimes and acts of sexual, physical and mental violence, there is a consistent individualisation of ethical responsibility for those rendered vulnerable – be it Ben Cousins or Lara Bingle. For this author, such simplistic moralising at best obfuscates, with the AFL's teflonic responsibilisation of individuals a reflection of the neoliberal governmentalities of behaviour that underpin the organisa-tion's worst tendencies. There is not much glory: from partner-swapping rapes, players stepping over abject and objecti-fied women and the vilification and abandonment of Kim Duthie. But in putting forward an alternative ethics, Cover elucidates an ethics of care, rather than the object-and-other base that currently sits under extant codes of 'behaviour', such as the AFL's Respect and Responsibility. Instead of treating women like the other, the always-already potential victim of male footballers, Cover suggests AFL requires an ethical reconstruction that places vulnerability, and with it the dignity of the subject, at the centre of everything from gender relations to the thick bravado of male bonding and the pitfalls of drug abuse, as well as the reckless approach to physical danger which sees players injured from the highest to the lowest levels of the game. By looking beneath the mythology of the game and the swirls of scandals, this work envisions a brighter, safer sport.