Undead Child in Popular Culture

Craig Martin teaches screen studies in the Department of Film, Games and Animation at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.Debbie Olson is an associate professor of English at Missouri Valley College, USA.

• Introduction1. “Silk is a Child’s Skin: Marx, Engels, and the Modern Moloch” 2. “‘That canal gees me the creeps’: Haunted Bodies of Water and Geographies of Dead Childhood in the Cinema of Lynne Ramsay”3. “Beyond Zombies: Resurrected Young People and Incongruity in Les Revenants, The Returned (US) and Resurrection”4. “White Futures Only: Racialized Undeadness in The Last of Us”5. “Not Quite Dead: The Function of Ghost Children in William Mumler’s Spirit Photography”6. “Nightmares about Fossils: Spectral Children, Colonial Legacies and Intergenerational Trauma in the Work of Hilary Mantel”7. “Taken from Life”: Lewis Carroll’s Photographic Memory and the Cur(s)ing of Sleeping Beauties Sent to Wonderland8. Fraught and Fragile Domesticity: Visions of the Undead Child(hood) in Walter de la Mare’s Broomstick9. “Written on the Body: Traumatic Encounters with the Dead Child in Sharp Objects (HBO, 2018)”10. “But You’re Just a Girl”: The Haunting Specter of Childhood in Buffy the Vampire Slayer11. “Undead Child, Undead Parents: ‘Honor Crime’ and Matricide in Yashar Kemal’s To Crush the Serpent”12. “‘They Never Come Back ... as Boys’: The Necropolitics of Hitler's Children in Disney's Pinocchio (1940) and Education for Death (1943)”