El. knyga: Children Beware!: Childhood, Horror and the PG-13 Rating

""How does a culture respond when the limits of childhood become uncertain? The emergence of pre-adolescence in the 1980s, signified in part by the new PG-13 rating for film, disrupted the established boundaries between childhood and adulthood and affected not only America's pillar ideals of family and childhood innocence but also the very foundation of the horror genre's identity: an association with maturity and exclusivity. Cultural disputes over the limits of childhood and horror were explicitly articulated in the children's horror trend (1980-1997), a cluster of child-oriented horror titles in film and other media, which included Gremlins, The Gate, the Goosebumps series, and others. As the first serious analysis of the children's horror trend, witha focus on the effects of ratings, this book provides a complete chart of its development while presenting it as a document of American culture's adaptation to pre-adolescence, with each important children's horror title corresponding to a key moment of ideological negotiation, cultural power struggles, and industrial compromise. This book includes an appendix of children's horror from the Scooby-Doo franchise in 1969 to Netflix's Stranger Things in 2016 and many of the films, novels, and television series in between."-Provided by publisher"--

How does a culture respond when the limits of childhood become uncertain? The emergence of pre-adolescence in the 1980s, signified in part by the new PG-13 rating for film, disrupted the established boundaries between childhood and adulthood and affected not only America's pillar ideals of family and childhood innocence but also the very foundation of the horror genre's identity: an association with maturity and exclusivity. Cultural disputes over the limits of childhood and horror were explicitly articulated in the children's horror trend (1980-1997), a cluster of child-oriented horror titles in film and other media, which included Gremlins, The Gate, the Goosebumps series, and others. As the first serious analysis of the children's horror trend, with a focus on the effects of ratings, this book provides a complete chart of its development while presenting it as a document of American culture's adaptation to pre-adolescence, with each important children's horror title corresponding to a key moment of ideological negotiation, cultural power struggles, and industrial compromise. This book includes an appendix of children's horror from the Scooby-Doo franchise in 1969 to Netflix's Stranger Things in 2016 and many of the films, novels, and television series in between.

The author contends that the emergence of the children's horror film trend during the 1980s and 1990s was a sign of sociocultural change, arguing that concepts of childhood and horror were reconstructed as the new social category of pre-adolescence emerged in American culture, and showing how the new PG-13 rating created a new demographic by separating children from young teens and blurring the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. She contends that the introduction of the rating was a key cultural moment illustrating America's changing ideas of childhood and the horror genre. She discusses the emergence of pre-adolescence in US culture, its destruction of the concepts of childhood and horror, and its effects on the film industry, including Disney's first horror experiments, and the PG-13 rating and its association with the establishment of pre-adolescence as a concept in American culture, including the rating’s creation and consequences in the cultural position of the horror genre. She then examines the cultural responses to the rupture caused by pre-adolescence and the reconstruction of the concepts of childhood and horror, as well as the cultural meaning of film as a medium, including horror as response to the legitimization of pre-teen audiences and how the genre recreated its identity to exclude this demographic, Hollywood's response to the rise of the family audience and the cultural dominance of attachment parenting philosophies, and the end of the children's horror film cycle. Each chapter includes case studies of films like The Lost Boys, Goosebumps, Poltergeist, Gremlins, and Casper. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)