Horror Films for Children

Reviews / Votes

This meticulously argued book provides readers with significant insight into the genre's importance in enabling the agency of children through the cinematic experience of horror. Lester commands the reader's attention with her thorough, considered explorations of the topics at hand. * Film Matters * 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 *