Stranger Danger: Child Abduction in the Horror Film (London)

From Lang’s M to Derrickson’s The Black Phone, the spectre of the child murdering stranger has long haunted cinema. Aside from adult concerns for child safety, scenes of ‘stranger danger’ in horror and related media reignite repressed magical thinking and our childhood fears of the dangerous adult Other. Unlike mature adults, these abductors (or Danger Strangers) – The Child Catcher, Pennywise the Clown, Rose the Hat, The Grabber – are more akin to grown-up children, possessing supernatural talents and/or childlike characteristics that act as magical lures to entrap their victims, making them all the more unsettling.

In this lecture I will present a loose structural model that represents 13 recurring stages in child abduction scenes, with examples from a number of films. As a filmmaker my focus is on formal aspects so we will be digging down into visual subtext and cinematic storytelling devices to see how meaning and tension are created on screen.

Form here I will broaden out the investigation to look at both Freud’s essay on the uncanny and the Jungian concept of the puer aeterna, touching on the Trickster archetype and Pan, and relate these ideas to the character of the Danger Stranger and what it means to us as spectators.

Following this we will investigate the language of Stranger Danger in a wider context by examining preventative public information films from the UK and US, Victorian cautionary tales and fairy tales. We will also look at how the irrationality of satanic panics and the scapegoating of minorities play into stranger danger narratives.

The lecture will conclude with a presentation of my most recent horror short, The Watcher, which was built on my research and the 13 stage model I developed.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have to postpone this lecture (originally scheduled for October 26th), STRANGER DANGER: CHILD ABDUCTION IN THE HORROR FILM (LONDON), to Tuesday, November 22nd, 7:00 pm GMT.