The Recreational Fear Lab is proud to be co-hosting the Fourth Annual Aarhus Workshop on Recreational Fear with the Youth & Horror Research Network, run by Dr. Cat Lester and Dr. Kate Egan. For this exciting workshop, which brings together researchers from a range of scientific and scholarly fields, the focus will be on children, young people, horror, play, and education.
The Youth & Horror Research Network is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, Northumbria University and our partners Into Film, Learning on Screen and Flatpack Festival. It is an AHRC-funded, interdisciplinary network of scholars, educators and cultural partners which aims to investigate and impact scholarly and public understandings of the relationship between children, youth and the horror genre. By bringing together scholars, teachers, guardians and cultural managers from across disciplines and sectors through a series of events and activities, the network will address vital questions about this frequently misrepresented relationship.
There will be coffee/tea served during the day, but participants will have to buy lunch themselves.
The workshop is in-person participation only (no online participation is possible). Participation is free, but registration is required. Please register here - registration deadline is August 18, 2024, at midnight CET.
Venue: Meeting room M2, Building 1427 (room 246), Fredrik Nielsens Vej 2, 8000 Aarhus C
| Time | Presentation | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30-9:00 | Registration and refreshments | |
| 9:00-9:10 | Setting the Agenda for the Day | Network Investigators Cat Lester & Kate Egan |
| 9:10-9:30 | Introduction to the Recreational Fear Lab and Interdisciplinary Recreational Fear Research | Lab Directors Marc Andersen & Mathias Clasen |
| 9:30-10:30 | Keynote: Children's Risky Play: When Play Is Scary and Fun at the Same Time | Ellen Sandseter |
| 10:30-11:15 | Youth and Horror Network Findings: Introduction to Into Film + “That's how I found out there was no Santa Claus”: Gremlins, Censorship and Intergenerational Audiences | Michael Prescott and Steve Ryder (Into Film), Cat Lester and Kate Egan |
| 11:15-11:30 | Break | |
| 11:30-12:15 | "How I Met Your Monster": Encountering Horror through Products and Play in 1970s Children's Culture | Simon Brown |
| 12:15-13:00 | Why Bad Taste is Good for Kids: Bourdieu, Horror and the Limits of Childhood as a Liminal Class | Sarah Cleary |
| 13:00-14:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00-14:45 | "Zoinks! Zombies!": Learning the Language of Horror through TV Cartoons | Stacey Abbott |
| 14:45-15:30 | Gothic Traditions in My Little Pony and the 2010 Generation: Friendship is Magic | Ewan Kirkland |
| 15:30-16:00 | Break | |
| 16:00-16:45 | In the Two Minutes Before You Go to Sleep: Children and Adolescents’ Responses to Horror and Horror Film | G. Neil Martin |
| 16:45-18:00 | Roundtable & Wine Reception | All speakers |
Dr Catherine Lester is Associate Professor of Film and Television at the University of Birmingham. Her research centres on the intersections between children’s culture, the horror genre and cult media with a particular focus on horror films and television made for children in Britain and the US. Her key publications in this area include the monograph Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury 2021) and the edited collection Watership Down: Perspectives on and Beyond Animated Violence (Bloomsbury 2023).
Dr Kate Egan is Assistant Professor in Film and Media at Northumbria University, and a member of Northumbria’s Horror Studies Research Group. Kate is the author of Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (2007), Cultographies: The Evil Dead (2011), and (with Martin Barker, Tom Philips and Sarah Ralph) Alien Audiences (2016). She is also co-editor (with Shellie McMurdo and Laura Mee) of the Hidden Horror Histories book series (Liverpool University Press) and is currently developing further research on audience memories of horror cinema and television. This includes a monograph, Remembering Ghostwatch: Horror, Childhood and the Home and (with James Rendell) an edited collection, Researching Horror Fans and Audiences in the Twenty-First Century.
Professor at the Department of Physical Education and Health at Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education. Her primary research focuses on children’s physical play, outdoor play, and risky/thrilling play, as well as how to develop physical environments for children’s play, development, and learning. She has also done research on children’s well-being, involvement, and physical activity, as well as studies about injuries and injury prevention in Norwegian Kindergartens. Currently, she is the project manager of a project exploring the effects of childhood risk experiences on children’s (7-10 years) risk management skills using Virtual Reality (VR) technology, eye-tracking, and motion-capturing.
Michael Prescott (Curation Lead) and Steven Ryder (Curation Coordinator) are curators for young audiences at the UK’s leading film education charity, Into Film. They helped to launch and continue to curate the UK’s only dedicated streaming service for schools, Into Film+, as well as programming films for year-round cinema school screenings. Michael studied MA Film Studies with Screenwriting at Sheffield Hallam University and graduated in 2012. He is a British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) voter, has written for Film Stories magazine, worked at the British Council, and volunteered at organisations including Sheffield Doc/Fest, Cinema for All, Edinburgh TV Festival, and Chapter Arts Centre. Michael’s areas of interest include documentaries and LGBTQ+ cinema. Steven graduated from the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in 2019 with an MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation. He is a BIFA voter and freelances as a film critic/podcaster, while previously working for Curzon cinemas. Steven’s specialisms include children’s horror films and the role grief plays in contemporary cinema.
Simon Brown is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Kingston University, UK. He has presented and published widely across a range of topics, including early British cinema, film technology (especially colour and 3D), cult television, and horror and adaptation. His most recent publications include the monographs Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2018), and Creepshow for the Devil's Advocate Series (Auteur Press, 2019) as well as an article on British horror author James Herbert for the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic (2020). He is currently co-writing a monograph on Robert Zemeckis and researching the impact of horror-themed books, toys, games and snacks on children in the 1970s. He is part of the 1970s generation that grew up learning about horror films without seeing them.
Stacey Abbott is Professor of Film at Northumbria University and a member of the Northumbria University Horror Studies Research Group. She is a leading scholar of horror studies, with a particular interest in TV Horror and the vampire and zombie in film and television. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007), Angel: TV Milestone (2009), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (2016), and the BFI Film Classic on Near Dark (2020). She has also edited numerous scholarly collections on cult television, including Reading Angel: The Spin-off with a Soul (2005), Investigating Alias: Secrets and Spies with Simon Brown (2007), TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map to Supernatural with David Lavery (2011), and The Cult TV Book (2010). She co-wrote, with Lorna Jowett, TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2012) and together they have expanded their examination of horror on television through numerous book chapters, a special issue of Horror Studies (2017), and an edited collection on Global TV Horror (2021). Abbott and Jowett are also writing a book on Women Creators of TV Horror. Abbott is also currently researching and writing a monograph on Horror Animation: History, Aesthetics, and Genre, which includes chapters on ‘Children and Animated Horror TV’ and ‘The Animated Horror Feature’.
Ewan Kirkland is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies: Digital and Interactive Art at University for the Creative Arts, UK. Ewan’s main research concerns the politics of children’s media, combined with a broad interest in popular culture, identity politics and the horror genre. Since completing his PhD on children’s cinema, Ewan has published on cartoons and animation for young audiences, relationships between screen entertainment and toy culture, and the pleasures media for children provide for adult audiences. Children’s Media and Modernity, Ewan’s first major publication, explored film, television and digital games in terms of childhood’s relationship with history and screen media. Ewan’s second book, Videogames and the Gothic, details how horror games draw upon tropes and traditions of Gothic fiction. More recent projects include studies of stop motion and the uncanny, Gothic influences on 1980s children’s videos, and the ‘childness’ of animation, comics and computer games. As a multidisciplinary scholar whose work incorporates both children’s media and horror culture, Ewan is one of the leading academic authorities on both Hasbro’s My Little Pony range, and Konami’s survival horror series Silent Hill.
Dr G Neil Martin is Honorary Professor of Psychology at Regent's University London, former Head of Department, consultant, and Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He recently published the first review of the empirical research on the psychological responses to horror film. He is the author of around 13 books and 150 papers on psychology and related subjects.
Having gained her PhD from Trinity College, Dublin, Sarah Cleary is a horror consultant, lecturer, and author of The Myth of Harm: Horror, Censorship and the Child, which explores society’s long and often uncomfortable relationship with children, horror and media effects. Having written extensively on horror and the Gothic, Sarah works as a consultant on horror within the Irish media. In addition to her consultancy, she also works as a development executive and script editor specialising in genre and horror features. Dedicated to making horror studies accessible to all, she founded Deadly Doses Horror Podcast in 2020.
A natural part of children’s physically active play involves engaging in play that is a bit scary and somewhat risky (i.e., risky play). Children actively seek this thrilling kind of play, and nearly all children love the quivering feeling of butterflies in their tummy when they encounter something they do not know if they can manage or what the consequences of their actions will be. This presentation will focus on what risky play is and why it is important for children’s experiences, development, and learning. Through risky play, children build self-confidence, physical/motor competence, social skills, psychological resilience, and risk management skills. Nevertheless, within an increasingly safety-focused society, our desire to protect children has invaded their daily lives. The presentation will also discuss how this has resulted in a culture of caution among educators, teachers, and parents, as well as restrictive rules and laws on children's play environments.
Gremlins was first released in June 1984, making it 40 years old this summer. In the United States, the film, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, triggered the invention of a new age rating, PG-13, making Gremlins an important milestone in film history and especially the history of horror for children and young people. In the UK, the British Board of Film Classification classified the film as 15, barring British children from legally viewing it, but, in 2012, then re-classified it as 12A.
As part of research for the AHRC-funded Youth and Horror network, a 40th anniversary screening of the film was held in May 2024 at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, UK as part of the annual Flatpack Festival. Together with Michael Prescott and Steven Ryder from Into Film, the UK’s leading film education charity, network investigators Cat Lester and Kate Egan introduced the film and its British classification history to the audience and chaired a discussion afterwards. The audience was made up of people of all ages, from as young as 5 to adults who remembered seeing the film in 1984. This paper will outline key aspects of the audience responses put forward during this discussion, which showed – in a variety of ways - that Gremlins hasn’t lost any of its power after four decades.
In his introduction to Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence’s book Scarred for Life, writer Johnny Mains says ‘the seventies were a very twisted time’. In addition to public information films that terrified infant-school children, the decade saw an explosion of horror within pre-teen popular culture. From Dracula-ice lollies and horror crisps, through board games and card games, children’s books, model and make-up kits, records, comics and magazines, the decade saw the emergence of an industry peddling horror to enthusiastic British children. Even the Weebles’ house was haunted. However this was before home video and those children had little or no access to watching horror films. Age restrictions in cinemas were enforced, and horror movies were shown late at night on TV in houses where there was often only a single set controlled by adults. It would thus be wrong to assume that the majority of UK children enjoying a Dracula lolly had seen a Dracula film, or that those picking leg bones out of the shark’s mouth in Ideal’s 1975 Game of Jaws had seen Robert Shaw chomped on the big screen. This paper will examine the range of products through which children could encounter monsters in the 1970s and offer some preliminary hypotheses and approaches around the way in which such encounters impacted upon and shaped a generation’s engagement with the idea of the monstrous.
The greatest fear concerning early critics of Gothic was “an absence of taste, or rather, the bad taste of the writers” (Georgieva, 2013, p. 61). Centuries later, though experiencing something of a boom in the past decade or so, horror has remained a genre destined to languish in the playpen of cinematic offerings. Even when horror is not necessarily aimed at children, a perspective often characterized by its R rating, it conversely is perceived by many as base, puerile and childish. In order for text to have any significant or profound qualities it seemingly must take on a “more than horror” or “elevated horror” moniker. And while there may be an unfortunate correlation between horror and immaturity which the genre cannot seem to escape, an alternative perspective allows one to view the genre as a child-centric enterprise which uses the very thing its denigrated for as a means to advocate for a young underclass.
Invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s reading of taste as “first and foremost” a distaste or disgust “provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others” (Bourdieu, 2007, p. 45), throughout the course of this paper I would like to explore how horror, a genre which deliberately revels in its denouncements of bad taste attracts not only the child but the adult seeking retrospective agency from the disenfranchisement and marginalization encountered by their youth. Horror not only roots for the underdog, it grants the pup autonomy.
Cartoons were not always perceived to be the terrain of children’s programming. In the early days of cinema, cartoons were influenced by vaudeville performances and newspaper comic strips, while being used as forms of political satire and propaganda. In the studio era, they would be screened alongside newsreels, documentaries, and B-movies, with most studios possessing their own animation wing. The tropes of horror often appeared in animation whether in the form of surreal experimentation or comic parody. It was in part the success of Disney Studios that fuelled the association with children and this association became more pronounced with the rise of the Saturday Morning Cartoon slot on American and Canadian TV channels from the 1960s-1990s. The aim of this paper will be to examine how the Saturday Morning Cartoon negotiated debates about screen violence while also introducing kids to the visual and aural language of horror. The paper will illustrate how shows such as Scooby Doo, Where Are You? and Beetlejuice engaged kids with classic gothic monsters, abject body horror, and surreal imagination, reimagined through the form and format of animation. Looking at a range of examples, the paper will illustrate how the language of animation, and the medium’s focus on materiality and metamorphosis, creates a secure space to experience horror without sacrificing the genre’s transgressive potential.
Hasbro’s My Little Pony range is a long running children’s franchise, incorporating television, cinema, comics and digital games, but primarily pony-themed toys and accessories. Reflecting children’s culture’s traditional affinity with romantic fantasy, folk tales and fairy stories, media associated with the MLP range frequently draws upon Gothic imagery, themes and narrative structures. Early animated specials contain stories of imprisonment, enslavement and monstrous transformation, where Gothic-coded antagonists intrude upon the bucolic idyl of Ponyland. In staging confrontations between a bright pastel pony world, and a dark contaminating villainy, these cartoons employ Gothic tropes to promote the brand’s signature aesthetic, personified in an iconic rainbow weapon wielded by the show’s human protagonist. While such Gothic elements feature inconsistently in subsequent MLP generations, the 2010 reboot ‘Friendship is Magic’ often employs Gothic characters, tropes and iconography. Villains include a vengeful princess exiled to the moon, a changeling queen infiltrating a royal marriage, and corrupted versions of familiar characters turned villainous by malignant forces. Such aspects, while often aligned with specific toy range releases, reflect the multi-generational appeal of the Gothic, and the increasingly broad demographic addressed by this long running franchise.
When Charlie Higson asked a 13 year old girl who had read him a horrific short story during a school’s creative writing class why it had appealed to her, she replied: “What you’ve got to understand, Mr Higson, is that that kids love death” (Higson, 2013). Much of the social psychology literature on children’s responses to film and television has focused on the effect of violent stimuli on behaviour and thinking. This talk will focus on another aspect of media consumption: fictional horror, and the literature on the effect of watching horror film on children’s behaviour. It outlines what children are generally afraid of, how the source of fear changes as they get older, how horror has been studied developmentally, how any negative effects can be ameliorated, and examines the role of real and imagined monsters in development.
The workshop is organized by the Recreational Fear Lab in collaboration with the Youth & Horror Research Network and generously funded by the Youth & Horror Research Network and the Department of English/School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.
