Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! My name is Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today we are continuing my series on the monsters of childhood innocence by discussing what happens when that innocence is not nurtured. How badly do adults have to drop the ball for an innocent child to turn into a monster?

            This is my fourth video about the monsters of childhood innocence, but the last one popped off, so I now have a lot more people watching. Which: hi! I’m really glad you’re here! Thank you so much for the warm reception of my last video. The conversations in the comments have been so exciting, though I fear my to-read and to-watch lists are going to get even more out of control than they already are based on all the stories that you guys have been mentioning. You’ve all also been incredibly nice to me, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

I started this series with that video up in the corner, which I recommend if you haven’t checked it out, but I’m going to take this opportunity to reiterate some of how we’re talking about “childhood innocence” as a social construct. I won’t give the entire rundown again, but this is a good opportunity for just a little refresher.

            So: one of the most prevalent attitudes about childhood in the modern Western world is that it is a period of life that is inherently “innocent.” However, this belief is not a natural law, but rather a social construction, which Alison and Adrian James define as “A theoretical perspective that explores the ways in which ‘reality’ is negotiated in everyday life through

people’s interactions and through sets of discourses.” In other words, all cultures interpret the observable facts of the world around them in certain ways that are constantly communally reproduced and reinterpreted by the functioning of the culture at large. It is through social constructions that we organize our lives. Gender would be a really obvious one here. Interpretations of gender have come pretty far from whatever prehistoric observations our species made about the diversity of bodies we have. Clearly, our beliefs about the genders of colors, for example, don’t come from nature. These constructions are extremely important in organizing social life – but they are not completely fixed. I mean, I get to have my own bank account, which I wouldn’t have a few decades ago. So that’s what we’re talking about with social constructions: they are specific to a time and place, though deeply grounded in history; they have powerful material impacts on people’s lives; but they are also mutable over time.

James and James provide a handy overview of what Childhood Studies scholars are talking about when we discuss “childhood innocence” as a social construction. They explain that this construction has two intertwined definitions: innocence is seen as the states of being “lacking in experience and certain kinds of knowledge, and free from moral guilt.” Our old buddy Jean-Jacques Rousseau was instrumental in the development of this construction in the 18^th century. There’s a good article by Robbie Duschinsky in the works cited if you want to read more about Rousseau’s ideas re: childhood, but one of things that Rousseau posited was that children are inherently close to Nature and distant from Society, capital N, capital S. Already, we see the grounding of these ideas within Rousseau’s own social constructs, as his philosophies reveal that particularly Western division between Nature and Society that not all cultures perceive within their own understandings of reality. Even within the West, there have been multiple interpretations of this perceived division between Nature and Society and how that pertains to childhood. For example, the Puritans and other groups influenced by Calvinist theology believed that kids were born innately and inherently sinful, and raising them was a matter of breaking their will. (Unfortunately, this idea still exists today, too, often in weird paradoxical conjunction with ideas about childhood innocence, but that is a topic for another video.)  

The idea of childhood as what James and James describe as “a special period in the life-course that needed to be nurtured and protected” was particularly beloved within the Romantic era in Europe, from the late eighteenth through mid-ish-nineteenth centuries. This is where we see a lot of depictions of children embedded in Nature, clearly distinct from the trappings of adult society, peaceful, sweet, wistful, nostalgic, sentimental – a lot of how adults still see childhood today. And like … none of that sounds bad, on the surface. But James and James point out that these ideas of innocence have historically been reserved for “white, middle-class children” – check out my Devils, Darkness, and White Supremacy video for more on that. Also, children often get excluded from aspects of social life that affect them “under the guise of their protection.” So what does it mean for an adult – specifically, for a parent – to protect a child’s innocence?

            It’s interesting, because in this whole sort of Nature vs. Nurture debate that everyone is so preoccupied with, “childhood innocence” as a concept really rests squarely on both. Yes, children are imagined as innocent by virtue of simply being children. Lack of experience gets conflated with moral purity in this construct. So there’s your Nature. But that can all crumble very fast without the right Nurture. If you bungle that, then your kid isn’t going to stay innocent for long.

            And that sounds like an excellent intro to a monster story. So join me, why don’t you, as we do one of my favorite things: talk about Frankenstein.

UNNATURAL AND UNNURTURED: FRANKENSTEIN

            I have taught excerpts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in a couple of undergrad courses. If your Frankenstein knowledge is primarily derived through general cultural osmosis and not the actual novel, there are a few things you need to know. As iconic as the “it’s alive!” sequence from the 1931 film is, Victor Frankenstein did not have this reaction to his Creature in the source material. Not that I’m knocking the movie. That film is fundamental in my development as a monster nerd. But monster stories change over time, and they should. In his iconic “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains, “Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them” (5). What our monsters mean will meet our present moment, even if we’re retelling an old story. So while the crazed mad scientist enthralled by his own ill-gotten success was what captured the imagination in Depression-era Hollywood, the original Victor is capital-R Romanticism all the way down.

The novel was first published in 1818, and it was written as a result of a spooky story contest by Lord Byron while he and all of his literary friends were chilling at Lake Geneva during a summer that stayed cold and gray due to the global effects of a massive volcanic eruption. Sometimes real life really is that dramatique. Romantic era artwork was all about beauty, nature, and above all, emotion. Enlightenment era ideals of reason and logic were insufficient, Romantics believed, to fully understand the world and the human experience. Life can’t just be about what makes you think; it’s also about what makes you feel. Now Rousseau was an Enlightenment guy, but his preoccupation with Nature translated well into the Romantic era. The Romantics were very into the idea of the innocent child at one with the Natural world around them, and I hope you can hear the continued capital N here.

Okay, so we’ve set the scene (or at least sketched the scene. I need this essay to not be nine hours long). Now let me share a couple of sections from the text with you. These are the sections that I’ve assigned in my classes: the moment when the Creature first comes to life, and then the Creature’s account of his early coming to awareness through his observations of a small poor but loving family.

So our guy Victor is essentially a college dropout, having left his education in a huff when all of his professors asked him to please stop talking about alchemy all the time, you weirdo. Victor himself is quite a young man, which is one thing that I do kind of wish more adaptations would take up. As utterly hype as I am to see Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming film with Oscar Isaac as Victor – and I cannot adequately express how much this feels like a gift from the universe specifically to me – I think the undergrad-aged Victor, as written by the undergrad-aged Mary Shelley, is an important element to the text. Anyway, Victor is all I’ll show you and successfully makes a guy. He makes a very large guy, since he had to scale everything up so he could properly recreate the intricacies of the human body. But Victor, in proper Romantic fashion, was careful to make his guy beautiful. From the spare parts he surreptitiously gathered, he sculpted a fine form and visage, and now is ready to give his creation the spark of life. And the illustrations I’m showing here are from Bernie Wrightson. Not 100% how I picture things, but a very compelling artistic rendition that is specific to the text itself.

From Victor’s narration: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.”

Immediately filled with regret, Victor runs and hides until the “demoniacal corpse to which [he] had so miserably given life” leaves the premises. Like any good nineteenth-century novel protagonist, Victor then falls into a protracted period of mental breakdown-induced fever. When he recovers, he returns home to his family.

But what’s going on with his abandoned Creature? Later in the novel, the Creature himself tells us. It’s rough going at first, because despite being around eight feet tall and possessing a facsimile of an adult body, the Creature essentially starts life in the same state of newborn helplessness as anyone else: “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original æra of my being: all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.” He learns quickly how to move his body and attend to his hunger, thirst, tiredness, and cold. Still, in his first lonely night of life, full of fear and pain, the Creature weeps until sunrise. The rebirth of warmth and light in the world fills the Creature with wonder – with innocent wonder, one might say. The Creature begins to make observations about the natural world around him, as any Natural child would, and he is delighted by trees, birds, and the moon.

But still, he is alone – until he comes upon a village. His first encounter with the villagers goes about how you’d expect. He retreats from their fear-fueled attacks and finds a low hovel in which he can shelter, attached to a cabin belonging to the DeLacey family, which consists of an older blind father, his son and daughter, and later the son’s fiancée. The Creature is immediately enamored by the love they show for one another. Through his observations of them, he learns language and human culture. The DeLaceys sing and play instruments; they comfort each other through their hardships. The Creature is enraptured.

Finally, the Creature can stand his solitary observations no longer, and he tries to make contact. Since the elder DeLacey is blind, he figures he might have a decent shot of acceptance if he approaches him first. The Creature tells DeLacey, “I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth.” DeLacey attempts to comfort the Creature: “I am blind, and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere.” Unfortunately, the Creature runs out of time for this private conversation, as the three younger DeLaceys return and react with horror. They drive the Creature out of their house and into despair.

This is where my assigned excerpts would end, and I’d talk to my students about how they feel about the Creature. Unanimously, they would express their sympathies. Then I would ask them, “Would it change the way you feel to know that by the time the Creature is relating this story, he has already murdered a child?”

Because that is what finally drew Victor out and caused him to confront his creation for the first time since he gave him life. The Creature, having learned his creator’s name, tracks Victor down and comes upon his very young brother, William. At first, he just wants to steal William away to teach someone to love him, but William, though a little kid, is already as afraid of the Creature as any adult. Then the Creature finds out William is a Frankenstein and kills him. In her essay “‘A Kind of Insanity in my Spirits’: Frankenstein, Childhood, and Criminal Intent,” Melissa J. Ganz points out that the Creature’s intent is a bit ambiguous here. The Creature recounts the crime thus: “The child still struggled, and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to my heart. I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet.” So was murder the goal? Hard to say, though the Creature does feel that the suffering that Victor experiences from the loss of his brother is a just punishment for abandoning what should have been his son.

William, unlike the Creature, had embodied the physical ideal of the innocent child. This is important; you can check out my last two videos on childhood, monstrosity, and disability for a longer discussion about how only certain bodies are afforded that social construct of innocence. As William had previously been described by Elizabeth, Victor’s foster sister/fiancée – don’t worry about it – “he is very tall of his age, with sweet laughing blue eyes, dark eyelashes, and curling hair. When he smiles, two little dimples appear on each cheek, which are rosy with health.” Because of this angelic appearance, William has access to all of the nurture that the Creature does not. The Creature strangles William, and William’s nanny, Justine, is blamed for the crime and executed. Victor, by the way, fully knows that it was the Creature the whole time, but he does not do anything like confess that he made a guy in order to save Justine. He’s really sad about it, though. Probably he’s even suffering more than Justine, because at least she knows that she’s innocent, while he is tormented by his hideous mistake. So actually, Victor has it worse. Victor Frankenstein is one of the great characters of literature, an absolute standout of an unreliable narrator – not unreliable in the sense of obfuscating information, but unreliable about himself and his role in the story. He listens to the Creature’s entire tale of neglect and woe and still thinks his main mistake was making an ugly fiend, instead of then immediately abandoning him. Victor is consumed by guilt, but rarely for the things he should be. It’s deeply compelling. The man’s a literary masterpiece. He also sucks. Just so bad.

Anyway, you can probably tell where my sympathies lie by the fact that I immediately went on a digression about how Victor’s the worst after revealing that the Creature had killed a little kid. Not that I’m cool with what the Creature did to William. It’s incredibly upsetting. In no world should William have to suffer and die for his brother’s failings, and Shelley’s narrative doesn’t try to soften that fact. If you’re going to care about the Creature – and the novel absolutely positions the reader to do so – you’re also going to feel uncomfortable about it. That’s, in my mind, one of the best things about a really good monster story. It doesn’t let you off the hook. It makes you hold that cognitive dissonance, that moral dissonance.

But, if we are to believe the Creature’s own account – and I’m more inclined to trust his interpretation of events than Victor’s – the Creature did not kill William because of his nature. He and William were experiencing early childhood simultaneously: figuring out their sensory experiences, making observations about the world, and becoming enculturated through exposure to moral people. The crucial difference is that William was able to interact with those people: his family, his servants like Justine, and his friends. The Creature remained totally isolated, and not in a fun pseudo-prehistoric Rousseauian way. He was just as “innocent” as William to begin with, but he was deprived of nurture.

Ganz puts the novel in the context of shifting legal treatments of childhood in England at the time. So these philosophies about children’s moral natures have direct material consequences on the lives of children – especially children caught up in the criminal justice system. While previous versions of “justice” had focused on just the facts of who committed a crime – and if it was a kid, that’s treated the same way as an adult – Ganz demonstrates that “The treatment of children’s criminal capacity underwent an important shift over the course of the eighteenth century.” Now people were paying attention to issues of actual intent, which requires moral knowledge. Does the child culprit truly understand the difference between right and wrong? And who is to blame if a child becomes a criminal in the first place? Ganz argues that Shelley answers that question firmly with “the parents.” She writes, “During his formative years, the creature receives no guidance, love, or sympathy; he has no parent to develop his reason or to shape his will. Through her portrait of the creature’s natural benevolence and gradual turn to violence, Shelley underscores parents’ role in and responsibility for the making of criminals.”

I think Ganz’s argument is compelling, and to me that begs the question, why did Victor drop the ball so hard? What caused Shelley’s cautionary tale of a bad dad to renege on his great responsibility? What I think the text suggests is that it is the perception of innocent childhood that ultimately creates the experience of innocent childhood. Victor did not bring life to the shape of a baby, so no one – including Victor himself – ever sees the Creature as such. And like, Mary Shelley is still a Romantic. Her account of the Creature’s earliest life does uphold the belief in an inherently good default state of the human – or mostly human – experience. The Creature does not only learn about his senses, but he wonders at them and derives a pure and sweet joy from the pleasant sensations of nature. He also instinctively loves the DeLaceys. Unseen, he provides them resources to alleviate their poverty. So Mary isn’t necessarily claiming that childhood innocence is a social construct, like I do. In the imagined world of her novel, it is a natural truth. But that innocence is fragile. It may start as nature, but it needs nurture to persist. Victor did create a monster, just not in the way that he thinks.

In other words, childhood innocence is a massive adult responsibility – and as precious as we collectively imagine this state of being, childhood can become equally as rotten and deadly if we fumble that responsibility. That’s at least what one of our most monumental cultural touchstones of monstrosity claims, and Mary Shelley is not alone in that assertion. So what other havoc can a child wronged wreak?

MOTHERLESS MONSTERS: DARK WATER

            The Japanese film Dark Water was released in 2002, six years after the publication of the short story Floating Water, on which it was based. There was later a 2005 American remake, but I haven’t seen it, so I’m just going to talk about the Japanese original. Spoilers are ahead: it’s not super possible to talk about this film without talking about the ending. Dark Water was directed by Hideo Nataka, who also directed Ringu, later remade into the American The Ring, so when I sat down to watch Dark Water about a year or so ago, I expected to be very spooked. But this movie wasn’t actually that scary, but it did make me incredibly sad.

            In Dark Water, a woman named Yoshimi is – and here I wrote “struggling to keep afloat,” and then regretted writing that, but I couldn’t actually find another metaphor that worked, and that’s probably kind of the point. So she is in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, and she currently has primary custody of her young daughter Ikuko. Ikukuo’s father is fighting Yoshimi for custody, despite his general history of deadbeat-ness. He is using the fact that Yoshimi had previously received psychiatric treatment against her, because he sucks as a person. But this does make it difficult for Yoshimi to trust herself or reach out for help when things start going very wrong in the run-down apartment that she is forced to rent. Her ceiling has leaks and water damage, and a child’s little red handbag keeps appearing, despite Yoshimi throwing it away multiple times. The eeriness adds to Yoshimi’s anxiety as she tries to find a job while still taking care of Ikuko. One sequence shows Yoshimi sitting through a job interview gone over time while Ikuko is the last child remaining in the classroom as she waits to be picked up. Flashbacks show that Yoshimi also had this childhood experience, as she sat alone at a desk while her mother made excuses over the phone to her teacher. Yoshimi desperately wants to not repeat this pattern, but she can’t seem to succeed.

            Unfortunately, her ex and the court are not the only things that Yoshimi needs to fight. Water-based hazards escalate in the apartment building. Yoshimi begins to catch glimpses of a little girl in a yellow rain coat – often near Ikuko. She learns that a girl, around Ikuko’s age, went missing from this apartment complex the previous year. That child’s name was Mitsuko: she was abandoned by her mother, and then subsequently disappeared. It turns out that Mitsuko, left to her own devices, drowned in the water tank on the building’s roof. Since then, she has become a ghost desperate for what she did not have in life: a good mother.

            At first Mitsuko seems to see Ikuko as a friend, but it soon becomes clear that she instead sees her as a rival. She tries to drown Ikuko in the bathtub, but Yoshimi arrives just in time – or so it seems. She runs to the elevator, clutching the unconscious child to her chest. But before the doors close – since all this water damage has been seriously messing up the electric system – she sees a figure emerge into the hallway. It’s Ikuko. The child she “rescued” was Mitsuko, who, now revealing her true form as a waterlogged corpse, clings to Yoshimi’s neck, calling her mama. At first, Yoshimi denies this charge and tries to get her off, but then she realizes that if she gives Mitsuko what she wants, Ikuko will be safe. She turns on the stern mom voice to tell Ikuko to stay away, then gently cradles Mitsuko and confirms that she is her mama now. The elevator doors shut and Ikuko, sobbing, runs up the stairs to intercept it, but when the doors open again on the higher floor, they just release a torrent of water. The child actor who plays Ikuko, Rio Kanno, is very talented, so I don’t know that I’m ever going to get those heart-shattering wails for her mother out of my head.

            Ten years later, the teenage Ikuko visits the old apartment. She doesn’t seem to remember exactly what happened, so when she sees the ghost of her mother, she asks why no one told her that she was living so close. Yoshimi is delighted to see her again, but she cannot stay for long. Mitsuko appears to reclaim her ghostly mother, and Yoshimi leaves Ikuko with the revelation that she was always looking out for her.

            In her article “Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema,” Lindsay Nelson explains, “Japan’s social stability and its prospects for the future are, as in the United States and many other countries, tied to the concept of the child, who must be shielded from the destructive and violent forces that seem to be infiltrating Japanese society at an alarming rate” (1). In other words, there’s a lot of overlap in American and Japanese cultural constructions of the preciousness and importance of a child’s futurity for the nation, as well as the intense need to protect childhood from going culturally off-script. The constructs are not identical, of course: the legacy of Rousseau and Romanticism is obviously less of a thing in societies that weren’t included in those historical movements. “Childhood innocence” as a concept has in many ways gone global, but it’s still interpreted and applied in different ways from context to context. But that primacy of the child’s needs, that intense pressure for the right kind of nurture, is very much part of Japanese stories like Dark Water. Nelson argues, “For Japan, the figure of the child is not only an icon of the future and the one for whom social order must be maintained, but an icon of the past, of a fixed and unchanging sense of traditional values and identity. When the child is under threat – or, in the cast of the films under discussion here, turns monstrous – it is not only a stable future that is threatened but a utopian vision of the past” (1-2). Cultural identity itself – a shared past, a common goal for the future – rests on the preservation and protection of the right kind of childhood, which requires everyone to get on board to provide the right kind of nurture.

            Now, Dark Water clearly knows how difficult it can be to provide that nurture. Many of Yoshimi’s struggles are beyond her control. She clearly wants to be there for and with her daughter, and when she is, she is a loving presence in her life. But Nelson points out that the film is “often of two minds about its protagonist (subtly shaming her one minute for being a working, single mother but also sympathizing with her struggle to do the right thing)” (11). The viewer is not positioned to dislike Yoshimi in any way, but it is still her absence – the deficit of the nurture that she is able to give Ikuko – that puts Ikuko at risk to Mitsuko. It is the divorce – that breakdown of the nuclear family, as we see in horror movie after horror movie – that leads to them being in that dingy old apartment complex in the first place. And when Yoshimi is not physically present, that is when Mitsuko poses the most danger to Ikuko.

Mitsuko herself, meanwhile, is only monstrous and murderous because she was deprived of protection and nurture. As I alluded to earlier, though, she is a tragic figure as well a scary one. The general goopiness of her decomposing face is unpleasant, but her pleas for mama are the same as Ikuko’s (albeit with some spooky sound mixing). Her death was a tragedy, as is her lonely, uncared for afterlife. Despite the horror of Yoshimi’s separation from Ikuko, the gentleness with which she holds Mitsuko in the elevator comes as something of a relief. Like the Creature, Mitsuko induces that cognitive and moral dissonance in the viewer. We may hate the violence, but we – or at least I – still want her to be held. As Nelson explains, “The monstrous child embodies the space of in-between, transgressing the boundaries between cleanliness and purity, innocence and abjection, death and birth” (9). A big part of this in-between-ness, as I see it, is that tension between a belief in an inherently good or innocent nature, and that easy destruction of that goodness through the wrong kind of nurture. Neither Mitsuko nor the Creature started bad; their monstrosity is an indictment of those who gave them life.

I’ve mentioned in previous videos that Karen J. Renner, in her book Evil Children in the Popular Imagination, argues that a lot of “evil children” horror stories ironically uphold the belief in childhood innocence – at least inherent childhood innocence. (There are, of course, some exceptions, and the “child sociopath” is something I want to explore in a future video.) But in these stories where the children aren’t bad from birth, the cause of the monstrosity is the way in which the children are failed – which means that successful childhood is still the ultimate good, the opposite of monstrosity. But I think this also shows how anxiety-producing the construct of childhood innocence can be. One wrong move, and it’s gone for good. Tragedy and horror story all in one.

There are some stories that allow the neglected or abused child to hold on to some of their goodness, though. They may still become monsters – not-human, not-child – but they might not be all bad – especially if there’s an even more innocent child left to look out for. So let’s take a look now at the first real scary movie I ever saw: The Sixth Sense.

CHILDREN SAVING CHILDREN: THE SIXTH SENSE

            Oh, The Sixth Sense. It came out in 1999, and by the time I saw it probably a year-ish later, I, like everyone else, already knew the twist ending. The surprise isn’t necessary to like the movie, though, and, despite the fact that it terrified me as an eleven-year-old, I did quite like it. I was particularly captivated by the story of Kyra, the child ghost played by a little Micha Barton.

            But first, let’s back up. If you’re only familiar with this film again through cultural osmosis, allow me to fill you in on some of the details. Like Dark Water, this movie also features a struggling single mom and her imperiled child. Cole is nine years old and weird. He is smart but very solitary, and strange things keep happening around him. He’s also really racking up the unexplained injuries, which obviously alarms his mother, and also puts her under suspicion of abuse. Childhood psychologist Malcolm starts seeing Cole after a real low point in his career, in which a former patient, now an adult, breaks into his house and blames Malcolm for not helping him. This former patient shoots both Malcolm and himself, killing them both, no need to be coy, we all know that Bruce Willis is dead the whole time. But Malcolm himself does not know that; he just sees Cole as a potential chance at redemption. A child he can actually save.

            Cole eventually admits what’s going on to Malcolm with the now-iconic line “I see dead people.” The ghosts frequently attack Cole in their rage and confusion. They “don’t know they’re dead,” but they do know that they’re suffering. Together, Malcolm and Cole work on a plan of action: Cole will offer to listen to the ghosts to find out what they need. This is not easy for Cole to do because the ghosts are very scary, but the next time a ghost shows up, he offers to help.

            This ghost is Kyra. She is spooky as hell: pale, bruised, vomiting, and intoning, “I’m feeling much better now.” She is absolutely an abject figure. Abjection is a concept that, according to the writings of Julia Kristeva, refers to the things that threaten the stability of a subject position, an individual identity. It’s what Kristeva calls the “not-I” – the stuff that has to be separated, thrown out, run away from, so that it ceases to threaten that illusion of a clean, controlled, immutable personhood. I say “illusion” because basically all that is abject is part of the human experience: waste, bodily fluids, violence, death. It’s taboo, it’s the stuff that makes us gag, and it’s also frequently stuff that can’t help but draw our interest, even as we abhor it. The abject is all about that push and pull: revulsion and fascination. Kyra’s abjection is evident in all of the contradictions that she embodies: she is a mess of opposites that are not supposed to coexist. Her key feature is vomit: her insides turning into her outsides. She is dead, but still here, still corporeal, at least to Cole, whom she can touch. According to Kristeva, the human corpse is the most abject thing of all: a subject-less body, a reminder of the ultimate dissolution of identity that awaits every human.

And, of course, Kyra is a child and, by virtue of being a ghost, also a monster. She is just too scary to be innocent anymore. And it is true that Kyra doesn’t always behave in a benign manner, unlike the ghost of Malcolm. When, based on her instructions, Cole attends her funeral repast at her house, her hand shoots out from under the bed to grab him by the ankle in one of the biggest jump scares of the movie. I remember talking about this moment on the school bus in middle school, and one of the neighborhood kids said that he would take a giant flying leap into his bed from across the room for days after seeing this film. But unlike the Creature or Mitsuko, Kyra does not try to cause harm to another child. Instead, she directs Cole to present her grieving father with a videotape that Kyra made to record her homemade puppet shows. The recording kept going when her mother came in the room with Kyra’s lunch – which she then doctored with poison. This Munchausen’s-by-proxy was the cause of Kyra’s illness and death, and now her mother has begun to make Kyra’s younger sister sick, too. By revealing the truth, Kyra and Cole save an even younger – and therefore particularly innocent – child’s life.

In “‘I See Dead People’: Ghost-Seeing Children as Mediums and Mediators of Communication in Contemporary Horror Cinema,” Sage Leslie-McCarthy explores characters like Cole as facilitators of togetherness. She argues that in child medium movies, “the very otherness of the children is a means of brining about greater unity: families and communities eventually pull together through them” (2). Cole is clearly not a normal kid; because of his exposure to the violence of the ghosts, he does lack a certain element of innocence – namely, ignorance. But Leslie-McCarthy argues that this otherness allows Cole to provide “voices to the marginalized, the abused, and the forgotten who are often also children” (2). The Sixth Sense places just as much emphasis on nurture as Frankenstein or Dark Water. Clearly, it demonstrates the worst effects of the violation of parental responsibility: instead of strengthening and protecting her daughter, Kyra’s mother literally sickens her until she dies. But it is only through Cole, another child, that Kyra is able to communicate that message to her father. Based on his reaction to the tape, he is utterly blindsided. Now that he has the knowledge that he lacked, he at least is empowered to protect and nurture his remaining child.

But The Sixth Sense is also interested in the nurturance of Cole. He keeps his abilities secret from his mom because he doesn’t want her to know that he’s a “freak,” but this lack of communication, Leslie-McCarthy argues, just hurts them both. It’s not the fact that his mom is a single working mother that endangers him; it’s that he cannot communicate with her to let her know what he experiences and therefore what he needs. Through his work with his dead psychologist – both of those being important here – Cole learns to facilitate communication between other kids and adults, as well as communication between himself and the most important adult in his life, his mom – tellingly, by offering communication from her mother, who has died. (Also, this is the second video in a row where I’ve discussed a movie with an absolute banger of a Toni Collette performance.)

I think Leslie-McCarthy’s arguments are interesting in the context of my analysis here, because they suggest that nurture is not an entirely one-way street. It’s not just the imparting of care and knowledge from a parent to a child, but it’s also the active communication between parent and child. This appeals to me as someone who is always looking for ways to uphold and advocate for the active roles of children within their social worlds. It’s also interesting, though, that The Sixth Sense is a horror story that ultimately lacks that moral dissonance that I talked about with the previous two examples. A lot of this is just M. Night Shyamalan’s general propensity to wrap things up in a neat bow. But I also think the ultimate goodness of both Cole and Kyra – othered and abject children though they may be – once again shows how central the concept of childhood innocence is to so much of our storytelling. Here, lack of nurture can endanger children physically and eventually psychologically and morally. But Malcolm’s murderer is an adult before he resorts to violence. He is portrayed in ways that highlight his arrested development: his scrawny physicality, his appearance in only his underwear, kind of like a baby in a diaper, and his cringing affect and manner of speech all point to a psyche stuck within a childhood destroyed. So that lack of proper communication, that lack of adult attendance to a child’s needs, is still shown to be a cause of monstrosity. But the actual kids of the movie remain resilient in their morality, at least for now. The Sixth Sense is ultimately quite a comforting movie, ankle grab jump scares notwithstanding. It suggests that vulnerable children can still be properly nurtured – and that they themselves can tells us how.

CONCLUSION: BUT ARE WE LISTENING?

            As per uzh, I would like to close things out with a discussion of how these narratives may reflect and reinforce the ways children – and in this case, also adults – are treated in real life. I found an interesting study from Germany about stigma and childhood trauma. The researchers, Schomerus et al., define stigma as “labeling, stereotyping, separation and status loss” (2). They posed the following scenario to participants in their study: “Imagine you have a new neighbor. When talking to you, they indicate that they have experienced [traumatic event] and are still dealing with the consequences” (3). The events they included were sexual abuse as a child, physical abuse as a child, serious accident as a child, and physical abuse as an adult. They had participants rate their responses to this hypothetical neighbor in several ways – check out the works cited if you want to read more – but one of those ways was the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with stereotypes: “Statements started with “people who have experienced [traumatic event]. . .”, followed by four positively framed statements (are able to have good friendships; are just as suitable for a responsible job like any other person; perform their parental duties just as well as other people; have survived a crisis and have grown through it), and six negative statements (are unpredictable; have a higher risk of becoming a criminal; are harmed for the rest of their lives; are guilty of what has happened to them to a certain degree; are not able to have a stable relationship; have already been vulnerable before the event, should they develop a mental illness)” (4).

            It’s very important that we note that “most respondents agreed with positive, and disagreed with negative stereotypes” (6). So I am not making a one-to-one argument between monster stories and real life here. The data would not support that, thank god. People in general do have a lot of sympathy for childhood trauma – but I’m interested in whether that is useful sympathy. I think that this insistence we collectively have for the existence of a precious and fragile state of childhood innocence that must be protected correctly lest it disintegrate and lead a person to a sort of internal state of ruin is probably not too helpful to people who have actually experienced things like abandonment, neglect, or abuse. And I think this hypothesis of mine is supported by Schomerus et al.’s results. They found that “The most frequently endorsed assumption was that people are permanently harmed by their traumatic experiences” (6). This was the only negative stereotype that made up the majority of responses for both forms of interpersonal childhood trauma (so not the accidents). But there were also some negative stereotypes that, while they comprised a minority of results, still represented statistically significant increases over different forms of trauma. For instance, “People who experienced sexual abuse in childhood are regarded more frequently to be unable to have a stable relationship,” as well as being assumed less frequently “to have grown from their adverse childhood experiences” (6). However, they were also considered “somewhat less guilty than people reporting all other types of trauma … and they are seen more competent as parents … and in difficult jobs … compared to someone reporting adult physical abuse” (6). Meanwhile, the results for stereotypes about people who’ve been through childhood physical abuse showed that they “are seen at greater risk of committing criminal offenses … a significant difference to childhood accident and adult physical trauma. They are also seen less capable of having good friendships” (7).

Like I said, if you want the numbers for all of that, they are in the source; I felt like that would be hard to keep track of in a spoken format, so I breezed over the specifics, but they did find statistical significance for everything I just said. They also acknowledge that this is not any kind of comprehensive view of stigma in these areas. They just wanted to produce a study that would demonstrate to what extent stigma for childhood trauma exists at all, as a jumping off point for future research into what effects it may have on the people who have experienced those traumas, especially when it comes to barriers to seeking help. For my part, putting this research in conversation with our monster stories about various forms of bad or missing nurture I think shows the limitations of some of our social constructs of childhood. It makes for an emotionally resonant, frightening story to say that a child can become a monster if they are not raised right, but does that narrative allow us to write off kids who’ve been through painful things as lost causes – especially kids who’ve suffered under cruel or neglectful parents? Not always, but still, I think, too often.

Of course, Schomerus et al. also point out that the stigmas they attempted to partially measure do not exist in isolation. Different assumptions will be made about children who’ve experienced parental trauma based on plenty of other factors. Like I said, in my first video in this series, I talked about the effects of race on which children are assumed to embody innocence, and my last two videos talked about how disability fits into that equation. We can add trauma – the notion of a “bad childhood” – as one more factor in our growing list of caveats and qualifications around childhood innocence. In my next two videos, I will layer on yet another consideration: queerness. So please go ahead and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss that conversation, which I am extremely excited about.

Thank you again so much for all the new viewers for tuning in. I may or may not have cried a little bit last week at some of the comments that you left. Literally all I’ve ever wanted to do my whole life was write things that resonated with people and their own life experiences, so those of you who let me know that these videos have been resonating with you, you are literally making my dreams come true over here. I have a lot of exciting things for the channel planned for down the road, so I hope you stick around. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like, and I’d love to get another good conversation going in the comments on this one. And with that, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will see you next time on The Monster & The Child for more monstrous food for thought.