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In this chapter, I consider the re-emergence of the monstrous-child sub-genre, in the contemporary American horror film and its relationship to the traumatic events of 9/11. In particular, I focus on the manner in which the representation of the monstrous child can be understood as a metaphorical terrorist in that it, threatens the bourgeois, patriarchal family–the family as symbolic of the nation as a whole–from within. I suggest that child as monster can be interpreted as signalling fears around the loss of boundariespolitical, economic and cultural-as inscribed within the demonic figure of the child (the ‘other’/not-America/outside), which turns against the parent (the ‘self’/America/Inside). The child is not only abject - signalling in Freudian terms the return of the repressed - but is a place of becoming, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, which places the hegemonic ideology of patriarchal capitalism under threat: articulated through the threat to the bourgeois family as the embodiment of its values. In these terms, the child as metaphorical terrorist highlights the fragility of the symbolic order in the face of the threat of the “other”: a fragility, which was only too obvious in the light of the horrific events of 9/11.
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