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Angels, Monsters and Childhood: Liminality and the Quotidian Surreal

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Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ((PSADVC))

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Abstract

The classic bildungsroman structure of many narratives for young people is apt to map transitional subjectivities onto a metanarrative that implies that childhood and adulthood are unified states of being that an adolescent transitions between. While grounded in a substantive ‘reality’, fantasies, in uncanny, Gothic and magical realist modes conjugate that reality with the fantastic and the surreal, and have the capacity to disrupt conventional metanarratives, render character subjectivity and the fictive world fluid, liminal and ambiguous, and offer a range of imaginative possibilities. Focussing on film adaptations of David Almond’s Clay (2005; directed by Andrew Gunn) and Skellig (1998; directed by Annabel Jankel), and Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012), a loose reworking of the Frankenstein story and its filmic progeny, this chapter examines how magical realist and Gothic fantasy strategies are used in literature and film to blur distinctions between the real and the fantastic, thus creating a world of the quotidian surreal and raising questions about the nature of being and knowledge.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Blake Archive. www.blakearchive.org/

  2. 2.

    Ernie is an old man who lived and died in Michael’s family’s house, who, according to the doctor, spoke ‘of certain images that came to him’ (115).

  3. 3.

    He returns, of course, in the sequel The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and innumerable more sequels and adaptations.

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  1. Sydney, Australia

    Robyn McCallum

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McCallum, R. (2018). Angels, Monsters and Childhood: Liminality and the Quotidian Surreal. In: Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39541-2_5

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