The Gothic Child on Film

Abstract

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of children in gothic have had a lasting influence on the literature of the Victorian period and on the neo-gothic movements of the twentieth century. The contemporary evolutions of the gothic child range from the extreme success of the heroic, almost messianic Harry Potter saga (2001–11) and the disturbing Sixth Sense (1999), in which the child is an intermediary between the world of the dead and the living, to the less well known Warden of the Dead (2006). This Warden is a young orphan who becomes the ‘guardian’ and keeper of the keys to a graveyard only to find out, in the company of a dying painter and an old man who wants to kill himself, that he is able to predict people’s deaths. Most character traits and elements from the life of the now long-standing gothic child are in place here: the death of the parents, the mystery of the child’s fate, the child resisting hardships, the gravestones, spirituality, the candles, the burial ceremonies, the nightly journeys through underground passages and the final realisation that comes with newly acquired knowledge, the happiness of finding love and a new family. Interestingly, the train element is present too. As in Harry Potter and in The Chronicles of Narnia, as in Carroll’s Wonderland and in the work of Dickens, this train is an eerie combination of technology, mystery and horror.