Children in Post-Apocalyptic Film

Screening Children in Post-Apocalypse Film and Television

• Children in post-apocalyptic films often provide a sense of futurity, suggesting recovery, a return to what was lost, or a new society full of hope.
• The image of the child embodies the belief in humanity rising from destruction, capturing "a rhythm of longing, [and] its enticements and entrapments."
• Children carry legacies of innocence, compassion, humanity, innovation, modernity, love, and hope.
• Apocalyptic representations rarely end with the actual end, there is always remains or a transformation into paradise.
• Children represent "debris," leftovers from modernity, functioning as a promise for a new paradise.
• Not all children function as vessels of hope as some can be the cause of destruction.
• Cinema has a long history of portraying evil children or those who desire the destruction of adults, seen in films like Lord of the Flies (1954), The Bad Seed (1954), and Children of the Corn (1984).
• The evil children operate within modernity which is flawed but functional, their designs are seen as anomalies within the framework.
• Malevolent children are perhaps more terrifying and shocking in post-apocalyptic circumstances than in normal societal conditions.
• The zombie is a monstrous character rooted in "the folkloric figuration of the experiences of enslaved Africans, a figure that inhabits-and embodies-a borderline where biological life meets societal death."
• The zombie film emphasizes notions of normal versus problem bodies, and the undead hunger for human flesh in a hyper-instinctual frenzy to highlight the value of the normative.
• Child zombies create further terror through the corruption of innocence and childhood.
• Night of the Living Dead (1968) features child zombie Karen Cooper attacking her parents and [Rec] (2004) features a seductively innocent toddler zombie.
• Children in such films are already suspect, making their killing less surprising, though still conflicting with preconceived notions of childhood innocence.
• Zombie children bite to infect while possessed or haunted children kill.
• The "evil child" formula involves the child being considered "normal" or "whole" before becoming corrupt, which is shocking.
• It is rare for a such film to present a child character who straddles the space between good and evil, between innocent and corrupt, and who keeps the audience guessing.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)

• In The Girl with All the Gifts, a fungus has infected the earth and turned humans into zombies, called Hungries, eventually mutating into a fungus plant after death.
• "Disability" and the "disabled body" play a role in the human hope for a cure for the current state.
• The Hungries are disabled bodies that need to be controlled and are out of the non-zombie societal expectations.
• The race is on to find a cure and reverse the effects of the fungus, there exists a subclass that is both zombie and human.
• These hybrid children, born of infected human mothers, have zombie desires for flesh, but can also reason and think.
• Melanie, the film's protagonist, straddles both human and non-human, and old versus new species.
• Disabled bodies are shown in order to shore up a sense of normalcy and strength in a presumed able-bodied audience.
• Girl with all the Gifts reveals that disabled child bodies are not a means to save human existence or a recovered human future.
• The disabled child body is the new body and species, marking the end of humanity.
• The new bodies redefine childhood and signal the death of the human notion of innocence.

Dis/Abled Child Bodies

• There are a select few amount of Hollywood who use disabled characters. International films however do this much better.
• Melanie, played by Sennia Nanua, brings great deal of richness to the "appearance of problem bodies on screen".
• Disability studies is a growing field which looks at how non-normative on screen.
• Early films used disabled people to heightened emotional reactions.
• Film depictions of both mental and physical disabilities were used as vehicles to create metaphors for metaphors for terror, ridicule, heroism, empathy and community integration.
• Traditionally, literary and filmic representations of mentally and or physically disabled presume a normalcy that reinforces itself and incarceration.
• Disability activist call this 'ableist' ideology, one that differs bodies by able and disabled, visibility and invisibility.
• The disabled character thus represents a history of social economic and cultural assumptions.
• The figure of the Child functions as a preeminent emblem of the motivating end of every political vision as a vision of futurity.
• Any "good" future "excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it is the very absence of disability that signals this is a better future."
• In zombie movies, the zombie is the abject body that is often the abject, which is disrupted by the zombie.
• In this movie, the abled bodied are Melanie and the other child zombies, who wish to reclaim the current narrative paradigm.
• Melanie first appears bound to a chair in a cement cell
• It also brings us to the argument of the hybrid children whom live confined to cemet cells in wheel chairs.
• Hayes suggests disabled people live confined and controlled by another.

Questioning Innocence

• The story makes us question the viewers, of whom the victims are as well as there sympathies.
• People are incarcerated by institutional structures which determine methods of control.
• Often the audience feel pity of those who are in wheel chairs.
• These children in wheel chairs underscore that they have unnatural body parts that need to be contained and controlled.
• The children of this story do not appear to even experience human touch.
• The movie touches on both kids are aggressors and victims "sends a message that disability makes social interaction impossible"
• The touches on Melanie seem insignifancant but touches on ideas of aggression as well as victim complexes "sends a message that disability makes social interaction impossible"
• There is discussion of boundaries between monsters and humans "monsters are monstrous and humans are humane", however Melanie's kind don't know this.

Zombie Futures

• The text goes onto to discuss themes around zombies and what they might entail.
• Zombies rise not without but from within is a popular quote here which means this zombies are the creation of society.
• There is also idea about zombies are either mindless or kids who think, plan and will their victims.
• human adult zombies were thought to reflect social structures which challenges the thought of the very idea.
• Steven Shaviro suggests, zombies are devoid of energy and will. Their restless agitation is merely reactive.
• The movie argues that zombies are both alegoric and "mimetic figures", between human and zombie.
• This also goes hand in hand with Caldwell tells Melanie "You are not like anything that has existed before." as well as Melanie facial underscoring her non-human status even whilst speaking.

Zombie Science

• Glenn Close plays a Dr.Caldwell, as well as experiment mother and a hybrid herself.
• The movie goes onto suggest that Melanie provides the potential of a cure to them, which can only provided after their death to recreate humanity.
• There is scene of showing how a brain is being taken out of Melanie to conduct tests and find a potential cure of her zombiness.
• The movie also delves into them denying as a kid rather than the truth of present" only as such.
• There has been a pattern through where children have disappeared for being dissected.
• The Dr justifies the children through the view of "exquisite mimicry"
• Denial of Melanie being a child makes her a dehumanising agent to support certain behaviour.
• denying there humanity as children can dissect them more due to not seeing them as humans

Endings and Conclusions

• Movie uses child innocence through children, through there interaction play.
• Melanie doesn't have access to memories of childhood and there for more thoughtful and observant.
• She desires to be real, just like in Pinoccio with his desire to be real, there desire matches.
• In Caldwell's eyes Melanie is something less than human, this can be seen in there interactions.
• It asks the point of what is to be human and child in terms of the existence with relation society.
• One of the end scenes is about saving a human to save her vs the other humans.
• When the child is saving the humans it asks if they are monster or child.
• It could also mean that in this film in the end, human had no significance or no right to exist anymore.