Good Nature, Bad Nurture: Frankenstein, Dark Water, and The Sixth Sense

Описание: "Childhood innocence" is such a nice idea. If everyone is born innocent, then humanity is ultimately good by nature, right? But then what accounts for all the times we haven't been? The social construction of "childhood innocence" may imagine that innocence as natural ... but it also imagines it as very fragile. One wrong move of nurture, and you can wind up with not an innocent child, but a monster. In this video, we discuss some examples of abandoned and mistreated kids turned abject and dangerous, from Frankenstein's Creature to Mitsuko of Dark Water to the ghosts and mediums of The Sixth Sense. As always, there is more to "childhood innocence" than meets the eye!

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
06:07 - Unnatural and Unnurtured: Frankenstein
21:00 - Motherless Monsters: Dark Water
30:27 - Children Saving Children: The Sixth Sense
38:47 - Conclusion: But Are We Listening?

Media discussed:
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (1818)
Dark Water, dir. Hideo Nataka (2002)
The Sixth Sense, dir. M. Night Shyamalan (1999)

References:
Cohen, J.J. (1996). Monster Culture: Seven Theses. In J.J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (pp. 3-25). University of Minnesota Press.
Duschinsky, R. (2013). Augustine, Rousseau, and the Idea of Childhood. The Heythrop Journal, 77-88.
Ganz, M.J. (2022). "A Kind of Insanity in My Spirits": Frankenstein, Childhood, and Criminal Intent. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 56(1), 53-74.
James, A., & James, A. (2012). Key Concepts in Childhood Studies. SAGE.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Approaching Abjection. In Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (Trans. L.S. Roudiez). Columbia University Press.
Leslie-McCarthy, S. (2014). "I See Dead People": Ghost-Seeing Children as Mediums and Mediators of Communication in Contemporary Horror Cinema. In D. Olson & A. Scahill (Eds.), Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema. Lexington Books.
Nelson, L. (2009). Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Cinemascope, 13.
Renner, K.J. (2011). Evil Children in the Popular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan.
Schomerus, G., et al. (2021). Stigma as a barrier to addressing childhood
trauma in conversation with trauma survivors: A study in the general population. PLoS ONE 16(10): e0258782. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone....

Transcript: https://kathleenwriting.com/2025/09/2...