Teen Horror. From Scream to It Follows
by Pascal Francaix
Publisher : Deep Red (June 2020)
Language : French
Number of pages : 410 pages
Adolescence and horror cinema have a long relationship, emotional as well as conflictual. From the end of the 1950s to the present day, the “horror” genre has been nurtured and evolved according to its chosen target: this constantly changing age category that is the adolescent public. What about adolescence at the turn of the 21st century ? What issues, what conflicts are solicited by contemporary horror cinema in its evocation of teenagers ? In what the teen horror of the 2000s differ from the model developed during the 1970s and 1980s?
Calling on more than fifty films (from Scream to It Follows) , the author insists on the anxieties materialized by the monsters of teen horror , on the power relations and the sexual relations that it evokes and which are not no longer the same as before. It is a question of getting out of fixed theories to show how the imagination and the realities to which this filmic category refers are not immutable. The teen horror , broader and more radical than one might think, reflects the upheavals of the society it depicts.