'Error Bred in the Bone': The Bad Seed. Issue 2 (1st October 2015)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- 'Error Bred in the Bone': The Bad Seed. Issue 2 (1st October 2015)
- Main Title:
- 'Error Bred in the Bone': The Bad Seed
- Authors:
- Singer, Robert
- Abstract:
- This article examines William March's The Bad Seed ([1954] 1997), an American naturalist novel about a violent serial killer, 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark, and its film adaptation, Mervyn LeRoy's The Bad Seed (1956). When read as a hypotextual narrative, March's The Bad Seed has multiple, significant intertextual variations, such as Ruben's film The Good Son (1993) and Collet-Serra's film, Orphan (2009), which focus on the theme of the biological, non-supernatural child serial killer. These films should be read critically as products of the materialistdeterminist philosophy of Emile Zola's modernist notion of natural, quasi-scientific causalities leading to criminality: genetic malfunctions in action. This article also suggests LeRoy's film adaptation is more appropriately viewed as a re-interpretation of Maxwell Anderson's popular stage horror-melodrama, Bad Seed, produced in New York, 1954. In particular, 'Error Bred in the Bone': The Bad Seed examines the appropriation of the monster-child by popular culture. From the living room, to the dollhouse, and to the hospital bed, bad seeds liberally germinate.
- Is Part Of:
- Horror studies. Volume 6:Issue 2(2015)
- Journal:
- Horror studies
- Issue:
- Volume 6:Issue 2(2015)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 6, Issue 2 (2015)
- Year:
- 2015
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 2
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2015-0006-0002-0000
- Page Start:
- 177
- Page End:
- 194
- Publication Date:
- 2015-10-01
- Subjects:
- Horror in mass media -- History and criticism -- Periodicals
Horror -- Periodicals
700.4164 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/index/ ↗
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal, id=151/view, page=0/ ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1386/host.6.2.177_1 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 2040-3275
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 9702.xml