Researcher ORCID Identifier
0009-0007-4298-4043
Graduation Year
2026
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Media Studies
Second Department
Spanish
Reader 1
Carmen Sanjuan-Pastor
Reader 2
Ryan Engley
Reader 3
Jennifer Friedlander
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
This thesis interrogates the prolific figure of the spectral child in post-dictatorial horror cinema in Spain. During the renaissance wave of the horror boom (a period between the late 1990s and early 2000s that experienced a surge in horror films), narratives of haunting often presented the ghost in child form, blending childhood and horror. This thesis examines the spectral child as depicted in the seminal horror films The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and The Orphanage (2007). First, I establish the historical context behind these films, exploring the traumatic history of children during the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, Spain’s cultural understanding of the child figure, and the politics of memory in Spain during the early 2000s. Next, I examine these films through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and Freud’s the uncanny to analyze how the ghostly, in conjunction with childhood theory, demonstrates a complex and nonlinear experience of time. I argue that (1) by dissolving temporal boundaries and blending past and present, the spectral child becomes a figure of Spain’s collective haunting as it attempts to work through historical trauma; (2) through this figure, the films operate as political rhetoric; and (3) they ultimately suggest that Spain must confront and repair its past before it can fully move into its democratic future. In conversation with Lee Edelman's concept of reproductive futurity, I argue that the child in these films symbolizes the future, but that the films complicate his claim by insisting, through the use of the spectral child, that a return to the past is necessary before Spain can take that path forward.
Recommended Citation
Denniston, Harper A., "The Split Child: Fragmented Temporalities and Selves in Post-Francoist Horror Cinema" (2026). Scripps Senior Theses. 2740.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2740
