ABSTRACT
The horror genre has its origins in graphic, repetitive folklore, myth and legend told all over the world: Greek Kronos or Cyclops, Russian Baba-Yaga, or Brazilian Mula Sem Cabeca or Saci Perer stories, many drawn from native or indigenous cultural traditions, depicting child-eating ogres, witches and demons. Marina Warner has traced the Pied Piper story of stolen children from 1240, retold all over Europe. Industries such as the ‘penny dreadfuls’ in Victorian England no doubt set the pattern for what would later become cheap, popular horror series. Despite its predictabilities, ‘horror’ as a category is a moveable feast, wherever people are in the world. Camp-horror is invariably comic and disruptive rather than terrifying; full of self-conscious, self-referential theatrical irony and exaggeration, like much performative camp. Gothic-horror fiction may end without closure, maintaining suspense, and not necessarily happily. Children live under the same shadows of abuse, neglect, over-protection, war, epidemics, economic and environmental crises as adults.
