ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes three films from the Spanish language horror canon, two from Spain, The Baby's Room and No-Do / The Haunting and one from Uruguay, La casa muda, remade as Silent House in 2011. All three films derive from a previous generation's patriarchal military dictatorship, as Franco famously referred to himself as the father of the nation and a subsequent period of reform marked by continuing anxieties related to the social politics of reproduction. The films narrate tales of terror involving children, prominently featuring domestic interiors, partly emblems for the nation, which fail in their capacity as safe spaces for raising children. It focuses on the way the child serves as a source of primal fears and also performs a second generation, historically self-conscious critique of post-dictatorship culture. The chapter examines which situate children within the domestic confines of the bourgeois home, suggests that such structures cannot confine monstrosity associated with children.
