Horror in Children’s Cinema and Film Education explores a field that is often considered controversial within children’s audiovisual culture. While frightening motifs in films for young audiences frequently provoke public debate and educational concern, they also offer rich aesthetic, cultural, and pedagogical possibilities. Focusing on Finnish children’s cinema, this research examines how horror can support film literacy, participation, and active spectatorship in film education.
Horror has long been considered a marginal or even problematic element within children’s audiovisual culture. While frightening motifs in films for young audiences regularly provoke public debate and educational concern, their cultural meanings and pedagogical potential have rarely been examined in depth, particularly outside an Anglo-American context. Marjo Kovanen’s dissertation, Horror in Children’s Cinema and Film Education, addresses this gap by exploring horror elements in Finnish children’s cinema and by examining how such elements can be meaningfully approached within film education.
Taking a cultural and educational perspective, the study investigates how horror operates aesthetically, intertextually, and pedagogically in Finnish children’s films, and how it can support film literacy and active spectatorship. Rather than framing horror solely as a risk factor, the research highlights its capacity to foster participation, interpretation, and multiliteracy in educational contexts.
The appendix of the Finnish-language dissertation includes the English-language article Horror in Finnish children’s cinema and film literacy: A case study of Iris, (p. 105-130) also published in the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, which presents key aspects of the research.
Introduced by Margret Albers