Ferals

As children supposedly unaffected by social influences, ferals emblematize human nature at its purest. As a result, they conjure up mixed images. Positive connotations often focus on the idyllic lives of children raised by animals, the narratives simultaneously serving as a paean to nature. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) and its more well-known 1967 Disney adaptation contain perhaps the most iconic example of this plot. Other versions imagine children left to survive on their own in a dangerous world who remain essentially good and act as a testament to the human will to live—think of The Feral Kid in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Newt in Aliens (1986). ¹ Even when the so-called feral child is a victim of terrible abuse and neglect, as in Room (2015), treatments still tend toward the idealistic. As Roger Ebert wrote of Nell , a 1994 film based on a real “feral” child named Genie and starring Jodie Foster, “[i]n real life, a wild child might not be quite so inspiring or pleasant to know. But in ‘Nell’, the result is a quiet poem to the more natural side of our natures.” But the feral child narrative has a dark side, too, one that invokes images of youngsters who run on all fours, speak only in grunts and screeches, gnaw on raw meat (often literally biting the hand that feeds them), and have a whole array of hygiene problems. These ferals are unruly, pleasure-driven, and dangerous and offer a most damning evaluation of human nature.

One of the most famous stories about ferals, Lord of the Flies , is often read as a story about exactly this type of feral, its brutal children serving as reflections of the fundamental baseness of human nature, which rears its ugly head when freed from the restraints of polite civilization. Although a negative portrayal of humankind may have been Golding’s stated purpose for the book, ² the novel subverts that intention by hinting that the savagery of these stranded boys has its source in an immoral adult society that focuses on hierarchies, externalizes evil, and delights in war and violence and that corrupted the children long before they came to the island.

Evil feral child narratives do the same work today. Dystopic science fiction stories often show the dangerous consequences of problematic social practices by tracing out their effects to extreme but logical conclusions. By populating their fictional settings with savage ferals, such texts demonstrate that the problems that define these dystopias must be serious indeed if they could cause the future generation of children to go so astray. If our children are the direct benefactors of our society and our children are acting like barbarians, then perhaps it is time to give our society a careful once-over, these stories seem to say. Horror stories, like the film Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) and “Children of the Corn” (1977), also point the finger of blame at societal problems. Especially common is an indictment of the bellicose tendencies of adult society. Such a militant culture creates literal and metaphorical child soldiers, whom ferals frequently symbolize.

Feral imagery has long been employed in descriptions of child criminals as well, as both the wilding scare of the late 1980s and the superpredator moral panic of the 1990s demonstrate. Similarly, in media articles about the London riots of 2011, lower-class “chav” youth were frequently equated with feral children and rats. So prevalent is the fear of the chav that an entire subgenre called hoodie horror has arisen in response to it. The feralization of child criminals is especially concerning since it exiles these children from the realm of The Child and thus justifies sentences better fitting adult offenders.

Optimistic Feral Child Narratives

Like the possessed child, the feral child has long been a fixture in the cultural imagination, and, like the possessed child narrative, some of the earliest stories portray the child in a positive light. Enkidu, companion to the central character of the Epic of Gilgamesh , was raised by animals, and that text dates back to around 2100 BC. Romulus and Remus—founders of Rome—were also said to be feral children who had been suckled by a she-wolf; their myth dates back to roughly the fourth century BC, about 300 years after their birth. The feral child continues to fascinate people today. The story of Victor of Aveyron, a feral child found in France at the turn of the nineteenth century, has been retold at least three times in the past 50 years: in François Truffaut’s 1970 film L’Enfant sauvage and, more recently, in the novel Wild Boy (2003) by Jill Dawson and in the title story of T.C. Boyle’s 2011 collection Wild Child and Other Stories . The feral child continues to interest academics, too, serving as the focus of several twenty-first-century studies, including Julia V. Douthwaite’s The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (2002), Kenneth Kidd’s Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (2004), and Adriana S. Benzaquén’s Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (2006). Feral children have even served as the subject of a recent photographic project by Julia Fullerton-Batten. ³

During the Age of Enlightenment, the feral child drew particular attention, even earning a scientific category in Carl Linnaeus’s tenth edition of Systema naturae (1758) as Homo sapiens ferus (Douthwaite 2002, 177; Yousef 2004, 97). The feral child then rose from curiosity to cultural hero during the Romantic era, a time when the natural world and those most at home in it—animals, noble savages, and children—were considered the purest examples of humanity. Children were, in fact, essentially feral in the Romantic imagination since their most essential characteristic was that they had not yet been tainted by the corrupting influences of civilized society. In “Intimations of Immortality” (1807), William Wordsworth directly addresses the child as a “[m]ighty prophet” and “[s]eer blest!” because he or she has just come from heaven and therefore is more closely connected to the spiritual world: “Thou, whose semblance doth belie / Thy soul’s immensity; / Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep / Thy heritage” (109–113). Ralph Waldo Emerson would similarly declare in “Self-Reliance” (1841) that “children, babes and even brutes” were “pretty oracles”: “Their mind being whole, their eye is yet unconquered” (28). Elsewhere, Emerson described the “lover of nature” as one “whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other” and “who has retained the spirit of infancy” (9).

The positive possibilities of the feral child would continue to be realized in turn-of-the-twentieth-century fiction. One can detect its optimistic echoes in a character like Huck Finn, who, despite an upbringing in abject poverty alongside an abusive, alcoholic father, still manages to slowly work out for himself a moral scheme far superior to many of his elder and more civilized companions. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893–1894) contains one of the best known examples of the positive feral child. Lost as a baby and raised by wolves, Kipling’s Mowgli grows “strong as a boy who does not know that he is learning any lessons” (1920, 26), the jungle providing a far better moral education than an official school. When he returns to civilization, Mowgli is unimpressed by the caste system and chooses to judge people for their inherent value rather than that assigned to them by an arbitrary hierarchical system, a tendency that the novel clearly applauds. ⁴ A celebration of feral boyness can be found in other texts of the time period, too, such as Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes (1912), and, as Kenneth Kidd demonstrates, Thomas Bailey Aldritch’s Bad Boy books. ⁵

It was not only within fiction that the feral child found its advocates: child development expert G. Stanley Hall also called upon feral child tropes in his Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime and Religion (1904). Hall, for example, argued that the healthy development of children required extensive time spent in nature and that adults should “perpetually incite [the child] to visit field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him” (1904, xi). “[N]ativistic and more or less feral instincts can and should be fed and formed” (xi), he claimed. Eventually the child would, of his or her own accord, outgrow these savage tendencies and progress into adulthood. ⁶

The optimistic branch of the feral child narrative continues to have its proponents. One of the most unusual examples in recent times are the chronicles of Bat Boy as reported in the now defunct Weekly World News (WWN ). First “sighted” in 1992, Bat Boy remained a frequent character in the supermarket tabloid right up until its final issue in 2007. Although Bat Boy was reported several times as having attacked humans, stories more frequently presented him positively, including one that claimed there was “not one case on record of Bat Boy attacking a human unprovoked.…And scientists who have interacted with him say he’s intelligent, sensitive and even gentle by nature” (Creed 1999, 13). Although Bat Boy was at one point placed into captivity for biting a girl, WWN claimed that letters from more than 62,000 of its readers aided his release (Craven 2000, 41). The tabloid also touted Bat Boy as a political candidate—John Kerry reportedly claimed, “Bat Boy is down to earth and speaks in sentence fragments that people can understand, much like President Bush” (Mann 2004, 2). In addition, he was chronicled as a war hero who took out tanks, defused bombs, exposed machine-gun nests while making sure to save the children (Mulder 2003), and found Saddam Hussein (Foster 2004). (He also was rumored to have married Britney Spears at one point.) He even inspired a musical.⁷ Although an absurd example of the positive potential of the feral child, Bat Boy stands as an example nonetheless.

But it is in YA and children’s literature that the feral child has found its most positive imaginings lately. Certainly, the feral child narrative is not new to this genre; one of the most well-known children’s books, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), relies on just this sort of story. One can also see the feral child’s influence on YA novels like Scott O’Dell’s The Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) and Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves (1972). As these latter two novels suggest, the feral child narrative has been employed to champion what Kathe Pollitt described in an April 2012 article in The Nation as a sort of “feral feminism.” While Pollitt pointed to Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games trilogy as the most apparent icon of feral feminism, other examples can be found in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2005), in which protagonist Tally Youngblood can only find her true feminist identity once she abandons her urban, technological home and takes up with the Smokies who live off the land outside the borders of the cities. ⁸ A 12-year-old girl is also the eponymous hero of Che Golden’s The Feral Child Trilogy (2011, 2013, 2014), and a feral girl is the star of Emily Hughes’s Wild , a 2014 children’s book. Singer Sia even chose the image of a feral girl as the star of the music video to her “Elastic Heart,” the lyrics of which describe a triumphant response to lost love.

If we look closer at Hughes’s Wild , we can see how the feral child plot is being put to feminist use in the twenty-first century. The story begins with a wild-looking girl with unruly green hair living happily in the forest. She is found by a well-meaning couple who return her to society, where she is adopted by an equally well-meaning psychiatrist and his wife. They try to civilize her—in the book’s terms, that involves subduing her green locks into a sophisticated updo and encouraging her to play with dolls. But the child ultimately rejects her new life and escapes back to the forest, and “all knew it was right [b]ecause you cannot tame something so happily wild.” ⁹ In Hughes’s children’s book, the feral child symbolizes the uninhibited girl society wishes to civilize into a “proper” woman, a process that the book ultimately rejects.

The feral child is used in a similar feminist fashion in Australian writer Louis Nowra’s Into That Forest (2013). In this story, which is set in the early twentieth century, two girls become lost in the woods, and their survival is largely due to the relationships they build with Tasmanian tigers, a species that became extinct during that time period. Even before the children go feral, their “wild” behavior is seen as worrisome; the narrator describes how she prefers to be “outside and playing” and even spends time talking to Sam the pig “in grunts and snuffles” to the point that it concerns her mother. Upon returning to society, she observes other girls and recognizes “[h]ow fragile they seemed in their pretty dresses and long curly hair. Their lives were not for me.” Her companion, Becky, has similar difficulties adopting society’s rules. Although she is cast to play Little Red Riding Hood in a play, the narrator describes how “she moved in on the boy like he were the pretty rather than the other way round.” The novel launches a clear critique of the ways in which society attempts to “tame” girls whose feralness simply represents a desire for freedom of expression, sexual and otherwise.

Feral imagery also helps forward the feminist message of Libba Bray’s tongue-in-cheek Beauty Queens (2011), a novel that imagines a group of beauty pageant contestants who undergo a feminist awakening after they become stranded on a desert island. While the plot would seem to recall Lord of the Flies , the characters don’t resort to savage competition but rather help each other realize and overcome the oppression that has become natural to them in their roles as beauty queens. The character of Mary Lou is especially freed by their feral existence. Mary Lou and the women of her family are supposedly plagued by a curse: “Wild girls, they were called. Temptresses. Witches. Girls of fearless sexual appetite, who needed to run wild under the moon. The world feared them. They had to hide their desires behind a veneer of respectability.” And yet while she hides her true self, she is aware that other such feral girls exist: we learn that “[o]ccasionally, from the school bus windows, she could see other wild girls on the edges of cornfields, running without shoes, hair unkempt,” and she senses “the feral quality” in other young women as well. By the end of the novel, Mary Lou embraces her own feralness as a marker of power and identity: “I’m a wild girl from a cursed line of women,” she declares. “I paw at the ground and run under the moon. I like the feel of my own body.” Again, the feral child is employed as a positive icon meant to encourage girls to embrace their “errant” desires.

Feral feminism celebrates what Adriana S. Benzaquén has called the “free wild child,” “a creature of our imagination and desire: the desire to leave the wild child alone, to celebrate and preserve the wild child as wild child” (2006, 259). ¹⁰ Although she cites only one case of a “real” free wild child, examples abound in fiction, especially in children’s and YA literature. If for Benzaquén the figure acts as a “civilized adult’s guide—away from, or beyond, civilization” (263), it seems clear that children are already well aware of the rules of civilized adulthood and already quite happy to flee from them.

The Frightening Feral Child

While fictional feral children were proving to be role models for some during the nineteenth century, others had already begun to detect their darker potential. One can see the mixed feelings inspired by the feral child in a character like Pearl, the illegitimate daughter at the center of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). Pearl is certainly a breath of fresh air in comparison to those musty Puritan offspring, the true imps of the tale, and she does ultimately end the novel apparently civilized enough to be worthy of an aristocratic marriage in the Old World. However, before her redemption, she’s a pretty creepy kid. ¹¹

Other authors pointed out the frightening potential of the feral child, even when their overall opinion of the figure was positive. In Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883), for example, the titular character initially rejects school and all other civilizing institutions in favor of a life of leisure in nature. His transformation into a “real boy,” however, can only take place once he realizes his duty as wage earner and caretaker to his parental figures. Only by rejecting the supposedly natural state of boyhood and embracing the civilized adult world can Pinocchio find happiness and earn respect. During his feral state, though, Collodi’s Pinocchio is far more disturbing than Disney would have us believe. He ends up killing the unnamed cricket that serves as his conscience by throwing a mallet at him, leaving him “stretched out stiff, and flattened against the wall” (1914, 22). When confronted about the incident, he expresses no remorse: “I threw the hammer at him, and he died; but it was his fault, for I didn’t want to kill him” (32).

J.M. Barrie, too, portrayed the feral boy as more narcissistic than charismatic in Peter Pan (1911). Far more vicious than his Disney counterpart, Barrie’s Peter has little true affection for his band of Lost Boys, disposing of individual members once they reach maturity without hesitation: as the narrator tells us, “when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out” (2004, 47). Peter’s adventures also take on a monstrous air when the narrator reveals that Peter often neglects to mention the casualties that ensue as a result of his escapades: “He might have forgotten…so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out you found the body” (71). Barrie suggests that all children have a little Peter Pan in them, noting that the Darling children’s affection for their parents is questionable as well. Furthermore, according to Barrie’s narrator, mothers are responsible for manufacturing the innocent image that we associate with The Child: “When you wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on” (8). At least in early years, the seeming sweetness of children is, according to Barrie, merely an outfit prepared by vigilant mothers for their offspring to wear. As much as Disney might have tried to sanitize Barrie’s depiction of children, the threatening and disturbing side of Peter continues to linger in the cultural mind. ¹²

An even more negative portrayal of the feral child occurs in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1929). In this novel, children raised in the supposedly savage environs of the Caribbean prove more malicious than the pirates who take them captive. At one point, for example, they are described as catching birds and then “decid[ing] by ‘Eena, deena, dina, do’, or some such rigmarole, whether to twist its neck or let it go free” (1999, 9). In her introduction to the book, Francine Prose comments on “the serial cruelty with which they treat the island’s hapless indigenous fauna” and claims that they “might as well be feral children” (1999, vi, vii).¹³ A childhood spent in the “wilds” of Jamaica seems to be the cause of the children’s savage dispositions.

Although playful, these works do point to the potentially monstrous elements of The Child due to their inherent feralness. Prose actually considers Hughes’s book far more subversive than William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), to which it is often compared, because it “resists any attempts to extract from it a moral or sociological lesson.…It’s hard, in fact, to think of another fiction so blithe in its refusal to throw us the tiniest crumb of solace or consolation” (1999, xi). As Prose suggests, even though Golding’s novel is typically considered a bleak presentation of children as naturally depraved, it can be read as implying that the boys have already been corrupted by adult society and that their existence on the island simply allows them to enact behaviors they already have been taught.

A response to an earlier text, Coral Island (1858), which Minnie Singh describes as an optimistic feral child narrative—”a protracted meditation on a Rousseauistic education” (1997, 207)—Golding’s novel imagines what would happen to a group of proper British boys left to their own devices upon a deserted island. ¹⁴ Initially, the boys are thrilled by their unrestricted existence. Some find it offers the perfect opportunity to act on sadistic desires they weren’t able to when under the close supervision of grown-ups. A boy named Roger, for example, quickly discovers the pleasures of domination when he throws a rock at another boy: although he aims to miss, it is only because “there was a space…, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law” (1999, 52). Roger, however, quickly overcomes these internalized restrictions and descends into savagery, as does almost every boy in the novel at one point or another.

Lord of the Flies would seem to have at its core a belief in the natural depravity of mankind since it implies that even the most innocent members of civilized society—children—are quite literally only a stone’s throw from savagery. However, one can also find passages in Golding’s novel that suggest that these children are not merely acting on natural instinct but perhaps have been tainted by a corrupt society. After all, the novel reveals that the children became stranded on the island in the first place because a world war has begun: an “atom bomb” is mentioned early in the story (1999, 7), and several times the boys discuss how their plane was shot down (2, 26). Later on, we are told about a battle being “fought at ten miles’ height,” of which the paratrooper who falls to the island and which the children mistake as The Beast is a casualty. Furthermore, the children often appear to be imitating their militarized society. When Ralph suggests that Jack and his choirboys “could be the army,” Jack retorts that they could also be “hunters” (16), early on establishing a connection between hunting and the typical behavior of soldiers. Jack conflates the two again when he explains that he has painted his face “[f]or hunting. Like in the war” (52). Even the military men who appear at the end of the novel just in time to save Ralph from being slaughtered confuse their savage actions with military play, asking the boys: “What have you been doing? Having a war or something?” (181). ¹⁵

It’s apparent, too, that the boys have war on the brain, for many of their actions are described with military terminology. At one point, for example, Golding depicts Ralph mimicking combat when he “danced out onto the hot air of the beach and then returned as a fighter-plane, with wings swept back, and machine-gunned Piggy” (1999, 5). When the boys mindlessly push a boulder off a cliff and into the forest below, they label its destructive aftermath as being “[l]ike a bomb!” (20); a tree that explodes during a fire is described with the same word (38). Several areas on the island are termed “forts” (21, 93, 95) or “bastions” (21), and thunder repeatedly sounds like a “cannon” (127, 129). At one point, the boys even express fear of being “taken prisoner by the Reds” (145). The most apparent message of Golding’s novel is that all of humankind—including innocent children—would return to a vicious feral state if freed from societal constraints; war is simply the adult expression of these savage impulses. However, the children could also be imitating their militaristic elders, having unconsciously absorbed the most savage traits of a war-torn society. ¹⁶ Nor would Golding have been unique in this belief; the same year that Lord of the Flies was published, an article in the New York Times , quoting the director of the Special Juvenile Delinquency Project, asserted: “The positive correlation between the rate of delinquency and war and cold war cannot be ignored. It is hard to instill those built-in controls of hostile behavior when children are being reared in a world that reeks of hostility and in which the whole economy is geared to the ultimate in expression of hostility—death and destruction” (Peck 1954, 11). The 1990 cinematic adaptation of the novel also picked up these themes in making the boys refugees from a military school. Lord of the Flies has remained an enduring narrative, distinguishing itself as one of those rare works of literature that people know without having read. More importantly, its approach to the feral child would influence future texts that imagined the shocking behavior of savage children as being due to war.

In 1986, Whitney Houston crooned her way to the top of the music charts by declaring that “the children are our future.” She certainly wasn’t alone in that thinking; as a number of scholars, including Lee Edelman, have argued, “the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (2004, 10–11). It is exactly that symbolism that dystopian novels rely upon when they use ferals to critique their imaginary civilizations: any society that allows youth to devolve into a savage state must be deeply flawed. ¹⁷ These fictional dystopias are not simply thought experiments; rather, they often extrapolate the effects of issues already at play in our current culture. By tracing these problems to their extreme but logical conclusions, the dystopian novel serves as a cautionary tale about the future to which we are headed if we do not make certain changes. War is one problem with which the dystopian novel frequently concerns itself. Military conflict obviously impacts children, who are frequently its casualties. However, ferals in dystopian novels more often emblematize the ways that children either absorb the violent messages sent by war or play a direct role within it as child soldiers.

The image of the child soldier became increasingly salient after World War II. The Hitler Youth movement had shown that children not only could be trained for combat but also might zealously volunteer to do so. ¹⁸ Hitler Youth came to great attention in the 1940s after the publication of Gregor Ziemer’s Education for Death in 1941. In 1943, Disney released an animated short inspired by Ziemer’s book that shared the same title; it detailed in ten minutes the progression of one German boy from baby to Nazi. A movie called Hitler’s Children was the fourth highest grossing film that year as well. All were discussed in the February 1, 1943, issue of Life magazine. As the Cold War geared up, the image of Soviet child soldiers also drew attention, as did the Western fear that children might be brainwashed into serving the Communists. ¹⁹ Ray Bradbury’s “Zero Hour” (1951), in which children abet a Martian invasion under the very noses of their inattentive parents, is one symbolic rendition of this fear; John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and its cinematic adaptation, The Village of the Damned (1963), are two others (discussed in the chapter on Changelings).

Children were also a particularly prominent part of Vietnam War iconography: anti-Vietnam propaganda focused on Vietnamese children as tragic wartime victims, murdered by heartless baby-killers, while defenders of American soldiers focused on how the Vietcong actively used children to fight the war and that no child, however helpless-looking, could be trusted. ²⁰ The supposed willingness of the Vietcong to involve their children in the fight was cited as evidence of their monstrosity and of the necessity of their defeat. ²¹ The use of child soldiers increased rapidly after Vietnam, ²² perhaps most infamously in 1990s Uganda, where children were kidnapped and forced to fight for the Lord’s Resistant Army, and more recently in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iraq, and within the terrorist group ISIS. ²³ In fact, it wasn’t until the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child in 1989 that the military recruitment of children under the age of 15 was considered a crime. ²⁴

Fear of the child soldier was symbolized in several feral child narratives after World War II. In an episode of the original Star Trek titled “Miri” (1966), the crew discovers a planet identical to Earth in the 1960s, except that a plague has wiped out the adult population, leaving only children behind. The children are actually hundreds of years old, the disease having protracted their aging process. However, they are still very much children. They hate adults, whom they refer to as “grups,” because, as the title character explains, they can “remember the things you grups did. Burning, yelling, hurting people.” At one point, a group of kids even attacks Kirk with monkey wrenches, hammers, and all manner of bludgeoning devices. Significantly, several of the children are clad in military garb—the leader, Jahn, wears a green military jacket with red insignia and other younger kids have World War II helmets. “Miri” therefore appears to comment on the ways in which warfare leads children into savagery, mimicking the violence they have witnessed.

Logan’s Run (novel 1967; film 1976) involves similar ferals. The novel imagines a society that handles overpopulation by killing people when they reach the age of 21. Lives are divided into three seven-year eras, each marked by the color of a crystal embedded into the right palm of every citizen. During the first era, the yellow stage, children are separated from their parents and raised in nurseries run by machines. In the second, the blue stage, children return to society. The third, the red stage, is the era of adulthood, when citizens are expected to earn a living. On the peripheries of “civilized” society is the Cathedral, a place for youth who refuse to conform to societal demands. The Cathedral is described in the novel as “a festering sore in the side of Greater Los Angeles, an area of rubble and dust and burned-out buildings, a place of shadow and pollution, of stealth and sudden death” (1967, 15)—likely a reference to the supposed “ghettoes” of LA.

The Cathedral is a place to be feared because of the “cubs,” or young children, who live there: “Logan was well aware of Cathedral’s blood history.…Of the unchecked violence. Even the police avoided Cathedral. With good reason. They’d sent in a cleanup squad the previous summer to tame the cubs.…None of the squad survived” (1967, 16). At one point, Logan sees cubs attack a man, surrounding him “in a rippling, weaving circle; and each wet, bone-shattering blow brought [the man] closer to death” (17). Ironically, however, the cubs are really only putting into practice the customs of their culture: exterminating “reds” who don’t leave of their own accord. ²⁵ As Logan tells their leader, Billy, “[a] strutting, feral-faced thirteen-year-old” (37), “[y]ou’ll leave Cathedral then, Billy, when you’re on red, because they won’t let an adult stay here. The young ones. They’ll gut-rip you if you stay” (38). Logan’s Run also suggests that violent children are simply imitating their aggressive elders.

Barbarella (1968), a cult classic film starring a young and scantily clad Jane Fonda, had its own trippy take on ferals. In the film, which is based on a comic created by Jean-Claude Forest in 1962, Barbarella, a five-star, double-rated “astronavigatrix,” is sent to the system of Tau Centi to find Durand Durand, the inventor of the positronic ray. Although “the universe has been pacified for centuries,” the president fears that the citizens of Tau Centi, an unchartered area, may try to use the invention as a weapon and ruin the peace of the universe. Barbarella accepts her mission and flies to the Tau Centi system but crashes on Planet 16, where she promptly encounters girl twins. Although they appear harmless, one brains her with an ice-filled snowball, and they bind her hands and take her back to their lair (on a sled drawn by a manta ray, no less). There, Barbarella encounters several more sets of creepy-looking twins. They tie her up and set their dolls upon her—dolls with very sharp metal teeth and snapping jaws that proceed to bite Barbarella all over while the children look on with amusement. Thankfully, Barbarella is saved by Mark Hand, the Catchman. He tells her that “all children must live in the ice and forest of Weir until they have reached a serviceable age…and then I capture them with my net…and turn them over to the authorities,” a line that sounds suspiciously like a forced conscription of sorts. At any rate, the primitive planet 16, a possible location of a warmongering people who could destroy the peace of the universe, is clearly marked as such by its savage children and its savage treatment of them.

The connections between ferals and child soldiers were solidified in the 1970s. The Spanish film Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), for example, tells the story of a couple—Tom and his pregnant wife, Evelyn—who take a vacation to a remote island in Spain, on which, they discover, the children have killed all adults. The children’s sudden outbreak of violence is portrayed as the result of some sort of infection that can be easily passed from one child to another through mere eye contact. ²⁶ The film overtly exculpates the children for their violence not only through this infection trope but also by blaming it on the aggressions of the adult world. The film begins with shocking footage and narration documenting the atrocities done to children and the total numbers of kids killed during the Holocaust, the civil war between India and Pakistan, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the civil war in Nigeria; the discussion of each war is interspersed with children singing a tune (eerily similar to that which opens Rosemary’s Baby ) and then giggling. The film’s opening message seems straightforward: the violence we are about to see the children commit is simply payback for the innumerable abuses they have suffered at the hands of adults. Director Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador was quite open about this moral: in an interview, he stated: “I don’t like talking about the message of a film but I think…this is easy to understand. If the children are cruel and they rebel against the adults, they are not to blame; we are to blame.” Elsewhere, he claimed that “the film is a defence of children.…Adults sow cruelty and violence in children” (quoted in Lázaro-Reboll 2012, 119).

However, this seemingly straightforward theme is complicated by the fact that violence committed against children during the film seems more than warranted. In fact, reluctance to use violence against the children simply because they are children is presented as pretty darn stupid. For example, even though Evelyn realizes the danger that the children pose, when Tom drives his car toward a blockade of them, intending to ram his way through, she cranks the steering wheel to the side, causing them to crash and almost allowing them to be overrun by the violent horde. They then take refuge in an old jail cell. While some kids pound on the door with a makeshift battering ram, another child crawls up to the barred window that looks into the room with a gun, intending to shoot Evelyn in the head. Tom, however, sees him and shoots him first. ²⁷ With that, the children depart. Tom then realizes that the children have left because he stood up to them: “Nobody dared to attack a child, to kill one of them. That’s why they weren’t afraid, but now they are.” The willingness to take violence against a child leads to temporary safety for the couple.

The end of the film also seems to endorse violence against children as an unfortunate but sometimes necessary course of action. When he tries to escape, Tom comes face to face with a wall of children, many of them smiling beatifically. With a tormented look on his face and tears in his eyes, Tom mows them down with a machine gun in order to get through. ²⁸ He is, however, attacked before he can make his getaway on a boat. Armed men show up just in time to see Tom fighting the children off and, assuming that he is simply some monster assaulting innocent children, they shoot him. Their assumption proves fatal, for the children steal guns from their boat the minute their backs are turned and shoot all of the adults, then prepare to invade the mainland. Essentially, adult belief in the inherent innocence and vulnerability of The Child allows what we can imagine will be a pandemic of child violence.

Stephen King’s 1977 short story “Children of the Corn” directly relates to Vietnam, as Tony Magistrale has demonstrated, a subtext of the story that was entirely eliminated in the 1984 cinematic adaptation. ²⁹ Set in the mid-1970s, King’s story describes a couple, Burt and Vicky, who take a wrong turn on a road trip and end up in Gatlin, Nebraska, a small and seemingly abandoned town nestled in cornfields. Over the course of the story, the couple comes to discover that the town’s children are very much alive and that they slaughtered all of the adults in 1964 as a sacrifice to “He Who Walks Behind the Rows,” the god of their newly constructed religion. Once children turn 19, they voluntarily walk into the cornfields to meet their maker. The Vietnam connection comes primarily from the protagonist Burt, a Vietnam vet. Burt sees all events through the lens of his war experiences. He thinks that he and his wife are saving their marriage “the same way us grunts went about saving villages in the war” (1979, 250). The smell of fertilizer in the fields has for Burt “a sickish sweet undertone. Almost a death smell. As a medical orderly in Vietnam, he had become well versed in that smell” (263). Furthermore, like Who Can Kill a Child? “Children of the Corn” also holds a bifurcated view of its children: the short story simultaneously portrays Burt as a “baby-killer” while at the same time suggesting that his violence against children (though it fails to save him or Vicky) is more than justified. ³⁰

I think it no coincidence that both Who Can Kill a Child? and Children of the Corn have been recently remade: the former was released as Come Out and Play (2013) while the latter was redone as a made-for-television movie that aired on Syfy in 2009, significantly with King’s Vietnam references reinstated. In fact, the twenty-first century has seen a veritable renaissance of evil feral children, proof that the genre is deeply connected with the impact of war on children. The 2006 film The Plague hints at these connections. In the film, all children under nine fall into a catatonic state that lasts ten years. When they awaken, they have a fierce hatred for adults, whom they attack without mercy, never speaking or offering explanation of any kind. Although alive, they are little more than zombies. By the end of the movie, however, the protagonist Tom recognizes that adults are the cause of the children’s aggression. At the end, surrounded by a ring of armed children, he tells his ex-wife, Jean: “It’s not just what we say and do.…It’s everything we are. Everything we think and feel. That’s what they take from us.” He offers himself up, and Jean is left to live freely among the children who, though still zombie-like, are no longer aggressive. In the final scene, Jean walks inside her house, significantly leaving the door open to demonstrate that she is no longer afraid; her refusal to give into fear is all that’s needed for a peaceful resolution.

Published in the same year, Max Brook’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is structured as a series of interviews with people who were eye-witnesses to a global zombie outbreak. While zombies are, of course, the primary danger ferals—groups of children abandoned in zombie-infested areas but who managed to survive—also pose a considerable threat. One man in the book describes how dangerous they could be: “A lot of them weren’t kids anymore, some were teenagers, some full grown. They were fast, smart, and if they chose fight instead of flight, they could really mess up your day” (390). Although Human Reclamation (HR) teams advocated tranquilizing ferals,

that didn’t always work. When a two-hundred-pound feral bull is charging balls out for your ass, a couple CCs of tranq ain’t gonna drop him before he hits home.…If a dart didn’t stop a feral, we sure as hell did. Nothing screams as high as a feral with a PIE round burning in his gut. The HR pukes had a real problem with that…all sticking to this code that human life, any life, was worth trying to save. I guess history sorta backed them up now, you know, seeing all those people that they managed to rehabilitate, all the ones we just woulda shot on sight. (391)

His words have already been confirmed, for earlier in the book, we meet one such reformed feral, Sharon, at the Rothman Rehabilitation Home for Feral Children. She only has the mind of a four-year old though a much older woman, and it’s clear she has been greatly traumatized, but she is able to describe the initial zombie attack that left her abandoned. Not only does the book allow us to see the potential for feral rehabilitation through Sharon, but a man who has encountered them as vicious enemies also supports the cause in retrospect. The novel makes an uncompromising symbolic claim that even children involved directly in combat can be redeemed.

While positive versions of the feral child frequently focus on a single figure, building sympathy through detailed characterization and backstory, negative accounts prefer their ferals to come in hordes. ³¹ After all, a mob of wildings is far more threatening than a single savage tot and thus more likely to evoke the fear and outrage expected of the horror and sci-fi genres. Furthermore, because it is far harder to empathize with a group, especially when its members are barely differentiated from each other, a lessening of sympathy occurs in the evil feral narrative which allows the viewer to enjoy the us-versus-them plot structure common to both horror and science fiction with fewer pangs to the conscience. Thus, as much as feral child narratives might depict savage youngsters as the unfortunate collateral damage of a war-torn society, they also ensure that ferals can be killed off with little afterthought.

Ferals in Juvenile Justice

Feral language has been applied not just to symbolic child soldiers but also to delinquent populations. As Kenneth Kidd has shown, even texts devoted to the cause of “child saving” in America dehumanized the very children they aimed to save. Kidd offers as an example a line from The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), written by urban reformer and founder of the Children’s Aid Society, Charles Loring Brace: “Sometimes they seemed to me…like what the police call them, ‘street rats’, who gnawed at the foundations of society, and scampered away when light was brought near them” (quoted in Kidd 2004, 95). ³² One can see this fear reemerge in juvenile delinquent films of the 1950s. ³³ When Stanley Cohen sought to define folk devils, deviant groups who come to be blamed for certain social problems, in his 1972 Folk Devils and Moral Panics , he tellingly took as his objects of study the Mods and Rockers, two chiefly white youth gangs whose clashes created a moral panic in the 1960s. ³⁴

During the late twentieth century, urban and largely minority American youth were broadly dehumanized as “wildings,” especially after the so-called 1989 Central Park jogger case, in which a woman was brutally attacked and raped. Almost immediately blame was attached to a gang of local minority schoolboys, whom the Chief of Detectives claimed told him the crime was “the product of a past time called ‘wilding’” (quoted in Welch, Price, and Yankey 2002, 5). The media immediately latched onto the term, attaching it almost solely to perpetrators of color and playing up all of its animalistic connotations. The accused boys were treated as a feral pack, indistinguishable members of a criminal mob and evidence “of a general social disintegration” (Acland 1995, 53). Five boys were wrongfully convicted, their sentences later vacated when another man confessed to the crime in 2002.

In the late 1990s, a new panic about youth emerged aided by the coining of another catchy term, the “superpredator,” by Princeton political scientist John J. Dilulio. Dilulio described superpredators as “perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons” (1995). If the idea of superpredators wasn’t frightening enough, Dilulio warned that they would be arriving in droves. He predicted that “by the year 2010, there [would] be approximately 270,000 more juvenile superpredators on the streets than there were in 1990” (Equal Justice Initiative 2014). Other experts repeated Dilulio’s dramatic rhetoric and figures. One predicted that by the year 2000, there would be “thirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready” (quoted in Howell 2009, 4). Others warned of “a bloodbath of teenage violence lurking in the future” (Zoglin 1996) or declared the crime wave would be “‘Lord of the Flies’ on a massive scale” (“Superpredators Arrive”). ³⁵

These scare tactics were effective. Clyde Haberman claims: “It energized a movement, as one state after another enacted laws making it possible to try children as young as 13 or 14 as adults” (2014). To be fair, however, the superpredator panic cannot be blamed entirely for the new “get tough” policies on juvenile crime, for laws had begun to change before then, as Ronald Burns and Charles Crawford point out. ³⁶ Even an article titled “The Superpredator Myth, 20 Years Later,” located on the Equal Justice Initiative’s website, notes that the increased “treatment of juveniles as adults for purposes of sentencing and punishment” began as early as 1992. However, the idea of the superpredator was embraced so widely that in 2001 the surgeon general “released a report in which he declared the ‘superpredator’ theory a myth, finding that ‘there is no evidence that the young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youth in earlier years’” (Tanenhaus and Drizin 2002, 643).

In the UK, the “chav” has become an equivalent source of fear. Initially defined in the Collins English Dictionary in 2005 as “a young working-class person who dresses in casual sports clothing,” like hooded sweatshirts, tracksuits, and sneakers, Owen Jones claims that the term “chav” now expresses “distaste towards working-class people who have embraced consumerism, only to spend their money in supposedly tacky and uncivilized ways rather than with the discreet elegance of the bourgeoisie” (2011, 8). ³⁷ This emotion is exploited in so-called hoodie horror films, in which the monsters resemble hooded youth. These films take great effort to dehumanize these creatures, constructing them as animalistic or undead creatures. Furthermore, because the hoodie appears in a horde, he—and I’m using that gendered pronoun purposefully, for female hoodies are rare—is not individualized to an extent that promotes sympathy. Not only are hoodies similarly dressed and therefore difficult to distinguish from each other, their identities are literally hidden, obscured beneath the hood of their sweatshirt. Although hoodie horror seems to be slowly dying out, it has generated an impressive number of films, including Them (2006), Eden Lake (2008), The Disappeared (2008), Harry Brown (2009), Cherry Tree Lane (2010), F also known as The Expelled (2010), Community (2012), Tower Block (2012), and Citadel (2012). The Strangers (2008), The Purge (2013), and The Purge: Anarchy (2014) also fit into the genre; its young adult killers simply substitute masks for hooded sweatshirts.

The dehumanized treatment of obvious emblems of youth in these films mirrors the ways in which “chav” youth have been negatively stereotyped in the British media. During the series of riots that took place in London in August 2011, the media coverage of youth involvement was filled with animalistic language and imagery. In a Daily Mail article, Matt Hastings claimed: “From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.” Another by Jaya Narain described “hundreds of youths and ‘feral’ children [who] stormed through the streets smashing windows and stealing clothing, mobile phones and jewellery.” Similarly, in a Telegraph article, Richard Alleyne and John-Paul Ford Rojas reported that one looted shop-owner “spoke of…the ‘feral rats’ as young as 13 who joined in the riots.” And in Andrew Sparrow’s article for The Guardian , he quoted a deputy mayor of London complaining about “feral youth who fancy a new pair of trainers.”

The creators of hoodie horror sound incredibly similar to writers who attacked these youth in the media. Writer and director of Citadel , Ciarán Foy, described how he was himself attacked by a gang of youths at the age of 18 (Smith). Daniel Barber, director of Harry Brown , does not discuss any sort of comparable personal experience but admits to an equivalent fear of youth gangs: “‘I’m scared of these kids in gangs’, says Barber. ‘They have no respect for any other part of society’” (Graham 2009). James Watkins, director of Eden Lake , gives an example of his own run-in with aggressive youth and concludes that his film therefore has “a sense of reality about it” (Maher 2008). And to be fair, the creators are not simply imagining the threat posed by youth in England. As Greg Philo, research director of Glasgow University Media Group and professor of sociology, affirms, “The culture of violence is real” (Graham 2009). However, as Philo further points out, the real problem is in the simplistic explanations given for this epidemic of violence in both the media and these hoodie films: “upbringing or just evil children. Their accounts of what happens are very partial and distorted, which pushes people towards much more rightwing positions” (Graham 2009). ³⁸

Not surprisingly, the general consensus among critics is that hoodie horror “is a conservative and problematic film genre that reinforces social abjection and stigmatization of the British working classes” and that “this kind of demonisation is a cornerstone of neoliberal capitalism because it eradicates complex social problems by transferring the blame onto abject individuals, thereby freeing the state from its responsibilities” (Lönroth 2014, 4). Mark Featherstone similarly considers the hoodie to be “a projection of the evil socio-economic system that scapegoats others to hide its own monstrosity” (2013, 193). ³⁹

Citadel , for example, begins with the brutal murder of protagonist Tommy’s wife by a group of hooded children. The children, we discover, are actually the spawn of boy-girl twins—inbred, mutated, zombie-like creatures, who can literally see fear. In the course of the film, Tommy meets a man who plans to exterminate the hoodies by blowing up their building. Just before he dies, he admits that he is actually the father of the horde’s forebears whom he “abandoned”; he states that he “won’t find forgiveness” for what he’s done. Citadel ’s hoodies are said to be the byproduct of a corrupt adult world, and yet complete annihilation is the response. F also hints that hoodies are understandably lashing back at their elders for devaluing them. The film starts with the main character, a teacher, mocking a boy severely for his poor writing skills. His humiliation of the teen is inexcusable, especially considering that nothing suggests that the boy’s unsuccessful work is a matter of laziness: the teacher says in front of the class that the boy’s writing “is fantastic if you’re in primary school. Perhaps you’d feel more comfortable with a box of crayons coloring in pictures of little kittens.” It’s hard not to sympathize with the boy, even when he strikes his teacher. But it quickly becomes impossible to retain any sympathy for the hoodies, who are reduced to animalistic monsters.

Hoodie horror relies on what Philo listed as the second explanation typically given, namely that hoodies are “just evil children,” savage ferals who do not even meet the definition of children. In Citadel , for example, the hoodies are more zombie than human: they never speak, only hiss and growl. Like bats, they are blind, able to see only fear, and like bats they must return to their hive during daytime. One scene even shows them licking the slime that covers the walls of the decayed high-rise in which they live. Redemption is obviously an impossibility for the hoodie, this film claims. In F , the hoodies are also dehumanized to the point of being literally faceless, only an empty blackness filling the space beneath their hoods. They never speak or make any sound at all, even when attacked. They also move like animals, leaping to perch in high places with ease, like a monkey or cat, or walking back and forth like a wild animal in a cage. ⁴⁰ Similarly, although the villains in Them are ultimately revealed to be everyday kids—at the end of the film we see them get on a school bus after spending a night terrorizing and finally murdering a couple—for the bulk of the film they, too, seem like otherworldly beings, communicating via a series of insectile clicks. In Heartless , the hoodies are simply demonic. Having dehumanized the hoodie, these films can sidestep the complex social problems that create delinquent youth in real life and focus instead on taking bloody retaliation against them.

Conclusion

As an emblem of “pure” human nature, ferals can represent both the best and worst conceptions of humankind. The view of the feral is impacted by attitudes toward both nature and society. When the former is valued, so, too, will be the feral. Thus, for feminists, who often see society as unfairly limiting girls’ identities, the feral can be an icon of hope; a woman’s natural self is her best self. In other popular texts, ferals prove no more savage than supposedly civilized society, especially during times of war; our natural self is our worst self.

The use of feral imagery in texts about child soldiers and juvenile crime is particularly concerning. In an essay entitled “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children” (2014), Phillip Atiba Goff et al. demonstrated that participants in a study consistently “overestimated the age of Black targets” and, as a result, black felony suspects “were seen a[s] 4.53 years older,” which means that African American boys “would be misperceived as legal adults at roughly the age of 13 and a half” (2014, 532). Moreover, after being “primed with dehumanizing words,” participants “showed a reduced belief in the essential distinction between Black Children and Black Adults” (540). This research suggests that feral imagery poses a real danger in that it can banish children from the realm of The Child, turning them into shadowy beasts who are far easier to dismiss and dispatch.

Notes

1.

Rudolph Glitz sees these two characters as well as the Little Sisters in the video game Bioshock as feral children who “represent the precarious future of humanity” (2014, 43).
2.

In “Fable,” Golding claimed that after World War II, he became convinced that “the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation.…I decided to take the literary convention of boys on an island…and try to show how the shape of the society they evolved would be conditioned by their diseased, their fallen nature” (1966, 87–88).
3.

Priscilla Frank’s article “Photographer Brings Unbelievable Stories of Feral Children to Life” gives samples and discussions of Fullerton-Batten’s photography.
4.

For this same reason, Jane Hotchkiss sees Mowgli as part of a British colonialist fantasy: “In Mowgli…Kipling has created the ideal subaltern, the native without the ‘native problem’, by engendering a new Indian race disturbingly divorced from Indian history, culture, and tradition” (2001, 441).
5.

See Chapter 5 on Tarzan in Jerry Griswold’s Audacious Kids and Chapter 2 of Kidd’s Making American Boys .
6.

According to Gail Bederman, Hall actually stated at a national kindergarten’s teacher’s convention that teachers should “encourage the little boys in their care to act like savages” (1995, 77).
7.

Judith Goldstein demonstrates the extent to which Bat Boy acts as a positive emblem of freedom in Bat Boy: The Musical , which premiered in 1997: she notes that the chorus to the theme song “repeatedly asks the audience to ‘love your Bat Boy’, to cultivate the wild and strange in their hearts” (2004, 37).
8.

Christopher Arigo argues that by the end of the trilogy, Tally’s transformation is meant to be a model for all readers, regardless of gender: “The final chapter of the series…reaches beyond the trilogy’s narrative, exhorting all readers to push back against our domesticated lives, and for all of us to tap into our feralness” (2014, 128).
9.

See Maria Popova’s article “A Sweet Illustrated Celebration of Our Wild Inner Child” at her website Brain Pickings , https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/17/emily-hughes-wild/ for a discussion and overview of the book.
10.

Alexa Wright sees a similarly liberating potential in the feral child: “the image of the ‘wild child’ living in a state of nature gives form to the fantasy of escape from the routine of human life and freedom from social control. In this incarnation, the wild child personifies Rousseau’s idea of an essential humanity” (2013, 43).
11.

During Pearl’s infancy, Hester often imagines she sees reflected in Pearl’s eyes “a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice.…It was [as] if an evil spirit possessed the child” (2005, 66). Pearl also responds violently to being picked on by the Puritan children, “grow[ing] positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue” (64). Elsewhere, she dances on graves (89) and breaks a bird’s wing with a pebble (115). However, I defend Pearl as a child who is far from evil in the essay “Hawthorne’s Pearl.”
12.

See, for example, the illustrated novel The Child Thief (2009) by Brom and Season 3 of Once Upon a Time (2013–2014).
13.

T.J. Henighan argues of the novel: “Both the baby mind and the child mind…are grounded in nature. Hughes indulges here in no particular mystification. Nature means to him the growing, spontaneous animal side, not necessarily a repository of ‘good’, but rather a sphere prior to society where creation and destruction are both present” (1967, 10). Daniel Brown similarly notes that the images of wildlife in Hughes’s book “parallel the antics of the children in order to stress his theme of their animality” (1968, 9).
14.

Coral Island is directly referred to in the novel. When the boys first positively assess their new home, they call it “Coral Island” (1999, 26). At the end, one of the naval officers says, “Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island” (182), suggesting that he is unable to imagine The Child engaging in the sort of savagery that we know has been occurring.
15.

Sabine Büssing argues that the boys “bring along with them an amount of military knowledge which must not be underestimated” (1987, 21).
16.

Seen in this way, ferals could trace their origins back to the Grimm fairy tale “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” as Sue Short points out in Fairy Tale and Film (2015, 136). Rarely anthologized today, the disturbing story has two short parts, each as haunting as the other; in both, a child slits the throat of another child—designated the pig—in imitation of the local butcher.
17.

One exception would be Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End (1953), adapted into a Syfy mini-series in 2015. In the book, the children are selected to evolve into a higher state of being, becoming a part of a greater entity called the Overmind. Before their transformation, the children have many feral traits. For example, they have little affection for others: at one point, they stand “in scattered groups along the sand, showing no more interest in one another than in the homes they were leaving forever” (1990, 179). Later, they are described as “naked and filthy” with faces “emptier than the faces of the dead” (196). Eventually, they wipe out all life on Earth and then Earth itself before passing into their higher state. While the events would seem at first glance to be entirely negative, the book presents them as more neutral—a necessary step in human evolution that, as one character recognizes, “repudiated optimism and pessimism alike” (198).
18.

In Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination , David M. Rosen claims that “by 1943, the Waffen SS was recruiting widely from the Hitler Youth. In some parts of Germany they recruited 80 to 92 percent of sixteen-year-olds and by 1945 youngsters as young as fourteen and fifteen” (2015, 78).
19.

Soviet child soldiers were certainly no myth: Olga Kucherenko states that estimates of their numbers during World War II range from 60,000 to 300,000 (2011, 2). See also Margaret Peacock’s Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War .
20.

Patrick Hagopian considers the two images of Vietnam children—terrorized victim and juvenile terrorist—as having a symbiotic relationship in the imaginary. Hagopian writes: “Veterans’ narratives are peppered with stories of Vietnamese babies being booby-trapped by explosives, of children leading the Americans into ambushes, and of children coming up to unsuspecting American troops and unleashing lethal attacks with grenades and bombs. These stories are likely grounded in fact, but they possess a wider significance in relation to the stories of America’s child victims. The knowledge that Vietnamese children sometimes behaved as a threat to U.S. forces might mitigate the guilt of American troops who killed or injured children” (2009, 337).
21.

While I haven’t found a study that clearly indicates how frequently children actually did participate in guerilla tactics during Vietnam, Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves shows that GIs were trained to view them as threats: “Many [veterans] recall immediately being told that…even women and small children were possible foes or outright enemies.…A child, GIs believed, might throw a grenade or be strapped with explosives” (2013, 28).
22.

Locicero sees the invention of the AK-47 in 1947 as a major contributing factor. As Locicero explains, “[t]he AK-47 rifle is presumed to have enabled young children to fight as child soldiers.…Even children as young as six and seven years old can use the weapon” (2014, 93). Project AK-47, a group devoted to saving child soldiers, chose their name for this very reason. See also P.W. Singer’s “Caution: Children at War.”
23.

A November 2015 Newsweek article entitled “ISIS Is Training an Army of Child Soldiers” reported that ISIS recruited 1100 children under the age of 16 between January and August.
24.

Article 38 reads: “State parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” In 2002, the age was finally increased to 18 by the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
25.

A similar plot device occurs in the video game Fallout 3 (2008), in the town of Little Lamplight. Only children below the age of 18 are allowed in; turning 18 means you become a “Mungo” and must move on to “Big Town.”
26.

The feral child as infected is a trope used in the campy flick The Children (1980), a movie also called The Children from 2008, which is not a remake of the first, and Cooties (2014).
27.

The gun Tom uses is an MP-40, a WWII-era German submachine gun, according to the Wikipedia article on the film. This choice of weapon itself embodies the conflicted views toward the children that the movie harbors. On the one hand, it supports the film’s declared defense of children: that Spanish children are shot down by a German gun reminds the viewer of the Nazi aid given to Franco during the Spanish Civil War; the children are literally being punished for the sins of their elders. Tom even refers to the civil war earlier in the film. On the other hand, the MP-40 was a favorite weapon of the Allies when they could appropriate it from their fallen enemies (Bishop 2002, 260). Symbolically, it’s almost as if the children represent evil Axis forces, and Tom is an Allied soldier using their own weapon against them.
28.

The conclusion of Beware: Children at Play (1989) also ends with this sort of mass killing of ferals.
29.

See Tony Magistrale’s essays “Inherited Haunts” and “Stephen King’s Viet Nam Allegory.”
30.

In the 1984 film, Vicky and Burt escape, and by the end of the film, the children have become almost comic.
31.

A noteworthy exception would be the 2013 film Mama , which focuses on two sisters.
32.

See also Liz Thiel’s “Degenerate ‘Innocents’.”
33.

See Timothy Shary’s “Delinquent Youth” in his Generation Multiplex and “Bad Boys and Hollywood Hype,” Ruth M. Goldstein and Edith Zorrow’s chapter on “Delinquency and Crime” in The Screen Image of Youth , James Gilbert’s A Cycle of Outrage , Ann Kordas’s chapter “The Violent Years: Fears of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime” in The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America , and Dominic Lennard’s discussion in Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors , 21–28. For discussion of female delinquents specifically, see Elizabeth McCarthy’s “Fast Cars and Bullet Bras.”
34.

One can find similar gangs of monstrous youth in Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and its 1972 cinematic adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick as well as in narratives about the horrors of boys’ private schools, like If … (1968), Unman, Wittering and Zigo (first produced as a radio play, then a film in 1971), and American writer Robert Marasco’s Child’s Play (a drama first staged on Broadway in 1970 and then adapted into film in 1972).
35.

See Lynelle Hancock’s “Framing Children in the News” for further details about the rhetoric surrounding the superpredator.
36.

They write that “under toughened laws that have become increasingly popular since the 1980s, all 50 states and the federal government allow juveniles to be tried as adults” and that states began to “change[] their laws to make it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults” as early as 1994 (1999, 164).
37.

See also Elias le Grand’s chapter “The ‘Chav’ as Folk Devil,” Keith Hayward and Majid Yar’s article “The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass,” and Imogen Tyler’s Revolting Subjects .
38.

In his interview with Maher (2008), Watkins makes it clear that Eden Lake is intended to blame “upbringing”: “I don’t want to overstate any of this…but it’s very deliberate that in the film the very first and the very last act of violence that you see on screen is a slap perpetrated by a parent on a child.” Maher understands Watkins as implying that “the real villains are not the hoodies…but their negligent parents.”
39.

Attack the Block , “in which hoodies are the goodies,” as Johnny Walker puts it, would be one exception to the rule (2012, 451).
40.

Newman argues that the antagonists in F are “human rats in the line of descent from the semi-supernatural street gang of Assault on Precinct 13 ” (2011, 477).

6. Ferals

Optimistic Feral Child Narratives

The Frightening Feral Child

Ferals in Juvenile Justice

Conclusion

Notes