Introduction

The ventriloquism of the child protagonist that I have discussed thus far has been in the appropriative vein that negates the agency and subjectivity of the child character: from the representation of child appropriation to sexual abuse to abduction by a ventriloquist. In the current chapter, I will explore the liberating and empowering potential of another classification of ventriloquism – prosopopeia – and how it relates to the Gothic child protagonist from Marcelino pan y vino (The Miracle of Marcelino) (Vajda 1955) to El orfanato (The Orphanage) (Bayona 2007). Features in the Gothic mode from the cine con niño to the nuevo cine con niño construct a child protagonist whose sensitivity and marginality allows him or her to empathise with the suffering of other innocents and choose to serve as their advocate. These others may be spirits, ghosts, living dead, or civil dead who have been persecuted with impunity. The Gothic child protagonists engage with the disenfranchised through prosopopeia, which is ‘a form of projection; a form of ventriloquism in which the living speak for or through the dead, just as the adult revisits, reshapes and retells his childhood experiences as if he were (still) a child’ (Lury 2010: 111). This ventriloquial connection to the dead or otherwise maligned is the feature that most interests us in these films. Here we will explore the dialogism of films in the Gothic mode, saving their broader dialogism with regards to rites of passage for Chapter Six. Ann Davies has traced a latent Gothic mode in Spanish cinema whereby:

For Maria Pramaggiore, the international resonance of these films is due to the child: ‘Spanish horror has succeeded as a global genre embracing Spanish cinema and Spanish language films from other national contexts partly because it uses the child to interrogate the genre's ability to represent traumatic history’ (2017: 71).