The peer-reviewed monograph of Batalina Khrystyna Fridrikhivna "The Child as the Embodiment of Evil in Horror Films of the Second Half of the 20th to the Beginning of the 21st Century"
Authors:   Vasil Stefanik Carpathian National University, Kholod Oleksandr 
Published: December 2023

H. F. Batalina's monograph is devoted to the problem of creating the image of a child as the embodiment of evil in horror films of the second half of the 20th - beginning of the 20th century. The topic formulates an important problem, primarily of a moral and psychological nature. The relevance of the work lies in the fact that "a certain niche, currently unfilled in the Ukrainian cultural space, is being explored in a situation where Ukrainian cinema is beginning to take steps to meet the audience and enter wide distribution with genre films" [p. 22 of the manuscript]. H.F. Batalina points out that "the study of the problem of the child as a cinematographic object, except for a few exceptions, is not developed in the scientific film literature, although such a need is increasingly expressed as one of its important tasks" [p. 22 of the manuscript]. It should be added to the above that the research is also relevant because the image of a child in horror films is not a norm for post-Soviet society, is not inherent in the culture of modern Ukraine, but is planted by cultural traditions of Western countries (for example, the planting of the Halloween holiday). Therefore, the research of H.F. Batalina allows us to understand where and why other traditions appear in the culture of Ukrainians. We are convinced that the degree of validity of scientific statements, conclusions and prospects for solving the problem of finding archetypal and semiotic during the creation of the image of children in films of the horror genre, which is reflected in the monograph, has a sufficient level to recommend the above-mentioned scientific work for publication. We consider the specification of the categorical and terminological apparatus of film horror based on the philosophical and aesthetic aspects of the problem to be an important achievement of H. F. Batalina's research. We respect H. F. Batalina's confident attempt to offer the scientific community an author's vision of the paradigm of genre features of horror films. Time will demonstrate the functionality of the proposed features, and reveal the shortcomings and dominant advantages of such a paradigm. Since we are followers of the principle of Karl Popper's fallibilism (in the understanding of the concept of "fallibilism" by Charles Peirce), which implies the axiom that any scientific knowledge is fundamentally not final, but only an intermediate interpretation of the truth, which involves the subsequent replacement by a better interpretation, we assert: the author's vision of the paradigm of genre features of the horror film has the right to exist and needs further practical verification, which, in our opinion, is already a victory for scientists. F. Batalina and the victory of scientific thought in the field. The monograph is made at a sufficient scientific level, contains important theoretical provisions and has practical significance. We have an individual, theoretically and operationally supported research position that contributes to the formation of modern theory.