In January 2019, Netflix released the unexpectedly popular Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Joe Berlinger, true crime director, compiled interviews with Bundy, law enforcement authorities involved with Bundy’s arrest and trial, and members of Bundy’s community to create a four-part docu-series focusing “on a man whose personality, good looks, and social graces defied the serial-killer stereotype, [which allowed] him to hide in plain sight” (Berlinger). The somewhat romanticized Ted Bundy Tapes serve as an example of modern folklore, in which the archetypal bogeyman has been narrativized for contemporary society as a charming, rather than hideous, monster. This bogeyman trope—a child-snatching, fear-inducing, paranoia-provoking monster—can be traced back through a number of famous folkloric tales, like The Pied Piper, through the fairytale realm, as illustrated with Peter Pan, and into popular contemporary media with productions like the Ted Bundy Tapes and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. These folkloresque narratives help to explain how certain trials or traumas were overcome. The Ted Bundy Tapes opened a discourse community surrounding Ted Bundy as more than a historically recorded villain, but as an almost fictive evil hiding behind a “hot” façade. Forming Bundy as a charming child-snatcher and then presenting this character in a widely available docu-series promulgated the surrounding lore, making Bundy into a bogeyman. Instead of romanticizing Bundy now, we have to recognize his form as a bogeyman character in order for this archetype to serve in a truly useful cautionary capacity and to help us work through inevitable trauma.

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<p>This dissertation deals with how didactic fiction and writers of child literature of the 18^th and 19^th centuries tried to strike terror into their young listeners to make them obedient to the social and moral norms of adults. Particular attention is devoted to texts where children themselves function as protagonists. Fairy-tales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm but also by Ludwig Bechstein and Charles Perrault are taken into consideration as are examples of child literature by Johann Baptist Strobl, a less famous didactic philanthropist at the end of the Enlightenment.</p><p>The theme of horror and intimidation is followed and analyzed with special regard to narrative techniques, but also to objectives of educational and socialisation processes. The dissertation argues that many of the recurring stereotypes and <i>topoi</i> in these horror stories for children can be traced back to popular superstition and other notions of an early preliterary and oral society.</p>

This dissertation deals with how didactic fiction and writers of child literature of the 18th and 19th centuries tried to strike terror into their young listeners to make them obedient to the social and moral norms of adults. Particular attention is devoted to texts where children themselves function as protagonists. Fairy-tales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm but also by Ludwig Bechstein and Charles Perrault are taken into consideration as are examples of child literature by Johann Baptist Strobl, a less famous didactic philanthropist at the end of the Enlightenment. The theme of horror and intimidation is followed and analyzed with special regard to narrative techniques, but also to objectives of educational and socialisation processes. The dissertation argues that many of the recurring stereotypes and topoi in these horror stories for children can be traced back to popular superstition and other notions of an early preliterary and oral society.