Wild animals! Violent hoodlums! Roaming the streets in packs, eager to harry any good, upstanding citizen, causing damage or worse to person and property, denigrating all that is moral and wholesome and proper, the so-called “teenager,” under the influence of rampant hormones, alcohol, the ‘devil’s weed,’ or worse, is a scourge on our society that must be brought to heel if civilization is to have any hope of survival! Take your heads out of the sand! Open your eyes! See the danger that is all around, and start taking action before it’s too late!!!
So this week, I’m doing something a little different. The films I’m tackling would not generally be considered “horror” by most, but I think they comprise a fascinating artifact of the social fear of a certain mid-century America, making them richly worthy of consideration as, if not ‘horror’ per se, then horror-like works that reflect significant anxieties in their fictions. Harnessing the eternal distrust of the young (who don’t respect their elders, and worse, are coming to replace them), but funneling that through the rigid culturally specific tropes of the era when they were most produced, what may be termed “JD” (juvenile delinquent) films, propaganda-hygiene films, or simply “Fifties Teensploitation,” reveal the deep-set fears of a generation as much as films like King Kong, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (any version), or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre so clearly do.
Doing My Research
I’ve found myself drawn to this topic as I’d like to do something creative with it myself. I have previously made mention of my collaboration with La Folie Retro Cabaret Show, a group I work with in Kraków, Poland, and specifically of a piece I particularly enjoyed building that paid homage to the style and glamour of horror from the 20s and 30s. As an upcoming performance will be rooted in the 40s and 50s, I thought the tight sweaters and fast cars of this film cycle could be a fertile source of inspiration, and thus have started diving into the oeuvre. I can’t claim to have exhaustively studied the field, but in the last week, I have gone through eleven works, collecting patterns and observations about them. For the most part, they were all made between 1954 and 1958, though one comes from as early as 1938 and one as late as 1968.
They are: Reefer Madness (1938), Girl Gang (1954), Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Violent Years (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1957), Reform School Girl (1957), High School Confidential (1958), and She Mob (1968). Many, if not all, are available on Youtube.
Though they all revolve around the same subjects and themes, they are also fairly varied. Three were actually released as “horror,” including a supernatural/sci-fi element, one is an earnest work of early anti-drug propaganda, some are “legitimate” studio pictures, some are cheapie “exploitation” flicks, one is a very idiosyncratic sexploitation movie, and one is a genuinely great, iconic film, rightly famous. All, however, engage with the idea of the then recently named ‘teenager’ as a monstrous hybrid of youth and adulthood, a monster intent on great social disruption (which seems right in line with Noel Carroll’s horror taxonomy in which he claims an essential characteristic of a monster is that it breaches categories).
It’s not my intention to review all of these films here, or even detail each in some way. Rather, I’d like to try identifying and discussing some trends that seem to recur or some elements that stand out as seemingly unique and noteworthy.
But First, a Bit of History.
I’m taking a lot of this from a Saturday Evening Post article. You can read it all here. As I understand it, the term “teenager” wasn’t even coined until the 40s and didn’t come into regular use until the 50s. That said, what we know as the teenager really began to form in the first decades of the 20th century. Before that, for most of human history, human development was essentially divided into childhood and adulthood. Few people stayed in school beyond the 5th grade and those who did studied in single room schoolhouses with kids of all ages. Except for the very privileged very few, most completed their education at the end of “childhood” (if they even made it that far) entered the workforce, and started taking on adult responsibilities, providing for their families. It wasn’t uncommon to marry and start having kids by 15 or 16 and before that, most rituals of courtship occurred in the home, under the watchful eyes of parents.
It wasn’t until the late 19th/early 20th century that society really started cracking down on child labor and one way that was done was to extend the period of mandatory education. Furthermore, as automobiles were invented, it was possible to create consolidated high schools, bussing students in from a wider geographic area, putting all these teens together all day every day, creating an unprecedented social dynamic, a roiling pot of hormones and ego, making all the teenagers within more like each other and less like children or adults. Finally, when cars became common, “dating” as it is now known became a thing, away from the family, as did “teen culture”.
A period of new affluence and comfort birthed a new commercial demographic. Teenagers had to study, but generally had a new kind of free time and disposable income. They could work, but didn’t have the same financial responsibilities of previous generations and could spend their earnings on records, clothes, hanging out at the soda fountain, and judging from the movies I watched this week, switchblades, lots of switchblades.
They were also getting into trouble in cars, getting in accidents, getting pregnant, experimenting with drugs, and getting into fights. And people freaked out, as can be seen in films of the times. In the 30s, there was a boom of ‘hygiene’ films and ‘propaganda’ films, warning against new dangers targeting the youth of the time. For this collection, I watched the classic Reefer Madness, a very self-serious (if often laughable) entry, showing how rapidly young lives could be devastated by just one puff of marijuana. Unscrupulous pushers target nice, clean-cut young teens, inviting them back to their drug den to party. Before you know it, there are hit and runs, deadly gunshots fired in a hallucinatory haze, suicidal leaps out the window, and loads and loads of maniacal laughter. All of it is framed by a high school principal addressing parents at a PTA meeting, trying to drive home the message of how these dangerous threats could come for their very own children if they don’t act immediately.
Recurring Trends
The main thrust of Reefer Madness represents one key trend I saw in these works – sometimes, the kids are really “good” kids, but wicked people are out to corrupt them, to take advantage of them, destroying them in the process. And even if pushers aren’t actively trying to hook your kid on smack, all it takes is for your daughter to take a joy ride in a hot car with the wrong boy, one who would kill someone in a hit and run and let her take the fall, for her to become a Reform School Girl (though to be fair, in that case, the girl in question already had a bad home life with her aunt who resented her and her uncle who lusted after her – all of which pushed her into the arms (and passenger seat) of this dangerous delinquent). These films suggest that parents today are willfully blind to the deadly temptations their kids are facing. Reefer Madness is one of these, but there are many, many more (about drugs, about sex, about violent crime). And while this film was quite earnest in its messaging (produced by a church group that really was worried about marijuana’s corrupting influence), many others were rather exploitation fare, promising moral instruction and preventative education in order to get around the Hays Code and feature lurid subject matter like sex and drugs and their often violent and tragic consequences.
And this trope of the world (and especially high school) being much more dangerous than parents are willing to imagine continued for quite some time, still going strong in 1958’s High School Confidential, in which drug dealers are trying to work their way into a high school market, starting the kids first on weed, but rapidly moving them on to the hard stuff. The school is already run by a gang when the protagonist arrives and the first half of the story involves him taking over and making a connection with the local heavies who can supply the junk he wants to sell. I find it interesting that this moral panic about pot serving as a ‘gateway drug’ had such staying power. When I was a teen in the 90s, I was encountering much the same rhetoric. Things change slowly if at all.
In the 40s, while those just a bit older were away at war, a generation of teens was really on their own and free in an unprecedented way. And people were worried about what they were getting up to. I didn’t watch anything from this era exactly, but I think this was when the “youth runs wild” picture was born (and in 1944, a film exactly bore that name). I believe many of these can be grouped loosely under the umbrella of “film noir,” often with teens falling under the influence of gangsters and criminals. Whereas films like Reefer Madness posited innocent teens being preyed upon by unscrupulous pushers, this era started to present the tale of “good kids gone bad,” seeing teens not only destroyed by their brush with the dark side, but also showing them go bad themselves, becoming criminal, becoming violent, becoming animals.
And then, by the 50s, one of the biggest trends I see is just presenting the teens as dangerous criminal animals from the get go. Girl Gang (1954) begins with the eponymous group of teen girls carrying out a car-jacking and leaving the driver for dead on the side of the road before going to get their fix. To let another girl join, they inform her she first has to have sex with five boys who are “friends” of the gang, prostituting her in exchange for membership. They don’t need to “go bad.” They are bad already (though much of the rest of the run time focuses much less on the girl gang, and much more on an sinister drug pusher getting nice high school kids hooked on junk, who then have to resort to violent crime to maintain their heroin habits).
Blackboard Jungle (1955) features a well-intentioned young teacher going to an inner city, multi-racial school where the kids are presented as wild and dangerous from the very beginning. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) isn’t about juvenile delinquents the way some of these other films are, but it sure features them. On the first day that James Dean’s character comes to his new school, his car is vandalized, he’s pushed into a knife fight he doesn’t want to be in, and he is challenged to a cliff edge game of chicken with deadly consequences. He is actually a nice kid (who just doesn’t fit in to such a dishonest, superficial world), but generally the teens he meets are a pretty rough bunch.
And some of the roughest characters are probably the gang of seemingly good, proper teen girls in the Ed Wood penned (though he was uncredited) The Violent Years (1956). Exploitation through and through, this film doesn’t seek to warn that your kids could be preyed upon, or turned to the dark side. Rather, it indicates that your sweet, loving daughter could just be waiting for you to go to work so she can rally her gang of cop killing teen girlfriends (it seems that there were a lot of ‘girl gang’ movies –just more shocking I guess) to knock over gas stations, attack couples on lover’s lane (trussing up the girls and outright raping the boys), and carrying out acts of vandalism on their school at the behest of an unnamed international interest (which is clearly the soviets). This trend was still going strong by the late 60s with She Mob in which the girls aren’t explicitly teens, but they are still a dangerous gang, led by their sexuality to acts of kidnapping and murder (it is also a very weird little movie, but oddly fascinating like some kind of strange insect – a bit like crossing John Waters with Russ Meyer). And it’s hard to find a more ultra-violent presentation of teen life than in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), so this is an idea with staying power (though this is both out of the era and geographic focus of my selections).
I don’t actually know the stats on violent crimes committed by youth in the fifties, but I can’t help but think that it wasn’t as bad as people imagined. Still, with films like these (and it seems that there were loads of them in a pretty short period) representing the contemporary mindset, it’s not surprising that J. Edgar Hoover was ringing the warning bell in a 1953 FBI report about the “appalling crimes” he was expecting teens to commit in the coming years, or that Dwight Eisenhower called for federal legislation in the 1955 State of the Union to deal with the scourge of juvenile delinquency.
If you aren’t careful, you may discover that your kids have been monsters all along – and it’s obviously your fault for not paying more attention sooner! These were the original teenage ‘super-predators.’
And speaking of monsters, we do have the three entries that are actually horror films: I Was a Teenage Werewolf (which I wrote about at somewhat greater length in my last post), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and Blood of Dracula (which is essentially a gender flipped version of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, with a girl becoming a vampire instead), all released by AIP in 1957. Really aimed at a teen audience, these are a bit kinder to the “teenager,” setting up a manipulative adult (therapist, scientist, teacher) as the true villain of the piece, who is experimenting on some teen against their will, bringing out the monster within (which will apparently somehow save humanity), but still, they all suggest that every teen has that inner violent, powerful monster tucked away inside, just waiting to be released by a well-intentioned, if quite evil, mad scientist. And I suppose they’re also a warning that if you drive recklessly, some British guy might steal your corpse and turn you into a monster, so there’s that…
Some Reflections
I think often when we look back on the past, we naively imagine something quaint. Especially in terms of the 50s, much of the pop culture that has stayed in the public eye seems so sanitized. This was a time when married couples were always shown in separate beds and apparently no sitcom family’s home came equipped with a toilet. But of course, we have always been violent; we have always been getting into trouble. The teenager as we know it is a more modern concept, but people have been documented complaining about ‘youth today’ since at least Socrates. From the 30s to the late 60s, there was more censorship (at least in American pop culture, but I expect that was also true in other countries as well), and this means that the cultural documents we have (film, TV, etc…) tend to paint a picture of a world that never was. The reality was probably just the opposite.
By all accounts, “kids today” are engaging in adult activities (sex, drinking, drugs, work, and driving, among other things) later and later. Comparatively, the teens of the past really were running wild and getting into much more trouble than young people do nowadays. Whereas once society was terrified that teens were forming packs to roam the streets, preying on the vulnerable, now people just complain that teens spend too much time inside, looking at their screens – now parents might be concerned their kids aren’t getting in enough trouble. And oddly, just as young people now may hold on to aspects of childhood longer, I dare say that the current young generation is probably more plugged into what is going on in the world than in most previous eras. With a dread of a world irreparably environmentally ruined by those that came before, with a newfound insistence on all people being treated with full respect, regardless of race, creed, sexuality, gender expression, etc., and with a tragically reasonable terror at the prospect of being gunned down on the way to algebra class, my impression is that teens now are a pretty serious minded bunch.
Sadly, these days, I think they have more to legitimately fear from and for the world than the world has any reason to fear them…
Exploitation
One final thought: operating in horror spaces, there is often much mention of “exploitation” films. I always kinda get what people mean by that, but it also feels a bit nebulous. Where exactly is the line between “exploitation” and “legitimate” filmmaking? Does it depend on the budget? On the studio? On just how titillating the subject matter is? Watching this set of films was interestingly illustrative in marking the differences.
Don’t get me wrong – I really do appreciate an actually “great” movie, and from this set, that is clearly Rebel Without a Cause. It is just a beautiful, interesting, rich film and Dean’s performance is truly special. However, generally among these movies, it was the more ‘exploitation’ fare that I found most enjoyable, and honestly, less moralistically uncomfortable.
Case in point: Blackboard Jungle is a very well-made film, from a bigger studio (MGM), and stars some actual names (not to mention featuring prominent up and comers – it was a young Sidney Poitier’s first film). Thus, while it is a ‘JD’ flick, you wouldn’t call it an ‘exploitation’ picture. But the presentation of high school kids as threatening animals felt kinda icky. This is a film that is good enough to actually communicate a sense of reality and the one it was pushing – of the horrific monstrousness of ‘kids today’ – is reasonably ugly when effective (I wonder about a comparison with the far more exploitationy Class of 1984 (1982), which is basically a remake). Of course, by the end, the idealistic young teacher hangs in there and makes a difference, but along the way, there is a real demonization of the young that lands in a different way than in some of the cheaper, less highly produced flicks.
On the flip side, a movie like The Violent Years makes a point of showing teens as so very, very horrible, and yet it is just oddly watchable and fun, and doesn’t turn me off with its moralizing, even though it explicitly does so much more of it. There is something to the fact that any messaging it has about the dangers to and of youth are so transparently just cashing in on a trend and using it to titillate. This results in a peculiar aesthetic pleasure. I’d rather indulge in the singular charms of honest sleaze over the genuine moralistic scolding of a “well-made film” any day.
And the “exploitation” of films like Girl Gang, Reform School Girl, or The Violent Years also feels closer to the horror genre – which I’m supposed to be writing about. For all of their superficial moralizing, it feels obvious that they are actually just using that faux preachiness to justify salacious entertainment, having fun with the concept of the teenage monster. And they are kinda a blast.
But also, do yourself a favor and watch Rebel Without a Cause. It’s just a beautiful piece of work. I loved it!
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And there we are. I acknowledge that these movies really aren’t “horror” and even more, I feel I barely described them. But still, I think they do something that horror does: they take a fear that is on the minds of society and distill it into an entertainment – to exorcise that fear, to oppose the source of that fear, or simply to capitalize on that fear to make a quick buck, thus effectively preserving a valuable social document – a lens through which to examine a past moment in time. And thus, on my horror journey, it’s been interesting to take this little detour, and I think I’ve collected some fun stuff to feed into creative work of my own. Thanks for indulging me in some slightly off brand commentary this week. Next time, perhaps I can just talk about one good scary movie. Let’s see what happens…
