It Came From the 1950s!: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties
Author: Darryl Jones; Elizabeth McCarthy; Bernice M. Murphy
Date: 2011-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Social Science; Sociology; General; Media Studies; Performing Arts; Film; History & Criticism; Theater; Anthropology; Cultural & Social
Description: An eclectic and insightful collection of essays predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times. 1950s popular culture is analysed by leading scholars and critics such as Christopher Frayling, Mark Jancovich, Kim Newman and David J. Skal.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

It Came From the 1950s!

Also by Darryl Jones

STUDYING POETRY ( with Stephen Matterson) HORROR: A THEMATIC HISTORY IN FICTION AND FILM

JANE AUSTEN

REINTERPRETING EMMET: ESSAYS ON THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF ROBERT

EMMET

M. R. JAMES, COLLECTED GHOST STORIES ( edited) Also by Elizabeth McCarthy

FEAR: ESSAYS ON THE MEANING AND EXPERIENCE OF FEAR ( co-edited with Kate Hebblethwaite)

Also by Bernice M. Murphy

THE SUBURBAN GOTHIC IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE

SHIRLEY JACKSON: ESSAYS ON THE LITERARY LEGACY

It Came From the 1950s!

Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties

Edited by

Darryl Jones

Elizabeth McCarthy
and

Bernice M. Murphy

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy 2011

Individual chapters © Contributors 2011

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2011 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978–0–230–27221–7

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

DJ: For Margaret and Morgan, with love EMcC: For Paul Cronly

BM: For my Godson Ieuan Murphy

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Contents

List of Illustrations
ix

Acknowledgements
x

About the Contributors
xi

Introduction

1

1 A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups

17

David J. Skal

2 ‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

33

Darryl Jones

3 Mutants and Monsters

55

Kim Newman

4 ‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The Fifties Hammer Invasion 72

Wayne Kinsey

5 Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s

90

Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston

6 Hammer’s Dracula

108

Christopher Frayling

7 Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America

135

Elizabeth McCarthy

8 ‘A Search for the Father-Image’: Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch’s 1950s Fiction

158

Kevin Corstorphine

9 ‘Reading her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthropology

176

Dara Downey
vii
viii

Contents

10 ‘At My Cooking I Feel It Looking’: Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing 198

Lorna Piatti-Farnell

11 ‘All that Zombies Allow’ Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven and Fido

216

Bernice M. Murphy

Bibliography

234

Filmography

244

Index

250

List of Illustrations

7.1 ‘Booby trap/Syphillis and Gonorrhea’

140

7.2 ‘Chippers’. Women war workers of Marinship Corp., 1942

143

7.3 Sensational Exposés (April 1957)

145

7.4 D for Delinquent, artist unknown (Ace D-270, 1958) 148
ix

Acknowledgements

This book began life in James Toner’s public house, Baggot Street, Dublin, in 2007 when the editors sat down to recover from a viewing of the rare Dublin-based giallo horror The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, and between them cooked up a plan to run a conference on 1950s popular culture. This conference was held in Trinity College Dublin in May 2008, and the volume of essays you hold in your hands is its mutant offspring.

We would like to thank all the participants in that conference, many of whom agreed to contribute to this book. Our thanks to Cyndy Hendershot, Jarlath Killeen, Stephen Matterson and Jenny McDonnell for their help with the original conference. Our thanks to the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and particularly to the MPhil in Popular Literature, for their financial assistance in running the event.

To Clive Bloom, for helping us to get the book into print, and to Christabel Scaife and Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience and enthusiasm.

Our thanks to the following hep cats and real gone kids, for their advice, encouragement and support: James Bell, John Exshaw, Tracy Fahey, Peter Hutchings, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Maria Parsons, Diane Sadler, Aspasia Stephanou, and to all our students on the MPhil in Popular Literature.

x

About the Contributors

Kevin Corstorphine is lecturer in English at the Scarborough campus of the University of Hull, having previously taught at Limerick and Dundee. He holds a PhD entitled ‘Space and Fear in Contemporary American Horror Fiction’ from the University of Dundee as well as an M.Litt in Romanticism from the University of St Andrews. His interests include the Gothic, American Literature, popular culture, film and theoretical approaches to space and place. He is also interested in the reception of science in literature, particularly evolution. He has published articles on H.P. Lovecraft, Oscar Wilde, Stephen King, and John Ajvide Lindqvist, among others. He is currently working on the weird tale, ecology and the Gothic, with particular reference to Ambrose Bierce.

Dara Downey is an IRCHSS post-doctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and completed her PhD there in 2009. She has previously published essays on the work of Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Richard Matheson and Mark Z. Danielewski. As the book review editor for The Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies she has produced numerous reviews on horror fiction, film and television. Her current research project is concerned with the nineteenth-century American women’s ghost story.

Christopher Frayling was Rector of the Royal College of Art in London from 1996–2009, and Professor of Cultural History there as well as a former Chairman of the Arts Council England. He has published 16 books and numerous articles on visual culture, design and history, over the last 25 years including The Vampyre (1976) Spaghetti Westerns (1980); The Royal College of Art: 150 years of art and design (1987); Vampyres – Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991); Nightmare – The birth of horror (1996); and Mad, Bad and Dangerous – the Scientist and the Cinema (2005) as well as many academic articles, review pieces and essays. He was knighted in 2000 for ‘services to art and design education’.

Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of several books: Horror (1992); The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (1993); Rational xi
xii

About the Contributors

Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (1996); and The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (with Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings, 2003). He is also the editor of several collections: Approaches to Popular Film (with Joanne Hollows, 1995); The Film Studies Reader (with Joanne Hollows and Peter Hutchings, 2000); Horror, The Film Reader (2001); Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (with James Lyons, 2003); Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis, 2003); and Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (with Paul Grainge and Sharon Monteith, 2006. He was also the founder of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; and is series editor (with Eric Schaefer) of the MUP book series, Inside Popular Film. He is currently writing a history of horror in the 1940s.

Derek Johnston was awarded a PhD from the University of East Anglia based on his thesis ‘Genre, Taste and the BBC: The Origins of British Television Science Fiction’ in 2010. His publications include ‘Experimental Moments: R.U.R. and the Birth of British Television Science Fiction’ for the journal Science Fiction Film and Television; the entry on ‘When Worlds Collide’ for When Worlds Collide: The Critical Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations and ‘The BBC versus Science Fiction! The collision of transnational genre and national identity in British television in the early 1950s’ in Alien Nation: British Science Fiction Film and Television.

Darryl Jones is Head of the School of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches nineteenth-century fiction and popular literature. He has written or edited seven books, most recently an edition of M.R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories for OUP. He has also written many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular literature, film and culture.

Wayne Kinsey is a consultant histopathologist in Norwich and lecturer at the University of East Anglia School of Medicine. He became a Hammer fan in 1971 at the impressionable age of 10 after watching a Friday night season of Hammer horror films and hasn’t been the same since.

Since 1997 he has been writing the fanzine The House That Hammer Built and has written two successful books on the company, Hammer Films – the Bray Studios Years and Hammer Films – the Elstree Studios Years.

The latter was recently nominated for best book of 2007 in the prestigious American Rondo horror film awards. He is currently working on two more books about Hammer. Hammer Films – a Life in Pictures is a pictorial book in collaboration with the BFI stills archive, expanding a

About the Contributors
xiii
former BFI Southbank exhibition he contributed to showing that Hammer didn’t just make horror films, but had a much wider canvas working with a number of international acting and technical legends. This is to be followed by The Real Hammer Story, detailing the lives of the gifted technicians that made Hammer’s films the cult they are today. He also co-wrote the script for the supernatural thriller Messages (2007) starring Jeff Fahey, based on his original story.

Elizabeth McCarthy teaches in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where she was awarded a PhD in 2008. She has published essays on Romantic aesthetics and the serial killer, the vampire body and its mutilation, the politics of the guillotine in the French Revolution, World War I Propaganda and Post-World War I American Advertising, the ghost stories of Margaret Oliphant and conservative politics in Back to the Future. She has also co-edited the book Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear (2007) and is currently compiling and editing the book Jack the Ripper: Early Fictional Accounts of the Whitechapel Murderer.

She is the co-founder and editor of the online journal The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (web address: http://irishgothichorrorjournal.

homestead.com).

Bernice M. Murphy is Lecturer in Popular Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has edited the collection Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (2005) and written The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (2009). She is co-founder and editor of the online Irish Journal of Horror and Gothic Studies and has also published essays on Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Jonathan Carroll, Back to the Future and the recent decline of the American horror movie.

She is currently working on a book about the relationship between horror and the wilderness in American popular culture.

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, the Anno Dracula novels, The Quorum, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (writing Empire’s popular Video Dungeon column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television
xiv

About the Contributors
documentaries. He has written and directed a tiny film called Missing Girl and written plays for BBC radio. His official web-site can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com.

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is lecturer in Cultural and Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology. Her main research interests include cultural history, twentieth-century literature, film studies and advertising. Additional research interests include anime, manga and Gothic fiction. In her work, Lorna takes an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on issues of ethnicity, gender, national identity and cultural iconography. She specializes in food scholarship and has published on several aspects of culinary studies, including food and subjectiv-ity, sugar and cultural politics, culinary history and memoirs. Lorna is currently completing a monograph entitled Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction, to be published in late 2011. Her next project, a monograph entitled Beef: A Global History, will be published in 2012.

David J. Skal is an author and documentary film-maker who has extensively explored horror and science fiction in such books as The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror; Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, and Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. With Nina Auerbach, he is co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and, with Elias Savada, author of Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning. He has guest lectured at dozens of colleges and universities across the United States, and has taught courses based on The Monster Show at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Victoria. His official web site is www.monstershow.net.

Introduction

The Age of Anxiety. This was the title of W.H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prizewinning long poem of 1947, in which four representative characters gather to talk, love and dream in a New York bar during World War II. Auden clearly caught a post-war mood, and the phrase ‘age of anxiety’

soon became proverbial, seeping into all levels of American culture over the next few years. The young composer Leonard Bernstein read The Age of Anxiety in the summer of 1947, and felt an ‘extreme personal identification of myself with the poem’, which signified for him ‘the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith’ in the modern world. His second symphony, composed in 1948–9, is his own record of his engagement with the poem’s themes and ideas; he called this symphony The Age of Anxiety.1

Subtitled ‘A Baroque Eclogue’, and written in an alliterative verse-form which he adapted from Anglo-Saxon poetry, Auden’s poem would generally be recognized as a characteristic high-cultural document, deploying a classic Modernist repertoire of allusions, images and registers to create a fragmented textual representation of the archetypal city of modernity, New York, the city to which Auden had moved in 1939. To a certain extent, The Age of Anxiety operates as a poetic response to T.S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the greatest of all poetic documents of the modern city (though its use of dream and stream-of-consciousness interior monologue also demonstrate the extent of Auden’s engagement with the later work of Joyce). What Auden’s poem does is to inscribe in poetic form the superseding of London by New York as the global mega-lopolis, itself a symbol of the rapid decline of the British Empire across the interwar years, and its replacement by the US as a global–imperial superpower.

It might not have been a surprise to find Leonard Bernstein, sophisticated New York intellectual that he was, wrestling with the implications 1

2

It Came from the 1950s!

of both The Age of Anxiety and the Age of Anxiety in the late 1940s. But the age of anxiety, as a structure of feeling, or what we might now call a cultural meme for the post-war years, operated across traditional aesthetic hierarchies and genre boundaries, and in doing so reached an enormous audience made up of highly disparate interpretive communities, affecting not only the metropolitan intellectual elite whom Auden might be thought of as addressing in his work (readers such as Bernstein), but also the rather different implied (and actual) readership of bestselling, mass-market fiction, those readers whom, according to some accounts, Modernism set out explicitly to exclude and alienate.2

And so it was that readers of William March’s potboiling classic, The Bad Seed (1954), would have encountered a scene near the beginning of the novel in which Christine Penmark, mother of the murderously precocious young sociopath Rhoda (who has just murdered a classmate because he won a school prize she coveted, and is the ‘Bad Seed’ of the novel’s title), overhears a conversation between two men in a park which comes conveniently close to expressing both her own increasingly uneasy state of mind and that of the United States itself during the 1950s:

‘I was reading the other day,’ said the taller of the two, ‘that the age we live in is an age of anxiety. You know what? I thought that was pretty good – a pretty fair judgement. I told Ruth about it when I got home, and she said, “You can say that again!” ’

‘Every age that people live in is an age of anxiety,’ said the other man. ‘If anybody asks me, I’ll say the age we live in is an age of violence. It looks to me like violence is in everybody’s mind these days. It looks like we’re just going to keep on until there’s nothing left to ruin. If you stop and think about it, that scares you.’

‘Well, maybe we live in an age of anxiety and violence.’

‘Now, that sounds like it. Come to think about it, I guess that’s what our age is really like.’3

In a further series of acts of cultural transference, The Bad Seed was almost immediately transformed into a successful stage melodrama, which in turn became a minor masterpiece of trash cinema in 1956, at the hands of Mervyn LeRoy, a veteran Hollywood director with a background in vaudeville.

While some might want to read the story we have just told as one of the sleazy exploitation of high art to low ends, or even an act of cultural vandalism, the editors and contributors of this volume tend to see things rather differently. Rather than the debasement of great art, we see this as

Introduction

3
a story in which W.H. Auden is one commentator among many, articulating a much more generalized sense of anxiety, and one which rapidly found its appropriate level, form and register in the sphere of popular culture. This volume of essays, then, is predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times, most particularly through their habitual deployment of forms of symbolic or metaphorical articulation, as a means of approaching their subjects obliquely. Unsurprisingly, cinema, the great popular aesthetic medium of the twentieth century, plays a definitive part in this argument. The two defining genres of 1950s cinema can themselves be seen as popular cultural responses to the age of anxiety: film noir, with its literalized shadow-world of troubling moral perplexities; and science fiction, which turned increasingly to paranoid fantasies of invasion and mutation. Both genres attempted to represent a world in which there were no certainties, and nothing was as it seemed.

A series of questions suggest themselves. Why the 1950s? Why America? Why popular culture? And why this sense of anxiety? These are interrelated questions, and thus to a very large degree impossible to approach separately. Cumulatively, the essays in this volume provide a series of answers to these questions.

The story of America’s cultural rise, which this Introduction and a number of our essays chart, is also, inextricably, the story of the end of the British Empire. In the decade after World War II, it had become apparent that Britain was finished as a global–imperial power –
but not necessarily immediately as a cultural one. British popular cultural production in the 1950s has its own low-key fascination and integrity, and the first half of our book interweaves accounts of British and American pop culture, which we hope our volume places in a dialogic relationship, each commenting upon the other. It is no accident, therefore, that we chose to begin with W.H. Auden, a British émigré commenting on the American scene. Nevertheless, the burden of our story is that the 1950s was to be the first authentically American decade.

The received idea of 1950s America is a comfortable one, with a nation basking in suburban security under the wise, grandfatherly presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, enjoying an unprecedented consumer boom brought on by post-war affluence. This affluence was itself a direct product of America’s new-found superpower status. It is our contention that the securing of the American imperium after 1945 manifested itself in two ways. One was hard power, the global (or, at least, western) military and political hegemony of the superpower, in which

4

It Came from the 1950s!

the ‘military-industrial complex’ – not, at that time, a catch-all focus for conspiracy-theorist paranoia, but a descriptive term for the peculiar nature and source of American power in the post-war settlement, and furthermore a term coined by (or at least attributed to) Eisenhower himself – oversaw all (or very many) aspects of American life. Indeed, Eisenhower can be seen to embody in his very career the indissociabil-ity of military and political power in post-war America, as he moved seamlessly from Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe (1943–45) to Chief of Staff of the US Army (1945–48), to Supreme Commander of NATO (1950–52), to President of the United States (1953–61).

From 1948–50 he was President of Columbia University, New York, suggesting in symbolic terms that all spheres of American life, including its universities and its intellectuals, were open for incorporation into the military-industrial complex, gathered in under the protective wing of the B-52 bomber.

But the story of 50s America and its place in the world is also one of soft power, of cultural imperialism enabled by the first genuinely global popular culture. The 1950s marked the beginnings of a distinctively contemporary popular culture, one in which television became the dominant medium for transmission, as it was to remain throughout the twentieth century. Television was the perfect cultural medium for this new, suburban, homeowning America, disseminating, embodying, reflecting, and creating its values. Twentieth-century popular culture is primarily an American phenomenon, and it is for this reason that the 1950s might be understood as the first distinctively ‘American’ decade; and, as Aldous Huxley – like Auden, a British intellectual transplanted to American soil – wrote prophetically as early as 1932 in Brave New World, ‘The future of America is the future of the world’ – though Huxley was certainly ambivalent about this future, as his account of a feral, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles in Ape and Essence (1949) shows. As well as television, the 50s also saw the widespread introduction or popularizing of many other characteristic features of American modernity: air travel; two-car families and a greatly expanded highway system for them to drive on; supermarkets and fast food; large-scale college education, initially as a product of the 1944 GI Bill, which provided free college education for servicemen returning from World War II; vast corporations, economic powerhouses of the new American Empire, and in their wake the emergence of a managerial class, the white-collar worker, or ‘organisation man’.4 With the economic boom came prosperity and security on a level never before experienced by so many people. As James Patterson has put it, it was ‘the biggest boom yet’ and the ‘mid 1950s

Introduction

5
seemed almost wonderful, especially in a material sense, to millions of upwardly mobile people.’5

This was not the only boom. 1950s popular culture created a generation, the first generation to have grown up immersed in popular culture within the home. This is the famously self-mythologizing ‘baby boom’

generation, products of a demographic phenomenon, a marked rise in American birth rates from approximately 1946–64, which was itself in part a (natural!) response to post-war affluence and security. Indeed, this period 1946–64, might be said to constitute a ‘long 1950s’: this is certainly how we as editors and contributors to the volume would want to define the historical parameters of our period. Unquestionably, the baby boomers were to set the American cultural agenda for the second half of the twentieth century. As with ‘age of anxiety’, the very term

‘baby boom’ was to become axiomatic, permeating American cultural discourse across the 1950s and beyond, and doing so in a variety of ways which were, again, often oblique. The term seems to have been coined, or at least popularized, by the columnist and economic commentator, Sylvia Post, in a New York Post article of 1951: ‘Take the 3,548,000 babies born in 1950. Bundle them into a batch, bounce them all over the bountiful land that is America. What do you get? Boom. The biggest, boomiest boom ever known in history.’6

Post’s self-consciously hip, flip, pop-cultural mimicry is itself a cultural product, an act of linguistic inflation entirely in keeping with its affluent, confident historical moment. It also, like a number of cultural endeavours of the 50s and early 60s, attempts to graft pop-cultural sensibilities onto older forms. The ‘New Journalism’ of Tom Wolfe and others (whose characteristic tone Post seems to be anticipating here) was such an endeavour, as of course was the Pop Art movement, whose practitioners attempted to assimilate the modern media of advertising, comic book art, and graphic design and reproduce them as refracted through the high-cultural formulations of fine art.

Coming at the end of the baby boom period, Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam!

(1964), the iconic document of the Pop Art movement, encapsulates many of the ideas we are discussing here and throughout this volume, most notably Cold War paranoia, American weapons-fetishism, and the interpenetration of traditional aesthetic hierarchies, to produce a work which is simultaneously satire, homage, critique, celebration, and translation. Lichtenstein, like Leonard Bernstein, was a New York intellectual curious about popular culture. In 1957, Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim translated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into the medium of the Broadway musical with West Side Story; Lichtenstein, who taught

6

It Came from the 1950s!

fine art at SUNY Oswego in upstate New York, and then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, adapted Whaam! from the Jerry Grandenetti cover for DC Comics’ All American Men of War # 89 (February 1962). In a manner which is again entirely characteristic of its age and its subject, the painting’s title, Whaam! , is a near-synonym for ‘Boom!’

Given this standard view of the 1950s as a period of great stability and affluence, readers might be justified in asking what precisely it was that America had to be anxious about. In part, the answer to this question is a Freudian one, and so we might want to understand popular cultural documents as arising out of the American unconscious; many of the essays in the book do precisely that. But the answer is also materialist and ideological; that is, it arises from historical concerns specific to the 1950s. As the literary historian Sacvan Bercovitch has observed:

In a strange way, no quarter of the century has had to grapple with extremity, or its terrible aftermath, more than the seemingly tranquil decades after the Second World War, which some Americans still look back on as a Golden Age. Besides coming to terms with general carnage on an unheard of scale, and moving rapidly towards the reconstruction of Europe and Asia, the post war world had to assimilate the most shocking news of the war, perhaps of the century as a whole: the details of the holocaust and the effects of the nuclear bomb.7

Indeed, ‘rarely has a society experienced such rapid or dramatic changes as those which occurred in the US after 1945’.8 The war had proved a decisive catalyst for post-war growth.9 The gross national product soared by 250% between 1945 and 1960; millions of returning GIs prompted the rapid growth of suburbia and one of the most astounding migra-tions in history. Consequently, between 1948 and 1958, 11 million new suburban homes were established. An astonishing 83% of all population growth during the 1950s took place in the suburbs. By 1970, they would house more people than either cities or farms. Behind the dry statistics lay the inescapable reality of the situation: that the basic living pattern of American society was undergoing a revolution.

The surface gloss of widespread prosperity and domestic bliss promoted by the official ideology was all too often contradicted by the facts beneath. From 1950 to 1953, the nation was engaged in the Korean War, a bitterly divisive conflict that would result in over four million casualties, and which almost culminated in the use of nuclear

Introduction

7
weapons.10 Despite the nation’s unprecedented prosperity, millions of its citizens – including most African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans – were still living with poverty and discrimination.11 Films, television, advertising and popular fiction all worked to bombard the nation’s women with positive images of themselves as homemakers, housewives, mothers; and yet millions of women felt frustrated and unfulfilled within these roles, particularly in the wake of World War II, which had, among other things, offered (or, more accurately, demanded) that women contribute to the war effort by becoming active and highly visible outside the home. In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique provided a devastating analysis of the oppressive condition of the American housewife in the 1950s, and the modern Women’s Movement was born. Perhaps the most spectacular example of the psychologically-imploding American woman of the 1950s was provided in the person of Sylvia Plath, and in this volume Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s essay demonstrates the extent to which Plath’s poetry is indebted to American consumer culture and the language of advertising. Plath wrote that she wanted to transform her own home into ‘an ad out of House and Garden’, complete with its ‘dream kitchen’, but in her poetry, these domestic ideals are transformed into phantasmagorical images for her own psychological breakdown. There is, we would contend, something representative about this process of transformation.

The unconscious traumas of 50s American life were to an extent kept in check by the growth of biological psychiatry. The 1950s saw the introduction of numerous ‘wonder drugs’ with sedative properties, aimed directly at women undergoing a variety of emotional difficulties. Drugs like Meprobamate were increasingly widely prescribed; by 1956 it and other tranquillizers were taken by one in 20 Americans.12

By no means confined to the era’s housewives, this emotional anxiety and sense of crisis was also experienced by their white-collar husbands, who were expected to devote most of their time and energy to the wellbeing of ever more demanding and impersonal corporations (including, of course, pharmaceutical corporations) so that they would have enough money to buy those luxuries that society told its citizens they must have in order to be happy. Was it for this that they had fought the War?

A culture of conspicuous consumption and built-in obsolescence, as part of a life lived under perpetual Cold War conditions, proved unbearably traumatic for many Americans. Expectations for an ever-increasing quality of life, measured in terms of material acquisition, became normalized in post-war America; but the disparity between idealized

8

It Came from the 1950s!

expectation and lived reality could seem insupportable. Increasingly, intellectuals such as David Reisman issued scathing critiques of the modern way of life that emphasized the psychological dangers which post-war American society allegedly posed its inhabitants. Similarly, critiques of suburbia by writers such as John Keats ( The Crack in the Picture Window, 1956), and Richard and Katharine Gordon ( The Split-Level Trap, 1961), claimed that the ‘conformist’, insular way of life encouraged in these new communities was also extremely detrimental to the mental wellbeing of their inhabitants. As James Patterson has pointed out, many of the key terms used in such critiques exposed these fears for the nation’s mental health – expressions such as ‘alienation’, ‘identity crisis’, ‘eclipse of community’, and, as we have seen, ‘age of anxiety’, entered public discourse.13 America was populated by the uprooted; the mass society obliterated individual identity; society itself, according to Riesman, was really a lonely crowd. The influential social commentator, Vance Packard, weighed in with a series of acutely sceptical analyses of modern America, The Hidden Persuaders (1957, on advertising), The Status Seekers (1959, on American social aggrandisement), The Waste Makers (1960, on built-in obsolescence), and The Pyramid Climbers (1964, on organization men and corporate hierarchies). If the cumulative effect of Packard’s works was to present a picture of post-war America as hollow, valueless and sick, then he was in good company, as this, too, was the conclusion of the great Harvard economist J.K. Galbraith in his most influential work, The Affluent Society (1958), which demonstrated the ways in which the values and aspirations of America were completely at odds with its actual social needs.

One of the most vivid expressions of this post-war anxiety is Norman Mailer’s notorious essay ‘The White Negro’, in which he notes how

‘A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life’, the result of which is ‘a collective failure of nerve’. Commenting specifically upon the ‘psychic havoc’ caused by World War II and the knowledge it brought of the depths of man’s inhumanity and the indiscriminate and meaningless nature of mass death, be it by atomic war or concentra-tion camp, Mailer concluded that the American ‘psyche was subjected to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well’.14 And if, as Barbara Ehrenreich has claimed, ‘warfare and aggressive masculinity have been . . . mutually reinforcing cultural enter-prises’, then the apparent lack of agency that was concomitant with the modern warfare of World War II might well be seen as a point of crisis for masculinity.15 Or, as Mailer phrases it, being ‘deprived of cause and effect’, the aftermath of war had created a ‘crippled and perverted

Introduction

9
image of man’16 (291). Again, in a manner entirely in keeping with the era’s need for a rapprochement between avant-garde cultural analysis and the mass media, Mailer’s essay was reprinted in a collection entitled Advertisements for Myself (1959).

Like so many other cultural analyses of this period, Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ is founded on anxieties which grew out of fears of nuclear holocaust. For this reason, we might think of the 50s, as many did during that decade, as an epistemic moment for modernity. For Mailer and others, being members of the first generation to have to live with the ever-present possibility of total global annihilation was potentially an unbearable psychological strain; to live under these conditions required a commensurately total renegotiation of the norms and conventions of social life and relations – all previous bets were off. The 50s, we have seen, witnessed an economic boom; it witnessed a baby boom. But it was nuclear warfare that unquestionably promised ‘the biggest, boomiest boom ever known in history’.

What was a radical critique in the 1950s has by now become internalized, and so it has long been assumed, with considerable justification, that the dominant preoccupation of the 1950s was precisely with nuclear fears; and in part, at least, our volume reflects this. In fact, it could be argued that ‘The Bomb’ attains the status of an overarch-ing metaphor or master-narrative for the era as a whole. On receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature on 10 December 1950, William Faulkner famously said: ‘our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: “When will I be blown up?” ’17 This identical sentiment is expressed over 30 years later by Stephen King, Pop Lit laureate of the baby-boom generation, in a well-known quote from his semi-autobiographical study of the horror genre Danse Macabre (1981):

We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth and that any Iron Curtain outlaw who tried to draw down on us in that great saloon of international politics would discover who the fastest gun in the West was . . . but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any other nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium-90 in our milk from nuclear testing.18

10

It Came from the 1950s!

This dominant preoccupation accounts for the fact that many of our essays here are concerned with Science Fiction and Horror, as it was obviously through these genres that nuclear fears tended to find their most ready articulation. We are pleased to reprint here revised and expanded versions of classic essays by two of the foremost contemporary commentators on cinematic popular culture. David J. Skal, writing on the way in which American popular culture became saturated with ‘anxious images applied science and technology’, which ‘provided a safe outlet for diffuse fears about the scientific, technological and military juggernaut that was engulfing the world’. Kim Newman’s essay considers the ways in which these anxieties about nuclear warfare resulted in a series of memorable science-fiction monsters, both American and Japanese. Unable to look the Bomb in the eye at such close quarters, popular culture displaced its anxieties into these images of giant, irradiated monsters laying waste to cities. In their essay, Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston invite us to revise what might have been easy assumptions about 50s genre films, arguing that it was the generic special effects, rather than the encoded ideological messages, which most preoccupied the original audiences of 50s sci-fi, and that, far from attempting an early version of today’s CGI verisimilitude, it was precisely the outlandishness and self-conscious artificiality of these often low-budget effects that gave them their force and appeal.

However, as with all forms of majoritarian or dominant historiogra-phy, this assumption leaves out as much as it includes. Indeed, Faulkner notwithstanding, statistical analyses from the 1950s themselves tended to show that other, more directly tangible fears were as at least as prevalent: for instance, a poll taken in 1959 indicated that American citizens viewed juvenile crime as more worrisome than open-air atomic bomb testing.19 Youth culture had certainly made its impact on 1950s America. There were more teenagers than ever before, they had more money and were more aware of themselves as a semi-autonomous group within society. This, of course, had innumerable consequences for popular culture, as did the crime statistics of the period, which indicated a substantial rise in crimes committed by teenagers, commonly referred to as Juvenile Delinquents. The media panics which surrounded the issue of Juvenile Delinquency were wide ranging – and went far beyond the specifics of criminal behaviour, broaching every aspect of youth culture.

Music (specifically Rock ’n’ Roll), films, TV and comics were all brought under scrutiny, not just in terms of their content and imagery, but also of the ways in which they were consumed by their teenage audience.

As one commentator on the subject has suggested, such media panics,

Introduction

11
by reasserting the values of dominant adult groups, seek to defuse the threat posed by youth culture and thus to ‘re-establish a generational status quo’.20 However, what the theme of Juvenile Delinquency also reveals is the extent to which issues of race, class, gender and national identity, as well as generational conflict, contributed to rising public discourses of anxiety, particularly among dominant social groups, during the 1950s. Elizabeth McCarthy’s essay on ‘JD’ panics focuses specifically on one area of anxiety: the reckless, destabilizing energy of female sexuality, threatening to overwhelm the carefully-constructed family norm of 50s America. Time and again, pulp fictions and exploitation movies, at all points privileging packaging over content, presented lurid, salacious images of large-breasted, scantily-clad ‘thrill-seeking’

women in a manner meant simultaneously to arouse and to unsettle their consumers.

Even those anxieties ostensibly entirely concerned with nuclear destruction often revealed subtler forms of unease. The Civil Defense movement of the 1950s encouraged all Americans to become Cold Warriors, emphasizing the fact that, for most citizens, the frontline of the battle against the communism was the home front. It was the individual responsibility of families to provide themselves with as much protection as they could against an impending nuclear strike; thus, it was their patriotic duty to turn their suburban homes into bomb shelters.21 As Kim Newman writes elsewhere, ‘the bomb shelter became an American institution . . . . A whole cowboy industry tried to persuade paranoid suburbanites of the fifties that shelters were as essential as a pool in the backyard, a finned car, and aluminium siding on the house’.22 The trope of the suburban home as a kind of fortress became increasingly prevalent across our long 1950s, revealing unexpected anxieties about the nature of community in the new suburbs, in small-town America, and in the big cities. Frequently, the threats explored in these shelter narratives come not from the Bomb itself, nor from invading communist forces, but from one’s very neighbours: come the apocalypse, it is against the unpatriotic unprepared that American citizens will need to arm themselves. This is the scenario animating a number of the classic works of genre fiction of the period, most notably Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), whose post-apocalyptic protagonist barricades himself into his home, as his former friends and neighbours, now infected with vampirism, try to force their way in. Shirley Jackson’s novel The Sundial (1958) has a wealthy New England family locking themselves away against Armageddon in their well-stocked shelter – and pointedly locking their lower-class neighbours out. Similarly, a number

12

It Came from the 1950s!

of episodes of Rod Serling’s landmark sci-fi TV series, The Twilight Zone, offered powerful critiques of mob culture and self-centredness: in ‘The Shelter’ (1961), an unfounded UFO scare exposes the egocentric nature of an otherwise idyllic neighbourhood; while in ‘The Monsters are Due on Maple Street’ (1959), a power failure and rumours of alien invasion again cause neighbour violently to turn against neighbour.

Bernice Murphy’s essay revisits the suburban 1950s from a contemporary perspective, and in doing so examines the creative potentials of revisionism itself, as seen in Todd Haynes’ obsessively detailed homage to the lush melodramas of Douglas Sirk in Far from Heaven (2003) and Andrew Currie’s delirious 2006 ‘reimagining’ of 1950s suburbia in the comic zombie movie Fido. Both films are part of an ongoing series of works which look back to received notions of a halcyon 1950s of suburban stability, and exploit the anachronistic gap between contemporary sensibilities and nostalgic dreams for often highly creative ends.

Serling, Jackson and Matheson, like very many of the classic genre writers of this time, were powerfully engaged with the implications of their historical moments, and two of the essays in this collection are studies of 50s genre greats. Dara Downey’s essay reads the work of Shirley Jackson in the light of the discoveries of 1950s anthropology, and places her work in the main stream of the American academic intellectual discourse of the time through analysing its repeated concerns with ritual and myth, purity and danger, all embodied in the classic generic trope of the Gothic house. Kevin Corstorphine looks at the short fiction of Robert Bloch, literary father of Norman Bates, which proves revelatory on the subject of 1950s masculinity, and causes us to rethink (once again) simplistic assumptions about the monolithic sexual politics of the pulp story: ‘Bloch’s writing of the 1950s,’ Corstorphine writes,

‘shows an attitude to women that subverts received notions of female submissiveness and male dominance.’

Given the geopolitical concerns of the 1950s, it is perhaps fitting that British culture should feature in our introduction – although not in the essays themselves – as a kind of coda. And yet it is fascinating to examine the ways in which the former global hegemon adjusted to its new-found role as subsidiary world power, or even perhaps as US client state. The Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Britain and France humiliatingly withdrew from using Israeli forces to launch a proxy war in Egypt after Eisenhower had refused to support the venture, is often seen as marking the definitive end of the British Empire. Again, these are concerns which find their popular cultural expressions. In this volume, Darryl Jones’s essay looks at the tensions and compromises involved in an Anglo-American

Introduction

13
co-production of 1957, Night of the Demon, one of the great post-war horror films, and a genuinely international venture, and examines the film’s clash of rationalist modernity and pre-modern metaphysics in the light of the clashing cultures of those involved, at all stages, in the making of the film.

W.H. Auden, with whom we began our story, is in some ways an embodiment of the changing geopolitics of the post-war settlement.

As noted, he moved to New York in 1939, and in 1946 he took up the US citizenship which he was to retain for the rest of his life; The Age of Anxiety might fairly be seen as Auden’s poetic response to becoming an American. For some, Auden became the archetype of what became known in the 1950s as the ‘integrated’ intellectual, reinforcing dominant cultural values.23 Auden may have felt that he was leaving a sinking ship, but for a number of British intellectuals this just made him a rat. In an influential 1960 essay, ‘Outside the Whale’ (its title adapted from ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell’s account of 1920s Modernism), the great socialist historian E.P. Thompson looked despairingly at an America characterized by ‘the roar of empty affluence and the constant solicitations of “organization man” ’, and pointed the finger squarely at the American Auden as the representative of ‘the “Natopolitan”

intellectual of the fifties’.24 Stephen Spender, fellow member of the marx-isant ‘Auden gang’ of the 1930s, became an avowed Cold Warrior in the 50s, as joint editor (with Irving Kristol) of Encounter, a periodical funded by the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom, a front organization for the CIA.25

Many of the issues and anxieties we have discussed in this introduction had their own peculiar, Vimto-flavoured British inflections. The end of rationing in 1954 marked the official demise of post-war austerity, and the beginnings of a home-grown consumer boom for which Prime Minister Harold Macmillan liked to take a good deal of the credit. The titles of two recent major histories of post-war Britain, Austerity Britain and Never Had It So Good (the last an election slogan associated with Macmillan) neatly encapsulate this transition.26 The catastrophic visions of the novels of John Wyndham, notably The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) are distinctive domestic versions of the Cold War anxieties which permeate so much post-war culture. More explicitly nuclear was the BBC docudrama The War Game (1965), depicting the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Britain, and considered so horrific that it was pulled from the schedules, and not shown on British television until 1985. Making a rather belated appearance in 1968, the poet and painter Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture

14

It Came from the 1950s!

was a self-conscious attempt to translate the sensibilities of Mailer’s

‘White Negro’ for a specifically British post-war audience and milieu, with home-grown Teddy Boys joining American beatniks and hipsters as the authentic voices of nuclear existentialism.27

It was the Gothic visions of Hammer Studios that were to prove the most distinctive British contribution to popular culture in the 1950s.

The scholarly literature on Hammer is extensive, and deservedly so, as the studio’s films carved out a global identity over the late 1950s, with their highly distinctive mixture of contemporary sensibilities (sex and gore) and traditional virtues: a specifically British literary canon (the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker and Conan Doyle, from which they never deviated for long), a superb repertory company of actors led by Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and a production team of eccentrics, boffins, and steady chaps who could be relied upon to perform wonders on small budgets by recycling sets, costumes, stars and scripts as necessary. In a manner entirely characteristic of post-war Britain, Hammer were simultaneously cosy and radical – as their frequent battles with the censors testify. This volume includes two essays on Hammer. The first is by the studio’s foremost historian, Wayne Kinsey, whose essay offers an overview of the reception of Hammer in the 1950s, and particularly of its ongoing battles for creative autonomy against the British Board of Film Censors, a body who often seem determined to stamp out any whiff of originality or excitement in these films. Fortunately for Britain, and for cinema history, Hammer proved extraordinarily resilient and resourceful, and so tended to find ways around the censors. It is in part because of this achievement that the films are now held in such cultural esteem, and Christopher Frayling, doyen of British popular cultural studies, begins his essay on Hammer’s Dracula with an account of his own role as a cultural commentator and administrator in helping to secure for Hammer’s collection of props, make-up and costumes, from fake eyeballs to Kensington Gore, their rightful place as part of the British ‘national heritage’.

In all of the books, films and images discussed in this volume, popular cultural narratives operate in complex and often duplicitous ways.

As Theodor W. Adorno – like Auden and Huxley, another European intellectual transplanted into American soil – recognized in the essays later collected as The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (1990), the fruit of his meditations upon his new home, popular culture could operate conspiratorially to reinforce the power of vested interests – as a recursive medium, which does the thinking for its audience, and presents them with art which he notoriously likened to pre-digested baby food,

Introduction

15
popular culture was the perfect medium for securing and enforcing cultural-imperial hegemony. And yet, as we have seen, popular culture also became a means of expressing themes and concerns which openly contradicted the cosily consensual message being disseminated by the military-industrial complex of which it might be viewed as the cultural arm. This duality, we would argue, is at the very heart of popular culture and its appeal. It is voracious. It is promiscuous. It respects no boundaries. And . . . IT! came from the 1950s!

Notes

1. Leonard Bernstein, ‘Essay on The Age of Anxiety’ (1949). For an account of Bernstein’s composition of The Age of Anxiety, see Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein, (London, Faber and Faber, 1994.), p. 335.

2. For the classic account of Modernism’s exclusivist programme, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses; Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).

3. William March, The Bad Seed (New York: Harper Collins, 1953; 1997), p. 30.

4. William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War Two (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 111–17.

5. James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 311.

6. Sylvia Post, ‘Babies Equal Boom’, New York Post, May 4, 1951.

7. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Cambridge History of American Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 24.

8. Chafe, p. 111.

9. Ibid., p. 111.

10. Patterson, p. 339.

11. Ibid., p. 333.

12. Jonathan Michel, Prozac on the Couch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 72.

13. Patterson, p. 339.

14. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” in Advertisments for Myself, (London: Flamingo, 1961; 1994), p. 291.

15. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (London: Virago, 1998), p. 129.

16. Mailer, p. 291.

17. William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, Stockholm, 10 December 1950: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html; accessed 24 January 2011.

18. Stephen King, Danse Macabre, (London, Warner 1981) p. 23.

19. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 63.

20. John Springhall. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).

21. See Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

16

It Came from the 1950s!

22. Kim Newman, Millennium Movies: A Critical Guide to Contemporary Horror Films (Prospect, KY: Harmony, 1999) p. 66.

23. For ‘integrated’ intellectuals, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 137–70.

24. E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Out of Apathy (London: New Left Books, 1960), pp. 177, 193.

25. Collini, p. 145.

26. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006).

27. Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).

1

A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups1

David J. Skal

When the atomic bomb leveled Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, newspaper readers learned not only of the appalling devastation but also of the explosion’s unearthly beauty, a glowing hothouse blossom rising to the heavens. Witnesses to the test blast in the New Mexico desert on 18 July tried to describe the indescribable. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy to General Leslie R. Groves, head of the War Department’s atomic bomb project, combined the language of the theatre and literary criticism in his recollection of the event to the press: ‘The lighting effects beggar description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty that the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.’2

From its first deployment, the atomic bomb began radiating metaphors about knowledge, sin, and science that gave startling new life to ancient ideas. ‘I am become Death, shatterer of worlds,’ said bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Upanishad after the first test detonation. H.G. Wells, who died in 1946, bitter and frustrated by a war that had dashed his utopian hopes, saw a real Judgment Day.

‘[T]he end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded,’ he wrote in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).3 Promethean presumption, the spoiling of Eden, Pandora’s box, the golem, Faust, and Frankenstein all absorbed new energy from the atomic blast and in the process gave popular culture of the post-war years a particular mythic intensity. Like the fatal, beautiful plants envisioned by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Dr Rappaccini’s garden, the blossoming of the atom had a resonant symbolism that folded modern science into ancient alchemy.

17

18

It Came from the 1950s!

Uranium was the new philosopher’s stone, a substance that promised almost mystical powers over the physical world and the processes of life.

Public receptivity to a re-energized Frankenstein mythos didn’t come out of nowhere; the war years had seen an unprecedented number of mad scientists in Hollywood films, not only from the major studios but from independents as well. It is not surprising that the war effort was shadowed in popular entertainment by anxious images of applied science and technology. Without overtly challenging the patriotism of wartime audiences, mad science films provided a safe outlet for diffuse fears about the scientific, technological and military juggernaut that was engulfing the world.

Dr Cyclops (1940) presented what remains one of the screen’s most chilling portraits of an obsessed scientific mind, a distillation of all the Depression decade’s suspicions about experts and intellectuals and run-away science. Dr Thirkell (Albert Dekker) is a classic scientific hermit, holed up in the Peruvian Andes, where he has found a way to use atomic radiation to miniaturize living things, in much the same way previously essayed in Tod Browning’s The Devil Doll (1936). Thirkell’s intellectual brilliance is matched only by his nearsightedness – literal as well as figurative. Completely self-absorbed, he cannot fathom his visitors’ objections to being used in his experiments or their outrage at being reduced to the size of figurines. All human values are beneath consideration. As iconography, Thirkell’s shaved head seems influenced by Peter Lorre’s similar bald pate in Mad Love (1935); it simultaneously draws attention to his braincase while rendering him creepily child-like. Thirkell is, after all, a monstrous baby, concerned only with his own interests and gratifications. Dr Cyclops was the brainchild of the producer-director team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack, the same pair responsible for another famous study of relative scale, King Kong (1933).

Hollywood’s bogeymen laureates, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, became even more identified with mad science during the war than in their first decade as the screen’s leading purveyors of fear. Karloff, of course, had built an identification with the Frankenstein story (despite other, distinguished work as a character actor), and Lugosi had played a handful of mad doctors among his villainous characterizations of the 1930s. Now, both men occupied the laboratory the way the Nazis occupied France.

All the Hollywood mad doctors of the war years operated in obsessive reclusion, paralleling the real-world secrecy surrounding the efforts of military research scientists. The public, of course, knew nothing of

A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 19
the Manhattan Project, but it did know, from a thousand reminders about loose lips and sunken ships, that there was much at stake in keeping science in the service of war hush-hush. Movieland madmen of the 1940s also conducted their experiments under conditions of strict secrecy; those who stumbled into their laboratories or learned their secrets were dealt with harshly. But it would have been strange for the public not to be curious about the secret activities of wartime scientists.

Might there be a superweapon in the works that might defeat Hitler? But part of the message conveyed by Hollywood horror pictures was that it was better not to poke around laboratories, ask too many questions, or interfere with techno-scientific prerogatives generally. But for audiences, the closed laboratory would have the irresistible appeal of Bluebeard’s forbidden room.

Enrico Fermi, a key member of the scientific team at Los Alamos that gave birth to the atomic bomb, pooh-poohed concerns among his colleagues that deployment of the new weapon might present ethical problems. In a quote that might have rolled easily off the tongues of Lionel Atwill or George Zucco, Fermi is reported to have said, ‘Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples. After all, the thing’s superb physics.’4 He is also said to have wagered with co-workers all night over whether the bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world.

But after witnessing the test blast at Alamagordo, Fermi was so shaken he was unable to drive his car. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer later expressed his misgivings about participating in the development of the bomb, his oft-quoted 1956 observation that ‘we did the work of the devil’ being the most pointed. Following the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic device in 1949, Oppenheimer opposed the development of an even more powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb, an invention championed by his far more hawkish counterpart, Edward Teller. President Harry Truman ordered the development of the H-bomb in 1950, and Oppenheimer was investigated as a possible Soviet agent.

Nuclear jitters increased as the United States became embroiled in the Korean War, with talk of possible H-bomb deployment.

Hollywood’s first post-Hiroshima monster of any consequence was, like one of Rappaccini’s creations, a vegetable. The Thing from Another World (1951) featured James Arness in his pre- Gunsmoke days as an eight-foot-tall space alien found frozen in Arctic ice. Despite the extraterrestrial pedigree, Arness’s make-up is clearly inspired by the tried-and-true Frankenstein formula. And while not initially created by science, this jolly green golem is protected by a scientist who can’t pass up an experiment, regardless of the dangers (‘Knowledge,’ he says, ‘is more

20

It Came from the 1950s!

important than life’). The Thing from Another World also forges a link with Frankenstein in its evocative use of the North Pole as a setting; Mary Shelley had employed the same backdrop as a framing device in her novel, though it had not yet been featured in any film adaptation.

The arrest, trial, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to Russia gripped the nation between 1950 and 1953, a period when invasion fantasies with atomic overtones began to pro-liferate in Hollywood films. The Promethean theme of unforgiveable fire-stealing pervaded the trial and its aftermath. Of course there was nothing proprietary about the principles of nuclear physics, and the Rosenbergs’ alleged contact with the ‘enemy’ took place during the war, when Russia was an American ally. As early as 1946 physicist E.U.

Condon, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, argued for a realistic attitude: ‘the laws of nature, some seem to think, are ours exclusively and that we can keep others from learning by locking up what we have learned in the laboratory . . . . Having created an air of suspicion and mistrust, there will be persons among us who think that other nations can know nothing except what is learned by espionage . . . . ’5

Thus the already fluid metaphor of nuclear energy became colored by an additional overlay of invasion or violation fantasy. Among the rash of movies released during the Rosenberg incarceration was Five (1951), a landmark, if talky, film about a quintet of nuclear holocaust survivors directed by Arch Oboler, best known for the scare tactics he developed for his legendary radio suspense series Lights Out. George Pal’s When Worlds Collide (1951) didn’t mention the atomic bomb, but its end-of-the-world story would likely not have found as strong an audience in the absence of real apocalyptic fear.

In Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), earth is issued a stern warning by the alien visitor Klaatu (Michael Rennie, after both Claude Rains and Spencer Tracy had proved unavailable), not to export its deadly nuclear capabilities into space, upon penalty of extinction by more evolved races that have successfully eliminated territorial aggression from their cultures. The film marked the first use of the eerie electronic theremin in a strange science context; previously it had been used by Alfred Hitchcock for surrealistic dream sequences in Spellbound (1945), and to underscore the alcoholic delirium of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1947). Thereafter, the futuristic instrument, played without strings or keyboard by moving the hands through a mag-netic field, was almost exclusively associated with the science fiction genre (its occasional use as back-up instrumentation by the Beach Boys notwithstanding).

A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 21

The advertisements for The Day the Earth Stood Still are notable for inaugurating the now time-honored tradition of women with nearly exposed breasts as indispensable mad-science iconography. Never mind that the décolletage displayed by the actress on the poster is nowhere to be found in the film itself; in the case of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Patricia Neal appears in the advertising art squirming in a tight red strapless dress while Gort, the towering robot, aims an extraterrestrial death ray over her shoulder, destroying the US Capitol. In the film she never wears anything but the most conservative attire. A second poster goes even further in altering her appearance: in an illustration based on an actual photograph of Neal being carried off by the robot, her real clothes are replaced by another low-cut dress (this one does have straps, but they’re falling off), and her hair is considerably lengthened, and bleached blonde to boot. A quick glance at almost any selection of fifties film posters reveals a steady equation between out-of-control science and overflowing brassieres. Breasts are promotionally prominent in graphics for Invaders from Mars (1953), Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), Forbidden Planet (1956), It Conquered the World (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Beginning of the End (1957), Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957), and dozens of others. A perennial favorite is the anatomically improbable painting for Bride of the Monster (1955), in which the unconscious woman’s mammaries are so eager for attention that both have somehow migrated to the same side of her torso.

On one level, the sci-fi films were simply reflecting the swelling Hollywood trends toward big-busted blondes in a decade of unprecedented abundance, where breasts took on a cornucopian significance.

And, looking beyond the already entrenched exploitation of the female body in advertising, one can discern a more revealing gestalt. The archetype of the nourishing breast, combined with images of fantastic images of science and destruction in the fifties, yields a concise visual statement: the attraction and terror of the technological teat.

The torrent of technological and science-driven socioeconomic change in the 1950s also spurred a desire for the return of protective moral and religious values seemingly swept away in the post-war tide of transformation. John L. Balderston, whose unproduced (but Hollywood-purchased) stage adaptation of Peggy Webling’s Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre had enabled Universal Pictures to launch mad science talkies in 1931, co-scripted a bizarre right-wing harangue called Red Planet Mars (1952), in which the apparent voice of God, radio-ing earth from Mars, causes a counter-revolution in Russia and stops a Nazi inventor from destroying the world with something called a

22

It Came from the 1950s!

hydrogen valve. ‘In an age of A-Bombs, B-Pictures, cold wars and science fiction,’ the New York Times observed, ‘such items as Red Planet Mars, which landed at the Criterion on Saturday, would seem to be inevitable.’6

Although an inexorable Frankenstein energy pervaded the science fiction films of the fifties, the original picture that had set mad science rolling in Hollywood now took a back seat to more up-to-date horrors.

The old film itself, however, had a fascinating second life in litigation.

Balderston sued Universal in 1951 over money owed for several sequels involving the monster. The suit itself turned on a B-movie question: Who brought the Frankenstein monster to life and who could control it?

Balderston, suffering from heart disease and near the end of his life, desperately needed a transfusion of cash (he had already liquidated many treasured possessions, including a Shakespeare first folio). Despite the somewhat shaky basis of the suit – the studio had used almost nothing of the Balderston – Webling play in the original film, and save for a prologue involving Mary Shelley, had substantially rewritten the contract work Balderston had done for the 1935 sequel Bride of Frankenstein –

Universal settled out of court, paying the screenwriter and Webling estate more than one hundred thousand dollars to acquire all future rights to ‘their’ monster.

In 1957, Frankenstein’s director James Whale, inactive for many years and disabled by a series of strokes, committed suicide in his Pacific Palisades swimming pool. It was years before his oeuvre would receive any serious critical attention. The same year Frankenstein figured prominently in another California court case, in which actress Mae Clarke (Frankenstein’s fiancée, Elizabeth, in the film) filed a publicity-generating one-million-dollar suit against a Los Angeles television station and its female horror movie host, Ottola Nesmith. During the breaks in a broadcast of the Whale film on 1 October 1957, Nesmith identified herself as Clarke (‘You are going to see me tonight in Frankenstein, a film I made when I was young and pretty’). Clarke claimed that Nesmith had impersonated her as ‘an aged, demented, has-been actress, presumably poverty-stricken, slovenly attired, and arthritic of body.’ According to Clarke, ‘I saw my whole career destroyed, all I had done, all I had worked for, all my future earnings swept away in one-anda-half hours.’7 In the only recorded instance of a horror movie being screened in an American courtroom, Frankenstein was projected for a superior court jury on 16 July 1958, which found for the defense. Upon appeal, however, Clarke won the right to a new trial and settled out of court for a ‘substantial sum.’

A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 23

But aside from television and the courtroom, Frankenstein’s quaint Depression-era pyrotechnics amounted to a mere firecracker compared to the box-office bang of the Bomb in its increasingly outsized screen cataclysms in the fifties. In Columbia Pictures’ Invasion USA (1952), atomic bombs are used to attack New York, Washington, and Boulder Dam, but the story turns out to be a demonstration of mass hypnosis.

Paramount’s War of the Worlds (1953), directed by George Pal, didn’t depict an actual atomic holocaust, but its images of alien death rays and mass conflagration had only one referent in the real world, and it was hotly radioactive.

Weird science films proved to be just what the mad doctor ordered in an America embarking on a backlash binge against experts of all stripes. The 1952 presidential race between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson became a mass referendum on guts versus brains, men of action versus ivory tower intellectuals. Red Planet Mars, released two months before the Republican National Convention of 1952, confidently assumed the ascendancy of Eisenhower, featuring a fictional president with a strong physical resemblance to Ike, identifying him as a former general as well.

Anti-intellectualism isn’t anything new in American culture, and reached back to the puritanical distrust of prideful knowledge. Richard Hofstadter, in his classic study, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, observes that Stevenson ‘became the victim of accumulated grievances against intellectuals and brain-trusters which had festered in the American right wing since 1933.’8 The McCarthy era further pushed an

‘atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility’9 in American affairs. The average citizen, writes Hofstadter, ‘cannot cease to need or be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain-truster, or the mad scientist . . . . ’10

The Eisenhower–Stevenson conflict embedded itself firmly in the narrative formulas of 1950s science fiction films, the ones in which the military is called in to clean up the debris generated by starry-eyed scientist-intellectuals. The appeal of action over thoughtfulness was understandable in a public still heady over winning the war (the only American conflict since the Revolution to enjoy unqualified public support). But Hofstadter finds that the negative stereotype of intellectualism in the 1950s was only the most recent manifestation of a long tradition: ‘Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or

24

It Came from the 1950s!

abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests of the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.’11

The human brain itself was presented in an evil light in Donovan’s Brain (1952). Dr Patrick Cory (Lew Ayres, in a marked departure from his benign Dr Kildare persona of the 1940s) keeps alive the brain of a ruthless industrialist whose body has perished in an air crash. Half-submerged in an aquarium-style tank, Donovan’s brain begins to throb and glow malevolently and in short order stages a telepathic leveraged takeover of Cory’s personality. Where, in his corporeal life, Donovan ever learned this neat out-of-body trick is never really explained, but soon Cory is continuing Donovan’s tax evasion schemes from beyond the grave and blackmailing his former business associates. Cory’s concerned wife (Nancy Davis, later First Lady Nancy Reagan) is concerned only to a point; her initial ethical concerns about her husband’s stealing a brain – she actually helps him cut it out – and putting it on life support in a laboratory just off the cozy living room are quickly quelled by her husband’s reassurances and brash scientific enthusiasm. Davis gives a truly weird performance, with a manner and vocal style that seem telegraphed from some other, very different picture. Intentional or not, the out-of-synch quality is somehow appropriate to a character who comes to accept a disembodied brain and its attendant apparatus as just another piece of home furnishing, post-war style. Brains, finally, are the problem in the film, just as they were in the same year’s presidential campaign. Cory’s overreaching intellectual curiosity merges with the misapplied brain-power of a vengeful megalomaniac, with disastrous results (all that thinking!). The future First Lady knows best: Just turn off your own higher brain functions, watch out for your husband’s interests, and everything will be fine.

But sometimes other people’s brain functions needed to be turned off – permanently. Questions of their guilt aside, the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on 19 June 1953, amounted to a burning at the electrical stake of wizards who trafficked in forbidden, poisonous knowledge. The fallibility of modern technology was gruesomely underscored by the multiple applications of electricity needed to kill Ethel and the

‘ghastly plume’ of smoke that rose from her head to smudge the sky-light of the Sing-Sing death house.12 Jean-Paul Sartre, the following day, published an excoriating attack on America in the pages of the Parisian daily Libération: ‘By killing the Rosenbergs you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch hunts,

A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 25
autos-da-fé sacrifices – we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear . . . .’13

The prosecution of the Rosenbergs served many purposes beyond pure justice, advanced numerous political careers, and provided useful scapegoats for America’s fear-sickness. The Soviet atomic threat, however, was hardly illusory, though its cracked reflection in popular entertainment of the time, abetted by the never-ending re-run loop of television, per-sists in memory longer than historical facts. As a result, our perception of the Red Scare is often colored by a surreal, campy hysteria that distorts the very real fears generated by the Cold War.

One classic manifestation of nuclear fear – the association of atomic energy with giant, rampaging Hollywood monsters – began the very summer of the Rosenberg executions with Warner Bros’ The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), based, extremely loosely, on a Saturday Evening Post story by Ray Bradbury titled ‘The Fog Horn,’ in which a slumber-ing prehistoric beast is roused from the deep by a lighthouse horn that sounds like a monstrous, melancholy mating call. Bradbury’s story was strictly a mood piece and required considerable expansion, not to mention distortion, for the screen. In the film, the dinosaur is freed from an eons-old ice prison by atomic testing, although it is not in any sense an atomic mutation. The reawakened Beast goes on a rampage in lower Manhattan and is finally chased to Coney Island, to be spectacularly destroyed while trapped in the cage-like confines of a roller coaster.

Around the time of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Warner was also developing a film based on an original story by screenwriter George Worthing Yates about giant ants running amok in the New York City subway system. Yates called his story ‘Them!’ He had posited nuclear radiation for the insects’ enormous size, rather like the highly publicized giant marigolds grown from irradiated seeds. From the standpoint of animal biology it was a dumb idea but a highly visual one. And thereby George Worthing Yates, previously known as the scriptwriter of such films as This Woman is Dangerous (1952) with Joan Crawford and Those Redheads from Seattle (1953) with Rhonda Fleming, set in motion one of the most imitated motion picture formulas of all time.

Them! (1953) producer Ted Sherdeman had served as a staff officer to General Douglas MacArthur during World War II and had strong feelings about the use of nuclear weapons. Upon learning of the Hiroshima bombing, ‘I just went over to the curb and started to throw up,’ he said.14

When the story treatment for Them! crossed his desk, Sherdeman saw two pluses: ‘Everyone had seen ants and no one trusted the atom bomb, so I had Warner buy the story.’15

26

It Came from the 1950s!

Unfortunately, screenwriter Yates, like many a mad scientist, overreached in his creation of mutant insects and turned in a script that deviated considerably from his original concept and was considered unfilmable because of budget considerations. Sherdeman took the script over and shaped the final version, which moved the ants from New York subway tunnels to Los Angeles storm sewers, and eliminated a final battle between the military and the monsters on an amusement pier (Warner story editors obviously recycled the concept in the roller coaster finale of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released the previous year).

Them! director Gordon Douglas recalled that the production team took the story very seriously. They ‘weren’t trying to make a comic strip or be cute about it . . . . We talked a great deal about the bombs these scientists were playing around with . . . .’16 Douglas was disappointed when further budget cuts made it necessary to film Them! in black and white rather than in 3-D and color, as had been planned. ‘I put green and red soap bubbles in their eyes,’ Douglas recalled of the 12-foot-long mechanical bugs. ‘The ants were purple, slimy things. Their bodies were wet down with Vaseline. They scared the bejeezus out of you.’17 In the end the film’s main titles were rendered in stand-alone color, an effect restored for DVD release.

Them! was the first piece of popular entertainment to suggest, however wrong-headedly, that nuclear radiation might cause garden-variety insects, arachnids, or reptiles, to metamorphose into gigantic monsters threatening post-war peace and prosperity. The novelty and topical-ity of the subject drew large audiences and even half-respectful critical attention. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called the film ‘tense, absorbing, and surprising enough, somewhat convincing.’18 Time took the new style in monsters in its stride, finding in the faces of the giant ants ‘just that expression of chinless, bulge-eyed evil that Peter Lorre has been trying all these years to perfect.’19

The Japanese film Gojira (1954) didn’t receive an American release until 1956, with some added, Americanized footage featuring Raymond Burr. Known in the West as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, it came to epit-omize the atomic mutation genre, the first in what was to become the longest-running monster series of all time. Rather than simply be caused by the bomb, Godzilla, in essence, was the bomb, the pop-culture by-product of the only society that had directly felt the power of the atom unleashed. As if to begin a healing process, it was first necessary to name the trauma and put a face on it – even if the face was that of a fanciful prehistoric dragon somehow awakened by atomic testing. Godzilla may have helped Japan to come to terms with the awful reality of Hiroshima

A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 27
and Nagasaki through a process of desensitization; repeated over and over through the course of the film and its many sequels, the spectacle of a radioactive, fire-breathing horror destroying Japanese cities became easier and easier to take. In contrast with Godzilla’s later campy, even cuddly persona, the monster depicted in the original film is somber and frightening.

The American film formulas were much more preoccupied with guilt, sin, and fear, focused on the anticipation of judgment, retribution, and irradiation. Images of post-war prosperity and domesticity were inevitably under siege; a key bit of iconography occurs in Earth vs. The Spider (1958) as a mammoth, marauding tarantula takes to Main Street for lunch. A looming crane shot from the spider’s point of view descends inexorably on a screaming woman, doomed because her skirt is caught in the door of a shiny new car. Americans have oversized messes to contend with in films like Tarantula (1958), The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), The Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Beginning of the End (1957), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), War of the Colossal Beast (1958), and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), to name only a few.

It might seem at first a stretch to compare giant radioactive bugs in the movies to dust balls in the home, but both were part of a con-tinuum of contamination anxiety particular to the 1950s. In Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, Suellen Hoy chronicles the culture of clean that had its roots in the nineteenth century but reached full expression in the years following World War II. ‘Considerations of health, which had been so important before World War II, ceased to be the primary reason for cleanliness after 1945. The contagious diseases that had plagued Americans for nearly all their history had virtually disappeared’20 Nonetheless, American felt dirty. In order to reassure themselves that they had truly joined the middle class, millions of the newly upwardly mobile turned to ritual cleansing. ‘Afraid of backsliding and afraid of offending, they became the main market for an endless supply of deodorants, mouthwashes, shavers, improved detergents, kitchen appliances, and bathroom fixtures.’21 Hoy doesn’t speculate about the fear, conscious or unconscious, of nuclear fallout and ideological contamination, but these issues were more than mere subtexts in a decade that introduced Senator Joseph McCarthy, fall-out shelters, and strontium 90.

Cultural historian Thomas Hine, in his classic study of post-war America, Populuxe, suggests that the 1950s fetish for push buttons on household appliances was part of a mass cultural ritual to tame the nuclear threat. ‘The President of the United States was widely viewed

28

It Came from the 1950s!

as having a push button on or in his desk that would trigger atomic war as surely and inexorably as a housewife could activate her dishwasher.’22 In Bride of the Monster (1955), filmed under the title Bride of the Atom, schlock film-maker Edward D. Wood, Jr gave a decrepit Bela Lugosi his last speaking role as Dr Eric Vornoff, obsessed with creating an atomic superwoman, who wears an old-fashioned bridal gown for her up-to-date nuclear nuptials. Lugosi’s laboratory, perhaps significantly, is thrown together out of low-tech household items, including a fifties-style refrigerator, and, unintentionally underscoring the decade’s stomach-churning atomic angst, someone’s bottle of Pepto-Bismol, care-lessly left in camera view. The atomic blast that ends the film (after Lugosi is devoured by an irradiated octopus) is absurdly contained, virtually domesticated. An observer, apparently within yards of the rising mushroom cloud, has no difficulty intoning the script’s judgmental coda: ‘He tampered in God’s domain.’

Images of atomic disaster worked their way into other kinds of films besides science fiction and horror. At the climax of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the villain, Albert Dekker (Dr Cyclops himself), describes the mysterious contents of a locked box to his moll in cryp-tic terms invoking Pandora, Lot’s wife, and the Medusa. It’s all too tempting. Deciding that what’s inside must be worth a fortune, the treacherous blonde (Gaby Rodgers), plugs Dekker, who, with his dying breath, begs her not to open the box. Of course she promptly does just that, releasing a glowing mass of atomic fire accompanied by a sound effect of obscene, devilish panting.

While 1950s America was enthralled by modern, money-making variations on the Faust–Frankenstein story, other parts of the world had strikingly different reactions. In September 1955 South Africa’s interior minister, T.E. Douglas, banned Mary Shelley’s novel, calling it ‘indecent, objectionable and obscene.’23 Merely owning the book was grounds for a $2800 fine and five years in prison. In Australia, novelist Nevil Shute wrote an international best seller, On the Beach (1957), that trumped all the bug-eyed monster stories with its low-keyed narrative describing the end of all life on earth following a short, but devastating nuclear war.

Shute presents a bleak, post-hydrogen bomb death-watch, as the inhabitants of Melbourne spend five months counting down the arrival of the radioactive cloud that has exterminated the rest of the human race.

Written in stoic, Hemingwayesque prose, and with nary a mutant in sight, the book follows its characters to their inescapable annihilation; the result, according to the Atlantic, is a narrative with ‘a kind of cobra fascination.’24 Kirkus Reviews called it ‘an obsessive, nightmarish book,

A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 29
the more so because it is written on almost a deadpan level of narration, deliberately shorn of histrionics.’25 Catholic World had some specific complaints: ‘A young Australian woman in love with the American captain agree[s] that a “smutty love affair” is no way in which to face the world’s end. Good marks for that, of course. But On the Beach must set a record for suicides. I know of no other novel in which all the major characters, all, commit suicide. For this reason, despite the author’s skill and the book’s crusading earnestness, On the Beach definitely cannot be recommended to any reader.’26

Nonetheless, the book received considerable favorable word of mouth, and in 1959 it was reverently adapted to the screen by Stanley Kramer as Hollywood’s first ‘prestige’ nuclear nightmare. The all-star cast included Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins. Linus Pauling, soon to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, provided a blurb for the film, predicting that On the Beach would be remembered as ‘the movie that saved the world.’ This prompted critic Pauline Kael to take a snipe at both the film and director Kramer, whose greatest ability, she wrote, ‘may have been for eliciting fatuous endorsements from famous people.’27 Others took the film quite seriously; the Eisenhower administration, recently having issued a national policy urging all citizens to take responsibility for building and maintaining home fall-out shelters, responded dutifully to the Hollywood hoopla by issuing an internal document called ‘Possible Questions and Answers on the Film “On the Beach”.’ The film was chosen as best of the year by both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, despite Variety’s complaint that

‘there is no relief from depression. The spectator is left with the sick feeling that he’s had a preview of Armageddon, in which all the contestants lost.’28

In spite of all the boom and gloom, On the Beach grossed $5 300 000, making it the fifth-highest-earning film of the 1959–60 season, trailing only Ben Hur, Psycho, Operation Petticoat, and Suddenly, Last Summer.29

Another post-apocalyptic film of 1959, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, did not fare so well at the box office; its story of a lone trio of nuclear survivors (Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens, and Mel Ferrer) used a Rod Serlingesque premise to hammer home a liberal parable about race relations, one that failed to ignite audience interest.

By the late 1950s, B-movie clichés were becoming sufficiently thread-bare to reveal the floorboards beneath. Frankenstein 1970 (filmed in 1958) can be read as an almost transparent allegory of post-war Hollywood sci-fi horror: the latest Baron Frankenstein (Boris Karloff), tortured by Nazis, allows his castle to be used by an American film crew

30

It Came from the 1950s!

in exchange for the nuclear reactor he needs to revive his monster. The film studios, of course, had been doing exactly that for the better part of a decade: exploiting atomic energy to resurrect the Frankenstein formula on-screen. On the Beach marked a turning point in the representation of nuclear issues; whatever its deficiencies as a novel or film, Shute’s story managed to strip away the monster mask from what lay underneath: an old-fashioned skull. Once faced directly, the primal fear of death no longer required Hollywood euphemisms.

Atomic mutation and radiation anxiety have now largely faded from the front burners of popular discourse. Radioactive monsters are now primarily the stuff of camp nostalgia, but Rappaccini’s poisoned garden still flourishes in new mutated forms. A key transitional film, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) lampooned paranoid notions of ideological contamination with General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his now-famous rants about ‘precious bodily fluids’ and their imminent contamination.

A decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) alerted the world to the poisonous shadow of pesticides, one can detect a nascent environmentalism in pop culture’s fixation on polluted worlds that strike back at their polluters. These worlds were very much our own; beginning with Them! , a remarkable number of fifties monsters were nothing more than ordinary inhabitants of the backyard, poisoned by radiation and massively magnified into predatory horrors: ants, spiders, praying mantises, grasshoppers, and, in one case, even trees (1957’s From Hell It Came). Occasionally the standard big-bug formula was treated with unusual inspiration, as in The Fly (1958), the story of a French-Canadian scientist, André DeLambre (Al Hedison), whose experiments with matter teleportation scramble his atoms with those of a housefly. Part of the horror is obvious – the ickyness of a human-sized fly – but some of the shudders come from the implied question of humanity’s ultimate place in the ecosystem, where we are already entangled with a complex web of insects, microbes, and other ‘insignificant’ life forms, of which, science tells us, we may be just another passing example.

A good deal of environmentalist debate has been shaped, at least to some extent, by mad science conceits: the evils of technology and technological thinking, science-created horrors (i.e., frightfully fouled ecosystems) that rise up to destroy their makers, and grandiose, Saturday-matinee talk about ‘destroying the planet’ and ‘saving the planet.’ It’s not surprising, therefore, that Hollywood environmentalists, inhabitants of a particularly megalomaniacal ecosystem dedicated to the

A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 31
construction and destruction of imaginary worlds, are often especially adept at this kind of monstrously inflated rhetoric.

Notes

1. A previous version of this essay appeared in Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture by David J. Skal (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997).

Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright c 1997, 2011 by David

J. Skal. All rights reserved.

2. Lewis Wood, ‘Steel Tower “Vaporized” in Trial of Mighty Bomb’, New York Times: 7 August 1945: 1.

3. H.G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (London: Heinemann, 1945), p. 1.

4. Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), p. 202.

5. E.U. Condon, ‘An Appeal to Reason’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: 1 March 1946: 6–7.

6. A.H. Weiler, ‘The Screen’, New York Times: 16 June 1952: 15.

7. ‘Mae Clarke Raps TV Portrayal,’ Los Angeles Examiner: 17 July 1958.

Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection.

8. Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 221.

9. Ibid.: 3.

10. Ibid.: 37.

11. Ibid.

12. Bob Considine, television reporter and witness to the Rosenberg executions, quoted in Alvin H. Goldstein, The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (New York and Westport: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1975). Unpaginated book.

13. Quoted by Walter and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 254.

14. Bob Groves, ‘ “Them!” Giant Ants That Spawned a Film Legacy,’ Los Angeles Times Calendar: 17 April 1988: 28.

15. Al Taylor, ‘Them!’ Fangoria, no. 5 (1979): 23.

16. Groves, op. cit.: 29.

17. Ibid.

18. Crowther, Bosley, ‘ “Them!” Warner Brothers Chiller at Paramount,’ New York Times: 17 June 1954. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection.

19. ‘Them!’ (review), Time: 19 July 1954. Unpaginated clipping.

20. Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 171–2.

21. Ibid.

22. Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 133.

23. ‘M.W. Shelley Book “Frankenstein” Banned,’ New York Times: 5 September 1955: 9.

24. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Atlantic: August 1957. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection.

25. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Kirkus Reviews: 1 July 1957. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection.

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It Came from the 1950s!

26. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Catholic World: October 1957. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection.

27. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 429.

28. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Variety: 2 December 1959. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection.

29. Cobbert S. Steinberg, Film Facts (New York: Facts on File, 1980), p. 23.

2

‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ Night
of the Demon and the Decline and

Fall of the British Empire

Darryl Jones

I

In 1950, few Britons would have recognized the narrative of British imperial decline across the second half of the twentieth century, a narrative which, seen from our own perspective, seems to have taken on the status of historical inevitability. Indeed, much of the 1950s in Britain was characterized by a new-found climate of optimism. Rationing finally came to an end in 1954, and with it ended the period of what David Kynaston has recently termed ‘Austerity Britain’.1 In Britain as in America, the 1950s witnessed a consumer boom – by the mid-50s, Kynaston writes, Britain was, ‘if not quite yet a fully fledged consumerist society, at least a proto-consumerist one’2 – with the increased availabil-ity of both everyday necessities and luxury commodities accompanying a period of widespread employment, as the depression and dole queues of the previous generation disappeared over the horizon of the past, perhaps for good. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 had many commentators proclaiming the arrival of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’, a new golden age predicted by Winston Churchill when, on 11 February 1952, he paid tribute to the late King George VI in the House of Commons:

‘A fair and youthful figure, Princess, wife, and mother, is the heir to all our traditions and glories . . . and to all our perplexities and dangers never greater in peacetime than now. She is also heir to all our united strength and loyalty. She comes to the Throne at a time when a tormented mankind stands poised between world catastrophe and a golden age. That it should be a golden age of art and letters we can only hope – science and machinery have their other tales to tell – but 33

34

It Came from the 1950s!

it is certain that if a true and lasting peace can be achieved . . . an immense and undreamed of prosperity with culture and leisure ever more widely spread can come . . . to the masses of the people.’3

Undoubtedly the greatest and most enthusiastic of all New Elizabethans was Nigel Molesworth, the Curse of St Custard’s, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s incorrigible schoolboy terror, whose subversive memoirs first appeared in Young Elizabethan, the educational magazine of the New Elizabethan movement (with A.L. Rowse as its historical advi-sor). In 1956, Molesworth opened Whizz for Atomms, the third volume of his adventures, with a chapter of advice on ‘How to be a Young Elizabethan’.4 It was to be an age of progress and modernism, of a Britain forged, as Harold Wilson would famously pronounce in 1963, in the

‘white heat’ of a scientific revolution.5

With this progressivism came the sense that Britain remained a global-imperial power. One of Wilson’s Prime Ministerial predecessors, Harold Macmillan, who came to office in 1957, owed a large part of his appeal to his ability to convey the impression that he was in fact a displaced Edwardian gentleman, a walking embodiment of Britain’s High Imperial past, exuding perpetual confidence in the continued existence of the British Empire: on a visit to Soviet Russia in 1959, he strolled around in plus-fours greeting Russians with a cheery exclamation of ‘Double-gin!’6

But, with hindsight, we now know that all was not, of course, well with the British Empire. The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 might be said to signal the beginning of imperial collapse, though there had been slow dwindlings for decades, and by the late 50s such was the proliferation of decolonization, particularly in Africa, that almost all competent observers recognized that the British Empire, as a geopolitical force, had all but disappeared. Since the 1940s there had been concerns and warnings about imperial overstretch, that Britain’s damaged post-war economy was simply unable to continue to meet the demands of maintaining the nation’s traditional global military presence. As early as 1945, no less a figure than John Maynard Keynes had warned the Treasury of the danger of a serious ‘over-playing of our hand’ were Britain to continue to ‘undertake liabilities all over the world’: We have got into the habit of maintaining large and expensive establishments all over the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa to cover communications and provide reserves for unnamed contingencies and to police vast areas from Tunis to Burma, and northwards from East Africa to Germany.7

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 35

Keynes’s warnings went largely unheeded, though Kynaston notes that, by the mid-50s, a recurring note of ‘declinism’ had begun to insinuate its way into the cultural discourse.8 This note was soon to become the dominant one.

If there was a symbolic moment in this process, it was probably the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which waning imperial powers Britain and France attempted to use Israel to wage a proxy war against Egypt, a former British colony, in an attempt to reverse the nationalization of the Suez Canal, a trade route long vital to the British Empire. British public opinion was sharply divided, along a broad left – right wing axis: on Saturday 3 November, with a splendid sense of the popular-cultural rhetoric of the time (if nothing else), the front page of the populist right-wing Daily Sketch reported the bombing of Egyptian air-bases under the headline

‘RAF ROCK ’N ROLL ’EM ROUND THE CLOCK’.9 Two days earlier, the Sketch had warned, with perhaps unwitting prescience, ‘Suez means for us survival or ruin . . . [I]f Britain were now forced into an ignominious retreat by a frenzied faction at home, then indeed would our nation be eclipsed and our standing in the world lost for many years to come.’10

When President Eisenhower refused to lend US support to this venture, it promptly collapsed (partly for financial reasons, as Britain simply could not afford to continue military action without an American loan), leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, and a recognition that Britain was no longer an overwhelming force on the world stage, but rather a contingent power, or even for some a client state of the US.11 Writing home from Cambridge, where she was study-ing on a Fulbright scholarship and had recently met her future husband Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath got it right: ‘The attack is a disaster from every angle – moral, military, political . . . Britain is dead; the literary and critical sterility and amorality which I long to take Ted away from is permeating everything. God bless America.’12 By 1957, the New Elizabethan movement was well and truly over – Young Elizabethan magazine folded that year (though fortunately for civilization there was to be one more volume of Molesworth’s adventures, 1959’s Back in the Jug Agane), as did the nascent Elizabethan political party.13

II

In 1957, Sabre Film Productions, under the distribution of Columbia Pictures, released Night of the Demon, a genre classic made by a very uneasy collection of Brits and Americans, with a French-American director, Jacques Tourneur, and notable contributions from a pair of Irishmen

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It Came from the 1950s!

and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Readers of this volume will by now be familiar with the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times, most particularly through their habitual deployment of forms of symbolic or metaphorical articulation as a means of approaching their subject obliquely. While Night of the Demon has received some scholarly attention down the years, and has even been the subject of one full-scale monograph, Tony Earnshaw’s Beating the Devil: The Making of ‘The Night of the Demon’ (2005),14 its contextual significance as an Anglo-American co-production of 1957 has never, as far as I’m aware, been analysed.

Night of the Demon is probably best described as an elaboration of the great Edwardian M.R. James’s classic ghost story ‘Casting the Runes’

(first published in 1911). In the film, Dr John Holden (played by Dana Andrews), an intransigently rationalist psychologist and cocksure embodiment of enlightened American modernity, travels to England, and from there back into pre-modernity, as he is given a comprehen-sive lesson in metaphysics by a home-counties Satanist, Julian Karswell (actually played by an Irishman, the Dublin actor Niall MacGinnis, a graduate of medicine at Trinity College), which forces him completely to change his world-view. The rational scepticism which Holden articulates with such total conviction throughout the film is, he comes to recognize at its close, nothing more than blinkered materialist dogma. The neo-Edwardian Harold Macmillan was fond of suggesting that Britain’s new role in the post-war world order could be as wise, aged, cultured Greece, offering sage advice to America’s vigorous, energetic, youthful Rome. Night of the Demon suggests that, at the very least, what is required is an Edwardian scholar-connoisseur’s appreciation of the appeal, force, and validity of the supernatural, and of the fact that it does exist and have a place in the modern world. In this, Holden is educated not only by Karswell, but by his scientific colleagues, the Irish Professor O’Brien (the Limerick-born Abbey Theatre actor Liam Redmond, a former student of medicine at UCD) and Dr K.T. Kumar of Bombay (Peter Elliott, not even remotely Indian), both representatives of decolonized former British Imperial territories, both well versed in the old ways. Professor O’Brien says, ‘I’m a scientist also, Dr Holden. I know the value of the cold light of reason, but I also know the deep shadows that light can cast.

The shadows that can blind men to the truth.’ More simply, Dr Kumar says, when asked for his opinion on devils and demons, ‘Oh, I believe in them – absolutely.’

Jacques Tourneur himself was a genre specialist who claimed never to have turned down a script, telling Bertrand Tavernier in a 1971

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 37
interview, ‘In Hollywood, I accepted systematically all scripts that were offered to me, always, regardless of what the script was about.’15 Given this – and especially given his close working relationship in the 1940s with the great producer Val Lewton – it is difficult to know how much agency to afford Tourneur over his own work: in the Tavernier interview, he acknowledged that ‘I have only initiated a few films’, and singled out I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and the anti-racist western Stars in my Crown (1950) as personal projects. Nevertheless, the two extant book-length studies of Tourneur and his work, the volume of essays edited by Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (1975) and the monograph by Chris Fujiwara (1998), both take a full-blooded auteuriste approach to their subject, inflected respectively with post-structuralist and formal-ist readings of the films themselves.16 To an extent, the attempt to understand Tourneur’s oeuvre as the unified product of a single artistic sensibility constitutes an act of reclamation, redressing the received view of Tourneur as a technician working most effectively under the guidance and creative control of Lewton, who tends to be credited with a near-total aesthetic influence over his films in a manner almost unique among Hollywood producers. While auteriste readings of Tourneur seem to me to be especially problematic in the case of Night of the Demon, given the complex and turbulent production context of that film (which I shall discuss later), it does nevertheless appear to be the case that there are recurring thematic concerns across many of Tourneur’s films, as well as a certain common tone, look, and mood.

As Fujiwara notes, Tourneur was one of a number of European directors who began Hollywood careers in the 1930s and 1940s (others include Edgar G. Ulmer, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk and Andre De Toth). Reflecting and growing out of this sense of cultural and aesthetic displacement,

‘ Night of the Demon is the central work in a group of Tourneur’s films about Americans in Europe.’17 Holden, an American among Europeans, seems intent on behaving as obnoxiously and high-handedly as he can, towards Karswell and the various occultists he meets, but also towards love-interest Joanna (Peggy Cummins), and his Old World colleagues, O’Brien and Kumar. As Fujiwara writes, ‘Holden has come [to Britain] on a mission to provoke and offend people’.18 More generally, some of Tourneur’s other key films dramatize a clash between rational, progressive American modernity and pre-modern supernaturalism: in Cat People (1942), ‘good plain Americano’ shipbuilder Oliver (Kent Smith) and his Serbian wife Irena, Old-European inhabitant of a world of fairy tales and ancestral curses; in I Walked With a Zombie (1943),

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It Came from the 1950s!

Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) and the voodoo priests and zombies of the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian. Night of the Demon, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie all to varying extents negotiate a delicate narrative relationship between the secular techno-modernity of the New World and the metaphysics of the Old, and have been praised for the subtlety and sophistication of this achievement.

In his own belief-system, however, Tourneur himself permitted no such ambiguities, telling Tavernier:

I hate the expression ‘horror film’. For me, I make films about the supernatural because I believe in it. I believe in the power of the dead, witches. I even met a few when I was preparing Night of the Demon.

I had a long conversation with the oldest witch in England about the spirit world, the power of cats. I also visit haunted houses. I happen to possess some powers myself. I sometimes get the feeling that I am about to meet a friend I haven’t seen in a long time. I scribble his name on a piece of paper. A few hours later the doorbell rings and it’s him. I show him the piece of paper on which, in front of witnesses, I wrote his name . . . I also know there are universes parallel to ours.

I wrote a script on the subject, entitled Whispers in a Distant Corridor.

It’s about the fight between on the one hand all the most sophisticated technical equipment, the most modern computers, etc., and on the other hand, the world of the dead which is trying to establish contact with ours. Their world is far more powerful than ours. One always hears of the problem of minorities, well, we, the living, are truly a minority compared to the dead . . . But it is really exasperating that supernatural forces are always represented as malevolent. Why this racism? If they exist and if they are malevolent, we would have been swept away a long time ago.19

This comment, I would argue, provides a suggestive interpretive gloss on the action of Night of the Demon.

‘The oldest witch in England’ to whom Tourneur refers in this interview was in fact a distinguished Professor of Egyptology and Anthropology at University College London, Margaret Murray, who seems to have acted as a de facto consultant for Night of the Demon.20 Murray also, according to her Dictionary of National Biography entry, did practise witchcraft, and was given to casting spells in order ‘to reverse academic appointments of which she disapproved’.21 To give the film a measure of scholarly credence, Murray was invited as a guest to the film’s press launch in the Dorchester Hotel, on 18 October 1956 (Tony

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 39

Earnshaw reproduces a remarkable photograph of the 93-year-old Professor Murray being kissed at the launch by a clearly-inebriated Dana Andrews).22 Murray wrote numerous influential anthropological studies of witchcraft, most notably The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931), both of which trace the relationship between modern witchcraft and pre-Christian religious rites and practices.23 It is to investigate Karswell’s own ‘devil-cult’ that Holden comes to England, but the presence of Murray’s work behind Karswell’s religion suggests both a more scholarly and a more sympathetic interpretation of Karswell than Holden’s blanket denial will allow. Karswell, who frequents the British Library and has himself ‘what is perhaps the finest library in the world on witchcraft and the black arts’, practises an anthropologically-based comparative religion, with its roots at Stonehenge, in aboriginal British belief-systems.

Unquestionably, Satanism and the occult were a vivid presence in British popular culture in the 1950s, as they so often have been. Easily the most high-profile literary diabolist of the time was Dennis Wheatley, who very clearly understood the Devil as a figure for his times. For Wheatley, in fact, Satan was the ultimate Cold Warrior: very consistently, across a series of works from, for example, The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948) through The Satanist (1960) and beyond, Wheatley understood Communism as a gigantic Satanic plot to control the world –

Stalin himself was merely a tool or agent of the Devil. One of his best-known novels of the 50s, The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), is essentially a neo-Victorian spiritualist novel, full of out-of-body experiences, astral journeys, and fears of premature burial, but it begins with a very long and hawkish account of British Cold War military policy: so long, in fact, that Wheatley’s narrator feels obliged to interrupt his own narrative with an italicized disclaimer; ‘ any reader of this document who is uninterested in future strategy and our measures for countering the threat of Soviet invasion will lose nothing by omitting the next few thousand words and resuming this account on page 40’.24 Britain, Wheatley seems to be arguing, needs a nuclear deterrent in order to combat the Satanic forces of evil. His 1971 critical study, The Devil and All His Works, which acknowledges the influence of Margaret Murray on some of its ideas, makes very plain Wheatley’s belief that Satan, in fact, creates and controls secular modernity:

We must also consider this new Age of Unbelief. Atheism goes hand in hand with Communism. During the past few decades, particularly in Russia and China, as the older generations die off there are ever

40

It Came from the 1950s!

fewer people who accept the beliefs of their forefathers. This applies to millions in the Western world and among the better-educated peoples of the Near East. . . .

The decline in the faiths has led to major changes in outlook and conduct by many million people [sic] – to a repudiation by the young of the authority and (possible) wisdom of their elders, a seeking for some mental stimulant that will replace accepted religions, and a breaking down of prohibitions that, though the ages, have protected society for its own good. Whether unorthodox aid is deliberately sought, or atheism accepted, the removal of the old barriers against self-gratification has rendered a great part of the new generation vulnerable to temptations which, out of fear or with a hope of reward, they would otherwise resist.

And nothing can change the laws which, at the time of the Creation, it was decreed should dominate the lives of human beings.

So we all remain, and must continue to remain, subject to the Powers of Light and Darkness.25

According to Wheatley’s gloomy prognosis, only conservatism, socially and politically, and a return to the values of the British Empire, can save the world.

While in his post-war works, from Toby Jugg (1948) onwards, Wheatley fingered Communism as the master-narrative for understanding the occult, his earlier works in the 1930s tend to interpret it in a colonial context, where threats to the British Empire come from its own disgruntled imperial Others. The Devil Rides Out (1934) opens with a gathering of Satanists presided over by the ipsissimus Mocata, whose manservant, the heroic Duc de Richleau explains, is ‘A Malagasy I should think. . . . A native of Madagascar. They are a curious people, half-Negro and half-Polynesian. This great brute stands about six foot eight, and the one glimpse I had of his eyes made me want to shoot him on sight.

He’s a “bad black” if ever I saw one, and I’ve travelled, as you know, in my time.’26 Among the other colonial grotesques at the gathering are

‘a tall, fair fellow. His thin, flaxen hair brushed flatly back and whose queer, light eyes proclaimed him an Albino’; ‘a stout man dressed in a green plaid and ginger kilt, [who] was walking softly up and down with his hands clasped behind his back, muttering to himself inaudibly. His wild, flowing white hair and curious costume suggested an Irish bard’;

‘A grave faced Chinaman wearing the robes of a Mandarin, whose slit eyes betrayed a cold, merciless nature: a Eurasian with only one arm, the left, and a tall, thin woman with a scraggy throat and beetling

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 41
eyebrows which met across the bridge of her nose’; ‘A fat, oily Babu in a salmon-pink turban and gown’; and ‘a red-faced Teuton, who suffered the deformity of a hare lip.’ They are, thinks the Duc, ‘Altogether a most unprepossessing lot’.27

The Devil Rides Out was Wheatley’s first real foray into the genre of the Satanic thriller, which was to make his name and fortune until his death in 1977. At around the same time as the novel was published, Wheatley first met Rollo Ahmed, the West Indian occultist, yogi, convicted fraud-ster, and possible MI5 agent.28 After the success of The Devil Rides Out, Wheatley was asked to write a history of black magic but, lacking first-hand practical experience, suggested Ahmed for the job. His study, The Black Art, was duly published in 1936, with a glowing introduction by Wheatley himself, who cites Ahmed as his major source for The Devil Rides Out:

Such praise as I have received in a most voluminous correspondence from all over the world as to the accuracy of the data in my book, The Devil Rides Out, is almost entirely due to my many long conversa-tions with Mr. Rollo Ahmed. With unfailing patience he answered my innumerable questions, and in the most generous manner he placed his profound knowledge entirely at my disposal, in order that I might make my novel a little more than an ordinary fiction book.29

Rereading the Black Art while researching The Devil and All His Works, Wheatley was ‘again amazed at the extent of his knowledge’.30 After an extraordinarily lurid account of the Black Mass, Ahmed’s book closes with the assertion that black magic is an ongoing practice in modern society, and that secret societies of Satanists remain all around us.

Satanic cults teach their initiates that ‘evil is only a relative term; that people have evolved, to see the beauty in so-called wickedness; that sin has no reality, and that the only way to a full life is to ignore ordinary standards of honesty, purity and kindliness, because the exercise of these qualities prevents people yielding to all their impulses and limits their material attainments.’ Soon, these initiates end up ‘wallowing in evil for its own sake’.31 Ahmed’s influence, mediated through Wheatley, is discernable in Rand Hobart’s Satanic creed in Night of the Demon.

Asked, ‘What is the order of the true believer?’ Hobart (Brian Wilde) replies: ‘Those of us who believe that evil is good, and good evil. . . . Who blaspheme and desecrate. In the joy of sin will mankind that is lost find itself again.’

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It Came from the 1950s!

Wheatley was also to make much of his acquaintance with Aleister Crowley, easily the most high-profile occultist of the twentieth century, to whom Wheatley was introduced in 1934 by the journalist and future Labour MP (and alleged occultist) Tom Driberg. Crowley gave Wheatley a copy of Magick in Theory and Practice, with a hand-customized title-page: ‘This unique copy . . . Published for Dennis Wheatley only 1934 e.v.

[era vulgaris]’.32 It is often claimed that Karswell is explicitly modelled on Crowley, though this seems very unlikely in the case of James’s original story: though Crowley was a student at Trinity College Cambridge in the 1890s, by which time James was a Fellow of next-door King’s, there is no evidence of their having met, nor that James knew anything at all of Crowley. James’s Karswell is barely described: ‘a stout, clean-shaven man’; ‘Nobody knew what he did with himself: his servants were a horrible set of people; he had invented a new religion for himself and practised no one could tell what appalling rites.’33 It does seem likely, however, that MacGinnis’s performance as Karswell – a portly, balding, middle-aged necromancer of impeccable manners – is inflected by an awareness of Crowley as refracted through Wheatley’s own work: he appears as the effete, ambiguous Mocata in The Devil Rides Out, ‘a pot-bellied, bald-headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp. He reminded me of a large, white slug.’34 MacGinnis’s Karswell is far more nuanced, sympathetic and interesting than either James’s blank original or Wheatley’s gross caricature.35

In the 1950s, Rollo Ahmed, disguised as ‘Mr. A’, participated in a series of sensational exposés of contemporary Satanic cults for the Sunday Pictorial: ‘It is the cult of many organized groups, they include people who are nationally and internationally famous.’36 At around the same time,

‘Fabian of the Yard’ (ex-superintendent Robert Fabian of the Metropolitan Police) published London After Dark, his own exposé of the capital’s seamier side, with, to quote the back-cover blurb, its ‘dope, prostitution, blackmail, low night-clubs, cosh boys and their molls, and all that goes with the murky side of London after dark’. This ‘murky side’ included ‘a private temple of Satanism!’ in Lancaster Gate, London W2: At one end of the long room is an altar, exactly as in a small church –
except that the altar candles are black wax, and the crucifix is head downwards.

Pentagrams and sigils . . . are on the low ceiling. On the left of this altar, is a black African idol – the ju-ju, obviously, of some heathen fertility rite. It is nearly five feet high, squat, repulsive, and obscenely

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 43
constructed. It is rubbed to a greasy polish by the ecstatic bare flesh of the worshippers.37

In June 1956, Reynold’s News and Sunday Citizen claimed to have acquired a Scotland Yard file on its investigations into contemporary black magic in London: ‘Peers on Yard Black Magic List’ ran the headline: The list reads like pages taken from Debrett! It includes two or three of the most famous names in the peerage and that of a former ambas-sador to the Court of St. James. It also names a number of wealthy people, including one with two country mansions and a luxurious West End flat.38

Responding to this sensation, from 3–24 June 1956 The Sunday Graphic ran a series of articles on black magic by ‘the man who knows more than anyone else about this strange, evil cult’, Dennis Wheatley himself. Wheatley had apparently been reading Fabian of the Yard: ‘Yet it is not only in Africa that such abominations are practised. A few years ago women were giving themselves up to hideous eroticism with a great carved ebony figure, during Satanic orgies held in a secret temple in Bayswater, London W2.’39 Clearly, there are in this narrative barely-concealed anxieties about the activities of Britain’s new immigrant community, who, from the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948, carrying 492 Jamaican passengers, had become a recent (and, for some, a troubling) feature of 1950s English life.

III

Night of the Demon’s opening scenes juxtapose its clash of modernity and the pre-modern through a clash of two architectural visions of Britain.

The film opens with a spoken prologue over a shot of Stonehenge, which Holden will later visit after going to the Hobart farmhouse (the Hobarts are a family of rustic Satanists), and where he finds the originals of the runic symbols which Karswell has written on the parchment which summons the Demon. From there we move to the death of Professor Harrington, Holden’s English colleague, killed by the Demon Karswell summons. The next scenes show Holden’s transatlantic flight to England, where he first meets Joanna Harrington, and then the important scene where he lands at Heathrow. The building at which he arrives, the Europa Building (now Heathrow Terminal 2) is a hyper-modern symbol of New Elizabethan England, a classic of post-war British

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It Came from the 1950s!

modernist architecture, opened to great fanfare by Queen Elizabeth as recently as 1955.40 Indeed, Elizabeth’s early connections with Heathrow were profound, as she symbolically laid the first slab of concrete on the runway in the year of her coronation, 1953. One could, in fact, argue that Heathrow is the great symbolic municipal project of the New Elizabethan age. The Europa Building is part of a great movement of 1950s British modernist architecture, which was to give form to the nation’s post-war reconstruction: the Royal Festival Hall, designed by Leslie Martin, Robert Matthew and Peter Moro as the centrepiece for the 1951 ‘Tonic for the Nation’, the Festival of Britain, is probably the greatest single example of this movement for social and physical reconstruction. Architecture was, in fact, the representative medium of British post-war Modernism, and was animated by a distinct, progressivist social ideology. To borrow the title of Robert Elwall’s study of British architecture in the 1950s, it was to be the means of Building a Better Tomorrow.41

Night of the Demon’s trajectory is to take Holden, in his investigation of reason’s dark shadows, away from the gleaming techno-modernity of Heathrow, and towards the ancient darkness of the Hobart farmhouse and Stonehenge.

With hindsight, one could argue that, once it leaves the gleaming Modernism of the Europa building – which is itself clearly liminal space, simultaneously nationalist and supra-national – Night of the Demon’s entire mise-en-scène betokens British declinism, reflecting a late-imperial world on the very cusp of irrevocable change. One of the film’s key scenes famously takes place in the British Library Reading Room, where Holden, looking for The True Discoveries of Witches and Demons, first encounters Karswell, who offers to lend Holden his own copy of the book, and while doing so slips him the parchment which he believes will seal his fate, Casting the Runes. While Christopher Frayling has written fascinatingly about the use and significance of the British Library Reading Room in Night of the Demon, and in cinema more generally, the fact remains that, within a generation, this extraordinarily resonant British cultural space was no more, having been replaced by Colin St John Wilson’s highly controversial new British Library on Euston Road.42

Many important scenes also take place in Holden’s London hotel, the Savoy, which was opened to great fanfare in 1889 as the city’s premier hotel, originally managed by César Ritz. Winston Churchill held his cabinet dinners at the Savoy. But by the early 50s, this great Victorian institution had itself become symbolic of the tensions under which the post-war British economy found itself, as a traditional British banking and business establishment began to come under threat from

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 45
a new, aggressive, American-inspired capitalist endeavour, the hostile takeover. As Kynaston writes:

Over the autumn [of 1953] it had emerged that two of the financial world’s outsiders, Charles Clore and the property developer Harold Samuel, were between them seeking to engineer the takeover of the Savoy group of hotels, including Claridges and the Berkeley as well as the Savoy itself. This was a source of consternation to many leading City figures. Not only did they (like Churchill) greatly value the hospitality of these places, but the Clore/Samuel move was an ominous sign that the aggressive takeover bid was becoming a regular part of financial life, an assault in fact on keeping things in the club.43

The hostile takeover of the Savoy was thwarted at the last minute by the intervention of City financiers, much to the relief of Kim Cobbold, Governor of the Bank of England – but the writing was on the wall for such cherished British Imperial institutions.

Night of the Demon closes with an extended railway scene, filmed around two Hertfordshire stations, Watford Junction (doubling in the film for Clapham Junction), where Holden gets on the 8.45

Southampton train, and nearby Bricket Wood, where Karswell meets his demise at 10 p.m., and where Holden, demonstrating that he has finally learned Karswell’s lesson in metaphysics, speaks the film’s last words to Joanna: ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know.’44 The film’s last shot is of a train going past, its billowing steam and screaming whis-tle a deliberate echo of the demon’s own accompanying effects.45 But the British railway system was by this time horrendously inefficient and cripplingly loss-making (losing over £100 million a year by the early 1960s). In 1963, the British Transport Commission, headed by Dr Richard Beeching, wielded its infamous axe, getting rid of 160 000
jobs, 5000 miles of track, and 2359 local stations during the 1960s.46

As Macmillan’s biographer Alistair Horne writes, this really did sound a death-knell for Britain: ‘It all meant a vast change in the quality of British life, with crumbling railway embankments shorn of rails and sleepers and overcrowded roads epitomising the disappearance of the heritage of the Industrial revolution that had made Britain great.’47

Bridging the two worlds, of secular modernity and a haunted British past, Night of the Demon famously takes Holden to a séance in the front parlour of the suburban Victorian home of the medium Mr Meek (Reginald Beckwith). It is surely this celebrated scene that Carlos Clarens, one of the film’s early admirers, had in mind when he

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It Came from the 1950s!

commented that it ‘abounds in prosaic situations turning implacably into nightmares’,48 as following a rendition of ‘Cherry Ripe’ – ‘We must all sing! The spirits like it!’ Mrs Karswell says (‘Cherry Ripe’, written by Robert Herrick, is an English folk classic, and was used by John Buchan in Mr Standfast as a code, which only true-hearted British imperialists would understand)49 – Mr Meek’s spirit possession moves from comedy Indian Chief and Scotsman, through a little girl who has lost her doll, before the unmistakable voice of Professor Harrington cries in terror the films most famous lines: ‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’ (lines which Kate Bush sampled for the opening of the title track to her 1985
album, The Hounds of Love). Like the zombie Carrefour (Darby Jones) in I Walked with a Zombie, Mr Meek is that representative Tourneurian figure, the psychopomp, standing at the crossroads ( carrefour) between two worlds, conductor of souls to the place of the dead. Meek’s séance takes us back to a major, and now largely disregarded, facet of Victorian and Edwardian British life: spiritualism and the occult.

The arcana of occultism might seem literally outlandish to us now, as inhabitants, like John Holden himself, of a secular, materialist modernity characterized by, to use Max Weber’s famous term, Entzauberung (‘disenchantment’): in 1917 Weber wrote that ‘the fate of our times is characterized by rationalism and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”’.50 But the total distinction that we tend to draw between matter and spirit – let alone the scepticism with which many of us treat the very existence of ‘spirit’ – may well have been meaningless to our contemporaries a century ago, who were drawn in very large numbers to the distinct but overlapping practices of spiritualism, psychical research, Theosophy, and occultism. One of the leading Theosophists, Annie Besant – Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s successor as head of the Theosophical Society – wrote in her book Why I Became a Theosophist (1891):

‘Spirit’ is a misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immaterial-ity and a supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes in neither one nor the other. With him all living things act in and through a material basis, and ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are not found dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than those at present known to science.51

As Janet Oppenheim has argued, spiritualist beliefs pervaded virtually all corners of Victorian life in Britain: in fact, spiritualism was the major Victorian response to the advances and discoveries of scientific

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 47
materialism, far more so than agnosticism or atheism. Far from being, as we might imagine, the province of a small number of fringe ideologues, cranks and zealots, or a retreat for the socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised (as it may be today), spiritualism and its scientific companion, psychical research, attracted some of the most prominent scientific, intellectual, cultural and political figures of the time, and thus should be placed ‘squarely amidst the cultural, intellectual and economic moods of the era’.52 Furthermore, spiritualism was an extraordinarily broad and flexible movement, able to accommodate all social classes and many varieties of belief, from Anglicanism to occultism.

Indeed, far from being antithetical to our post-Weberian disenchanted world, the historian Alex Owen has suggested in her book The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern that occultism should be understood as a major, and seriously neglected, component of modernity.

IV

If the séance at Mr Meek’s takes us back to a forgotten Victorian Britain, then it is tempting to read the Demon itself as the American Colossus, stomping all over the film’s carefully-constructed air of subtle restraint.

For many viewers, the inclusion of the Demon constitutes the film’s fatal flaw, its sop to commercialism. This, too, accounts for the received version of the film’s genesis, troubled and compromised from the outset through having to make accommodations with the money-men. Certainly, the film’s English writer, Charles Bennett, felt that the integrity of the project had been destroyed by the vulgarity of the film’s American producer, Hal E. Chester, saying in an interview:

‘So . . . this guy, Hal Chester, messed up the screenplay quite a bit.

It was so good, that screenplay, that it couldn’t be completely destroyed, only half destroyed. It’s still considered a good movie.

‘I think the job Jacques Tourneur did with what Hal Chester gave him was awfully good. Hal Chester, as far as I’m concerned, if he walked up my driveway right now, I’d shoot him dead.’53

Tourneur himself considered Night of the Demon ‘a vulgarisation of the truth’, and came to disavow responsibility for the finished film:

‘To me, Night of the Demon was two films. Three-fourths of the film to me was honest and in a pseudo-scientific way correct. It was science

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fiction psychology but it was almost honest. Then one-fourth of the film, which had to do with the delineation of that monster, belonged in another type of film which is the teenage horror film. Now we had carried on and made the whole film believable and logical and if we’d suggested that monster we’d have had a completely honest film, but to me it’s two things. The film was edited after I left.’54

The Demon itself was designed by the great Ken Adam (an émigré to Britain in 1934 from Nazi Germany, where he was born Klaus Hugo Adam to a Jewish family in Berlin), whose account of the process supports that of Bennett and Tourneur:

I designed the monster, but under protest. I agreed completely with Tourneur. We both felt that it was completely wrong to show the monster because we felt the footprints – when you see steam coming from the imprints – were enough. But they insisted even though we were dead against it. Jacques Tourneur was a lovely man to work with except when he had this big battle with Hal E. Chester!55

I should note, however, that things are not necessarily that simple. It is not quite as straightforward as a case of Europeans versus Americans here – and not everyone remembers events in the same way. Assistant director Basil Keys maintained that the Demon was central to the film’s conception from the very beginning, and certainly not (as Tourneur had implied) inserted in post-production editing: ‘It was always in the script,’

he claimed.56 Chester was fond of taking credit not only for the finished film, but for the initial idea and script:

Night of the Demon I got from the book, ‘Casting the Runes’. I travelled back and forth to California and I ran into Charlie Bennett,

[who] used to be Hitchcock’s collaborator. Now I had already written, frankly, practically a whole script – a long treatment. I said ‘I tell ya what I’ll do, Charlie, I’ll give you first billing. Your name will be first. But I don’t have the patience to sit down and break it down into close-up, medium shot, long shot, all that.’ He said, ‘Sure, but I want a trip to Europe out of it.’ I said ‘Okay, ya got it.’ So that’s how his name got on the thing and the picture got made.57

To make matters even more complex, Tony Earnshaw, who knows more about the film’s genesis than anyone, maintains that the scenes with the Demon were not written by Chester at all (and certainly not by

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 49

Bennett), but were part of a script-doctoring job done by Cy Endfield, who may even have directed the footage of the Demon at the beginning and end of the film.58 For our purposes here, Endfield is a very interesting character, as he was certainly no friend to American imperialism. Endfield was exiled to Britain in 1951 after being blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was forced to earn a living as an anonymous script doctor or pseudonymous director (as variously Jonathan Roach, Hugh Raker and Charles De Lautour) until 1957, when as C. Raker Endfield he got the job of directing Hell Drivers, a fantastically rugged British thriller set around a two-fisted haulage firm, with one of the manliest casts ever assembled on cellu-loid (Stanley Baker, Sean Connery, Patrick McGoohan, Herbert Lom, Sid James, William Hartnell, Alfie Bass, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum –
plus Peggy Cummins from Night of the Demon). Today, easily Endfield’s best-known work is also one of the great cinematic monuments to the British Empire, Zulu (1964), wherein Stanley Baker, Michael Caine, Jack Hawkins, Nigel Greene, Patrick Magee and a bunch of fighting Welsh choristers headed by Ivor Emmanuel restage the battle of Rourke’s Drift, in which, on 22–23 January 1879, the 150 soldiers of B Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 24th Regiment, the South Wales Borderers, fought off 4000 Zulu warriors, winning 11 Victoria Crosses in the process (the most ever awarded to a single regiment in a single battle). Even this film’s reputation as a high-Imperialist fantasy, or indeed as the British cinema’s valediction for the Empire, needs some nuancing. The film was very much a personal project for its star and producer, Stanley Baker, who understood the project quite clearly as bodying forth both his own Welsh patriotism, and his deep-rooted socialism. It is, after all, a film about the working-class subjects of internal colonialism (a Welsh regiment, comprised largely of Breconshire farmers) finding common cause with anti-colonial insurgents (the Zulus, who recognize and salute their heroism).59

V

Much of the most influential theorizing of popular culture in the twentieth century has been animated by a hermeneutic of suspicion, or even disdain. Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the Culture Industry asserts that pop culture, an entirely deleterious force, serves as a hegemonic agent of capitalism, a means by which it exercises control over its consumers, through commodifying even its own dissent. The function of art, Adorno maintains, is to operate as a site of resistance to dominant

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capitalist ideologies; the modern consumer ‘is converted, along the line of least resistance, into the acquiescent purchaser’, incapable of critique, as the Culture Industry promotes only banality and passivity. Only the most austere, confrontational, avant-garde art allows us to escape the rapacious maw of the Culture Industry, by means of its very dissonance, asceticism, and difficulty. ‘All “light” and pleasant art has become illusory and mendacious’; any art which relies on an aesthetic of pleasure is always already compromised. Anyone who enjoys a work of art, Adorno believes, is a Philistine.60

Is there no possibility that popular culture can provide its own sites of resistance? Theorists of the British New Left, such as E.P. Thompson or Stuart Hall, attempting a reformulation of Marxist theory away from state-controlled ideology in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the revelations of the genocidal truth of Stalin’s regime, began from the 1960s to examine ways in which ‘bottom up’ cultural formations, for example, might constitute forms of genuinely radical

‘folk art’, operating outside (or beneath) the ideological control of the Culture Industry.61 I want to close by offering another, albeit related, possibility for the socially liberating power of popular culture, and one in keeping with my subject. Popular culture, I contend, is the medium through which we experience Sympathy for the Devil. Though, for all Cy Endfield’s radical politics, one would hardly want to make a case for Night of the Demon as a document of the New Left (if anything, it adumbrates a version of the same Victorian Imperial Toryism which informed M.R. James), it is worth stressing that it is produced from the same complex of historical forces that resulted in the New Left, and at the same time.

As Satan’s biographer Peter Stanford suggests, the Devil is ‘a popular figure, not a dogmatic abstraction, and has come alive not in learned tomes or seminary debates, but in the lives of the faithful, terrifying, omnipresent and grotesque, evil incarnate.’62 In large part this is because, as the great historian of the Devil, Jeffrey Burton Russell, argues, the questions posed by theodicy, about the place and workings of evil in a creation supposedly governed by divine grace, are so difficult and painful as to prove essentially unanswerable, or answerable only by slip-pery evasions.63 Thus, mainstream, official, or institutionalized theology tends to avoid these questions. It has, in other words, ceded the territory of evil to popular culture: this is the domain of the Devil.

There is a fine tradition, of course, of radical counter-readings of the Devil, as famously exemplified by the work of William Blake, for whom, of course, the ‘true poet’, as he observed in ‘The Marriage of

Night of the Demon & the British Empire 51

Heaven and Hell’, was necessarily ‘of the devil’s party’ – ‘For this history,’ Blake maintains, ‘has been adopted by both parties.’64 Blake was an important precursor-figure for the New Left: E.P. Thompson’s own last work was a landmark study of Blake’s intellectual formation, Witness Against the Beast.65 ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ draws to its apocalyptic climax with the ringing exclamation ‘Empire is no more!’66

For many, including Blake, the Devil has stood for the little man, the underdog, the revolutionary, the witness against empire. Standing at the end of one empire, the British, and facing into another, the American, Night of the Demon, in its concern with asserting the primacy of traditional beliefs and structures of feeling over a bull-headedly progressivist techno-modernity, bears, in its oblique, sinister way, such witness.

Notes

1. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).

2. David Kynaston, Family Britain 1951–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 664.

3. Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000 (London: Pan Macmillan, 2003), p. 211.

4. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, Molesworth, ed. Philip Hensher (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 214–28.

5. For an analysis of the significance of this for British social and political history in the 1960s, see Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2006).

6. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 236.

7. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 433.

8. Kynaston, Family Britain, p. 616.

9. Ibid., p. 685.

10. Ibid., p. 682.

11. For accounts of Suez and the end of the British Empire, see, for example, Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, pp. 1–30; Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 484–500.

12. Kynaston, Family Britain, p. 683.

13. Weight, p. 317.

14. Tony Earnshaw, Beating the Devil: The Making of ‘The Night of the Demon’

(Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, 2005).

15. Jacques Tourneur, ‘Interview’ [with Bertrand Tavernier], in Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, eds, Jacques Tourneur (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1975), p. 51. The Interview first appeared in Positif, 132 (November 1971).

16. Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

17. Ibid., p. 7. Other films in this category include Berlin Express (1948) and Circle of Danger (1951).

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18. Fujiwara, p. 244. In part, this unpleasantness is a consequence of Dana Andrews’s own alcoholism, which took its toll on the filming – as a number of commentators have noted, he is visibly drunk in a few scenes.

19. Tourneur, ‘Interview’, pp. 54–5.

20. Earnshaw, pp. 32–5.

21. ‘Murray, Margaret Alice (1863–1963)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online: http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/35169?

docPos=4 (accessed 17 January 2011). This practice connects Murray to Margaret Johnston’s academic witch Flora Carr in Sidney Hayers’s Night of the Eagle (1962), based on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife. Night of the Eagle is often placed alongside Night of the Demon in accounts of horror cinema, and the two films are narratively very similar.

22. Earnshaw, p. 33.

23. See M.A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Margaret A. Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

24. Dennis Wheatley, The Ka of Gifford Hillary (London: Hutchinson, 1956), p. 22.

25. Wheatley, The Devil and All his Works (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 11.

26. Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out (Ware: Wordsworth, 2007), p. 21.

27. Ibid., pp. 25–7.

28. For Ahmed’s relationship with Wheatley, see Phil Baker, The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2009), pp. 318–20.

29. Wheatley, ‘Introduction’ to Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art (1936; London: Senate, 1994), p. 8.

30. Wheatley, The Devil and All His Works, p. 270.

31. Ahmed, pp. 253, 259.

32. Baker, pp. 298–300. For Wheatley on Crowley, see The Devil and All His Works, pp. 273–6.

33. M.R. James, ‘Casting the Runes’, Casting the Runes and other ghost stories, ed.

Michael Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 149, 137.

34. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, p. 20.

35. In 1967, Charles Gray gave a brilliant performance as Mocata, a middle-aged ipsissimus of wealth, taste and breeding, again far outshining Wheatley’s original, in Terence Fisher’s Hammer version of The Devil Rides Out.

36. ‘Mr. A’s’ articles appeared on 28 October 1951 and 7 November 1954: see Gareth J. Medway, The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 143–9.

37. Robert Fabian, London After Dark: An Intimate Record of Night Life in London (London: Naldrett Press, 1954), pp. 75–6. The back-cover blurb is from the rather more lurid 1962 Panther paperback edition, credited to ‘Fabian of the Yard’.

38. Medway, The Lure of the Sinister, p. 152.

39. Baker, pp. 527–8.

40. The Europa Building was built for international traffic. The two other buildings of Heathrow’s Central Terminal Area were opened in 1956: the No. 2

Building Britannic (for domestic flights) and the Queen’s Building (for

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administration): see Philip Sherwood, Heathrow: 2000 Years of History (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 87–9.

41. Robert Elwall, Building a Better Tomorrow: Architecture in Britain in the 1950s (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2000). For 1950s British architecture, see also William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd edn (London and New York: Phaidon, 1996), pp. 929–45; Alan Powers, Britain: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2007). For the Festival of Britain, see Weight, pp. 191–206.

42. See Christopher Frayling, ‘Introduction’, in Earnshaw, Beating the Devil, xx–xxiv.

43. Kynaston, Family Britain, p. 351.

44. Earnshaw, pp. 75–80, has a useful list of the film’s locations.

45. This shot also echoes perhaps the most famous moment in any of Tourneur’s films, the scene in Cat People where Alice (Jane Randolph) believes she is being stalked by a panther; the scene comes to a dramatic climax with the appearance from nowhere of a bus with loudly-hissing air-brakes. This cinematic device, the shocking but bathetic climax to a scene of sustained tension, became known, in honour of the producer, as ‘Lewton’s Bus’.

46. For these figures, see Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, p. 122.

47. Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan 1957–86: Volume 2 of the Official Biography (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 252.

48. Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 144.

49. Ronald Pearsall, one of the historians of Victorian supernaturalism, noted that séances developed a fixed code of practice across the second half of the nineteenth century, and would often begin with prayers or songs. The spirits were fond of popular songs, and on one occasion, Pearsall notes, a rendition of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ met with particular approval from the other world, with the spirits joining in; see Pearsall, The Table-Rappers: Victorians and the Occult (Gloucester: Sutton, 2004), p. 44.

50. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans.

and eds H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1958), p. 155. For an analysis of Enzauberung specifically in the context of fin-de-siècle and Edwardian spiritualism and occultism, see Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 10–16.

51. Owen, p. 38.

52. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 4.

53. Earnshaw, Beating the Devil, p. 26.

54. Ibid, p. 26.

55. Christopher Frayling, Ken Adam and the Art of Production Design (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 78.

56. Earnshaw, p. 21.

57. Ibid., p. 22.

58. Ibid., pp. 22–3. The very meticulous film scholar Sheldon Hall supports Earnshaw’s assertion that Endfield rewrote the screenplay of Night of the

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Demon, though does not comment on whether or not he directed key scenes; see Hall, Zulu With Some Guts Behind It: The Making of the Epic Movie (Sheffield: Tomahawk, 2005), p. 82.

59. See Hall, Zulu, for a lengthy and fascinating account of this film’s genesis and production, and of the various participants in its making.

60. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed.

J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 32–3 and passim.

61. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963). Stuart Hall has made a number of important interventions in this field: see, for example, Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (London: Hutchinson, 1964).

62. Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1996), p. 93.

63. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977).

64. William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in The Complete Poems, ed.

W.H. Stevenson (London and New York: Longman, 1989), p. 107.

65. E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

66. Blake, p. 124.

3

Mutants and Monsters1

Kim Newman

Sci-fi has always been fascinated with the Other, and critics of popular culture have been quick to point out that the Other is always other than itself, which is to say, the pods and blobs are ‘symbols’ standing in for something else. Ever since Susan Sontag pointed to the fact that the Other in 50s sci-fi was often linked to radiation, it has been customary to equate the Other with the Bomb. John and Jane Doe might think they’re being attacked by elephantine aphids run riot in their garden, but we know better. The hypothetical film informs us that a tactical nuclear weapon has been set off at the desert test site just ten miles away from the Doe residence; one step ahead, we realise that it is radiation that has caused the ravenous aphids to double in size every ten minutes, and jumping to conclusions, we decide that The Attack of the Giant Aphids is really about the arms race, and that John and Jane are down with a severe case of nuclear anxiety. But films like this are not primarily worried about the Bomb; they loved the Bomb, or at least the technology that made it possible. The Does may not be as dumb as we thought, and to understand what these films did worry about, all we have to do is look at what’s before our very eyes; it’s aphids after all, nature run amok.2

Science fiction films of the 50s, the period when nuke-awareness was at its height, are full of monsters. And the monsters tend to be radioactive. Peter Biskind, quoted above, tries to reduce the monster movies of the 50s to expressions of the oldest theme in the horror cannon, nature run amok, but monsters are rarely as simple as they at first 55

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seem. The Thing From Another World (1951), the first monster of the 50s, is a vegetable vampire from outer space who looks like Boris Karloff in a boiler suit. As played by James Arness, the Thing is Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Enemy Invader and Nature Run Amok in one catch-all package. The Bomb is never actually mentioned in the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film, but there is a possibly significant moment when an explosive intended to free a flying saucer from the arctic ice proves much more destructive than the soldiers who set it off expect it to be. With its means of getting back to Another World blown to bits, the Thing might reasonably see itself as the victim of a pre-emptive first strike from the human race, and thus be rather more justified in killing everyone it runs into than the film suggests.

The Thing From Another World ends famously with the American military/scientific (with the emphasis on the former) team triumphant over the ‘intellectual carrot’, and Scotty (Douglas Spencer), the wisecracking reporter, turning serious as he delivers the fade-out speech to the rest of the English-speaking world. ‘I bring you a warning . . . tell the world . . . tell this to everybody wherever they are . . . watch the skies!

Keep watching the skies!’ Among other things, this prompts the audience to remember just what that good ol’ American base in the middle of the arctic is there for. It is part of the Distant Early Warning system, watching the skies with radar should the Soviets ever mount a bomber attack. The Russians are further implicated by the fact that the only sympathizer the Thing finds on this world is a cold, unemotional scientist with a beard and a fur hat. Nature may be running amok in The Thing, but the suggestion is that the rampant vegetation has friends in the Kremlin. The film may not be about the arms race, but the Cold War certainly forms a potent subtext for the s-f thrills of man against monster.

The first real atomic monster movie is Samuel Newfield’s The Lost Continent (1951), a very cheap item from Lippert, the company that had produced Rocketship X-M (1950), the first real atomic Awful Warning movie. Its historic status aside, The Lost Continent is a minor film and the radioactive elements almost completely arbitrary. Major Cesar Romero leads an expedition to the South Seas in search of a downed, nuclear-powered rocket. It turns up on an island where dinosaurs have been

‘kept alive by uranium deposits’. The magic mineral has also pulled the experimental missile from the skies and can probably be blamed for the green tinting of all the lost continent scenes. Radiation is a funny thing, we are told in these films; it can do strange things. In fact, it can do anything convenient for the plot.

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This kind of radiation causes Douglas Fairbanks Jr’s duck to lay uranium eggs in Val Guest’s Mr Drake’s Duck (1951), makes Mickey Rooney glow in Leslie H. Martinson’s The Atomic Kid (1954), puts Peter Arne seven and a half seconds into the future in Ken Hughes’s Timeslip (1955), creates geniuses or zombies in John Gilling’s The Gamma People (1956), shrinks Grant Williams in Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1956), grows Glenn Langan in Bert I. Gordon’s The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), revives a murderous native as a walking tree in Dan Milner’s From Hell It Came (1957), makes Japanese gangsters sentient slime in Ishiro Honda’s Bijo to Ekitai Ningen (1958, The H-Man), turns Ron Randell to steel in Allan Dwan’s The Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961) and makes Tor Johnson into Coleman Francis’s The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961).

In 1962, Stan Lee could get away with having Peter Parker, The Amazing Spider-Man, develop his superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider; and Marvel’s mutant group The Uncanny X-Men, who followed by a year, were originally ‘children of the atom’, the superfreak offspring of those exposed to radioactivity during the Manhattan Project.

For all its scientific double-talk, The Lost Continent is as much of a throwback as its man-in-a-suit tyrannosaurus. It is an imitation of the greatest nature run amok film of all, King Kong (1933). In 1952, a re-released Kong earned four times as much as it had done during its original depression run. This success encouraged Warner Brothers to launch the atomic monster cycle, first by distributing the independently-made The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) then by producing Them! (1954).

In Beast, a dinosaur frozen for millennia in the same ice that had held the Thing is thawed out by an arctic bomb test. As a result, the ‘rhedosaurus’ not only has the people-eating and building-smashing habits of King Kong but is also highly radioactive. Soldiers tracking it by spilled blood sicken and die of a nuke-related plague. In Them! , New Mexico bomb testing has caused successive generations of ants to get bigger –
a rare instance (along with World Without End, 1956) of a script which seems to understand that genetic mutation means effects showing up in the offspring of the irradiated rather than assuming radiation has magical transformative properties. By the time the film starts, the insects are 20 feet long and need lebensraum. Like King Kong, the films find their monsters in isolated and under-populated regions, then brings them to a city for the finale. The Beast heads for its ancient breeding grounds in New York, the ants take their last stand in the Los Angeles storm drains.

Of the films, Them! , despite its awkward puppet creatures, is by far the more successful. While Beast is content to ape the King Kong plot

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and fill in the non-monster scenes with aimless chatter, Them! effectively presents itself as a documentary-style thriller along the lines of The House on 92nd Street (1945), The Naked City (1948) or Panic in the Streets (1950). Well directed by Gordon Douglas, the film is strongly cast, nicely written, and, given the central absurdity of the giant ants, sensibly plotted. But what has it got to do with the Bomb? In Cinefantastique, Steve Rubin writes that the film’s ‘power lies in its ability to deliver a subtle but crucial message of the hazards of the nuclear age’.3 Ted Sherdeman, the film’s writer and original producer, saw Them! as an opportunity to deal with his own atomic anxieties. ‘I was a Lieutenant Colonel then,’ he said of the Hiroshima bombing, ‘and when I heard the news I just went over to the curb and started throwing up.’4 Dr Medford (Edmund Gwenn), the film’s humanist scientist, has a few grim lines about the Biblical prophecy that ‘the Beasts will rule the Earth’. There is also no question but that the bombs tested by Our Side are responsible for the menace, but in its endorsement of the official line Them! is hardly ambiguous.

As soon as the New Mexico police discover the ants’ first victim was an FBI man on vacation, the Bureau is called in. Its plaster-of-Paris impres-sions of mysterious footprints and the presence of large amounts of formic acid in the corpse lead to the summoning of a pair of experts from the US Department of Agriculture. Cop James Whitmore, G-Man James Arness, elderly bug specialist Gwenn, and pretty bug specialist Joan Weldon are the heart of the team, but they can call upon the entire resources of the country’s law enforcement agencies, military might and scientific establishments. These are not quaking victims of atomic paranoia, but the level-headed nine-to-fivers who weighed up the consequences and decided to drop the Bomb in the first place. Like the semi-documentaries on which it is patterned, Them! is a hymn to the government. In the exciting finish, the military swing briskly into action in defence of the city and the monsters are convincingly taken out with superior firepower. Joe Public is ignored as the experts get on with their jobs. Before the battle, a Tannoy announces ‘your personal safety and the safety of the entire city will depend on your full co-operation with the military authorities’.

Them! drops the touchy issue of the Bomb itself in order to reaffirm the worth of the society that made it possible, though it ends with Gwenn pondering the question of what further mutations might be thrown up by all the nuclear tests subsequent to the one that created the ants. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, however, displays a fearful circularity: the rhedosaurus is accidentally revived by the atom bomb,

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but it is also deliberately killed with an injected isotope. In a satisfying finale, Paul Christian and sharpshooter Lee Van Cleef face up to the Beast in the flaming ruins of Coney Island and shoot a radioactive device into the creature’s neck. Ray Harryhausen’s splendid special effects creation thrashes to its death with geiger counters still clicking. Gojira (1954), It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) and Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959, The Giant Behemoth) also feature primordial monsters awakened by underwater bomb tests who are done away with thanks to the judicial application of a handy ultimate weapon. The message here is that science and the military can contain any monstrosity they might inadvertently unleash. The safety precautions work.

After The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Them! , the Bomb and its side-effects became central to monster movies. Somehow, the atomic angle became bankable. The titles alone are testimony: Atom Man Versus Superman (1950), U-238 and the Witch Doctor (1953, a cut-down of the serial Jungle Drums of Africa), The Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), Atomic Rulers of the World (1956, originally Kotetsu No Kyojin), The H-Man, The Atomic Submarine (1959), Atom Age Vampire (1960, actually an Italian film Seddok, l’erede di Satana), The Atomic Brain (1963), The Fiend With the Atomic Brain (1972, Blood of Ghastly Horror). Man-Made Monster (1941) was re-released as The Atomic Monster, Bride of the Monster (1956) was originally Bride of the Atom, the British Timeslip became The Atomic Man in America and a feature-length version of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial was retitled Atomic Spaceship. Just as later films would put ‘sex’ or ‘blood’

in their titles, these movies capitalize on atomic buzz-words to lure in a nuke-conscious audience. Sometimes, the deception was deliberate: Kurt Neumann’s The Fly (1958), a film about a matter transmitter that deals in atoms but not atomics, was misleadingly advertised as ‘the first time Atomic Mutation on humans has been shown on screen’.

The sublime terror that accompanies the epochal failure of society and individual men and women has not, especially in the case of the 1950s creature film, been represented in holy enough language. The characters in most of these efforts are flat caricatures who bathet-ically spout maudlin clichés, mouth scientific mumbo-jumbo, and scream hysterically for far too long in the direction of monstrously large reptiles. These gross efforts, pathetic claptrap, answer the most significant question of the 20th century with tacky special effects, papier-mâché sets, and idiotic plots. How can lumbering dinosaurs spewing atomic fire, giant carnivorous plants, and implacable mutant insects approach the fiery chaos that engulfed Japan? The force that

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killed too many in a hellish firestorm, the force that poisoned thousands more with pestilent radiation, the force powerful enough to etch the shadows of unknowing pedestrians into the cement is not a fit subject for cheap Hollywood productions. We needed a responsible contemporary of Bosch or Goya and not Samuel Z. Arkoff or Roger Corman to render, in proper proportions, our deadliest spectacle.5

Aside from occasional class acts like The Thing From Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or Jack Arnold’s remarkable series for Universal, s-f in the 50s was strictly a B genre. However, it would be an error to assume that the low-grade atomic paranoia movies constitute a coherent expression of a single point of view. Even among the quickest of the quickies, there exists a surprising spectrum of attitudes to the atomic society. These films fall roughly into two separate groups – those produced by the B units of major studios to support their own A features, and those made by independent producers for grindhouse and drive-in double bills. In the former camp we have Columbia’s It Came From Beneath the Sea, Universal’s The Deadly Mantis (1957) and United Artists’

The Monster That Challenged The World (1957); while the latter is represented by the likes of Bert I. Gordon’s The Amazing Colossal Man and Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), both released through American International.

On the whole, the major studios have better special effects and thus are more confident in staging scenes of mass devastation (though the Deadly Mantis’s attack on Washington is every bit as feeble and unconvincing as the Colossal Man’s rampage in Las Vegas). They can afford to rely on the fairly expansive formula of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Them! , building up to a battle between monster and military. Not uncoincidentally, the major studio films cited above were made with the co-operation of the Department of Defence; independent producers almost never received loans of men and materiel from the armed forces. The indies are forced to use claustrophobic settings, fewer characters and do without heavy artillery. Sometimes this means that the monsters have to be weedy enough to be killed off with a blowtorch ( It Conquered the World, 1956) or hot rod headlights ( Invasion of the Saucer Men, 1957), but occasionally budgetary restrictions lend a doomy feeling of helplessness to the struggle.

At the major studios, quick-thinking military men of action are valued more than the muddle-headed men of science. In Robert Gordon’s It Came From Beneath the Sea, the love triangle is resolved when

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Dr Donald Curtis steps aside so that Navy man Kenneth Tobey can get Faith Domergue to give up the laboratory for the kitchen. Which shouldn’t be too hard, since all she does while the boys are discussing the giant octopus that threatens San Francisco is make coffee and look beautiful. Arnold Laven’s The Monster That Challenged the World is more interesting in its military/scientific polarity. Prehistoric eggs long dor-mant in an inland sea are hatched into giant mollusc creatures when nuclear waste is dumped. The fault is squarely with civilian eggheads (atomic power), but the victims who get fried and/or eaten are downto-earth Navy fliers. Lieutenant Commander Tim Holt romances base secretary Audrey Dalton, a widow whose little girl likes to play in the laboratory. A nascent scientist, the kid learns her lesson when her tampering with the thermostat awakens the last of the killer snails. Holt saves everyone, the equation between reckless science and childish blun-dering has been made, and we realize white-coats need uniforms to bail them out when they foul up.

In It Came From Beneath the Sea, Tobey reprimands a hesitant comrade with ‘you’re not afraid of a little radiation are ya?’ The major studios were unable to exclude the atomic angle from their films, but tended to play it down. Only in the independently-produced, studio-released Beast From 20,000 Fathoms do we get to see the test that revives the monster; in Them! and It Came From Beneath the Sea the big bangs take place off-screen before the action. Nathan Juran’s The Deadly Mantis opens with 20 minutes of stock footage from air force shorts ( Guardians All, One Plane – One Bomb, SFP308) and narration that informs us of the great job being done for the free world by SAC and the DEW line. The giant praying mantis isn’t woken by the Bomb, but by an erupting volcano. The military spot the big bug as it flies south and are ready for it by the time it reaches the States. The Deadly Mantis is a symbol for the Bomb all right, only the Bomb it symbolizes belongs to Someone Else.

The independent films are less afraid to make allegations. In The Amazing Colossal Man, we see Colonel Glenn Langan disobey orders and rush into the site of a ‘plutonium bomb’ test in order to rescue the pilot of a crashed plane. Exposed to the blast, he has all his skin and body hair blasted off. Attack of the Crab Monsters concerns a scientific team sent to a Pacific Island to assess the effects of fall-out from H-Bomb tests on the flora and fauna. Both films deal with innocent victims of ill-advised tests and feature conscience-stricken Oppenheimer-type scientists trying to solve the problem in a test tube while the army is out blowing things up. The major studios present simple soldier heroes who act by the book and never question orders, but the independents are actively

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anti-military. ‘What sins could a man commit in a single life time that he should deserve this?’ asks the misanthropic, confused, doubting Colossal Man, flashing back to hand-to-hand dirtiness in Korea. The Amazing Colossal Man isn’t a very good film, but it fits the anxious/paranoid view of the 50s better than self-confident exercises like The Deadly Mantis.

Gordon brought the Colossal Man back in War of the Colossal Beast (1958, The Terror Strikes) and starred another radioactive giant in The Cyclops (1957). Since he uses wonder drugs to make people and animals big in The Beginning of the End (1957), Village of the Giants (1965) and Food of the Gods (1976), shrunk people with light rays in Attack of the Puppet People (1958, Six Inches Tall) and never bothered to explain the gigantism of The Spider (1958, Earth Versus the Spider), he was obviously more interested in the effect than the cause.

Attack of the Crab Monsters, despite its ludicrous villains, is a decent, chilling little film. Though the monsters look especially ridiculous in stills, they are slightly more effective in the film itself, which is dimly-lit enough to disguise the shortcomings of the giant crab outfits. Its military characters get killed early, leaving the problem to be solved by a group of multi-national scientists. One by one, they are murdered and decapitated, and the island crumbles until it is little more than an atoll. Whereas major studio monsters tend to be mindless destruction machines, the independents favour intelligent, even articulate, mutations. The Colossal Man rants endlessly about his personal problems; the Crab Monsters absorb the contents of the brains they eat, and get smarter with each kill. Like the monster in Corman’s The Day the World Ended (1956) and the invulnerable gangster in The Most Dangerous Man Alive, the Crab Monsters are functional mutations, more fit than man to survive a radiation-polluted environment. In this, films were following science fiction magazines, where, as Paul Brians points out in Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1984 (1987), ‘the most common side effect of radiation is not blindness, hemophilia or limblessness; it is the ability to read minds.’6

The majors were unwilling or unable to deal with their atomic monsters in anything but the most cut-and-dried, official-line-toeing terms.

The doubts of The Amazing Colossal Man or the dreads of Attack of the Crab Monsters are nowhere to be found. Jack Arnold, a liberal whose films were made within the studio system, touches only tan-gentially on nuclear issues. However, Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), inspiration of course for The Amazing Colossal Man, is an atomic mutation movie. Grant Williams’s yacht drifts through a radioactive dust cloud and he begins to shrink. The origin of the cloud is barely

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considered and the film is concerned mainly with the physical and psychological plight of a man growing too small for his white-collar life.

Screenwriter Richard Matheson, adapting his novel The Shrinking Man (1956), later worked with Roger Corman on his Edgar Allan Poe films; he ends his script with an echo of Corman’s benevolent mutation theme by having Williams enter a sub-atomic world of wonders and make peace with the universe. Arnold and Matheson have a more generous vision than Bert I. Gordon; the Amazing Colossal Man is gunned down on Boulder Dam, but the Incredible Shrinking Man finds transcendence in a microscopic landscape.

Outside America, the concerns were subtly (sometimes not so subtly) different. Japan’s Toho Studios were so impressed with The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms that they assigned Ishiro Honda to direct an unofficial remake, Gojira. The film was a big hit in Japan, and got exported to the rest of the world as Godzilla, King of Monsters, with new scenes involving Raymond Burr as an American reporter spliced into the old footage.

Gojira is a film from the nation that had the Bomb dropped on them, and it shows. We identify with King Kong and to some extent share his desire to trash New York, but the devastation of Tokyo in Gojira is agonising. The film opens in the burning ruins of the city, and flashes back to the lead-up story. Gojira is a rare monster movie to go into the nasty details of the catastrophe: hordes of injured refugees, thronging field hospitals, churches full of widows and orphans. The monster is not only completely unsympathetic, but also a far more explicit symbol for the Bomb than any of its American counterparts. The creature has fiery radioactive breath, and its spines glow ominously whenever it exterminates anything.

Gojira is, at one remove, about the physical after-effects of the Bomb (a chilling little scene, not in the export version, has a doctor diagnose that a perky little girl with radiation poisoning is inescapably doomed), but it also tries to discuss the moral dilemma surrounding its use. Gojira is an enemy as unreasonable and implacable as any dictator, and conventional weapons are useless against it. The film’s hero, an embittered scientist, has invented an unlikely-sounding ultimate weapon, the Oxygen Destroyer. With the Oxygen Destroyer, Gojira could be defeated, but the scientist wants to suppress his invention for the good of humanity.

In an American film, the tension would rise from the race-against-time development of the monster-destroying weapon, which would then be used speedily and with no qualms (cf: Earth vs the Flying Saucers, 1956).

Much of the last third of Gojira is taken up with the scientist agoniz-ing over the ethics of unleashing such a terrible force. In a typically

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Japanese heroic gesture, he finally deploys the Oxygen Destroyer against the monster, turning it instantly into a skeleton, then commits suicide so that his deadly knowledge will be lost forever.

The film was a sensational success, in Japan and abroad, and led to the thriving and popular Kaiju Eiga genre of giant monster movies. Godzilla was swiftly brought back for Motoyoshi Oda’s Gojira no Gyakushu (1955, Gigantis the Fire Monster), a quickie sequel which introduced not the oxygen-destroyed skeleton in Tokyo Bay but a relative, who proceeded to stomp through a series of encounters with rival monsters until 1975, then vanished until Kohji Hashimoto’s Gojira (1984, Godzilla 1985) did resurrect the original beast and inaugurated its own cycle, which wound up in 1995 to make way for Roland Emmerich’s Americanized Godzilla (1998). Less impressive as an effects-created creature than Harryhausen’s rhedosaurus, Godzilla – a lumbering stuntman in a suit, dragging a tail across fabulously detailed miniature sets – became a far more lasting icon of the unleashed atom, though he gradually reformed under the influence of the children who formed the core of his adoring audience.

The first Japanese monster movies were sombre, black and white efforts, with few of the wisecracks found in contemporary American films. However, the tone of the films soon changed. In Honda’s Rodan (1956), a pair of revived pterodactyls make sonic booms that are as destructive as A-Bomb blasts. But they don’t mean any harm and, when one is killed, the mate commits grief-stricken suicide by flying into a volcano. Rodan is sentimental in pretty-pretty colours, while Gojira is grim in black and white. In later Kaiju Eiga films, the scenes of mass destruction are visually appealing and almost cheerful. The most charmingly surreal of the run is Honda’s Mosura (1961, Mothra), which features a giant moth revived by nuclear testing in the Pacific and also caricatures America as the aggressive Republic of ‘Roliscia’, but features such fantastical devices as tiny twin singing princesses to give it a fairytale feel.

In subsequent films, the monsters reformed and became sympathetic protectors of the Earth from alien invaders, befriending small children and paternally encouraging young love.

Godzilla began a series of monster bouts with Honda’s Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (1962, King Kong vs. Godzilla) and Mosura tai Gojira (1964, Godzilla vs. the Thing), then began his rehabilitation by teaming with former enemy Mothra and Rodan against a triple-threat from outer space in Honda’s San Daikaiju Chikyu Sandai no Kessen (1964, Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster). Mosura tai Gojira is the last of the original series to pay much attention to Godzilla’s nuclear origins – visiting the formerly par-adisiacal island home of Mothra, a Japanese reporter (Akira Takarada)

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muses ‘it’s like the end of the world here . . . this island alone is good reason to end nuclear testing’ – and it has a streak of melancholy to go with its colourful and destructive battle scenes. Not coincidentally, it was also the last film to cast Godzilla as a bad guy; once the giant reptile was on our side, his radioactivity wore off or went unmentioned, and his fire-breathing trick was just another attribute of his dragon-like hero status rather than a mark of mutation.

In his increasingly silly, occasionally endearing way, Godzilla took on Ghidrah again (Honda’s Kaiju Daisenso/ Monster Zero, 1965, and Kaiji Soshingeki/ Destroy All Monsters, 1968), battled a giant lobster (Jun Fukuda’s Gojira, Ebirah, Mosura: Nankai no Dai Ketto/ Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, 1966), learned parental responsibility (Fukuda’s Kaiju Shima no Kessen: Gojira No Musuku/ Son of Godzilla, 1967), appeared in the Play It Again, Sam fantasies of a bullied child (Honda’s Gojira-Minira-Gabara:Oru kaijû daishingeki 1969), tackled a creature who embodies pollution in a brief return to seriousness (Yoshimitsu Banno’s Gojira tai Hedorah/ Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, 1971) and dealt with ridiculous-looking creatures (eg: Gigan, a fat metallic parrot with a buzzsaw in its stomach for breaking up wrestling holds) under the control of alien invaders (Fukuda’s Chikyu Kogeki Meirei: Gojira tai Gaigan/ Godzilla vs.

Gigan, 1972, Gojira tai Megaro/ Godzilla vs. Megalon, 1973, and Gojira tai Mechagojira/ Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster, 1974, and Honda’s Mekagojira no Gyakushu/ Monsters From an Unknown Planet/ Terror of Mechagodzilla, 1975).

Godzilla’s change of heart was influenced by the success of a series from Toho’s great rival, Daiei Studios. Noriaki Yuasa’s Daikaiju Gamera (1965, Gammera the Invincible) introduced Gamera, a giant turtle who divides his time between rescuing children and tearing chunks out of more ferocious, malevolent monsters. There were Japanese monster movies which didn’t imitate the city-stomping Godzilla and Gamera films, often featuring bizarre human mutations created by scientific experiment or mishap. The stalwart Ishiro Honda alone was responsible for the human blob gangster of Bijo to Ekitai-Ningen (1958, The H-Man), the self-explanatory Gasu Ningen dai Ichigo (1960, The Human Vapor), and the shipwrecked yacht party who transform into colourful fungus creatures in Matango (1963, Matango – Fungus of Terror/Attack of the Mushroom People). In competition with these oddities were the teleporting electro-man of Jun Fukuda’s Denso Ningen (1960, The Secret of the Telegian) and Peter Dyneley as the man who splits into two monsters in George Breakston and Kenneth Crane’s US–Japanese The Split (1961, The Manster). However, the G-Force was irresistible and many

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imitators weighed into the fray, affording the spectacle of sumo wrestlers in uncomfortable suits grappling among decreasingly impressive miniature sets: Honda’s Uchi daikaiju Dogora (1965, Dagora, the Space Monster), Haruyasu Noguchi’s Daikyoju Gappa (1967, Gappa, the Triphibian Monster), Kazui Nihonmatsu’s Uchu daikaiju Guirara (1968, The X From Outer Space), Honda’s Gezora Ganime Kameba Kessen nankai no daikaiju (1970, Yog: Monster From Space).

In the 50s, Britain was failing to come to terms with its increasing irrelevance to the global superpower confrontation. British atomic monster movies are therefore much more nervous than their American inspirations. Leslie Norman’s X the Unknown (1956) and Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face (1958) seem to be pro-militarist movies along the lines of Them! but are far less self-confident. In X, the army confronts a ravenous radioactive blob from the bowels of the Earth in Scotland; while Fiend (set in a Home Counties version of Manitoba) exonerates a military atomic installation and blames the brain-eating monsters on a local mad scientist. The scripts are woodenly heroic, with stolid soldiers and dedicated military scientists handling problems bravely, but the visuals tell another story. X the Unknown opens with a bored army unit using geiger counters on a desolate beach, and an edgy, black and white gloom is cast over the entire film. Sympathetic characters (including children) are gruesomely eaten and the government men who face the crisis are high-handed time-servers. Fiend Without a Face undercuts its endorsement of the army with an amazingly graphic final shoot-out as the brain creatures are splattered to death. As in many British films of the time, the authorities are presented as remote and unsympathetic. Joseph Losey, who was to have made X the Unknown for Hammer, returned to the company with The Damned (aka These Are the Damned, 1961), the most vicious indictment imaginable of official policy in the face of the possibility of nuclear holocaust.

In the late 50s, the atomic mutation cycle began to lose momen-tum. The majors dropped the genre first, then the independents began to cool off. Eugène Lourié, director of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, went to Britain to do yet another remake, Behemoth the Sea Monster.

Two years later, he did the story again as Gorgo (1961) but cut the nuke angle completely. Meanwhile, Fred F. Sears’s The Werewolf (1956), Gene Fowler’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Herbert L. Strock’s Blood of Dracula (1958, Blood Is My Heritage) combined radiation with more traditional movie monstrousness. During this cycle, even Baron Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) needed to employ an atomic pile, in Howard W. Koch’s Frankenstein 1970 (1958). In these films, mad scientists turn innocents

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into monsters in order to create a hardier human being able to survive in a tougher, post-holocaust world. Here, the soldier/scientist opposition is downplayed in favour of generation gap stories in which elderly scientists are intent on ruling the lives of happy-go-lucky teenagers who only want their inalienable right to drag-race, neck and listen to rock

‘n’ roll.

After the first burst of mutant movies, when any self-respecting monster had to be radioactive, the sub-genre’s half-life dwindled. The task of keeping the form ticking was left to a trickle of mostly ridiculous and self-explanatory obscurities like Kenneth G. Crane’s Monster From Green Hell (1958) (giant wasps in Africa), Bernard L. Kowalski’s Attack of the Giant Leeches (1960, Demons of the Swamp), Robert Hutton’s The Slime People (1963) (more scaly than slimy), Del Tenney’s The Horror of Party Beach (1964) (underwater fish-human zombies), Lawrence Huntington’s The Vulture (1967) (Akim Tamiroff with wings and clawed feet), Harry Essex’s Octaman (1971) (yes, a man with an octopus for a head), Stephen Traxler’s Slithis (1978, Spawn of the Slithis), Douglas Camfield’s TV serial The Nightmare Man (1981) (a Soviet pilot fused with his crashed atomic warplane) and Greydon Clark’s The Uninvited (1987) (a cute cat escaped from a nuclear lab, who periodically transforms into a killer puppet).

Beach blanket boppers in their bikinis and ball-huggers are being menaced by monsters that were created when drums of radioactive waste leaked. But not to worry; though a few girls get carved up, all comes right in the end in time for one last wiener roast before school starts again. These things happen only rarely because directors, writers and producers want them to happen; they happen on their own.

The producers of The Horror of Party Beach, for example, were two Connecticut drive-in owners who saw a chance to turn a quick buck in the low-budget horror-movie name. The fact that they created a film which foresaw a problem that would become very real ten years down the road was only an accident . . . but an accident, like Three Mile Island, that perhaps had to happen sooner or later . . . The producers of The Horror of Party Beach never sat down, I’m sure (just as I’m sure the producers of The China Syndrome did), and said to each other: ‘Look – we’re going to warn the people of America about the dangers of nuclear reactors, and we will sugar coat the pill of this vital message with an entertaining story line.’ No, the line of discussion would have been more apt to go like this: Because our target audience is young, we’ll feature young people, and because our target audience is interested in sex, we’ll site it on a sun-and-surf type beach, which

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allows us to show all the flesh the censors will allow. And because our target audience like grue, we’ll give them gross monsters. But because any horror film has got to at least pay lip service to credibility, there had to be some reason for these monsters to suddenly come out of the ocean and start doing all these antisocial things. What the producers decided upon was nuclear waste, leaking from those dumped canisters. I’m sure it was one of the least important points in their preproduction discussions, and for that very reason it becomes very important.7

By the late 60s, the stragglers of the radioactive mutant film were confined to a few out-of-touch countries like South Korea (Kiduck Kim’s Dai Koesu Yongkari/ Yongary, Monster From the Deep, 1967) and the Philippines (Gerardo De Leon’s Brides of Blood, 1968). In George A. Romero’s seminal horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968), the dead come back to life and start eating the living. We are reminded of the radioactive para-sites that got the corpses walking in Edward L. Cahn’s Invisible Invaders (1958), but when the situation is ‘explained’ as the result of radiation from a crashed space probe, it’s supposed to be a joke. The film is an assault on our complacency and its events are so horrifying that the actual reason for the violence – obscured further in Romero’s follow-ups Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1984) – is simply irrelevant.

All monster movies have subtexts; if Them! is about the Bomb, then Night of the Living Dead is about Vietnam. In the 70s, films such as George McCowan’s Frogs (1972) and Peter Sasdy’s Doomwatch (1972) are about pollution. In the 80s, there was a mini-trend of toxic waste monster movies (John Bud Cardos’s Mutant, 1984; Graham Baker’s Impulse, 1984; Michael Herz and Samuel Weil’s The Toxic Avenger, 1984), and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D (1984) mixes toxic with nuclear waste and comes up with radioactive cannibal mutants wandering the New York sewers. Troma, following up their Toxic Avenger, got into the nuclear business with a run of ghastly wannabe comedies illustrating the dire consequences of storing radioactive waste in a high school: Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986), Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown (1991), Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part III: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid (1992). Troma’s anything-for-offence approach, which includes the rampages of Tromie the Giant Nuclear Squirrel, is curiously self-defeating: by straining to make the kind of cult kitsch the makers of The Horror of Party Beach came up with without effort, they create very thin, bad-tasting beer indeed, and the foregrounding of an anti-nuke sub-text only serves to make it utterly meaningless.

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The rehabilitation of Gojira in films like Yoshimitsu Banno’s Gojira tai Hedora (1971, Godzilla Vs the Smog Monster) parallels the recession in nuclear anxiety during detente. However, Kohji Hashimoto’s Gojira (1984, Godzilla 1985), a remake-cum-revisionary-sequel, sets aside all the series since the original and tries to get serious again, indicting (in the Japanese version, at least) both the Soviets and the Americans as the Japanese government resists pressure to deploy nuclear weapons against the revived monster. This led to a revival of the Kaiju Eiga, re-introducing Ghidorah, Mothra and the rest of the gang, and refining Godzilla’s origin story. In Kazuki Omori’s Gojira vs. Kingu Ghidora (1991, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah), we learn that Godzilla was originally an ‘ordinary’

dinosaur, a prehistoric survival friendly to Japanese troops in the Pacific during WWII, and that it mutated into the familiar creature thanks to bomb tests. Time travellers from the future, out to forestall Japan’s economic dominance, try to tinker with the past and unmake the monster, but it seems that the post-1945 nuclear world will inevitably create the Godzilla it needs. The new series also included Kazuki Omori’s Gojira vs.

Beorante (1989, Godzilla vs. Biollante), Takao Okawara’s Gojira vs. Mosura (1991, Godzilla vs. Mothra) and Gojira vs. Mekagojira (1993, Godzilla vs.

Mechagodzilla) and Kenshou Yamashita’s Gojira vs. Supeesu Gojira (1994, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla), then climaxed with the return of pleasing circularity by bringing back original heroine Momoko Kochi and the Oxygen Destroyer, incarnated as a monster in Takao Okawara’s Gojira vs.

Desutoroia ( Godzilla vs. Destroyer, 1995) and the supposedly final death of the original Godzilla.

With Godzilla reaching the end of his second screen series in the mid-90s, Daiei took the opportunity to get back in the kaiju eiga game by reviving their own monster, giving him a new origin myth and pit-ting him against the bird-creatures of Noriaki Yuasa’s Daikaiju kuchusen Gamera tai Gyaosu (1967, Gamera vs. Gaos) in Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera Daikaiju Kuchu Kessen (1997, Gamera the Guardian of the Universe).

Successful enough to relaunch the series, this back-to-basics Japanese monster movie is among the best of its genre. Kaneko takes the absurd epic with a refreshingly straight face, making some sequences actually moving or frightening as well as exciting on a smash-’em-up level.

Gamera himself remains more than a tad ridiculous, especially when using jet exhausts to turn his shell into a species of flying saucer (we are told the monster is ‘not the product of evolution’, which explains a lot).

The silly design of the original is modified but Gamera is still stuck with ridiculous aspects such as a set of impractical tusks, though the quality of the miniature work as cities are devastated and monsters tangle with each other is exemplary.

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In a familiar plot structure, the film opens with various omens and sightings, sends off experts to puzzle together the mystery while the monsters go from glimpsed attacks to all-out war, culminating in a big show-down between the good guy creature and the avian embodiment of flesh-eating evil. As in the 1990s Godzilla films, a young girl is psychically linked to Gamera, adding a rooting interest in that she sym-pathetically shares the wounds inflicted on him by the especially vicious Gyaos monsters. The script has a few adult touches – the ornitholo-gist heroine learns of her mentor’s fate when she finds his glasses in a lump of Gyaos excrement – but goes out of its way not to throw in the pseudo-American razzamatazz of the resurgent Toho films. The heroes are models of Japanese virtue, dutiful and polite; the big moral quandary faced by the authorities is again whether Japan has the right to launch a military attack even in defence (and the army chooses to attack the wrong monster). We are even shown how monster attacks affect Tokyo’s public transport system and the value of the yen (it plummets). Though the film opens with a ship carrying plutonium waste encountering the Gyaos, these monsters are – like Mothra – more mystic in origin, and it turns out that Gamera, who is disguised as an island when we first meet him, was genetically-engineered by a lost civilization for the purpose of defending the world against any monsters that might come along of their own accord or be created by man’s hubris.

Roland Emmerich’s American Godzilla (1998) amusingly replaces the anti-American bias of the Japanese films with an indictment of the per-fidious French, whose Pacific tests have not awakened a dinosaur but mutated an iguana (as in Mark Jacobson’s odd literary novel Gojiro, 1991) into a streamlined, lantern-jawed beast which heads for New York in a de facto remake of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The lazy comic edge of the Hollywood Godzilla obscures its reversal of the militarism of Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996): as much damage is caused to the city by the bungled application of US firepower as by the monster.

At one point, heat-seeking missiles are fired at a cold-blooded beast. It is perhaps a symptom of the changes of anxiety about the nuclear threat that Godzilla even lets its ostensible villains off lightly. Jean Reno, the French covert operative in charge of covering up the fiasco, is heroic and sympathetic, while the army are clod-hopping rather than callous.

This monster is just another big animal (nature run amok, again), suggesting a world more worried about nuclear tests because of their impact on the environment than because they might be a preliminary for war.

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Notes

1. This essay previously appeared in Millennium Movies (London: Titan, 1999).

2. Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 127.

3. Steve Rubin, ‘Retrospect: Them! ’, Cinefantastique 3, no. 4 (1974): pp. 23–7.

4. Biskind, see note 2.

5. Jonathan Lake Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film (California: Sage Publications, 1994), p. 102.

6. Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1984 (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), p. 67.

7. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Warner, 1981), p. 182.

4

‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The

Fifties Hammer Invasion

Wayne Kinsey

In 2009 the British Film Institute re-released an uncut version of Hammer’s original ‘X’ (16) rated 1958 production of Dracula as a certificate ‘12A’. The main cut that had been reinstated was of a staking which showed the stake entering a body, with the welling of blood: a scene that the UK Censor at the time deemed too graphic for an adult audience to see. Yet, the same scene survived in the American print for parental guided matinees.

However, times are a changing. Today we become desensitized to horror through factual events graphically shown on prime time news programmes and the horror film has simply adjusted in order to stay one step ahead. As a pathologist, I have a duty to safeguard people from the horrors of the post mortem room; even medical students at the University of East Anglia have a counselling session on ‘how to deal with a dead body’ before they can see an autopsy. With that in mind, I remember questioning the responsibility of the makers of Saw IV

(2007), who open their movie with a sexed-up, extremely graphic and life-like autopsy that revolted even me, who does the job regularly. And that was on DVD in the safety of my lounge, not watching it in the dark on an enormous screen. I often wonder what would happen if the audience of 1958 had to sit in front of that. I’m sure they would need the services of a pathologist the next day!

Then again, if I were living in the fifties, maybe I would be saying the same about the new, all-colour, graphic and sexually-charged Hammer horror films that were just emerging, while defending the moral ground of the black and white Universal cycle of the thirties and forties.

The point I’m trying to make here is that any essay on the impact of Hammer horror in the fifties must be taken in the context of the time period they were made. As we emerge from the noughties following 72

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these years of desensitization, it can be difficult now to appreciate the impact fifties’ horror classics made at the time they were released (at a time when this author was not even a twinkle in his parents’ eyes); particularly in light of the fact that children and young adults today see these films as very tame (hence their DVD releases as certificate

‘12’). So what evidence do we have 50 years on to remind ourselves of what was acceptable back in those halcyon days when TV was only just starting to appear in ordinary British homes? To the rescue comes our guardian angels of all things decent (yes, those latter day spoilsports) –
the good old British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). Their deliberation will form the core of this essay’s exploration of the impact of Hammer horror in the 1950s.

By the close of the 1940s, the sun was setting on Universal’s Gothic horror cycle and they were giving their monsters an undignified send off in the hands of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello – Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953); Frankenstein (1948); The Mummy (1955); The Invisible Man (1951) and The Killer, Boris Karloff (1949). Instead, horror and sci-fi had meshed into a cacophony of bug-eyed monsters and giant insects as the paranoia of the nuclear age took its toll. Enter Hammer films.

Hammer began as the production arm of a family distribution company called Exclusive Films (run by the Carreras and Hinds families). The company chairman, James Carreras, was persuaded to hurl the company into film production in 1948 by Jack Goodlatte, managing director of the ABC cinema chain, as post-war Britain started flocking to the cinema again. Hammer started off by playing it safe with big screen adaptations of successful radio and TV shows, such as Dick Barton, PC 49, The Man in Black and the Lyons family. And this is how they came to produce their first real horror film in 1954, The Quatermass Xperiment.

In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. The sales of TVs went through the roof to watch the spectacle and the BBC (the sole TV station at that time) now had an appreciable audience to entertain. To bolster the summer schedule they turned to Manx writer Nigel Kneale and asked him to pen a 6-part serial for Saturday evenings. Initially called Bring Something Back, cashing in on the festering paranoia of space flight, Kneale took the name of his plagued rocket scientist from the telephone directory and The Quatermass Experiment was born. Britain’s first manned rocket returns to earth with one survivor who, infected by a drifting alien intelligence, slowly metamorphoses into a creature capable of sporing and taking over the planet. It was Doctor Who for grown-ups, except that where you previously hid from the Daleks behind the safety

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of your own sofa, now Quatermass was so scary you hid behind your neighbour’s sofa! Britain was gripped as each Saturday night the story unfolded – and the producers at Hammer also watched, wringing their hands with pound signs in their eyes.

Hammer seized the moment and dropped the ‘E’ from Experiment in the title to emphasize the ‘X’ certificate. At an early stage, they realised the benefits in appeasing the BBFC and sent the script in for comment before production. Hammer would continue this during their horror cycle – not that they always took notice – but it gave them a chance to anticipate what scenes would later come under attack when they submitted the final film for certification. Even at this stage, milder than the colour shockers to come, the BBFC had their reservations: We have now read the screenplay of The Quatermass Experiment which was enclosed with your letter of the 27 August. I must warn you at this stage that, while we accept this story in principle for the ‘X’ category, we could not certificate, even in that category, a film treatment in which the horrific element was so exaggerated as to be nauseating and revolting to adult audiences. Nor can we pass uncut, even in the

‘X’ category, sequences in which physical agony and screams of pain or terror are unnecessarily exaggerated or prolonged.1

The next test for the film after surviving the censor’s scissors was of course the acceptance by the critics (who never warmed to horror films and could never accept them as worthy of serious attention). Director Val Guest (veteran writer of the Will Hay and Crazy Gang comedies) had done his job well and the critics’ comments were mixed. The New Statesman wrote, ‘Val Guest directed and A. Hinds produced. None of these –
if I may put it so – are classed among our swells; but they have done their job well, and the result seems to be a better film than either The War of the Worlds or Them.’2 Meanwhile, Reynolds News lamented, ‘That TV pseudo-science shocker The Quatermass Xperiment has been filmed.

And quitermess [ sic] they’ve made of it, too.’3

Its success encouraged Hammer to make two further sci-fi shockers in early 1956. First was X the Unknown, an original tale about a mass of radioactive slime that escapes from a fissure on the Scottish moors to scour the countryside in search of radioactive calories. It was the first script by former Hammer production manager Jimmy Sangster and was again passed on to BBFC for comment. Their readers had a field day: I think the film company should be strongly cautioned on treatment: we cannot stop them making the film, but I think it will revolt many

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people – even The Quatermass Experiment did this, and it was mild compared with the present subject. The free use of the words ‘evil’

and ‘obscene’ is ominous. Well, no one can say the customers won’t have had their money’s worth by now. In fact, someone will almost certainly have been sick. We must have a great deal more restraint, and much more done by onlookers’ reactions instead of by shots of

‘pulsating obscenity’, hideous scars, hideous sightless faces, etc., etc.

It is keeping on and on in the same vein that makes this script so outrageous. They must take it away and prune. Before they take it away, however, I think the President should read it. I have a stronger stomach than the average (for viewing purposes) and perhaps I ought to be reacting even more strongly.

The readers’ comments were submitted to the BBFC secretary, Arthur Watkins, whose job it was to convey their misgivings in a somewhat more diplomatic manner to Hammer,

We have now read the draft script of X the Unknown. While we have no basic objection to the story for the ‘X’ category, we consider that a great number of details will prove too nauseating even for that category and that much more restraint will be necessary in preparing the shooting script, which we should see. This applies particularly to shots of ‘the unknown’, which are too numerous and in many cases likely to be too revolting, and to the shots of its victims, alive and dead.

Watkins went on to list problematic scenes, such as, ‘the final shots, in which his face runs into “horrible blodges of formless flesh” and the eyeball loosens in its socket, are quite prohibitive.’ Producer Tony Hinds replied with hollow reassurance,

I have noted all your comments and will act accordingly. The ‘angry blisters’ on the boy’s body will be handled with care; the ‘burn scars’

on the Old Soldier will not be in any way horrific; the love-making will be played for comedy and will not be distasteful; and the shots of the ‘Unknown’ will be cut down to the minimum (I only wish I thought it could look half as exciting as the writer has described it!) With regard to the two horror sequences, Unwin being attacked by the ‘Unknown’ and the body of the soldier in the fissure, I think the only thing we can do is shoot them and then show them to you. The shot of the Security Guard engulfed in slime will simply be a shot of

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a man sprayed with chocolate blancmange and I do not think it will be upsetting.

Hinds raised an important point here in that the written word was often far more horrific that anything Hammer could conjure up on screen.

Next came Hammer’s interpretation of Kneale’s second Quatermass serial, Quatermass 2. This time Kneale himself worked on the first draft and director Val Guest was again brought in to refine it and direct it.

The script, however, still caused consternation among the readers at the BBFC:

What nonsense. Sillier than Quatermass I, or the other recent effu-sion from Hammer Films on the same lines. However, it is the sort of nonsense which aims at an ‘X’ certificate and is quite disgusting, if not frightening enough, to get it. I think I am right in saying that Quatermass II on television was preceded by the customary caution about children and nervous people; and the only part I saw (which involved engulfing people with slime) was quite sickening enough to be kept away from the very young or the moderately squeamish. For

‘X’, there should be the customary general caution that the sky is not the limit, either in sights or sounds.

Strange as it may seem, Hammer’s sci-fi revolution still wasn’t the catalyst that led to their horror revival. That came through one of James Carreras’ contacts at the Variety Club, head of New York based Associated Artists Pictures, Eliot Hyman (Carreras had been Chief Barker of the Royal Variety Club in 1954/55). Two fledgling producers, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, had just produced their first film, a Rock ’n’ Roll ‘musical’ called Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956), and now presented Hyman with an adaptation of Frankenstein. Intrigued by the idea, Hyman was not going to risk such a project with a couple that had only one film to their name, and a Rock ’n’ Roll musical at that, but told them he knew a man in England who could pull it off and directed them to James Carreras at Hammer with the premise of a co-production deal.

Hammer took the bait, but they were not impressed with Subotsky’s script, which drifted dangerously close to ideas developed by Universal in the 1931 version of Frankenstein, which may well have led to litigation problems. Subotsky was bought out and Hammer’s producer, Tony Hinds, placed the rewrite in the hands of Jimmy Sangster. The story has an interesting postscript: the two gentlemen who were deemed incapable of producing a horror picture went on to found Amicus

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Productions, who became Hammer’s main rival in horror films in the sixties and seventies, famed for their portmanteau style horror pictures.

Sangster explains his approach to the script: I was a production manager at the time, so I knew about budgets and I did tailor it to a certain extent to Hammer’s financial restrictions.

In every Frankenstein film there’s always peasants storming the castle at the end to burn it down. Tony said, ‘You can hear the peasants, you can see the torch light on the trees, but you can’t see the peasants.

We can’t afford it.’ So you have to be a bit imaginative. I told that story at a French film festival and I didn’t get a titter. I asked my interpreter later what went wrong. ‘Oh, peasants,’ she said. ‘I thought you said pheasants!’4

Once more, Hammer sent a copy of Sangster’s script to the BBFC for comment. The response from the readers was predictable, This is infinitely more disgusting than the first script. In fact, really evil. A lip-smacking relish for mutilated corpses, repulsive dismembered hands and eyeballs removed from the head, alternates with gratuitous examples of sadism and lust. While the general outline of the story cannot be rejected for ‘X’, a great many details will have to be modified or eliminated.

Other readers had equally strong views:

This is certainly a monstrous script. It is ludicrously written, with a complete disrespect for history . . . None of the details of the creature’s birth and activities bears much resemblance to what I have read of him and the author has done his best to pile horror on horror in a way that, in my opinion, makes it unlikely that we should be able to pass such a film as this . . . It seems to me that a film that is even somewhat watered down from this script might give many adults a nightmare: people who go to a Frankenstein film expect horror but is a horror based on a family well-known legend and not this sort of stuff.

Another added,

This is a loathsome story and I regret that it should come from a British team. We have had some horrors from America, but none in

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my experience without some saving humour or light interlude. The writer of this script seems to think that the ‘X’ category is a depository for sewage.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) was a milestone movie. It was Britain’s first colour horror film and the first version of Frankenstein in colour.

It was certainly more graphic than anything that had been seen before and the sexual elements were also heightened with buxom Hammer maidens in their plunging necklines. Colour was however the greatest draw; in black and white a bloodstained mouth would look no different from a chocolate smeared toddler’s mouth, but with the glory of Eastman color it was . . . blood – and gruesome at that! Hammer submitted a black and white cutting copy to the BBFC for certification, but the Censor board was quick to spot the irregularity. In a letter to Hammer, Arthur Watkins wrote:

Although reference was made as far back as the 13 June last in a letter from Colonel Carreras, to the fact that the film would be in colour, no step was taken to remind us of this when a black and white print was submitted on 11 January, 1957. We are prepared to view intended colour films in a black and white version if we are approached and asked to do so. When we view such versions we bear in mind the fact that the completed film is to be in colour and frequently ask for certain reels to be resubmitted when colour has been added. . . .

As regards The Curse of Frankenstein, it will certainly be necessary for us to see the whole film again in colour, in order to determine whether there is anything visually too unpleasant which we have overlooked at the black and white stage. There is one cut which I feel we shall have to ask you to make and you might as well do it now –
and that is the shot in Reel 3 of Frankenstein wiping the blood off on his overall after severing the head. It is also the colour factor which has influenced our request, made above, for the shot of the head being dropped in the tank to be removed.

Hammer naturally made as few cuts as they could get away with and the film was released in May 1957. Enter the film critics, who, as Christopher Frayling’s contribution to this volume also observes, were just as caus-tic as the BBFC readers. The Daily Telegraph commented, ‘When the screen gives us severed heads and hands, eyeballs dropped in a wine glass and magnified, and brains dished up on a plate like spaghetti, I can only suggest a new certificate – “S.O.” perhaps – for Sadists

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Only.’ Meanwhile, The Observer added, ‘Without hesitation I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half dozen most repulsive films I have encountered in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.’5

However, the condemnation of the critics merely drove patrons into their cinemas and the film opened to phenomenal success both in UK
and America. James Carreras wrote to Eliot Hyman who had co-financed the film and arranged distribution through Warner Brothers, ‘I enclose a new batch of figures which are quite fantastic. England is sweltering in a heat-wave and NOTHING is taking any money except The Curse of Frankenstein.’6 Indeed, on 29 July 1957, Today’s Cinema proclaimed, ‘ The Curse of Frankenstein is now the sixth highest grosser in America – this picture can’t go wrong!’7

Exploitation seemed to be Hammer’s game, as they briefly side-stepped Gothic horror for a horror of another kind. The Camp on Blood Island (1957) was a brutal story of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, whose commandant, Yamamitsu, has already told the British Colonel, Lambert, that if Japan loses the war he will raze both the male and female camps to the ground and will kill every man, woman and child in them. When Lambert secretly learns the war is over, he has to keep the news from Yamamitsu at any cost by sabotaging his radio, with horrifying consequences. Hammer pulled no punches in showing the atrocities in a film that was bound to open old wounds only a decade after the end of the war.

Initial plans for an ‘A’ certificate were soon cast aside when the new BBFC secretary, John Nicholls, wrote,

As you probably know, Exclusive Films sent us a treatment of this subject in November last, when we expressed the opinion that the film could qualify for the ‘A’ category. However, the developed script emphasises the potentially ‘X’ elements in the story and, without guaranteeing the category in advance of seeing the film, we agree with you that this picture will probably be ‘X’. From that point of view, there is little in the present script which seems likely to give trouble, provided the treatment is reasonably discreet, but obviously treatment is even more than usually important when there are so many tense and harrowing moments in the story and when the possibility of brutal action is ever-present.

Reynold’s News would single the finished product out as, ‘The most shameful and destructive picture of the year.’8

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However, Hammer was quick to follow the success of The Curse of Frankenstein with Dracula (1958). Again, Jimmy Sangster was asked to condense Bram Stoker’s novel, ‘The same rules applied as Frankenstein,’

he explains. ‘In the book Dracula travels to England by boat, on a stormy sea – at night. We couldn’t afford that. So, no sea voyage and no turning into a bat – both too expensive! But I always did that – even today when I’m writing a script – I always keep my eye on the budget.’9 Sangster once said that if he was asked to write an expensive scene, his pencil would break!

The BBFC readers outdid themselves this time when his script was submitted,

The uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style of Mr Jimmy Sangster cannot quite obscure the remnants of a good horror story, though they do give one the gravest misgivings about treatment . . .

The curse on the thing is Technicolor blood: why need vampires be messier feeders than anyone else?

Hammer took little notice of their warnings and another gruesome shocker (by fifties’ standards) was canned, which did not impress the Board when the first cutting copy was sent in for certification: This is yet another version of Dracula, but with such a strong infusion of horror comic element injected into considerable parts of it as to make them acceptable conventions within the horror film genre. The version we saw had six scenes missing and was in black and white.

The final version will be in colour and its addition, in our opinion will make certain scenes intolerable. The producers have ignored the script letter and, also, have deviated from the script. We consider that the president and other examiners should see this film.

John Nicholls wrote to James Carreras:

Further treatment is required to certain sequences to which we have already referred before we view the colour version for certification.

In view of the accentuation of certain obvious features in the film by the addition of colour and full sound we are unable to promise an ‘X’

certificate until the completed version of the film has been viewed.

The following cannot, in any case, be allowed: Reel 7. The whole episode of a stake being driven into Lucy, together with her screams, writhing and agonised face. The scene

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can retain only shots of Dr. Van Helsing taking up the stake and mallet, possibly one blow on the mallet as seen from outside the coffin, followed by him and Arthur looking at Lucy’s peaceful face.

Reel 8. The whole episode of Dracula and Mina together whenever either of them shows sexual pleasure. There must, for instance, be no kissing or fondling.

Reel 9. We have severe doubts about the disintegration of Dracula.

In any case the shot of the disintegrating ankle between trouser and boot must go and any shots where flesh seems to disintegrate. If handled with care the middle distance shots of clothing and dust blowing away from them can be acceptable.

We would advise the greatest caution about blood – on faces, necks and clothes and in, or immediately after, the blood transfusion scene.

Caution is also required with regard to the music effects, especially

‘shock’ music, and sound in general.

An outraged Carreras defended Hammer’s approach: Just a few general observations on ‘horror pictures’. These pictures get an ‘X’ certificate which immediately bars everybody under six-teen years of age from seeing them. The ‘X’ certificate also means that approximately 800 cinemas who call themselves family houses will not book the pictures. The horror audience is a very specialised one and many people who go to ‘X for sex’ pictures will not go to see a horror film.

Naturally those who do go to see horror films expect to see something out of the ordinary, although quite often the horror mis-fires and they laugh at it. With the very poor state our industry is in it would be a terrible thing if the horror addicts go to see horror pictures and there is no horror in them, in other words, we will lose this audience. There has always been a horror audience since movies began and nobody has ever been the worse for it.

Dracula is acknowledged the granddaddy of them all and as you know, has been made at least a dozen times. The specialised audience who will go to see Dracula will expect thrills but the cuts that you are asking us to make, in our opinion, are taking every thrill out of the picture, in fact, it is not as horrific as any of the past Dracula’s and we cannot believe that that is your intention.

Interestingly, the BBFC would still be objecting to blood on vampire’s mouths when Hammer submitted the script for The Kiss of the Vampire

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in 1962, ‘Care will have to be taken with the shot of Ravna with a thin trickle of blood appearing at the corner of his mouth and staining the bed. This is rather nauseating stuff.’ Considering these comments in the light of hit TV shows such as True Blood (HBO, 2008–) one can certainly observe a radical change in attitudes.

Back in 1958 the critics were fuming at Hammer’s latest offering.

C.A. Lejune of the Observer warned, ‘ “Don’t dare see it alone!” is the adjuration printed in a black panel on the artistically blood-spattered synopsis of Dracula. For my own part, I wouldn’t care to see the film with anybody else, preferring not to expose a companion to what seems a singularly repulsive piece of nonsense.’ Meanwhile, Nina Hibbin in the Daily Worker complained, ‘I went to see Dracula prepared to enjoy a nervous giggle. I was even ready to poke gentle fun at it. I came away revolted and outraged. From the moment that Dracula appears, eyes bloodshot, fangs dripping with blood, until his final disintegration into a crumbling, putrescent pile of human dust, the film disgusts the mind and repels the senses.’10

The success of The Curse of Frankenstein also led to its anticipated sequel, The Revenge of Frankenstein. Jimmy Sangster comments, ‘I wanted something that would really revolt me, because if it revolts me it probably revolts everybody else, so I thought of cannibalism.’ Frankenstein transplants the brain of his crippled assistant into a new body, which, following a head injury leads the creature into a state of decay and a desire for human flesh. Good ammunition for the readers at the BBFC
who noted that:

The end of this story shows that the Old Firm have their tongues even further in their cheeks than usual. Nevertheless, a great deal of the script is much too gruesome and repulsive. Much as we should like to, I do not think we can very well refuse to allow any sequel to Frankenstein, but the makers will have to walk warily, in view of the reaction of many people to their first instalment. (Mary Shelley would turn in her grave if she could see her name on the title-page). There should be a very strong warning on treatment and on the avoidance of gruesome and repulsive details: and there is one thing, basic to the present story, which I do not think we can have – the cannibalism of the Monster.

Before making his last film in England, The Judas Hole, Boris Karloff made a broadcast over the BBC and, with great emphasis, made the point that ‘horror’ should never be disgusting. The true elements of

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the real horror film are terror, suspense, action, the unknown, the macabre. The very introduction of the ‘mange business’ in this script introduces a strong and quite unnecessary element of disgust: and puts one out of sympathy with the project. p.73 is one of the most disgusting I have read for a long while, and the writer should be ashamed of himself.

His main problem here is the cannibalism. Again, I have a feeling of revulsion and disgust, since aversion to cannibalism is one of the strongest inhibitions of ‘civilised’ man. Yet, with discretion, cannibalism is fair enough in a ‘horror’ film provided the emphasis is on terror. In this script, the treatment of cannibalism is disgusting, especially since it’s ‘artificial’ cannibalism and most particularly since it is associated with sex.

Interestingly, the US Censor had a totally different outlook on the script.

No mention was made of the cannibalistic elements, their comments instead bizarrely focusing on:

Page 18. It will be unacceptable for the doctor to apply his ear to Vera’s breast. The dissolve should take place at the conclusion of Victor’s line ‘if you’d rather my dear . . . of course.’

Page 60. The concierge’s expression ‘My gawd’ is irreverent.

Page 62. Han’s expression ‘God’ is unacceptable.

Obviously, in America, cannibalism was more acceptable than profan-ing the Almighty. A common theme the BBFC was warning about was the mixture of sex and horror. Its readers had squirmed at Dracula’s relationship with his victims, who welcomed him as a lover. Now they were picking out more scenes in the Revenge script: We think that shots of Vera in her Victorian underclothes may well be all right. All we are concerned about is any danger of a horror film being too ‘sexy’: we often find that the juxtaposition of sex and horror gives rise to unfavourable criticism . . . Similarly, the nursing of male and female patients in the same ward has obvious sex implications, and we should prefer the ward to be a male ward only . . . Again, we do not mind Margaret appearing ‘defenceless’ and we are sure that the shots of her would not be indecent: all we want is that a monster should not appear to be lusting after her.

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Critics, as ever, were mixed in their responses to the film, but C.A. Lejune at the Observer was not amused, yet again: This the sequel to an earlier and almost as regrettable Frankenstein travesty made by the same company; and Peter Cushing, who can be an actor of parts when he so chooses, again demeans himself by playing the hero . . . The whole thing is to my taste a vulgar, stupid, nasty and intolerably tedious business. A crude sort of entertainment for a crude sort of audience. Films of this kind are the last refuge of unimaginative producers who have lost the art of communicating individually with human beings and have fallen back on the appeal to mass hysteria.11

However, the ‘crude’ audience clamoured for more and Hammer horror was born. Dracula was so successful it saved the then ailing Universal, who had financed the picture, from bankruptcy. As a result, the grateful company opened their vaults to Hammer and granted it rights to remake any of its back catalogue – an honour unprecedented for such a small independent British film company. Hammer chose The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera and The Invisible Man. Only the first two would be realized.

Long remembered for horror films, Hammer’s non-horrors are often neglected and were sometimes rather better films. The studio’s 1959
output is a case in point. That year Hammer made eight films. Only three were straight horror; two more Terry Fisher colour classics, The Mummy and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll and a monochrome shocker also by Fisher, The Stranglers of Bombay. These were supplemented by two comedies, a comic retelling of Jekyll and Hyde, entitled The Ugly Duckling (on the same lines as The Nutty Professor) and Watch it Sailor! ; a war film, Yesterday’s Enemy; a gritty police drama, Hell is a City (both directed by Val Guest and starring Stanley Baker); and a tense message movie called Never Take Sweets from a Stranger. The last three were among some of Hammer’s best. In fact, Yesterday’s Enemy was nominated for BAFTAs in the categories of best picture, best actor (Baker) and best supporting actor (Gordon Jackson). All accolades were won on the night by Sapphire.

Never Take Sweets from a Stranger is an extraordinary movie and still packs a punch when seen today, tackling as it does the particularly sensitive subject of child molestation. It was an adaptation of Roger Garis’s stage play, The Pony Cart. Actress Janina Faye, who was then only 11 years old, still has vivid recollections:

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The play of The Pony Cart was to be done as a one-off professional performance on a Sunday night at the Strand Theatre in London.

In those days the licensing laws forbade children performing on stage or on television until they were 12 years old, although they could appear on film – don’t ask me why? Because it was only a Sunday night performance, the people engaging me thought they would be safe. Unfortunately, the then Lady Lewisham decided to object very strongly about a child appearing in a ‘sex play’ before the age of 12!

She, of course, knew nothing about the context and message of the play before she raised such a fuss that made all the newspapers and even got me my own Giles cartoon in the Daily Express. The press reaction was quite remarkable, and my parents rightly decided to withdraw me from the production. I was devastated, as it would have been a very exciting experience for me, performing on a West End stage for the first time. I knew enough about ‘not talking to strange men’ to know the difference between this play and a play about sex!12

Fate decreed that Janina would reprise her role in Hammer’s film, although she still had to audition for the role. ‘As far as I am aware, it was coincidental that I then got the part in the film,’ she continues.

‘I was sent along with hundreds of others to audition for Cyril Frankel.

We all auditioned several times at Hammer House in Wardour Street, before final casting was made. Prior to the release of the film, I was told I would get no billing outside the cinema as my casting in the play had attracted so much adverse publicity.’ It looked, for once, as if Hammer was playing down the sensationalism to produce a well-meaning message movie.

With such sensitive subject matter, Hammer was again obliged to share its script with the BBFC. The reader noted: I hope that this is intended to be an ‘X’ film. I think that with its teeth drawn for ‘A’ it’s essential horror (which is the horror of the child and the bogey man, as old as the hills), would be so much reduced as to be pedestrian. It is the loneliness of the children in the wooded countryside, the dark water, and the silent pursuer which could give an audience the willies and to my mind this would be legitimate ‘X’ . . . It wasn’t, actually, attempted rape; it was something even worse to little girls, and it is a pity, I think, to mention rape.

Then, in the trial scene, surely we would recoil from the idea of the child’s being threatened with a medical examination, even if it were sound legally . . . What this may achieve, of course, and this is why it

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irritates me, is the mischief of arousing in the mind of the spectator a misgiving about neighbourly old men. It would be a pity if every old man became a D.O.M. and a danger to little girls.

Producer Tony Hinds responded:

There was a court scene in the play, in which Olderberry won his case by so fragrant a miscarriage of justice that we dared not use it.

In our version, the unpleasant trick that Olderberry and his Counsel use to win their case is to make the whole trial so distasteful that the Father insists that the trial be stopped, by dropping the charge.

For this reason, it is important to us that the trial should become, momentarily, very distasteful, otherwise we have no scene. (I have discussed the playing of this scene with the Director, who is arranging his camera set-ups so that the child actress need not be present during the more outspoken parts of this sequence).

Board secretary, John Trevelyan, was unyielding: I had quite forgotten that there was a court scene in the play and I certainly cannot remember how Olderberry Senior won his case, but we feel very strongly that the scene as at present scripted is most undesirable. The idea of a child being forced to have a medical examination to see whether or not she had been tampered with sexually is one that we would not be prepared to accept, and I must therefore ask you to find some other way in which you can reasonably get the father to drop the charge. I am sorry about this but we feel very strongly about it and feel that it is too distasteful even for the ‘X’

category.

Hinds met with his writer to tone down the discussion of the medical examination, but Trevelyan was still concerned: We are still worried about this. We suggest that you might consider a reduction of the scene. You could have the line ‘Would you mind if we brought a doctor here to see you now?’ If this were immediately followed by Pete’s objection and the dissolve to the judge’s room where the judge can explain why he had invited all the parties concerned to meet. In the revised version we would, I think, be worried about the lines given to defence Counsel, such as ‘I think we have a right to know whether this child is as innocent as she seems . . . .’

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etc. As you will see from this we might accept the idea that a doctor should be brought in but we should definitely not want anything that would emphasise the reasons why this proposal was made.

Hammer rewrote it again and this time it was accepted.

The finished film got its ‘X’ certificate, but Hammer boss, James Carreras, was soon imploring Trevelyan to give it an ‘A’ certificate: The press show is tomorrow, but almost every Society interested in the welfare of children have seen the film, every leading crime reporter in Fleet Street saw the film last Friday and in almost every case they all said what a pity John Trevelyan did not give the picture an ‘A’ Certificate. In view of what has happened recently in Southampton and what is really happening every day, isn’t it possible for you to change your mind and give the picture an ‘A’ Certificate?

It is because the dialogue is so clean and the action so inoffensive that I ask this and the fact that older children will never see the film seems to me a great pity. I wonder whether you could reconsider your decision.

He sent Trevelyan a further message the next day: The Rev Arthur Morton of the NSPCC is enthralled by the film and wants to contact you and have a talk with you. At the Press show today it was sensational – Jympson Harman said that every child should see it and that it should be shown at children’s matinees as a warning. Thomas Wiseman said that it was sensational and mad to give it an ‘X’. The general feeling was that it should be left to the parent’s discretion as to whether a child should see it but most parents would appreciate it as a warning. The Daily Herald, see attached, voices the general opinion. In USA, France and Germany, Welfare Authorities have the same opinion and urge for all children to see it.

However, Trevelyan stood firm:

The British Board of Film Censors gave an ‘X’ certificate to the film Never Take Sweets from a Stranger. Subsequently certain professional film critics expressed the opinion that this film should be in the ‘A’

category so that it might be seen by children, at the discretion of their parents, with a view to conveying a warning to them that it was dangerous to talk to strangers. In view of these criticisms the Board

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decided to see the film again and review the question of category.

After careful consideration it was decided that the film should remain in the “X” category’:

The Board felt that the warning given in this film was important but that, in view of the way in which it was given, it was more suitable as a warning to parents than to children direct. It is believed that children tend to identify themselves with child characters on the screen, and this film two little girls are shown in a desperate situation and thoroughly frightened. Young children seeing the film might themselves be frightened and might not understand the exact nature of the danger. They would be aware that the old man was the source of the fear and some might even think that they should be afraid of old men. The theme of the story is an unpleasant one and the film is full of powerful tension. In the opinion of the Board, all these things made it desirable that the film should be in the ‘X’ category so that it could not be seen by young children.

The cocktail of sex and horror would continue to plague Hammer into the sixties, along with its many imitators. As early as 1960, Tony Hinds objected to the BBFC when Hammer were asked to cut a scene from the script for The Curse of the Werewolf where a dumb beggar girl stabs a perverted Marquis in self defence when he attempts to rape her. Hinds’

defence was that he’d just seen a movie where a psychotic transvestite stabs a naked girl repeatedly in the shower! However, it was clear Mr Hinds was no Mr Hitchcock.

Then, with the seventies, came the birth of sexploitation; the bar was lowered by the BBFC and the ‘X’ certificate now moved from 16 to 18
to allow the new films to be more graphic. John Trevelyan explains,

‘We believed that the new category would enable the Board to reduce the number of “X” films, and that raising the minimum age for the

“X” category would give the Board more flexibility and would possibly make it rarely necessary to refuse or cut films for adult audiences.’13 Sex and horror were finally married with the BBFC’s consent, and Hammer immediately took the advantage and set to work on a trilogy of nude lesbian vampire films based on Sheriden Le Fanu’s novella, Carmilla; a far cry from the lustful look on the face of one of Dracula’s victims during the fifties that was then considered inappropriate for ‘adult’ audiences.

The Hammer story continues today with Let Me In (2010) (a re-imagining of acclaimed Swedish vampire film Let the Right One in), The Resident (2010) (starring Oscar winner Hilary Swank and featuring

‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The 50s Hammer Invasion 89
a welcome return for old Hammeronian Sir Christopher Lee) and, in production, The Woman in Black starring Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe.

The revival will hopefully introduce a whole new audience to Hammer horror: sadly, most young people today would baulk at the back catalogue if they happened to encounter such seemingly ‘old-fashioned’

films on TV or DVD. Indeed, how tame the ‘shockers’ of times past seem over 50 years later – but as the critical commentary contained in this essay suggests, in their time such films were considered a genuine threat to public decency. ‘Don’t dare see it alone!’ screamed the tagline of the lurid poster for Hammer’s Dracula back in 1958. For cinema-goers during the 1950s the warning was a welcome indication that screen horror would never be the same again.

Notes

1. Documentation for this and all further BBFC comments at the British Board of Film Censors.

2. The Quatermass Xperiment review, New Statesman, 27 August 1955.

3. The Quatermass Xperiment review, Reynolds News, August 1955.

4. Jimmy Sangster, interview with the author, 1999.

5. Reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein by Campbell Dixon, Daily Telegraph, May 1957; C.A. Lejeune, Observer, 3 May 1957.

6. Documentation at British Film Institute Library.

7. Trade advertisement for The Curse of Frankenstein, Today’s Cinema, 29 July 1957.

8. Reynold’s News, 20 April 1958.

9. Sangster interview (1999).

10. C.A. Lejeune, Observer, 31 May 1958; Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker, 31 May 1958.

11. Lejeune, Observer, 31 August 1958.

12. The interview with Janina Faye from which these quotations are taken was conducted with the author (2001).

13. John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), pp. 60, 63.

5

Genre, Special Effects and

Authorship in the Critical

Reception of Science Fiction

Film and Television during
the 1950s

Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston

Accounts of science fiction in film and television in the 1950s often present it as dominated by the alien invasion narratives, in which monsters from outer space seek to subjugate or exterminate humanity.

Furthermore, these alien invasion narratives are commonly presented as rather simplistic products of Cold War tensions in which the alien is merely a thin disguise for soviet aggression. As Andrew Tudor puts it: In the fifties . . . our way of life is threatened by alien forces which adversely affect the world around us. In this xenophobic universe we can do nothing but rely on the state, in the form of military, scientific and governmental elites . . . In this respect, then, fifties SF/horror movies teach us not so much ‘to stop worrying and love the bomb’ as

‘to keep worrying and love the state’, an admonition which accords perfectly with the nuclear-conscious Cold War culture of the period.1

In other words, the dominant image of 1950s science fiction film and television is reinforced by its easy fit with specific social and political contexts within the period.

Furthermore, this image is also supported by the tendency to privilege specific films, such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which are often singled out due to their association with the auteur directors Howard Hawks and Don Siegel. However, neither of these films was a major industrial production nor particularly significant in terms of their performance at the box office. The New York 90

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Times does not even seem to have bothered to review Invasion of the Body Snatchers, although it did regard The Thing from Another World as one of the most enjoyable science fictions films of the period.2 Even in histories of British film and television, the critical focus on the Quatermass serials, and their subsequent film adaptations, seems to conform to this image of the period.

However, there are a number of problems with this account of 1950s science fiction film and television. Most centrally the alien narrative was not a product of Cold War paranoia but had been a key element in the science fiction pulp fiction and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s (although its literary roots stretch back to ‘England Invaded’ narratives such as G.T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) and H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898).) Indeed, by the 1950s, the alien invasion narrative was considered such a cliché within science fiction literature that writers such as Ray Bradbury were even parodying the form in stories such as ‘The Concrete Mixer’.3 In other words, different media had very different understandings of science fiction as a genre and, in science fiction literature, the alien invader was not only regarded as old fashioned, but even actively rejected. Certainly, a number of key alien invasion stories were written within the period, including Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951), Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955) and John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), but all of these novels clearly distinguished their alien invaders from the Bug-Eyed Monsters (or BEMs) of the 1930s and 1940s. Elsewhere prose science fiction covered a range of settings and themes but became strongly associated with the ‘ “Hard SF” fabulation’ of Arthur C. Clarke4
and the ‘weird under-the-skin oddness’ of Ray Bradbury.5 Conversely, the films and television programming of the period made little use of ‘Hard SF’ and while there was some interest in the work of Robert Heinlein, whose Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) provided the basis for Destination Moon (1950), it was Bradbury who came to signify the best of the science fiction literature to both the personnel who made films and television programmes, and the critics who evaluated them.

For example, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was claimed to be

‘from a story by one of the most imaginative science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury’,6 while the New York Times made special mention of the fact that It Came from Outer Space (1953) was an ‘adaptation of a story by Ray Bradbury, a top hand in the science fiction field’7 and Variety claimed that this ‘Ray Bradbury story proves to be good science-fiction.’8

Bradbury was even used as an marker of quality against which to evaluate other films, and while The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) was based

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on a novel by Richard Matheson, it was praised for being ‘as startlingly original as a vintage Ray Bradbury short story’.9 Conversely, The First Man into Space (1959) was claimed to have various merits but to be ‘far from achieving Ray Bradbury quality’.10

Of course, in the realm of science fiction literature, Bradbury has never been considered typical of the dominant trends in 1950s, and is often distinguished from the genre altogether on the grounds that he ‘has no use for science except as an allegorical device’, a position that results in the claim that he is a writer of ‘fantasy and horror rather than SF’.11

Perhaps the reason that he was often identified as central to science fiction literature within the realms of film and television production and criticism was that, although he was associated with the pulps in various ways, he was one of the key writers to have broken out of the subcul-ture of science fiction fandom and had managed to publish within the

‘slicks’, the glossy, mainstream magazines exemplified by the Saturday Evening Post.

If understandings of science fiction within literature were very different from those in film and television, it is also a mistake to assume that film and television were the same, and there is now a growing body of work that demonstrates that the genre works very differently in each medium.12 Generic categories in operation in one medium are not necessarily operative in another, and even when both media use the same generic term, this term may have a very different meaning in each medium. The key trends in science fiction television during the 1980s or 1990s, for example, look very different from the key trends within the films of these decades.

Furthermore, as Roberta Pearson and Maire Messenger Davies point out, even in cases where film and television texts are part of the same franchise, the franchise may acquire a very different character in each medium. In their account of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94), for example, they illustrate that while the television series, and the films that followed it, share the same characters, the same universe and even purport to be temporally continuous, these texts are noticeably different in their concerns, their narrative organisation and even their understanding of character.

Pearson and Messenger Davies see this as largely a result of differences between the two media, so that cinema is seen as a predominantly visual medium, in which science fiction is principally about spectacular special effects, while television is presumed to be a far less visual medium, in which science fiction is largely concerned with ideas, narrative complexity and the development of character arcs. Certainly, Pearson and

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Messenger Davies’ attention to the differences between science fiction film and science fiction television is vital, although these differences are probably not due to some inherent feature of each medium, but rather due to the differences between specific institutional contexts. Indeed, we seriously reject the frequent claims that the image is relatively unimportant within television,13 and would stress that from the earliest days of science fiction television special effects and spectacle have always been important.14

Furthermore, it is not simply that film and television are different from one another, but also that American science fiction films of the 1950s were fundamentally different from those made in Britain in the period, and that American science fiction television in the 1950s was very different from 1950s British television. Indeed, while American science fiction film is generally seen as far more creative than American science fiction television during most of the 1950s, with television initially dependent on materials culled from the film serials and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s, the case was very different in Britain, where it was television which was the dominant and creative form, with many of the key British science fiction films being attempts to exploit television successes as demonstrated by the Hammer film versions of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials. Furthermore, the differences between the television programmes and their film adaptations were recognized by reviewers at the time, with the Monthly Film Bulletin declaring that the film version of Quatermass II had been ‘arbitrarily cut’ from the television version so that it ‘has necessarily lost much of the quality of the original’.15

As should be clear, then, one needs to be careful of generic terms such as science fiction, which do not simply describe a coherent and unitary body of texts but rather a process of classification subject to intense debate and conflict. Indeed, while many American television programmes were routinely identified as science fiction from the very start of the 1950s, most of the programmes identified today as key examples of British science fiction television were not identified as such at the time. It was not until Mystery Story (1952) that there was any overt reference to a programme as science fiction, and even then the programme was not identified as science fiction in listings pages but rather on the letters page where viewers responded to the show after the event.16

Even a supposed science fiction classic such as The Quatermass Experiment was actually described as a ‘thriller’ by the BBC rather than science fiction, although the Monthly Film Bulletin referred to the film version as ‘closer to the horror film than most recent science fiction pictures’,17

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showing that there was a difference in the use of genre labelling between media.

One reason that these British television shows were not identified as science fiction was due to the very different meanings of the term in the United States and Britain. At the time, science fiction was only beginning to be taken seriously as genre, and it was still largely associated with the pulps and the comic books. This was not a problem in the United States, where science fiction television was largely identified as a form of children’s entertainment, but it was a problem in Britain, where the programmes later identified as science fiction were usually presented as serious or at least adult dramas. Furthermore, negative responses to British television science fiction were often couched in relation to what were considered to be ‘childish’ or ‘sadistic’ comics, which could appeal

‘only to immature minds, to children and to young people, and to some adults who are perhaps not very intelligent’.18 The comics, and by association genre science fiction, were perceived as being part of a particularly American popular culture which threatened British native culture and therefore its national identity.

However, during the early 1950s, the image of the genre started to change due to a series of factors. The golden age writers had already been struggling to present their writings as serious speculation on the social, economic and political effects of technological change, while others such as John Wyndham had been working to stress the literary credentials of science fiction by drawing attention to the stylistic qualities of their writing. Christopher Priest has even claimed that Wyndham’s popular success was due to the distance that he established from science fiction as a genre so that his novels can to be seen as ‘comedies of English manners’.19 However, following the critical and commercial success of Wyndham’s novel, The Day of the Triffids, in 1951, the mainstream press started to develop science fiction lists that would further validate the genre and distance it from an association with the pulps and comic books.

As a result, it is not just that different media have different perceptions of a genre but that definitions may change across periods,20 and even conflict within periods.21 For example, Gernsback had invented the term

‘science fiction’ precisely to designate a particular type of fiction in which writers would ‘focus on the technological aspects of their stories or base their adventures on some scientific premise’,22 and so distinguish his pulp magazine, Amazing Stories, from other types of futuristic and fantasy fiction. Later generations of writers and editors would be highly critical of Gernsback’s contribution, but many continued to use

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‘science fiction’ as a term of precision. For example, the period in which John W. Campbell was editor of Amazing Stories is often seen as crucial to ‘the dawn of a new age in SF’ that would bring into being ‘the intelligent, adult genre that we know today’;23 and his influence is often attributed to the way in which he ‘strove to make his writers consider the full implications of their ideas and to question the motives of their protagonists’,24 a move that ‘led him to reject the Bug-Eyed Monsters’ of the pulps.25

However, if these uses of science fiction sought to privilege ‘intelligent, adult’ fiction over the supposedly childish concerns of the pulps magazines and the comics, by the 1950s, science fiction had become virtually synonymous with the pulps and comics for those making and reviewing film and television. Moreover, if these uses of the term ‘science fiction’ no longer required an attention to scientific plausibility, science fiction films and television were often seen as unscientific and even as anti-scientific, so much so that the term was also applied to a series of films that would rarely be identified as science fiction today. As a result, in its review of Project M7 (1953), the New York Times complained about ‘the wholly incredible and “unscientific” things [characters in the film] are permitted to do’,26 while it also described other films as

‘pseudo-scientific’.27 Taking a slight stronger tone, Variety even claimed of Captain Video that, from ‘a scientific standpoint, the script was generally balderdash’.28 As a result, some reviewers expressed a preference for the trend for semi-documentary films, and praised George Pal’s plans to follow up Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide with a move into

‘the realm of science-fact films’.29 Writing of these ‘semi-documentary’

or ‘science-fact films’, it was therefore claimed that Unidentified Flying Objects (1956) ‘quietly and effectively demonstrated’ that ‘truth can be more engrossing than fiction’,30 while On the Threshold of Space (1956) was claimed to be ‘proof that science-fact can be stranger and more interesting than science-fiction’.31

Of course, this position becomes more understandable when one considers that many reviewers by the mid-1950s had not only grown tired of the science fiction cycle but were also classifying a wide variety of fantasy films as ‘science fiction’. For example, Variety described The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) as a ‘Fairytale actioner with science-fiction and horror trimmings’,32 while the Monthly Film Bulletin identified Lost Continent (1951), a lost world picture featuring prehistoric creatures, as ‘a change from the more customary type of science fiction’.33 Nor was this simply a one-off and idiosyncratic description. The New York Times clearly identified Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) as a ‘science

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fiction’ story in which the heroes have ‘found another lost world and conquered it’,34 and it also noted the similarity between Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1954, US release 1956) on the one hand, and King Kong (1933) on the other.35 The latter film was even re-released in 1952 in an attempt to cash in on the science fiction monster cycle.36 Similarly, Rick Altman shows that, in 1954, Universal included the Mummy, the Wolf Man and Dracula in a list of ‘Hollywood’s prize science fiction monsters’ that it used to promote Creature from the Black Lagoon.37

This association of science fiction with the presence of mythological, prehistoric or extraterrestrial monsters also demonstrates the importance of special effects within the period, an importance that was equally relevant to television as film. For example, one of the first American science fiction shows of the decade was Captain Video (1949–55), which was described by the New York Times as ‘a triumph of carpentry and wiring rather than writing’.38 While this is clearly meant as a dismissal of the show’s supposedly juvenile content, the review also stresses that it is ‘in the use of settings, props and special effects that “Captain Video” derives its appeal’ and it is claimed that the show

‘boasts enough fancy gadgets to bewilder the adult and fascinate the youngster’. Similarly, Buck Rogers is claimed to be ‘endowed with a lot of expensive sets, technical mumbo-jumbo, scary incidents and atrocious acting, which probably will give it a banner Hooper rating with the small fry’.39

However, special effects were not simply associated with juvenile entertainment but were also believed to be capable of adding value to productions. As a result, while it was claimed that Out There ‘may prove to be the best of the lot’, when compared to the science fiction shows that had preceded it, the show was also claimed to be distinguished by its sets, which were described as ‘imaginative’.40

The New York Times even took the television industry to task in 1958
for its failure to develop science fiction shows after the Soviet launching of Sputnik. For the newspaper, this event should have made ‘ “sci-fi” programs . . . a natural for TV’: ‘If the cyclic history of TV means anything, TV-film producers should have begun preparing inter-galactic projects months ago’ but even Ray Bradbury was still ‘looking for someone to put [ Report from Space] on the air after it is filmed’.41 Television’s failure to develop a ‘strong trend to space shows’ is described as ‘another case of TV’s lack of foresight’. Certainly, the New York Times acknowledged that shows would have to avoid ‘ “Buck Rogers” type of excursions to worlds inhabited by seven-headed gloops’, and feature the strong

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‘human stories’, if they are to appeal to adults and so secure ‘prime-time evening audiences’. But it argued that the real problem facing television is that science fiction ‘must have the trappings of space and extra-terrestrial excitement’ and ‘the plain fact is, special effects are too expensive for the average TV budget’. However, this reference to special effects is not intended as an explanation for the failure of television but as a condemnation of it. As the article makes clear, the industry is ‘simply a season behind the times’ and that it cannot continue to get away with poor writing and cheap production values.

Of course, as the reference to Captain Video demonstrates, special effects were sometimes seen as silly and superficial spectacles that simply disguised worthless trash, but it is also the case that, as is clear from the discussion of the New York Times’ condemnation of television’s failures in the aftermath of Sputnik, special effects were also seen as vital to science fiction. Even poor or silly special effects were not straightforwardly condemned but could even be used to present the film as humorously inept, as fun in spite of itself. As a result, while the New York Times claimed that the ‘trick effects’ in The Blob (1958) ‘look pretty phoney’, it also claimed that the ‘color is quite good’ so that ‘the blob rolls around in at least a dozen horrible-looking flavours, including raspberry’.42 Similarly, Queen of Outer Space (1958) was described by the Monthly Film Bulletin as ‘an amiable, if rather tame, burlesque of science fiction formu-lae’, which featured ‘stylised settings, costumes and effects . . . pleasantly shot in shiny space-color.’43

While this quote obviously finds the film’s visuals as amusingly ludicrous but fun, the New York Times was unreservedly positive in its assessment of the colour processes in Destination Moon, which are described as ‘rich’ and ‘luscious’, while the film as a whole is claimed to ‘make a lunar expedition [into] a most intriguing and picturesque event’. Indeed, its complaint about the film was that the ‘human reactions’ of the film’s characters ‘are nothing to the gadgeted ship, their miraculous observations – and those are all we advise you to go and see’.44 In other words, the film is supposed to be distinguished by its visual spectacle: ‘it’s awesome to watch the mechanics constructing that giant rocket’ and ‘exciting to climb aboard the ship with those four men . . . to wiggle and squirm with them in agony as their silver tube roars into space and to join in their general amazement at the various phenomena which occur’.

Similarly, Forbidden Planet is described as ‘a wonderful trip into outer space’ that excels in its spectacle. Not only has it been ‘put on the screen in Eastman color and properly spacious CinemaScope’, it also features

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‘the gaudiest layout of gadgets this side of a Florida hotel’.45 In the process, the review not only draws attention to the spectacle of Robby the Robot, ‘a phenomenal mechanical man’, and Anne Francis, ‘the prettiest thing’ in outer space, but it positively stresses the film’s status as visual experience. For example, while Francis’s character is claimed to ‘intrigue and confound’ the spacemen in the film, who come to ‘see what’s what’, it is also stressed that the spacemen
see plenty – and so, we promise will you . . . You’ll see the dry and ragged face of a worn-out planet, looking for all the (modern) world like some of those handsome illustrations in the slick-paper picture magazines. You’ll see the vast subterranean power-houses built by the super-human Krells who inhabited this far-off planet 2,000 centuries before earth-man was born. And you’ll see – or rather you won’t see – the fearful monster created by the Id, which (according to Dr Morbius) is the evil impulse of the subconscious mind.

You won’t see him because he’s invisible, but when he gets caught in the electronic grid that the fellows put up around their flying saucer, you’ll get a vague idea of his giant proportions. And, brother, will you hear him roar.

The film may be kitsch but every one involved has ‘had a barrel of fun with this film’, and produced something that is not only fun for the audience but visually engaging. In other words, science fiction special effects were seen as having the capacity to be genuinely creative and inventive and, in its review of The Island Earth, it is the ‘technical artists’

who are ‘the real stars of the picture’, and their ‘technical effects’ are claimed to be ‘so superlatively bizarre and beautiful that some serious shortcomings can be excused’ in other aspects of the film.46

Similarly, Ray Harryhausen acquired a considerable reputation for himself in the period. The New York Times, for example, singled out both Harryhausen and his collaborator, Willis Cook, for credit in its review of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and these special effects artists are claimed to have ‘rigged an awesome apparition’ in their creation of the prehistoric monster of the title. Similarly, Variety gave Harryhausen ‘Special credit’ for the film’s ‘socko technical effects’ in which the ‘sight of the beast stalking through Gotham’s downtown streets is awesome’.47

In other words, special effects were seen as an area that could be genuinely creative and imaginative, and although the Monthly Film Bulletin complained that the creature ‘appears all too obviously a rather implausible model’, the positive reviews do not praise special effects for their

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realism but, on the contrary, for their capacity to create spectacular and off-beat fantasies.

This position is in marked contrast to discussions of science fiction today where, as Telotte puts it, ‘it is precisely the tension between such seemingly magical effects and the desire to make those elements neatly

“fit” into a reality illusion that is the core . . . appeal . . . of the entire science fiction genre’.48 In these accounts, special effects are understood as aspiring to the realism that the Monthly Film Bulletin finds lacking in Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In other words, these effects attempt to fit so seamlessly into the world of the film that they pass unnoticed or disguise their trickery like a skilled magician so that performance of the illusion is blatant but the method of achieving it is hidden. So while science fiction films often proclaim their special effects as moments of cinematic exhibitionism, both in their promotion and in their mobiliza-tion within individual films, it is claimed that the appeal still depends on an illusion in which our vision is fooled by the visual evidence of that which we know is a fabrication.

In this sense, science fiction special effects are seen as operating in much the same way as they do in historical epics. In other words, special effects are claimed to operate as part of the visual spectacle through which film industries, such as Hollywood, celebrate their own power and prestige. By appearing to reproduce the scale of bygone civilizations and major historical events, film industries confer an almost divine status upon themselves. As Moses declares, in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956
version of The Ten Commandments, after one of the most celebrated special effects sequences in the history of cinema in which the Red Sea has parted and then drowned Pharaoh’s armies: ‘Thou didst blow with Thy winds and the sea covered them. Who is like unto Thee Oh Lord? From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God!’

The difference, it is claimed, is that science fiction does not recreate the past but promises glimpses of the future, and this does not simply involve the spectacle of future societies and alien worlds, but also presents its special effects as being so advanced that they provide a glimpse into the future of film itself.49 In the process, such films present themselves as events in themselves, but such concerns have been read as both positive and negative. On the one hand, it has become commonplace today for academics, critics and even sections of the general public to complain that the spectacle of special effects now overwhelms plot and character,50 but others such as Telotte have argued that special effects also have the potential to foreground the very illusionist character of cinema. If special effects provide cinematic illusion as spectacle,

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they draw attention to themselves as illusions and to the workings of film as a whole.

Telotte’s argument is both persuasive and attractive but, like other accounts, it presents illusionism as being the fundamental appeal of special effects. However, it is important to remember that the obsession with ‘state of the art’ special effects is actually relatively new, and that, as Schatz has pointed out, when New Hollywood film-makers such as Lucas and Spielberg initially turned to science fiction, they were actually appropriating a tradition of fairly low budget filmmaking.51 While special effects were certainly vital to the serials of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, these were hardly big budget productions that used ‘state of the arts’ effects, and could therefore hardly expect their special effects to attain an illusory realism. Even by the 1950s, most science fiction films were low budget productions, and even someone like George Pal, who was using state of the art special effects, was hardly working in the most economically powerful or technologically advanced sections of the industry. While his budgets may have been bigger than his competitors, he was certainly not making films that competed with spectacular historical epics such as The Ten Commandments.

As a result, the function of the cheap, low-tech special effects of the 1950s would seem to be somewhat different to the financially intensive and technologically advanced special effects that distinguish contemporary blockbusters and, as a result, it is questionable how ‘illusionist’

1950s special effects were supposed to be. Even the work of figures such as Ray Harryhausen seems to have been evaluated less according to some notion of ‘realism’ than according to one of creativity and imagination; i.e., it was less a question of whether special effects had the capacity to create an illusion of actuality than whether special effects displayed skill and invention. In this way, they were judged according to the values of fantasy rather than realism: they were judged on the basis of whether they were able to offer a vision of ‘a world that has not previously and indeed might never exist’.52 In other words, Sobchack may be right that the ‘major visual impulse of all SF film is to pictorialize the unfamiliar, the non-existent, the strange and totally alien’, but she may be wrong that it always seeks to do so ‘with a verisimilitude which is, at times, documentary in flavor and style’.53

Indeed, Harryhausen continues to be a cult figure today and is valued for his ‘wonderfully wobblesome’ special effects,54 a phrase that stresses that his strength lies not in the invisibility of his craft but, on the contrary, in the imprint of its creator. Not only does the Radio Times

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frequently refer to Harryhausen as a ‘genius’ in its announcements of forthcoming television showings of his films,55 but it is the presence of his ‘unique touches’ that make a film such as 20 Million Miles to Earth a

‘minor classic’.56 Rather than creating an illusion of reality, he is praised for his imagination, which produces monsters that are ‘memorable’57
and often possess a ‘well-defined personality’ that can, at times, ‘evoke sympathy for its bewildered plight.’58 In short, his monsters are not seen as being creatures of mere artifice but as inspired ‘creations’,59 which are

‘brought to fabulous life’ by their creator.60

In this way, the ‘stop-motion special effects put the flat characters and routine plot[s] in the shade’61 or rather ‘the actors and the plot once again end up playing second fiddle to the magnificent Dynamation sequences meticulously created by the godfather of special effects’.62 Not merely an element in the construction of these films, the special effects are seen as having precedence and, rather than the director or stars, it is Harryhausen who assumes the function of the author of these films and their main attraction. In Harryhausen’s films, it is the ‘stop motion magician’63 who makes the film ‘worth an excursion’.64

Science fiction was therefore seen as something that could certainly be childish and ridiculous but also as something that could be creative and profound, and while in some cases it was the special effects creators who were claimed to acquire the status of artists, in other cases, it was the writers and the directors. In the case of television, Nigel Kneale’s scripts for the Quatermass serials are regarded as some of the most important products of the decade and attracted phenomenal audiences and controversy,65 while Rod Serling’s scripts for The Twilight Zone (1959–64) consolidated and extended his reputation as a writer while simultaneously bestowing respectability on the genre. Prior to the series, Serling had a strong reputation as a writer of several highly regarded single plays, particularly Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956). Furthermore, these plays were famous for their controversial social commentary, and Serling himself was famous ‘for his public protests against what he described as

“interference of non-artistic people in an artistic medium”.’66 His decision to co-produce the show was therefore seen as a significant move that even warranted a whole article in the New York Times, in which he claimed that the series would give him greater control over his scripts:

‘ “I’ll have a say in taste and policy,” he said. “I’ve never been in a position like that before. Nobody will be able to change lines by going to the executive producer because I’m the executive producer.” ’

However, the article also quotes him as saying that there ‘won’t be anything controversial in the new series’ and, although this might

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sound as though the move from the single plays to the science fiction series represented a retreat from social commentary, he was also claimed to have declared that he now believed that ‘you can get adult drama without controversy’. Indeed, as many critics have since noted, one of the strengths of The Twilight Zone’s fantasy format was that it enabled the show to handle materials that might have been too controversial outside the context of fantasy.67 As Serling himself said of his earlier work: ‘I was not permitted to have Senators discuss any current or pressing problem . . . In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots.’68 The show was therefore one of the first instances where science fiction television started to be taken seriously and the New York Times not only identified Serling as ‘one of television’s abler writers’ but also claimed that, in ‘the desultory field of filmed half-hour drama . . . Serling should not have trouble in making his mark. At least his series promises to be different.’69

In film, both Jack Arnold and Roger Corman acquired reputations as important directors. For example, Variety began to take note of Corman as a figure after describing Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954) as an ‘odd-ity’ on the grounds that it was supposed to be ‘a well done quickie’,70
and claiming that It Conquered the World (1956) was ‘a definite cut above the normal’, which ‘poses some remarkably adult questions amidst the derring-do’.71 Similarly, Teenage Caveman (1958) was claimed to be

‘somewhat surprisingly, a plea for international cooperation in terms of the dangers of radiation’ in which, despite its low budget, ‘the “message”

is handled with a restraint and good taste’ that ‘gives substance to the production’.72 Of course, not all Corman productions received positive reviews but reviewers seem to have seen him as more than just a director of low budget exploitation, and to have developed a genuine investment in his development as a director with the Monthly Film Bulletin comparing Not of This Earth (1957) to Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and declaring that since the former is ‘such a marked improvement’ on the latter, ‘one hopes it is the more recent of the two films’.73

Similarly, Jack Arnold was also singled out as a director of significance. For example, Variety described It Came from Outer Space (1953) as a ‘strong’ film in which Arnold’s direction is distinguished by his handling of atmosphere. He not only ‘whips up an air of suspense’ but also achieves a ‘considerable atmosphere of reality’ for such a fantastic story.74 He is also praised for doing a ‘first rate job’ with Creature from the Black Lagoon, a film that was commended for ‘the eerie effects of its underwater footage’.75 Monthly Film Bulletin also praised ‘Jack Arnold’s characteristically blunt and melancholy style of direction’, which it

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considered to be ‘perfectly attuned to and in sympathy with’ the story of The Incredible Shrinking Man.76 However, as the decade unfolded, there was a sense that he did not realize his early promise. Monthly Film Bulletin claimed that Revenge of the Creature (1955) ‘adds little to the repertoire of movements and mannerisms [the Gill-Man] displayed in his first appearance’ and described the film as a ‘naïve and indifferently played shocker’.77 Nor was Variety much more positive, and it dismissed the film as ‘a routine shocker with obvious appeal for the crowd that goes for the horror pix’.78 As a result, by the time of Monster on Campus (1958), the Monthly Film Bulletin complained that the once ‘astringent director’ was ‘repeating himself ad nauseam’ and that the film marked ‘a further decline in Jack Arnold’s melancholy, and at one time thoughtful, talent’.79

Conclusion

As we have seen, then, the contemporary critical preoccupation with the 1950s alien invasion narratives provides a very limited sense of the period’s science fiction film and television and rests on a questionable assumption that these narratives were the product of Cold War tensions.

However, the genre not only developed in very different ways within different media, but the meaning of the term was, and continues to be, a highly contested one that had diametrically opposed meanings within different contexts. While some sought to distinguish science fiction from the pulp fiction and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s, others directly associated science fiction with these forms.

Furthermore, the function of special effects was understood in ways that are very different from those common today. Certainly, in some cases special effects were seen as silly and childish but, in others, they were seen as genuinely inventive and creative, the products of special effects artists whose work was praised and admired. If, in the case of Harryhausen, the special effects artist was therefore seen as the true author of his films (or at least whatever was valuable within them), the period also saw the emergence of other authors (scriptwriters, producers and directors) whose reputations were not only constructed by distinguishing them from the genre more generally but which also worked, ironically, to legitimate the genre as it moved into the 1960s and 1970s.

Notes

1. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwells, 1989) p. 220. See also Peter Biskind, Seeing

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Is Believing: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Andrew Dowdy, Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: Morrow, 1973); Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Bill Warren, Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982).

For histories of science fiction see Brian Ash, ed., The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Harmony, 1977); Thomas R. Atkins, ed., Science Fiction Films (New York: Monarch, 1976); John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (New York: Paperback Library, 1970); John Brosnan, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1978); John Brosnan, The Primal Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film (London: Orbit, 1991); Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007); Edward Edleson, Visions of Tomorrow: Great Science Fiction from the Movies (New York: Doubleday, 1975); Alan Frank, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Handbook (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983); Denis Gifford, Science Fiction Films (London: Studio Vista, 1971); Bill Harry, Heroes of the Spaceways (London: Omnibus, 1981); Phil Hardy, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (London: Octopus, 1986); William Johnson, ed., Focus on Science Fiction Films (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder (Chicago: Advent, 1967); Frank Manchel, Great Science Fiction Films (New York: Franklin Watts, 1976); Douglas Menville, A Historical and Critical Survey of the Science Fiction Film (New York: Arno, 1975); Douglas Menville and R. Reginald, Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film (New York: New York Times Books, 1977); Peter Nichols, Fantastic Cinema (London: Ebury, 1984); Frederik Pohl and Frederik Pohl IV, Science Fiction_Studies in Film (New York: Ace, 1981); Jeff Rovin, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films (Secaucus: Citadel, 1975); Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1991); Philip Strick, The Movie Treasury of Science Fiction Movies (London: Gallery, 1976); J.P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State Univesity Press, 1979).

2. Bosley Crowther, ‘THE SCREEN: TWO FILMS HAVE LOCAL PREMIERES; “The Thing,” an Eerie Scientific Number by Howard Hawks, Opens at the Criterion “Communist for F.B.I.” New Picture at Strand Theatre, Features Frank Lovejoy At the Criterion’, New York Times, 3 May, 1951, p. 34.

3. Ray Bradbury, ‘The Concrete Mixer’, in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April, 1949
and republished in The Illustrated Man (first edition Doubleday, 1951).

4. Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 215.

5. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, p. 218.

6. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1953, p. 131.

7. A. W., ‘Look Out! The Space Boys are Loose Again’, in New York Times, 18 June, 1953, p. 38.

8. Brog., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, 27 May, 1953, p. 6.

9. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, June, 1957, p. 83.

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10. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, March, 1959, p. 45.

11. George Mann, ed., The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Robinson, 2001), p. 74.

12. See, for example, Glen Creeber, ed., The Television Genre Book (London: British Film Institute, 2001); Jane Feuer, ‘Genre study and Television’, in Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 138–60; and Jason Mittel, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).

13. For the classic account of this position, see John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema: Television: Video (London: Routledge, 1982). For challenges to Ellis’s claims, see John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 1995); and John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

Furthermore, there is often a confusion between the supposed transparency of television’s visual style, and the supposed lack of television’s visual style.

Writing of the supposed incompatibility between television and horror, Waller moves from a discussion of ‘the “invisible” style’ of the made-for-television films to a complaint about ‘the technical limitations that affect all telefilms’ so that the ‘relatively poor definition of the standard television image, for example, hampers, if not prohibits, telefilms from disclosing to the viewer a complex mosaic of vivid, mysteriously charged details’.

Gregory A. Waller, ‘Made-for-Television Horror Films’, in Gregory A. Waller, ed., American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 147.

14. RUR is often cited as the first science fiction programme made by the BBC

(1938) and reports of the programme drew attention to its use of superim-position of two camera images at the climatic moment of the programme to multiply the apparent number of robots represented on screen. This was then followed by The Time Machine (1949) in which special effects were used to convey the sense of movement through time: while two cameras mixed between live studio shots of the Time Traveller on his machine and scenery elements to establish the shift through time, a telecine sequence was also used which showed the dissolution of the Time Traveller’s laboratory to reveal the buildings of the future and the rapid passage of the sun, settling on the future landscape in the rain.

15. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1957, p. 75.

16. Anon., ‘Viewers Write to the “Radio Times” ’, Radio Times, 29 August 1952, p. 38.

17. Anon, Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1955, p. 150.

18. Michael Lewis, ‘Did You Hear That? Children’s Comics’, The Listener, 13 December 1951, p. 1007.

19. Christopher Priest, ‘British Science Fiction’ in Patrick Parrinder, ed., Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (London: Longman, 1979), p. 194.

20. See, for example, James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir and its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Stephen Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000).

21. Mark Jancovich, ‘A Real Shocker: Authenticity, Genre and the Struggle for Cultural Distinctions’, Continuum, 14: 1, April 2000, pp. 23–35.

22. Mann, p. 146.

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23. Mann, p. 98.

24. Mann, p. 98.

25. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Corgi, 1973), p. 258.

26. Bosley Crowther, ‘British Science-Fiction Thriller, “Project M.7,” and Italian Import, “The Lucky Five,” Bow Here’, New York Times, 27 November, 1953, p. 22.

27. Bosley Crowther, ‘20,000 Leagues in 128 Fantastic Minutes’, New York Times, 24 December, 1954, p. 7.

28. Anon., ‘Tele Followup Comment, Variety, 25 April, 1951, p. 36.

29. Thomas M. Pryor, ‘George Pal Plans New Film On Space’, New York Times, 21 May, 1952, p. 22.

30. A.H. Weiler, ‘Screen: “Saucer” Story – Quasi-Documentary on “Flying Objects” Bows’, New York_Times, 13 June, 1956, p. 46.

31. A.H. Weiler, ‘Screen: Supersonic Age Pioneers – ‘On the Threshold of Space’

Bows at Globe’, New York Times, 30 March, 1956, p. 10.

32. Hift., ‘7th Voyage of Sinbad’, Variety, 26 November, 1958, p. 6.

33. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1952, p. 36.

34. A.W., ‘At the Paramount’, New York Times, 1 May, 1954, p. 13.

35. A.W., ‘ “Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” Invades City’, New York Times, 25 June, 1953, p. 23; and Bosley Crowther, ‘Screen: Horror Import – “Godzilla” a Japanese Film, is at State’, New York Times, 28 April, 1956, p. 11.

36. Holl., ‘Film Review’, Variety, 17 June, 1953, p. 6.

37. Altman, Film/Genre, p. 78.

38. Jack Gould, ‘Television in Review’, New York Times, 20 November, 1949, p. X9.

39. Jack Gould, ‘Television in Review’, New York Times, 30 April, 1950, p. X11.

40. Jack Gould, ‘Television in Review’, New York Times, 4 November, 1951, p. 123.

41. Oscar Godbout, ‘TV Blast-Off: A Slow Start’, New York Times, 3 August, 1958, p. X9.

42. Howard Thompson, ‘ “Blob” Slithers into Mayfair’, New York Times, 7 November, 1958, p. 23.

43. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1959, p. 62.

44. Bosley Crowther, ‘ “Destination Moon,” George Pal Version of Rocket Voyage, New Film at Mayfair’, New York Times, 28 June, 1950, p. 32.

45. Bosley Crowther, ‘Screen: Wonderful Trip in Space – Forbidden Plant is Out of This World’, New York Times, 4 May, 1956, p. 21.

46. H.H.T., ‘ “This Island Earth” Explored From Space’, New York Times, 11 June, 1955, p. 8.

47. Anon., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, June 17, 1953, p. 6.

48. Telotte, p. 25.

49. Ibid.

50. There is a strong suggestion of this position in Pearson and Messenger Davies’ account of the film version of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was discussed earlier.

51. Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins et al., eds, Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 8–36.

52. Telotte, p. 28.

53. Sobchack, p. 88.

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54. AT, ‘Review of Clash of Titans’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

55. See, for example, AJ, ‘Review of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008; AJ, ‘Review of Earth vs the Flying Saucers’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

56. AJ, ‘Review of 20 Million Miles to Earth’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

57. AT, ‘Review of Clash of Titans’; and DP, ‘Review of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

58. AJ, ‘Review of 20 Million Miles to Earth’.

59. Ibid.

60. AJ, ‘Review of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

61. JG, ‘Review of The Valley of the Gwangi’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

62. DP, ‘Review of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’.

63. AJ, ‘Review of The First Men in the Moon’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

64. SG, ‘Review of Mysterious Island’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008.

65. See Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (London: Headpress, 2006). See also John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2003); and Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

66. John P. Shanley, ‘A Playwright at the Controls’, New York Times, 20 September, 1959, p. X19.

67. See for example Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–2002 (New York: Palgrave, 2003); and Jeff Sconce, ‘Science Fiction Programmes’ in Horace Newcomb, ed., Encyclopedia of Television (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997).

68. Quoted in Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

69. Jack Gould, ‘Rod Serling Series’, The New York Times, October 3, 1959, p. 39.

70. Neal., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, June 9, 1954, p. 6.

71. Kove., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, September 12, 1956, p. 6.

72. Powe., ‘Film Reviews’ Variety, 17 September, 1958, p. 7.

73. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1957, p. 89.

74. Anon., Variety, 27 May 1953, p. 6.

75. Anon., Variety, 10 February 1954, p. 6.

76. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, June, 1957, p. 83.

77. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1956, p.21.

78. Hift, Variety, 16 March 1955, p.6.

79. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, April, 1959, p. 61.

6

Hammer’s Dracula

Christopher Frayling

Several years ago, I received a strange request from England’s Heritage Lottery Fund, the body which distributes ‘good cause’ lottery money to national heritage projects.1 Would I comment on an application for funding to house in a museum a large collection of artefacts associated with Hammer horror films – mainly ‘special effects makeup’, the Phil Leakey and Roy Ashton collections – from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s? There was a detailed inventory in the package that included some ‘dental appliances with a reservoir of blood, operated by the actor’s tongue’ from Dracula (1958), eye inserts, a ‘box of rubber noses and oriental eye pieces’, moulds for scars, plaster-cast heads of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, prostheses and make-up boxes including the ingre-dients of Kensington Gore (fake blood), plus assorted pen-and-pencil sketches, pilot-drawings, character designs, production photos, scrap-books, press cuttings and documents. The main focus of the collection was on films from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) to The Reptile (1965).

Did they, or did they not, deserve to be considered part of the national heritage? Were they ‘national’ or an offshore product of Hollywood?

What was their ‘historical importance’? What was their cultural impact?

And their effect on the post-war British film industry? Above all, were the collections – as an archive – worthy of support as significant examples of ‘the heritage’? As someone who had written and broadcast on both the Gothic novel and horror movies, I seemed in a good position to answer these questions. A follow-up telephone call explained that the Heritage Lottery advisers were in a quandary about how to react to this application. The application was dated December 1997.

A decision had to be made by the end of January 1998, after which 108

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the collection would then be put onto the open market and probably be dispersed.

I did not hesitate. Of course, I wrote in my report, the material culture of Hammer films deserved a place, preferably a prominent place, in a museum. Why not? Why the hesitation? Where significance and impact were concerned, the five film versions of the Frankenstein story made between 1956 and 1972 (with Peter Cushing as the arrogant aristocratic scientist), the six versions of Dracula made between 1957 and 1970 (with Christopher Lee as the grand saigneur), plus The Mummy (1959, with both of them) and The Devil Rides Out (1967, with Lee as the good guy, for once) if not some of the later Hammer films –
represented for me a key moment in the history of British cinema. It was a moment when a small studio at Bray, just off the main Maidenhead –

Windsor road, a gap in the market, a repertory company of directors, designers, musicians, technicians and actors, and a great deal of entrepreneurial flair, created a distinctive product, a distinctively stylish product, which even took the American market by storm and eventually won the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1968 (the only film company to be so honoured). At the time of The Curse of Frankenstein – Hammer’s breakthrough colour film in 1957 – some Madison Avenue financial backers expressed concern that ‘just how British [the actors] are by way of accent’ might hold back the film’s chances on the American market. Hammer replied reassuringly that ‘the British cast will be absolutely first class and will have no trace whatsoever of British accent’2 – which was very odd, since the very Britishness of the project turned out to be part of its appeal. Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle, in some ways a spin-off from Hammer, was deliberately to contrast the barnstorming acting style of Vincent Price (school of the Barrymores in their prime) with the beach party delivery of the youngsters. Hammer’s repertory company belonged to a slightly more restrained British tradition: costume drama on stage – Peter Cushing learned about the importance of movement and unexpected gesture from watching Laurence Olivier at close quarters – and costume drama in film, which had been her-alded by popular Gainsborough Studios historical romances and by post-war Charles Dickens adaptations. So although these films revisited the stories of Hollywood films made some 25 years before, they were undoubtedly British – if that was one of the concerns of the Lottery advisers – British, with an important Celtic flavour: Mary Shelley grew up partly in Scotland, Robert Louis Stevenson was born and bred there, Arthur Conan Doyle had his roots there and Bram Stoker was –
according to which biography you read – ‘Anglo-Irish’, ‘Irish-Protestant’

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or ‘Anglo-Celt’. (My report was written before ‘the Irish Dracula’, the interpretation of the novel from various post-colonial perspectives, had become fashionable.)

The stories were also in direct line of descent from the Gothic novels of the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries, and in the case of the vampires, from the public image of Lord Byron himself.3 There was a credential: a direct link with the House of Lords! In this sense, too, they were definitely a part of the national heritage. Just after the arrival of the novel –

Eng. Lit.’s first eleven of robust and rational players, which had no doubt been studied by the Lottery advisers at school or university – had come this parallel form of irrational fiction. I remember citing a critic of the time on this:

We began to reorder the natural world with seed drills and crop rota-tion, steam power and longitudinal navigation; we began to drink tea and approve of reticence in public manners; and then we came home in the evenings to wallow in, say, Vathek – 1786’s big hit, by the creepy William Beckford, with great gross-outs – ‘he awoke stung . . . by wormwood-colour flies, which emitted from their wings a suffocating stench’ – and necrophiliac tendencies: ‘My taste for dead bodies,’ says Vathek’s usually lingerie-clad mother, ‘and everything like mummy, is decided.’ It’s a line Barbara Shelley should have delivered in a Hammer film . . . 4

This parallel form, this other, had been mocked in uneasy ways by members of the Eng. Lit. cricket eleven, partly because it had proved so very successful with the reading public. Bookending the first phase of the Gothic, Henry Fielding introduced book eight of Tom Jones (1749) with some jokes about the sorts of authors who resorted to horror and wonders to make their fictions interesting; then Jane Austen famously satirized the craze for Gothic fiction in Northanger Abbey, published posthumously a few months before Frankenstein at Christmas 1817

(though mainly written in the late 1790s, a time when 35% of all novels being issued in Britain were Gothics). This reaction was in the fulness of time to turn into a set of critical clichés – conditioned reflexes, almost –
about horror fiction. It was – so the litany went – a form of fiction that was deliberately sensationalist; with heroes, heroines and villains who were merely puppets – acting out dramas which had little or no connection with the facts or morals of everyday life – in narratives which were disjointed and irrational; an ephemeral fad with formulaic connections (antiquated castles, mannerist landscapes, hidden secrets, hauntings,

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scowling aristocratic villains, put-upon maidens, eighteenth-century heroes and heroines projected back into historical environments) which only deserved to survive as a cult, at best a symptom of nasty consumerism at the end of the eighteenth century and since. Edmund Burke – who in his A Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) provided the admittedly sometimes spurious aesthetic credo for many Gothic novelists – wrote approvingly of ‘the terrible sublime’

as an antidote to mental lethargy and boredom. Horace Walpole, seven years later, agreed that ‘Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing.’ This was sensationalism for sensationalism’s sake, best read or viewed at night when the critical faculties were half-asleep. First-eleven novels could be read in daylight.

So the authors of the original Gothic novels had not – until surprisingly recently – been admitted into literature’s first eleven by the academic community. They had been filed under ‘the popular novel’

instead, the sort of material Queenie Leavis – rather than her husband F.R. Leavis with his ‘great tradition’ – wrote about, in her studies of fiction and the reading public. Maybe this was another of the quandaries the advisers found themselves in. Was the post-1960s interest in the Gothic a lasting development? The late eighteenth-century debates about the ‘legitimate’ depiction of horror (best seen out of the corner of the eye) and the ‘illegitimate’ depiction of gore, had resurfaced in even starker terms when Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula were first released in 1957 and 1958. These debates too went right back to the era when Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho was thought to be a good example of ‘suggestion’ or ‘obscurity’ and M.G. Lewis’s The Monk was thought to be far too graphic for its own good. Another example of Hammer as heritage. Had the academic community moved substantively beyond these traditional concerns?

Then there was the question of originality. One reason why Hammer films made such a splash at the time of their first release – strongly disliked by the critics and equally strongly liked by the public – was that there had in fact been surprisingly few British horror films made before the late 1950s; surprisingly, given the importance of the native literary tradition. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi had made one or two in the 1930s (not their finest hours), but these did not perform well at the box office and they weren’t a patch on the actors’ Hollywood products.

The Universal cycle of horror films made in Hollywood had been dominated by European talent including British director James Whale; British actors Colin Clive, Cedric Hardwicke, Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Claude Rains, Ernest Thesiger and British production designer Charles D.

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‘Danny’ Hall. But that had been in Hollywood, on the Universal backlot, when horror was associated with the old world – German expressionism, pre-modern superstition, sets left over from First World War dramas –
when American stars thought playing the evil guys was bad for their image (they still do) and when the early talkies were kind to theatre-trained British accents. An old-world genre in the new world of talkies.

Between 1942 and 1945, the import to Britain of all ‘H’ certificate films was banned outright by the Central Office of Information and the British Board of Film Censors. The thinking was that there were horrors enough for the public to cope with in real life – a misunderstanding, incidentally, of how horror stories function. Who would risk being hit by a flying bomb while watching The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942), about an experimental breed of super-soldiers developed to do battle with the Nazis? Even after the Second World War, and the flood of Hollywood back numbers, a survey of the British film industry commissioned by the reconstruction Political and Economic Planning Group – which studied, by theme, 572 films screened in Britain between 1948 and 1950 – concluded that only 1.9% of the total fell into the ‘Supernatural’ category (meaning ‘beyond the known powers of the laws of nature’), compared with 26.9% in ‘Crime’ and 19.6%
in ‘Love’ (including ‘courtship and married life’).5 The only categories below ‘Supernatural’ on the list were ‘Pathological’ (relating to mental or physical illness) and ‘Social Problems’. Another official survey of the narratives of all films released in Britain between 1955 and 1957 showed that ‘Horror’ represented just over 1% of the total in 1955, 2% in 1956
and just under 5% in 1957. ‘Love’ showed a steep decline in the same period, as did ‘Comedy’ and ‘Historical’.6

So when The Curse of Frankenstein opened on 2 May 1957 – soon moving to two Leicester Square cinemas simultaneously – it must have seemed, to misquote John Ruskin, like a pot of bright-red paint flung in the face of the film establishment, complete with resurrected dog and eyeballs preserved in jam jars. The garish palette, well-endowed servant girl/mistress, tuppence coloured gore, the apparent revelling in realistic details and the foregrounding of the up-to-now repressed –
all these cast early Hammer horrors into the outer darkness. Most of the serious reviewers concluded that for such material to be justified, it needed either ‘poetry and art’ on the one hand, or comedic detachment on the other: the best of the Gothic novels – or the James Whale approach. Hammer seemed to have neither. C.A. Lejeune famously began her review in The Observer: ‘Without hesitation I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half-dozen most repulsive films

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I have encountered, in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.’ To which Campbell Dixon in The Daily Telegraph added: ‘when the screen gives us severed heads and hands, eyeballs dropped in a wine glass and magnified, and brains dished up on a plate like spaghetti, I can only suggest a new certificate – “S.O.” perhaps, for Sadists Only.’ Dilys Powell, in The Sunday Times, concluded: ‘after its early promise of rich absurdity, [the film] drops into the merely disgusting’.7

‘Repulsive’ and ‘disgusting’ were interesting words to have used in this context, because horror films – like their literary counterparts –
had indeed often revelled in being transgressive; in challenging social taboos. There had been the Hollywood version of Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) in which Dr Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) tried to re-enact the literal truth of Darwin’s thesis about the descent of man with help from the over-sexed Erik the ape; or, another example, the British Censors cutting the sequence where Karloff’s creature plays with the little girl by the lakeside, in Frankenstein (1931), and throws her into the water thinking she will float like a flower – a cut that actually created the impression that the girl had been molested; or The Island of Lost Souls (1933), with its crazy surgical experiments fusing people and beasts and its hint of bes-tiality, which had been banned outright in Britain. One of the functions of the Gothic was, traditionally, to provide a set of metaphors, of grown-up fairy-tales, with which to challenge mainstream morality and the tyranny of good taste. It has held up a haunted mirror – like the antique one in Ealing’s Dead of Night (1945), which reveals how repressed and artificial its bourgeois owners are – to the realist, true-to-life mainstream of English literature and cinema.

At that point I rested my case. I had argued in my report that Hammer Films represented an important moment in British cinema history, were distinctively British, were descended from the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century and its neo-Gothic followers, had been critically neglected, were original and – like the Gothic novel – were in their own way transgressive. The extreme reactions of the serious newspaper critics revealed the impact they had made. One of the best early books about Hammer (1973) – and the films’ connections with Gothic literary themes: the fatal man, the beauty of the Medusa, Milton’s Satan – had been called A Heritage of Horror, by David Pirie.8 I hoped these arguments would enable the Lottery advisers to support the application. Hammer Films, like them or not, were indeed ‘historically important’, made a big

‘cultural impact’ and were significant examples of ‘the heritage’.

In retrospect, my defence of Hammer-as-heritage now seems rather too broad-brush, too a-historical in the case it makes (‘The Gothic

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Novel’; ‘The Horror Film’, ‘Critical Clichés’, ‘Horror and Transgression’); not specific or precise enough in its delineation of what ‘the heritage’

and ‘the cultural impact’ might mean at any particular time. It has often been said that we get the horrors we deserve – and that what is considered ‘horrific’ by the consensus changes significantly over time, in tandem with wider social and cultural changes: the same certainly applies to notions of ‘the heritage’. In the 1950s, for example, big houses were known as ‘stately homes’; by the 1980s they had become ‘historic houses’, a less socially stratified phrase. And, to be precise, the Heritage Lottery application covered the whole of Hammer’s history at Bray up to 1966, and not just the early colour horror films of 1956–60 (from The Curse of Frankenstein to The Curse of the Werewolf, say) – with very little on the years at ABPC Elstree (1967–70) and MGM – EMI Elstree (1970–75): a ten-year slice of British film history, rather than the four-year slice on which I had concentrated.

So I want in this essay to try and recapture, to pinpoint, the moment in May 1958 when Hammer’s Dracula was first released in Britain, by focusing its cultural impact more than was possible in the confines of my Heritage Lottery report.9 Just what was it that upset the critics so much, and that seemed – in the context of British cinema – so novel at the time? The critics had treated The Curse of Frankenstein as unusually

‘sick-making’ and ‘nauseating’ and had emphasized more than anything else the garish gore: the two novelties were, apparently, the colour and the emphasis on physical detail. This reaction completely baffled the American distributors, who reacted to The Curse as standard teenage drive-in fare. But when Dracula was released the following year, it was something else – beyond the fact that the film was the first Dracula to be shot in colour – that appalled the critics and even encouraged some of them to ask the Censor to intervene.

A month after The Curse of Frankenstein went on general release in Britain – with record box-office figures already being reported –
screenwriter Jimmy Sangster was commissioned to begin work on his adaptation of Dracula.10 It was in late June 1957: When I wrote The Curse, I hadn’t read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein –
but everyone knew the story of a man who makes a monster. I did read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, twice, and was rather overwhelmed by it actually – turning this 450 page novel into a 90 page script. But I completed my final draft in about a month.

Sangster had been involved with Hammer as a company since the late 1940s, first as a third assistant, then first assistant, then production

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manager and then scriptwriter. He had worked with director Terence Fisher on ‘at least six of the pre-Gothic run-of-the-mill B-movies’ made by Hammer. So when he prepared his scripts, it was second nature to him to think about the exact cost of every word where budget and schedule were concerned. ‘We had no wolves, no gypsies, no Renfield, no boat, no Whitby – we couldn’t afford any of them. Every page was carefully costed.’

The film was budgeted at £81 412 (£750 for Sangster’s fee, £7788 for constructing the sets, £7810 for the artistes’ fees, £5000 for producer and director fees).11 The settings of Bram Stoker’s novel (Transylvania to Whitby to London to Transylvania) were reduced to Castle Dracula near Klausenberg, which is a coach-ride from Carlstadt, where the Holmwoods live, via a customs post at Ingolstadt. The main sets were the Castle (entrance hall, dining room recycled from the graveyard set, library/Gothic Room, Harker’s bedroom, crypt) and the Holmwood house (drawing room, cellar). The exterior of the Castle entrance, enhanced by a glass painting of turrets and Alpine peaks, was thought to be so impressive, and such good value for money, that it was soon to be recycled as Baskerville Hall (1958) and as an Indian village in The Stranglers of Bombay (1959). In this reduced physical space –
with its basic contrast between ‘Castle’ and ‘Holmwood house’, desire and domesticity – Sangster turned Dracula into a fast-paced, non-stop 82-minute three-act adventure (arrival at the Castle/Lucy and Mina vampirized/the chase) with some comic relief (a dotty undertaker called Marx, a bumbling Customs official, a suspicious innkeeper) to ease the tension. Sangster now calls this kind of comic relief ‘the “pass the mar-malade” line’ – after Peter Cushing’s memorably dry request to his betrothed at the breakfast table in The Curse of Frankenstein. It works in the same way as the ‘Porter at the gate’ scene after King Duncan’s murder in Macbeth.

I showed Jimmy Sangster some of director Terence Fisher’s preparatory notes12 – which had recently been published, in facsimile – on how to transform the novel into filmable material:

p. 3

Insert (Tedious).

p. 4

? Accents for Innkeeper and wife.

p. 6

Coach arrives Ext? Harker hears villagers’ dialogue as he goes through them.

? Foreign Language (Language Dictionary Dialogue).

p. 7

Int. Coach? Accents.

p. 10/11 Cal è che and wolves episode.

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p. 12

Dracula? White moustache.

p. 16

Geography of House (Hall from Dining Room in
relation to 1st entrance).

p. 22/23

No dialogue for 3 girls – Dancers (Mime only and whispers).

What happened, I wondered, to the Transylvanian insert, the cal è che, the wolves, and how did the three silent dancing girls – the brides of Dracula – turn into Valerie Gaunt, in only her second film role, insisting:

‘A reason! You ask for a reason! Is it not reason enough that he keeps me locked up in this house, holds me against my will . . . ’, just before trying to insert her upper canines into Jonathan Harker’s neck?

Maybe we couldn’t afford three girls, though there were three in the novel. Or the coach and the wolves. No-one can remember whether we had a coach or not! Jonathan Harker ended up arriving on foot.

I think I had a coach scene at the beginning, in my script. And Dracula certainly didn’t have a white moustache. This all reminds me of when I was later asked to write a pirate film for Hammer: “There’s just one thing,” they said. “We can’t afford a ship”!

The solution to the ‘? Accents for Innkeeper and wife’/‘? Foreign Language’/‘Int. Coach? Accents’ problem was to set the film in a Home Counties Transylvania – peopled with eccentric British character actors such as bumbling Miles Malleson, mummerset-accented George Woodbridge and officious George Benson – and to present the Holmwood household as a haven of Victorian domesticity. The Universal Dracula – like its Frankenstein – had been set in a strange hybrid of the past and the present. Sangster’s Dracula was set roughly in the historical era the novel was written (May to December 1885 rather than 1891–97), and turned the story into a period piece – which was to have implications for its presentation of the Count as sexual threat.

Where his ‘white moustache’ is concerned – and Bram Stoker’s celebrated description of Count Dracula as an aged military commander with massive eyebrows and a breath problem – the character was to be a younger, more brisk and sexually active figure, as well as a perfect host, from the early drafts onwards, although he was originally to wear a black hat. And his ability to change himself into a bat or wolf had gone, too.

Jimmy Sangster redefined the rules of earlier vampire films – and of the novel – in the scene where Van Helsing listens to phonograph recordings of his research notes, and records some of his new discoveries:

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Established that victims consciously detest being dominated by vampirism but are unable to relinquish the practice – similar to addiction to drugs. Death results from loss of blood but unlike normal death no peace manifests itself, for they enter into the fearful state of the un-dead.

Had Jimmy Sangster at that stage seen Nosferatu (1922), where the vampire Count is a folkloric creature with pointy ears, rodent teeth and a bald head, and where his contagion is likened to the plague? ‘No.’ Or Hollywood’s first Dracula (1931), where he was played in pre-Freudian style by Bela Lugosi as a hypnotic Hungarian in full evening dress, who comes across like a melodramatic demon king? ‘No.’ Really? ‘No.’

In fact, the protracted negotiations with Universal about who owned the film and performing rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula – which had been going on since October 1956 – were still inconclusive when Sangster was putting together his draft scripts.13 This was not because Universal owned the remake rights to the novel, but to protect Hammer from accusations of copying the innovations from the 1931 version and its theatrical source (the Count’s cloak and Van Helsing’s kit of wooden stakes, for example). Eventually, a deal was struck which gave Universal worldwide distribution rights.

Had Van Helsing’s new vampire rules also been dictated by budgetary considerations?

One of my reasons was that [the transformation into a bat and a wolf]

had never been done very well. I tried to ground the script to some extent in reality. I thought the idea of being able to change into a wolf or bat made the film seem more like a fairytale than it needed to be.14

Hence, the ‘addiction’ to drugs parallel, which made the dominance/dependence relationship between vampire and victim seem more real, more tangible, to a 1957 audience. As did the new-look Count, who had become a demon lover, a sexual predator. The scenes where these two came together involved Dracula’s seduction of Lucy (Carol Marsh) and Mina Holmwood (Melissa Stribling). In the film as released, these were among the most original contributions:15

LUCY’S BEDROOM, later that same night.

Medium close-up, Lucy in a four-poster bed, in a blue chiffon night-dress, her hair in plaits.

She is agitated.

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CUT TO:

The French windows in Lucy’s bedroom. One of them is open.

CUT TO:

Close-up, Lucy is more agitated. She feels the two scars on her neck.

CUT TO:

Close-up, swirling autumn leaves just outside the open window.

CUT TO:

Van Helsing’s study. He is looking at Harker’s diary while his voice is heard coming from the phonograph . . .

CUT TO:

Extreme close-up, Dracula’s face, with key light on his eyes, as he stands at the French windows.

CUT TO:

Lucy in bed. She is now very agitated.

CUT TO:

Leaves swirling.

CUT TO:

Long shot. In the foreground is Lucy in the
four-poster bed. Over her, standing in the open window, is Dracula. He walks forward, coming round the foot of Lucy’s bed, finally reaching her.

Pulling up his cape, Dracula conceals her from view.

The black cape fills the screen.

CUT TO:

The next morning. Mina and Dr Seward come out of Lucy’s bedroom . . .

————————

VAN HELSING: You must get some garlic flowers, as many as you can, place them by the windows and the door, and by the bedside. They may be taken out during the day but under no circumstances are they to be removed at night, even if she implores you.

I cannot impress upon you enough how important it is that you obey my instructions. Do exactly as I say and you may be able to save her. If you don’t she will die. I’ll be here in the morning.

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CUT TO:

LUCY’S BEDROOM, that same night. She is now wearing a white night-dress. The room is full of garlic flowers, with vases of them on either side of her bed. In bed, Lucy is struggling to reach one of the vases of flowers. Eventually she succeeds in knocking it over. The maidservant Girda, in a dressing-gown, her hair plaited, enters the room to inquire after the noise. She is flustered.

GIRDA: Heavens, child, what is it?

LUCY: Girda, these flowers, I can’t stand them.

GIRDA: They do smell strong, but Mrs Holmwood said . . .

LUCY: Please Girda, they stifle me.

GIRDA: Oh well, I’ll take them out.

LUCY: And the windows, you’ll open the windows.

GIRDA: Yes, miss, if that’s what you want.

Girda opens the French windows and removes some of the garlic flowers. As she leaves she turns to Lucy.

GIRDA: I’ll come back for the rest.

Exit Girda.

CUT TO:

MEDIUM CLOSE-UP, leaves swirling outside the
window.

CUT TO:

MEDIUM CLOSE-UP, Lucy in bed, her apprehension and excitement mounting.

CUT TO:

LONG SHOT, Dracula standing in the window.

CUT TO:

The full moon, as clouds pass across its face.

CUT TO:

Lucy in bed, a sheet pulled up over her face. Van Helsing stands near her, Mina and Arthur stand at the foot of the bed and Girda stands by the door . . .

VAN HELSING: Mrs Holmwood, did you do as I told you?

ARTHUR: She did. And you can see the result.

————————

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CUT TO:

CLOSE-UP OF Mina standing in the doorway, inside the Holmwoods’ house. She has a fur collar pulled up around her neck, a green coat, and she has a warm twinkle in her eyes that has not been there before. She is looking vibrant and sensual.

MINA: Good morning.

ARTHUR: Mina, you gave me quite a fright. Where have you been at this hour of the morning?

MINA: It was such a lovely day I got up early and went for a walk in the garden. I didn’t expect you back so soon.

ARTHUR: I’m afraid I’ve got to go out again.

MINA: Oh! When will you be back?

ARTHUR: I can’t say for sure. Mina, you look very ill, are you all right?

MINA: Arthur darling, don’t fuss, I feel perfectly well. Goodbye darling.

————————

CUT TO:

. . . VAN HELSING: I know I ask a great deal of you but you mustn’t weaken now. We have it within our power to rid the world of this evil, and with God’s help we’ll succeed.

CUT TO:

EXTERIOR, GARDEN OF THE HOLMWOODS’ HOUSE. Arthur is standing, jiggling the crucifix in his hand. He looks up at the window of Mina’s bedroom.

CUT TO:

INTERIOR, MINA’S BEDROOM. Mina is sitting on the edge of her bed.

CUT TO:

ARTHUR IN THE GARDEN, KEEPING WATCH. A wolf howls.

CUT TO:

INTERIOR OF THE HOUSE. Dracula is standing in the hall. The camera is high, looking down. As Dracula ascends the stairs the camera tracks across the top of the stairs, finally bringing Dracula into close-up.

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CUT TO:

MINA SITTING ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, apprehensive but eager. Dracula enters the room and approaches her. He plays his face close to hers and
pushes her back onto the bed. There is a
scream.

CUT TO:

CLOSE-UP OF AN OWL SCREAMING IN THE GARDEN.

CUT TO:

ARTHUR, STILL KEEPING WATCH . . .

Did Jimmy Sangster recall writing these scenes? ‘The ones with Lucy, they were definitely me. The scene of Melissa Stribling at the door, smil-ing, that was mainly Terry Fisher. I just wrote “enter Melissa Stribling”.

The scene of Melissa Stribling being visited by Dracula in her bedroom, that was partly me, partly Terry.’16

On 8 October 1957, the day before Terence Fisher was signed as the director of Dracula, the second draft of Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay was submitted to the recently appointed new secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, John Nicholls.17 Five days later, an internal Board memo sounded an ominous note – socially as well as morally: The uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style of Mr Jimmy Sangster cannot quite obscure the remnants of a good horror story, though they do give one the gravest misgivings about treatment . . .

The memo continued with serious worries about ‘Technicolor blood’,

‘shots of blood’ and ‘stake-work’, which were summarized by Nicholls in a letter to the Hammer people of 21 October. These worries mirrored the recent concerns of the newspaper critics about The Curse of Frankenstein. Sangster’s Dracula had introduced colour, fangs, red contact lenses, in-shot stakings – and décolletage – for the first time. At this stage, the Board’s reservations seemed to be almost entirely about the gore quotient, though there was a first warning about another issue as well:

p. 10, 29, 45 etc. It is important that the women in the film should be decently clad, not seen in transparent night-dresses or with bared breasts, or in unduly suggestive garments. I would add that anything which cross-emphasises the sex aspect of the story is likely, in a horror subject of this kind, to involve cuts in the completed film.

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This was presumably put in to protect the BBFC’s back, in case subsequent drafts – or the film itself – went beyond the submitted words on the page.

Jimmy Sangster had already crossed swords with the British Board, on X The Unknown (1956) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), but his final shooting script was dated 18 October – so while the Board was busy discussing his second draft, and having problems with it, Hammer was going ahead regardless. This was shortly to prove a source of irritation to the Board, and teach the Hammer executives a lesson about clearing up any misunderstandings well in advance of shooting expensive film stock. Filming began on 11 November 1957, partly on the new sound stage at Bray, and wrapped at the end of January 1958; on 5 February a black-and-white print of Dracula – minus six scenes and without ‘full sound’ – was winging its way to the BBFC. That same afternoon, an internal memo noted sniffily that ‘the producers have ignored the script letter and also have deviated from the script’. Just as they had feared, in the 21 October letter. By a week later, Hammer had belatedly agreed to make the cuts outlined by the BBFC at the script stage over three months before, and resubmitted a print on 12 February. This time, in addition to the graphic detail of the stakings and the disintegration of Dracula – the Board’s original concerns – a new sequence was added to the censors’

little list for the first time:

Reel 8. The whole episode of Dracula and Mina together whenever either of them have sexual pleasure. There must, for instance, be no kissing or fondling.

Plus ‘caution is also required with regard to the music effects, especially

“shock” music . . . ’

James Carreras, the head of the company, immediately fired back a letter to Nicholls with ‘Just a few general observations on “horror pictures”:

The horror audience is a very specialised one and many people who go to ‘X for sex’ pictures will not go to see a horror film . . . . The specialised audience who will go to see Dracula will expect thrills but the cuts that you are asking us to make, in our opinion, are taking every thrill out of the picture, in fact, it is not as horrific as any of the past Draculas and we cannot believe that that is your intention.

So the Board decided as a concession to screen the film again on 14 February, and this time one of the BBFC examiners noted:

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l 8. There is still a strong sex element in this scene. This is due to Mina’s anticipating expression in close-up and Dracula’s face (and expression) as it hovers over Mina’s before he applies himself to her neck. We are very doubtful whether this sex element can be removed . . . Cut the scene from immediately after Mina gets on the bed to shot of owl screaming . . .

On 3 April, a colour print – complete with James Bernard’s thrashing, orgasmic music; high-volume variations on the three syllables of Dra-cu-la followed by rising scales – was submitted, incorporating further small cuts in the staking of Lucy and the disintegration of the Count. Having watched this print, the Board concluded that it was now prepared to pass everything except Reel 8, which ‘should be resubmitted’: shot of Dracula’s face approaching Mina as she lies on the bed, with her reaction, must go. There should be a cut from where he enters the room to the owl (and the sound of the screams) outside . . .

Hammer’s good-humoured but firm response to this was to reiterate that they
could not see how [Dracula’s] face looks more censorable in colour than it did in black and white: he is wearing no special makeup. There is no blood on his face, he is not wearing contact-lenses – in fact, the rather pink look he has makes him look, if anything, a little prettier than he did before!

In the end, following a face-to-face meeting to resolve the deadlock on 14 April, the Board relented:

Reel 8. While we consider that, in the approach of Dracula to Mina the sex-element is still too prevalent, in view of the apparent misunderstanding over this [the suggestion that if the scene did not look worse in colour than black and white, it would automatically be passed] and the technical difficulty of effecting further reductions, we are prepared to waive our objection to this scene.

But a brief shot of the disintegrating face of Dracula, with ‘his hand pulling down’ had to go. On this basis, an ‘X’ certificate was duly issued a week later. The next Sangster-scripted Hammer horror, The Revenge of Frankenstein, would have an even rougher ride – with the BBFC making a point of being crystal clear about its reservations from the outset.

When the Board had first read the script of Dracula, its main concern – as

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it had been with The Curse – was the explicitness of the gore. Then, when the BBFC viewed the black-and-white print of Dracula, the bedroom scene involving Dracula and Mina – together with ‘the sex aspect of the story’ – began more seriously to alarm them, and especially the look on the Count’s face and Mina’s reaction to it. The ‘sex-element is still too prevalent’. But Hammer managed to persuade the board, on a technicality, to leave the scene alone. Why had it taken so long for the censors to notice the full implications of this scene? Jimmy Sangster’s view on this is clear:

It is because it wasn’t all in the script. [The BBFC memo of 5 February noted that the Hammer had ‘deviated from the script’.] It was a mixture of my script, Terry’s direction, James Bernard’s music and Bernard Robinson’s sets.18

Terence Fisher, who joined the team after Sangster’s first two drafts had been completed, always appreciated the way in which Sangster for-matted his scripts: set the scene, present the dialogue, don’t be too prescriptive about staging. And it is clear that the staging and cutting of the Lucy and Mina scenes – together with the thrashing music – was what drew particular attention to the ‘sex aspect’. Fisher always maintained that this was what he brought to the project: ‘I think my greatest contribution to the Dracula myth was to bring out the underlying sexual element in the story . . . ’19

Where the Lucy bedroom scenes were concerned, he recalled them as versions of the virginal bride waiting eagerly in her powder-blue night-dress for a nocturnal visitor:

It’s almost ballet the way she opens the doors, goes back and lies down again, her eyes focused, waiting for him to appear . . . You know, it’s a distortion of the so-called ‘true love’, and this is the power of evil working from a distance. Dracula could cause himself to appear there right at the moment when he realised that any resistance to him she might have had was gone.

And as for the controversial scenes involving Mina Holmwood, Terence Fisher saw these as being partly about the state of the Holmwoods’

marriage:

Dracula preyed upon the sexual frustrations of his women victims.

The [Arthur/Mina] marriage was one in which she was not sexually

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satisfied and that was the weakness as far as Dracula’s approach to her was concerned. When she arrived back after having been away all night [in the basement of the Friedrichstrasse undertaker’s parlour]

she said it all in one close-up at the door . . .

Fisher remembered advising Melissa Stribling to ‘imagine you have had one whale of a sexual night, the one of your whole sexual experience.

Give me that in your face!’ And she certainly did. A confident, sexy, emancipated half-smile, rather than her usual wan detachment. All Arthur can say, in time-honoured fashion, is: ‘You look very ill, are you all right?’

So Terence Fisher’s direction, plus composer James Bernard’s music (brass and woodwind for the climaxes, strings for the lyrical bits), turned the potential on the page into something to frighten the censors. In the process, the director brought his own strong sense of good and evil –
as well as of convention and transgression – to Hammer’s first Dracula.

Lucy’s ‘true love’ is contrasted with ‘the power of evil’. (Remember that old-fashioned ‘Love’ films were going seriously out of fashion at the time.) The physical/sensual side of a marriage provides the demon with his opportunity. The audience is positioned as innocent bystanders, watching a morality play:

all right, call it a vampire, call it the power of evil, call it the attraction of the power of evil – the important thing was the attraction of the power of evil. One of the greatest things that the power of evil has is to make its temptation tremendously attractive. There was a very strong sexual influence in Dracula, which is important, because two of his victims were women and they were . . . – apart from the superstition or legend of the power of the mind. You know what I’m trying to get at? It was human. It wasn’t impressionistic . . . it was an attempt to put it into realistic settings, of everybody’s personal experiences of what the power of evil is and how they can be controlled by it sexually, emotionally, any other way you can. If you go back to the Bible and the temptation of Jesus on the mountain . . .

The temptation took the charismatic form of a new-look Count Dracula, with gentlemanly Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (he had signed on 29 October) in the title role – surprisingly, the first British actor ever to play the part. Frankenstein was British in Hollywood. So were the Mummy and Dr Moreau. But Dracula was either Eastern European or American (from the South). Lee’s career as an actor had, by his own

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admission, been ‘moving very slowly’ up to that point, despite having acted in over 40 films since his debut in 1947. He had come to specialize in portraying ‘The Other’ in assorted period adventure films – Spanish captains, Arab traders, a Montevidean in The Battle of the River Plate, the creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, and, most recently, the Marquis St Evrémonde in A Tale of Two Cities. ‘I’m the tallest actor in the country [64],’ he said – in stark contrast with the vertically-challenged John Mills and Richard Todd and Richard Attenborough and most of the other stalwarts of British war/adventure films – ‘and am not entirely British in appearance’. Here was another solution to the ‘accent’ problem. He had proved himself a gifted mime, good at playing clipped or sinister aristocratic charm; and he could hiss and blaze convincingly when thwarted.

These were essential talents because unlike Count Orlok in Nosferatu, he did not depend on grotesque make-up to be plausible; and unlike Bela Lugosi in Universal’s Dracula, he had no need of hypnotism to get his way with his victims. And he didn’t have to transmute into bats or wolves to enhance his charisma. All he had to do was to stand magis-terially at a suburban window in a floor-length cloak, the lights on his eyes, and leave his victims – as well as the audience – to do the rest. Lee had only 13 lines in the film, all of them in the first two reels – which was admittedly 13 more than he’d had in The Curse of Frankenstein. But Dracula was to be his breakthrough movie. By Christmas 1958, a newspaper was featuring a cartoon about ‘Peter Cushion and Christopher Flea in Santa Claws’.

Christopher Lee’s take on the story in many ways seems to have matched Terence Fisher’s: ‘a morality play with an admixture of pan-tomime, fairy story and melodrama . . . this is black, this is white; this is good, this is bad’. Where the character of the Count was concerned, Lee tried to emphasize his sadness, ‘a tragic quality – the curse of being immortal . . . the loneliness of evil’. This was to be emphasized more in subsequent Hammer Draculas. But in interviews he was reluctant to be drawn on the character’s sexual implications as demon lover, a new take on Beauty and the Beast: ‘There is a sexual element in vampirism, I suppose . . . I’ve never thought of fangs that way, quite honestly’.20

But Sangster and Fisher’s project, to bring out the underlying sexual element in the story, was what made Dracula scary again after all those years of retreads and parodies. Executive producer Michael Carreras grasped this immediately: ‘The greatest difference between our Dracula and anybody else’s was the sexual connotation. There was no real horror in it, the women were eager to be nipped by Dracula and I think that

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gave it a fresh look . . . [plus] they were the first Gothic horror films to be in colour.’21 After the black-and-white years, British film-makers had at last found a roundabout way of telling stories about sex. So this would be the unique selling proposition which would be emblazoned all over the British posters. ‘Every night he rises from his coffin-bed to silently seek the soft flesh, the warm blood he needs’. Complete with split infinitive. At the Gaumont, Haymarket, where the film opened on 22 May 1958, the word ‘DRACULA’ was lit up in huge neon letters, and beneath them: ‘The terrifying lover who died . . . yet lived!’ A gigantic Christopher Lee lunged towards Melissa Stribling’s neck – as on the posters – and by some mechanism managed to draw blood from the puncture-holes he had made in her neck, which flowed vertically down her hair22: this, despite James Carreras’ assurance to the censors that this would not be an ‘X for sex’ picture in any way. His son Michael Carreras complained about the publicity issued for The Horror of Dracula (as it was called) by Universal’s marketing department in New York, which was ‘along the lines of the old Dracula pictures with Bela Lugosi’ – because it had completely missed the point: ‘Our Dracula is handsome and sexy . . . His victims are young, attractive women. The campaign in London is on horror sex lines and I would be grateful if you would re-examine.’ Out with the old bogeyman flapping his wings in evening dress, and in with Dracula sinking his fangs into Mina Holmwood’s neck. His wish was their command.23

By emphasizing ‘the underlying sexual element of the story’, Hammer’s Dracula was certainly to have a profound impact on the academic study of Stoker’s Dracula, as well as on the future of the vampire film. Before 1958, those commentators who wrote in any depth about Dracula – and there were very few of them – tended to place the book firmly in the context of Victorian neo-Gothic sensation literature.24

A kind of literary curiosity. Queenie Leavis in her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), her ‘outline of popular fiction’ in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, did not mention Dracula at all. Hall Caine yes, Bram Stoker no. Montague Summers, eccentric specialist in large antiquar-ian tomes about literary and folkloric vampires, with a bibliographical emphasis, acknowledged that ‘there is no sensational romance which in modern days has achieved so universal a reputation’, but complained that ‘Dracula is by no means briefly told’, that it contained ‘much care-less writing’ and that it lost its way from ‘the rather tedious courtship of Lucy Westenra’ onwards. The reason for the novel’s immense popularity lay in the choice of subject-matter rather than its treatment. The scant two pages Summers devoted to Dracula – in a chapter on ‘The Vampire

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in Literature’ (1928) – consisted mainly of plot summary (he particularly liked the Transylvania section) and ended on misspellings of the names Hamilton Deane (‘Deans’) and Bela Lugosi (‘Lugoni’). Peter Penzoldt’s The Supernatural in Fiction (1952), based on an academic thesis, included Stoker’s Dracula in the bibliography but had only two brief things to say about the novel in the text: that Hollywood had ‘taken it over’ and that it was not in fact Bram Stoker ‘who introduced the vampire into English literature’. Devendra P. Varma, whose The Gothic Flame was first published the year before Hammer’s Dracula was released, noted that Stoker had created ‘the prince of vampires’ through bringing to perfection ‘each piece of crude and creaking machinery of Gothic romance’.

And that was all he had to say about the novel. Varma found in Gothic novels ‘the same sinister overtones and the same solemn grandeur’ that twelfth-century cathedrals ‘evoked in medieval man’: Dracula was well beneath his intellectual threshold. Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony, first issued in 1933 and revised in 1951, sought ‘the erotic sensibility’ and

‘the pathology of Romanticism’ in a boisterously thematic approach to the literature of horror from De Sade to D’Annunzio – the Beauty of the Medusa, The Metamorphoses of Satan, The Shadow of De Sade, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Le Vice Anglais, themes later customized by David Pirie – but was much more concerned with the poetry and prose of the nineteenth-century romantics than with the more conventional neo-horrors of Bram Stoker. Dracula is not mentioned once, although Praz’s themes have all been applied to the novel – many times – since the 1970s. Summers was upset by Praz’s over-emphasis (in his view) on eroticism and called the book ‘disjointed gimcrack’. Other earlier studies of tales of terror – by Edith Birkhead (1921) and Michael Sadleir (1927) –
were not interested in either eroticism or Dracula: their emphasis was on bibliography, and rescuing the early Gothic novels from critical condescension. Sigmund Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, devoted a chapter to vampires in his On the Nightmare (1931), but omitted to cite Dracula in support of his thesis about repressed incestuous desires and the psychology of the living: Stoker’s blood transfusion scene would in fact have helped his thesis considerably, but he focused instead on medieval folklore and German Romanticism.25 The one major exception to this neglect of Bram Stoker was another card-carrying Freudian critic, who wrote partly in response to Ernest Jones. In December 1959 (just after the release of Hammer’s Dracula, but in some ways harking back to an earlier tradition), Maurice Richardson published a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek, article about the psychoanalytical implications of ghost stories in general and Dracula in particular which he referred

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to as ‘a bisexual oral-and-genital sadomasochistic orgy’, a parable of Oedipal conflict (the Count as Big Daddy), totem and taboo, and the dilution of the sexual drive. The date of publication may be significant, as we’ll see.

Today, the study of Dracula has changed utterly.26 The novel is at the centre of the extensive literature around ‘new Gothic criticism’. The approach now is to displace the basic function of the genre, which is to scare its readers in pleasurable ways, by solemnly deconstructing the words on the page into the ‘unsaid’ psychological or socio-political elements which may lie beneath them. Gothic novels have become texts, above all other forms of fiction, where ‘the repressed’ can return, where ‘the abject’ can be disguised, and where social anxieties can be buried – waiting for critics from today’s more liberated perspectives to dig them up. Since Foucault, it has become a critical cliché to set the category ‘Victorian’ against all that is ‘liberated’ and ‘modern’. And the key anxieties are to do with gender, sexuality and middle-class respectability in conflict with uncontrollable forces. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall have concluded from this that it is as if literary criticism itself has become some kind of Gothic project creating its own melodramas through which to confront villains within the crumbling hierarchies of the academy.27 From defensiveness to defiance. As Matthew Sweet has observed:

Dracula Studies first emerged as a serious discipline in the late 1960s and soon established the parameters of its interest. As Robert Mighall has argued in his book [ A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction:]

Mapping History’s Nightmares (1999), this kind of Freud-slaked, pro-grammatically anti-Victorian criticism proposed that ‘the vampire is monstrous not because it is a supernatural being which threatens to suck the protagonists’ blood and damn their souls, but because at some “deeper level” it symbolises an erotic threat.’ So, Mighall contends, a book that contains no obvious allusions to sex – apart from one use of the word ‘voluptuous’ – has been used to prove how much energy the Victorians invested in their programme to police sex into silence.28

Sometimes, Mighall concludes in a paraphrase of Freud’s famous remark about a cigar, ‘sometimes a vampire is only a vampire’. The less the book actually mentions sex, the more it provides evidence for the repression of Victorian society. QED. ‘[This] serves less to illuminate a body of fiction than to congratulate itself, on behalf of modern progressive

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opinion, upon its liberation from the dungeons of Victorian sexual repression or social hierarchy.’ By setting the story in the drawing-rooms and bedrooms of the Victorian past, vintage autumn 1885, and by using the character of Count Dracula as a catalyst for revealing Victorian hypocrisy and outmoded forms of sexual morality, Jimmy Sangster and team transformed perceptions of Dracula. The scholars who first encountered the film and book in the 1960s have themselves now become the critical/academic consensus. As Sweet concludes, ‘Lee’s performance convinced a generation of scholars that Dracula was a book about sex, and not about vampires.’

Actually, the sub-discipline of ‘Dracula Studies’ emerged in a serious way not in the late 1960s but the early 1970s. The first sustained study of the novel’s sexual symbolism was written in 1972, of its psychology of dominance and dependence in the same year; of its menstrual subtext in 1978; my own analysis of the literary genesis of Dracula –
which reprinted Jones’s chapter and parts of Richardson’s article for the first time – appeared in 1978; the first detailed study to examine the novel’s take on the ‘New Woman’ emerged in 1982; and its implications for gender studies were first fully explored in 1984. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Dracula, with its introduction by A.N. Wilson calling it ‘a great story of the second-rate type’, completely ignoring the critical reappraisals since the early 1970s, was published in 1983. This approach had become well-nigh unthinkable, where serious scholarship was concerned, by the late 1980s. By then, the point of Bram Stoker’s original story had been inverted, with the Count becoming the liberator and his victims the forces of orthodoxy and repression. David Punter wrote of this turnaround among the academics: ‘The middle class is perfectly imaged in the form of the person sitting rigidly in the darkened chamber while monstrous forces press against the window.’29 Recognize the scene? It was the one Jimmy Sangster wrote. Subsequent literary and film versions of the vampire – the vampire as addict, the vampire as contagion, the vampire as last romantic, the vampire as embodiment of adolescent growing pains – have all fed off this insight. Van Helsing has become the bad guy, a fundamentalist spoilsport.

But the precise cultural significance of the moment of Hammer’s Dracula in May 1958 is some way away from the subsequent rise of Gothic studies – coinciding with the growing interest in identity and sexual politics – from the early 1970s onwards. In fact, in some ways its significance is the opposite30 – because in Jimmy Sangster’s script and Terence Fisher’s direction, the precise context for ‘the sexual element’ in the story was a defence of family values and true love. We have seen how

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in Dracula the key conflict at the heart of the film is between Dracula and Arthur as the heads of two diametrically opposed households – the Castle and the family home – with Van Helsing as the priest/marriage guidance counsellor who helps to resolve the problems in Arthur’s marriage to Mina. Adultery is explicitly associated with letting the evil one in (‘everybody’s personal experience of what the power of evil is’, according to Terence Fisher). When the sexual act is not confined to marriage and the home (Mina is married; Lucy is engaged) it must be destroyed, if necessary with the help of a counsellor, a specialist in such things. Arthur cannot at first cope with the thought that the family itself may contain the seeds of Dracula’s power. He resents Van Helsing’s interference, thinks his wife must be unwell, and represses his and his wife’s libido and associates Dracula entirely with outside forces. Nothing to do with him and his marriage. But as Terence Fisher, again, put it: ‘Dracula preys on Mina’s vulnerabilities, her sexual frustration.’ Only when Arthur acknowledges – with Van Helsing’s professional guidance –
that his wife is an adulteress (is being vampirized), that she has sensual needs that he is not satisfying, that he must in future face up to his own libido (and confront Dracula as the male head of a rival household), only then can the Count be defeated by the forces of good. Meanwhile, Dracula – who has lost his ‘bride’ (remember Valerie Gaunt?) thanks to Jonathan Harker – desperately seeks another partner in the form of first Lucy (he has seen her framed photo in Harker’s bedroom: ‘May I ask her name? . . . Charming’) and then, via Lucy, Mina Holmwood. Unlike in the novel, he appears to vampirize one partner or mate of the opposite sex at a time. The stripping-down of the story, in short, turns it into a fairy-tale about adultery. The women in the film – the bride of Dracula, Lucy and Mina – are receptacles to be possessed by either ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’.

Van Helsing has no qualms at all about using them as bait to catch the Count. Dracula does vampirize Jonathan Harker, but that is treated as a revenge-killing rather than a seduction.

The celebrated ending of the film shows Dracula in the Gothic Room of his castle being forced into the light by the power of the crucifix, and disintegrating in the sun’s rays; this is intercut with a shot of the crossed hands of Arthur and Mina. As her stigma – the burn-mark of the cross –
fades, the camera remains on her hands for a few frames, making us aware of her wedding ring. Mina has been received back into the family, and to symbolize this Arthur kisses her hand. Meanwhile, ‘the only place [the Count] can make for now is home’, as Van Helsing has put it just before the final chase. There’s no place like home. I have seen it suggested that the final shot of the film reinforces this message. Dracula has

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been burned to dust, and all that is left of him is a pile of ashes and his ring (wedding ring?). Set into the marble floor beneath him, in the centre of the Gothic Room, is a circular zodiac design with inscriptions in Latin (on an outer ring) and ancient Greek (on an inner ring). The final shot shows the pile of ashes, the ring and a single Greek word. It has been suggested that the word is Eστ´ια, meaning ‘home or household or family hearth’. In Greek mythology, the virginal Hestia (Eστ´ι´α), was the guardian of the domestic hearth fire, which was not allowed to go out unless it had been ritually extinguished, after which it was renewed in a ceremony of purification – just the right place for the undead to die. It is a nice idea – attributing much subtlety to production designer Bernard Robinson31 – but unfortunately the word is in fact Eστ´ιν, which simply means ‘it is’, part of an illegible phrase around the inner ring.

The accent above the iota, in the film, is written the wrong way round.

Nevertheless, there’s no place like home. Roll the credits.

So in Terence Fisher’s words, it is ‘the ultimate victory of good over evil’. In May 1958, several years before the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, exactly two years before the first birth control pill was developed in the USA, the conclusion of Hammer’s Dracula is that per-missiveness (as it was then called) is a serious threat to the stability of the family, which is in turn one of the strongest bulwarks of society.

Yes, Terence Fisher’s Dracula pits inhibition against abandon, repression against desire, convention against the abject – all in the context of Hammer’s Eastmancolor version of Victorian domesticity around 1885 – but the film is not concluding from all this that liberation is or will be a social good. That thought was not available to mainstream film-makers in 1958. Subsequent, post-1970s, commentators on Dracula have projected the thought backwards because they want the film to be agreeing with them. They want today’s more liberated perspective to be there – even if ‘unsaid’ – so they can find it. Actually, and in some ways ironically, Hammer’s Dracula is far closer in spirit to Bram Stoker’s novel than to the post-1970s politics of liberation.

George Orwell, had he lived, could have written a classic essay –
along the lines of ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ or ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ –
about the cultural significance of Hammer’s 1958 Dracula. Orwell was a keen observer of British cultural metaphors and what they revealed about underlying social attitudes: Dracula would have provided him with excellent material – which in turn would perhaps have helped the Heritage Lottery to treat Hammer films unproblematically as part of the national heritage. I’m delighted to say that my report helped to persuade them, that the decision was made in time, and that the archive now

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resides in the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford.

Notes

1. Application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, dated 19 December 1997, entitled

‘Acquisition of Collection of Artifacts Associated with Hammer Films’, plus appendices 1–9 with supplementary information.

2. David Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study (London: BFI, 1980): Part 2, items 8 and 9, 28 August 1956 and 3 September 1956.

3. The citations I gave were to my then-recent Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (London: BBC Books, 1996) and Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber, 1991), esp. pp. 107–44.

4. Vera Rule, ‘The Refreshing Grapes of Goth’, The Guardian, 5 August 1996: 10, previewing Nightmare: The Birth of Horror.

5. The findings of the surveys of 1948–50 and 1955–57 are reproduced in David Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study (London: British Film Institute, 1980), pp. 6–7 and part three document 43.

6. This is an expansion of ideas discussed in my Introduction to Martin Myrone and Christopher Frayling, eds, The Gothic Reader (London: Tate Gallery, 2006), pp. 12–20.

7. Newspaper reviews photographically reproduced in Pirie ( op. cit.) part four document 46.

8. Revised in 2008 as David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror (London: Tauris, 2008).

9. This account of the genesis of Hammer’s Dracula (1958) owes much to Denis Meikle, A History of Horrors (Maryland: Scarecrow,1996), pp. 56–64; Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story (London: Titan, 1997), pp. 30–3; David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror pp. 95–112; Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films: The Bray Studios Years (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2002), pp. 91–113; David Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, pp. 51–62, and part six documents; and ed. Richard Klemensen, Hammer: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Little Shoppe of Horrors number 4, Iowa, April 1978), pp. 23–118.

10. Interview with scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster, at the Royal College of Art, November 2007.

11. Production budget for Dracula from Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, part six documents 71 and 72.

12. Terence Fisher’s preparatory notes are reproduced in ed. Richard Klemensen,

‘Terence Fisher – Hammer’s master of Gothic Horror’, Little Shoppe of Horrors, Issue 19 (September 2007): 52–4.

13. See Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, part six document 68 dated 31 October 1956.

14. My interview with Jimmy Sangster; see also Meikle, op. cit., and Kinsey, op. cit.

15. Dialogue and stage directions are my transcriptions from the film itself.

16. Interview with Jimmy Sangster, November 2007.

17. The correspondence with the British Board of Film Censors is quoted in detail in Wayne Kinsey, op. cit., pp. 94–6 and 110–13.

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18. Interview with Jimmy Sangster, November 2007.

19. Terence Fisher’s quotes are from Kinsey, op. cit. , pp. 100–1; Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, p. 56; Cinefantastique (vol. 4 no. 3), issue The Films of Terence Fisher, pp. 19–28; Little Shoppe of Horrors 19: 13–16, 36–51, 63–75; Fandom’s Film Gallery issue 1 (Belgium: Deurne, 1975); ed. Allen Eyles, Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry, The House of Horror (London: Lorrimer, 1973), pp. 12–15.

20. Christopher Lee’s quotes are from Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, p. 56; Eyles et al., The House of Horror, pp. 15–19; Kinsey, op. cit., p. 104; and Fandom’s Film Gallery issue 1.

21. Pirie, op. cit., p. 56.

22. Kinsey, op. cit., p. 126.

23. Matthew Sweet, ‘Flesh and Blood’, The Guardian Review, 27 October 2007: 14.

24. See Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939); Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (London: Kegan Paul, 1928), pp. 333–7; Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: Peter Nevill, 1952), pp. 37–40; Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: New York, Russell and Russell, 1966), pp. 160, 205; Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

25. For the relevant extract from Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare, see Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber, 1991), pp. 398–417; and for the extract from Maurice Richardson’s essay see Christopher Frayling, op. cit., pp. 418–22.

26. On the new critical landscape surrounding Bram Stoker’s Dracula, see especially William Hughes, Bram Stoker: Dracula: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

27. See Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in ed. David Punter, A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) pp. 209–28 and co-ed.

Christopher Frayling, The Gothic Reader introduction.

28. Matthew Sweet, op. cit.

29. Baldick and Mighall, op. cit., p. 225, citing David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (Longman, Harlow, vol. 2), pp. 201–2.

30. This reading of Hammer’s Dracula was originally inspired by discussions with Fern Presant – then a postgraduate student in the School of Film and Television – at the Royal College of Art in 1980.

31. On Bernard Robinson’s sets, see especially Kinsey, op. cit., pp. 98–100; and ed.

Kinsey, The House That Hammer Built, issue 11, volume 2:3 (1999): 137–76.

7

Fast Cars and Bullet Bras:

The Image of the Female Juvenile

Delinquent in 1950s America

Elizabeth McCarthy

Teenager Dori Graham is desperate to earn enough money to buy a dress for the local dance. That pretty much sums up the dramatic premise of the 1956 feature film Rock, Rock, Rock! But the film isn’t really about plot, it’s about music. It’s one of a series of similar productions featuring the pioneering disc jockey Alan Freed as himself. Other films in the series include Rock Around the Clock (1956), Mister Rock and Roll (1957) Don’t Knock the Rock (1957) and the ‘rock’-free title Go Johnny Go! (1959). In these films Freed played host to an illustrious cast of music groups and artists, including Bill Haley & His Comets, The Platters, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Little Richard, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Eddie Cochran, The Flamingos and Jackie Wilson. Long before the advent of the music video, the raison d’être of such films was to give their teenage audiences the opportunity to see their favourite artists in action.

Rock, Rock, Rock! featured Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers performing their hit songs ‘Baby Baby’ and ‘I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent’.

Used both in the title and in the chorus of the latter, it is evident just how widespread and recognizable the term ‘juvenile delinquent’ had become by the mid-50s. Far more significant, however, is the fact that Lymon’s irreverent presentation of the song quite blatantly shows the disparity between apparent message and actual performance. Brandishing a huge letter ‘T’ (for ‘Teenager’) on his sweater, with the Teenagers standing in a line behind him, similarly garbed, Lymon places his hands together in mock prayer and casting his eyes heavenward, sings: I’m not a juvenile delinquent

No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no

No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no

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No-no-no, I’m not a juvenile delinquent

Do the things that’s right

And you’ll do nothing wrong

Life will be so nice, you’ll be in paradise

I know, because I’m not a juvenile delinquent1

Combining a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression with a mischievous smirk, Lymon’s faux angelic poses and the performance’s youthful exuberance betray the lie of its moral message, poking fun at oversimplified concepts of good and bad which surrounded debates about 1950s American youth.2

Yet, for many Americans of this period juvenile delinquency was no laughing matter. A poll taken by the Roper organization in 1959
indicated that American citizens viewed juvenile crime as more worrisome than open-air atomic bomb testing.3 Youth culture had certainly made its impact on 1950s America. There were more teenagers than ever before, they had more money and were more aware of themselves as a semi-autonomous group within society. Presumably, this is why Eric Sevareid, in a 1956 CBS radio broadcast, felt compelled to remark,

‘We feel bound to question whether the teenagers will take over the United States lock, stock, living room and garage’.4 In light of such commentary – with its near-apocalyptic vision of the rampant ascendancy of teen culture – is it any wonder that the close of the decade witnessed the unleashing of films like Teenagers from Outer Space?

While the rise of youth culture in 1950s America had an incalculable influence on popular culture, it was also perceived as having a sizable effect on the crime statistics of the period, which rather dubiously indicated a substantial rise in crimes committed by teenagers.5 Yet, the media panics which surrounded the issue of juvenile delinquency went far beyond the specifics of criminal behaviour; they broached every aspect of youth culture. Music (specifically Rock ’n’ Roll), films, comics, television and fashion, were all brought under scrutiny, not just in terms of their content and imagery but also the way in which they were consumed by their teenage audience.

Rock ’n’ Roll was a favourite scapegoat of the media. The multimillion-selling recording ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which debuted in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle,6 was soon to become synonymous with teen violence when riots were reported to have taken place in various locations after the screening of the film Rock Around the Clock, which featured Haley & His Comets performing their hit. Headlines, such as ‘Rock ‘n Roll Fight Hospitalizes Youth’, ‘Gas Ends Rock ‘n Roll

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Riot’ and ‘Rock ‘n Roll Stabbing’, make the connection between this new popular music and juvenile delinquency patently demonstrable.

Most infamous of all, in terms of this new music’s vague yet threatening possibilities, was the media furore over Elvis Presley; with one source describing his live performances as ‘ “grunt and groin” antics’,

‘suggestive and vulgar, tinged with a kind of animalism’.7 In an article, from the New York Times, dated 28 March 1956, a quoted headline reads, ‘Rock-and-Roll Called ‘ “Communicable Disease”’. The individual quoted in the headline is Hartford Institute of Living psychiatrist, Dr Francis J. Braceland. Braceland diagnosed Rock ’n’ Roll as a

‘communicable disease, with music appealing to adolescent insecurity and driving teenagers to do outlandish things . . . It’s cannibalistic and tribalistic.’8 Robert M. Lindner, author of the 1944 study of delinquency Rebel Without a Cause 9 (the title but not the content of which was used by Nicholas Ray for the seminal film of juvenile alienation, starring James Dean10), echoed Braceland’s diagnosis in a 1954 interview when he described the youth of America as ‘literally sick with an aberrant condition of mind formerly confined to a few distressed souls but now epidemic over the earth.’11 With excessive terms such as ‘cannibalistic’,

‘epidemic’ and ‘disease’ used to describe the contemporary delinquency problem, the media were more than willing to repeat and augment these

‘expert’ assessments in their representation of American youth culture.

As John Springhall has suggested, the media panics and anxiety which gathered around the subject of juvenile delinquency sought to defuse the threat posed by youth culture and thus to ‘re-establish a generational status quo’ by reasserting the values of dominant adult groups.12

However, generational conflict is only one aspect of the discourses surrounding juvenile delinquency in the 50s. Issues of race, class, gender and national identity also contributed to rising public debates.

Juvenile delinquency itself was certainly a matter of public concern in America long before the 1950s. However, it took on a new significance in the post-war period. Pre-war discourses on crime tended to associate juvenile delinquency with a wide range of socio-economic and environmental conditions, such as poverty, education, inadequate recreation, overcrowding and slum housing. This understanding of juvenile delinquency was represented in popular culture by films such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and Boys Town (1938), which treated delinquency as a social problem. During the post-war era this focus had shifted, now emphasizing the changes in family dynamics brought about by the war. Ironically, in many social commentators’ minds, post-war suburban affluence now supplanted pre-war urban depravation as the major

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contributing factor to the perceived rise in juvenile crime. In 1945, J. Edgar Hoover had predicted that post-war American society would suffer an onslaught of juvenile crime unless adequate measures were taken. In an article entitled, ‘There will be a Post-War Crime Wave Unless It’s Blocked by Direct Action Sparked by Some Old-fashioned Virtues’, he explains:

There are many contributing causes of juvenile delinquency, such as the breakdown of the home as an institution, the general spirit of wartime abandon, the sharply increased spending power of inexperienced youth and the ‘war hero’ spirit of those not old enough to serve.13

The ‘breakdown of the home as an institution’, which Hoover refers to, is the result of the upheavals in family structure brought about by the war – with fathers conscripted into the military and mothers entering the workplace. Assuming that these circumstances will result in a less stable and controlled home environment, Hoover subsequently sees post-war affluence as a yet another contributing factor to this predicted crime wave because parental authority will be challenged further as teenagers’ sense of autonomy increases along with their financial independence.

These shifts in family dynamics, along with an ever-increasing awareness of Freudian theory in the popular culture of the period, resulted in films like Rebel Without a Cause, which eschewed the ‘social problem’ focus of earlier narratives of juvenile delinquency in favour of an emphasis on the internal struggles of the individual, both within him/herself and within the family home. As the tagline of Rebel Without a Cause professes: ‘This is Jim Stark, teenager – from a ‘good’ family.

Their families gave them everything – but a good example!’

While the nature of authority and autonomy for both adults and youths was central to debates on juvenile delinquency in this post-war period, attitudes towards gender and its social manifestation were never far behind.

The figure of the male juvenile delinquent, in particular, took on an extra import in relation to suburbia. As Leerom Medovoi points out, the post-war ‘bad boy’ ‘represented a youth spawned in the new suburbs, but refusing its domestication’.14 The themes of masculinity, liberty, and honour are key features in narratives of male juvenile delinquency and

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despite the rebellious image of the male delinquent in the 50s he can, to a certain extent at least, be seen as part of a long-running debate on American individualism, self-expression and self-fashioning.

The female juvenile delinquent, however, does not facilitate this reading so easily. While sociological and criminological, as well as psychological, readings were regularly applied to the boy delinquent during the 50s, the problem of female juvenile delinquency was primarily the domain of psychoanalysts. The subject of sexuality and sexual behaviour underlay much of the psychological profiling of female delinquents. As such, it is not surprising to find that, during this period, the term ‘sex delinquent’ almost exclusively refers to females.15 Such means of interpreting and dealing with female juvenile delinquency are directly linked to changing attitudes towards sexuality and sexual activity brought about by World War II and what Hoover had vaguely referred to as ‘the general spirit of wartime abandon’.

The image of the lawless female during the war was most vividly represented in the figure of the ‘good time girl’ or ‘pick up’ who actively sought sexual encounters with strangers; figuring this in terms of National Security – particularly in terms of the threat that VD posed to enlisted men – laws, and the propaganda campaigns which coincided with them, sought to deal with this threat by emphasizing the dangerous and criminal nature of female sexuality if left unchecked.

Anti-syphilis and gonorrhea posters regularly depicted women leering at GIs, out on the town, with captions that combine military terminology with destructive female sexuality – ‘Juke Joint Sniper’ ‘Booby Trap’

(see Illustration 7.1)

Many government agencies dealt with this threat in a very straightforward manner. One of the most prosaic, yet chilling, was America’s establishment of the Social Protection Division (SPD) of the Office of Community War Services; a wartime home front programme operating between 1941 and 1946. Its official mandate was to assist ‘communities affected by defense production and the war to provide community services’.16 Along with some forays into providing recreation for soldiers based near home, the health and welfare of the home front was its major concern. However, as Karen Anderson has noted, the SPD
soon expanded its ‘health program into a purity campaign’ dedicated to the search for ‘incipient and confirmed sex delinquents’ who ‘not coincidentally happened always to be women’.17

As a result of America’s stepped-up wartime programme for venereal disease control on the home front (under the auspices of the SPD), the laws defining morals charges became increasingly broad and vague.

Disorderly conduct became ‘endangering moral, safety or health’ and

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Illustration 7.1

‘Booby trap/Syphillis and Gonorrhea’

Source: Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, p. 194.

vagrancy could include lewd, wanton or lascivious speech or behaviour.

Some states introduced laws which made it illegal for ‘unescorted’

women to be served in a bar after eight o’clock in the evening; others imposed a curfew on girls below a certain age.18 Predictably, under these circumstances, FBI statistics indicated that, during the war years, the number of women charged with morals violations doubled; many of these were under 21 years of age, many under 19.19

In direct relation to the threat that female sexuality posed to the military, a 1943 report from the base surgeon of a large mid-western army airfield targeted young girls, in particular, as the primary cause of troops’

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high VD rates: ‘Good-time girls of high-school age are the army’s biggest problem today as a potential source of disease.’ The report concluded by noting, ‘While mothers are winning the war in the factories, their daughters are losing it on the streets.’20

The various responses to the behaviour of these young girls reveal the double standards at work in attitudes towards male and female sexual activity. The common interpretation that these girls are giving ‘free sex’21 to enlisted men is a clear indicator of how sexual desire is seen as a male prerogative, while female sexuality (female desire not even entering the equation) is a resource or commodity which can be saved up, sold or given away for free. Along with names such as ‘Victory Girls’ and ‘Wacky Khakis’, these girls were also commonly referred to as ‘patriotutes’, a combination of the words ‘patriot’ and ‘prostitute’. Such hybrid words point to a confusion over exactly how to understand and deal with such overt displays of female sexual desire.22 Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the conclusions of the 1942 Conference of the American Social Hygiene Association give a far more circumspect response to the issue, stating that it seemed that young girls practised ‘sexual delinquency of a non-commercial character . . . [as a means of seeking] adventure and sociability’.23 Whatever the motivational factors behind the actions of the ‘Victory Girls’ might be, their behaviour not only challenged gender ideology but also defied laws that curtailed their right to remain in public spaces.24

Like her wartime forerunner, the ‘good time girl’, the post-war ‘bad girl’ exhibits a predatory, indiscriminate and rapacious sexual appetite which is at odds with the concept of female sexuality as geared towards marriage, homemaking and family. The destructiveness of such undo-mesticated desire is summed up by Evelyn Millis Duvall in her 1950
guide for teenagers, Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers: Like every other source of power, it must be harnessed or it runs wild and becomes destructive. Electricity wired into your home will light your house, cook your meals, warm your feet, and perform all kinds of miracles. Left unleashed, as lightning, it can destroy everything you care about in one burning holocaust. So it is with sex.25

While properly ‘harnessed’ sexual desire is the equivalent of domestic comfort and bliss, sexual desire ‘left unleashed’ has the destructive potential of a ‘burning holocaust’. This threat to the sanctity of the

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home and the security of the Nation is exemplified by the figure of the socially and sexually promiscuous woman or girl, whose sexual lusts know no limits; traversing the boundaries of socio-cultural and political acceptability.

With the rise of the pulp novel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this new breed of sexual predator is, not surprisingly, associated with wartime scenarios, where ‘the general spirit of wartime abandon’ acts as a backdrop for tales of sexual desire which cross the boundaries of race, class and gender. Ernest L. Matthews, Jr’s Out of Bounds (1954) tells the story of wartime interracial sex between a German woman and black American GI. Its cover blurb reads, ‘He was a lonely GI and she a footloose fraulein.’ ‘Ursula was just a cheap blonde – but she brought him forbidden ecstasy!’26 Tereska Torres’ Women’s Barracks (1950), the first pulp to address a lesbian relationship explicitly, presents a fictional-ized account of Torres’ experiences in the Free French Forces in London during the war. Subtitled ‘The frank autobiography of a French girl soldier’,27 the novel sold four million copies and, in 1952, was selected by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials as an example of how paperback books were promoting moral degeneracy.

Other pulps of the era, dealing with potentially illicit themes, had avoided such bad publicity by being marketed as sociological and/or psychological studies. Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (1950), one of the first juvenile delinquency best sellers and ‘A shocking novel of teen-age gang life in the slums of Manhattan’ boasted an introduction by ‘noted psychiatrist Dr Fredric Wertham’, a figure we shall return to in due course.

Wertham supported Ellson’s work, stating ‘There is a new fiction literature dealing with juvenile delinquency which should open the eyes of many.’28 He would prove considerably less enthusiastic about many other forms of teen-related fiction.

Through the course of the 1950s pulp novels continued tapping into the themes of lesbianism and interracial sex, with, however, some significant shifts in focus. These later novels tended to place their tales of forbidden desire on American soil and outside of a wartime setting and, significantly, their central female protagonists were primarily young American girls, unlike the more mature, European protagonists of earlier pulps set during the wartime. J.C. Priest’s Private School (1959) is a typical example of the decade’s later pulp fiction forays into female sexual delinquency. It tells the story of a school for young girls, named The Briars, where lesbianism is an unofficial adjunct to the curriculum.

Like many other pulps of this kind (particularly those focusing on the vices of the younger generation), Private School follows the lead of Ellson,

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disingenuously presenting its lurid tale as a gutsy exposé; an essential read for parents who want to know the facts about the youth of today,

‘Every parent should read this shocking novel of adolescent girls who first tolerated vice, then embraced it, then could not live without it.’29

While the figure of the war’s ‘good time girl’ may be found lurking beneath the surface of these tales of vice-ridden girls, there is, nevertheless, a very different image of wartime women which also finds its echoes in the ‘bad girl’ of 1950s popular culture; the female war worker (see Illustration 7.2). These wartime images of young women working in a team, efficient, determined, and physically robust, brandishing traditionally masculine tools and handling them with skill and competence are mirrored in visual representations of the aggressive girl gang found in juvenile delinquency films and pulp novels. These gangs are often similarly garbed in masculine attire, and are depicted as working in a team, wielding guns efficiently and willingly using physical force to achieve their criminal goals, which include, gas station hold ups, drug peddling, car theft and, in the case of the 1956 film, The Violent Years, Illustration 7.2

‘Chippers’. Women war workers of Marinship Corp., 1942

Source: Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland. Public Domain.

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the gang rape of a young man; as the newspaper headline in the film proclaims, ‘Young Man Robbed – Criminally Attacked by Four Girls!’.

Combining teensploitation with sexploitation, films such as Girl Gang (1954) declare their no-holds-barred authenticity by recourse to real-life headlines, ‘Daring exposé of teenage orgies! – Torn from today’s headlines!’. This delinquent girl gang theme was equally prevalent in pulp novels, in a dizzying array of titles, like Albert L. Quandt’s Zip-Gun Angels (1952) (later titled Boy-Crazy), Wenzell Brown’s Gang Girl (1954), Joe Weiss’s Girl Gang (1957), Don Elliott’s Gang Girl (1959), Harry Whittington’s Halfway to Hell (1959) and Joseph Hilton’s Angels in the Gutter (1955); the last lamentably observing of its young protagonists,

‘They roamed in gangs, these lost girls, women at fifteen – too old at twenty.’30 Not to be outdone by fiction and film’s inroads into sensational stories ‘torn’ from real-life, true crime magazines capitalized on the seductive seditious image of the girl gang, with articles alerting their readers to ‘Montana’s Girl Gang-Leader’, ‘California’s Queen of the TeenAge Terror Mob’ and ‘She-Wolves in Blue Jeans – The Shocking Story of Girl-Gang Terror’ (see Illustration 7.3).31

This image of the 1950s ‘bad girl’ as part of a gang differentiates her ‘bad girl’ status from that of the femme fatales in film noir, who never operate in gangs. The figure of the 50s ‘bad girl’ is also different from the femme fatale in that her acts emphasize thrill-seeking and lawlessness for its own sake. Often young enough to still live at home, her motivations are not primarily financial but, rather, rebellious. It seems the recklessness of crime is itself an attraction for her; and this recklessness is often figured in terms of sexual excitement.32

In media representations, phrases like ‘thrill crazy’ and ‘out for kicks’

are frequently appended to her exploits. The promotional lines from the following pulp novels are typical examples of this association between female teenage delinquency and thrill-seeking: ‘The shocking story of a young girl who hunted for thrills’, Boy Chaser (1955); ‘Some girls will do anything for kicks’, Rock ‘n Roll Gal (1957); ‘They prowl the fringe of the underworld out for kicks’, Bad Girls (1958).33 Predictably, the taglines of juvenile delinquency films make similar associations: ‘A girl delinquent . . . a jet propelled gang . . . out for fast kicks’, Juvenile Jungle (1958);

‘Trying to crowd a lifetime of thrills into one night . . . every night’, Girls Town (1959).

It is essential to note that the advertising and promotion of juvenile delinquency films and pulp novels is often far more provocative than their actual narratives. But, by focusing on how these tales of juvenile delinquency are marketed, I am deliberately emphasizing presentation

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Illustration 7.3

Sensational Exposés (April 1957)

Source: Skye Publishing Co., 270 Park Ave., New York, NY, 60 W 46th St, New York, NY, and Louisville, KY. Public Domain.

over narrative and this is precisely how so-called exploitation fiction and film works. American International Pictures’ method of operation is a perfect example of this process. Although best known for their later horror film cycles, one of AIP’s earlier film cycles targeted the youth market with tales of juvenile delinquency in films such as Hot Rod Girl; often the titles, images and taglines for these films would come before a script or plot outline, and scripts were not infrequently given less attention than advertising. From 1956 to 1957, AIP produced no less than 11 juvenile delinquency films of various kinds, many with an emphasis on the girl delinquent; Hot Rod Girl (1956); Girls in Prison

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(1956); Shake, Rattle & Rock! (1956); Runaway Daughters (1956); Dragstrip Girl (1957); Rock All Night (1957); I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); Reform School Girl (1957); Motorcycle Gang (1957); Sorority Girl (1957); I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). Capitalizing on the quick production rate of their films, AIP would often distribute more than one film at a time to cinemas, accompanied by promotional material advertising the films in double and triple bills. The double-bill poster for Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night is a montage which included the original posters for the films along with the following words blazing around them, ‘Slap-Happy, Speed-Crazy Youth!’, ‘Never such Thrills!’, ‘You’ll want to see it again and again!’, ‘2 Rock! Sock Bop! Hits’, ‘Reckless . . .

Daring . . . Devil Don’t Care Speedsters out for every kind of thrill!’, ‘See!’.

In promotional material such as this, film viewing itself is being associated with thrill-seeking, excess and reckless abandon. This connection between movie viewing and thrill-seeking has a particular significance in the 1950s, with the rise of the drive-in cinemas. Despite some pro-moters’ attempts to present the drive-in as a venue for all the family, it developed into a popular site for teenagers in particular. So, while older and younger generations stayed at home and watched television, teenagers flocked to drive-ins, which, unlike indoor cinemas, held their own against the new technology.34 Within the semi-private confines of an automobile, drive-ins were a site for sexual encounter.35 Punning on the automotive nature of the drive-in, certain areas, normally at the back, were commonly referred to as ‘passion pits’. Aware of the dating rituals of their teenage audiences, and conscious of the fact that young courting couples may not want to go home too early, many drive-in theater managers provided fast food outlets for their young patrons and ran double, triple and quadruple bills; showing teen-orientated films, with crime, horror, science fiction, Rock ’n’ Roll and hot rod themes.

Few things captured the excitement of youth, sex, speed and independence in 1950s America better than the automobile and particularly the hotrod car. Not surprisingly, the thrill-hungry girl delinquent of popular culture loved fast cars. This love of danger and speed is most famously represented in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), when Judy (Natalie Wood) starts the chickey-run race and is quite clearly surging with excitement.

The late 1950s produced a spate of hotrod films with the image of the

‘thrill crazy’ and fast-living female juvenile delinquent rarely in the driving seat but frequently occupying centre stage in the film’s promotion,

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as the following taglines show: ‘Scorching story of the slick chicks who fire up the big wheels!’ Hot Rod Rumble (1957); ‘Car crazy . . . Speed crazy . . . Boy crazy!’ Dragstrip Girl (1957); ‘She’s hell on wheels . . . fired up for any thrills!’ Hot Car Girl (1958); ‘The Scorching, Reckless JOY RIDES
of Wild Girls of the Road!’ Young and Wild (1958).36

The poster art for hot rod films is similarly geared towards an emphasis on the female delinquent; her huge figure, in a tough and seductive pose, engulfing the majority of the image and dwarfing the other action, whether that action is speeding hot rods, romantic clinches or punch-ups. In these promotional materials the language and imagery of female sexuality and auto-mobility collapses together. The tagline for the 1957 film The Devil’s Hairpin is particularly blatant in this regard:

‘Fast, streamlined and low down – that’s the way the King liked his women and his cars.’

This image of the female body as hard, fast, streamlined and dangerous was not only evident in cinematic representation of the 50s juvenile delinquent, it was also manifest in the fashions of the era, most notably in the highly-structured, conically-pointed bullet bra, also known as a torpedo bra, which created a silhouette that was a definitive part of late 40s and 50s culture. With a shape reminiscent of a bullet, torpedo or airplane nose, the bullet bra silhouette is a unique example of the Cold War era’s far-reaching influence on American culture.37 Of course, the name torpedo or bullet bra is indicative of military terminology and as we have seen, both during and after the war, representations of female sexuality were frequently aligned with mechanical technology, be it in the form of

‘booby’ traps or hotrods. In this regard it is worth noting that World War II, itself, had a direct impact on women’s fashion and clothing. Dress codes in factories, which included trousers and shorter hair were soon fashion choices and, as we have seen, became a part of popular culture’s image of the tough gang girl. While Veronica Lake sheared her trademark peek-a-boo hair in support of women factory workers who had to do the same, companies like Lockheed informed their workers that bras must be worn because of good taste, anatomical support, and in order to boost morale. By the mid-50s virtually every female star sported bullet bras, from Mamie Van Doren to Agnes Moorehead.

The bullet bra made its unique presence known most dramatically when worn with a tight sweater. Commonly referred to as the ‘sweater girl’ look, this was often paired with tight fitting skirts or, in the case of younger women, with jeans. This latter look is particularly synonymous with the image of the girl delinquent. The character of Britches (Yvonne Doughty), in the 1953 film, The Wild One, is a noteworthy cinematic

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Illustration 7.4

D for Delinquent, artist unknown (Ace D-270, 1958) example but similarly garbed young women can be found on the covers of myriads of pulp novels, men’s magazines and true-crime publications (see Illustration 7.4). The bullet-braed ‘bad girl’ also appeared in comic books such as Crimes by Women and, despite its emphasis on the ‘Old West’, Women Outlaws.38 Of course, sometimes the bullet-braed female could be on the side of good, especially in science fiction comics, such as Startling Stories and Planet Stories,39 where the front-cover heroines sport ray guns, goldfish bowl headgear and impossibly angular frontal support crafted from space-age material.

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Because such comics were aimed at the younger generation it is not surprising to find that some viewed the suggestive imagery and content of these publications as a dangerous influence on that impressionable audience. In 1948, Dr Frederic Wertham began his crusade against the harmful effects of comics when he participated in a symposium entitled ‘The Psychopathology of Comic Books’. Later the same year, in an interview for a Collier’s article, with the attention-grabbing title ‘Horror in the Nursery’, he accused comics of being ‘sexually aggressive in an abnormal way’.40 Wertham launched his full-out attack in his 1954 publication, Seduction of the Innocent, pointing to comics as a major cause of juvenile crime. Linking delinquency to crime and horror comics in particular, his most vehement arguments targeted the sex angle of these publications. In a chapter entitled ‘I Want to be a Sex Maniac’, he disapprovingly noted that, ‘One of the stock mental aphrodisiacs in comic books is to draw girls’ breasts in such a way that they are sexually exciting. Whenever possible they protrude and obtrude.’41 As further evidence of the connection between female anatomy and automobile styling, Wertham noted how children call these ‘headlights’ comics.42

As if these feminine obtrusions were not enough, Wertham also claimed that prohibitive parts of female anatomy could be detected in the bark patterns of trees and the folds of characters’ clothes. Wonder Woman meets with Wertham’s particular ire. Quoting The Psychiatric Quarterly, he explains how she portrays an ‘extremely sadistic hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian’ and, extrapolating from this in his own words, he concludes, ‘For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls she is a morbid ideal.’43

In a slightly more lucid moment, Wertham noted the influence of comic book culture on other media, including films and television.

Interestingly, he chooses what he refers to as a ‘perverse, sexually sadistic scene’44 from a female juvenile delinquency film poster as an example of this collusion between comic books and other media. The poster, in question, is for the film Problem Girls (1953), which features a scantily-clad girl hitched up by a cord bound around her wrists while being subjected to a hosing down by an older female authority figure.

Wertham’s insights into the comic book as a blueprint for delinquency found another public forum when he was called as an expert witness at the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee’s aim was a ‘full and complete study of juvenile delinquency in the United States’ and, in particular, ‘an inquiry into the possible relationship [between] juvenile delinquency . . . and the media of mass

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communication’.45 At the conclusion of the comic books session, the subcommittee put forward a set of guidelines which led to the formation of the Comics Code Authority and ultimately to a radical alteration in comic book publication in the following decades. The subcommittee’s guidelines stipulated that ‘If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity.’46 It also asserted that ‘The letters of the word

“crime” on comic magazines shall never be appreciably greater than the other words contained in the title.’47 Much like the word ‘crime’, no physical components of a woman’s body were permitted to be represented as appreciably larger than any other; ‘Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.’48 Undoubtedly, this is a reference to women’s breasts, hips and bottoms. Ironically, under the subcommittee’s guidelines, 1950s Hollywood actresses such as Jayne Mansfield may well have qualified as prohibited material.

Curiously, neither the subcommittee nor Wertham gave a great deal of attention to the hugely popular genre of comics specifically aimed at girl readers. Both mention romance and love confession comics only in passing. In Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham had, yet again, expressed his concern over the subject of breasts, this time in relation to the advertising contained within the pages of romance comics. In the chapter entitled ‘Bumps and Bulges’, he notes:

[T]here are full-course lessons in hypochondriasis. In a comic book with stories of love’s frustrations there is a full-page advertisement . . . with sets of photographs: ‘Before’ and ‘After’. The ‘Before’

look like average girls; the ‘After’ have noticeably protruding breasts.

Accompanying these pictures are three sets of diagrams, each purporting to show profiles of women’s bust lines. Any girl, of course, especially after she has been alarmed by the text, can identify herself with at least one of these diagrams and brood about the correspond-ing information: ‘SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT YOUR FLAT-LOOKING

BUSTLINE?’49

Despite both Wertham and the subcommittee’s relative lack of attention to the genre, by emphasizing the trials, tribulations and dangers of female desire outside of the confines of homemaking or a contented married life, the images and storylines in girls’ romance and true confessions comics, such as Teen-Age Romances, Young Love and Teen-Age Temptations,50 come considerably closer to the image of female delinquency propagated in other mass media. Perhaps the little that is said about these girls’ comics in the subcommittee’s guidelines says

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everything that is needed in terms of the underlying attitudes about the root cause of female juvenile delinquency in this era: ‘The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.’51

The most immediate casualty of the changes brought about by the subcommittee’s findings was the horror comic. Attacking the very core of the horror comic’s being, the subcommittee proposed that ‘No comic magazine shall use the word “horror” or “terror” in its title’ and that vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies could not be portrayed.

While horror comics struggled under these restrictions in the latter half of the 1950s, horror films were, conversely, experiencing an upsurge in popularity and a new breed of horror emerged during the mid-50s which combined classic horror film motifs with science fiction and, along with atomically-mutated ants and big-brained invaders from the red planet, there came a motley assortment of angst-ridden teen monsters, most notably in the films I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957).

In their own way, these films are hybrid forms, combining the themes of earlier juvenile delinquency films with horror. Michael Landon, in the dual role of teenager and teenage werewolf is a violent and maladjusted youth at odds with his teenage peers. As the monster in I was a Teenage Frankenstein, Gary Conway is a confused assemblage of teenagers; part reckless joy-rider, part high-school football star, along with a few other parts, all of which are berated by his domineering creator/father. In their monstrous forms both blatantly represent the hormonal terrors which affronted teenagers, namely hair where there was no hair before and a terrible case of acne. Their ability to arouse nothing but loathing and disgust in the female sex compounds the image of these monsters as frustrated and confused teenage boys.

Despite these parallels between the teen horror film and juvenile delinquency films there were significant differences. For many, especially those with a vested interest in promoting horror films, teen horror offered a harmless alternative to the juvenile delinquency film. As AIP
producer Sam Arkoff pronounced in 1958, their ‘monsters do not smoke, drink or lust’52 – a far cry, indeed, from Karloff’s cigar-smoking, ale-swilling, mate-chasing monster in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Also in 1958, Herman Cohen, the producer of numerous teen horror films, remarked, ‘Teenagers who see those tough Juvenile Delinquency films

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can go out and buy a bicycle chain but no one can go out and make a monster.’53 Another notable difference between the more ‘realistic’ juvenile delinquency films and these later teen horrors was the comparative lack of convincing female teen angst in the latter, and a dearth of memorable or visually arresting images of female juvenile delinquency.

Few people can, for example, recall the female monster protagonists of Daughter of Dr Jekyll (1957) or Frankenstein’s Daughter (1959). One simple and partial explanation for this rather disappointing turn of events is the possibility that audiences didn’t want to see attractive young actresses disfigured behind monster make-up. The female juvenile delinquent as a high-school hellcat or a hotrod she-wolf may be ‘bad’ but she always looks ‘good’.

Two horror movies at the close of the decade with at least marginally more memorable female monster protagonists are Wasp Woman (1959) and The Leech Woman (1960). Interestingly, both protagonists are older women whose monstrous transformations are brought about by the ingestion of a youth formula, which releases the violent delinquent in both – albeit in semi-invertebrate form. Susan Cabot hopes to revive her failing beauty business as well as her own youth by injecting herself with jelly taken from queen wasps but as she grows younger by day she becomes ‘a lusting queen wasp by night’. Coleen Gray is an old woman who withstands the neglect and cruelty of her younger husband by hitting the bottle. She soon swaps alcohol for a compound that restores her lost youth when consumed with the pineal gland fluid of freshly dead males and she, accordingly, becomes the murderous Leech Woman.

Alcoholism, marital dissatisfaction, romantic rejection, and a sense of failure are the keystones of one of the 50s most powerful images of female delinquency. In Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) is an alcoholic, recently released from a sanatorium, who suffers all the indignities a woman can at the hands of her lowlife husband, Harry. Driving recklessly along the road one night, Nancy almost crashes into a spaceship and a giant alien tries to paw her. Assuming Nancy is drunk or deranged, the sheriff and townspeople dismiss her claims. When she tells her husband about her encounter, he happily assumes that this signals his wife’s ultimate breakdown and permanent return to the sanatorium, which will enable him and his mistress to spend Nancy’s 50 million dollar inheritance (it seems the dimensions of Nancy Archer’s gigantism and her bank balance may be interrelated).

However, Nancy’s story is proven true when she meets the alien a second time and suffers from some kind of radiation which causes her to grow to an enormous size. She rises out of bed and tears out of her mansion

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roof. ‘I know where my husband is!’ she exclaims in a booming voice, heading toward town, ‘He’s with that woman! I’ll find him.’ Nancy then begins a systematic rampage through her local town, wrecking the car of the sheriff, who didn’t take her alien sighting seriously, and ripping the rooves off buildings in an effort to find her unfaithful husband and his mistress. She finds them in a bar and, having killed off her rival, Nancy carries her husband away in her hand, à la Kong/Fay Wray. The sheriff fires a riot gun at an electrical transformer just as Nancy passes it. This electrocutes her as well as her husband.

Like all good exploitation art, the film’s promotional material promised more than the narrative delivered. And it is the iconic poster, by Reynold Brown, which invades popular consciousness rather than the film itself. Skimpily clad, straddling a highway, wrecking cars like they were toys and causing havoc, Nancy is undoubtedly a ‘bad girl’, a big bad girl. And the film’s tagline leaves us in no doubt that all of her physical attributes have undergone gigantic growth: ‘See a female colossus – her mountainous torso, skyscraper limbs, giant desires!’

While Nancy is no juvenile, she may certainly be classed as a female delinquent. Reminiscent of the imposing presence of the young female delinquent in the promotional material of hotrod films, Nancy’s giant figure engulfs Reynold Brown’s poster, dwarfing everything else. Mirroring the exploits of the female juvenile delinquent, Nancy drinks excessively, drives recklessly, trashes a police car and commits colossal acts of vandalism on her local area. Also, like the female juvenile delinquent, Nancy’s body grows, and with that growth she discovers a never-before-imagined power, which she uses to wreak vengeance on her neglectful spouse and on a community that has systematically dismissed her as ‘poor mixed-up Mrs. Archer’.

With the relative demise of the female juvenile delinquent in the popular culture of the 1960s and the rise of sexploitation, with its twisted takes on themes as divergent as Nazism and the ‘free love’

movement, the recalcitrant figure of Nancy, and her wasp and leech counterparts, reveal, if only briefly, that the threat posed by disaffected womanhood was not confined to the image of the ‘Car Crazy . . . Speed Crazy . . . Boy Crazy’ girl; it also included the misused, unappreciated and dissatisfied woman.

Notes

1. Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, 1957–02 [Gee: #1026].

2. It is of little wonder that Lymon performed the song with such irony. In an interview with Ebony magazine in 1967, he noted how far ‘I’m Not a Juvenile

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Delinquent’ was from being autobiographical: ‘You know I never was a child

[ . . . ]. In the neighborhood were I lived, there was no time to be a child. [ . . . ]

When I was 10, I made a good living hustling prostitutes for the white men who would come up to Harlem looking for Negro girls. [ . . . ] I had been smoking marijuana when I was in grade school. But, I didn’t start using the real stuff [heroin] until I got into show business.’ Ebony, Vol. 22, No. 3 (January 1967): 43. A year after this interview, Lymon died of a heroin overdose at age 25, in the same apartment in which he had grown up.

3. J. Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 63.

4. Quoted in Ibid., p. 13.

5. Despite the fact that by 1945 J. Edgar Hoover was claiming that ‘17-year-old boys and 18-year old girls have committed more crimes than any other age groups’, statistics on juvenile crime throughout the war period and well into the 1950s are indeed dubious. The means of collecting accurate statistical data on actual crime was less than reliable, especially in light of the fact that crime statistics can be affected by changes in what is considered a crime, as well as changes in police practice and reporting. In the absence of accurate data, sporadic and sensational accounts of juvenile crime and, in particular, J. Edgar Hoover’s own seriously biased and emotionally-charged reports on the social changes brought about by the war affected public perceptions of the juvenile delinquency problem. See J. Edgar Hoover’s

‘There will be a Post-War Crime Wave Unless –’, The Rotarian, Vol. 66, No. 4

(April 1945): 12–14; ‘Why Law Fails to Stop Teenage Crime’, U.S. News & World Report (14 January 1955): 64–75; and Max F. Baer, ‘The National Juvenile Delinquency Picture’, Personnel & Guidance Journal, 38 (December 1959): 278–9.

6. The film was based on Evan Hunter’s bestselling novel The Blackboard Jungle (1954). The subject of both the novel and film was juvenile delinquency in a New York inner-city school.

7. ‘Gas Ends Rock ‘n Roll Riot’, New York Times (4 November 1956); ‘Rock ‘n Roll Fight Hospitalizes Youth’, New York Times (15 April 1957); ‘Rock ‘n Roll Stabbing’, New York Times (5 May 1958); Ben Gross, New York Daily News (8 June 1956).

8. Francis J. Braceland, quoted in ‘Rock-and-Roll Called “Communicable Disease”’, New York Times (28 March 1956). Referring to Rock ’n’ Roll as

‘cannibalistic and tribalistic’, Braceland is undoubtedly tapping into fears about Rock ’n’ Roll’s influence, as an ostensibly black American music form, on white American youth.

9. The full title of Linder’s book is Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944). Linder’s book is the story of a violent and criminal psychopathic youth, named Harold, who uncovers the underlying causes of his aberrant behaviour with the help of a doctor who subjects him to a series of psychoanalytic hypnosis sessions. Linder was by no means shy of sensationalism or fear-mongering when it came to describing the state of society: ‘Psychopathy is more widely spread today than ever before in the history of our civilization . . . it is assuming more and more the proportions of a plague . . . it is today ravishing the world with far greater ill-effects than the most malignant of organic diseases.’ Rebel Without A Cause (London: Research Books Limited, 1945), pp. 15–16.

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10. In 1954, while the film Rebel Without a Cause was in pre-production, Nicholas Ray was interested in meeting Linder in order to compare his views on delinquency with his own. At this stage Linder knew that Ray and the studio had rejected the content of his book and retained the title alone.

He completely disagreed with Ray’s idea for a naturalistic treatment of the subject, insisting that his psychoanalytical approach was the only way to go about presenting the delinquency problem on screen. Fortunately, Ray utterly rejected this approach. See Douglas L. Rathgeb, The Making of Rebel Without a Cause (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), pp. 32–7.

11. Robert M. Lindner, quoted in Ronald J. Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York: Dembner Books, 1986), p. 270. See also, Cyndy Hendershot, I was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 2001), p. 114.

12. John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 1999), p. 7.

13. J. Edgar Hoover, op.cit.: 14. One could argue that Hoover’s predictions about a rise in juvenile crime are a self-fulfilling prophecy as he was instrumental in collating these statistics and presenting them to the American public.

14. Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 42.

15. See Rachel Devlin, ‘Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945–1965’, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (Winter, 1997).

16. Records of the Office of Community War Services [OCWS] (Record Group 215), 1940–48. http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/

215.html#215.3.3, accessed 15 September 2010.

17. Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (London: Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 104.

18. Ibid. p. 96; 103–4.

19. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 339.

20. Quoted in John Costello, Love Sex and War: Changing Values, 1939–45

(London: William Collins, 1985), p. 282.

21. Goldstein, p. 339.

22. This implicit understanding of female desire as confused and/or deviant is by no means confined to contemporary commentators. It is reasserted in more recent critics’ attitudes also. In his 2003 publication, War and Gender, Goldstein refers to these girls as giving ‘free sex’ to soldiers (Goldstein, p. 339); while John Costello, in his 1983 study, entitled Love Sex and War: Changing Values, 1939–45, interprets these girls’ sexual activity in terms which, despite the subtitle of his book, perfectly reflect the ‘values’ of many wartime commentators: ‘[S]tirred by a misguided adolescent patriotism . . . the ‘patriotutes’ as they were dubbed in the American press often dispensed their favours for a Coca-Cola, a meal, or the price of a movie.’

While the sexual activity of so-called ‘Victory Girls’ is thus interpreted as a combination of a confused sense of patriotism and a willingness to exchange sexual ‘favours’ for small fiscal rewards, the ‘young servicemen’ who have sex with these girls are interpreted as ‘naturally not averse to accepting the sexual invitations they were offered.’ (pp. 279–81).

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23. Goldstein, p. 339.

24. See Marilyn E. Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York; London: New York University Press, 2008). Narratives highlighting the dangerous threat women posed to military men continued well after the war. One true crime publication from 1952 announced ‘The Nation’s Number 1 Shame – The Dames Who Prey on G.I. Joe!’, ‘Millions of dollars are spent to teach G.I. Joe how to handle himself in combat, but he receives no training in how to defend himself against another kind of enemy.’ Police Detective, June 1952.

25. Evelyn Millis Duvall, Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers (New York: Association Press, 1950), p. 67.

26. Ernest L. Matthews, Jr, Out of Bounds (New York: Universal Books, 1954), cover blurb.

27. Tereska Torres, Women’s Barracks (New York: Gold Medal Books 1950), cover blurb.

28. Fredric Wertham, Introduction to Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (Michigan: Scribner, 1950), p. v.

29. J.C. Priest, Private School (New York: Universal Publishing & Distributing Corporation, 1959), cover blurb.

30. Albert L. Quandt, Zip-Gun Angels (New York: Original Novels, 1952); Wenzell Brown, Gang Girl (New York: Avon Books, 1954); Joe Weiss, Girl Gang (New York: Beacon Books, 1957); Don Elliott, Gang Girl (New York: Nightstand Book, 1959); Harry Whittington, Halfway to Hell (New York: Avon Books, 1959); Joseph Hilton, Angels In The Gutter (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal Books, 1955), cover blurb.

31. Police Reporter Year, 1956; Confidential Detective (June 1956); Sensational Exposé (April 1957).

32. A character like Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Gun Crazy (aka Deadly is the Female, 1950) may be seen as an exception to this. However, while she may be classed as a femme fatale who displays a thrill-seeking attitude towards crime, this is intimately connected to her position as a member of a romantic criminal couple whose crime spree acts as an expression of their sexual desire for one another.

33. Leo Margulies, Bad Girls (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1958); Kate Nickerson, Boy Chaser (Carnival Books, 1955); Ernie Weatherall, Rock ’n Roll Gal (New York: Beacon Books, 1957), cover blurbs.

34. Kerry Segrave, Drive-In Theaters: A History from their Inception in 1933

(Jefferson: McFarland, 2006) p. 10.

35. See Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

36. The subject of hot rods was by no means limited to the cinema screen.

For example, Henry Gregor Felsen wrote numerous, highly popular, hot rod novels, such as Jungle Highway (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1942); Hot Rod (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1950); Street Rod (New York: Random House, 1953); Crash Club (New York: Random House, 1958); Boy Gets Car (aka Road Rocket) (New York: Random House, 1960); Here is Your Hobby: Car Customiz-ing (G.P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1965); A Teen-Ager’s First Car (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1966).

37. Interestingly, these airplanes themselves often displayed nose art of pin-ups.

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38. Crimes by Women, Fox Feature Syndicate #1–15 (1948–50); Women Outlaws, Fox Feature Syndicate #1–8 (1948–49). As one Blog comment notes, ‘Yes, bra technology was much more advanced than I realized in the old west.’ Tom, Fantasy Ink, http://fantasy-ink.blogspot.com/2009/10/women-outlaws.html, accessed on 7 October 2010.

39. Startling Stories, Standard Magazines #1–99 (1939–55), Planet Stories, Fiction House #1–71 (1939–55).

40. Wertham, interviewed by Judith Crist, ‘Horror in the Nursery’, Collier’s 27 March 1948: 22–3, 95–7. See also Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America (Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Publishing, 1989), p. 45.

41. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York, Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc. 1953, 1954), p. 178. See also Maurice Horn, Sex in the Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), p. 134.

42. Wertham, op.cit., p. 179.

43. Ibid., p. 194.

44. Ibid., p. 370.

45. Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. Interim Report of the Committee on the judiciary pursuant to S. Res. 89 and S. Res. 190 (83d Cong. 1st Sess.) –

(83d Cong. 2d Sess.) A Part of the Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency in the United States. US Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary.

Juvenile Delinquency. 1955–6. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77–90720. Introduction.

46. Ibid. Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America, Inc., adopted October 26, 1954: 36–7.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Wertham, op. cit., p. 201. While the Subcommittee on Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency did not take as much interest in breast adverts as Wertham had, they did note, in reference to advertising in comic books, ‘Numerous pseudomedical advertisements in comic books and love magazines are aimed at the teen-ager’s desire to glorify his personal appearance or to improve his physique through easy measures: a tablet to put on weight; a tablet or chew-ing gum to take off weight; hair and scalp formula; skin cleanser or treatment for pimples; an electrically operated “spot reducer”; a course in exercises to develop muscles.’ Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. Interim Report.

1955–6. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77-90720.

50. Teen-Age Romances, St John #1–45 (1949–55); Young Love, Crestwood/Prize

#1–73 (1949–56); Teen-Age Temptations, St John #1–9 (1952–54).

51. Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. Interim Report. 1955–6. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77–90720.

52. ‘Wald Slams Exploitation Films, Told “Peyton Place” Pretty Lurid,’ Variety, 29 October 1958: 7. Quoted in Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 129.

53. Herman Cohen, quoted in Thomas Doherty, op. cit., p. 115.

8

‘A Search for the Father-Image’:

Masculine Anxiety in Robert

Bloch’s 1950s Fiction

Kevin Corstorphine

Robert Bloch’s writing of the 1950s shows an attitude to women that subverts received notions of female submissiveness and male dominance, and does so within the confines of the pulp fiction magazine: a form of literature that is often perceived to be at best adolescent fantasy and at worst misogynist exploitation. Bloch does not always avoid the outrageous sensationalism of his contemporaries, but uses his own tastes, developed as a young reader devouring Lovecraft and Poe, to convey a unique view of the world. This perspective is shaped by and yet resistant to 1950s norms of masculinity and conformity. Bloch’s own anxieties are revealed in startling ways, yet are overshadowed by a knowing and ironic sensibility, particularly in relation to these two writers, who take on the metaphorical aspect of father figures. Here I intend to focus on several short stories of the 1950s, viewing this decade as a transitional period, in Bloch’s work, between his earlier fantasy stories written in the shadow of Lovecraft and his later psychological crime fiction, overshadowed, of course by a novel that appears in 1959: Psycho.

Psycho, as is well known, deals with a disturbed killer by the name of Norman Bates. Although male by physical sex, Norman has been unable to individuate his personality from that of his mother. This manifests itself in a radical physical way. Norman’s mother and her lover died when he was a teenager (poisoned, we later discover, by Norman himself). Norman then wrote out a suicide note in her handwriting, and as Sam Loomis informs us at the end of the novel, changed in the process: Apparently, now that it was all over, he couldn’t stand the loss of his mother. He wanted her back. As he wrote the note in her handwriting, addressed to himself, he literally changed his mind. And Norman, or part of him, became his mother.1

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He then dug up her corpse, preserved it, and brought it back into the house. All this is unbeknown to Mary Crane, who has made a sponta-neous decision to steal a rich businessman’s cheque from her office and elope with her boyfriend Sam. On the way to meet Sam, she stops for the night at the motel run by Norman and chats briefly to him. In a fit of jealous rage, ‘Mother’ bursts in on Mary while she takes a shower and decapitates her. The rest of the novel consists of Sam Loomis, Mary’s sister Lila, and a private detective named Arbogast attempting to work out what happened to Mary and the money. Eventually they are led back to Norman and discover the awful truth.

Psycho was popularized, and is most often discussed in popular and academic discourse, in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film version.

Replicating Bloch’s plot, it has been viewed2 as exemplifying the fallen woman Eve/whore archetype in its brutal punishment of Mary (renamed Marion), who has attempted to transgress the boundaries of patriarchy by absconding with money that belongs to her patronizing employer and his business associate. From the other perspective, ‘Mother’ seems to be an overt representation of the monstrous feminine; a repressive, emasculating force that controls Norman’s actions, despite her physical absence. Bloch’s novel resists such straightforward readings, however, in its complex interplay of gender roles. The novel begins by putting Norman in the role of victim, describing the fright he gets from rain hitting the window, when he fears that someone is tapping on the pane. Our sympathetic identification with Norman, however, is soon subverted by Bloch’s unsettling description of his mental state. Norman is mentally stunted and completely under the control of his mother’s influence. This immediately brings to mind Freud, but a direct reference to the Oedipus complex by the third-person narrator deftly signals the importance of psychoanalysis while simultaneously deflecting the possibility of a straightforward Oedipal reading. While Norman sits reading, we are apparently presented with an argument between himself and his mother, which is later revealed to be a deranged monologue.

‘Mother’ criticizes Norman’s choice of reading, comparing his anthropological book to the psychology he apparently tried to explain to her in the past:

‘Psychology isn’t filthy, Mother!’

‘Psychology, he calls it! A lot you know about psychology! I’ll never forget that time you talked so dirty to me, never. To think that a son could come to his own mother and say such things!’

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‘But I was only trying to explain something. It’s what they call the Oedipus situation, and I thought if both of us could just look at the problem reasonably and try to understand it, maybe things would change for the better.’

‘Change, boy? Nothing’s going to change. You can read all the books in the world and you’ll still be the same.’ (pp. 6–7) This is clearly an authorial confession that the Oedipal narrative is going to be used as a plot device, but it also precludes Freudian criticism by making obvious what would normally be hidden from view. We are also given an indication of the theme of arrested development that will saturate the remainder of the novel.

Themes of failure and betrayal are endemic to Psycho. Crucial to this is the idea of Norman’s masculinity. He has failed to develop properly as an adult male. Just as the voice of his mother informs, he will never change, Mary Crane is shocked by his confession that he has never been out with a woman. In an awkward conversation with Norman, Mary gives him advice contrary to his mother’s demands:

‘Mr Bates, you’ll pardon me for saying this but how long do you intend to go on this way? You’re a grown man. You certainly must realize that you can’t be expected to act like a little boy all the rest of your life. I don’t mean to be rude, but –’ (p. 26) Norman is under pressure from two contrary directions: he is labouring under the expectations of his mother all the while aware that wider society expects something different of him. He can fulfil neither of these roles in a satisfactory way and suffers from constant guilt over real and imagined failures. Psychoanalytic theories of trauma and guilt, however, do not hold sufficient explanatory power over this narrative in the light of Bloch’s extremely self-aware use of their implications. Although feminist concerns have informed discussion of the film’s scopophiliac tendencies, Psycho is less often considered in terms of the novel’s construction of masculinity. Norman is himself a victim of societal gender roles. Through his failure to individuate and take control over his own life, he becomes not so much a human subject as a creature of his environment, driven by forces unrelated to rationality or social norms.

Norman loses his father, but how this comes about and the effect it has is bound up with his confused notion of his own masculinity. His father is a shadowy and somewhat ambiguous figure. At one

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point we hear that Norman’s mother, Norma, was a widow by the time she opened the motel (p. 108). It seems likely, however, that either her husband died after leaving her or she merely claimed that he was dead. Norman is harassed by his mother’s voice talking about

‘Your-father-who-ran-off-and-deserted-me’ (p. 78), and Sam Loomis informs Lila that, ‘Mrs. Bates hated men ever since her husband deserted her and the baby, and this is one of the reasons she treated Norman the way she did, according to Dr. Steiner’ (p. 146). Norman’s simultaneous resentment of his mother and over-protectiveness towards her must stem at least partly from their abandonment by his father. If Psycho is set, as it appears to be, in the 1950s, then Norman’s father must have left before the war. Susan Faludi argues in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man (1999) that men have been failed by confining gender roles which, unlike women, they have felt no need to escape from. Among many factors, this is due to an overwhelming message from society that they are in control, when in fact a changing world has left them in a limbo from which it is difficult to see a way out.

Unlike the feminist movement, the cause of men lacks a clear oppo-nent or goal, leaving many men resentful of feminism, immigration and any number of issues that are not their real enemy. Faludi recounts how, ‘In the generation before the war, millions of fathers failed to support their families, became itinerant laborers, hoboes, winos. But that was the fault of the Great Depression, not of its men.’3 This would account for Norman’s father in the time-scale just cited. Yet Faludi’s argument relating to post-war men is particularly relevant for Norman:

The post-World War II era was the moment of America’s great bounty and ascendance, when the nation and thus its fathers were said to own the world. Never, or so their sons were told, did fathers have so much to pass on as at the peak of the American Century. And conversely, never was there such a burden on the sons to learn how to run a world they would inherit. Yet the fathers, with all the force of fresh victory and moral virtue behind them, seemingly unfettered in their paternal power and authority, failed to pass the mantle, the knowledge, all that power and authority, on to their sons.4

An anxiety surrounding this time of transition for the American male suffuses Psycho. Norman’s failure is in becoming a man, as his failure to enter the adult world of sex and relationships goes to show. Likewise, his mother constantly chides him about being a baby, and even discourages

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him from looking in the mirror, presumably in case he realizes he has grown up:

Mother was right. It was nasty to stare at yourself, all naked and unprotected; to peek at the blubbery fat, the short hairless arms, the big belly, and underneath it –

When you did, you wished that you were somebody else. Somebody who was tall and lean and handsome. (p. 75)

Norman, however, has missed his chance to become a man, choosing instead to live in the past. As always, his inner life is reflected in his lived surroundings: the Bates Motel hardly gets any business thanks to a new bypass that has been built. It is progress that betrays Norman. As Mark Jancovich has pointed out, ‘Mrs Bates is not part of a wholesale attack on the changing gender roles,’ and that in Bloch’s writing in general, ‘the killer is often seen as a product of modernity, rather than maternity’.5

This is a theme that is specifically built up throughout Bloch’s short fiction in the 1950s.

A reading of these stories reveals some startling explorations of gender and creativity. ‘The Thinking Cap’ (1953) anticipates Bloch’s most successful heir, Stephen King, by constructing a nightmarish narrative around an author struggling with writer’s block. We are introduced to Barnaby Codd as he desperately stumbles around his rented room looking for tinned beans, too poor even to sustain an alcohol habit. His fortunes change when his past reputation leads to an increasingly rare dinner party invite, where he meets an enchanting green-eyed woman and somehow succeeds in being invited home by her. His sense of masculine confidence, however, has been shattered by years of failure: ‘Codd had difficulty in comprehending her invitation. It was just too good to be true.’6 Indeed, when he gets to her apartment he does not take the negotiations as far as sex, but manages only a depressed, rambling outpouring of emotion. Cleo Fane, as she calls herself, takes on the authoritative role as she introduces Codd to an absurd helmet designed to channel creativity. When he questions whether this might be a joke, she immediately withdraws the offer, emotionally manipulating him into begging for her to reinstate it. The wretched Codd gets his wish and is soon a bestselling author once more, inspired by his fantastic visions of alien planets and psychotic killers (material too suspiciously similar to Bloch’s own output to claim full authorial distance). Here, the male author figure is portrayed as a slave and his muse a taunting

Masculine Anxiety in Bloch’s 1950s Fiction 163
figure of authority. Ordered not to remove the helmet, he eventually does, at the urging of his (male) psychiatrist. This power dynamic is noteworthy: during the first meeting Codd asks Fane if she is ‘a lady psychiatrist’.7 The patronizing note of mistrust inherent in this is not apparent when, in desperation once more, he makes an appointment with the aptly-named Doctor Fine. The archaic word ‘Fane’ describes a temple or church. If we accept this symbolic interpretation then a binary opposition emerges between Codd’s irrational worship of the feminine figure and the calm reassurance offered by the masculine order (Fine).

Certainly this is supported by his visions of Fane while wearing the helmet, where she appears as a green-skinned goddess riding a giant dog.

Her precise nature is never revealed, but Codd, convinced she is delu-sional and has hypnotized him into sharing her fantasies, indulges in some psychoanalysis of his own by theorizing that she has a fixation on the sorceress Circe of Greek mythology. As is often the case in weird fiction, the hypothesis of the narrator turns out to be the most likely truth, as when he removes the helmet he is transformed into one of her beasts, doomed to serve as her steed on an alien planet.

Shades of Lovecraft are visible here, in the story’s suggestion that ancient gods are, and have always been, aliens. Witches too, in Bloch’s conception, as can be seen in ‘Broomstick Ride’ (1957), where astronauts on a strange planet discover an alien race; in fact a splinter group of Satan-worshipping humans who had discovered atomic-powered propulsion at some point in the past and left Earth in order to escape persecution. Although provocatively speculative in suggesting the strange possibilities inherent in science and history, this story is told with a wry sense of humour and its more outrageous elements reflect the expectations of its readership (here Super-Science Fiction) as well as Bloch’s own tastes. Nonetheless, there is a notable consistency in the way he returns to the same themes and builds a coherent vision of his fantasy universe. In the 1950s this is a world, to return to Jancovich’s argument, that is steeped in the concerns of his day, here atomic power, alien worlds, and contemporary unifying theories emerging from structural approaches to anthropology and myth. All of this is ready material for Bloch’s storytelling. His essay ‘Poe and Lovecraft’ (1972) reveals his attitude towards these past masters and more than a little about his own practice. Regarding their perceived lack of engagement with the real world he points out that, ‘Both Poe and Lovecraft were acute observers of the scientific and pseudo-scientific developments of their respective days, and both men utilized the latest theories and discoveries in their writing.’8 Note here the easy companionship of scientific and

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pseudo-scientific: both, of course, are equally valid sources of inspiration for fantasy fiction, certainly with Bloch. Going further, he criticizes the misconception that they were ignorant of contemporary writing merely by virtue of their own being so startlingly different: Both men, as professional writers, were well and widely-read in the contemporary work of their day: Poe as a working critic, demonstrates his knowledge in his nonfictional efforts and Lovecraft, in his correspondence, proves himself no stranger to Proust, Joyce, Spengler and Freud.9

Bloch’s assertion here that the fantasy or horror writer is not necessarily ignorant of either developments in the contemporary world or in literature is reflected in his own work. All authors are exposed to the same world, but process this into fiction in very different ways. ‘Thinking Cap’

can be seen as a kind of satire on the question commonly asked of all writers: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ His use of Circe reflects a keen interest in mythology and the ways in which ideas are transmitted through human culture. Man in this story is not a generative force, but a conduit through which something greater, here the feminine, flows.

A writer should not, perhaps, be so arrogant as to claim the power of creation for his own.

These ideas of feminine creativity, generative power and the unavoidable connection to childbirth can be seen in ‘The Goddess of Wisdom’

(1954); a rather odd anticipation of Ridley Scott’s Alien, in that an alien female uses men as a vehicle through which to reproduce. The narrator, looking for anonymous sex after six months of space travel, encounters an incredibly beautiful woman who, in a misogynist’s dream come true, does not speak. She had been found with no memories in the cock-pit of a ship beside the headless corpse of the narrator’s friend Harley, which fails to warn off the impassioned astronaut. They engage in a kind of telepathic sex, which is far from safe10 and ends with a reverse impregnation:

The seed grew in Harley’s brain, where it had been planted to grow, and his head burst out there in space, and in a week it was all over and Minerva was born. My Minerva.

In a week, now, she’ll reproduce again. But this time it’s feeding and growing in my brain. It absorbs the bony parts of the skull and the skin expands incredibly. It drinks the blood and eats the soft gray

Masculine Anxiety in Bloch’s 1950s Fiction 165
nourishment and waxes fat in godliness as it sups on the wisdom of men.11

It transpires that she is part of an ancient alien race that uses this method of reproduction to travel across the gulf of space. As Bloch puts it:

The seeds travel from world to world, from universe to universe, and man is the carrier and the host. And in ancient times, a man who could make such a journey would be a god. His offspring would be a god or goddess. It must have happened on Olympus, when Minerva was born. Yes, that’s the way it was. I remember the legend of the goddess of wisdom now, the legend of Minerva. Minerva, who sprang fullblown from the head of Jupiter.12

Throughout this short story, the narrator’s thought processes are constantly disrupted by this feminine presence. In Julia Kristeva’s terms, she is the abject, that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’.13 Abjection, as she writes, ‘is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it’.14 Bloch’s portrayal of the monstrous feminine though, is closer to the reclaimed sexual imagery of post-feminism than the abject monsters of literary history, and indeed much contemporary fiction in the 1950s. It is tempting to associate this alien woman with the Gothic trope of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth, which represents male fear of the castrating woman in psychoanalytic feminist criticism. The narrator even questions his pimp about this: ‘What’s the catch here, Ottar? Is she dangerous, does she bite?’15 Yet he does not get close to either her vagina or her teeth.

This interpretation is not necessarily indicative of female empowerment, as she is the monstrous other rather than the heroine. Although she claims to be a goddess this does not prevent her being demonized (after all the biblical Eve can be interpreted as an archetypal Goddess of Wisdom). Yet the narrator is supremely ambivalent about what has happened to him, perhaps even grateful to have encountered her. He has been entirely manipulated by this alien version of the noir femme fatale. Bloch also returns to this perversely attractive combination of beauty and cruelty in ‘String of Pearls’ (1956), where a regal Indian woman turns the tables on two con-artists by having them stran-gled and their skulls added to the very necklace they were trying to steal.

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Throwing gender boundaries and attempts to pin down Bloch’s own politics into confusion, he offers us precisely the opposite situation in

‘I Like Blondes’, a story originally published in Playboy in 1956. Here, an ageing Lothario tricks a naïve young girl back to his apartment by pretending to be innocent and plying her with booze. The atmosphere of menace exuded throughout the story is well justified. It transpires that he is an alien being, and it is not just earth-girl love he is after: ‘I like blondes. They can laugh at me all they please – I’ll take a blonde any time. As I say, it’s a matter of taste. And blondes are simply delicious.’16

A structuralist reading, of course, would reveal that this performs the same function as a hundred fairy-tales: a cautionary warning to young girls on the cusp of adult sexuality. This, however, is far from Playboy’s intended audience. There is a tempting correlation of plot with readership here, the narrator’s literal consumption of women reflecting the reader’s symbolic consumption of the female image. In the era of the femme fatale on the big screen, however, and the men’s magazine market maintaining a certain level of sophistication and indeed literary aspirations, it risks oversimplification to view this as titillation. ‘I Like Blondes’

clearly has more than a streak of satire about it. Far from being a suave operator, this alien seducer is portrayed by Bloch as a somewhat pathetic figure:

Perhaps I was a bit obvious and overdressed for the occasion.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have winked, either. But that’s a matter of opinion . . . isn’t it?

I have mine. Other people have theirs. And if the tall girl with page-boy cut chose to give me a dirty look and murmur, ‘Disgusting old man,’ that was her affair. I’m used to such reaction and it didn’t bother me a bit.17

He doesn’t understand music and is disturbed by the ‘vulgar sexual connotation’ of dancing. His own peculiar brand of misogyny marks him out as a sexual misfit. Even though he has paid to be in a ‘dime-a-dance’

hall, he has nothing but contempt for the women who work there: Those girls, those hostesses! Where did they get their dresses – the crimson Day-Glow gowns, the orange and cerise abominations, the low-cut black atrocities, the fuchsia horrors? And who did their hair –
poodle cuts and pony tops and tight ringlets and loose maenad swirls? The garish, slashing, red-and-white makeup, the dangling,

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bangling cheap jewelry gave the impression of pink ribbons tied to the horns of a prize heifer.18

Here it is the man who is demonized. A woman-hating, sexually maladjusted freak, he turns out not even to be human, and far from the ideal Playboy reader. In the first issue Hugh Hefner noted that the ideal reader enjoys, ‘inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex’.19 The narrator of ‘I Like Blondes’ has much more in common with Bloch’s portrayal of Norman Bates in Psycho than Anthony Perkins’ performance in Hitchcock’s screen version. Perkins is outwardly charming, but hides a damaged portion of his psyche that his despicable mother is entirely responsible for. Bates in the novel is a fat, middle-aged, bespectacled alcoholic who fantasizes over making musical instruments from flayed human skin. It is his own guilt over the murder of his mother, as much as the way he has been brought up, that compels him to further killings. Bloch’s portrayal of Bates and the narrator of ‘I Like Blondes’ as misfits and fantasists betrays an authorial urge to construct a vision of normality based on reason, and move away from the overbearing influence of two of the most psychologically-disturbed literary father-figures one could hope for: Poe and Lovecraft.

Bloch’s distancing of himself from the text frequently leads to a sar-donic tone and even the inclusion of Gothic in-jokes. In ‘I Like Blondes’

the alien goes by the name of Beers while on earth. It transpires though, that he is wearing a borrowed human body collected by his friend, Ril.

Describing Ril, he says:

He’s one of my friends. He collects, too. We all collect, you know. It’s our hobby. We come to Earth and collect . . . Ril has a rather curious hobby, in a way. He collects nothing but Bs. You should see his trophy room! He has a Bronson, three Bakers, and a Beers – that’s the body I’m using now. Its name was Ambrose Beers, I believe. He picked it up in Mexico a long time ago.20

This is a clear reference to Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913. Bierce is one of the authors singled out for discussion by Lovecraft in his essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (1927). He praises much of Bierce’s work, but does not shy away from criticism, pointing out, ‘a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or early-American provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror-masters’.21 Given the timescale, these later masters must

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no doubt include Lovecraft himself, who is generous in his acknowledgement of past authors but nonetheless adopts a certain sense of a teleological progression towards the more cosmic perspective of himself and his contemporaries. This sense of progression is inherent in Bloch’s staking out of his own literary territory. His reference to Bierce here, a seemingly minor point, is actually very telling. Presented here are the themes of collecting, consumption, and wearing the body of an older author as a disguise: the very motifs that characterize his own progression from reader to author of fantasy fiction by way of imitation. As S.T. Joshi points out, ‘Bloch has never made any secret of his literary and personal debt to H.P. Lovecraft’,22 but at the same time his 1950s output shows a concerted effort to move away from the fantasy-orientated themes of earlier work when he was writing for Weird Tales, such as ‘Mannikins of Horror’ (1944), ‘The Beasts of Barsac’ (1944), and under pseudonyms, somewhat crass efforts like ‘Death is an Elephant’ (1939) towards a more mature and self-possessed style, though one that remains bound to Lovecraft’s themes for some time, straining as it does to transform them and shed the dead weight of the past.

Bloch’s Lovecraftian story ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ (1950) begins the decade by incorporating Lovecraft as a character, and even making reference to his death in 1937, something that Joshi finds in

‘questionable taste’.23 In poor taste it may be, but this is not only 13
years later, but also in keeping with the sense of humour shared by Lovecraft and Bloch, demonstrated by their playful ‘killing’ of each other started by Bloch in ‘The Shambler from the Stars’ (1935), where an unnamed New England horror writer is destroyed by his Faustian thirst for forbidden knowledge. Lovecraft responded with ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (1936), where a similar fate befalls a thinly-veiled character called Robert Blake. Bloch’s finale to this peculiar trilogy, ‘The Shadow from the Steeple,’ follows Edmund Fiske (Tarleton Fiske, incidentally, was one of Bloch’s many pseudonyms), a friend of Blake’s, as he investigates the disappearance. Fiske writes to Lovecraft for help and advice as he does so, as did the young Bloch, who corresponded with Lovecraft for five years.

The investigation leads ultimately to Doctor Ambrose Dexter, a character mentioned in Lovecraft’s story, although his first name is Bloch’s addition. Dexter has been possessed by the ancient god Nyarlathotep, which is using the nuclear scientist to further its nefarious plans. The unusual name of Ambrose, with its connotations of immortality, would of course be revisited with Ambrose Beers in ‘I Like Blondes’, bringing both elder authors into the realm of the fictional, indeed granting them an afterlife on the page. Bloch utilizes a lightness of touch, however, and there is a possible pun here on ‘ambidextrous’, with Dexter gaining power from

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both his human and immortal aspects, a force to be reckoned with on

‘either side’.

If ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ can be interpreted as a young writer working through some kind of Oedipal issues with his literary ‘father’, then ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’ (1951) complicates things further.

Bloch began his career with literary imitations of Lovecraft, but this pastiche of the ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is much more self-conscious in its borrowing. Passages from Poe’s original are lifted verbatim and woven into the tale. Here, the narrator’s mysterious friend, the Usher-figure, is himself obsessed with Poe. Not only does he have a collection of all Poe’s first editions, but apparently unpublished work as well, which even includes ‘The Further Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym’.

By the time we discover that he has the ultimate collector’s item, Poe’s exhumed corpse, in the basement, it becomes increasingly obvious that he has resurrected the body by some means. It is Poe himself, rather than Usher’s sister, who comes shambling towards his captor to lock him in a deadly embrace. Not only does Bloch change Poe’s original to an all-male scenario, but it is a highly destructive one. Whereas Poe’s ‘Usher’

can be read as a satire on the decadence of European aristocracy, Bloch’s re-imagining portrays obsessive collecting and male hero-worship as a moral and creative dead end. The allusions to incest in Poe take on a different shade here. Usher’s relationship with Madeline is explicitly incestuous; the family line putting forth, ‘no enduring branch’.24 The narrator’s relationship to Poe, then, takes on connotations of literary incest. The arboreal metaphor can perhaps be stretched to comment on the apprentice’s anxiety surrounding the need to ‘branch out’, or indeed for the apple to fall further from the tree. Poe dies for the second time in the story, but takes the collector with him, allowing no escape from this odd Oedipal cycle, where Poe serves as both revered mother and overbearing father.

As with ‘I Like Blondes’, collecting behaviour is central, something that psychiatrists tend to associate with men.25 Certainly, ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’ maintains the wine-swilling manly drawing-room atmosphere of the original. The narrator is compelled to visit the mansion purely because he finds the implausibly named Launcelot Canning (the name is actually from ‘Usher’s’ interpolated poetic romance, ‘The Mad Tryst of Launcelot Canning’) to be an intriguing individual. He does not, however, share his obsessions:

I confess that his invitation as such did not enthrall me, for I hold no brief for the literary hero-worshipper or the scholarly collector as a type. I own to more than a passing interest in the tales of Poe, but

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my interest does not extend to the point of ferreting out the exact date upon which Mr. Poe first decided to raise a mustache, nor would I be unduly intrigued by the opportunity to examine several hairs preserved from that hirsute appendage.26

Bloch’s parody of the collector shows his sense of humour, but in the context of the story, the dangers of obsession are made clear as Poe brings about the death of his admirer. Like Madeline in ‘Usher’, he does this with an embrace:

There without the doors there did stand a lofty and enshrouded figure; a figure all too familiar, with pallid features, high, domed forehead, mustache set above a mouth. My glimpse lasted but an instant, an instant during which the man – the corpse – the apparition – the hallucination, call it what you will – moved forward into the chamber and clasped Canning to his breast in an unspeakable embrace. Together, the two figures tottered toward the flames, which now rose to blot out vision forever more.27

No doubt Freud would read this compulsive return to the moustache as phallic symbolism, but even without going that far, the figure of Poe is here, very much, an elder statesman. From a writer’s point of view, the message is clear: literary father figures can be stifling in their overbearing influence. Bloch, in a 1973 essay, claims that ‘Poe and Lovecraft are our two American geniuses of fantasy, comparable each to the other, but incomparably superior to all the rest who follow in their wake.’28 His comparison of the lives of the two writers would almost suggest that they had sprung Minerva-like, fully-formed from the New England soil.

He says:

Both Poe and Lovecraft were New England born. Both were, to all intents and purposes, fatherless at an early age. Both developed a lifelong affinity for poetry and the elements of a classical education. Both utilized archaisms in their writing styles and affected personal eccentricities which in time became consciously cultivated.29

Bloch is not blind to the faults of the two writers, pointing out that ‘their outlook was, to a marked degree, provincial; even parochial,’30 but then again, who is not critical of their parents? Despite their flaws, Bloch

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views these men as unique individuals who did not let their milieu dictate what they wrote. The problem is that of writing tales of the fantastic while retaining a personal voice, stepping out of the overshadowing legacy of these literary father figures. Bloch’s work is haunted by their ghosts in the same way that Psycho is haunted by the very lack of a father figure. Mrs Bates refers to Norman’s father purely in hyphenated terms:

‘Your-father-who-ran-off-and-deserted-me’ (p. 76). Poe retains this sense of mystery to the narrator of ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’, who can barely describe him: ‘the man – the corpse – the apparition – the hallucination, call it what you will.’ The revenant corpse takes on a perversely feminine role, almost breast-feeding the collector. Poe’s Madeline bears her brother to the floor a corpse, whereas Bloch has Poe cling to Canning in ‘an unspeakable embrace’ as the flames consume them both. Like the soulless tales churned out by the re-animated corpse, over-identification with a writer destroys creativity. There is a need, perhaps, for the kind of feminine creative energy embodied in the Minerva creature of ‘The Goddess of Wisdom’. Poe’s role here is not a feminine one but a grotesque parody exposing the lack of the feminine. From this perspective it is crucial that Psycho’s ‘Mother’ is not a true revenant female but rather a male projection of the extremes of the feminine grotesque.

Mark Jancovich, discussing Bloch’s novels, offers a warning against reducing his fiction to an emphasis on this feminine grotesque, arguing that Bloch does not compulsively return to a demonization of women:

Psycho’s use of the mother is . . . only one cause among many. Psycho’s concern with the crisis of identity may use the figure of the mother, but it does not simply emerge out of anxieties about ‘momism’ or the matriarchal family. While the killer in The Scarf is compelled by attitudes towards sex which are associated with his relationship to his mother, the killer in The Kidnapper is motivated by his relationship to his father.31

Indeed, the shifting identities and ironic reversals, common to many of Bloch’s short stories, reveal an outlook that sidesteps the totalizing discourse of Freudian narratives and offers a much more existential view of human agency. In the anti-communist and conformist America of the 1950s, Bloch presents characters who explicitly do not fit in. To com-pensate for this they use the strategy of acting out patterns of behaviour based on dominant ideas of masculinity.

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Bloch’s 1956 story, ‘A Good Imagination’, published in Suspect magazine, brings issues of masculinity to the fore when the narrator discovers his wife has been sleeping with George, the handyman. He describes George in terms that could not more obviously project fears about his own inadequate masculine identity:

He had to stoop a bit in the basement because he was so tall. Tall and heavyset, with the thick neck and broad shoulders that are the common endowment of outdoor men, movie stars, and adult male gorillas . . . But then, perhaps some women like apes. Perhaps they have a secret craving for hairy bodies and crushing weight and panting animalism. Louise always told me she hated that sort of thing. She respected me because I was gentle and understanding and controlled myself. At least, that’s what she said.32

The narrator tricks George into walling Louise inside the basement (a classic Poe motif), suffocating her, then takes great joy in telling him about it (this turns out to be a trick as well). What is interesting here is the way in which he overcomes this brutish masculine figure. First of all there is a ludicrously phallic revolver:

His eyes began to bulge. I watched his hand curl around the mouth of the beer bottle. And I brought the muzzle of the Colt up so he could see it . . . I inched the revolver up higher, and he flinched back . . . I saw his muscles flex, his neck tighten.33

Secondly, the narrator uses Poe as a touchstone for how he should proceed. After George runs off, mad with grief and guilt, he reaches for a conveniently placed book: ‘I picked up my copy of Poe, and not by accident. I wanted to see if his treatment of the situation was as melodramatic as mine had been.’34

Here is the essence of Bloch’s authorial anxiety: the burden of influence. In part, then, these stories are responding to the very notion of writing Gothic fantasy in the 1950s, post-Poe and Lovecraft, both authors who were being simultaneously reprinted in the same pulp magazines as Bloch. As a response, he experiments with models of masculinity, from hard-boiled characters who would not be out of place in a Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hammet novel, to nerdish literary types who use their superior knowledge to prevail. Most of these character types, though, break down and crumble in the face of narrative pressures. As a pulp writer, Bloch is equally shifting masks in order to present

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a model of masculinity that panders to the readership of whatever magazine he happens to be writing for. All these portrayals, however, have a strong vein of satire that disrupts these identities even as they are constructed. Norman Bates’s father, even in his ghostly absence, dictates the direction of Psycho. It is noteworthy that the narrator of ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’, the most reasonable and well-balanced figure in these short stories, avoids the fate of his obsessive friend, smothered by a literary forefather, but still describes events, hauntingly, in a voice that is not entirely his own.

A fitting postscript to Bloch’s 1950s output is his 1960 short story

‘The Funnel of God’: a psychedelic curiosity concerning a young white South African boy who embarks on an existential journey following an encounter with a shamanic figure known as ‘The Black Skelm’. Harvey Wolf’s mother has died in childbirth and his father has moved away on business, leaving Harvey in the care of his foreman and servants.

Disregarding all warnings to avoid the Black Skelm’s cave, Harvey is impelled to meet him, and having listened to the old man’s talk of the Zulu empire a hundred years past and much philosophizing about the rise and fall of civilizations, he is designated a fellow ‘seeker’ and seals this pact by drinking fresh cattle blood from a human skull. After a brief meeting with his father Harvey travels to America and becomes increasingly disillusioned with every aspect of the social order, from racial segregation to public holidays. Strikingly, he rails against ‘the artificial social values which emotionally warped young people into

“manliness” or “femininity” ’.35 Troubled by his inability to settle for illusion over truth, Harvey seeks out a psychiatrist, who points the finger of blame squarely at the figure of the absent father: ‘his self-styled search for Truth was merely a search for the Father-Image, denied him in childhood’.36

Harvey becomes every bit as discombobulated at the methodology of 1960s psychiatry as Esther Greenwood would be three years later in Plath’s The Bell Jar when his psychiatrist makes a series of image interpretations more akin to myth-making than science. Taking as his premise the significance of his patient’s second name ‘Wolf,’ he proceeds to dissect Harvey’s obsession with the film The Wolf Man: What had Harvey thought when the Wolf Man was beaten to death with a cane by his father in the movie? Did Claude Rains, as the father, remind Harvey of his own parent? Did he perceive the phallic symbolism of the silver cane used as an instrument of punishment?

And so on, blah, blah, blah – until Harvey Wolf got up from the couch and walked out again.37

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This slavishly Freudian analysis frustrates Harvey with its limitations; an interesting point given Psycho’s straightforward cause-and-effect presentation of mental health, where Norman’s problems seem ultimately to stem from an over-attachment to his mother in childhood.

This is in fact a fitting development that illustrates Bloch’s innovation in using the narrative of psychology to construct plot: something that would be imitated time and time again throughout the coming decades.

Although the stories discussed here offer insight into the motivations and concerns of Bloch and his time, it is important to note that in Bloch we have a writer who is self-reflexively aware of his own anxieties and those of his readers. Like Harvey Wolf, his perspective tends to the cosmic rather than the specific, but is tempered by a discipline that enables creativity within boundaries; a spectral return, perhaps, of the murdered superego.

Notes

1. Robert Bloch, Psycho (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 148. Further references to this edition are given in the text.

2. Most pertinently in Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992).

3. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), p. 597. Further references to this edition are given in the text.

4. Ibid., p. 597.

5. Mark Jancovich, American Horror from 1951 to the Present (Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1994), p. 246.

6. Robert Bloch, ‘The Thinking Cap’, Final Reckonings: The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume One (New York: Citadel Twilight, 1990), pp. 171–94 (175).

7. Ibid., p. 176.

8. Robert Bloch, ‘Poe and Lovecraft’, Ambrosia, Volume 2 (August 1973), reproduced at Alan Gullette’s Web Page, < http://alangullette.com/lit/hpl/bloch.

htm > , accessed 3 February 2008.

9. Ibid.

10. Anxiety surrounding sexually transmitted disease in the 1950s would be another fruitful line of enquiry here.

11. Robert Bloch, ‘The Goddess of Wisdom’, Final Reckonings: The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume One, pp. 219–31 (230–1).

12. Ibid., p. 230.

13. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.

14. Ibid., p. 4.

15. Robert Bloch, ‘The Goddess of Wisdom’, p. 224.

16. Robert Bloch, ‘I Like Blondes’, Final Reckonings: The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume One, pp. 267–75 (275).

17. Ibid., p. 267.

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18. Ibid., p. 268.

19. Hugh Hefner, Playboy, Issue 1, December 1953, cited in Christopher Turner,

‘Hugh Hefner in Six Volumes’, The Guardian, 17 July 2010.

20. Robert Bloch, ‘I Like Blondes’, p. 274.

21. H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Tales, ed. by August Derleth (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 423–512 (477).

22. S.T. Joshi, The Evolution of the Weird Tale (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004), p. 107.

23. Ibid., p. 116.

24. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Stories, ed. by John Seelye (New York & Toronto: Everyman, 1992), pp. 365–82 (366).

25. P. Subkowski, ‘On the Psychodynamics of Collecting’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 87: 383–401 (2006), p. 383.

26. Robert Bloch, ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’, The Best of Robert Bloch, ed. by Lester Del Rey (New York: Del Rey, 1977), pp. 79–96 (80).

27. Ibid., pp. 95–6.

28. Robert Bloch, ‘Poe and Lovecraft’, Ambrosia, Volume 2 (August 1973).

29. Robert Bloch, ‘Poe and Lovecraft’, Ambrosia, No. 2 (August 1973).

30. Ibid.

31. Mark Jancovich, op.cit., pp. 243–4.

32. Robert Bloch, ‘A Good Imagination’, Final Reckonings: The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume One, pp. 287–299 (287–288).

33. Ibid., pp. 293–4.

34. Ibid., p. 296.

35. Robert Bloch, ‘The Funnel of God’, The Best of Robert Bloch, pp. 289–318 (297).

36. Ibid., p. 306.

37. Ibid., p. 306.

9

‘Reading her Difficult Riddle’:

Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’

Anthropology

Dara Downey

In a 1959 lecture on Edgar Allan Poe, the poet and critic Richard Wilbur expressed a certain dissatisfaction with what he called the ‘current critical habit of finding symbols in everything’. He continues,

‘We are all getting a bit tired, I think, of that laboriously clever criticism which discovers mandalas in Mark Twain, rebirth archetypes in Edwin Arlington Robinson, and fertility myths in everything.’1 What Wilbur was referring to was the wholesale adoption of the language, concepts and imagery of anthropology into the language of literary criticism in mid-twentieth century America. While the focus of much British anthropology at the time was primarily sociological, a new breed of American cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were foregrounding ritualistic, symbolic or mythological motifs in a manner that tended increasingly toward generalization and archetypes. Such a universalizing discourse provided the increasingly self-conscious discipline of literary criticism with a ready-made vocabulary and structure, and the so-called ‘Myth and Ritual’

school, including scholars such as Northrop Frye, Dorothy van Ghent, Leslie Fiedler, and Stanley Edgar Hyman (the husband of Shirley Jackson, the focus of this essay), set out to excavate such motifs from the most canonical works of Anglophone literature.

As Wilbur’s comment suggests, it was not so much that, by the end of the 1950s, these critical tendencies were beginning to die out, but rather that they had attained a ubiquity that rendered them commonplace, no longer novel. Drawing upon a general sense that anthropology could unearth the hidden ‘symbolic’ nature of the daily practices and customs insisted upon by a culture, the less than self-evident meanings that the 176

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most apparently mundane tasks surrounding food, sex and labour were concealing, critics dutifully applied such thinking to the surface material of literary texts. Denham Sutcliffe’s 1961 introduction to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a case in point.2 He asserts, We have not read far before suspicion grows that we are dealing with something more than naturalistic story. It is not that things ‘stand for’ something else; they are inexorably themselves, but they begin to accrete meanings and associations. We begin to notice recurrent motifs, an emphatic insistence upon certain objects and ideas, and suspicion finally becomes certainty that this story of the pursuit of a whale is a huge metaphor of which one face is too be taken literally and the other symbolically.3

What this passage illustrates nicely is the extent to which, by 1961, terms such as ‘symbolic’ were being bandied about as if they were unproblematic and in need of no further explication or elaboration.

As I shall argue in this essay, the work of (until quite recently) neglected4 1950s writer Shirley Jackson makes more or less explicit use of the archetypes and quasi-mythical plots that critics, particularly those belonging to the so-called ‘Myth and Ritual School’, were busy identifying in more canonical texts. The popularity of her work within a broad contemporary readership, ranging from bored housewives who felt that they had found in her a kindred spirit, to no less a personage than Sylvia Plath, would seem to suggest that, by incorporating such motifs into her work, Jackson was tapping into an easily recognizable zeitgeist. Indeed, her work was published with notable frequency both in The New Yorker and in mass-market magazines such as Good Housekeeping.5 So commercially successful was her writing that, as Darryl Hattenhauer notes, her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, ‘bought her a dishwasher (with her money) because her labour was worth so much more as a writer. She wrote to her parents, “stanley [sic] said he figured it was costing us a couple of thousand dollars a day to have me wash dishes”’.6 Nonetheless, I would argue, Jackson’s use of a set of motifs and ideas that underpinned much of the critical and academic thinking of her day does not mean that her work conforms to a norm or ‘fits in’ with a trend in reading strategies. Instead, it serves to unpick that norm from within, to critique and even to resist the strategies whereby social groups reject and persecute those individuals who they label as ‘deviant’. The key to her characters’ success in doing so, however, lies within the nature of the spaces they inhabit or occupy, spaces which themselves partake in the

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characteristics of sacred and/or taboo space that anthropology had made just as familiar as ‘symbolic’ or ‘archetypal’ readings of literary texts. Far from applying the critical lexicon of the day to her work in a straightforward or unproblematized fashion, Jackson seizes upon a number of the ambiguities inherent in the terminology that she employs in order to further complicate, rather than create a coherent, unified mythology around, the relationships between women, houses and wider social structures of belonging.

Even a cursory look at her husband’s publishing record strongly suggests that Jackson occupied an intellectual landscape steeped in the language of anthropology. In 1948 (the same year that Jackson published her controversial short story ‘The Lottery’ in The New Yorker magazine), Hyman published The Armed Vision, in which he theorizes the uses of anthropology for literary criticism, as well as putting those theories into practice. In 1962, the year that his wife finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her last complete novel, Hyman’s The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers was published, a book which neatly drew evolutionary theory, economics, anthropology and psychoanalysis together under the banner of literary studies. That anthropology was more than a minor interest of his can be inferred from his contribution of a scholarly introduction to a 1969 edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough. This assumption is confirmed by papers held in the Library of Congress in Washington DC, which contain correspondence between Hyman and Dorothy van Ghent, Joseph Campbell and T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land is strongly marked by references to ritual and legend.7 These records, which include papers relating both to Jackson and to Hyman, also indicate that Hyman’s incredibly wide-ranging work encompassed research into witchcraft, a subject in which Jackson herself took great interest, on a personal and even practical level as much as on a literary one.

Hyman’s primary contribution to the anthropological movement of the 1950s, however, lay rather in the realm of literary criticism than in anthropology per se. In an essay from 1955, he acknowledges that the 1950s was an era during which ‘half a dozen new territories have been explored and to some extent colonized’ by anthropological thinking, not least the area of literary studies, and is confident that such approaches to understanding culture were ‘apparently here to stay’.8

Most usefully for my purposes here, he asserts that ‘myth tells a story sanctioning a rite . . . it neither means nor explains anything; . . . it is not science but a form of independent experience, analogous to literature’.9

As he elaborates, however,

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Literature is analogous to myth, we have to insist, but is not itself myth. . . . Myth and literature are separate and independent entities, . . . What such modern writers as Melville or Kafka create is not myth but an individual fantasy expressing a symbolic action, equivalent to and related to the myth’s expression of a public rite. No one, not even Melville . . . can invent myths or write folk literature.10

In other words, writers of fiction carry on the work of myth, producing ‘symbolic’ texts that say far more than their surfaces might initially betray, but which can never fully function, as myth itself does, as a means of defining, creating and expressing the norms and customs of a society. Literature cannot, Hyman seems to be insisting, merely reflect or enforce cultural structures and mores, since it does not spring organi-cally from a culture as myth does, being instead self-conscious and more complex in its aims and devices. The two – literature and myth – remain fundamentally linked in his formulation, and the latter becomes a way to understand and unpack the former, but he is careful not to posit an absolute identity (as he accuses Richard Chase of doing)11 between them, or to attempt to reduce the one to the other. Announcing that it is to be the job of the literary critic to untangle the complex relations between modern literature and its ritual and mythic origins,12 he ends the essay by stating, with considerably less bombast: If ritual is to be a general theory of culture, however, our opera-tions must get more tentative and precise in proportion as our claims become more grandiose. We then have to keep distinctions even clearer, know so much more, and use every scrap of fact or theory that can be used. Having begun so easily by explaining the myth of the Sphinx, we may yet, working humbly in cooperation with anyone who will and can cooperate, end by reading her difficult riddle.13

This is the challenge which, I would argue, Jackson’s work sets the literary critic – as her husband urges his fellow critics, it is vital not to

‘explain’ it as such, but to read it, to begin to suggest how an awareness of the anthropological and related thinking of the 1950s can open up multifarious interpretive possibilities, without closing down the often subversive ambiguity that characterizes her writing.

Indeed, whatever about her husband’s interests and any potential influence they may have had upon her writing, it is undeniable that Jackson’s own work abounds in anthropological motifs, language and

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imagery. Her infamous short story ‘The Lottery’ (1948) ends with a ritual stoning, while ‘Lord of the Castle’ (which was unpublished in her lifetime)14 is a sort of dark fairy or folk tale, with distinct mythic resonances.15 Similarly, ‘The Very Strange House Next Door’ (published as ‘Strangers in Town’ in the Saturday Evening Post in May of the same year as The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Wilbur’s lecture on Poe) features a couple whose maid uses witchcraft to make dinner from an acorn and curtains from a spider’s web. Perhaps the most direct acknowledgement of all of this comes in the form of Jackson’s non-fiction accounts of her experiences as a 1950s housewife. Drawn largely from her popular magazine stories, these are collected in two volumes entitled Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, calling to mind both the kind of fieldwork among ‘primitives’ that had long characterized much anthropological research, and the kind of supernatural horror (such as Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943) and Jacques Tourneur’s film Night of the Demon (1957)) that was beginning to pervade popular culture at that time.

She also apparently cast herself as ‘the only practising witch in New England’, claiming to be able to exact revenge upon enemies with spells and curses.16 She is quoted as announcing with a perfectly straight face,

‘I live in a dank old place with a ghost that storms around in the attic . . . the first thing that I did when we moved in was make charms in black crayon on all the door sills and window ledges to keep out demons and was successful in the main . . . .’17 According to her biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, however, Jackson encouraged a certain confusion over how she wished herself to be perceived:

She liked to pretend she was a witch; she liked to make people believe it; at the same time she liked to poke fun at the entire business, and at the very people who believed her so literally. . . . She was simultaneously believer and debunker, psychic traveller and removed, amused onlooker. . . . She would not cut any of her opinions; she would not be cubbyholed, no matter how much easier it would make things for others.18

Nonetheless, she was famed for tarot readings which were, allegedly,

‘so accurate that several of her friends nervously refused to let her tell them their fortunes’, and even for an ability to converse with cats.

Indeed, Jackson herself claimed, according to one particular interviewer, to be able to ‘break a man’s leg and throw a girl down an elevator

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shaft. Such things happen, she says! Miss Jackson tells us all this with a smile but she is not joking: she owns a library of two hundred books.’19

What emerges from all of this is a picture of a body of work and a professional persona carefully constructed from multifarious references to myth, ritual, anthropology, the occult, spiritualism and witchcraft, terms which cannot entirely be reduced to one another. While her work therefore revels in all that has been rejected by enlightened Western culture as so much dangerous hokum and atavistic superstition, it is simultaneously grounded in the ideas that formed the basis of serious academic inquiry in mid-century America. Having produced an oeuvre so stubbornly eclectic in its approach and generic affiliations, yoking together a radically shifting mélange of incompatible attributes and striking so precarious a balance between the scholarly and the superstitious, it is perhaps unsurprising that Jackson has proven such uncomfortable reading that much of her early work in particular has not been widely available until very recently, and has only garnered consistent critical attention over the past decade or so.20 It is vital, therefore, that the semantic slipperiness of Jackson’s writing should remain untamed by critical zeal.

What I do not wish to do, consequently, is to attempt to reconstruct a network of sources for or influences upon her writing. Apart from the fact that such assertions are notoriously difficult to prove irrefutably, doing so also tends to become an end in and of itself, rather than a way of expanding the potential interpretive range of a text or texts. As Robert F. Geary asserts, ‘When supernatural narratives advance detailed metaphysics of their own, they will cease to operate as classical horror stories.’21 It is therefore crucial neither to subordinate the less tidy elements of Jackson’s fiction to any grand narrative, including that of anthropology, nor to suggest that her oeuvre maintains a coherent or fully legible world-view. Indeed, doing so would be all but impossible, since in the 1950s and early 1960s, anthropology in America was by no means a monolithic entity, riddled as it was with vociferous disagreement and dispute. It is perhaps more accurately conceived of primarily as a means of negotiating and debating (rather than solidify-ing or codifying) conceptual boundaries, specifically those surrounding the theorization of the relationship between the individual and society at large; between the normal and the aberrant; and between the ‘official’

rituals of religion and the more personal, potentially subversive or even dangerous practices of magic.22

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In order to retain this sense of the subversive or non-normative, my reading of her two best-known novels (both of which were commercial successes, as well as enjoying a number of reincarnations in film and theatre respectively), The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is based primarily but by no means exclusively upon two contemporary works that Jackson probably never read. Indeed, one of these is not even about anthropology at all –
namely phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958, trans. 1964), a study of emotional responses to architecture; the other is anthropologist Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (1957, trans.

1959), an exercise in comparative religion. Although the publication dates of these texts are seductively consonant with those of Jackson’s own publications, this very proximity means that neither work was available in English by the time she finished writing Hill House. Rather, I have chosen them because the vocabulary used by each overlaps strikingly with that used both by Jackson in her novels, but in a manner which creates intriguing and illuminating discrepancies rather than providing a fully legible ‘key’ to the novels which, arguably, present the most sustained and complex versions of Jackson’s engagement with the anthropological discourses of her era. Furthermore, it must be borne in mind that there is no way of ascertaining whether these are in fact source books for Jackson – indeed, quite the contrary. While she may have read Eliade before publishing Castle, a lack of evidence in the Library of Congress23 makes it impossible to state with any confidence that she or Hyman ever encountered either author.

Nevertheless, what Bachelard, Eliade, and Jackson’s novels share is a prominent use of the word ‘reality’, a word that, as I shall argue, can operate as a useful means of understanding the novels, not least because the conformity that is traditionally seen as characterizing 1950s America itself created a consensual notion of what constituted ‘reality’ (in other words, normality and a refusal to deviate from accepted forms of behaviour). In using Bachelard, Eliade and a number of other anthropologists and philosophers in this way, it becomes possible to acknowledge Jackson’s debt to contemporary anthropological and mythological ideas without establishing these ideas as a privileged meta-discourse within the novels, or positing a unifying, linear historical teleology – not least because I am working from translations rather than originals. In this way, I hope to remain true to Rosemary Jackson’s model of ‘the fantastic’

as a mode that refuses to be restrained within the totalizing language of allegory, splitting off instead into multiple interpretive possibilities that cannot be bound within a single trajectory of signification.24

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‘Never Meant to be Lived In’: The Haunting of Hill House

Part of the usefulness of such an approach is highlighted by the sheer linguistic and figurative density of the opening lines of Hill House, which state,

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.25

To a certain extent, Jackson’s use of the phrase ‘absolute reality’ here might appear to be reasonably self-explanatory, reality and dreams being clearly dichotomized. Nonetheless, a further dimension comes into play in this passage if we bear in mind that in The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade uses the phrase as a means of describing sacred space.26 In a process that he refers to as ‘hierophany’, the divine manifests itself within the everyday world in a place that is then marked as holy and significant, since what has occurred there is a ‘revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse’, and as such must be protected from intrusion by external forces.27 Anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose book Purity and Danger was published in 1966, a year after Jackson’s death, provides a useful gloss on how Eliade’s ideas (which, as Douglas acknowledges, were reasonably commonly held at the time) can be applied to the novel. Douglas’s primary thesis is that the taboo nature of sacred space has led anthropologists mistakenly to confuse and conflate the sacred and the unclean, a confusion with which Jackson was evidently familiar, since Dr Montague, the academic with a degree in anthropology who organizes a group of psychically gifted individuals to investigate the house, suggests that it could be considered ‘leprous’, ‘unclean and forbidden – perhaps sacred . . . ’.28 As Douglas explains, however,
in some primitive cultures the sacred is a very general idea meaning little more than prohibition. In that sense the universe is divided between things and actions which are subject to restriction and others which are not; among the restrictions some are intended to

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protect divinity from profanation, and others to protect the profane from the dangerous intrusion of divinity. Sacred rules are thus merely rules hedging divinity off, and uncleanliness is the two-way danger of contact with divinity.29

This idea, that two dichotomous forms of space can all too often be mistaken for one another, quite clearly informs much of the action of Hill House, which centres upon the character of Eleanor Vance, a painfully shy young woman who, until she responds to an advertisement looking for test subjects willing to spend a number of weeks in a supposedly haunted house, has spent most of her adult life caring for her ailing mother, who is now dead. Upon her arrival at the eponymous mansion, Eleanor finds herself involuntarily thinking, ‘Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.’30 Ignoring this voice, which seems to be independent of her own consciousness (though the narrative provides us with no way of determining this either way), she is then subjected to a sort of ritual threshold scene in the form of a verbal argument with Mr Dudley, the gatekeeper, before she is permitted to enter the ‘hedged off,’ and thus apparently sacred, space beyond the gate. Described by Dr Montague as ‘a place of contained ill will,’ Hill House therefore demarcates a rigid boundary between the evil that it contains and those who seek to intrude upon it from without, rendering it both ritually unclean and an analogue of Eliadic sacred space, a space which, in Douglas’s terms, conflates two very separate, even diametrically opposed ideas.31

Already, therefore, we are confronted with a central and irreducible contradiction, one which cannot be disentangled from the events which follow Eleanor’s arrival at the house. The central drama for Eleanor is her struggle, and failure, to decide (or, more urgently, to figure out) whether Hill House is taboo because it functions as a sanctuary of the sacred or because it in fact harbours the dangerous forces of moral or supernatural dirt and disease. That it is more likely the latter is certainly suggested if we return to the novel’s opening. Moving away from anthropology, a potential interpretation of the emphasis placed upon dreaming in the passage can be found in Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, where he argues that well-loved houses are constructed as much from layers of memories and mental images as from bricks and mortar. As he puts it, the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in place. . . . the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream,

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and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling places of the past remain in us for all time.32

As a result, ‘Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another.’33 This nexus of constantly shifting associations and possibilities is, however, Bachelard’s ideal conception of living space, and he warns that ‘if a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality. All values must remain vulnerable, and those that do not are dead.’34 Dreams, the very thing that Hill House is lacking, elevate a house above its status as a mere inanimate object, imbuing it with something human but also intangible, thereby removing it from ‘absolute reality’. Hill House, which, we are told, is ‘not sane’ as a result of its inability (or perhaps its refusal) to dream, is therefore malevolent and insane because it occupies the negative ‘absolute reality’ posited by Bachelard. Indeed, as a later passage elaborates, Hill House equally has little or nothing to do with the human. We are told how a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, . . . a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil. This house . . . reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.35

While it might seem that the kind of personification that occurs in this passage constitutes a transformation onto the figurative (and indeed the human) plane, and that this ought to compromise the house’s ‘reality’, it is important to note here that the personification of Hill House is essentially impersonal. The face of Hill House is merely the face of the house itself, and not that of a human being.36 Much like the ‘vacant eye-like windows’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the ‘blank windows’ imply the absence of a resident animating personality.37 The house might be ‘awake’, but the assertion that it is ‘without concession to humanity’ forecloses the possibility of its being possessed by the spirit or memory of any of its former occupants. Described as being impervious to exorcism, as the phrase ‘whatever walks there, walks

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alone’ suggests, Hill House refuses to permit memories, even in the form of identifiable ghosts, to reside there. It appears to be neat and clean in an utterly inhuman kind of way, referencing once again the confusion between ritually pure and unclean, taboo space – Hill House is somehow both at once, both unclean and yet a place where ‘walls continued upright, bricks met neatly’ and so on. Nevertheless, it ‘had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more’, regardless of the human traffic that comes and goes – it is not rendered clean, it simply is clean, in the sense of being indifferent to and even actively repelling human inhabitants. When Jackson describes the face of Hill House, it is simply that – the face of the house, rather than of anybody living there, and it contains an impersonal form of haunting that never takes definite or recognizable anthropomorphic form. Since the personification does not therefore refer to a second term which is absent from the narrative frame, it functions on the level of the indicative and literal rather than the figurative, thereby retaining its ‘absolute reality’ even as it inhabits the sphere of supernatural impossibility.

Again, however, just as everything is beginning to make sense, a slippage in language, in which Bachelard appears to overturn completely his definition of ‘reality’, renders this interpretative path somewhat tortuous. He asserts that

Objects that are cherished . . . attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, . . . . For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to a new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.38

If this statement is taken at face value, it would imply that ‘housewifely care’ increases the reality in a house, a state of affairs which, if juxtaposed with his earlier comments, ought to carry negative connotations.39 Although it would be futile to attempt to unify the meanings of every instance of the word ‘reality’ as used by Bachelard, what these conflicting applications of the term allow us to do is to reconcile the Eliadic definition of reality with the Bachelardian one. If sacred space must be ‘hedged off’ and kept ritually pure, then absolute reality is in a sense created by the assiduous efforts of the housewife, who renders the home effectively sacred by preventing the intrusion of dirt.

This idea is supported via the figure of the housekeeper, Mrs Dudley, who seems proud of the house, and is excessively concerned with maintaining order there.40 When Eleanor, Dr Montague, and the two

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other members of the group – Theodora, who is apparently psychic, and Luke Sanderson, the last remaining heir to the house – are having breakfast on the first morning, Mrs Dudley tells them flatly, “‘I clear off at ten, . . . The dishes are supposed to be back on the shelves. I take them out again for lunch. I set out lunch at one, but first the dishes have to be back on the shelves.’ ”41 Theo asks her, “‘Do the dishes belong to the house?’ ” and the following exchange ensues:

‘They belong on the shelves,’ Mrs. Dudley said.

‘And the glassware and the silver and the linen? Lovely old things.’

‘The linen,’ Mrs. Dudley said, ‘belongs in the linen drawers in the dining room. The silver belongs in the silver chest. The glasses belong on the shelves.’42

This is an order that by its very nature excludes not merely human frailty and messiness, but also implies a form of dwelling in which domestic objects are barely used at all. With Mrs Dudley as its agent, everything in Hill House remains in its appointed place, and nowhere else, leaving little or no room for alteration or addition. As a result of this, its malevolence resides, not so much in its inherent status as polluted space, but in the negative effect that it has on those who themselves pollute it by violating its boundaries – in other words, by adding something that is not proper to it. Indeed, it is worth remembering here the dual meaning of the French word ‘ propre’, which signifies both ‘own’ (as in, ‘my own house’, which in French is ‘ ma propre maison’) and ‘clean’ (‘ ma maison propre’ meaning ‘my clean house’). The house’s determination to retain its propre status is underlined when Eleanor finally crosses the threshold and ‘Hill House came around her in a rush; she was enshadowed, and the sound of her feet on the wood of the veranda was an outrage in the utter silence, as though it had been a very long time since feet stamped across the boards of Hill House.’43 Hill House might be ‘outraged’ at her intrusion, but the immediate effect of her doing so is that she becomes

‘enshadowed’, engulfed and tainted by the darkness that it encloses.

It thus effectively protects itself by harming and/or swallowing up into its inner darkness those who are foolish or ignorant or wilful enough to violate its closely guarded boundaries.

Nevertheless, precisely because of the inhuman, defiled cleanliness that characterizes the house, this ‘swallowing up’ does not appear to function as a way of taking people into the house, making them welcome or part of itself. Indeed, for Eleanor, what is most dangerous about the house is that it gives the impression of offering her sanctuary, a place to

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finally belong. By concentrating upon her its efforts to appear to harbour a ghost (in other words, to contain some element of the human), the house tricks her into thinking that she herself is the origin or subject of the phenomena, which include her name written in bloody letters on the walls, a mysterious cold spot, phantom hands, the noise of a child crying and an overwhelmingly loud booming knocking on Eleanor and Theo’s bedroom door at night. The effect, which makes Eleanor unsure when she ends and Hill House begins, intensifies until she eventually, euphorically, herself takes on the role of the haunting phantom, running around the dark corridors and banging on the doors. Hill House has recruited yet another woman to do its work for it, destroying Eleanor’s sense of self in the process, precisely because it tricks her into believing that she has finally found somewhere to dwell: ‘I am home, she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home, she thought . . . .’44 The narration itself, however, undermines her certainty when her strange behaviour leads Dr Montague and the others (who thereby figure themselves as ‘normal’ and therefore somehow better able to withstand the house’s malevolence) to compel her to leave. However, instead of driving out of the gates as she is instructed to do and returning to her lonely life living with her sister and her sister’s family, she commits suicide. We are told,

I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway, I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really really doing it by myself.

In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?

Why don’t they stop me?45

Eleanor’s final act is profoundly ambiguous, as it can be interpreted both as an escape and as an attempt to stay, presumably as the ghost that Hill House has convinced her she can become. In either case, it is a failure. Her final thoughts, far from articulating a joyful homecoming, undermine any sense of individual agency and volition. It is equally clear that she has little or no hope of remaining there as a spectre, not least because the opening lines of Hill House reappear almost unchanged at the end of the novel. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), one of the two film versions of the book (the other being Jan de Bont’s from 1999), alters the final line to ‘and we who walk here, walk alone’, implying that Eleanor has joined the ‘ghosts’ of Hill House. Conversely, the words

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‘and whatever walked there, walked alone’ which close the novel more than suggest that Hill House remains in precisely the same condition in which it was at the beginning: Eleanor has made no difference to it one way or another, and nothing has been added to the house by the blood sacrifice of her death.46 It therefore remains ritually pure, untainted by the memories or presence even of those who have died there; and thus it continues, beyond the ending of the novel, to occupy ‘absolute reality’, diseased and unclean precisely because it is far too clean. It is a house, but never a home.

‘No Trespassing’: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The same cannot be said, however, of the Blackwood house, the claustrophobic yet strangely homely setting for Jackson’s 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, of which the first-person narrator is the 18-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood. Affectionately known as Merricat, our guide to her own personal underworld eventually reveals that she has poisoned her entire family, except for her sister Constance and her now invalid Uncle Julian, ten years before the narrative begins.

The densely-figurative, anthropologically-inflected language and plot elements of the earlier novel become filtered through Merricat’s peculiar, disturbed but compulsively appealing world-view, lending those elements even greater centrality and weight, as is particularly evident in the sisters’ highly developed sense of their home as a shrine to privacy.

For sacred space to retain its ritual purity, it must be strictly taboo.

As Eliade notes, the creation of sacred space involves ‘detaching a territory from the surrounding milieu and making it qualitatively different’.47 It is in just such an enchanted circle that the sisters live. The poisoning inevitably scandalizes the inhabitants of the nearby village, not least because of the court case in which Constance was tried but not convicted. So strong a social stigma has subsequently been attached to the family and the house that Merricat only leaves the house once a week to do the shopping, and Constance never goes out at all. The sisters’ effective agoraphobia and intense attachment to the privacy of their home is, however, by no means exclusively the consequence of the murders, but has long been deeply entrenched in the mindset of the women of their family. When she was first married, their mother insisted that the path running in front of the house be closed to the nearby villagers who ‘always hated’ the Blackwoods, and a ‘No Trespassing’ sign erected.48 Merricat has since attempted to supplement the effects of the sign, setting up what she calls ‘magical safeguards’ in various significant

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locations surrounding the house, burying a box of silver dollars, a doll, marbles, coloured stones and her baby teeth, and nailing a book to a tree. Described by Merricat as ‘held together under the ground by a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us’

and checked by her every Sunday morning, these safeguards effectively transform the Blackwood house into sacred space into which no villager dares intrude except under the formally codified social situation of ‘visiting’, and even this makes the women who engage in it profoundly uncomfortable.49

What is more, the housework in which the sisters regularly (even ritually) engage, presented in language which figures their activities as somehow witchlike, can be seen as returning to the conflation between Eliadic and Bachelardian ‘absolute reality’ identified in Hill House. Early on in the narrative, after Merricat and Constance have finished what she refers to as ‘neatening’ the house, she describes them as ‘carrying our dustcloths and the broom and dustpan and mop like a pair of witches walking home’.50 Perhaps more revealingly, Constance’s exceptional cooking skills, which have led to her rather than Merricat being accused of the mass poisoning, prompt her sister to exclaim,

“ ‘Old witch! . . . you have a gingerbread house,’ ” to which Constance replies, ‘ “I do not, . . . I have a lovely house where I live with my sister Merricat.’ ”51 On the level of narrative figuration, if not necessarily of content, this metaphorical malevolence can be seen as aiding in the but-tressing of the magical circle of protection which surrounds their home.

While we are encouraged to sympathize with Merricat and Constance, to those on the outside they appear to be evil witches, associated with death and abnormality to such an extent that the villagers are openly hostile to Merrricat when she does the shopping, and the local children taunt her with doggerel verses referencing the Blackwood murders.

It is in this sense in the novel that, as Eliade notes, the creation of sacred space involves asserting its ‘absolute reality’ (aided, in the Bachelardian sense, by their ‘housewifely care’) over the ‘unreality’ of everything else.52 Owing to the fragile nature of sacred space, which, as we have seen, needs constantly to be defined and protected against external forces which themselves need to be protected from the supernatural danger posed by the sacred, ‘everything outside [inhabited territory] is . . . a sort of “other world,” a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, “foreigners” (who are assimilated to demons and the souls of the dead)’.53 Using startlingly similar terminology, Merricat sees the villagers, who are already physically shut out from Blackwood property, as equally shut out from the world of the real, and as having, as

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she puts it, ‘no faces’. Similarly, she refers to the odious Cousin Charles, who invades the magic circle of their existence without being invited, as ‘a demon and a ghost’, and as ‘one of the strangers’.54 What bothers Merricat the most about his arrival is that Constance is so busy attending to his needs that she no longer fully observes their daily ritual of keeping the house clean and tidy, the care and purification that, for both Eliade and Bachelard, ensure the ‘reality’ of the house. Indeed, his very presence compromises the stability of the Blackwood home. As Henri Lefebvre insists, ‘The very rites of prohibition and protection that confer religious and magical power upon central spaces are responses to real threats from without’, and the penetration of an envoy of external chaos into the inner sanctum inevitably pollutes it.55

As Douglas acknowledges, however, the very danger inherent in dirt can also render it a powerful magical instrument. In an effort to banish Charles’s presence from their father’s room where he has been stay-ing, Merricat first scatters earth and twigs on the furniture, and then sweeps Charles’s still-smouldering pipe into a waste-paper basket. This ritual exorcism inevitably leads to the burning down of their house, and, though the villagers initially come to stop the blaze, it quickly transforms into an opportunity for them finally to find an outlet for their dislike and fear, and possibly even to destroy the objects of that fear. After putting out the fire, they begin to throw rocks at the windows, breaking dishes and ornaments, tearing curtains and spilling food, soiling and smashing everything the sisters have worked so hard to keep clean and homely. They mock the girls, implying that their house should have been burnt down long ago, interrogating them about the deaths in their family, and finally surrounding them, dancing around them and repeating doggerel verses made up by their children. They even go so far as to threaten to throw Merricat and Constance back into the house and watch them burn, and are only prevented from doing so when Merricat leaves the centre of the circle, approaching a group of the villagers who start back in irrational fear, allowing the sisters to escape to a hiding place among the trees around the house.56

It would therefore be erroneous to interpret the narrative as establishing her and Constance as helpless victims of the villagers’ persecution, and it is precisely because they have transformed their home into sacred space that, in the aftermath of the fire, they are in a position to exploit the fear that they inspire. Indeed, contrary to what the villagers seem to have wished, the fire and its aftermath allow the sisters to harness the power of ritual defilement, rendering the place more sacred and in a far more literal and absolute sense than ever, primarily because what

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the villagers have not succeeded in doing is depriving them of privacy.

The sisters tidy what they can, though most of the upstairs no longer exists, and Merricat erects barricades and boards up the windows, which she calls her new ‘magical safeguards’. Once these are securely in place, they refuse to emerge from the mutilated remains of the house, and, gradually, the men from the village begin to leave baskets of food prepared by their wives on the doorstep at night, often with notes attached, saying ‘This is for the dishes’, or ‘We apologise about the curtains’, or

‘Sorry about the harp’.57 As Bernice Murphy contends, the offerings of food are ‘inspired more by fear than by remorse’, since ‘the sisters have become the witchlike, shadowy figures they were always believed to be, and the villagers fear some sort of preternatural vengeance’.58 This is most clearly articulated in the way in which, after the fire, Merricat’s figurative language, which associates housework with witchcraft from the very beginning of the novel, begins to be substantiated and given greater weight on more concrete diegetic registers.

Never seen again by anyone, they rapidly gain a reputation as supernatural beings who live in darkness, seeing and hearing everything, evoked by parents to frighten children into obedience, but also a source of numinous dread for adults. In one conversation that Merricat overhears, a ‘bad’ woman tells two children, looking at them ‘evilly’, “‘They never come out except at night, . . . and then when it’s dark they go hunt-ing little children.’ ” She ghoulishly proclaims that the ‘ladies’ in the house force-feed poisoned candy to little boys, and eat little girls. While her friend scoffs and tells her to hush, the man with them says apprehensively, “‘Just the same, . . . I don’t want to see the kids going too near that house.’ ”59 Hearing this conversation, Merricat ponders “‘I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance’ ”. Significantly, Constance does not dismiss what she says, as she had earlier in response to the statement about the gingerbread house, but merely states, “‘I doubt if I could cook one.’ ”60 What this exchange highlights is the extent to which both girls have embraced wholeheartedly the sinister image that the villagers have always imposed upon them, and that doing so shores up their previously precarious privacy, since the house’s status as sacred space is now absolute rather than merely discursive. According to Douglas, ‘The separation of sanctuary and consecrated things and persons from profane ones . . . is basically the same as the separations which are inspired by fear of malevolent spirits.’61 It is this second, more dangerous aspect of the sacred, from which ‘ordinary’ people must be shielded, that the novel evokes following the villagers’ defilement of the Blackwood house. Much like Hill House, it now actively repels those who approach

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it, promising terrible punishment to those who seek to transgress the defences of its blackened walls.

However, what distinguishes the now-terrifying Blackwood house from the unclean Hill House is the fact that, even after it has been all but destroyed, the former is still the beneficiary of ‘housewifely care’ and a repository of memory. Following the fire, Constance remarks, “‘I’ve take such good care of [the kitchen] that it has to make me welcome, I think . . . ’ ”62 Warm, welcoming and a genuine site of safety and shelter, Blackwood Farm is very far from being ‘without concession to humanity’ – absolute reality in the Bachelardian sense – since it is steeped in a familial past, bodied forth by material objects which have been permitted to amass there. As Merricat announces proudly at the beginning of the novel,

We rarely moved things; the Blackwoods were never much of a family for restlessness and stirring. . . . We always put things back where they belonged. Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world.63

These possessions, and the preserved food in the cellar, lovingly put away by generations of Blackwood women, serve to imbue the house with a certain otherness, a layer of memory that is not intrinsic to it but that has become part of it as a result of housewifely care. Unlike the inhumanly clean Hill House, the Blackwood house is filmed over by a patina of figurative dust that even the villagers’ rampage has left more or less undisturbed. Dwelling among shifting Bachelardian registers of memory, they succeed, therefore, in mediating between three apparently incompatible versions of absolute reality, living in Eliadic sacred unclean taboo space; filling it with the memories and daydreams of which Hill House is so dangerously deficient; and continuing to clean and care for their house with affection and attention.

What is more, the villagers’ food offerings and fearful mythologizing of the sisters means that the occult and the ritualistic are no longer simply the preserve of the disturbed, parricidal Merricat. As even a cursory reading of the work of Clyde Kluckhohn, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Clifford Geertz, Susanne E. Langer or Bronislaw Malinowski makes clear, the 1950s were a time when the relationship between the individual and the wider culture was being hotly debated.

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The greater part of the writing of these thinkers at the time was devoted to figuring out whether ritual, magic and religion had their origins in individual drives and impulses, or in the need for collective, consensual practices that could unite a community, as well as where the lines could or should be drawn between them.64 Equally controversial was the issue of whether ritual practices, whether private and magical or public and religious, were an integral part of the practicalities of daily life, or constituted a realm outside of the everyday.65 This is perhaps most strongly put by Clyde Kluckhohn, who argues that ritual and myth bind a society together, preventing individual tensions from destroying it from within.66 They function, therefore, as a means of reconciling the individual to the larger group and preventing deviance.

It is this end of the anthropological argument that Jackson’s fiction fights hardest against. In particular, it implies that it is the aim of the individual, and specifically the deviant or anti-social individual, to be frightening rather than frightened, to resist assimilation into the group by means of an appropriation of supernatural powers – and, specifically, powers which are harmful to those who violate the sanctity of private, domestic space. In this, Eleanor fails where Merricat succeeds, because, as I have argued, of the nature of the spaces in which they act, and because of the fine distinction (or indeed overlap) between the taboo and the sacred, between a cleanliness that implies either a well-loved home or a death-like purity, between somewhere that protects its occupants from unwelcome intruders and a house where no one is ever welcome. In doing so, Merricat ensures that she and Constance inhabit a world that is emblematic of Jackson’s work as a whole, one in which radically multifarious and often conflicting signifying and figurative strands comfortably coexist. Only by following the lead of Jackson’s most popular character67 and refusing to resolve this conflict can we, as critics, do as Hyman urges, and read rather than explaining away Jackson’s ‘difficult riddle’, thereby allowing her work to occupy a realm other than that of absolute reality.

Notes

1. Richard Wilbur, ‘The House of Poe’ in R. Regan (ed.) Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 98–120, p. 98.

2. See also Chase, Richard, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949) for a reading informed by similar principles.

3. Denham Sutcliffe, Introduction to Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Chicago: New American Library, 1963), p. 538.

Shirley Jackson & late 1950s Anthropology 195

4. See in particular Darryl Hattenhauer, Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003) for a discussion of the sharp decline in Jackson’s popularity.

5. See Bernice M. Murphy, Introduction to Murphy (ed.) Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2005), pp. 3–4.

6. Hattenhauer, p. 18.

7. See http://memory.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/1997/ms997

001.pdf, accessed 8 November 2010.

8. Stanley Edgar Hyman, ‘The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic’ in Journal of American Folklore 68:270, Myth: A Symposium (October – December, 1955), 462–72, 463 and 466.

9. Ibid., p. 468.

10. Ibid., p. 472.

11. Ibid., p. 471.

12. For a further discussion of these issues, see Robert A. Segal, Introduction to Segal, (ed.) The Myth and Ritual Theory: An Anthology (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 1–12, p. 9; and Northrop Frye, ‘The Archetypes of Literature’ in Kenyon Review 13 (1951), 92–110.

13. Hyman, ‘The Ritual View,’ 472.

14. Shirley Jackson, ‘Lord of the Castle’ in L.J. Hyman and S.H. Stewart (eds) Just an Ordinary Day (New York: Bantam, 1998), pp. 181–90.

15. For a contemporary discussion of the differences between myth and fairytales, see Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (1942) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 174ff.

16. Lenemaja Friedman, Shirley Jackson (Boston: Twayne, 1975), p. 33.

17. Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988), p. 139.

18. Oppenheimer, p. 139. See also p. 189.

19. Oppenheimer, p. 189 and p. 139. That the interviewer did not specify that these were books on the occult allows for the interesting possibility that he perhaps considered a woman who owned two hundred books of any kind to be extremely dangerous.

20. See Murphy, pp. 1–21.

21. Robert F. Geary, The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief and Literary Change (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992), p. 116.

22. See Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. ix–xv for a definition of the ‘oppositional’ as that which quietly works against from within, rather than violently resisting, hegemonic power.

23. See http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/text/hyman.html for a list of Hyman and Jackson’s personal and professional papers and correspondence.

24. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 41.

25. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) in The Masterpieces of Shirley Jackson, intro. Donna Tartt (London: Raven, 1996), p. 227.

26. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans.

W.R. Trask (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovick, 1959), p. 21.

27. Eliade, p. 21.

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28. Jackson, Hill House in Masterpieces, p. 272.

29. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark, 1996), p. 8.

30. Jackson, Hill House in Masterpieces, p. 247.

31. Ibid., p. 248, p. 272 and p. 280.

32. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. M. Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), p. 6, italics Bachelard’s.

33. Ibid., pp. 6–7.

34. Ibid., p. 59.

35. Jackson, Hill House in Masterpieces, p. 248.

36. For another example of this in Jackson, see ‘The Visit’ in Hyman (ed.) Come Along With Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), p. 91, in which the house is described as having a

‘long-boned structure’, an attribute which personifies it without associating it with any particular character in the story.

37. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London and New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 231.

38. Bachelard, p. 68.

39. Admittedly, as M.R. Higonnet acknowledges, Bachelard seems to be referring to subjective rather than objective reality here. See Higonnet, ‘Bachelard and the Romantic Imagination’ in Comparative Literature 33:1 (Winter, 1981), 18–37, 24.

40. See M. Wigley, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’ in Beatriz Colomina, (ed.) Sexuality and Space (New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), pp. 327–89, p. 339 for a discussion of the role of the housekeeper as implying that she is a form of surrogate for domestic patriarchal power.

41. Jackson, Hill House in Masterpieces, p. 294.

42. Ibid., p. 294.

43. Ibid., p. 249.

44. Ibid., p. 385.

45. Jackson, Hill House in Masterpieces, p. 394. See Lootens, Tricia ‘ “Whose Hand Was I Holding”: Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House’ in Murphy, pp. 150–68 for a discussion of this moment.

46. Jackson, Hill House in Masterpieces, p. 395.

47. Eliade, p. 26.

48. Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) in Masterpieces, p. 415.

49. Ibid., p. 436.

50. Ibid., p. 461S.

51. Ibid., p. 466.

52. Eliade, p. 26.

53. Ibid., p. 29.

54. Jackson, Castle in Masterpieces, pp. 518, 408, 415, 473 and 528.

55. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998), p. 234.

56. See Lynette Carpenter, ‘The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ in Murphy, pp. 199–213 for a detailed reading of this scene. See also René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Y. Freccero (London: Athlone Press, 1986), pp. 24–44, and Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory (London: Athlone Press, 1977) for

Shirley Jackson & late 1950s Anthropology 197
further discussions of the links between victimhood, violence, difference and communal ritual practices.

57. Jackson, Castle in Masterpieces, p. 525.

58. Murphy, Bernice ‘The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us: Shirley Jackson’s New England Gothic’ in Murphy, 104–26, p. 123.

59. Jackson, Castle in Masterpieces, p. 526. See also ‘The Very Strange House Next Door’ (1959) in Ordinary Day, pp. 365–77.

60. Jackson, Castle in Masterpieces, p. 531.

61. Douglas, pp. 10–11. See also K.A. Rabuzzi, The Sacred and the Feminine: Towards a Theology of Housework (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), p. 56.

62. Jackson, Castle in Masterpieces, p. 517.

63. Ibid., p. 399.

64. Margaret Mead, Anthropology: A Human Science (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1964); Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1935) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays (1948) (London: Souvenir Press, 1974); Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life (1949) (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1985); and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Hutchinson, 1975).

65. See in particular Kluckhohn, ‘Myths and Rituals: A General Theory’ in Harvard Theological Review 35 (1942), 45–79.

66. Ibid., 74.

67. See http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/features/2002/mar/020319.characters.

html, accessed 18 January 2011.

10

‘At My Cooking I Feel It Looking’:

Food, Domestic Fantasies and

Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia

Plath’s Writing

Lorna Piatti-Farnell

In a letter addressed to her mother, dated 1 November 1956, Sylvia Plath writes of how she intends to transform her kitchen into a dreamy ‘ad out of House and Garden’.1 In later correspondence, she also affirms that food advertising in magazines provides her with ‘an Americaness’ she feels ‘a need to dip into’.2 It would seem that during the Fifties – and even up to her death in 1963 – Plath was responding enthusiastically to a burgeoning consumer desire to purchase and possess. In decanting the American fairy-tale kitchen of the Fifties, one could argue that Plath craved a dream-like domestic space of her own. This desire to create a ‘perfect’

domestic space, however, seems to go against the grain of Plath’s reputation as radical feminist poet and hardly confirms ‘the bohemian image we expect from someone seeking to become the female equivalent of W.B. Yeats’.3 It is possible to suggest, then, that despite her poetic mythology, Plath maintained a conflicted relationship with the idea of domesticity throughout her life. Focusing primarily on Plath’s verse and The Bell Jar, this essay will discuss how Plath voices her anxieties about the fictitious nature of food advertising and unveils how consumerism relies on transforming food into ‘image’: these images often contain ideological messages which encourage the subordination/reification of women in the home. I will concentrate on how the Gothic nature of Plath’s domestic poetry – populated by life-like objects, dark creatures and bloody imagery – echoes her conflicted feelings about gender roles in commodity culture. Gothic images of consumption simultaneously suggest that female oppression involves a complex array of 198

Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing 199
social, libidinal and economic determinants. Finally, I will show how Plath’s writing uncovers attitudes towards women’s role in Cold War America, which, as Christopher Holmes Smith points out, are hidden in the politics of ‘kitchen culture’.4

In cultural and historical terms, Plath’s decantation of the ideal domestic dwelling should not come as a surprise; not only did the Fifties provide the cultural and economic backdrop for Plath’s formation as an adult and artist, but they also witnessed the formation of a contemporary consumer identity in American society. Following a period of economic Depression during the Thirties, the end of World War II brought a wave of new prosperity to many white Americans. Men and women were encouraged by the government to do everything, as Linda Civitello notes, ‘in record numbers’.5 New couples were given fiscal incentives to get married, move into the newly built suburbs – part of the ‘GI Bill’ programme for the reintegration of veterans – and buy a variety of new products. David Kennedy reminds us that, in the years after World War II, former servicemen ‘became a vast and advantaged class of citizens’ which demanded ‘suburban housing’ and ‘private cars which had been unobtainable during the war’.6 As the newly-prosperous American economy reached the Fifties, the food industry, in particular, bloomed: appliances that facilitated the transport, preparation, stor-age and consumption of food were being bought at astonishing speed.

In the early Fifties, ‘twenty million’ new appliances, like ‘stoves, dishwashers . . . backyard barbecues . . . and the new home freezers invented by Amana’ were sold in ‘one five year period’ in the United States.7

Televisions were also purchased in monumental quantities and their impact on the food industry was unprecedented. Indeed, televisions in the houses of Americans brought visual food advertising into the home as never before. A seminal example here would be the part played by television in advertising the famous ‘aluminium tray’ for ‘ninety-cents’, which was ‘divided into compartments with an ‘entrée, vegetables and dessert’ and promoted ‘fast’ eating.8 In 1954, ‘fast-food’ consumption came to its epitome when the McDonald brothers founded a chain of restaurants which would later become the most successful fast-food franchise in America and in the world. The food industry expanded concomitantly with the increasing sales of automobiles (from 25 million registered cars in 1945 to almost 62 million in 1960) enabling consumers to go back and forth from the suburbs to the new sites of

‘consumption’ – restaurants, shopping malls and supermarkets. Constant ‘consumption’ was promoted and encouraged in America, and Fifties society was quickly adapting to accommodate it.

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While the economic expansion continued in Fifties America, the kitchen became the epicentre of a utopian ideal in advertising discourses. The promotion of food and household items was a principal interest in the consumer world. As part of a strategy to satisfy the consumers’ domestic desires, advertising was also increasingly influenced by psychoanalytical research. Consumer society was developing concomitantly with an interest in Freudian theory, which became a principal device in marketing strategies. Advertising campaigns were saturated with symbols and configurations which were intended to affect daily acts of consumption. These included bright colours and shapes designed to influence contemporary ideals of behaviour and social value. Writing in 1957, Vance Packard was aware that ‘the use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion’ had become ‘the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry’.9 The food industry, in particular, embraced the idea of ‘persuasion’ through psychoanalytical manipula-tion. The Freudian approach not only affected, but truly revolutionized the way in which food was sold to consumers. Considering food advertising in context, this does not come as a surprise. The Fifties were the golden age of the supermarket, when local shops were rapidly replaced by the retail chains which spread across America. The foods themselves were changing: the idea of ‘fresh’ was being replaced by technologically advanced frozen, powdered and packaged foods. It is worth noticing, en passant, that many of these ‘technological’ inventions were inspired by military science from the World War II. Looking for ways to transport and preserve large quantities of food more efficiently – shipping and flying it in bulk to different theatres of operation – the American government funded the development of freezing techniques. After the war was over, the surplus of frozen goods was placed in the domestic market. One can note here an ideological connection between consumption, psychology and the politics of warfare, validating Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster’s assertion that the study of food methods provides us with records of ‘historical and cultural moments’.10

As this world of ‘home consumption’ consolidated in the cultural imaginary, the housewife was confirmed as the primary target for the food industry. Aspects of psychoanalytical theory were deployed in order to entice the woman to purchase a product and, at the same time, re-enforce the Fifties mantra that women should stay ‘in the home’.

A contemporary of Plath, David Potter, reminds us that psychoanalytical advertising became an institution that touched on every aspect of domestic life, and aimed to ‘enforce already existing attitudes, to dimin-ish the range and variety of choices, and in terms of abundance, to

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exalt the materialistic virtues of consumption’.11 Food adverts changed to reinforce the housewife’s desire for ‘goodness’, ‘efficiency’ and, of course, a family. And, above all, they needed to appeal to the woman as a consumer. Packard points out that the new and improved food adverts of the Fifties needed to ‘hypnotise the woman’, because ‘just putting the name and maker of the product on the box’ had ‘absolutely no effect on the mid-century woman’.12 This desire was fulfilled in food advertising by constructing a surreal world for the housewife full of symbols and quasi-magical elements which subconsciously inspired the purchasing of a particular product. Every food product was associated by consumers with an activity which was integral to the idea of family. Peter Lewis reminds us that ‘when baking a cake, manufacturers of cake-mixes were told, women were acting out symbolically the birth of a child’ (this apparently produced the colloquialism which refers to pregnancy as ‘a bun in the oven’).13 In a ‘Baker’s Angel Flake’ advert from 1956, a capable housewife ascends from her domestic enclosure using magical cake wings.14 In a variety of magazine adverts from the mid-Fifties, the Green Giant materializes in the kitchen and shows the mesmerized housewife how to cook a delicious dish. In a similar manner, the Minute Minder man often visits housewives and offers helpful tips on how to save time in cooking. Whether it was a pre-prepared mixture for cake or a packet of frozen peas, the advertisers invested the product with, to borrow Packard’s words, ‘symbols that had dream-like quality’.15 This magical interaction between image and product – which came to define the commercial approach to advertising in the Fifties – is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria: beneath the surface display of rational, scientific improvement in the landscapes of modernity we can uncover archaic, mythological images. Michael Steinberg argues that Benjamin’s sense of phantasmagoria takes place when ‘relations between people come to be lived as relations between things, and relations between things are experienced as if they were human’.16 In giving kitchen products an almost living presence, one could argue that the spellbinding advertising techniques of the Fifties aimed to encompass the phantasmagorical ‘mirages of the market-place’

as experienced by the modern consumer.17

Indeed, the imagistic space of Fifties advertising provided a surreal environment in which the ‘dream house’ became the centre of the housewife’s consumer interest. The desire to transcend the scarcity and losses of the war period undoubtedly fuelled the attraction to the magical domestic utopia designed by a burgeoning advertising industry.

Magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal – which as Linda Wagner-Martin

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remarks, Plath absolutely ‘devoured’18 – offered training on how women should behave and act in this ideal home.19 Janice Markey remarks that food adverts in Fifties magazines exemplify ‘a decade when women were encouraged to forget their wartime forages into independence and to see their goals in life as being good housekeepers, wives and mothers’.20 The angel-like woman of 1950s advertising ‘floated’ in flow-ery aprons and an impeccable hair-do. In the miraculous, post-war advertising kitchen, as Bryant points out, ‘food could talk, housewives could levitate, appliances could marry’.21

As a reader of contemporary publications, Plath was concerned by the thought of the ‘ideal woman’ put forward by magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, which, as Bryant notes, promoted ‘images of young women who commodify their bodies for the marriage market’.22 Encouraged by her teachers to engage with Freudian theory – and persuaded, as Lynda K. Bundtzen points out, ‘to fashion herself as . . . an intellectual by applying . . . psychoanalytic doctrines’ – Plath was conscious of the Freudian tactics employed by the ‘hidden persuaders’.23 In her Journal, Plath considers the consumer images she encountered in magazines and on billboards and wonders how the will of people can be ‘mercilessly crushed’ under ‘the dictatorship of . . . industry . . . all their lives long’.24

The impact of commodification on food, identity and advertising is partially developed by Plath in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), which seems informed by a critical, yet conflicted view of commodity culture. In the novel, the relationship between food and the experience of eating is mediated by the presence of commodified images. Having won a national writing contest, the protagonist Esther Greenwood is awarded a month in New York, working for a magazine, Ladies’ Day. Esther’s account of her magazine experience in The Bell Jar is clearly based on Plath’s own involvement with Mademoiselle, another women’s publication which was very popular in the Fifties. For Esther, the world of the magazine company in New York is filled with glamorous elements, such as ‘fashion shows’ and ‘hair stylings at a famous expensive salon’.25 As a ‘young lady’ – who left her suburban life for the city – Esther is catapulted into a whole new world, full of different conventions, expectations and demands. However, alongside the excitement stirred by novelty, Esther also expresses hostility towards New York – and all that the city entails – from very early in the novel:

‘New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream’ (1). The practice of eating specifically articulates Esther’s social disenchantment, anxiety and confusions. On the one

Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing 203
hand, she wishes to abandon the narrow ideals of her provincial life and fully embrace the glamour of the city: ‘In New York we had so many free luncheons . . . I developed the habit of pick[ing] the richest, most expensive dishes and ordered a string of them’ (22). On the other, she dislikes the fabricated, shiny and superficial social world of consumer images.

Esther’s frustration and paradoxical fascination with the glamorous city come together during her tour of the Ladies’ Day photographic headquarters. The episode in Chapter Three is a key example of how Plath articulates carnality, consumerism and anxiety in the novel. Looking at photography as an essential part in the construction of food images, Plath illustrates how women and food are blended by the signifying practices of consumer society. She describes Ladies’ Day itself as

‘the big women’s magazine that features lush double-page spreads of technicolour meals, with a different theme and locale each month’ (23).

There is a distinct emphasis on the food photographs which accompany the discussion of meals and cuisine in the magazine. The photographs are described as ‘lush’ and are rendered in ‘technicolour’, which will attract attention in ‘double-page spreads’. The Focal Encyclopaedia of Photography reminds us that in a ‘good food picture’, the food must be

‘perfectly cooked and perfectly displayed’, if one wants it to appeal to the magazine reader.26 Rosalind Coward has polemically classified food pictures in magazines as ‘food pornography’: part of ‘a regime of pleasurable images’ which inspire desire and fascination.27 Food photography can be seen as pornographic because the experience of food is mediated by visual decodification; through this process, the experience of eating in itself is partially removed from its visceral status and becomes part of a cycle of consumer identification. The foods in photographs, particularly in women’s magazines, are turned into ‘images’ – embedded with meaning and messages – which promote specific ideas and are meant to be visually ‘consumed’ by the readers. The presentation of attractive meals encourages the spectator to indulge in visual pleasures which are rarely connected to the effort of actually preparing the food. The beautiful food pictures in culinary magazines are typically removed from the context of domestic labour and focus exclusively on the final product just prior to the moment of consumption. Christopher Lasch reminds us that cameras ‘not only transcribe experience but alter its quality’; in consumer culture, life ‘presents itself as a succession of images . . . recorded and reproduced by means of photography’.28 However, the image of perfection that the photographed meal suggests is not restricted to how food should be prepared and how it should be presented. Behind the façade of the perfect meal, lies a consumer ideology which is linked

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to food preparation. Food photography – or food pornography – is employed in order to promote ideal images of household economies which will linger in the viewer’s mind.

If Plath appears keen to illustrate the ideology of image consumption that lies behind food photography in magazines and advertising, she is also sensitive to the regime of gendered subordination that animates food photography in the Fifties. Coward reminds us that ‘cooking food and presenting it beautifully’ can be ‘an act of servitude’.29 The subliminal quality of the perfect food picture dictates a regime of domestic subordination, saying that a meal ‘should’ look as good as it appears in the magazines. This becomes particularly evident when Esther is given a tour of the Ladies’ Day building that includes the kitchens where the food is photographed:

we had been shown around the endlessly glossy kitchens and seen how difficult it is to photograph apple pie á la mode under the bright lights because the ice cream keeps melting and has to be propped up from behind with tooth-picks and changed every time it starts looking too soppy (23).

The fact that the kitchens are ‘glossy’ introduces the possibility that the food they produce is a matter of surface style as opposed to substantial taste. The process of food preparation – although intended for the camera and not for physical consumption – is shown as laborious and time-consuming. The presence of kitchen labour momentarily removes Esther from the glossy and unreal context of the Ladies’ Day photographs and reminds her of her grandmother cooking ‘joints’ and

‘meat-loafs’ (24). The food photographs at Ladies’ Day suggest to Esther that food preparation does not exist in isolation from labour. As a result, the food photographs are placed in a context of domestic labour that is no longer subliminal. Seeing the foods being touched-up for the camera reminds Esther of the labour involved in the preparation of food for the table. This element suggests that food photography can be, as Coward points out, ‘tied to positions of power and subordination’.30

It has been suggested by Janice Markey that Plath consciously portrays the influence of domestic advertising as ‘dangerously powerful’.31

While a selective reading of the letters and journals – and even parts of The Bell Jar – might support this contention, an overtly polemical imperative is less evident in the poetry. The images of kitchen, food and domesticity in Plath’s verse – and, in particular, the figure of the cooking housewife – do not seem openly to criticize the advertising ideal. Rather,

Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing 205
her poetry often seems to be informed by the glossy food adverts of the Fifties which promoted a vision of domesticity with which she had a particularly ambiguous relationship. What Plath appears to be doing in her verse is offering a poetic counter-discourse to the magic kitchen realm promoted by Fifties advertising. A re-elaboration of the Gothic element in Plath’s verse articulates her response to the utopian ideal of fairy-tale living in consumer capitalism. This confirms Bryant’s contention that Plath’s poetic incarnations of popular images of cooking and kitchen life ‘could prompt new ways of thinking about American advertising’.32

It is possible to find in Plath’s verse a variety of dreamy kitchen images that are directly reminiscent of advertising aimed at Fifties housewives.

Just like the woman in Fifties adverts, it would appear that Plath’s housewife is invested with almost super-human qualities: she can fly, speak to food and appliances and perceive unseen presences. Marjorie Perloff suggests that Plath’s domestic poetry seems to have the ‘peculiar ability to fuse the domestic with the hallucinatory’.33 In ‘Fever 103’ (1962) a delirious narrator in the kitchen thinks she ‘may rise’, meeting ‘kisses’

of a ‘cherubim’34. In ‘Lesbos’ (1962), there is ‘viciousness in the kitchen’, while ‘the potatoes hiss’. A cook measuring flour in ‘A Birthday Present’

(1962) perceives the presence of a supernatural being: ‘When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking’. In ‘The Applicant’ (1962), appliances come alive: ‘the smile of iceboxes annihilates me./Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!/I hear her great heart purr’. Bryant suggests that ‘like Plath’s poems, Fifties ads transformed domestic space into a dreamscape of daily miracles’.35 The idea of menacing figures materializing in the kitchen – as articulated in Plath’s kitchen nightmares –
is strangely evocative of Fifties adverts in which food is inhabited by hidden presences.

Despite her interest in food magazines and domestic advertising, however, Plath was not completely persuaded by the idea of ever relating

‘authenticity’ to kitchen politics. The presence of the magical element, of course, posed questions about the accuracy of the advertiser’s dream kitchen. The kitchen became a site of dreamlike experiences that clearly departed from the material actuality of specific American kitchen spaces and erased class, racial and regional differences as well as suppressing the mundane realities of domestic labour. Bryant speculates that the kitchen space of the Fifties confused the boundaries ‘between real and surreal, labour and magic, authenticity and performance’.36 Plath subverts the image of domestic perfection – promoted by advertising – when she re-imagines the kitchen as dangerous and ‘hungry’. In ‘The Tour’ (1962), the housewife – far from being ‘perfect’ – inhabits a house that is ‘a bit of

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a mess’; in the kitchen, she warns guests not to go near the appliances, saying that they ‘might bite’. Through the openly satirical quality of the poem, it is difficult not to interpret the dangerous, ‘biting’ nature of the appliances as a metaphoric reference to the devouring nature of consumer capitalism.

Developing this motif of ‘violent’ domesticity, Plath uncovers the issues in portraying the act of cooking as unquestionably happy – a suggestion she would later sadly materialize, as accounts of her life testify. In ‘Cut’ (1962), she subverts the magic of the perfect kitchen world where food preparation is miraculous and entertaining. The images of blood flowing – ‘that red plush’ – index historical violence in the public sphere, but also counterpoint this with domestic accidents and the labours involved in food preparation in the private sphere.

Furthermore, the haunting image of ‘Little pilgrim/The Indian’s axed your scalp’ could be viewed as an evocative comment on the nature of Western food economies: historical exploitation is metaphorically punished through appropriate food imagery. The bloody thumb is a testament to the hidden violence of food preparation which, as food critic Betty Fussell recalls in her memoir, is a constant ‘battle, deploying a full range of artillery-crushers, scrapers, beaters, roasters, gougers, grinders’.37 Suddenly, the war images evoked by Plath when peeling an onion – including the ‘Kamikaze man’ – do not seem so implausi-ble after all. The peculiar nature of Plath’s household verse – with its strange creatures, hidden domestic secrets and images of death – seems to belong to the Gothic sphere. Being a fan of Shirley Jackson and her writing, Plath was commonly and willingly acquainted with the possibility that the fictional lives of ‘happy housewives’ may carry decidedly Gothic undertones. As a genre, the Gothic provides an ideal arena for dramatising monstrosity, imprisonment and escape. Markey reminds us that the Gothic provides access to ‘the realm of the irrational . . . and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilised world’.38 Plath’s desire to portray a surreal, Gothic world of food could be symptomatic of inconsistent feelings concerning commodity culture

‘invading’ the kitchen.

Running alongside Plath’s Gothic re-elaboration of the Fifties kitchen, one also cannot help but notice the concomitant descriptions of the body ‘as food’, which fuel an ever-present obsession with cannibalism.

Images of blood and death in the kitchen are often accompanied by the prominent figure of the vampire. In ‘Lesbos’, the kitchen speaker can hear a voice ‘flapping and sucking’, belonging to a ‘blood-loving bat’.

In ‘The Glutton’ (1956), the vampire of the title demands a ‘Blood’s

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broth . . . cupped quick to mouth’. In ‘Daddy’ (1962), the blood-drinking images become explicit: ‘the vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood for a year’. In ‘Blackberrying’, Plath refers to ‘blue-red juices’

running through her fingers, which solemnly proclaim a ‘blood sister-hood’. In ‘Goatsucker’, an unknown presence ‘who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard’ is ‘vampiring dry milk’. In ‘Ouija’, Plath talks about unseen beings and tries to ‘imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark/for the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim/The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger’. In ‘Aftermath’, a vampiric ‘crowd’

hunts the speaker for ‘Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies’ and eventually ‘sucks her last tear’. The vampires in Plath’s poetry are endlessly haunting, sucking and draining. They hunt in the dark, threatening to annihilate the narrator and their appetite is insatiable.

At this point, it is worth recalling that, through a shared use of Gothic imagery – culminating in the ‘vampire’ – Plath appears to be echoing elements of Marxist critique. Marx used Gothic terminology to describe the workings of industrial capitalism: ‘capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’.39 The vampire could work as a connecting metaphor between bodily domination and capitalism. In this light, then, the recurrent use of the vampirizing ‘he’ in Plath’s poems comes to assume a meaning that perhaps extends beyond a purely sexual supremacy. Marx and Engels identified women’s exclusion from the workforce as a key element in the creation ‘of women’s oppression within capitalist society’.40 If one interprets blood sucking in the poems as a metaphor for capitalism, then the cannibalization of the narrator by the insatiable vampires could be seen as an implicit recognition and critique of the links between capitalism and patriarchy. The shared references to blood, sucking and a voracious, vampiric appetite – that, as Plath writes in ‘The Glutton’, literally will

‘not spare’ – might establish a political affiliation between Plath’s Gothic brand of domestic verse and the Marxist critique of capitalist appetite.

The Gothic vampire, consuming and continuously being consumed by its own hunger, provides a literary counterpart to Plath’s own divergent desires about consumer capitalism, Fifties fairy-tale living and domestic femininity.

If Plath returns to Gothic apparitions of capitalist vampires to convey the obliterating nature of Fifties consumerism, she also alludes to them in order to unveil haunted visions of women’s role in consumer capitalism. That role, echoing the political subtext of vampirism, involves a desire to consume and an obsession with being ‘cannibalized’ in return.

Plath goes as far as imagining herself as a ‘vampire’ in her journals,

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recalling her first amorous encounter with Ted Hughes in 1956: ‘I was stamping and stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth’.41 In her passion Plath bit Hughes’s face: ‘And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face’.42 Plath describes this practically anthropophagous act as a way of achieving a complete connection while being, peculiarly, possessed: ‘And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting to you’.43 There is a confusing incongruity about the way Plath articulates her feelings regarding this first romantic encounter with Hughes. On the one hand, she wishes to give herself to him completely, to be seized and enjoyed; on the other, her desire to be with him becomes self-annihilating, uncontrollable and is accompanied by a sense of guilt and protest – exemplified by the idea of ‘stamping’ on the floor, as if to object to her own desire.

The confusion of sexual politics with food politics could even extend to portraying female sexual appetite as domineering, destructive and annihilating – a possibility that perhaps haunted Plath following her first sexual encounter with Hughes. We might note here certain imagistic similarities between the vampires in the poetry and the image of Plath biting Ted’s cheek. In this context, one might recall that the figure of the vampiric seductress has often been employed to explore conflicting aspects of female sexuality. The association between female vampires and sexuality is long-standing. Since at least the publication of Le Fanu’s

‘Carmilla’ (1872) – which suggested the shocking reality of a ‘consuming’ female eroticism – the idea of the female blood-sucking monster has been widely explored. These representations, however, should not be casually viewed as ‘empowering’ and ‘feminist’. Instead, we need to consider the possibility that the Gothic image of the consuming woman ‘speaks more about male fears than about female desire’.44 In her verse, then, Plath might even be ventriloquizing patriarchal fantasies by imagining herself as a ruthless vampire.

Having established that the vampire in Plath’s verse provides a useful metaphor for the integration of sexual and economic politics, it is now necessary to notice how Plath specifically voices worries about engulfing consumer appetites – which ask people to consume while being consumed – through the image of the mouth. Culturally, the mouth is a complicated space for women not only for its function in eating, nur-turing and erotic foreplay but also, as Coward reminds us, because ‘it is though the mouth, in speaking, that a person asserts her presence in the world’.45 The conflict between the two functions highlights the animating presence of an engulfing and symbiotic orality: a desire to ‘eat’

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the other, to incorporate, while being swallowed in return. That desire is always latent, but consumer society makes it increasingly manifest.

In psychoanalytical terms, the mouth represents the initial source of sensual pleasure: the infant sucks the mother’s breast and derives pleasure from it. Oral gratification is seen as the earliest manifestation of sexuality and is referred to by Freud as the ‘oral’ or vampiric stage.46

As the child grows, erotic gratification is transferred from the mouth to genitalia, but for the girl, this passage is problematic. Coward observes that the girl has to ‘transfer her desire to incorporate another’s body to the vagina, away from the mouth, in order to take up a classically feminine position in a heterosexist society’.47 The desire to sexually

‘incorporate’ must be divorced from the mouth and displaced to the vagina. Nonetheless, adult kissing might still evoke the gratification of infantile sucking and consequently evoke taboos. The mouth thus becomes a site of conflict between, in Coward’s words, ‘the desire to pursue active needs and against the prohibitions levelled against women’s behaviour’.48 The irreconcilable desire to (be) incorporate(d) is highly conspicuous in Plath’s verse and typically associated with images of the consumption. In ‘Poem for a Birthday’ (1959), Plath writes of being ‘All mouth’. In ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ (1962), the wind is ‘gagging’ the narrator’s ‘mouth’ with her ‘own blown hair’: one cannot fail to notice the peculiarly auto-cannibalistic imagery here. In ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1962), on the other hand, the poetic voice proudly proclaims that she eats ‘men like air’. In Plath’s verse, the mouth seems to become part of a system of desire which, following the path dictated by psychoanalysis, involves a conflicted eroticization of eating. In taking the consuming mouth as a metaphor, Plath feeds off images of engulfing consumerism and talks back to it in terms of uncontrollable, vampiric longing.

As one explores Plath’s use of the Gothic terminology of vampirism and engulfing orality, her poetry also offers a tracery of compelling associations between cannibal desire, women’s bodies and consumer capitalism. Plath re-imagines the female body as a consumable. The idea of the body as ‘dead meat’, especially in terms of sexual possession, is prominent in Plath’s poetry. In ‘Death & Co’ (1962) she is afraid of being

‘red meat’. In ‘The Glutton’, Plath explores the shift in meanings that accompanies the connection between women, meat and consumption.

The narrator describes herself as food for a fictional man who is, as Plath depicts him, ‘hunger-stung, hard to slake’. Plath imagines herself not as preparing food, but as ‘being food’: ‘So fitted is for my black luck . . .

That all merit’s in being meat/Seasoned how he’d most approve’. The subtext of cannibalism here is, again, unavoidable. Plath’s association

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between woman and meat is symptomatic of a social and cultural condition in which the female body is expected to be, as Carol Adams points out, ‘prepared, reshaped [and] acculturated to be consumable in a patriarchal world’.49 In ‘Pursuit’ (1956), the imagery supplied by Plath in order to describe an imagined ‘hunt’ seems strangely energized by sadomasochistic pleasures: ‘blood, let blood be spilt’. A mysterious ‘panther’

hunts the narrator in order to consume her flesh and, suggestively, possess her body. The brutality of carnivorous consumption is associated here with the sexual act in ways that might recall the work of Angela Carter. In ‘Speculative Finale’, the last chapter of The Sadeian Woman, Carter provocatively entangles consumption, sex and violence in her critical reading of the Marquis de Sade: ‘Sade is a great puritan and will disinfect of sensuality what he can lay his hands on . . . therefore, he writes about sexual relations in terms of butchery and meat’.50

With Sade’s connection between meat and sex in mind, the organization of eating and food choice might be seen to bear a practical resemblance to mating activities. Eating usually entails a process of food search, preparation and final consumption; similarly, mating relies on identifying a potential mate, courting – generally – and final copula-tion. In ‘The Princess’ (1847), Tennyson charts this narrative trajectory as follows:

Man is the hunter, woman is his game.

The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;

They love us for it and we ride them down.51

The ritual parallelism between eating and sex is reflected in the respective discourses associated with each activity; one can speak, for example, of ‘consuming love’ or wanting to ‘eat’ someone in erotic terms. These parallels and interactions between basic human functions of course share a common root in self-preservation and the continuation of the species. As Nick Fiddes points out in Meat, natural analogies between sex and eating include ‘that both perpetrate life, that both may be pleasurable, and that both imply vulnerability by breaching normal bodily boundaries’.52

While Plath offers imagery of cannibalistic consumption to unveil the ambivalence of sexual relations in her verse, she also reconnects consuming, ‘eroticized’ desires to visions of Fifties kitchen domesticity through the recurrent trope of ‘cooked bodies’. The corpses in ‘Two

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Views of a Cadaver Room’ (1959) are ‘burnt as black turkey’ while dead foetuses are pickled in a jar. In ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’ (1959), the bodies of sun-bathers are juxtaposed with ‘the hotdogs split and drizzled/On the public grills’. An imagistic web is spun in ‘Pursuit’ between male desire and roasting female bodies, which are eventually ‘charred’; simultaneously, the body of the narrator is set ‘aflame’ and cooks in a forest of desire. The idea of the female body being ‘cooked’ by sexual desire is particularly significant. In Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis, Freud proposes that ‘kindling fire, and everything to do with it, is intimately interwoven with sexual symbolism. Flame is always a male genital’.53

The idea of ‘cooking’ with desire remains strong in Plath, as she writes in ‘The Glutton’ that the body of the woman is ‘seasoned’ and ready to be eaten. Echoing the idea of the domestic meat-woman portrayed by Plath, in Total Joy – a women’s self-help manual – Marabel Morgan explores the cultural connection between women and patriarchal domination through the metaphor of the hamburger. When advising a woman on how to deal with her husband, she concludes: ‘like the hamburger, you may have to prepare yourself in a variety of different ways now and then’.54 Although Morgan wrote her housewife-aimed, self-help books in the late Seventies, her portrayal of the woman – and her relationship to her husband – was openly inspired by 1950s ideals of the eager housewife, whose world of servitude and domestic resourcefulness made her the perfect social product. Morgan’s image of the ‘hamburger woman’ recalls Plath’s depiction of the female body as seasoned meat in

‘The Glutton’. Both metaphorical images understand the female body as objectified, without will or agency and therefore simply existing to satisfy male ‘hunger’ and desires.

It is important to remember here that the idea of ‘hunger’ also bears an affinity with sexual politics, which are often portrayed in terms of cannibalistic consumption. Feminist scholarship, of course, has widely explored anthropological notions of manhood and strength in order to explore the association between meat-eating, sexuality and gender politics. According to this account, the connections between hunger, eating animals and the ‘animality’ of sexual encounters carry inescapable associations. The association between ‘meat’ and the female body seems to be widely acknowledged in everyday language. A variety of expressions related to the concept of ‘being meat’ occur in the English language, especially by victims when discussing episodes of sexual violence and rape. The concept of ‘dead flesh’ is evocative of submission and inability to react; comparing a body to meat implies its inevitable lack of

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resistance and struggle. The implication of ‘being meat’ occurs within a strict, metaphoric system of language. In Carnal Appetites, Elspeth Probyn argues that ‘ “[e]ating the other” . . . is the point where knowing the self and caring for the other merge, where food and sex intersect’.55

Seeing someone as meat implies the capacity to understand the body as without feeling and, ultimately, lifeless. This vision of the female body as mere meat reinforces the relationship between women and animals as inferior and victimized groups. Once perceived as animals, Keith Thomas argues, people are ‘liable to be treated accordingly’.56

With this concept in mind, Plath’s idea of a housewife being ‘seasoned’ like the hamburger introduces the possibility that the domestic sphere can act as an arena for commercial, libidinal and consumer enter-prise. The running associations between elements of consumerism – like the public hot dogs – and the roasting of women’s bodies in Plath’s verse suggest not only a devivification of the housewife as a simple product; more precisely, a standardization of the domestic body in advertising, moulded into a consumable product. Writing about the impact of advertising on the body, Benjamin argues that consumer images open a direct, embodied relationship ‘between women and ware’.57 One cannot help but see the re-elaboration of the female body as ‘seasoned meat’ in Plath’s poetry as an echo of the standardization of living and consumption in the Fifties, which was subliminally pushed into the public consciousness by advertising and fast-food chains like McDonald’s.

In imagining the domestic living of the Fifties as a mixture of horror, vampirism, cannibalism and blood, Plath uncovers a Gothic transformation of the housewife’s body as meat, rolling on the domestic grills like a hot dog. As her feelings towards Fifties glossy and photographic domesticity conflict and clash, she re-elaborates the various dimensions of the female body – cooked, damaged, cannibalized, dehu-manized – that underpinned the ideals of fairy-tale living in popular food adverts, in which the housewife was happily ‘labouring’ for the family. This poignant outlook on the commercialization of the home supports Bryant’s suggestion that Plath’s writing ‘reiterates, revises, coincides and collides with American advertising and its representations of domesticity’.58 As Plath incorporates the politics of consumer capitalism in the Fifties, she expels it in the form of a Gothic haunting, envisioning bodies and identities as part of a system of economic consumption. Passing through the filter of Plath’s Gothic imagination, the vision of Fifties fairy-tale domestic living is shattered as the poetry gestures towards an eroticization of the consuming body, not only as purchaser, but also as a consumable ideal incorporated into consumer culture.

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Notes

1. Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 283.

2. Ibid., p. 433.

3. Marsha Bryant, ‘Plath, Domesticity and the Art of Advertising’, College Literature, 29 (2002): 17.

4. Christopher Holmes Smith, ‘Frozen Foods and the Postwar Family’, in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race, ed.

by Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p.

177.

5. Linda Civitello, Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People (Hoboken: Wiley, 2007), p. 329.

6. David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 786–7.

7. Civitello, p. 329.

8. Ibid., p. 331.

9. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 11.

10. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster, The Recipe Reader: Narratives – Contexts –

Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 2.

11. David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 188.

12. Packard, p. 94.

13. Peter Lewis, The Fifties (London: Book Club Association, 1978), p. 19.

14. Marsha Bryant, 17.

15. Packard, p. 95.

16. Michael Steinberg, Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 199. See also Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002).

17. Ibid.

18. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (New York: St Martin’s, 1987), p. 51.

19. Although Ladies’ Home Journal was a leading magazine, it is important to remember that it had largely, as Bryant remarks, ‘a white, middle-class readership’ (19).

20. Janice Markey, A Journey into the Red Eye: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath – A Critique (London: Women’s Press, 1993), p. 86.

21. Bryant, 18.

22. Ibid., 18.

23. Lynda K. Bundtzen, ‘Plath and Psychoanalysis: Uncertain Truths’ in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, ed. by Jo Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 37.

24. Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962 (London: Faber, 2000), p. 31.

25. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963; London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 3. Further page numbers are given in the text in parentheses.

26. The Focal Encyclopaedia of Photography, quoted in Rosalind Coward, Female Desire (London: Paladin, 1984), p. 103.

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27. Coward, p. 103. Coward’s remark here also recalls Fredric Jameson’s well-known statement on the nature of the ‘visible’: ‘The visible is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.’ ( Signatures of the Visible, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 1).

28. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 47.

29. Coward, p. 103.

30. Ibid., p. 106.

31. Markey, p. 94.

32. Bryant, 17.

33. Marjorie Perloff, ‘Icon of the Fifties’, Parnassus, 12–13 (1985): 283.

34. All references to Plath’s verse are taken from her Collected Poems (1981; London: Faber and Faber, 2002).

35. Bryant, 17.

36. Ibid., 21.

37. Betty Fussell, My Kitchen Wars (New York: North Point Press, 1999), p. 4.

38. Markey, p. 84.

39. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 342.

40. See Ruth Pearson, ‘Gender Relations, Capitalism and Third World Industrialization’, in Capitalism and Development, ed. by Leslie Sklair (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 339.

41. Plath, Journals, p. 113.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 7.

45. Coward, p. 118. Coward’s cultural reference is used in relation to Western societies.

46. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’ in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Anna Freud (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 277–375.

47. Coward, p. 98.

48. Ibid., p. 122.

49. Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 55.

50. Angela Carter, ‘Speculative Finale: The Function of Flesh’ in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979), p. 71.

51. Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Princess’ (1847) quoted in Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 144.

52. Fiddes, p. 144.

53. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1

(London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), p. 197.

54. Marabel Morgan, Total Joy (New York: Berkeley Books, 1978), p. 113.

55. Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 70.

56. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), p. 44. Despite the vehement nature of a vegetarian-feminist critique of ‘consumption’, one cannot overlook the changes in ideology imposed on the dichotomy ‘consumer/consumed’ in the

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past 30 years. What is of great importance about the female that consumes, however, is her ability to subvert the iconic role of woman as ‘victim’ or, to be more specific, ‘woman as meat’.

57. Benjamin, p. 62.

58. Bryant, 18.

11

‘All that Zombies Allow’

Re-Imagining the Fifties in

Far from Heaven and Fido

Bernice M. Murphy

In her 2005 book, A Kindler, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s, Mary Caputi discussed the way in which neoconservative politi-cians and thinkers have, since the Reagan administration, consciously and consistently looked back to that era as a kind of ‘Golden’ period in American life. According to neoconservative ideology the decade is seen as ‘a time span that has acquired a dense layering of mythological meanings and metaphoric overtones, an era freighted with encoded references that play upon America’s self-understanding’ and as a result,

‘even Americans who never experienced the historical 1950s seem to understand that this time frame somehow correlates with America’s definition of itself, and that the decade’s defining attributes partake of a narrative about who we are and what we stand for’.1 Of course, this sense that the 1950s are somehow a ‘special’, uniquely privileged (and significant) time in American political, social and cultural history is not restricted to ideological conservatives, even if they did (and do) continue to promote a particularly dewy-eyed vision of the era that, as Caputi provocatively observes, allows for ‘virtually no slippage between what actually happened and what they wish had happened, between the television version of 1950s reality and everyday life during the decade’.2

As this is a book about the various ways in which 1950s popular culture so often served as a means of expressing the powerful anxieties bubbling beneath the surface of everyday life in Britain and the United States, it seems fitting that there should also be room for a consideration of the way in which modern film-makers have depicted the era. Using Caputi’s observations as a starting point, then, I will discuss two twenty-first century films in which suburban life in 1950s America is re-imagined in a manner that takes full account of – and indeed 216

Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven & Fido 217
exploits – this ‘slippage’ between the way in which the decade is mediated to us through the television and film of the decade itself (and those that followed) and how it actually was. They are Todd Haynes’s critically acclaimed 2002 melodrama Far from Heaven, a loose remake of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All that Heaven Allows, and Andrew Currie’s 2006
horror/comedy Fido.

Currie’s film – a light-hearted satire in which well-to-do suburbanites living in the aftermath of a devastating zombie outbreak use the reanimated dead as slave labour – received a few admiring notices at the time of initial release but essentially sank without trace; a victim, perhaps, of the sheer glut of zombie-related films, literary-mash ups, and comic books that emerged in the wake of the likes of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), and Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. By contrast, Haynes’s knowing recreation of a type of film Hollywood simply doesn’t make any more – the lush, emotionally overwrought classical melodrama – was, in the main, lavishly praised, and nominated for four Academy Awards, among them Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Score. According to Richard Falcon, who reviewed the film in Sight and Sound shortly after its UK release, the film was a ‘ravishing experience’, the success of which, he observed, had shifted Haynes’s career up a gear, ‘from Indie festival favourite to mainstream acclaim’.3

Another obvious difference between the films would seem to relate to the genres that they operate within: Far from Heaven is an acutely self-conscious re-enactment of 50s melodrama while Fido is a tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy. Yet, as Tony Williams has usefully observed, the formal mechanisms of the two genres have much in common: Like a melodrama with its hysterical overtones, the horror film is a genre of excess with a particular style and content. As Laura Mulvey and Jackie Byars note, certain melodramas function conservatively, employing stylistic and thematic devices to conceal, rather than reveal, contradictions . . . The melodrama is a sister genre to family horror because it has a specific relationship to it in terms of depicting family trauma. Within melodramas excessive elements often appear at the moment of extreme family meltdown. These features parallel the excessive special effects that occur at specific moments within the horror genre. Both devices attempt to distract audiences from what is really happening.4

In both Fido and Far from Heaven the repressive, conservative social, political and sexual mores of the 1950s – and of the 1950s nuclear family

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in particular – are filtered through a knowing, self-consciously referential twenty-first century perspective. These then are not so much films about the 1950s as they are films about the way in which the decade was (and is) represented to us by popular culture, both at the time and in the decades since. In Far from Heaven, Haynes creates an almost uncannily familiar recreation – even simulacrum – of the Sirkian melodrama in which the style, tone and trappings of the period are painstakingly replicated, but in which preoccupations and undercurrents present in the source films are brought bubbling to the surface. The contradictions referred to by Byars and Mulvey are therefore highlighted rather than concealed, and the film’s melodramatic style and subject matter is a crucial part of this narrative strategy. Fido places the most iconic representative of post 1968 American horror – the zombie – squarely within the confines of the 1950s suburban family unit and similarly uses generic convention (this time that of the horror film rather than the melodrama) vividly to dramatize, albeit in a highly exaggerated, deliberately unrealistic fashion, preoccupations and anxieties associated with the decade (as well as the more recent American past). The effect that both films have upon the contemporary audience depends to a very large extent upon our awareness of the difference between the self-consciously ‘mythic’, self-congratulatory depiction of the era seen in the more conservative examples of this type of film (in particular, the likes of Back to the Future (1985) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)) and the much more complex realities of the decade itself.

It is important to stress here too that my observations apply only to films in which the 1950s setting is of paramount importance. What I mean by this is that while there are quite a few modern films which are (at least partially) set in 1950s America, in many of them – particularly biopics such as Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005) or films that span a large time period, such as Born on the Fourth of July (1989) Forrest Gump (1994) and Goodfellas (1990) – the 50s settings are there because they have to be, rather than because they are the main focus of the film. Similarly, while the 50s setting of the likes of Shutter Island (2010) isn’t entirely irrelevant (because our protagonist is haunted both by his participation in World War II and by McCarthy era paranoia), I would suggest that the mores of the decade itself are still nevertheless secondary to the narratives’ central mystery. In other words, Shutter Island may be a film set in the 1950s, but it is not substantially a film about the 1950s, unlike another recent film also starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the film adaptation of Richard Yates’s bleak suburban-set novel, Revolutionary Road (novel, 1961, film, 2008).

Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven & Fido 219

Of course, films set in the 1950s have by no means been a rarity in American cinema over the past 40 years. As I have observed elsewhere,5
the decade loomed particularly large in 1980s cinema, in a trend sparked by the success of calculatedly nostalgic, teen-orientated hits such as Grease (1978) and American Graffiti (1973). On the small screen, the Fonz-centric sitcom Happy Days – essentially a cosier small-screen reboot of American Graffiti which, in actor Ron Howard, even had one of that film’s leads as its main character – ran from 1974 to 1984. Back to the Future featured time travel from the an unsatisfactory 1980s present to an idyllic, small-town version of 1955 in which the era’s institutionalized racism and sexism, are glossed over, and apparently minor historical details such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the near-fascistic excesses of the McCarthy era go conspicuously unmentioned. Time travel from the 80s to the 50s also featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue got Married (1986), in which, as in the Stephen King adaptation Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986), 1950s-set sequences are juxtaposed with a disappointing 1980s present.6

One of the most interesting 1980s takes on the decade came in Bob Balaban’s unfairly neglected ‘Cannibals in 1950s suburbia’ movie, Parents (1989): a gory, intense satire of sanitized, nostalgic representations of the decade and of the cultural and consumerist implications of the post-war suburban existence which has much in common with Fido (although the latter is ultimately a rather less disturbing vision of the milieu, even if, as in Parents, there is a fairly high body count).7 The movie’s tongue-in-cheek approach is apparent even from the opening sequence, in which an overhead shot of 50s suburbia is accompanied by the faux-big band style track ‘Meat Loaf Mambo’, composed by frequent David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. This is a film in which meat really is murder, and in which the cannibalistic proclivities of the sweater-wearing, Oldsmobile-driving Laemles, the middle-class couple at the centre of the narrative are, as Williams has observed, shrouded within Eisenhower-era images of normality.8 As in many suburban-set horror narratives, the authorities – even the sympathetic ones – are categorically unable to protect a child from dangers which emanate from within the nuclear family itself because the veneer of middle-class respectability, erected by guilty parental figures, is so convincing that it blinds them to the true nature of what they are dealing with.

The film also seems to suggest the murderous activities and unconventional culinary leanings of the Laemle clan aren’t really all that more offensive than some of the other things that were happening during the deceptively placid, cosy-seeming decade book-ended by the horrors of

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World War II and those of Vietnam. Writer/Director Balaban’s satirical, cynical take on the decade is conclusively reinforced by the decidedly tongue-in-cheek end credits: the cast grin stiffly and wave at the audience, as though they had just taken part in the latest episode of a particularly hokey family-centred sitcom.

David Lynch’s surreal neo-noir Blue Velvet (1986) also begins with an uncannily idyllic, hallucinatory vision of idealized small-town suburbia during the 1950s and then – as one would expect from a film which opens with a scene in which a seemingly all-American boy (Kyle McLachlan) finds a worm-infested human ear – proceeds to upend this deceptive veneer in order to expose the seething tangle of criminal, sexual and psychological corruption that lies beneath. More recently, in the 1998 comic fantasy Pleasantville, troubled teenagers from the present (a squabbling brother and sister played by Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire) find themselves transported by a magical remote control into a relentlessly idyllic 50s sitcom world in which cheerful, but ultimately, suffocating repression is the order of the day. Here, everything is literally, black and white; at least until the much less restrictive sexual and social mores of the present day are introduced into this tightly-controlled universe. One unsanctioned sexual act –
which, as in the films to be discussed here in more detail, is undertaken by a frustrated and repressed suburban housewife – instigates an unstoppable chain reaction of emotional and carnal liberation which is literalized onscreen as colour gradually leaches into the film’s previously monochrome cinematography.

As in Fido and Far from Heaven, Pleasantville’s depiction of 1950s America is both unabashedly nostalgic and at the same time, ultimately critical. The seemingly stable family units and innocence of Pleasantville’s fictional universe are presented as attractive and comfort-ing to the unhappy modern-day siblings who find themselves living like characters in an old sitcom, even as the more restrictive conventions of the age are seen as something to be challenged, a barrier to individual freedom and happiness. Though Witherspoon’s character ultimately opts to remain behind rather than return to the real world of the 1990s at the end of the film, she only decides to do so once the more obviously repressive mores of the fantasy world have been successfully overthrown. As Douglas Muzzio and Thomas Halper note in their survey of the way in which suburbia has been portrayed in American movies, ‘The film is not so much a satire of the 1950s as a critique of Americans’ hunger for nostalgia (that is, those who now call for a return to family values) and bloodless, soulless, lifeless Puritanism

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generally.’9 Pleasantville’s depiction of the decade as, first, a halcyon time of family-centred wholesomeness and then, later on, as a deeply restrictive period in which individual happiness is subordinated to conservatism and conventionality (and the manner in which these two apparently contradictory aspects of the time are reconciled in the film’s final act), provides some indication of the kind of ideological juggling act undertaken by Haynes and Currie in their own films.

All of the 50s-set films mentioned here feature highly-evocative set designs, costuming and attention to detail. The decade tends to be evoked through use of clichéd cultural signifiers such as the luridly furnished suburban ranch house, period-specific automobiles, hooped skirts, bobby socks, and sweater-wearing, pipe-smoking Dads. These films have more to do with our pre-existing ideas about the 50s than the 50s themselves, and as such, they conform to the definition of the so-called ‘nostalgia film’ identified by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991): Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation . . . Faced with these ultimate objects – our social, historical, and existential present, and the past as ‘referent’ – the incompatibility of a post-modernist ‘nostalgia’ art language with genuine historicity becomes dramatically apparent. The contradiction propels this mode, however, into complex and interesting new formal inventiveness; it being understood that the nostalgia film was never a matter of some old-fashioned ‘representation’ of historical content, but instead approached the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or

‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion . . . 10

The same can therefore be said of both Far from Heaven and Fido, both of which also attempt to convey the ‘pastness’ of the past by recreating the Technicolor palette, idyllic settings and sumptuously-tailored costuming of Douglas Sirk’s cinematic heyday – although Haynes’s film does so in a much more obviously faithful, and indeed, fetishistic fashion, not just evoking Sirk’s style and subject matter but openly replicating them. As one critic has noted, ‘For the viewer acquainted with classical Hollywood family melodrama, watching Far from Heaven is like stepping in to a steady downpour of references’ and this referencing goes so far as

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to encompass ‘narrative formulas, mise-en-scène, composition [and] camera movement’.11 However, as we shall see, the film also draws attention to its own difference from Sirk’s universe by opening on to a ‘social and historical perspective that explores the shaping effects of the 1950s on the contemporary culture’.12

Of course, this wasn’t Haynes’s first foray into the angst-ridden world of the unhappy suburban housewife. Prior to Far from Heaven, he had written and directed the ironically-titled Safe (1995), which, like Far from Heaven, starred Julianne Moore. Safe is an unapologetically intellectual horror film about the rapid physical and emotional collapse of an affluent but deeply troubled young housewife. Set amid the luxurious suburbs of the San Fernando Valley during the late 1980s, the protagonist here is ‘Carol White’, an affluent young wife and stepmother whose meaningless, hopelessly routine-bound lifestyle begins to take a terrible toll: she literally becomes allergic to twentieth-century life. The accidental delivery of a black couch (which clashes terribly with her all-white living room) sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually condemn Carol to an uncertain existence as a tortured invalid willingly confined to an obviously exploitative new-age health farm. After Safe, Moore became the First Lady of cinematic suburban alienation, returning to the soulless San Fernando Valley for Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling epic Magnolia (1999) (in which she memorably played a pill-popping trophy wife who tries to kill herself). She would later play another suicidal housewife in The Hours (2002), which was released in the same year as Far from Heaven, and also features a 50s setting. The apotheosis of all Moore’s dissatisfied suburban housewives to date is of course reached in Haynes’s sumptuous and deliberately anachronistic melodrama, a heartfelt if ultimately problematic tribute to Sirk in which the style and tone of his most famous films is painstakingly, and, unlike in the parodic Fido, unironically recreated.13

Sirk’s best-known films today are Magnificent Obsession (1954), Written on the Wind (1956), All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959). They are notable for their lavishly-sentimental soap-opera-style content, mannered acting styles, painstakingly composed colour schemes, emotive scoring and Sirk’s tendency to use the same actors over and again (most famously the likes of Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman). Though sometimes dismissed as something of a sentimental hack following his heyday, Sirk’s work has in recent decades been reappraised by critics who have argued, with considerable justification, that there is a great deal more to his oeuvre than perhaps first meets the eye. While discussing Imitation of Life and All that Heaven Allows, for

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instance, Jon Halliday suggests that while on the surface, ‘The latter is just a standard women’s magazine weepie – mawkish, mindless and reac-tionary . . . just below the surface it is a tough attack on the moralism of petit-bourgeois America’. He then goes on to argue that Imitation of Life is ‘another multilayered film, in which, more than any other movie, one can see Sirk’s talents at work in adverse circumstances’.14

Todd Haynes has obviously internalized the growing body of criticism because Far from Heaven is his attempt ‘not simply [to] reference the director, but filter his work through the intensive auteur criticism that recontextualised his work beginning in the early 70s’.15 Sharon Willis has persuasively furthered this contention by suggesting that 1970s and 80s feminist film theory in particular allows Haynes to ‘open up new angles on the spurned genre of women’s melodrama’.16 The film therefore has a highly self-conscious dual purpose, because what Haynes is indulging in here is an act of both loving recreation and pointed revisionism.

Set in the upscale suburban town of Hartford, Connecticut in 1957, Far from Heaven’s leading character is a seemingly-contented middle-class housewife named Cathy Whitaker whose comfortable, routine-bound life is suddenly disrupted by two shocking discoveries. First of all, she finds out that her seemingly devoted husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) is gay, and has been struggling to suppress his homosexuality for years. Then, as her marriage disintegrates (despite the couple’s desperate but doomed attempts to overcome what is euphemistically referred to as Frank’s ‘problem’), Cathy becomes aware of her own growing feelings for Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), her kind, attentive, and cultured gardener, who also happens to be black.

The basic plotline of Far from Heaven is of course a knowing melange of themes and undercurrents strongly associated with Sirk’s oeuvre. Frank’s alcoholism and impotence brings to mind that of Robert Stack’s character in Written on the Wind while his painfully repressed homosexuality recalls the troubled personal life of Rock Hudson, who starred in seven Sirk films during the 1950s, on several occasions appearing in two a year. The basic plotline – in which a lonely and neglected suburban housewife falls in love with her gardener – is taken from All that Heaven Allows, although in this instance the relationship is further complicated not by a significant age gap, as in the original, but by the even more problematic issue of race. The loving but complex friendship between a white woman and her black house keeper, featured in Sirk’s 1959 Lana Turner vehicle Imitation of Life and that film’s concern with racial politics and prejudice, also leaks into Haynes’s film. Indeed, Imitation of Life

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was one of the era’s few major hits to directly address issues of race and in particular the notion of ‘passing’ for white.17

Sirk’s oeuvre is evoked down to the smallest detail of Haynes’s film, from the casting of All that Heaven Allows co-star Agnes Moorehead lookalike Patricia Clarkson as Cathy’s droll best friend Eleanor, to the colour-coordinated costuming and the lavishly-artificial design of the interior of the Whitakers’ home, which is deliberately designed to look like a studio set. Even Frank Whitaker’s prestigious job as a sales executive for the ‘Magnatech’ Television corporation recalls one of Sirk’s most famous shots: the moment in All that Heaven Allows in which the stricken face of his heartbroken heroine, middle-class widow Cary Scott (who has briefly forsaken true love with younger man Ron Kirby for the sake of her selfish adult children), is reflected in the screen of the television set they have presented her with as a kind of grimly inappropriate consolation prize – ‘the last refuge for a lonely woman’. Certain scenes from All that Heaven Allows – such as the one in which Hudson’s character Ron takes Cary to see the trees in his nursery so that she can admire their beauty – are even directly recreated by Haynes in his own film.

However, one crucial manner in which Haynes updates the film in order to reflect the present is in allowing his characters openly to confront issues which were present in Sirk’s work in a coded rather than overt form. This is particularly the case in relation to Frank’s homosexuality. As Falcon notes, ‘Alongside the 1950s social repressions dictating that homosexuality be seen as a curable pathology, Haynes here allows a degree of contemporary frankness to breach the retro mood in a way he doesn’t with the Cathy–Raymond plot.’18 So, we get a series of scenes which would have been unthinkable in a studio film from the actual 1950s, such as that in which Frank cruises a local gay bar, a steamy clinch with a male co-worker (interrupted by a horrified Cathy) and, in one of the film’s most commented-upon conceits, an outburst in which a desperate Frank shouts ‘I just wanna get the whole fucking thing over with!’ in reference to the intensive therapy he must endure in an effort to ‘cure’ his condition. Clearly, this intentionally anachronistic eruption is, when considered within the context of the rest of the film, meant to seem as shocking to the audience as it is to Cathy Whitaker, to whom Frank’s use of the ‘F’ word is in many ways as disturbing as the slap in the face she will later receive at his hands.

Anachronism is the very raison d’être of Fido, another film that consciously seeks to evoke the mise-en-scène and look of the 1950s melodrama, albeit in a decidedly more tongue-in-(rotting) cheek fashion.

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Fido wryly combines elements of Sirkian melodrama, the post-1968

American horror movie and morbid black comedy.

Set in a parallel-universe version of 1950s suburbia in which humanity has successfully contained – but crucially, not defeated – a devastating zombie outbreak, Canadian writer/director Currie envisions a world in which, as at the conclusion of British ‘RomZomCom’19 Shaun of the Dead (2004), zombies can be controlled by electronic collars and can therefore become a perfectly acceptable addition to the average suburban home.

As well as referencing Romero and Sirk, Fido also employs the ‘Timmy’s down the well’-style plotting of heroic dog films such as Lassie Come Home (1943) and Old Yeller (1957).

In another indication of the film’s indebtedness to the mores of post-war popular culture, it must be noted that the obviously outlandish central conceit strongly evokes the early 60s trend for gimmicky sitcoms.

Beginning with Mr Ed the talking horse in 1961, there appeared on American television screens a whole cycle of sitcoms based upon fantastical and otherworldly premises.20 Indeed, the ‘magic’ sitcom was arguably the most popular type of programme on American television during the decade.21 This subgenre included shows such as My Mother the Car (1965), My Favorite Martian (1963–66), and the ghoulish family dynamics of The Munsters (1964–66),and The Addams Family (1964–66), which debuted within a week of each other and would end at the same time as well. Then there was Bewitched (1964–72), which even had its own imitator in the form of the slightly-more-hip I Dream of Jeanie (1965–70).

In all of these shows, the seemingly-outlandish or even initially-threatening ‘outsiders’ who seem so very different from the white-bread suburbanites around them end up teaching the cosseted representatives of ‘normality’ a thing or two about tolerance and open-mindedness, although not without an attempt by the ‘real’ people to teach the outsider the profound satisfaction of simple, ‘normal’ and consumer-orientated bourgeois life in the USA.22 In similar fashion, the arrival of house zombie Fido into the sorely repressed Robinson family helps each family member to become a better, happier person (although significantly, for Bill Robinson, finally realizing how much his wife and son mean to him will have fatal consequences). At the same time, Fido himself, after a troublesome killing spree, becomes fully integrated into the nuclear family by the end of the film – though not before the existing patriarch has been removed.

The parameters of the film’s universe are succinctly outlined in the amusing spoof newsreel that opens the film. This sequence owes a great

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deal to the black and white atmospherics of Night of the Living Dead (1968), to which Fido could be seen as an unofficial sequel. A cloud of cosmic radiation containing particles that can reanimate the dead led to the so-called ‘Zombie Wars’, in which the last remnants of humanity desperately tried to eradicate the undead (as opposed to the red) menace that had rapidly devastated conventional society. Thanks to the discoveries of a scientist named Reinhold Geiger (who figured out that zombies could be killed for good if you shot them in the head), the distinctly Halliburton-style ‘ZomCon’ corporation managed to contain the outbreak, and developed control collars which enabled them to ‘tame’ wild zombies for use as cheap labour during the reconstruction.

Set some three decades after the Zombie Wars, Fido’s lead character is little Timmy Robinson (K’Sun Ray) whose solitary existence is transformed when his status-conscious mother Helen (played by Carrie Anne Moss) overrules the objections of her Zombie-phobic spouse Bill (Dylan Baker) and buys one to help around the house so that the family aren’t ‘the only ones on the street without one!’. The muted concern with racial politics present in Imitation of Life, in which the lives of a wealthy white actress and her devoted black housekeeper are interwoven with suitably melodramatic results, here becomes the basis for a broad satire which also humorously – if most likely unintentionally –
critiques elements of Far from Heaven.

While there are no black or brown faces in Timmy’s hometown of Willard, there are plenty of blue ones, courtesy of the shambling, old school zombies who shuffle round the neighbourhood carrying out all the tasks that these cosseted, wealthy and yet deeply paranoid suburbanites would prefer not to have to do themselves. There are zombie milkmen, removal men, janitors, gardeners and maids, all rendered

‘gentle as a household pet’ by the evocative steel collars fixed around their necks. There are even zombie sex slaves. In one of the film’s most subversive plot strands, the Robinsons’ neighbour, Mr Theopolis, has an undead teenage ‘girlfriend’ named Tammy, whose body, we are told, remains fairly well preserved because a collar was clamped round her neck before it even had a chance to get cold. The deeply disturbing inclinations of this detail – and the fact that a dead teenager is clearly being used for sexual and emotional gratification by a seedy middle-aged man – are however glossed over, and the relationship between Tammy and Mr Theopolis is ultimately presented as a loving rather than exploitative one. However, the couple’s unconventional ‘relationship’ is frowned upon by everyone and costs Theopolis his job as a ZomCon technician. It is fine, therefore, to order a zombie to mow your lawn

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or clean your car, but not to have sex with or grow genuinely fond.

It isn’t difficult to see the similarities between this scenario and the doomed platonic romance which provides the emotional ballast in Far from Heaven, and which similarly denies the ‘outsider’, in the taboo relationship (Raymond in Far from Heaven, Tammy/Fido in Fido), individual agency.

Many of the film’s wittier moments come courtesy of its attempts to envisage just what it would be like to live in a society in which zombies were an everyday reality, and in which, thanks to lingering radiation, a sudden death poses a threat to the entire community. Timmy and his classmates are taught from an early age how to handle firearms and shoot at zombie-shaped targets during the self-defence part of the school curriculum; adults carry handguns as a matter of course, and old folks homes are now maximum-security facilities because the residents’ old age makes them virtual time bombs. In the words of a ZomCon commercial: ‘The elderly – they seem friendly enough, but can you really trust them?’

Timmy is a shy boy who proves an easy target for bullies, in particular a nasty pair of slightly older boys who belong to the distinctly fascistic ‘ZomCon Cadets’. There’s trouble at home too, in the form of his psychologically-scarred father whose own experiences during the Zombie Wars have made him deeply neurotic and notably unaffectionate towards both his son and his desperately unhappy wife. Though, unlike Frank Whitaker, Bill is never explicitly depicted as being gay (and the film never suggests this possibility), he does reject his wife’s romantic advances more often than not, and appears to be a deeply repressed and anxious man who cares more for his precious car than for his family. The repressed husband/neglected housewife dynamic of Haynes’s film is therefore present here also, although the main focus of the film, at least for the first half, is on the relationship between Timmy and Fido rather than Fido and Helen. As the film progresses, however, it is the attraction between these two characters – the lonely housewife and the outsider (for non-white, here read ‘non-alive’) who is meant to be her servant, and not her friend – that increasingly becomes the film’s real focus.

For Bill Robinson – who, like Frank Whitaker, is a complacent but troubled corporation man – a nice family day out means dragging Helen and Timmy to a funeral because, as he enthuses, only ten percent of the population ever receive one. Indeed, it is much more cost-efficient to be cremated, due to the fact that interment of an intact body in a world in which the recently-deceased always come back to life requires many

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precautions, notably the requirement that the head be severed from the body and buried in its own separate coffin. Significantly, Bill’s affection for his family can only be couched in decidedly morbid terms. He is immensely proud of the fact that he is able to provide funeral insurance for all three of them, and upon hearing that his wife is pregnant with their second child, reacts not with joy, but by fretfully saying ‘I just don’t think we can afford another funeral!’.

It’s no wonder then that Fido, played by Billy Connolly (who actually doesn’t utter a single line, just the occasional moan), gradually becomes first a beloved pet, and then substitute father figure to Timmy.

As previously indicated, Fido ultimately wins Helen Robinson’s heart as well. Their relationship has much in common with that of Ron Kirby/Cary Scott or Raymond Deagan/Cathy Whitaker, except in this case the complicating factor isn’t race, class, or an age gap, but the fact that one of the parties in this touching romance is a reanimated corpse.

Indeed, as Williams’s earlier comments about the similarities between the two genres suggest, the conflation of Sirk-style melodrama and the horror genre – in this instance the George A. Romero zombie film –
isn’t as incongruous as it may at first appear. From Night of the Living Dead onwards, Romero has time and time again presented radical critiques of the American family and of the complacency and materialism of post-war American society. Furthermore, race relations and their relationship between ordinary people and the supposed forces of law and order have also been a recurring preoccupation in Romero, most recently seen expressed in his 2008 film Diary of the Dead, in which the authorities are, at best, spectacularly useless at containing the zombie outbreak, and (in a clear echo of events in New Orleans after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina), at worst, openly hostile towards the uninfected civilians they strip of guns and supplies. Similarly, the greedy and oppressive ZomCon corporation’s control of post-apocalyptic North America is made possible by the actions of a fascistic security force whose most powerful representative is the Robinson’s dictatorial new neighbour, Mr Bottoms (Henry Czerny). Bottoms banishes those who violate the community’s strict code of conduct to the zombie-infested

‘Wild Zone’: a literal exile from suburbia with terrifying consequences.

Whereas the violation of social taboos in Far from Heaven means social death (but perhaps, for the first time, psychological freedom) for Cathy Whitaker, here, breaking the rules that govern the suburban enclave means actual death.

Far from Heaven appeals to both our sense of social injustice and to our knowledge that not all that much later than 1957, the social and

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cultural constraints of American society would drastically and irrevocably change: we cannot help thinking that had Raymond and Cathy met just a little later, things might have been different for them. A great change is on the way, Haynes seems to be intimating as the end credits roll, and noble, romantic and idealistic souls like Cathy will have their part to play in it. Haynes’s view of humanity here is therefore essentially an optimistic, progressive one, and twenty-first century viewers implicitly can congratulate themselves on the fact that western society has come a long way since then.

Fido’s concluding scene – in which both Bill Robinson and Timothy Bottoms, the inadequate patriarchs who have blighted their families, have both been killed and replaced by compliant zombie substitutes, is actually rather more challenging. While the film ends with a scene of domestic contentment for the newly-reconfigured Robinson family, there is no such hope of change for society at large. Fido may have become one of the family and the tyrannical Mr Bottoms (now a zombie himself) is lead around on a leash by his entirely nonplussed young daughter, but, this dash of female empowerment aside, there is no sense at all that ZomCon’s repressive grip on American society is going to lessen anytime soon. The zombie threat is still out there, the steel fence around the suburbs has been repaired, and no one in Willard – least of all our main characters – seems to think that there is anything at all distasteful or unjust about using the undead as domestic slaves. Fido’s newfound status within the family is clearly an exception rather than a sign of significant change to come. Repression, conformity and, indeed, outright slavery have been completely normalized, and that is how things are going to stay for the foreseeable future, despite the changes which have taken place in one family.

By plausibly projecting Romero’s 1968 vision of a zombie apocalypse backwards into an alternative-universe vision of 1950s suburbia, Currie’s film therefore manages to make some pertinent points about the containment culture of both that period and of our own. As well as satirizing the oppressive racial contexts of that decade, Fido successfully evokes the upscale suburban developments of the present day United States, which rely upon cheap migrant labour in the form of underpaid and often undocumented nannies, housekeepers, gardeners and workmen in order to keep things ticking over nicely. Furthermore, the security-obsessed and manipulative conflation of the military/industrial complex, epito-mized in ZomCon, contains unmistakable shades of the opportunistic greed displayed by George W. Bush’s administration: for ZomCon, read Halliburton. In addition, Willard, a suburban, all-American community

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patrolled by aggressive security forces, fenced off by a ring of steel from the lawless and threatening ‘Wild Zone’, has much in common with Baghdad’s heavily fortified ‘Green Zone’. This is the gated suburban community as fortified encampment.

Once Timmy and Helen Robinson are able to create their own, less repressive and more loving family unit, they have no great interest in changing the world around them, and so the film ends with the status quo restored. There will be no zombie civil rights marches in Willard anytime soon, and no one seems to think that there should be. In his portrayal of a deeply insular, self-absorbed world in which idealistic notions of political and social justice are ultimately subordinated to the desires of the nuclear family, Currie’s decidedly neglected horror comedy therefore actually says something a great deal more pessimistic about American society during the 1950s and the present day than Haynes’s more obviously respectful, sensitive and labour-intensive recreation of the milieu manages to achieve.

Eric Avila notes in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight that all too often post-war suburbanization ‘sanctioned the formation of a new racial geography that spatialized the starker contrast between black and white’.23 In other words, as white families left the increasingly-troubled inner cities behind, black families were generally obliged to stay put, a trend that was greatly helped by the fact that both the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) incorporated a racially-biased set of policies that greatly frustrated minority attempts to buy into the suburban dream.24 For many African-Americans during the 1950s therefore, their main contact with the suburbs came as part of their working lives: as housekeepers, gardeners, cooks and cleaners – just like Raymond the gardener and Sybil the housekeeper in Far from Heaven, who carry out the domestic tasks wealthy householders, like Cathy and Frank, would rather not have to do themselves. Fido literalizes this often unacknowledged aspect of 50s life in a way that, while unsubtle, is ultimately rather more challenging than the knowingly liberal, modern-minded Far from Heaven, which replicates the contexts of the period but fails to satisfactorily critique it. Like the dying marriage that it depicts, Far from Heaven is more glossy surface than actual substance. While Fido may balk at exploring the nitty-gritty of sexual relationships between human and zombie (and it may be that this kind of detail would have made it a very different kind of film),25 and Helen Robinson is never as sympathetic or as well drawn as Cathy Whitaker, the film does by and large succeed in its satirically effective reimagining of 50s racial mores. Despite Haynes’s

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deliberate inclusion of plot elements and violations of social and sexual protocol that would never have been openly dramatized in an actual 50s melodrama (principally Frank’s homosexuality), his slavish adher-ence to these conventions means that the film is, perhaps inevitably, an artefact trapped in amber, beautiful to look at, but ultimately devoid of true daring or emotional resonance.

In fact, it may be that Far from Heaven’s most noteworthy achievement is significantly to have influenced another modern-day recreation of the relatively recent past: the television series Mad Men (AMC, 2007–).

The show, set in 1960s Manhattan, depicts that period with a similarly painstaking attention to detail and near-obsessive interest in the exterior trappings and visual/verbal signifiers of period-specific authenticity. It’s all about the hair, the clothes, the furniture and the cars, not to mention the institutionalized racism, sexism, and artery-hardening dependence upon cigarettes and booze displayed by the show’s protagonists.

Like Far from Heaven, Mad Men also relies upon the sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking frisson the viewer gets from filtering historical mores and conventions through a twenty-first century sensibility – from watching a heavily pregnant woman smoke and drink alcohol, a young secretary experience horrendous sexual harassment, or a mother tell her child off for putting her head in a dry cleaning bag not because it is dangerous, but because she’s wrinkled the clothes it contains. As in Haynes’s film, our knowing distance from (and yet familiarity with) such situations is an important part of the proceedings. There is one highly significant difference however. While Mad Men is a highly self-referential show much indebted (especially at a visual level) to period authentic films, novels, newspapers, magazines, and of course advertisements, the show, unlike Far from Heaven, is not intended to function as an act of homage or recreation: ultimately, it stands on its own, even if an ideal viewer would probably be able to tell that, for instance, a certain character is meant to evoke Hitchcock-era Grace Kelly,26 or that Don Draper’s characteristic penchant for grey flannel suits is no mere coincidence.27 By way of contrast, Haynes is so terribly respectful towards the filmic form he is recreating, that his film fails really to look beyond the surface of the supposedly scandalous topics it has broached.

In other words, it may be that unlike the decidedly less ambitious Fido, Far from Heaven fails to tell us much about the 1950s that we didn’t know already.

In Far from Heaven and Fido, then, what we have are two twenty-first century visions of life in the 1950s which amply demonstrate, albeit in differing ways, the continuing hold that the decade has

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upon the imagination of modern writers and film-makers. As with many of the other most notable depictions of the era on screen, the vision of post-war suburban life presented to viewers in both films is a highly-exaggerated, knowingly-artificial one in which the two duelling (yet inextricably linked) perspectives on the decade – the 50s as family-centred golden age, and the 50s as repressive, conformist and anxiety-riven nightmare – are dramatized simultaneously. In both films, genre – the conventions of the melodrama and the horror film respectively – is used to achieve this delicate balancing act. Far from Heaven is a self-consciously cinematic visual and narrative experiment, a gloriously excessive act of homage that in part serves to illustrate how far the United States has come since the 1950s. Fido – an unpretentious genre film which features workmanlike direction, a relatively undistinguished cast and a decidedly parodic tone – shows how far it still needs to go before true racial, sexual and economic equality can be reached.

What seems clear is that even today, cinematic representations of the 1950s continue to fascinate those who see the era as a time when many of the most troubling – as well as most admirable – aspects of modern American life were established. Like the undead hero of Fido, the 1950s linger on (and on) in the popular imagination, and with each new onscreen representation, another level of meaning – or make-believe –
gets erected over the remains of the decade that actually was.

Notes

1. Mary Caputi, A Kindler, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s (Wisconsin: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) p. 4.

2. Ibid., p. 6.

3. Richard Falcon, ‘Magnificent Obsession’, Sight and Sound, March 2003.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/61, accessed 6 December 2010.

4. Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, (Madison, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), p. 17.

5. See ‘ “You Space Bastard! You Killed my Pines!” Back to the Future, Nostalgia and the Suburban Dream’, (in) Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (ed.), The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (North Carolina: McFarland, 2010), pp. 49–62.

6. Now, perhaps inevitably, characters from the present are starting to travel back to the 1980s, as in the comedy hit Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and in a 2007 episode of the animated sitcom, Family Guy, entitled ‘Meet the Quagmires’, which parodies Back to the Future.

7. Though he has directed several films, Balaban is best known as a respected character actor who has appeared in the likes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Capote, Gosford Park, and Best in Show.

8. Williams, p. 261.

Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven & Fido 233

9. Douglas Muzzio, and Thomas Halper, ‘Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in American Movies’, Urban Affairs Review, 2002; 37: p. 543.

10. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 19.

11. Scott Higgins, ‘Orange and Blue, Desire and Loss: The Colour Score in Far From Heaven’, All that Heaven Allows: The Cinema of Todd Haynes, Ed. James Morrison (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p. 101.

12. Sharon Willis, ‘The Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk’, Camera Obscura 54, Volume 18, No. 3, 2002. p. 132.

13. Falcon, op. cit.

14. Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Secker and Walberg, 1971), p. 10.

15. Higgins, p. 102.

16. Willis, p. 134.

17. Arthur Knight, ‘Movies and the Racial Divide’, American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations (London: Berg, 2005), p. 237.

18. Falcon.

19. Romantic Zombie Comedy.

20. Gerard Jones, Honey, I’m Home! Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream (New York: Grove Wiedenfield, 1992), p. 174.

21. David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (2nd Edition) (Malden: Blackwell, 1974 edition), p. 107.

22. Marc, p. 109.

23. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 35.

24. Ibid., p. 35.

25. As in films such as Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) or Bruce LaBruce’s hardcore gay zombie flick LA Zombie (2010).

26. Betty Draper (January Jones), the blonde, blue-eyed and (almost) always impeccably-attired wife of main protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm), bears a striking resemblance to Kelly which has been remarked upon by other characters in the show, and which is further (deliberately) enhanced by her hairstyle and wardrobe. Jones has also frequently been placed in scenarios which emphasize her similarity to other Hitchcock blondes, in particular, Tippi Hedren. Don Draper, the ad man who is quite literally all style and no substance, also strongly evokes North By Northwest’s charming cad Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) whose initials (R.O.T.) provide a powerful indication of the emptiness that lies at the heart of his successful facade.

27. See Sloane Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), which is about a deeply unhappy corporation man torn between family and the world of business.

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Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar (1963; London: Faber and Faber, 2001).

Plath, Sylvia, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962 (London: Faber, 2000).

Poe, Edgar A., ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London and New York: Penguin, 1982).

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Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

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Filmography

Abbot and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Charles Lamont, 1953) Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (Charles Lamont, 1951) Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

All that Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (Bert I. Gordon, 1957) American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938) Attack of the Crab Monsters (Roger Corman, 1957) Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958) Attack of the Giant Leeches (aka Demons of the Swamp, Bernard L. Kowalski, 1960) Attack of the Puppet People (aka Six Inches Tall, Bert I. Gordon, 1958) Atom Age Vampire (originally Seddok, l’erede di Satana, Anton Giulio Majano, 1960) The Atomic Brain (Joseph V. Mascelli, 1963) Atom Man Versus Superman (Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1950) The Atomic Kid (Leslie H. Martinson, 1954) Atomic Rulers of the World (originally Kôtetsu No Kyojin, Koreyoshi Akasaka, Teruo Ishii & Akira Mitsuwa, 1959, US release, 1964) The Atomic Submarine (Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1959) Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1956) Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugene Lorie, 1953) The Beast of Yucca Flats (Coleman Francis, 1961) Beginning of the End (Bert I. Gordon, 1957) Behemoth the Sea Monster (aka The Giant Behemoth, Douglas Hickox & Eugène Lourié, 1959)

Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959)

Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948) Bijo to Ekitai Ningen (aka The H-Man, Ishirô Honda, 1958) Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958) Blood of Dracula (aka Blood Is My Heritage, Herbert L. Strock, 1958) Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

The Boogie Man Will Get You (Lew Landers, 1942) Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) Boys Town (Norman Taurog, 1938)

The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) Bride of the Monster (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1955) Brides of Blood (Gerardo De Leon, 1968) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

The Camp on Blood Island (Val Guest, 1957) Chikyû kogeki meirei: Gojira tai Gaigan (aka Godzilla vs. Gigan, Jun Fukuda, 1972) C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, 1984)

244

Filmography

245

Circle of Danger (Jacques Tourneur, 1951) Class of Nuke ‘Em High (Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman, 1986) Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown (Eric Louzil, Donald G. Jackson, 1991)

Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid (Eric Louzil, 1992)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) The Creature with the Atom Brain (Edward L. Cahn, 1955) The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961) The Cyclops (Bert I. Gordon, 1957)

Dai Koesu Yongkari (aka Yongary, Monster From the Deep, Kiduck Kim, 1967) Daikaijû Gamera (aka, Gammera the Invincible, Noriaki Yuasa, 1965) Daikaiju kuchusen Gamera tai Gyaosu (aka Gamera vs. Gaos, Noriaki Yuasa, 1967) Daikyojû Gappa (aka Gappa, the Triphibian Monster, Haruyasu Noguch, 1967) The Damned (Joseph Losey, 1961)

Daughter of Dr Jekyll (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1957) Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1987) Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004)

Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985) The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) The Day the World Ended (Roger Corman, 1956) The Devil’s Hairpin (Cornel Wilde, 1957) Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2007) Denso Ningen (aka The Secret of the Telegian, Jun Fukuda, 1960) Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden & Robert Hamer, 1945)

The Deadly Mantis (Nathan Juran, 1957) Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) The Devil Doll (Tod Browning, 1936)

The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1967) Donovan’s Brain (Felix E. Feist, 1952) Don’t Knock the Rock (Fred F. Sears, 1957) Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)

Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)

Dragstrip Girl (Edward L. Cahn, 1957) Dr. Cyclops (Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1940) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956) Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2003)

Fido (Andrew Currie, 2006)

The Fiend With the Atomic Brain (aka Blood of Ghastly Horror, Al Adamson, 1972) Fiend Without a Face (Arthur Crabtree, 1958) First Man into Space (Robert Day, 1959) Five (Arch Oboler, 1951)

The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958)

Food of the Gods (Bert I. Gordon, 1976) Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1957)

246

Filmography

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)

Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)

Frankenstein 1970 (Howard W. Koch, 1958) Frankenstein’s Daughter (Richard E. Cunha, 1958) From Hell It Came (Dan Milner, 1957)

Gamera Daikaiju Kuchu Kessen (aka Gamera the Guardian of the Universe, Shusuke Kaneko, 1997)

The Gamma People (John Gilling, 1956) Gasu Ningen dai Ichigo (aka The Human Vapor, Ishirô Honda, 1960) Gezora, Ganime, Kameba: Kessen! Nankai no daikaijû (aka Yog: Monster From Space, Ishirô Honda, 1970)

Girl Gang (Robert C. Dertano, 1954)

Girls in Prison (Edward L. Cahn, 1956) Girls Town (Charles F. Haas, 1959)

Go Johnny Go! (Paul Landres, 1959)

Godzilla (Roland Emmerich, 1998)

Gojira (Ishirô Honda, 1954)

Gojira (aka Godzilla 1985, Kohji Hashimoto 1984) Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura: Nankai no Dai Ketto (aka Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Jun Fukuda, 1966)

Gojira-Minira-Gabara: Oru kaijû daishingeki (aka Godzilla’s Revenge, Ishirô Honda, 1969)

Gojira no Gyakushû (aka Gigantis the Fire Monster, Motoyoshi Oda, 1955) Gojira tai Hedorâ (aka Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, Yoshimitsu Banno, 1971) Gojira tai Mechagojira (aka Godzilla vs. Cosmic Monster, Jun Fukuda, 1974) Gojira tai Megaro (aka Godzilla vs. Megalon, Jun Fukuda, 1973) Gojira vs. Beorante (aka Godzilla vs. Biollante, Kazuki Omori, 1989) Gojira vs. Desutoroia (aka Godzilla vs. Destroyer, Takao Okawara, 1995) Gojira vs. Kingu Ghidora (aka Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, Kazuki Omori, 1991) Gojira vs. Mekagojira (aka Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Takao Okawara, 1993) Gojira vs. Mosura (aka Godzilla vs. Mothra, Takao Okawara, 1991) Gojira vs. Supeesu Gojira (aka Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, Kenshou Yamashita, 1994) Gorgo (Eugène Lourié, 1961)

Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)

Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield, 1957)

Hell is a City (Val Guest, 1960)

Horror of Party Beach (Del Tenney, 1964) Hot Car Girl (Bernard L. Kowalski, 1958) Hot Rod Girl (Leslie H. Martinson, 1958) Hot Rod Rumble (Leslie H. Martinson, 1957) Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010) The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, 1959) The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

The House on 92nd Street (Henry Hathaway, 1945) Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953)

Filmography

247

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) Invasion of the Saucer-Men (Edward L. Cahn, 1957) Invasion USA (Alfred E. Green, 1952)

Invisible Invaders (Edward L. Cahn, 1958) Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1933) It Came From Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, 1955) It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) It Conquered the World (Roger Corman, 1956) The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957) I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler Jr., 1957) I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (Herbert L. Strock, 1957) Juvenile Jungle (William Witney, 1958) Kaijû Daisensô (aka Monster Zero, Ishirô Honda, 1965) Kaijû Sôshingeki (aka Destroy All Monsters, Ishirô Honda, 1968) Kaijûtô no kessen: Gojira no musuko (aka Son of Godzilla, Jun Fukuda, 1967) King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (aka King Kong vs. Godzilla, Ishirô Honda, 1962) Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943) L.A. Zombie (Bruce LaBruce, 2010)

The Leech Woman (Edward Dein, 1960)

Let the Right One In (Thomas Alfredson, 2008) Lost Continent (Sam Newfield, 1951)

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1947) Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954) Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) Man-Made Monster (aka The Atomic Monster, George Waggner, 1941) Matango (aka Matango – Fungus of Terror/Attack of the Mushroom People, Ishirô Honda, 1963)

Mekagojira no Gyakushu (aka Monsters From an Unknown Planet/ Terror of Mechagodzilla, Ishirô Honda, 1975)

Mister Rock and Roll (Charles S. Dubin, 1957) Monster From Green Hell (Kenneth G. Crane, 1958) Monster From the Ocean Floor (Wyott Ordung, 1954) Monster on Campus (Jack Arnold, 1958) The Monster That Challenged the World (Arnold Laven, 1957) The Most Dangerous Man Alive (Allan Dwan, 1961) Mosura (aka Mothra, Ishirô Honda, 1961) Mosura tai Gojira (aka Godzilla vs. the Thing, Ishirô Honda, 1964) Motorcycle Gang (Edward L. Cahn, 1957) Mr Drake’s Duck (Val Guest, 1951)

The Mummy (Terence Fisher, 1959)

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932) The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948)

Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (Cyril Frankel, 1960) Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers, 1962)

248

Filmography

Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (F.W. Murnau, 1922) Not of This Earth (Roger Corman, 1957) Octaman (Harry Essex, 1971)

Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957)

On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959)

On the Threshold of Space (Robert D. Webb, 1956) Operation Petticoat (Blake Edwards, 1959) Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950) Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989)

Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986) Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998)

Problem Girls (Ewald André Dupont, 1953) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998)

The Quatermass Xperiment (Val Guest, 1955) Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004).

Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985)

Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) Red Planet Mars (Harry Horner, 1952)

Reform School Girl (Edward Bernds, 1957) The Resident (Antii Jokkinen, 2011)

The Reptile (John Gilling, 1965)

The Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1958) Revenge of the Creature (Jack Arnold, 1955) Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008) Rock All Night (Roger Corman, 1957)

Rock Around the Clock (Fred S. Sears, 1956) Rock Rock Rock! (Will Price, 1956)

Rocketship X-M (Kurt Neumann, 1950)

Rodan (aka Sora no daikaijû Radon, Ishirô Honda, 1956) Runaway Daughters (Edward L. Cahn, 1956) Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

San Daikaijû Chikyû Sandai no Kessen (aka Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, Ishirô Honda, 1964)

Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2007)

Shake, Rattle & Rock! (Edward L. Cahn, 1956) Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010).

The Slime People (Robert Hutton, 1963) Slithis (aka Spawn of the Slithis, Stephen Traxler, 1978) Sorority Girl (Roger Corman, 1957)

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

The Spider (aka Earth Versus the Spider, Bert I. Gordon, 1958) The Split (aka The Manster, George Breakston & Kenneth Crane, 1961) Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)

The Stranglers of Bombay (Terence Fisher, 1959) Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) A Tale of Two Cities (Ralph Thomas, 1958)

Filmography

249

Tarantula (Jack Arnold, 1958)

Teenage Caveman (Roger Corman, 1958)

Teenagers from Outer Space (Tom Graeff, 1959) The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1953)

This Island Earth (Joseph Newman, 1955) This Woman is Dangerous (Felix E. Feist, 1952) Those Redheads from Seattle (Lewis R. Foster, 1953) Timeslip (Ken Hughes, 1955)

The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (Terence Fisher, 1960) Uchu daikaijû Dogora (aka Dagora, the Space Monster, Ishirô Honda, 1965) Uchû daikaijû Girara (aka The X From Outer Space, Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968) The Ugly Duckling (Lance Comfort, 1957) The Uninvited (Greydon Clark, 1987)

Unidentified Flying Objects (Winston Jones, 1956) Village of the Giants (Bert I. Gordon, 1965) The Violent Years (William Morgan, 1956) The Vulture (Lawrence Huntington, 1967) Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005)

War of the Colossal Beast (Bert I. Gordon, 1958) War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953) Watch it, Sailor! (Wolf Rilla, 1960)

Wasp Woman (Roger Corman, 1959)

The Werewolf (Fred F. Sears, 1956)

When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Mate, 1951) The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953)

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)

The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2011) The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959) World Without End (Edward Bernds, 1956) X The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956)

Yesterday’s Enemy (Val Guest, 1959)

Young and Wild (William Witney, 1958) Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964)

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan Juran, 1958)

Index

20 Million Miles to Earth

101

‘Applicant, The’

205

28 Days Later

217

Arkoff, Samuel Z.

60, 151

Abbott, Bud

73

Armed Vision, The

178

Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and

Arne, Peter

57

Mr Hyde

73

Arness, James

19, 55, 58

Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein

Arnold, Jack

57, 60, 62–3,102–3

73

‘Art of Donald McGill, The’

132

Abbott and Costello meet the Invisible

Ashton, Roy

108

Man

73

Associated Artists Pictures

76

Abbott and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Astaire, Fred

29

Karloff

73

Atom Man Versus Superman

59

Abbott and Costello meet the Mummy

Atomic Brain, The

59

73

Atomic Kid, The

57

Adam, Ken

48

Atomic Spaceship

59

Adams, Carol

210

Atomic Submarine, The

59

Addams Family, The

225

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman

27, 152

Adorno, Theodor

14, 49–50, 60

Attack of the Crab Monsters

21, 27,

Advertisements for Myself

8

60–2, 102

Affluent Society, The

8

Attack of the Giant Leeches

67

‘Aftermath’

207

Attack of the Puppet People

62

Age of Anxiety, The

1–2, 13

Attenborough, Richard

126

Ahmed, Rollo

41–2, 43, 52

Auden, W.H.

1, 3–4, 13–15

Aldrich, Robert

28

Austerity Britain

13

Alien

164

Avila, Eric

230

All American Men of War

6

Ayres, Lew

24

All that Heaven Allows

222–4

Altman, Rick

96

BAFTA Awards

84

Amazing Colossal Man, The

27, 57,

‘Baby Baby’

135

60–2

Bachelard, Gaston

182, 184–6,

Amazing Stories

94–5

190–1, 193

American Graffiti

219

Back in the Jug Agane

35

American International Pictures (AIP)

Back to the Future

218–19

151

Bad Girls

144

Amicus Productions

76–7

Bad Seed, The (novel)

2

Anderson, Karen

139

Bad Seed, The (film)

2, 15

Anderson, Paul Thomas

222

Badalamenti, Angelo

219

Andrews, Dana

36, 39

Baker, Dylan

226

Angels with Dirty Faces

137

Baker, Graham

68

Angels in the Gutter

144

Baker, LaVern

135

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Baker, Stanley

49, 84

23

Balaban, Bob

219–20

Ape and Essence

4

Balderston, John L.

21–2

250

Index

251

Baldick, Chris

129

Bont, Jan de

188

Bano, Yoshimitsu, Gojira tai Hedora (aka Boogie Man Will Get You

112

Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster)

Born on the Fourth of July

218

65, 69

Boy-Crazy

144

Bass, Alfie

49

Boy Chaser

144

Battle of Dorking, The

91

Boyle, Danny

217

Battle of the River Plate, The

126

Boys Town

137

Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The

25–6,

Boys’ Weeklies

132

57–9, 63, 66, 70, 91, 96, 98–9

Braceland, Francis J.

137

Beast of Yucca Flats, The

57

Bradbury, Ray

25, 91–2, 96

‘Beasts of Barsac, The’

168

Brave New World

4

Beating the Devil: The Making of Night

Brians, Paul

62
of the Demon

36

Bride of Frankenstein

22, 151

Beatles, The

132

Bride of the Atom

28

Beckwith, Reginald

45

Bride of the Monster

21, 28, 59

Beginning of the End

21, 27, 62

Brides of Blood

68

Behemoth the Sea Monster

59, 66

British Board of Film Censors (BBFC)

Belafonte, Harry

29

73–89, 121–4

Bell Jar, The

173, 198, 202, 204

British Broadcasting Corporation

Ben Hur

29

(BBC)

82, 93

Benedict, Ruth

176, 193

British Film Institute

72

Benjamin, Walter

201, 212

‘Broomstick Ride’

163

Bennett, Charles

47–8

Brown, Reynold

153

Benson, George

116

Browning, Tod

18

Bercovitch, Sacvan

6, 15

Bryant, Marsha

202, 205, 212

Berlin Express

51

Buchan, John

46

Bernard, James

123–5

Buck Rogers

96, 100

Bernstein, Leonard

1–2, 5, 15

Building a Better Tomorrow

44, 52

Berry, Chuck

135

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

20

Besant, Annie

46

Bundtzen, Lynda K.

202

Best in Show

232 n. 7

Burke, Edmund

111

Bewitched

225

Burr, Raymond

26, 63

Bierce, Ambrose

167–8

Bush, George W.

229

Bijo to Ekitai- Ninjen (aka The H-Man) Byars, Jackie

217

57, 65

Byron, George Gordon, Lord

110

Birkhead, Edith

128

‘Birthday Present, A’

205

C.H.U.D.

68

Biskind, Peter

55, 71

CBS

136

Black Art, The

41

Cabot, Susan

152

‘Blackberrying’

207

Cahn, Edward L.

68

Blackboard Jungle, The

136

Caine, Hall

127

Blake, William

50–1, 60

Caine, Michael

49

Blob, The

97

Camfield, Douglas

67

Bloch, Robert

12, 158–75

Campbell, John W.

95

Blood of Dracula

66

Campbell, Joseph

178

Blue Velvet

220

Camp on Blood Island

79

Boas, Franz

176, 193

Capote

232 n. 7

Body Snatchers, The

91

Captain Video

95–7

Bomb Culture

14

Caputi, Mary

216

252

Index

Cardos, John Bud

68

Coppola, Francis Ford

219

Carey, Jon

15

Corman, Roger

60, 63,102, 109

Carmilla

88, 208

Corstorphine, Kevin

12

Carnal Appetites

212

Costello, Lou

73

Carreras, James

73, 76, 78, 80–1, 87,

Coward, Rosalind

203–4, 208, 209

122, 127

Crack in the Picture Window, The

8

Carreras, Michael

126–7

Crane, Kenneth G.

67

Carson, Rachel

30

Crawford, Joan

25

Carter, Angela

210

Crazy Gang, The

74

‘Casting the Runes’

36

Creature from the Black Lagoon, The

Cat People

37–8

95, 96, 102

Chandler, Raymond

172

Creature with the Atomic Brain, The

59

Chase, Richard

179

Crimes by Women

148

Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of

Crowley, Aleister

42

Cleanliness

27

Crowther, Bosley

26

Cheek, Douglas

68

Culture Industry, The

14

Chesney, G.T.

91

Cummins, Peggy

37, 49

Chester, Hal E.

47

Currie, Andrew

12, 217, 221, 225,

Chikyu Kogeki

65

229–30

China Syndrome, The

67

Curse of Frankenstein

76–9, 80, 108,

Christian, Paul

59

109, 111–15, 121, 122, 124,

Churchill, Winston

33, 44–5

126

Chysalids, The

13

Curse of the Werewolf

88, 114

Cinefantastique

58

Curtis, Donald

61

Circle of Danger

51

Cushing, Peter

14, 84, 108, 109, 115

Civitello, Linda

199

‘Cut’

206

Clarens, Carlos

45–6

Cyclops, The

62

Clarke, Arthur C.

91

Czerny, Henry

228

Clarke, Mae

22, 31

Clarkson, Patricia

224

D For Delinquent

148

Class of Nuke ’Em High

68

‘Daddy’

207

Class of Nuke ’Em High Part Three

68

Daikaiju Gamera (aka Gamera the

Class of Nuke ’Em High Part Two

68

Invisible)

65

Clive, Colin

111

Daikyoju Gappa (aka Gappa, The

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

232

Triphibian Monster)

66
n. 7

Daily Express

85

Cobbold, Kim

45

Daily Herald

87

Cochran, Eddie

135

Daily Sketch

35

Cohen, Herman

151

Daily Telegraph

78, 113

Collier’s

149

Daily Worker

82

Comics Code Authority

150

Dalton, Audrey

61

‘Concrete Mixer, The’

91

Damned, The (aka These are the

Condon, E.U.

21, 31

Damned)

66

Conjure Wife

180

Danse Macabre

9, 71

Connery, Sean

49

Daughter of Dr Jekyll

152

Connolly, Billy

228

Davies, Máire Messenger

92–3

Conway, Gary

151

Davis, Nancy

24

Cook, Willis

98

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

217

Cooper, Merian C.

18

Dawn of the Dead

68

Index

253

Day of the Dead

68

Ealing Studios

113

Day of the Triffids, The

13, 94

Earnshaw, Tony

36, 39, 48–9, 51

Day the Earth Stood Still, The

20–1,

Earth Vs. The Spider

27

60, 62

Earth versus the Flying Saucers

63

DeMille, Cecil B.

99

Eden, Sir Anthony

35

De Toth, Andre

37

Ehrenreich, Barbara

8, 15

Deadly Mantis, The

60–2

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

23, 29, 34–5

Dead of Night

113

Eliade, Mircea

182–4, 190, 191

Dean, James

137

Eliot, Peter

36

Deane, Hamilton

128

Eliot, T.S.

1, 78

‘Death & Co’

209

Elizabeth II

33, 44, 73

‘Death in an Elephant’

168

Elliott, Don

144

Dee, Frances

38

Ellson, Hal

142

Dekker, Albert

18, 28

Elwall, Robert

44, 52

Denso Ningen (aka The Secret of the Emmanuel, Ivor

49

Teligan)

65

Emmerich, Roland

64, 70

Destination Moon

91, 95, 97

Encounter

13

Devil Doll, The

18

Endfield, Cy

49–50

Devil Rides Out, The

40–1,109

Engels, Friedrich

207

Devil and All His Works, The

29, 41

Essex, Harry

67

Exclusive Films

73, 79

Devil’s Hairpin, The

146

DiCaprio, Leonardo

218

Fabian, Robert

42

Diary of the Dead

228

Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers

141

Dick Barton, Special Agent

73

Fairbanks, Douglas

57

Dickens, Charles

109

Fakuda, Jun

65

Dixon, Campbell

113

Falcon, Richard

217, 224

Doctor Who

73

‘Fall of the House of Usher, The’

169,

Domergue, Faith

61

185

Donovan’s Brain

24

Faludi, Susan

161

Don’t Knock the Rock

135

Family Guy

232 n. 6

Doomwatch

68

Far from Heaven

12, 216–24, 226–32

Doughty, Yvonne

147

Faulkner, William

9–11

Douglas, Gordon

26, 58

Faye, Janina

84–5

Douglas, Mary

183–4, 191, 192

Feminine Mystique, The

7

Douglas, T.E.

28

Fermi, Enrico

19

Downey, Dara

12

Ferrer, Mel

29

Doyle, Arthur Conan

109

‘Fever 103’

205

Dr Cyclops

18

Fiction and the Reading Public

127

Dr Strangelove

30

Fiddes, Nick

210

Dracula (1931)

116, 117, 126, 127

Fido

12, 216–31

Dracula (1958)

14, 72, 80–2, 89,

Fiedler, Leslie

176

108–33

Fielding, Henry

110

Dracula (novel)

127–30

Fiend Without a Face

66

Dragstrip Girl

146–7

Fiend with the Atomic Brain, The

59

Driberg, Tom

42

Finney, Jack

91

Duvall, Evelyn Millis

141

First Man into Space, The

92

Dwan, Allan

57

Fisher, Terence

84, 115, 121, 124–6,

D’Annunzio, Gabriele

128

130–2

254

Index

Five

20

Gaunt, Valerie

115, 131

Flamingos, The

135

Geary, Robert F.

181

Flash Gordon

100

Geertz, Clifford

193

Floyd, Janet

200

Gernsback, Hugo

94

Fly, The

30, 59

Gezora Ganime Kameba: Kessen! Nankai

Focal Encyclopaedia of Photography
no daikaijû (aka Yog: Monster From 203

Space)

66

Food of the Gods

21, 60, 62,

Giles (cartoonist)

85

Forbidden Planet, The

97–8

Gilling, John

57

Forrest Gump

218

Girl Gang (film)

144

Foster, Laurel

200

Girl Gang (novel)

144

Foucault, Michel

129

Girls Town

144

Fowler, Gene

66

Girls in Prison

145

Francis, Anne

98

‘Glutton, The’

206–7, 209, 211

Francis, Coleman

57

Go Johnny Go!

135

Frankel, Cyril

85

‘Goatsucker’

207

Frankenstein (1931)

22–3, 76, 113,

‘Goddess of Wisdom, The’

164–5,

116

171

Frankenstein (novel)

19–20, 22, 28,

Godzilla (1954)

96

110

Godzilla (1995)

63, 70

Frankenstein 1970

29, 66

Godzilla, King of the Monsters

26

Frankenstein: An Adventure in the

Gojira (1985)

63

Macabre

21

Gojira (aka Godzilla)

26, 59, 63–5

Frankenstein’s Daughter

152

Gojira, Ebrira, Mosura: Nankai No Dai

Frayling, Christopher

14, 44, 52, 78

Ketto (aka Eibira, Horror of the

Frazer, James George

178

Deep)

65

Freed, Alan

135

Gojira-Minra-Gabara: Oru Kaiju

Freud, Sigmund

128–9,159, 164,

Daishingeki

65

170, 209

Gojira No Gyakushu (aka Gigantis the Friedan, Betty

7

Fire Monster)

64

Frogs

68

Gojira Versus Kingu Ghidora

68

From Hell It Came

30, 57

Gojira Vs Mosura (aka Godzilla Versus Frye, Northrop

176

Mothra, 1991)

67

Fujiwara, Chris

37, 51

Gojira tai Mechangojn (aka Godzilla

‘Funnel of God, The’

173–4
versus the Cosmic Monster)

65

Fussell, Betty

206

Gojira tai Megero (aka Godzilla versus Megalon)

65

Gainsborough Studios

109

Golden Bough, The

178

Galbraith, J.K.

8

Good Housekeeping

177

Gamera Daikaju Kuchu Kessen (aka

‘Good Imagination, A’

172

Godzilla and the Guardians of the

Goodfellas

218

Universe, 1997)

69

Goodlatte, Jack

73

Gamera Versus Gaos

69

Gordon, Bert I.

57, 60, 63

Gamma People, The

57

Gordon, Richard and Katharine

8

Gang Girl

144

Gordon, Robert

60, 62

Gardner, Ava

29

Gordon, Stuart

233 n. 25

Garis, Roger

84

Gorgo

66

Gasu Ninjendai (aka The Human

Gosford Park

232 n. 7

Monster)

65

Gothic Flame, The

128

Index

255

Grandenetti, Jerry

6

Hibbin, Nina

82

Grant, Cary

233 n. 26

Hidden Persuaders, The

8

Gray, Coleen

152

Hilton, Joseph

144

Grease

219

Hinds, Anthony

74, 75–6, 86, 88

Greene, Nigel

49

Hine, Thomas

31

Guest, Val

57, 74, 76, 84

Hitchcock, Alfred

20, 88, 159, 167,

Gunsmoke

19

231

Gwenn, Edmund

58

Hitler, Adolf

19

Hofstadter, Richard

23, 31

Haley, Bill

135–6

Holmes Smith, Christopher

199

Halfway to Hell

144

Holt, Tim

61

Hall, Charles D. (‘Danny’)

111–12

Honda, Ishiro

57, 63–6

Hall, Sheldon

53–54

Hoover, J. Edgar

137–9

Hall, Stuart

50

Horne, Alistair

45

Halliday, Jon

223

‘Horror in the Nursery’

149

Halper, Thomas

220

Horror of Party Beach, The

67–8

Hammer Studios

72–89, 108–33

Hot Car Girl

147

Hammet, Dashiel

172

Hot Rod Girl

144

Happy Days

219

Hot Rod Rumble

147

Hardwicke, Cedric

111

Hot Tub Machine

232 n. 6

Harman, Jympson

87

Hours, The

222

Harryhausen, Ray

59, 64, 98, 100–1,

House and Garden

198

103

House on 92nd Street, The

58

Hartnell, William

49

Hoy, Suellen

27, 31

Hashimoto, Kohji

64

Hudson, Rock

222–3

Hattenhauer, Darryl

177

Hughes, Ted

35, 208

‘Haunter of the Dark, The’

168

Huntington, Lawrence

67

Haunting, The

188

Hutton, Robert

67

Haunting of Hill House, The

180,

Huxley, Aldous

4, 14

182–90, 192–3

Hyman, Eliot

76

Haunting of Toby Jugg, The

39

Hyman, Stanley Edgar

176–9, 194

Hawkins, Screamin’ Jay

135

Hawks, Howard

56, 90

I Am Legend

11–12

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

17

I Dream of Jeanie

225

Hay, Will

74

‘I Like Blondes’

166–9

Hayden, Sterling

30

‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent’

Hayes, Allison

152

135–6

Haynes, Todd

12, 217–18, 221–4,

I Walked With A Zombie

37–8

227, 229–31

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein

146, 151

Haysbert, Dennis

223

I Was a Teenage Werewolf

66, 146,

Hedison, A. l30

151

Hedren, Tippi

233 n. 26

Imitation of Life

222–4, 226

Hefner, Hugh

167

Impulse

68

Heinlein, Robert A.

91

Incredible Shrinking Man, The

57,

Hell Drivers

49

62–3, 91, 103

Hell is a City

84

Independence Day

70

Heritage of Horror

113

Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis

Herrick, Robert

46

211

Herz, Michael

68

Invaders from Mars

21

256

Index

Invasion USA

23

Kim, Kiduck

67

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) King, Stephen

9, 15, 71,162, 219

60, 90

King Kong (1933)

18, 57, 96

Invasion of the Saucer Men

21, 60

Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (aka King King Invisible Invaders

68

Versus Godzilla)

64

Invisible Man (Hammer Studios)

84

Kinsey, Wayne

14

Island of Lost Souls, The

113

Kiss Me Deadly

28

It Came From Beneath the Sea

59–61

Kiss of the Vampire, The

81

It Came from Outer Space

91, 102

Kluckhohn, Clyde

193–4

It Conquered the World

21, 102

Kneale, Nigel

73, 76, 93, 101

Koch, Howard

66

Jackson, Gordon

11–12, 49, 84

Kotetsu No Kyojn (aka Atomic Rulers of Jackson, Rosemary

182
the World)

59

Jackson, Shirley

176–97, 206

Kowalksi, Bernard L.

67

Jacobson, Mark

70

Kraken Wakes, The

91

James, M.R.

36, 50

Kramer, Stanley

29

James, Sid

49

Kristeva, Julia

165

Jameson, Fredric

220

Kristol, Irving

13

Jancovich, Mark

10,162–3, 171

Kubrick, Stanley

30

Johnson, Tor

57

Kynaston, David

16, 33–4, 45, 51

Johnston, Claire

37

Johnston, Derek

10

L.A. Zombie

233 n. 25

Jones, Darby

46

LaBruce, Bruce

233 n. 25

Jones, Darryl

12

Ladies’ Day

202–4

Jones, Ernest

128–9

Ladies’ Home Journal

201–2

Joshi, S.T.

168

‘Lady Lazarus’

209

Journal (Plath)

202

Lake, Veronica

147

Joyce, James

164

Landon, Michael

151

Judas Hole, The

82

Lang, Fritz

37

Jungle Drums of Africa

59

Langer, Susanne E.

193

Juran, Nathan

61

Lasch, Christopher

203

Juvenile Jungle

144

Lassie Come Home

225

Lauer, Arnold

61

Kael, Pauline

31

Laughton, Charles

111

Kafka, Franz

179

Le Fanu, Sheridan

88, 208

Kaiji Shima No Kessen: Gojira No

Le Roy, Mervyn

2

Musuku (aka Son of Godzilla)

65

Leakey, Phil

108

Kaiju Daisenso (aka Monster Zero) 65

Leavis, F.R.

111

Kaiju Soshingeki (aka Destroy All Leavis, Q.D.

111, 127

Monsters)

65

Lee, Christopher

14, 89, 108, 109,

Kaneko, Shusuke

69

125–7, 130

Ka of Gifford Hillary, The

39

Leech Woman, The

152

Karloff, Boris

18, 29, 56, 66, 73, 82,

Lefebvre, Henri

191

111, 113, 151

Leiber, Fritz

180

Keats, John

8

Lejeune, C.A.

82, 84, 112

Kelly, Grace

231

‘Lesbos’

205

Kennedy, David

199

Let Me In

88

Keys, Basil

48

Let the Right One In

88

‘Kidnapper, The’

171

Lewis, Matthew

111

Index

257

Lewis, Peter

201

Marx, Karl

207

Lewisham, Lady

85

Matango (aka Fungus of Terror, Attack of Lewton, Val

37
the Mushroom People)

65

Lichtenstein, Roy

5

Matheson, Richard

11, 63, 92

Life Among the Savages

180

Matthew, Robert

44

Life with the Lyons

73

Matthews Jr., Ernest L.

142

Lights Out

20

Maynard Keynes, John

34

Lindner, Robert M.

137

McArthur, Douglas

25

Little Richard

135

McCallum, David

49

Lom, Herbert

49

McCarthy, Elizabeth

11

London After Dark

42

McCarthy, Joseph

23, 27

‘Lord of the Castle’

180

McDonalds

199, 212

Lorre, Peter

18, 26

McGinnis, Niall

36, 42

Losey, Joseph

66

McGoohan, Patrick

49

Lost Continent, The

20, 56, 95

McLachlan, Kyle

220

‘Lottery, The’

178, 180

Mead, Margaret

176, 193

Lourie, Eugene

66

Medovoi, Leerom

138

Lovecraft, H.P.

158, 163, 167–8, 172

Meka Gojira No Gyakushu (aka Monster Lucas, George

100
from an Unknown Planet)

65

Lugosi, Bela

18, 28, 111, 113, 117,

Melville, Herman

177, 179

126–8

Midwich Cuckoos, The

13, 91

Lymon, Frankie

135–6

Mighall, Robert

129

Lynch, David

219–20

Milland, Ray

20

Millennium Movies

70

MGM

114

Mills, John

126

Macbeth

115

Mind at the End of Its Tether

17

Macmillan, Harold

13, 34, 45

Mister Ed

225

Mad Love

18

Mister Rock and Roll

135

Mad Men

231

Moby Dick

177

Mademoiselle

202

Monk, The

111

Magee, Patrick

49

Monster From Green Hell

67

Magick in Theory and Practice

42

Monster From the Ocean Floor

21, 102

Magnificent Obsession

222

Monster on Campus

103

Magnolia

222

‘Monsters are Due on Maple Street,

Maguire, Tobey

220

The’

12

Mailer, Norman

8, 9, 14

Monster that Challenged the World, The

Malinowski, Bronislaw

193

27, 60–1

Malleson, Miles

116

Monthly Film Bulletin

93, 95, 97–9,

Man-Made-Monster

59

102–3

‘Man Who Collected Poe, The’

Moore, Julianne

222

169–71, 173

Moorehead, Agnes

147, 224

Man in Black, The

73

Morgan, Marabel

211

‘Mannikins of Horror’

168

Morton, Rev Arthur

87

Mansfield, Jayne

150

Moss, Carrie Anne

226

March, William

1

Most Dangerous Man Alive, The

57, 62

Markey, Janice

202, 204, 206

Mosura (aka Mothra)

64

Marsh, Carol

117

Mosura tai Gojira (aka Godzilla Versus Martin, Leslie

44
the Thing)

64

Martinson, Leslie H.

57

Motorcycle Gang

146

258

Index

Mr Drake’s Duck

57

Omori, Kazuki

69

Mulvey, Laura

217

On the Beach

28–9, 31–2

Mummy, The (1959)

84, 109

On the Nightmare

128

Munsters, The

225

On the Threshold of Space

95

Murders in the Rue Morgue

113

Operation Petticoat

29

Murphy, Bernice M.

12, 192

Oppenheim, Janet

46, 52

Murray, Margaret

38–9, 52

Oppenheimer, Judy

180

Mutant

68

Oppenheimer, Robert J.

17, 19, 61

Muzzio, Douglas

220

Orwell, George

13, 132

My Favorite Martian

225

‘Ouija’

207

My Mother the Car

225

Out There

96

Mysteries of Udolpho, The

111

Out of Bounds

142

Mystery Story

93

Owen, Alex

47

Naked City, The

58

PC 49

73

Neal, Patricia

21

Packard, Vance

8, 200

Nesmith, Ottolo

22

Pal, George

20, 23, 95, 100

Never Had it So Good

13

Panic in the Streets

58

Never Take Sweets from a Stranger

84–6

Parents

219–20

New Statesman, The

73

Patterson, James

4–5, 15

New York Times, The

91, 95–8, 101–2,

Pauling, Linus

29

137

Pearson, Roberta

92–3

New Yorker, The

177–8

Peck, Gregory

29

Newfield, Samuel

56

Peggy Sue Got Married

218–19

Newman, Kim

10–11

Penzoldt, Peter

128

Nicholls, John

79, 80–1, 121–2

Perkins, Anthony

29, 167

Nietzsche, Friedrich

167

Perloff, Marjorie

205

Nightmare Man, The

67

Phantom of the Opera, The (1962)

84

Night of the Demon

13, 33–54,180

Philosophical Enquiry, A

111

Night of the Living Dead

68, 226, 228

Picasso, Pablo

167

Nihonmatsu, Kazui, Uchu daikaiji Girara

Pirie, David

113, 128

(aka The X From Outer Space)

66

Place of Enchantment, The

47

Noguchi, Haruyasu

66

Planet Stories

148

Norman, Leslie

66

Plath, Sylvia

7, 35, 173, 177,

Northanger Abbey

110

198–215

North by Northwest

233 n. 26

Platters, The

135

Nosferatu

117, 126

Playboy

166

Not of this Earth

102

Pleasantville

220–21

Nueman, Kurt

59

Poe, Edgar Allan

109, 158, 163, 164,

Nuttall, Jeff

13

169–72, 176, 180, 185

Nutty Professor, The

84

‘Poe and Lovecraft’

163–4, 170

Nyby, Christian

56

‘Poem for a Birthday’

209

Poetics of Space, The

182, 184–6

Oboler, Arch

20

Pony Cart, The

84–5

Observer

79, 82, 84, 112

Post, Sylvia

5, 15

Octaman

67

Potter, David

200

Okowara, Takao

68

Powell, Dilys

113

Old Yeller

223

Praz, Mario

128

Olivier, Laurence

109

Preminger, Otto

11

Index

259

Presley, Elvis

137

Requiem for a Heavyweight

101

Price, Vincent

109

Resident, The

88

Priest, Christopher

94

Revenge of Frankenstein

82–3, 123

Priest, J.C.

142

Revenge of the Creature

103

‘Princess, The’

210, 211

Revolutionary Road

218

Private School

142

Reynold’s News

74, 79

Problem Girls

149

Richardson, Maurice

128–9

Probyn, Elspeth

212

Robinson, Bernard

124, 132

Project M7

95

Robinson, Edwin Arlington

176

Proust, Marcel

164

Rock, Rock, Rock!

76, 135

Psychiatric Quarterly, The

149

Rock All Night

146

Psycho

29, 158–62, 167, 171, 173,

Rock Around the Clock (film)

135–6

174

‘Rock Around the Clock’ (song)

136

Puppet Masters, The

91

Rocketship Galileo

91

Purity and Danger

183–4

Rocketship X-M

56

‘Pursuit’

210

Rock’n’Roll Gal

144

Pyramid Climbers, The

8

Rodan

64

Rodgers, Gaby

28

Quaid, Dennis

223

Romantic Agony, The

128

Quandt, Albert L.

144

Romero, Caesar

56

Quatermass II

76, 93

Romero, George A.

68, 225, 228

Quatermass Xperiment, The

73–5, 93

Rooney, Mickey

57

Queen of Outer Space

97

Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius

20, 24,

25

‘Rabbit Catcher, The’

209

Rosenberg, Max

76

Radcliffe, Ann

111

Rubin, Steve

58

Radcliffe, Daniel

89

Runaway Daughters

146

Radio Times, The

100

Ruskin, John

112

Rains, Claude

111

Raising Demons

180

Sacred and the Profane, The

182, 183

Randell, Ron

57

Sade, Donatien Alphonse François,

Ray, K’Sun

226

Marquis de

128, 210

Ray, Nicholas

137

Sadeian Woman, The

210

Ray

218

Sadleir, Michael

128

Re-Animator

233 n. 25

Safe

222

Reagan, Ronald

216

San Daik Aiju Chikyi Sandai No Kessen

Rebel Without a Cause (book)

137

(aka Ghidra the Three-Headed

Rebel Without a Cause (film)

137–8,

Monster)

64

146

Sandbrook, Dominic

16, 51

Red Planet Mars

21–3

Sangster, Jimmy

74, 77, 80, 82,

Redmond, Liam

36

114–17, 121, 123–4, 126, 130

Reform School Girl

146

Sapphire

84

Reiner, Rob

219

Sartre, John Paul

24

Reisman, David

8

Sasdy, Peter

68

Rennie, Michael

20

Saturday Evening Post

92, 180

Reno, Jean

70

Saw IV

72

Renoir, Jean

37

‘Scarf, The’

171

Report from Space

96

Schatz, Thomas

100

Reptile, The

108

Scott, Ridley

164

260

Index

Searle, Ronald

33, 51

Star Trek: The Next Generation

92

Sears, Fred F.

66

Stars in My Crown

36

Seddok, L’Erede di Santana, (aka Atom Startling Stories

148

Age Vampire)

59

Status Seekers, The

8

Seeing is Believing

71

Steinberg, Michael

201

Sensational Expos é s

145

Stevens, Inger

29

Serling, Rod

12, 29, 101–2

Stevenson, Adlai

23

Sevareid, Eric

136

Stevenson, Robert Louis

109

Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, The

95

Stoker, Bram

80, 109, 115, 127–8,

‘Shadow from the Steeple, The’

130, 132

168–9

Stranglers of Bombay, The

84, 115

Shake, Rattle & Roll!

146

Stribling, Melissa

117, 121, 125, 127

‘Shambler from the Stars, The’

168

‘String of Pearls’

165

Shaun of the Dead

225

Strock, Herbert L.

66

Shederman, Ted

58

Subotsky, Milton

76

Shelley, Mary

20, 22, 28, 82, 109

Suddenly, Last Summer

29

‘Shelter, The’

12

‘Suicide off Egg Rock’

211

Sherdeman, Ted

25

Summers, Montague

127

Shoedsack, Ernest, B.

18

Sunday Times, The

113

Shrinking Man, The

63

Sundial, The

11

Shute, Nevil

28

Super-Science Fiction

163

Shutter Island

218

‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ 167

Siegel, Don

90

Supernatural in Fiction, The

128

Silent Spring, The

30

Suspect

172

Sirk, Douglas

12, 37, 217, 218, 221,

Sutcliffe, Denham

177

222–25, 228

Swank, Hilary

88

Skal, David J.

10

Sweet, Matthew

129–30

Slime People, The

67

Slithis

67

Smith, Kent

37

Takadara, Akira

64

Snyder, Zack

217

Tale of Two Cities, A

126

Sobchak, Vivian

100

Tamiroff, Akim

67

Sondheim, Stephen

5

Tangled Bank, The

178

Sontag, Susan

55

Tarantula

27

Sorority Girl

146

Teen-Age Romances

150

Spellbound

20

Teen-Age Temptations

150

Spencer, Douglas

56

Teenage Caveman

102

Spender, Stephen

13

Teenagers from Outer Space

136

Spengler, Oswald

164

Teller, Edward

19

Spider, The (aka Earth Versus the Spider) Telotte, J.P.

99–100

62

Ten Commandments, The (1956) 99, 100

Spielberg, Steven

100

Tenney, Del

67

Split, The (aka The Manster)

65

Tennyson, Alfred Lord

210

Split Level Trap, The

8

The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

233

Springhall, John

137
n. 27

Stack, Robert

223

Them!

25–6, 30, 57–9, 66, 68, 74

Stalin, Joseph

39, 50

Thesiger, Ernest

111

Stand by Me

219

Thing From Another World, The

Standford, Peter

50, 60

19–20, 55, 60, 90

Index

261

‘Thinking Cap, The’

162–4

Wagner-Martin, Linda

201

This Island Earth

98

Walk the Line

218

This Woman is Dangerous

25

Walpole, Horace

111

Thomas, Keith

212

War Game, The

13

Thompson, E.P.

13, 15, 25, 50–1

War of the Colossal Beast

27, 61

Those Red Heads From Seattle

25

War of the Worlds, The (1953)

23, 74

Timeslip (aka The Atomic Man) 57, 59

War of the Worlds, The (novel)

91

Tobey, Kenneth

61

Wasp Woman

152

Today’s Cinema

89

‘Waste Land, The’

1, 178

Todd, Richard

126

Wastemakers, The

8

Tom Jones

110

Watch It, Sailor!

84

Tomboy

142

Watkins, Arthur

75, 78

Torres, Tereska

142

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Total Joy

211

178, 182, 189–94

‘Tour, The’

205–6

Weber, Max

46–7, 52

Tourneur, Jacques

35–8, 47–8, 51,180

Webling, Peggy

21

Toxic Avenger, The

68

Weil, Sam

68

Traxler, Stephen

67

Weird Tales

168

Trevelyan, John

86–8

Weiss, Joe

144

True Blood

82

Weldon, Joan

58

Truman, Harry

19

Wells, H.G.

17, 31, 91

Tudor, Andrew

90

Werewolf, The

66

Twain, Mark

176

Wertham, Fredric

142, 149–50

Twilight Zone, The

12, 101–2

West Side Story

5

Whaam!

5–6

Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, The

84

Whale, James

22, 111–12

‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’

Wheatley, Dennis

39–43, 45, 52

210–11

When Worlds Collide

20, 95

Whispers in a Distant Corridor

38

U-238 and the Witch Doctor

59

‘White Negro, The’

8–9

Uchi Daikiju Dogura (aka Dagura the Whitmore, James

58

Space Monster)

66

Whittington, Harry

144

Ugly Duckling, The

84

Whizz for Atomms

34

Ulmer, Edgar G.

37

Wilbur, Richard

176, 180

Unidentified Flying Objects

95

Wild One, The

147

Uninvited, The

67

Wilde, Brian

41

Universal Studios

72, 73, 116–17,

Wilder, Billy 37

126, 127

Willans, Geoffrey

33, 51

Willemen, Paul

37

Van Cleef, Lee

59

Williams, Geoffrey

33, 51

Van Doren, Mamie

147

Williams, Grant

57

Van Ghent, Dorothy

176, 178

Willis, Sharon

223

Variety

95, 98, 102–3

Wilson, A.N.

130

Varma, Devendra P.

128

Wilson, Colin St. John

44

‘Very Strange House Next Door, The’

Wilson, Harold

34

(aka ‘Strangers in Town’)

180

Wilson, Jackie

135

Village of the Giants

62

Wilson, Sloane

233 n. 27

Violent Years, The

143

Wise, Robert

20, 188

Vulture, The

67

Wiseman, Thomas

87

262

Index

Witherspoon, Reese

220

Wyman, Jane

222

Witness against the Beast

51

Wyndham, John

13, 91, 94

Wolf Man, The

173

Wolfe, Tom

5

X the Unknown

66, 74–5, 122

Woman in Black, The

9

Women Outlaws

148

Yasua, Noriaka

69

Women’s Barracks

142

Yeats, Richard

218

Wonder Woman

149

Yeats, W.B.

198

Wood, Ed

28

Yesterday’s Enemy

84

Wood, Natalie

146

Yongary, Monster From the Deep

67

Woodbridge, George

116

Young Elizabethan

33, 35

World, The Flesh and the Devil, The

29

Young Love

150

World Without End

57

Young and Wild

146

Worthing Yates, George

25–6

Wray, Fay

153

Zip-Gun Angels

144

Written on the Wind

222–3

Zulu

49

Document Outline

- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- About the Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups

- 2 ‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

- 3 Mutants and Monsters

- 4 ‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The Fifties Hammer Invasion

- 5 Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s

- 6 Hammer’s Dracula

- 7 Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America

- 8 ‘A Search for the Father-Image’: Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch’s 1950s Fiction

- 9 ‘Reading her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthropology

- 10 ‘At My Cooking I Feel It Looking’: Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing

- 11 ‘All that Zombies Allow’ Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven and Fido

- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- About the Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups

- 2 ‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

- 3 Mutants and Monsters

- 4 ‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The Fifties Hammer Invasion

- 5 Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s

- 6 Hammer’s Dracula

- 7 Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America

- 8 ‘A Search for the Father-Image’: Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch’s 1950s Fiction

- 9 ‘Reading her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthropology

- 10 ‘At My Cooking I Feel It Looking’: Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing

- 11 ‘All that Zombies Allow’ Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven and Fido

- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index