The Myth of Harm: Horror, Censorship and the Child 9781501378287, 9781501378256, 9781501378270

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
The myth of harm: An introduction
Introduction
Book outline
Defining horror
Towards a definition of the child
Infantilisation of adults
Myth as narrative
Myth as Gothic
Negative effects
Positive effects
Harm(less) definition
What’s the harm?
Chapter 1: The golden age of Hollywood horror
Introduction
The origins of horror film controversy
Formation of the Production Code
The ‘golden age’ of Hollywood horror
Gothic eugenics
The Payne Fund Studies
The myth of Movie Made Children
The ‘new’ Production Code
The British ‘ban’ on horror films
The decline of the 1930s horror film
Chapter 2: The horror comics controversy
Introduction
Comic books as Gothic texts
From dime novels to comics books
Early comic book criticism
The ‘threat’ of juvenile delinquency
The other ‘Other’
Formation of the Comic Code
From crime to horror
Home is where the heartache is
Seducing the innocent
Horror comic communism
The hearings: An introduction
The Taste Trap
British ban on horror comics
The decline of the horror comic
Chapter 3: The video nasty controversy in the UK
Introduction
Nasty Gothic
Background to the video nasty campaign
The ‘Powerhouse’ that was Mary Whitehouse
‘New Horror’: A prelude to video nasties
VHS nasties hit British shelves
Nasty scene setting
Nasty campaigns
‘The Video Violence and Children Report’
Common-sense censorship
‘Killing of Innocence’
Chapter 4: Gothic video games and ‘murder simulators’
Introduction
New technologies; old fears; same myth
Racing towards death
Body and soul
1993 congressional hearings
Doom and gloom
Video games as Gothic texts
Addicted, desensitised and depraved
‘We’ve got to quit fooling around with this’
Bad science good headlines
Chapter 5: The slender man stabbing case study
Introduction
Cybergothic
The myth that became a man
He’s behind you
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Myth of Harm

ii

The Myth of Harm Horror, Censorship and the Child Sarah Cleary

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Sarah Cleary, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover illustration: Emmett Mulligan All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cleary, Sarah (Media consultant), author. Title: The myth of harm: horror, censorship and the child / Sarah Cleary. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An engaging account of the controversies generated by horror that examines some of the most high-profile media debates around the issue of whether or not horror texts corrupt children”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022019229 (print) | LCCN 2022019230 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501378287 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501378263 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501378294 (epub) | ISBN 9781501378270 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501378256 Subjects: LCSH: Horror in mass media. | Mass media and children. | Censorship. Classification: LCC P96.H65 C53 2022 (print) | LCC P96.H65 (ebook) | DDC 700.4164–dc23/eng/20220722 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019229 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019230 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-7828-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-7827-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-7829-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of figures  viii Acknowledgements  ix

The myth of harm: An introduction 1 Introduction 1 Book outline 5 Defining horror 8 Towards a definition of the child 10 Infantilisation of adults 16 Myth as narrative 19 Myth as Gothic 21 Negative effects 24 Positive effects 26 Harm(less) definition 27 What’s the harm? 30

1 The golden age of Hollywood horror 35 Introduction 35 The origins of horror film controversy 37 Formation of the Production Code 41 The ‘golden age’ of Hollywood horror 43 Gothic eugenics 55 The Payne Fund Studies 60 The myth of Movie Made Children 62 The ‘new’ Production Code 71 The British ‘ban’ on horror films 73 The decline of the 1930s horror film 76

vi

CONTENTS

2 The horror comics controversy 79 Introduction 79 Comic books as Gothic texts 80 From dime novels to comics books 83 Early comic book criticism 84 The ‘threat’ of juvenile delinquency 89 The other ‘Other’ 90 Formation of the Comic Code 91 From crime to horror 94 Home is where the heartache is 99 Seducing the innocent 112 Horror comic communism 116 The hearings: An introduction 118 The Taste Trap 124 British ban on horror comics 126 The decline of the horror comic 129

3 The video nasty controversy in the UK 135 Introduction 135 Nasty Gothic 136 Background to the video nasty campaign 137 The ‘Powerhouse’ that was Mary Whitehouse 139 ‘New Horror’: A prelude to video nasties 141 VHS nasties hit British shelves 152 Nasty scene setting 160 Nasty campaigns 164 ‘The Video Violence and Children Report’ 170 Common-sense censorship 175 ‘Killing of Innocence’ 177

4 Gothic video games and ‘murder simulators’ 185 Introduction 185 New technologies; old fears; same myth 191 Racing towards death 192 Body and soul 193 1993 congressional hearings 197

CONTENTS

Doom and gloom 198 Video games as Gothic texts 202 Addicted, desensitised and depraved 211 ‘We’ve got to quit fooling around with this’ 221 Bad science good headlines 227

5 The slender man stabbing case study 235 Introduction 235 Cybergothic 236 The myth that became a man 240 He’s behind you 245

Conclusion 249 Selected bibliography  251 Index  272



vii

FIGURES

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 5.1 5.2

Lakeside scene from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) with Boris Karloff and Marilyn Harris Cut scene from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) where Little Maria is thrown into the lake ‘Cycle of Horror’, Chamber of Chills Magazine, no. 16, March 1953 ‘Chef’s Delight’, Mysterious Adventures, no. 20, October 1953 ‘Bottoms Up’, Mysterious Adventures, no. 18, February 1954 ‘The Orphan’, Page 8, Panel 7, Shock SuspenStories, no. 14 December 1954 ‘Shoe-Button Eyes!’ Page 7, entire page The Vault of Horror, no. 35, 1954 Front cover of EC’s Crime SuspenStories (entire page) no. 22, 1954 Original cover art for Meir Zarchi I Spit on Your Grave (1978) The first of two original photoshopped Slender Man photographs by Victor Surge featured on the web forum Somethingawful​.c​om The second of two original photoshopped Slender Man photographs by Victor Surge featured on the web forum Somethingawful​.c​om

46 47 97 102 103 108 111 122 157 237 238

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Bound by their immeasurable support and patience, there isn’t a line of this book that has not been shaped in some way by the love and assistance of my family and friends in its journey from scrappy bits of research to the publication you hold in your hands. To Bernice, whose knowledge and determination is forever inspiring. To my midnight writing buddies, Mystery, Allman, Krugs and now Maggie, who kept me company well into the small hours. To Emmett, my gratitude for a glorious childhood well spent watching endless inappropriate VHS. To Leon my thanks for all the years of support and for giving me the space and time I needed without question. To my mother Kathleen whose advice and pragmatism always kept me focused and to my father Patrick who taught me not to fear the monsters but instead, believe in the magic. My endless appreciation and love for all that you have done and continue to do. I am eternally grateful and this book is dedicated to you both.

x

The myth of harm An introduction

Introduction Over one hundred years before the first horror film was shot, in his 1797 review of Matthew Lewis’s controversial Gothic novel The Monk (1796) the poet Samuel Coleridge wrote: Mildness of censure would here be criminally misplaced and silence would make us accomplices. Not without reluctance then, but on full conviction that we are performing a duty, we declare it to be our opinion, that the monk [sic] is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter he might reasonably turn pale.1 Coleridge was not alone in his denunciation of the Gothic as a class of entertainment capable of corrupting the innocent child. Many eighteenthcentury critics of the Gothic described it as something akin to a ‘venereal disease’, or a ‘virus [. . .] spreading in all directions’,2 capable of ‘impressing young imaginations with gross improbabilities, unnatural horrors, and mysterious nonsense’.3 Five years after Coleridge lambasted one of the most read novels of its time, The Monthly Review condemned Charlotte Dacre’s supernatural novel Zofloya; or, The Moor (1802) as a ‘mode of impression which fills the mind of the juvenile reader with horrid ideas of supernatural agency, and makes him fancy like Macbeth, that he sees bloody spectres flitting before his eyes, and ensanguined dangers streaming in the air’.4

Samuel Coleridge, ‘The Blasphemy of The Monk’, The Critical Review. 19, February 1797, pp. 194–200, p. 199. 2 Andrew Maunder, (ed.) Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890, Volume 1. Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), p. xii. 3 Robert D. Mayo, ‘Gothic Romance in the Magazines’, PMLA. 65, 1950, p. 789. 4 The Literary Journal, 1806; cited in Jennifer C. Kelsey, A Voice of Discontent: A Woman’s Journey Through the Long Eighteenth Century (Leicester: Matador, 2009), p. 104. 1

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THE MYTH OF HARM

Likening Dacre’s imaginative impulses to a putrid infection, the review shrieked how: Ladies of her description [. . .] have the seed of nonsense, bad taste, and ridiculous fancies early sown in their minds. These having grown to maturity render the brain putrid and corrupt, and the consequence is the formation of millions of the strangest maggots that one can conceive [. . .] That our fair authoress is afflicted with the dismal malady of maggots in the brain is, alas, but too apparent, from the whole of her production [. . .] This malady of maggots is rendered more dreadful by its being infectious [. . .] It might be a charitable thing to have a hospital for the reception of these unfortunate people while under the influence of the disease.5 Apparently ‘Curst’ and full of ‘every Thing ytShdnot be anywhere’ [sic],6 and ‘proscribed by the canons of good taste and morality’,7 the controversies which beset early Gothic texts, such as The Monk, Zofloya and possibly the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), ultimately generated a historical precedent in terms of how horror was received, especially when children were concerned. Consequently, a mythic narrative of harm which arguably had its roots in Platonic discourse concerning the dangers of art as a corruptive form of imitation and influence grew around Gothic literature and its alleged negative effects on vulnerable consumers incapable of controlling their desires or tastes. Over two hundred years later it appears we are still troubled by these narratives of harm. Having started life in 2018 as a ‘viral game’ which allegedly targeted children on WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook, the Momo Challenge was said to be a meme which encouraged young recipients of messages to complete a series of progressively strange and dangerous tasks from watching a horror movie to taking their own lives. Though nothing was ever substantiated, it was reported that children were dying due to this vague presence which had infected their digital space.8 Online searches for the Momo Challenge produced an avalanche of hits warning parents that the meme was a danger to their children. As letters were sent home to

Kelsey, 2009, p. 104. Mrs Thrale- Piozzi speaking of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, in her Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs Piozzi) 1776–1809 cited in K. C. Balderston, (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 969. 7 Victor Sage, (ed.) The Gothick Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 12. 8 Sourced https://www​.mirror​.co​.uk​/news​/world​-news​/momo​-challenge​-victims​-revealed​-kids​ -14062514 [accessed 10 June 2021]. 5 6

AN INTRODUCTION



3

parents,9 and childcare experts flocked to our screens with vague though sensational admonitions about the dangers of Momo and by extension social media, online games and the internet, it didn’t take long for the Momo Challenge to be exposed as a hoax.10 The fact we fell for such an incredible piece of blatant chicanery, however, belies both a wilful ignorance and a genuine need to displace our fears about child protection on to fictional predators. Instead of viewing Momo as a viral allegory about suicide or more importantly a scathing exposé of how little we actually understand about how the internet works, we assumed that the threat was ‘true’. But as we shall see, truth, that drunken cousin of fact, is simply whatever works at the time providing us with semi-coherent narratives about an often inchoate world. Given the genre’s dalliances with the darker side of humanity, the imbrication of Gothic and amorality gave ‘moral entrepreneurs’ an opportunity to confirm and consolidate a sundry of prejudices and preconceptions about people who engaged with the genre. By the same token, imbuing fictional literature with such a destructive agency to harm and corrupt intensified and substantiated a narrative which was never anything more than a scary story about bogeymen. Consequently, the identification and exploration of the Myth of Harm which is introduced within this book will attempt to interpret how debates over the past century concerning horror and ‘violent media’ were nothing more than a Gothic tale we tell ourselves in order to make sense of a world which is often incomprehensible. With a view to expand upon the research accomplished by horror and media studies scholars, the major impetus of this work is to examine how horror has been and continues to be regulated, restricted and ultimately censored as a result of an ostensible necessity to protect children from the genre’s apparent ability to ‘deprave and corrupt’.11 Exploring the genre’s controversial past, especially when contextualised within debates regarding children, offers a clear historical trajectory which reveals how time and time again narratives of harm purporting scientific evidence, ethical concerns and common sense have been touted as fact when nothing could be further from the truth.

Sourced https://www​.wmar2news​.com​/news​/region​/anne​-arundel​-county​/anne​-arundel​-schools​ -send​-letter​-warning​-parents​-about​-momo​-challenge [accessed 10 June 2021]. 10 Sourced Sarah Cleary, ‘Momo Challenge Worked by Playing to Society’s Underlying Fears’, Irish Times, 13th April 2019. Sourced https://www​.irishtimes​.com​/culture​/momo​-challenge​ -worked​-by​-playing​-to​-society​-s​-underlying​-fears​-1​.3854771 [accessed 10 June 2021]. 11 This phrase is borrowed from the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which states, ‘For the purposes of this Act an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect or (where the article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.’ Sourced https:// www​.cps​.gov​.uk​/legal​-guidance​/obscene​-publications [accessed 22 June 2021]. 9

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THE MYTH OF HARM

Considered by its earliest critics as a corrupting influence, the genre of horror would go on to possess a rather unique position in society as a mainstream entertainment that is constantly under pressure to curb, suppress and censor that which initially has made it so popular – its ability to disgust and to horrify. An allegory for the ‘evil’ that exists in mankind and not its embodiment, one of the key tropes of the genre is the representation of societal ills as a means of release, exploration and belonging. Yet time and time again the genre is found at the centre of controversy charged with the very corruption it seeks to represent. Blaming the mirror for what it reflects, the myth that the genre poses harm to children is as powerful now as it was when Coleridge decried The Monk ‘a Mormo for children, a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee’.12 Bolstered by Joseph Crawford’s claim that ‘the myth of audience vulnerability to moral contagion through new media technologies’ is the most ‘pernicious Gothic fiction of all’,13 this book sets out to track and examine the development of the myth of harm which has dogged the horror genre for centuries distorting reality, obfuscating facts and fuelling anxiety surrounding children and horror. Although work has been published on the positive effects of horror from a psychoanalytic perspective from the likes of Noel Carroll (1990), Barry Keith Grant (2004), Thomas Fahy (2012) and others, critics even to this day have a tendency to remain ambivalent regarding whether or not horror is a harmful influence. For example in ‘Reading like an Alien’ (1995) Kelly Hurley claims that ‘body horror’, such as that discussed in Chapter 3, ‘may be harmful to the consumer’,14 while Ken Gelder states in his introduction to The Horror Reader (2000) how the ‘negative effects of horror, real or imagined keeps the genre downtrodden and free from complexities’.15 In ‘The Justification of Torture-Horror’ (2012) Jeremy Morris offered both sentimentalist and utilitarian readings of films such as Last House on the Left (1972) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005) in order to submit a defence of the practice of watching and enjoying extreme horror. While his thesis that the efficacy of ‘torture-horror’ conversely depends upon a moral audience is rather compelling, he concludes on quite an ambiguous note which arguably undermines his argument declaring that the ‘enjoyment of torture-horror

Coleridge, 1797, p. 199. Italics own. Joseph Crawford, ‘Evolution of Media Technology’, in Justin D. Edwards, (ed.) Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 35–47, p. 46. 14 Kelly Hurley, ‘Reading Like an Alien: Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Cronenberg’s Rabid’, in Judith M. Halberstam and Ira Livingston, (eds) Posthuman Bodies (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 203–224, p. 204. Emphasis mine. 15 Ken Gelder, Horror Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 5. Emphasis mine. 12 13

AN INTRODUCTION



5

is not necessarily immoral’.16 Less vague, however, is Ian Conrich’s claim in ‘Seducing the Subject’ (1997) that ‘kid culture’ is a form of ‘spectacle as entertainment’ whereby plot is subverted in order to heighten visual stimulus, a quality which is apparently manifested in ‘addictive video games’.17 Similarly Carol Davison pathologises video game play asserting that ‘we are offered virtual drug-taking options in some video games that change the pace and ambience of the game (as if video games weren’t addictive enough)’.18

Book outline Focusing on five major controversies from 1931 to the present day, this book seeks to track and trace the myth of harm which had dogged the horror genre. Having unpacked what is implied by the myth of harm including a discussion of how myth and its social construction informs the way we view narratives of harm, the use of the Gothic as a mode to analyse removed from its typical textual remit will also be justified. Following a similar path to the one advocated by Brain McKernan in his article ‘The Morality of Play’ (2013), this book will employ a form of ‘narrative analysis’ in order to ‘gain insight’ into a hundred years of horror and its alleged effects on children. With its roots in ‘semiotics, literary theory, and hermeneutical philosophy’, narrative analysis ‘reveals how social actors understand events by transforming them into stories’.19 Thus these stories or narratives in media reports give form and meaning to often confusing events such as school shootings or child killings. As this book will argue, these stories furnish us with narratives of harm which allow society to discern and organize often inarticulate threats upon which we can shelve the heavy burden of a range of anxieties, agendas and socio-political issues. As a point of departure Chapter 1 explores fears over children watching ‘fright’, ‘terror’ and crime films at the turn of the twentieth century and well into the ‘Hollywood Horror Golden Age’. No doubt a period of

Jeremy Morris, ‘The Justification of Torture-Horror: Retribution and Sadism in Saw, Hostel, and The Devil’s Rejects’, in Thomas Fahy, (ed.) The Philosophy of Horror (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), pp. 42–46, p. 55. Emphasis mine. 17 Ian Conrich, ‘Seducing the Subject: Freddy Krueger, Popular Culture and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films’, in Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan, (eds) Trash: Popular Culture and its Audience (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997), pp. 118–131, p. 121. Emphasis mine. 18 Carol Davison, ‘The Gothic and Addiction: A Mad Tango’, Gothic Studies. 11, (2), 2009, pp. 1–8, p. 6. Emphasis mine. 19 Brain McKernan, ‘The Morality of Play: Video Game Coverage in The New York Times From 1980 to 2010’, Games and Culture. 8 (5), 2013, pp. 307–329, p. 307. 16

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technical advancement and cinematic growth, Sarah Smith refers to this time as the ‘zenith of all concerns regarding children and cinema’.20 In Chapter 2 the explosive rise and notorious fall of American horror comics in the late 1940s to mid-1950s is explored. While looking at a series of horror and exploitation films from the mid-1960s to late 1970s as context to the controversy, Chapter 3 explores the ferment surrounding ‘video nasties’ in the UK. Examining the rather contentious place of ‘violent’ video games, Chapter 4 considers the claim that violent and horrific games have allegedly ‘taught a generation of children to kill’.21 Taking a slight departure, the analysis of so-called violent video games will argue how a sustained narrative of harm which has dogged certain forms of entertainment has now been completely incorporated into the media effects debate. Though often not ‘recognized to be so’, such a reading leads one to conclude, as James Shanahan does, that ‘most of the basic conclusions of media effects work are strongly contingent on context’.22 As this book will argue, contextualised within a myth of harm, media effects research will arguably lead to harmful effects. Having charted the myth of harm throughout a century of horror history, a case study will conclude this book. While so-called moral panics about horror are perhaps considered a rather anachronistic overreaction to emerging technologies, Chapter 5 will offer a reading of the 2014 Slender Man Stabbing as a continuation of the myth of harm well into the twentyfirst century. Sympathetic of the same fears that were espoused in the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s and 1990s, the media reports and related narratives from experts and pundits surrounding the 2014 attempted murder expose how ubiquitous the myth that horror can harm really is.

What this book is not Apropos of tracking the myth, attention must first be apportioned to what this book is not. While the most sustained part will draw upon the many controversies which have blighted the horror genre, this is not an exploration of moral panics solely as they pertain to the horror genre. Though the research contained within this book often straddles much of the rhetoric and themes regarding moral panics, the myth of harm is a myth of Aristotelian extraction in that it gathers ‘the meaning of things’.23

Sarah Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship from Dracula to the Dead End Kids (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), p. 8. 21 See David Grossman, On Killing (New York and London: Black Bay Books, 2009) and Dave Grossman and Gloria Degaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1999). 22 James Shanahan, Media Effects: A Narrative Perspective (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 28. 23 Shanahan, 2021, p. 51. 20

AN INTRODUCTION



7

Linking many periods in history, this book argues that the myth is capable of assimilating disparate moral panics regarding a multitude of mediums and media related to the horror genre into a greater narrative of harm from a child-centric perspective. However, the myth also seeks to incorporate alternative strands of rhetoric into its narrative of harm. For example, in Chapter 1 which explores the Golden Age of Hollywood Horror, problematic academic and quasi-academic research conducted throughout the era will be probed as contributing to contemporary media effects research. Elsewhere in Chapter 2 attention will be given to scrutinising the efficacy of Fredric Wertham’s objectivity when it came to his conclusions regarding comic books and how they were a ‘distinct influencing factor in the case of every single delinquent child’ he studied.24 Especially pertinent to this chapter will be an investigation into how Wertham’s research was appropriated by the Senate Subcommittee Hearings into juvenile delinquency, leading the oncestaunch anti-comic book campaigner to distance himself from the hearings. Elsewhere in Chapter 3, while detailing the video nasty controversy, this reading will also incorporate the manifold voices at the centre of the debate and trace the myth of harm at the centre of the panic from the 1970s right up to the mid-1990s. While the 1980s was a particularly contentious one especially throughout the United States with various associated controversies concerning metal music, daycare centres and board games all contributing to what became the Satanic Panic, no doubt influenced by the zeitgeist in America, the circumstances which led to the video nasty controversy will inform the majority of this chapter.25 While there exists strong parallels and even corollaries between the Satanic Panic and video nasties, it is beyond the scope of this book to include a comprehensive reading of this period in the United States. Because of that, this chapter will limit its reading of 1980s horror films and the myth of harm to the UK video nasty controversy. Regarding the remit of this study, a further qualification must be made regarding the taxonomy of horror discussed throughout. Echoing Jacqueline Rose in her much-cited The Case of Peter or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1994), Catherine Lester muses upon ‘children’s horror’ as an ‘impossible’ subgenre arguing how an immediate problem with the concept of the ‘children’s horror film’ is that the principle intention of the horror film is to scare its audience, but, as

Judith Crist, ‘Horror in the Nursery’, Collier’s. 27th March 1948. Sourced https:// crisisofinnocence​.library​.ryerson​.ca​/files​/original​/da7​c42d​8fc8​886c​e5a5​4d73​bb413ebdf​.pdf [Accessed 2nd July 2021]; cited in David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America (New York: Picador, 2008), p. 101. Emphasis mine. 25 See Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe, Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (London: Fab Press, 2016). 24

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established above, the notion of intentionally scaring children or showing them ‘horrific’ material can be seen as controversial.26 While recognizing that there does appear formal qualifiers between horror and children’s horror in the guise of ratings such as the introduction of PG-13 by the MPAA in 1984, Lester does concede that generic definitions still allude consensus. However, ‘there is an important distinction between films that are merely “suitable” to be viewed by children and those that specifically target children as a core part of the audience’.27 That said, while close attention will be paid to a range of child-centric narratives pertaining to the horror genre, this is not an exploration of children’s participation with horror or whether this horror is deemed ‘suitable’ or not. Rather this is a study exploring the manner in which the genre (in its manifold iterations and interpretations) has been at the centre of a narrative of harm which is fuelled by a myth. Propagated over centuries, the myth espouses the sentiment that children are at risk by the very existence of the genre of horror whether or not they are ‘exposed’ to it. Consequently, while the child’s engagement with horror will be reflected upon throughout, this book will rather disobediently evade the troublesome debate over what constitutes ‘children’s horror’ and instead plunge headlong into arguably a much more contentious and often vitriolic arena of alleged media effects. Tracking the development of a myth as it transforms throughout the aforementioned periods will hopefully provide a measured and conscientious analysis of how insidious this narrative is as it continually threatens to destabilise and entrammel discourse concerning the welfare of children and the rights of adults. Therefore, it is not my intention to sidestep challenging aspects of child-centric horror discourse, but rather momentarily opt out of the debate for fear it detracts from the overall thesis of this book.

Defining horror In terms of a working definition of what is horror, for Gelder it is ‘where the archaic (the “primal,” the “primitive,” the “frenzied subject of excess”) and the modern (the “struggling moral subject,” rational, technological) suddenly find themselves occupying the same territory’.28 How each individual text resolves this entanglement is of course ‘another question’. Recognizing the many variations upon this theme Gelder continues how:

Catherine Lester, ‘The Children’s Horror Film: Characterizing an “Impossible” Subgenre’, The Velvet Light Trap. 78, (Fall), 2016, pp. 22–38, p. 22. 27 Lester, 2016, p. 24. 28 Gelder, 2000, p. 3. 26

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the ‘field of horror’ is a fractured, many-faceted thing and critical depositions not only depend on what is being looked at, and when, but will determine what is being looked at (and what is deemed inappropriate, irrelevant, and so on) in the first place. Like the broader field of cultural production, for example, horror has its high and low cultural components – and these may themselves be seen as absolutely incommensurable with one another. Horror texts at the bottom end of the market, for example, can send the more discerning member of the audience scuttling off to other, more accommodating points in the field.29 Agreeing with Gelder’s first point pertaining to the ‘many-faceted’ nature of horror, his analysis of horror is undeniably informed by quite rigid attitudes towards culturally defined demarcations between highbrow and low brow texts.30 Despite the fact that a large number of the texts under discussion are by his estimation ‘scuttle-worthy’, this book will identify many more which hit more ‘accommodating points in the field’.31 Therefore it would be remiss of this definition of horror to simply accept that low brow horror typically arouses debate and concern. Rather as a testament to the malleability of contemporary horror texts, this book will put forward a more panoramic definition which directly complements the mutable nature of Gothic criticism. Horror will be seen as a category of aesthetic representations continually under suspicion, as it evolves and transforms with each new generation.32 Bypassing any static definition of what is ipso facto horror will help contribute to a larger debate concerning what Darryl Jones denotes as the ‘ethics of representation’ or ‘what can and cannot be shown, and to what extent the government should legislate to restrict the availability and dissemination, or even the production, of violent or otherwise transgressive documents’.33 A further potential challenge encountered throughout is the fact that although the genre of horror is the central focus, the identification of genre is often quite a challenging affair. Although Stephen King believed the definition of horror to be nothing more than a ‘trap’ and he couldn’t think of a ‘more boring academic subject’,34 such an endeavour, though problematic, seeks to streamline and sharpen the focus of such a large undertaking. This

Ibid., p. 4. See Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (New York: Routledge, 2004). 31 Gelder, 2000, p. 4. 32 L. Andrew Cooper, Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture (North Carolina: McFarland, 2010), p. 4. 33 Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Hodder Arnold, 2002), p. 2. 34 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Gallery Books, 2010), p. 16. 29 30

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is easier said than done, however, especially in Chapter 4 when the subject of horror video games is under discussion. In the course of researching this book, it has become obvious that few media effects researchers feel it necessary to differentiate between genres within video games – or see the point of doing so. As a result, much of the research into video games and effects has dissolved horror into two categories of ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent’.35 Consequently, this binarism becomes especially problematic for a generic analyses of video games. Hence, having worked through the various issues and moral implications of referring to something as violent, video games will fall within the broad spectrum of horror for the purposes of this study due in part to their Gothicised status as liminal cultural products.

Towards a definition of the child Defining what is meant by the word ‘child’ seems to be as complex a task as defining what is meant by horror. In the same manner as horror can be construed in several ways, interpretations of the ‘child’ are equally diverse, as there seems to be as many interpretations of the word as there are myths surrounding its construction. Moreover, as this book will argue conceptions of the child are not only historically, culturally and geographically specific, they are also infused with symbolism, allegory and class stratification. Therefore, the term child will come to denote much more than a person under the legal age of eighteen. Commenting upon this complexity, Heather Montgomery concludes that any formal definition of childhood falls between either a social or biological understanding but adds that these categories are in themselves inherently problematic as the ‘idea of “the child” as representative of a whole category of younger people has been shown to be untenable, and age, gender, birth, order and ethnicity all have an impact on the ways that children experience childhood within cultures’.36 One way of approaching a definition of a child is through its legal categorisations. For example, in Ireland a child is considered an immature individual under the ‘age of majority’ who is referred to as a ‘minor’, which denotes ‘a person who is not of full age’ but not ‘an infant’.37 While the age of consent seems to establish a simple binary difference between a child and adult, the British Board of Film

See James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Leonard Annetta, Serious Educational Games: From Theory to Practice (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008). 36 Heather Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives (Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), p. 50. 37 Sourced http://www​.irishstatutebook​.ie​/1985​/en​/act​/pub​/0002​/print​.html​#sec3 [Accessed 29th May 2021]. 35

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Classification (BBFC) considers a child as an individual under the age of eighteen.38 Therefore any films which are designated ‘18’ ‘are for adults’.39 However, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has set their highest restriction one year earlier at R17, claiming that ‘no children will be admitted’ as the rating ‘signals that the content is appropriate only for an adult audience’.40 This rating seems to confuse the notion of child and adult, as the seventeen-year-old ‘adult’, according to the MPAA, must wait another year in which they are considered a ‘legal’ adult before the state and a further three before they can consume alcohol. Not discounting the ‘primary significance of biological relations’, Barry Goldson elaborates upon the idea of a ‘constructed’ childhood in Childhood in ‘Crisis?’ (1997). Emphasising how problematic the notion of childhood is to characterise, he writes how ‘the central contention here is that at any historical moment childhood will be constructed around a complex interplay of competing social, economic and political priorities’.41 He adds that this way of thinking ‘is not intended to negate the primary significance of biological relations, but to shift the focus from notions of naturalistic determinism to an analysis of the conceptual relativity of childhood during the last two centuries’.42 Drawing attention to the relative novelty of childhood studies, Leena Alanen notes that the construction of childhood is made up of a number of different perspectives in which ‘the contemporary “paradigmatic childhood” can be seen to be centrally linked to the larger project of modernity’.43 Thus the ‘child’ or rather the construction of the child is arguably a product of the climate in which it is produced.44 However, as a cultural construction, a number of myths and falsehoods have attached themselves to the concept of childhood. The first of these myths is that childhood is a crystallised period of innocence and children have no interest in accessing the dark and frightening side of life. The second of these myths is the idea that children are now more than ever exposed to violent media.

Sourced http://www​.bbfc​.co​.uk​/download​/guidelines​/BBFC​%20Classification​%20Guidelines​ %202009​.pdf [Accessed 5th September 2020]. 39 Ibid. 40 Sourced http://www​.mpaa​.org​/ratings​/what​-each​-rating​-means [Accessed 6th September 2020]. 41 Barry Goldson, ‘Childhood: An Introduction to Historical and Theoretical Analyses’, in Phil Scraton, (ed.) Childhood in ‘Crisis’? (London: UCL, 1997), pp. 1–28, p. 4. 42 Goldson, 1997, p. 4. 43 Leena Alanen, ‘Women’s Studies/Childhood Studies Parallels, Links and Perspectives’, in Jan Mash and Toby Fattore, (eds) Children Taken Seriously: In Theory, Policy and Practice (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Ltd, 2005), pp. 31–45, p. 38. 44 See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 125. 38

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In reference to the first of these myths, the Romantic image of the innocent and pure child is a notion which is seldom exhibited in reality. Patricia Holland highlights this issue claiming how: Nearly two hundred years after its inception, the once inspirational vision of the ‘child’ as an expression of simplicity and purity has become a shallow stereotype [. . .] the image of innocence lingers only in the most decadent forms on Christmas cards and in the truncated language of the moral right.45 John Clarke similarly notes that ‘[t]his emphasis was widespread amongst the new middle-classes and was provided with powerful intellectual support in the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment view that children were naturally innocent and needed to be directed by appropriate care and education to become good citizens’.46 Citing an 1883 example found in The Ladies’ Magazine, Catherine Hardyment illustrates how childhood amongst the middle and upper classes had ‘became a saccharin-sweet state of purity and innocence’.47 The article depicts childhood as that ‘[W]hich speaks to us of heaven, which tells us of those pure angelic beings which surround the throne of God, untouched by sin, untainted by the breath of corruption’.48 ‘This benign child-centeredness,’ notes Clarke, ‘became popular and was associated with the growth of Romanticism, which saw children as close to nature and in some cases uncorrupted and pure.’49 Arguably the inspiration for this way of thinking was derived from Romantic poets such as Wordsworth whose ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood (1807), resonated with the ideals of childish innocence.50 Paradoxically, the conceptualisation and veneration of the Romantic ideal of childhood innocence during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century coincided with the mass sexual and economic exploitation of the working-class youth. ‘Huge numbers of children,’ Gillian Pugh notes, ‘survived on the streets by prostitution, begging, boot-blacking [. . .] and

Patricia Holland, ‘Childhood versus Children’, in Martin Barker and Julian Petley, (eds) Ill Effects: The Media/ Violence Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 78–86, p. 50. 46 John Clarke, ‘The Origins of Childhood. In the Beginning…’, in Derek Kassem, (ed.) Key Issues in Childhood and Youth Studies (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–13, p. 9. 47 Catherine Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 7. 48 Cited Hardyment, 1984, p. 7. 49 Clarke, 2010, p. 9. 50 Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 27. 45

AN INTRODUCTION



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pick pocketing.’51 This notion of the idealised child hit its most worrying peak with the penchant for ‘Sick Child’ paintings during the early nineteenth century which focused on the dying child ‘as reaching a state of moral perfection which would ensure an afterlife of eternal bliss’.52 Positing the child as an exemplar of ‘simplicity and purity’ only undermines the child’s desire to understand the world around them. In a similar, though not always identical manner to adults, the child can also find relief and entertainment in horror texts and is therefore as indignant at an authority censoring their pastimes as an adult would be. Of course, in terms of the child’s interaction with horror, there are undeniable limits to their ‘sophistication’, to say nothing of the fact that arguing for the right of the child to engage with horror does not necessarily follow that all will or have the inclination to do so. This latter point is problematised in Howarth’s Under the Bed Creeping (2014) in which he regularly invokes sweeping statements regarding children and their relatability to Gothic themes.53 Their understanding of the text, as David Buckingham has remarked, ‘depends to no small extent on the critical perspectives that are made available to them from other sources as parents and teachers’.54 But the child is no mere passive spectator in their interaction with horror: Many people – including children – actively choose to watch or read things that they know will upset or frighten them; and the sadness or fear is often inseparable from the pleasure. Texts that generate such ‘negative’ emotions may also enable us to understand and deal with real life anxieties and concerns.55 Children are frequently (though not always) ‘drawn’ to horror as they incorporate the very fears which habitually consume the child, because children ‘are bound to be drawn to texts that speak to their fear and loss and abandonment, of disgrace and humiliation and offer them ways of coming to terms with them’.56 This sort of introspection tends to clash with perceptions of the child as personifying idealised innocence. Engaging

Gillian Pugh, London’s Forgotten Children: Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2007), p. 27. 52 Sara Holdsworth, Joan Crossley and Christina Hardyment, Innocence and Experience: Images of Children in British Art from 1600– to the Present (Manchester: Manchester City Art Galleries, 1993), p. 70. 53 See Michael Howarth, Under the Bed Creeping: Psychoanalyzing the Gothic in Children’s Literature (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2014), pp. 5, 11, 14, 39, 66, 72. 54 David Buckingham, ‘Electronic Child Abuse? Rethinking the Media’s Effect on Children’, cited in Barker and Petley, 2001, pp. 63–77, p. 66. 55 David Buckingham, Moving Images: Understanding Children’s Emotion Responses to Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 2. 56 Buckingham, 1996, p. 3. 51

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with horror themes often provides audiences with an insight into forbidden arenas of knowledge which can negate or at the very least undermine the child’s perceived naivete. Perhaps then as Rose muses, innocence may not necessarily be a ‘property of childhood but as a portion of adult desire’57 which has been imposed upon the child at the expense of their own agency. Thus, we see at the heart of many crimes concerned with juvenile perpetrators ‘an active struggle to maintain childhood – if not actual children – as pure and uncontaminated’.58 An interest in horror or violent content tends to subvert and destabilise these traditional expectations of childhood. Thus any transgressions outside the conceptualised limits of idealised childhood seek to marginalise the actual child who doesn’t conform. Perhaps this otherness of children is an expression of that which is ‘repressed’ within us. Seeking to ‘mould’ future generations into what Robin Wood calls ‘replicas of ourselves’, we in turn repress in our children what ‘previous generations repressed in us’.59 And so it continues from one generation into another. The second myth that children are now ‘exposed’ to more potentially harmful content than ever before is also one which is similarly based on problematic assumptions concerning childhood. In a 1946 Guild of Pastoral Psychology lecture, Gerhard Adler declared how ‘[I]t is a strange but psychologically most interesting fact that almost every critical period in history considers itself as the worst that has ever existed and as the one that precedes the final doom of mankind’.60 Similarly, each generation seems to think that when it comes to children, they are now in greater danger than ever before. In an article titled, ‘Shots Straight to the Heart of Our Sick Society’, published days after the Dunblane killings in 1996 in which Thomas Hamilton shot dead sixteen children and one teacher at a primary school in Scotland, Andrew Neil wrote that ‘[t]here are some crimes so horrific that they make us all wonder what kind of country we have become’.61 Under the circumstances this was an understandable, albeit emotionally charged appraisal. What was unwarranted, if not unreasonable however (on the basis of the Dunblane tragedy), was his condemnation of

Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1994), p. xii. 58 Patricia Holland, ‘“I’ve Just Seen a Hole in the Reality Barrier!” Children, Childishness and the Media in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century’, in J. Pilcher and S. Wag, (eds) Thatcher’s Children: Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s (London: Falmer, 1996), pp. 12–13. 59 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 67. 60 Gerhard Adler, ‘Psychology and the Atomic Bomb’, Guild Lecture No. 43 (London: The Guild of Pastoral Psychology, 12th August 1946), p. 21; cited in Jerome F. Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 1. 61 Andrew Neil, ‘Shots Straight to the Heart of Our Sick Society’, Sunday Times News Review. 17th March 1996. 57

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‘the values and mores of modern society’ from which ‘monsters are bound to emerge’. No doubt alluding to the erroneous press reportage that Hamilton was obsessed with the action hero Rambo, Neil condemned ‘popular entertainment’ for polluting society and creating a ‘new tolerance in which what was thought to be beyond the pale becomes acceptable’. ‘Young minds’, he abruptly added, were ‘particularly vulnerable’.62 Concluding his article Neil writes how ‘there was a time within my memory when popular culture sought to lift our spirits and encourage what was good, honourable and just in our society. We aspired to what we saw on our screens, and evil was generally given a bad press.’63 However, it could be argued that his article, playing on the fresh grief of a nation, actually reflects a nostalgic desire to escape the present and return to a hyper-idealised vision of a simpler past which never existed. However does this process ultimately become therefore self-defeating? Written forty years before Neil bemoaned the lost innocence of popular culture, Margaret Dalziel in Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (1957) lambasts such sentimental grumblings claiming that: There is a particular force in the conviction that ‘popular’ literature nowadays is far more depraved and degrading than that of earlier times [. . .] It is widely believed that such modern publications as comics, crime fiction, and love stories of the ‘true confession’ type are much worse than their counterparts of former days. Those nostalgically yearning after the more innocent days of children’s pastimes seemingly never came across Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), where he lays out his fears concerning the exposure of children to horror and crime comics where ‘murder, violence and rape are themes’ and ‘gorillas do much more exciting things with half-naked girls than just wrestling’.64 Nonetheless, the point is that while it is outside the remit of this book to determine whether or not children are indeed accessing socalled violent media in greater quantities than ever before, what is important to note is that every generation seems to lament this same intensification. Buckingham has remarked that ‘[t]here is a kind of grandiose cultural pessimism here: the modern world is seen to have collapsed into a spirit of inexorable moral and cultural decline. Essentially we are all going to hell, and it’s the media and consumer culture that is taking us there.’65 Caught up in this apocalyptic melee, children are seen as ‘vulnerable victims’. However,

Neil, 1996. Ibid. 64 Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Main Road Books, 2004), pp. 326–327. 65 David Buckingham, The Material Child: Growing up in Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 18. 62 63

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the ‘banal possibility that most children (and their parents) are reasonably well adjusted and doing fairly well – or simply that society has become more fluid and diverse – is not one that can be entertained’.66 Yet with the passing of one generation and the maturity of another into adulthood for the most part unscathed, these generational arguments hold little water. Such protean definitions of the child who paradoxically needs protection yet still have the potential to threaten the moral fabric of society are perpetuated throughout the myth of harm as it travels from one generation to the next. In a final effort to formalise a more dynamic understanding of childhood, perhaps understanding it as a period of disadvantage may prove beneficial. ‘Children,’ writes Neil Postman, ‘are a group of people who do not know certain things that adults know.’67 In Children Beware!: Childhood, Horror and the PG-13 Rating (2020) Filipa Antunes furthers Postman’s definition by expanding upon this lack within childhood as a period defined by its boundaries. Thus, Antunes deduces, ‘we know childhood because we know limits.’68 Such a definition can at least be considered reasonable, especially when one probes the limits of what is appropriate for children to read, watch and play. However, while it is well understand that childhood and adolescence is a period of testing and pushing past boundaries, understanding childhood through its limitations may problematise neat definitions even further, especially when viewed within the context of adult infantilisation, class and censorship.

Infantilisation of adults Returning to Neil’s article momentarily, it is ironic that he should concern himself with the vulnerability of ‘young minds’ especially considering it was a 43-year-old man who had previously been blacklisted from various youthfocused organisations who committed the Dunblane shootings. Regardless, it brings up an interesting point concerning the conflation of weak minds, class and adult infantilisation within the myth of harm. Throughout the nineteenth century a fondness for Gothic literature was often attributed to weak mindedness especially amongst woman and the working classes. Infantilised by their interests in ‘vulgar sufferings’, critics were on hand to denounce such literature, even going as far to make efforts to limit such publications on mental health grounds. In one such review published in 1802, Scots Magazine was extremely critical of the Gothic:

Buckingham, 2013, p. 18. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (London: W.H. Allen, 1983), p. 85. 68 Filipa Antunes, Children Beware!: Childhood, Horror and the PG-13 Rating (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2020), p. 4. 66 67

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Besides generating imbecility of mind, the sensibility of readers of novels, it will likewise be observed, is easily awakened, and the tear of sympathy quickly afforded to an imaginary tale of woe, while, it is probable, to a scene of real distress, if it comes not attended with circumstances similar to those related in a romance, pity is denied as they know not how to compassionate what appears to them to be vulgar sufferings. Such is the effect of these false representations of life produce on weak youthful minds.69 Undermining any artistic, cultural or social benefit the genre of horror has, though incredibly offensive, the ‘weak minds’ argument is repeatedly invoked throughout the myth of harm as a way of othering and pathologising tastes in horror. Giving credence to this highly contentious notion, ‘British censorship’, argues Tom Dewe Mathews, has worked with the ‘long-serving, silently spoken rubric: the larger the audience, the lower the moral mass resistance to suggestion’.70 Expanding upon this theme, Julian Petley continues: Debates about media effects tend to focus on how children and young people are supposedly affected – usually for the worse. But lurking behind these fears of ‘corruption of innocent minds’ one finds, time and time again, implicit or explicit, a potent strain of class dislike and fear. The object is often the spectre of the working class in general – at other times it is more specifically defined as an ‘underclass’, an ideologically loaded version of what used to be called (equally ideologically) the redundant population, the relative surplus, the residuum, the lumpenproletariat, the social problem group, the dangerous classes, the undeserving poor and so on.71 For example, Mathews cites an anxious Ken Penry, then deputy director of the BBFC (1967–88), who claimed that those who found the recent trend in video nasties harmless were worryingly wrong. He observes how, now and again, you get clever dicks who say, ‘Ah this is art. This is bigger than it seems’. But I think of Joe Bloggs who’s going to the Odeon on Saturday night who’s not on that wavelength. He’s going along seeing it

W.W., ‘On Novels and Romance’, Scots Magazine. 64, 1802, pp. 470–474; Emma Clery and Robert Miles, Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 211. Emphasis mine. 70 Tom Dewe Mathews, Censored: What They Didn’t Allow You to See and Why: The Story of Film Censorship In Britain (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p. 2. 71 Barker and Petley, 2001, p. 170. 69

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literally and I always keep that in mind. Joe Bloggs is the majority and film censorship is for the majority.72 In other words, it seems the working classes and those too weak minded to decipher the difference between fact and fiction must also be protected. Another more subtle form of infantilisation is highlighted by the seemingly lowly status of agency afforded to parents within the myth of harm. Persistently redefining the very practice of parenting through different methods and modes, child experts dole out often conflicting advice concerning what a child should and should not engage with. Ultimately, these conflicting messages often lead parents to feel both confused and guilty for not providing the perfect environment to raise the perfect child. Unpacking the concept of the ‘Paranoid Parent’ sociologist Frank Furedi highlights a major generational fear which amounts to ‘failing our children’. He suggests that parents are quite vulnerable to the charge that they lack the ability to care for their children adequately. He adds that this vulnerability can ‘hold parents’ captive to whatever is offered as the latest advice’ from experts who seemingly know more about their children than they do.73 Thus, in a move to offset this supposed ineptitude, Furedi argues, parents often overcompensate especially when it comes to listening to expert opinion regarding the well-being of their children. Consequently, this ‘parental paranoia leads to mistrust and renewed demands for even more drastic security measures’, adding that ‘the commercial sector is more than happy to feed the parent’s appetite for more security’.74 As a consequence, the practice of ‘over-parenting’ is said to be just as dangerous for the child and contributing in part to the myth of harm which constantly surrounds the vulnerable.75 Not all commentators, however, agree with Furedi’s controversial model of hyper-parenting or ‘invasive parenting’,76 which in a climate of ‘“inflated risk” leads parents to micromanage all aspects of their children’s lives in an effort to protect the child from adverse experiences’.77 Furedi’s assertion Penry quoted in Mathews, 1994, p. 250. Frank Furedi, Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2002), p. 86. 74 Furedi, 2002, p. 3. 75 Edith Buxbaum in Your Child Makes Sense: A Guidebook for Parents (1949) highlights the issue of parents constantly seeking reassurance that their child is normal. In W. W. Bauer’s Stop Annoying Your Children (1947), the author asserts that ‘too much science can ruin childhood as easily as too little’. W. W. Bauer, Stop Annoying Your Children (New York: Bobs-Merril, 1947), p. 5. 76 See M. Hill, et al., Parenting and Resilience (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2007). And M. Ungar, ‘A Constructionist Discourse on Resilience: Multiple Contests, Multiple Realities among At-Risk Children and Youth’. Youth & Society. 35 (3), 2004, pp. 341–345. And M. Ungar, ‘Resilience across Cultures’, British Journal of Social Work. 38, 2006, pp. 218–235. 77 Diane M. Hoffman, ‘Risky Investments: Parenting and the Production of the “Resilient Child”’, Health, Risk & Society. 12, (4), August 2010, p. 387. Sourced http://www​.guardian​ 72 73

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that ‘the image of a “child at risk” is the product of current adult sensibilities and imaginations’78 continually resonates in popular discourse concerning the perceived threats of the modern world. ‘Parenting advice and research,’ asserts Furedi, ‘bears the stamp of moral and cultural values and concerns. These days, matters are further complicated by the lack of consensus about moral norms and values. [. . .] We live in an era of moral confusion – here the absence of consensus encourages competition between moral values.’79 And it is within all these liminal spaces between what constitutes horror and harm; conceptions of childhood and actual children; advocacy and agenda and morality and self-importance where the myth of harm prevails.

Myth as narrative Having developed in tandem with the Gothic genre since the late eighteenth century, the myth of harm is the principal narrative at the core of media effects debates within the horror genre forging links between culturally disparate historical epochs and exists in a continual state of metamorphosis remodelling to suit the cultural climate of each new epoch. Evocative of McKernan’s use of narrative analysis when researching the New York Times video game reportage,80 the myth of harm is a composite of social narratives zoomed out to not only include one medium within a particular period but an entire genre which has been at the centre of these narratives of harm for over a century. As the following chapters detail, the myth of harm acts as a default social narrative allowing for unchecked ‘moral evaluation of both the actors and the proceedings’ all in the name of child protection.81 Presented as tales of mental, moral and physical harm and facilitated through the register of media sensationalism, moral entrepreneurship and political ‘showboating’, the myth of harm is habitually used as ‘an instrument of ideology’.82 Referencing Roland Barthes, Christopher Flood argues that myth ‘purveys, reinforces, and validates practices, beliefs, and values which are themselves the products and supports of a socio-economic

.co​.uk​/books​/2003​/dec​/20​/featuresreviews​.guardianreview7 [accessed 14 March 2020]; See Rachel Pain, ‘Paranoid Parenting? Rematerializing Risk and Fear for Children’, Social and Cultural Geography. 7, (2), April 2006, pp. 221–243. Also see Hara Estroff Marano, A Nation of Wimp (New York: Crown Publishing, 2008); Carl Honore, Under Pressure: Rescuing our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting (New York: Harper One, 2009); Lenore Skenaz, Free-Range Kids (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), and Levine Madeline, The Price of Privilege (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 78 Furedi, 2002, p. 90. 79 Ibid., p. 160. 80 McKernan, 2013. 81 Ibid., p. 313. 82 Christopher Flood, Political Myth (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 164.

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order’.83 Similarly the diverse elements which nurtured this myth equally serve to bolster a central theme concerning the protection of children from the so-called harmful effects of the horror genre. Creating meaning and selfexpression through the stories we tell ourselves, Jerome Bruner furthers this point arguing how: Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors. Unlike the constructions generated by logical and scientific procedures that can be weeded out by falsification, narrative constructions can only achieve ‘verisimilitude.’ Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and ‘narrative necessity’ rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness, although ironically we have no compunction about calling stories true or false.84 Begot of generations of social narratives, morality tales and culturally proscribed norms, the myth ‘distorts’ reality. If the myth is as Barthes argues neither a lie nor a confession, but an ‘inflexion’,85 genuine fears over that which we don’t fully comprehend are co-opted and narratives of harm are spun in a crucible of real fears generated from scientific research, sensational media reports, classism, cognitive dissonance and displaced moral outrage. In other words, to cite the oft quoted aphorism from King: ‘We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.’86 The irony here of course is that the genre of horror is a manifestation of these fears and not the thing to fear. Horror works in a parallel fashion to the myth of harm, drawing from and on our displaced anxieties about life and helps to confront such fears. Horror puts a face on our fear and gives it a name. But instead of confronting the message, we kill the messenger. And the fear grows like a virus, facilitating these panics as they rise to a crescendo only to fade into oblivion until we find another product to latch our inarticulate fears onto. Though narrative theory is a composite of semiotics, literary theory and hermeneutical philosophy,87 the myth of harm can also be read within the context of Gothic and horror studies. Binding the various controversies under discussion, the myth dictates that not only is the theme of children at risk akin to a Gothic story but the mode in which this ‘Gothic story’ is transferred via the media, pro-negative

Flood, 2002, p. 164. Jerome Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, Critical Inquiry. 18, (1), 1991, pp. 1–21, p. 4. 85 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage Books, 2009), p. 129. 86 King, 2010, p. 13. 87 McKernan, 2013, p. 313. 83 84

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effects researchers and moral crusaders is also decidedly Gothic.88 Hence the myth operates on a number of levels whereby both the narratives of harm and the mechanisms in which these narratives are told equally invoke the monstrous tale that somehow horror fiction is capable of harming children. While still acknowledging horror’s textual relevance, the Gothic in this sense is simultaneously observed ‘as a living thing, and as an agent of culture’.89 By utilising such a mode of interdisciplinary criticism, the circumstances within each chapter will therefore be read as part of a Gothic narrative of harm in which the myth that the horror genre is capable of harm is propagated to benefit a number of separate issues such as the policing of moral boundaries and the deflation of larger sociological concerns.

Myth as Gothic Initially used as a descriptive term signifying the barbaric, the Gothic eventually came to signify a structural opposition to the classical approach in terms of architecture, literary and narrative devices. The term Gothic therefore became something of an antithesis for refined and coherent structures within literature as well as architecture, art and poetry. This descriptive term which eventually gave rise to a genre lent its name to an emotional, irrational, archaic form of expression. In complement to Barthes’ earlier claim of myth as distortion, Patrick O’ Malley has observed how the Gothic is similarly a ‘distortion of the past produced as the anxiety of the present’.90 Thus the Gothic can act as a cultural lens and a ‘linguistic paradigm through which we can interpret experience and culture’,91 providing what Catherine Spooner refers to as a ‘language and a set of discourses with which we can talk about fear and anxiety’.92 Shaping both our experience and identity, as Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville observe, ‘certain events and realities have become “Gothicised”’.93 Regularly invoking the language of ‘transgression, excess and monstrosity’94 to interpret tragic or horrifying events which defy explanation, these Gothic stories which thrive in the machinations of media

Crawford, 2015, p. 35. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville, ‘Introduction’, in Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville, (eds) The Gothic and The Everyday (Hampshire: Macmillan, 2014), p. 4. 90 Patrick O Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 12. 91 Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville, 2014, p. 4. 92 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 30. 93 Piatti-Farnell and Beville, 2014, p. 3. 94 Fred Botting, Gothic (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), p. 8. 88 89

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reportage create manageable narratives for ‘unmanageable realities’.95 As a result seriously disturbed and disadvantaged children and teenagers are referred to as ‘evil’96 or ‘monsters’.97 This will be become especially apparent throughout Chapters 3 and 4 as society struggles to comprehend the actions of young children who kill. Contributing to a growing area of research within Gothic criticism, the myth of harm seeks to engage with work pertaining to the diversification and mutability of the Gothic outside of its traditional textual parameters. Speaking of the diversification of this Gothic perspective, Scott Brewster has observed that in ‘the latter twentieth-century, the tendency has been to celebrate Gothic as a scandalous and transgressive psychosexual arena of forbidden desires and excess that threatens bourgeois order’.98 Such a view works in concert with yet another interpretation of the Gothic as providing ‘a language and a lexicon through which anxieties both personal and collective can be narrativized’.99 Thus, outside of its ‘formal literary structures’,100 the Gothic has the potential to provide unique perspectives and engage in discussion on a range of ‘contemporary impulses’101 concerning history, culture, space and time and provide a unique framework to debate controversial issues such as the alleged effects of horror on children. Within Gothic discourse, hyperbolic symbols are regularly invoked in order to represent that which is unpresentable; that which is monstrous.102 Consequently, horror fiction is symbolically charged with ‘monstrosity’ due to its alleged ability to somehow harm. However, within Gothic discourse, the term ‘monstrous’ or ‘monster’ is informed by a more subversive inference. Aside from its ability within popular culture to shock, terrorise and disgust, as Gelder remarks, ‘the word monster is linked to the word demonstrate: to show, to reveal’.103 In other words, the monster within horror is typically

Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5. 96 Sourced James Nye, ‘“I Wish He Had Never Been Born”: Adam Lanza’s Father Breaks His Silence On “Evil” Son Who Killed 20 Children at Sandy Hook School in First Interview Since Tragedy’, Mail Online. 10th March 2014. Sourced http://www​.dailymail​.co​.uk​/news​/article​ -2577174​/I​-wish​-never​-born​-Adam​-Lanzas​-father​-makes​-startling​-admission​-son​-killed​-20​ -children​-Sandy​-Hook​-school​-interview​-tragedy​.html​#ixzz3CYl42VmI [accessed 6 September 2020]. 97 Referring to the Bulger case: ‘How Do You Feel Now, You Little Bastards’, The Star. 25th November 1993. 98 Scott Brewster, ‘Gothic and the Question of Theory’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, (eds) The Gothic World (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 308–320, p. 321. 99 Spooner, 2006, p. 9. 100 Piatti-Farnell and Beville, 2014, p. 3. 101 Taken from the Preface to Byron and Townshend, 2014. 102 See Maria Beville, Gothic Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), p. 41. 103 Ken Gelder, ‘Introduction to Part Three’, in Ken Gelder, (ed.) The Horror Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 81. 95

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perceived as a ‘harbinger’ of societal degeneration and not its cause. Moreover, as Gelder remarks, if ‘monsters signify something about culture, then culture can (at least to a degree) be read through the monster’.104 Such a perspective creates a ‘much wider multidisciplinary space for the study of the Gothic’.105 This last point is an integral aspect of utilising a Gothic mode of criticism as it not only provides a critical lens in which society can be read in relation to a desire to restrict and censor the horror genre, but it also accommodates the wide breadth of research already done within other disciplines on the alleged threat horror fiction poses to children. Such a multidisciplinary approach will hopefully offer fresh perspectives to research concerned with controversial horror while simultaneously grounding contemporary Gothic criticism within an established tradition of cultural and media studies. Thus as Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien argue, ‘[t]he fascination with the legacies of the Gothic, and its connections to cultural practices, testifies to the mutating nature of Gothic scholarship and the way in which Gothic concerns bleed into areas of both academic and popular interest that have not been historically associated with the literature of terror.’106 Strategic as it is symbolic, the need to protect a child from an intangible threat forms the stimulus behind the myth. Placing children at the centre of any controversy immediately reframes the emphasis. When such a controversy is concerned with perceived attacks on morality and threats of harm, claim makers raise the stakes making it impossible not to take notice. ‘Lurking behind these judgements’, Buckingham observes, ‘are further prejudices about taste and cultural value’ which habitually use ‘these apparently scientific arguments’ to ‘justify what are clearly moral judgments, particularly about the influence of sexual and violent content in the media’.107 Furthermore: making children the focus of claims often provides a powerful means of pressing emotional ‘buttons,’ and hence of commanding assent even when the actual target is much broader. If harmful influences in society can be shown to impact specifically on children, the argument for controlling those influences come to appear much stronger.108 While utilising the work of critics within the aforementioned fields of cultural and media studies, this book will also present the myth of harm as

Gelder, 2000, p. 81. Piatti-Farnell and Beville, 2014, p. 6. 106 Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, ‘Introduction: The Gothic Compass’, in Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, (eds) New Directions in Twenty-First Century Gothic (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 3. 107 Buckingham, 2013, p. 11. 108 Ibid., p. 17. 104 105

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a way of perceiving each era as part of a bigger narrative pertaining to the control and regulation of children’s pastimes, the policing of cultural tastes, the infantilisation of adults, political scapegoating, class discrimination and media sensationalism, all obfuscated by a myth that horror can harm. Continually invoking a narrative of harm in order to obscure not only our own fears but also generational judgements about morality and taste, evinces a similar characteristic of the Gothic genre which probes ‘conceptual questions about aesthetic form and taste, about verisimilitude and fantasy, and about how we read and write the past’.109 In seeking an explanation for this insistent need to invoke this myth of harm, David E. Morrison maintains that secular lifestyles which placed less emphasis upon strict moral guidelines, enlightened by Christian doctrine, have left people ‘confused about how they should live, and that they were left adrift in an indeterminate sea of uncertainty, but all the time anchored by the pragmatic principle of protecting themselves and those close to them from harm’.110 For Morrison, this model of contemporary living is informed by a mistrust of the world around them,111 which in turn has the potential for further intensification when the image of the ‘child as victim’112 becomes in essence the embodiment of ‘risk from harm’.113 Morrison further suggests that instead of appealing to ‘foundational truths’ or values, cultural issues are now determined by the application of scientific evaluation as demonstrated by an insistence on media reports to cite academic research regardless of its competence. As a consequence, ‘harm’ has not only been mythologised, but as a wider concept it has become ‘a central plank in the debate over symbolic representations of the world’.114

Negative effects A major feature of the myth of harm concerns the issue of harm derived from ‘negative effects’.115 Considered by Martin Barker and Julian Petley an

Brewster, 2014, p. 310. David E. Morrison, Matthew Kieran, Michael Svennevig and Sarah Ventres, Media and Values: Intimate Transgressions in a Changing Moral and Cultural Landscape (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), p. 86. 111 Morrison, Kieran, Svennevig and Ventres, 2007, p. 86. 112 Buckingham, 2013, p. 8. 113 Frank Furedi, Paranoid Parent: Abandon Your Anxieties and be a Good Parent (London: The Penguin Press, 2001), p. 28. 114 Morrison, Kieran, Svennevig and Ventres, 2007, p. 90. 115 See Buckingham, 1996, p. 98; Steffen Hantke, (ed.) Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2007), p. 154; W. James Potter, Media Literacy (London: Sage, 2010), p. 361; Raymond W. Preiss, Mass Media Effects Research: Advances Through Meta-Analysis (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 142. 109 110

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ideologically loaded term the word ‘effects’ has come to insinuate ‘negative, judgmental and censorious connotations’.116 The imbrication of harm and media effects arguably has the potential to ‘frame’ research within a narrative of harm which can then create erroneous and spurious correlations by dint of association.117 While exploring these very limitations within the study of media effects, Shanahan argues how ‘framing is another way of arguing that content has influences without seeming to argue that particular propositions in and of themselves have effects’.118 While not necessarily arguing that all research within media effects suffers from framing or ‘persuasion research’,119 he continues that ‘everything is a frame for everything else in a context in which holistic narrative understandings are more important than hierarchically structured views of information organisation’.120 While incidents of such framing can be identified throughout this book, perhaps the most notable lie within Chapters 3 and 4 in which video nasties and so-called violent video games come under fire as corruptive influences with little to no corroborating data. As will repeatedly be the case, when the data does not provide evidence or enough evidence of negative effects, so powerful is the frame the material accused will remain guilty due to its potentiality or may-ness to harm. Here the myth of harm burns brightest as it ‘transforms history into nature’. Reaching the ‘very principle of myth’ Barthes continues that ‘in the eyes of the myth-consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept, can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is read not as a motive but as a [rational] reason’.121 Within the myth, meaning is ‘emptied’ in a process Barthes refers to as ‘adhomination’ only to be replaced by a socially constructed concept which has passed through numerous emotional registers. The validity of such research as reported in the media is created by ‘freezing’ the concept into a stable and fixed meaning which is utterly contrived and hides the true motivation of its creation behind what Barthes refers to as verisimilitude or the appearance of real.122 In order to fully comprehend the motivation behind these narratives of harm, the issue of how media affects children negatively must be supplanted Barker and Petley, 2001, p. 18. Examples include school shootings (James N. Meindl and Jonathan W. Ivy, 2017); underage crime (Anderson et al. 2003); morality (Matthew Grizzard et al. 2016) and developmental delays (Eveline A. Crone and Elly A. Konijn, 2018). 118 Shanahan, 2021, p. 47. 119 Ibid., p. 49. 120 Ibid., p. 51. 121 Barthes, 2009, p. 129. 122 See Barthes, Criticism and Truth (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1987). 116 117

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by a quest to understand why fictional representations are constantly implicated in complex social issues such as juvenile delinquency, mental health and school shootings. In response to the ‘effects debate’ Petley and Barker state quite categorically that ‘those who insistently make these claims are asking the wrong question’, adding that: their question has the same status as those who for centuries, insistently asked if human illnesses, the death of the pigs, thunderstorm, and crop failures were the result of witchcraft. The fallacy is that you have to have a ‘thing’ called ‘witchcraft for the question to make sense in the first place.123 Echoing Barthes’ claim regarding the transformation of history into nature, from such a perspective it is not a case of proving or disproving effects but the acknowledgement that the very field of media effects and ‘violent media’ is morally and culturally loaded.

Positive effects Before moving forward it should be noted that while the following chapters draw attention to the inherent weaknesses and falsehoods of much of the research concerning horror and negative effects, this book is not conversely an argument for the positive effects of horror. In complement to the close readings of some of the more controversial texts littered throughout this book, discussions concerning horror from a pro-effects perspective are beneficial in offering a well-rounded account of the genre’s tumultuous history. However, issues of scope immediately arise as a comprehensive exploration of positive effects may compete for space. Instead, this book assumes a position close to that of Barker, whose research seeks to understand why horror is constantly implicated, as opposed to questioning how it affects. Moreover, the relationship between pro/negative effects research and the media presentation of this work habitually exhibits undeniable discrepancies which both exaggerate claims and use inconclusive evidence as a means to validate certain ‘commonsense’ claims about the nature of media effects on children. As a result, while it is advantageous to refer to studies which advocate positive effects, it may be just as problematic to spend too much time concentrating on this area. Therefore the real issue here is exploring why horror remains

Barker and Petley, 2001, p. 1.

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embroiled in narratives of harm after a century of research which has failed to produce any conclusive evidence.

Harm(less) definition The socially constructed image of the vulnerable child at risk is one of the most ubiquitous anxieties of the twenty-first century. Juxtaposed with an insidious threat of moral corruption from horror texts, the ostensibly noble quest to protect the child from such indiscernible harm is contrasted by a purportedly insatiable desire amongst those working in the field of horror to produce such contentious material. Although efforts to protect children from horror are pervasive to the point of intrusive, definitions of what actually constitutes harm are seldom delivered in any satisfactory way. Arguably, this may be down to a number of divisive and even arbitrary bureaucratic, cultural and clinical interpretations all imbued with specific characteristics reflecting often disparate agendas. While it may actually prove impossible to arrive at any universal or unequivocal definition, reflecting on the polysemous nature of harm is vital to understanding just how tenebrous the myth of harm has and continues to be. Therefore, it may be easier to examine definitions of harm already in place and as a jumping-off point probe how the BBFC defines harm. According to their current guidelines, the role of the rating system is ‘to protect children and vulnerable adults from potentially harmful or otherwise unsuitable media content’.124 While they are quick to claim that this is done in a manner which refrains from any impingement upon the rights of an adult to view material, these rights do not extend beyond either the law or that which is ‘potentially harmful’. The configuration of harm and unsuitable here is problematic as it seeks to conflate two quite separate issues as one and the same. Acknowledging how ‘[m]edia effects research and expert opinion on issues of suitability and harm can be inconclusive or contradictory’, BBFC’s definition of harm which follows is redolent of many groundless criticisms of the horror genre: In relation to harm, we will consider whether the material, either on its own, or in combination with other content of a similar nature, may cause any harm at the category concerned. This includes not just any harm that may result from the behaviour of potential viewers, but also any moral harm that may be caused by, for example, desensitising a potential viewer to the effects of violence, degrading a potential viewer’s sense of

Sourced https://www​.bbfc​.co​.uk​/education​/secondary​-students​/guidelines​-intro [accessed 29 August 2021]. 124

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empathy, encouraging a dehumanised view of others, suppressing prosocial attitudes, encouraging anti-social attitudes, reinforcing unhealthy fantasies, or eroding a sense of moral responsibility. Especially with regard to children, harm may also include retarding social and moral development, distorting a viewer’s sense of right and wrong, and limiting their capacity for compassion.125 Therefore, if definitions of harm derived from the media effects research tradition are problematic due to their ‘highly contestable’ status, upon what does the BBFC base its own concept of ‘harm’? The answer received from a past BBFC director David Cooke (2004–16) was that their ‘parent statute’, ‘The Video Recordings Act’ of 1984, provided the precedent from which the BBFC derives its attitude to ‘harm’.126 However, as the VRA doesn’t actually define harm it seems more than a little specious to base their interpretation upon it. A decade on after the bill was first announced, in 1994 an amendment sought to define ‘harm’ using a number of criteria. Taking into consideration a number of factors, the amendment stated that The designated authority shall, in making any determination as to the suitability of a video work, have special regard (among the other relevant factors) to any harm that may be caused to potential viewers or, through their behaviour, to society by the manner in which the work deals with – (a) criminal behaviour,

(b) illegal drugs, (c) violent behaviour or incidents, (d) horrific behaviour or incidents, or (e) human sexual activity.127 While harm is indeed mentioned, no concrete meaning of what constitutes harm is provided. With such broad strokes, arguably one is left with more questions about what actually constitutes harm than before as we now have to excavate a number of terms for meaning such as ‘violent’, ‘horrific’ and ‘human sexual activity’. Moreover, we ultimately find ourselves back at square one as the whole amendment rests on the assumption that film can cause harmful behaviour in the first place. Reflective of the manner in which the adhomination of a concept ‘can remain manifest’ without actually explaining or having any perceptible ‘interest in the matter’,128 it’s clear here that protection from harm is invoked

Ibid. David Cooke, Director of the BBFC, personal correspondence, dated 3 May 2014. 127 Sourced https://www​.legislation​.gov​.uk​/ukpga​/1984​/39​?view​=plain. [accessed 18 July 2021] 128 Barthes, 2009, p. 129. 125 126

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as a motivating factor to restrict and regulate films, but what exactly constitutes harm is left open for interpretation. Although he recognizes this issue, Cooke nevertheless maintains: Perhaps the most one can conclude is that there are some films for some individuals in some circumstances where there may be cause for concern. Beyond that, there is something inherently problematic about trying to generalise from lab experiments, on typically student volunteer across the huge gulf to real world situations in all their variety. There are also major ethical constraints about experimenting on children. Hence our search for a much more capacious approach to harm.129 Irrespective of the fact that both Cooke and the BBFC guidelines acknowledge the failings of media effects research, they conversely still adhere to its model. While the BBFC did not confirm to what extent certain imagery is capable of harming a child, in conjunction with Cooke’s personal correspondence, the BBFC did inadvertently substantiate claims that such concepts of harm are nothing but a justification for the potentiality of certain content causing offence. In other words, due to the fact that the BBFC’s interpretation of harm pertains to indeterminable concepts such as social retardation and moral corruption, without any clear framework of how such concepts are correlated with horror films, it remains at the discretion of a BBFC reviewer to define harm. Perhaps the questions being asked surrounding harm are in essence the problem as they tend to reduce the loaded question of whether or not certain content is indeed harmful.130 Recognizing that the rhetoric of the ‘pro-effects’ camp and the ‘null-effects’ camp has numerous similarities despite the fact that they are ‘posed as alternative positions’, Andrea Hargrave and Sonia Livingstone argue for a reconciliation between the two positions, predicated upon the acknowledgement that while there may be ‘modest harmful effects for certain groups, these effects being perhaps smaller than the many other causes of violence that may, in turn, merit greater public policy interventions but they are not, nonetheless, either insignificant or unsusceptible to intervention’.131 While reducing the many complexities surrounding the issue of effects, the main point of contention within such a hypothesis is that it fails to recognize the wider social implications of aligning a horror text with harm, regardless of negligibility. As past cases have indicated, any perceived affiliation between the child and horror text will be exploited

David Cooke, Director of the BBFC, personal correspondence, dated 3 May 2014. Andrea Millwood Hargrave and Sonia Livingstone, Harm and Offence in Media Content: A Review of the Evidence (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2009), p. 42. 131 Hargrave and Livingstone, 2009, p. 43. 129 130

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within the myth of harm. While seeking a reconciliation between the ‘pro’ and ‘null’ effects camp is an interesting hypothetical endeavour, the need to completely disassociate the issue of ‘harm’ from fictional representations, thus destabilising the myth, is now more urgent than ever.

What’s the harm? With each new generation, opposing forces both within and outside science and academia wage war on ‘harmful’ material which inevitably includes horror and related texts such as video games and digital forms of storytelling such as forums and memes. But this is a war waged against paper tigers who arguably pose no actual threat other than undermining the status quo, confronting humanity’s hubris and providing entertainment for the masses. As a battleground, the field of negative media effects is littered with the corpses of these paper tigers. Accused of corruption, immorality and injury, horror texts such as the ones described in the following chapters are denounced and vilified as agents of harm. While consensus on what exactly constitutes harm remains elusive and the very ineffability of the term an impediment to ratiocination, for the sake of argument and without wishing to sound reductive, when it comes to the narratives of harm what is the harm exactly? With no clear definition of harm, where children are concerned is it not better to be safe than sorry? One could wonder what all the fuss is about if the end goal was the protection of society’s most vulnerable. Therefore, defaulting to a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach,132 especially where children are concerned, seems the most ethical, if not practical? With its origins in Environmental Policy, such an approach is embodied within the ‘precautionary principle’ which ‘compels society’, as Eva Lievens asserts, ‘to act cautiously if there are certain – but not necessarily absolute – scientific indications of a potential danger and if not acting upon these indications could inflict harm’.133 Formulated by a cross-section of environmental policymakers and academics at a Wisconsin conference in 1998, the Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle follows (1998) that: ‘Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment of human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.’134 While

Poul Harremoës, et al., (eds), The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons for Early Warnings (London: Earthscan, 2002), p. 4. 133 Eva Lievens, Protecting Children in the Digital Age: The Use of Alternative Regulatory Instruments (Boston: Martinus Nijhofff Publishers, 2010), p. 38. 134 Nicholas Ashford et al., ‘Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle’, January 1998. Sourced http://www​.gdrc​.org​/u​-gov​/precaution​-3​.html [accessed 4 January 2020]. 132

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Lievens is quick to note that policymakers have ‘never explicitly’ referred to the ‘Precautionary Principle’ in the formation of regulatory measures for children in the field of media effects, this may be because ‘the protection of minors against harmful media content benefits from its “acquired status” as a goal of public interest’.135 Drawing parallels between public policy regarding media effects and the precautionary principle, she continues: The decision to pursue this goal of public interest is of a political nature and one that has usually been favourably received, even when one is unable to fall back on sound, unanimously agreed upon scientific evidence. It has traditionally been accepted that is justified to err on the side of caution when it comes to the protection of vulnerable beings against potential harm.136 Ostensibly one could argue in favour of such a supposition; however, Lievens’s interpretation of regulation and public policy concerning media effects fails to recognize the controversies in which media effects research is founded. While her analysis ‘that this goal of public interest is of a political nature’ has merit, it is only a half-truth as a large portion of rhetoric concerning harmful media effects is informed and ultimately consumed by lay people or what Aristotle referred to as ‘untrained thinkers’.137 Moreover, as argued earlier, once the issue of media effects and harm is contextualised within a child-centric narrative the issue becomes all the more emotionally charged and empirical meaning is consequently emptied. Therefore, if as Walter Fisher argues that narratives which are designed to aid the communication process are ultimately ‘moral constructs’, ‘public moral arguments’ which are ‘oriented towards what ought to be’ tend to be ‘undermined by the “truth” that prevails at the moment’.138 Never a static image, the prevailing truth at the time typically leads one back to ambiguous bromides about protecting children from harmful media effects. In an effort to draw parallels between public policy regarding media effects and the precautionary principle, perhaps the most striking weakness in Lievens’s comparison is that she presupposes that there exists a ‘potential harm’ from media effects in the first place. But again, even if such public policy was founded on wellintended falsehoods what is the harm? Historically speaking, the harm caused by accusing the horror genre specifically, and violent media in general of negative media effects is of a grave nature. As subsequent chapters will alight on the following in great Lievens, 2010, p. 38. Ibid. 137 W. Fisher, ‘Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument’, Communication Monographs. 51, 1984, pp. 1–22, p. 12. 138 Fisher, 1984, p. 12. 135 136

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detail, apropos of demonstrating how the myth of harm has masqueraded as fact, it is important nonetheless at this early stage to emphasise the manifold ways in which real tangible harm has been committed and continues to be inflicted. Most notably, invoking the myth while scapegoating certain media obfuscates complex social issues such a gun control, poverty, domestic abuse and mental illness. Considering we now live in the most liminal of times in which the checks and balances that are necessitated by objective proof are now marginalised in favour of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news,’ observing such a historical trajectory in which the myth of harm is actualised as fact becomes all the more pertinent. To say nothing of the cost to the taxpayers in funding these studies, the legal ramifications of implicating and in certain cases indicting the horror genre and violent media within tribunals, federal investigations and criminal cases seek to undermine the integrity of the legal system by calling to the stand imps and devils from the fireplace. Moreover such legerdemain frequently distorts policy concerning child welfare, media regulation and criminal cases.139 Furthermore, the allegation that those who engage with or create horror could somehow be capable of harm has serious and far-reaching implications potentially marginalising societally deemed outliers who are often drawn to the genre. As many opponents of these negative media effects theories can attest, defending the genre can often have serious economic and personal ramifications as jobs, careers and reputations are lost and tarnished amidst false allegations and media sensationalism. Finally, one of the most insidious ways in which real harm is committed is located within the motivations of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who use children as emotional buttons to espouse calls for stricter regulation and censorship driven by morally superior agendas. Observing how such individuals encounter ‘evil’ where others see entertainment, they feel it is their moral duty not to rest until this evil is defeated. ‘The prototype of the rule creator’, observes Howard Becker: is the crusading reformer. He is interested in the content of rules. The existing rules do not satisfy him because there is some evil which profoundly disturbs him. He feels that nothing can be right in the world until rules are made to correct it. He operates with an absolute ethic; what he sees is truly and absolutely evil with no qualification. Any means is justified to do away with it. The crusader is fervent and righteous often self-righteous.140

Such as the James Bulger murder trial in 1993, the murder trial of Christopher Harris in 2009 and the ‘Slender Man Stabbing’ in 2014. 140 Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in Sociology of Deviance (New York: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1997), p. 147. 139

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In order to gain public support for the enforcement of such rules, they appeal to various narratives of harm loaded with emotional issues such as vulnerable children and distil them into one dominant and more importantly tangible threat. Thus, the campaigner ‘becomes a professional discoverer of wrongs to be righted, of situations requiring new rules’.141As recurring characters throughout horror’s long and controversial history, these moral entrepreneurs rely heavily on the ‘pro effects’ model, common sense and ‘better safe than sorry’ approach. Yet unlike the precautionary principle which posits an ‘informed and democratic’ process which is open to a ‘range of alternatives, including no action’,142 moral entrepreneurs position their arguments within a strict binary between good and bad. In other words, you are either for the horror genre or against protecting children – a reductive choice for the majority of people that arguably renders the entire negative effects debate incoherent. On the other hand, given that a large portion of the negative effects debate is steeped in pejorative myth making, such cognitive dissonance is perhaps to be expected. Locating the first major controversy of modern cinematic horror within 1930s America, we now turn to what has been referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood Horror.143 While exploring the extent to which horror films were considered by various movements to be a negative influence, this chapter examines how the era set many twentieth and twenty-first-century precedents in terms of how the myth of harm was invoked in order to regulate and restrict horror cinema due to its apparent ‘risk’ to both younger and vulnerable audiences.

Becker, 1997, p. 153. Perhaps in the parlance of our own times such an individual may be referred to as a keyboard warrior. 142 Ashford et al., 1998. 143 See Gregory William Mank, Hollywood Cauldron: 13 Horror Films from the Genres’ Golden Age (London: McFarland, 1994). 141

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1 The golden age of Hollywood horror

Introduction On 28 August 1895 audiences bore witness to arguably what was the first horror film. Produced by Thomas Edison and directed by Alfred Clark, it depicted the 1587 beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. Though only thirtyone seconds long it packed quite the punch as its silent grainy footage exuded a remarkable realism anticipating perhaps the low-budget faux-realism of the video nasty era some fifty years later. Just one year later, Georges Méliès would follow with his phantasmagorical horror Le Manoir du Diable (The Manor of the Devil or The Haunted Castle) in 1896. Within a couple of years, as the twentieth century dawned, the novel innovation of film was proving a favoured pastime in local pictures houses across the United States and Europe.1 It wasn’t long, however, before old fears concerning the horror genre and the preservation of children’s morals crept again back into cultural discourse as the ‘shock of the new’ transplanted nineteenth-century concerns regarding penny dreadfuls and dime novels into film. ‘Pictures’, according to one Kansas University philosophy professor, were more ‘degrading than the dime novel’, because they represent real flesh and blood characters and import moral lessons directly through the senses. The dime novel cannot lead the boy further

Early horror films included Esmeralda (1906), The Hunchback (1909), The Love of a Hunchback (1910) and Frankenstein (1910). 1

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than his limited imagination will allow, but the motion picture forces upon his view things that are new, they give first-hand experience.2 One of the earliest concerns was expressed by a YMCA official report from 1908 which feared that: Unless the law steps in and does for moving-picture show what it has done for meat inspection and pure food, the cinematograph will continue to inject into our social order an element of degrading principle. The only way that the people and especially the children, can be safeguarded from the influence of evil pictures is by careful regulation of the places of exhibitions.3 Evaluating the level of threat between cinema and dime novels, in both statements there is a desire to equate films with Victorian preoccupations concerning moral, ethical and physical decline which reached something of a fever pitch throughout the fin de siècle. A reference to both meat and ‘pure food’ underscores the idea that parents must be wary of what their child ‘consumes’. Representing fears surrounding the introduction and assimilation of new technology, such a comment appeals quite stridently to the myth of harm as Gothic narratives of felonious activity and mephitic consumption are invoked. Observing how myths concerning childhood and myths pertaining to new technology often meet at an intersection between harm, vulnerability and modernity, Buckingham writes how: both positive and negative arguments draw on essentialist notions both of childhood and of technology. In effect, they connect a mythology about childhood with a parallel mythology about technology. Thus, children are seen to possess a natural, spontaneous creativity, which is somehow (paradoxically) released by the machine; and, at the same time, they are seen as vulnerable, innocent and in need of protection from the damage that the technology will inevitably inflict on them.4 A familiar trope within the myth of harm, this fear of the new will crop up again and again as one controversy fades and another is ignited.

Cited in Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 10; Larry May, Screening Out the Past: Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 40. 3 Letter to the Editor, from Darrel O. Hibbard, Boys’ Work Director, YMCA, Indianapolis, Indian; The Outlook. 105, (July 1912, p. 599; Black, 1996, pp. 9–10. 4 Buckingham, 2013, p. 45. 2

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Though much has been written upon this era in Hollywood, this chapter seeks to expand the usual limits of discussion to include a reading of the Hollywood Production Code with a specific focus on the horror genre and the manner it was used to engineer quite stringent censorship regulations on all cinema. While exploring the development of the myth within the context of Depression-era America, special attention will be given to a number of horror films at the centre of various controversies, namely Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) and Freaks (1932). Though these films have in the past endured quite rigorous analysis,5 as part of a wider narrative of harm this book proffers a fresh context for evaluation. Concentrating primarily on US reactions to the perceived dangers of Hollywood ‘fright films’, this chapter will also examine how the UK dealt with ‘problematic’ American horror films accumulating in a UK ‘ban’ in 1936. Alternating between these two countries, this book will adopt a similar pattern of investigation to Joanna Bourke in Fear: A Cultural History as she similarly alternates between the United Kingdom and the United States, charting the presence of fear as a cultural phenomenon.6 Central to this investigation will also be an analysis of Henry Forman’s controversial book Our Movie Made Children (1933). While controversy concerning the methodology, procurement and efficacy of scientific data related to media effects has raged unabated since its emergence, Forman’s book marks a distinct period within the myth of harm whereby research was extrapolated and misinterpreted in order to condemn the film industry and its alleged effects on children, thereby propagating erroneous narratives as scientific fact.

The origins of horror film controversy Fearing that children would mimic the actions of on-screen criminals, at the turn of the century all focus seemed to be on crime films. Discouraged by the popularity of the revenge film The Black Hand (1906) British newspapers such as the Sheffield Telegraph claimed that these violent films were directly involved with the rise in juvenile crime as young boys had broken into a shop using ‘tricks’ which they had acquired while watching such films.7 In response to the emergence of these harm narratives by 1909 the UK Home Office brought in some of the earliest restrictions on the film industry in the

See David Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001) and Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1936–1946 (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2007). 6 See Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005). 7 Cited in Smith, 2005, p. 22. 5

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shape of the Cinematograph Act of 1909.8 This Act required the licensing of all premises exhibiting films and would grant local authorities and councils throughout the UK power to censor the exhibition of certain films. Four years later in 1913, a governing body in the form of the BBFC was elected by parliament to control, restrict and organize all the various ad hoc bodies into one unified system.9 As allegations flew that these crime films could influence a child to identify with criminals thus impairing moral judgement, the central mission for these new bodies was ostensibly the protection of children. However, considering the early emphasis on juvenile delinquency and film watching, arguably these new bodies were set up to protect the public from the potentiality of juvenile delinquency and not necessarily children from harm. In an early example of the increasing anxieties towards this new medium and juvenile delinquency in 1913 The Times declared: Before these children’s greedy eyes with heartless indiscrimination, horrors imaginable are [. . .] presented night after night [. . .] terrific massacres, horrible catastrophes, motor car smashes, public hanging, lynchings [. . .] All who care for the moral well-being and education of the child will set their faces like flint against this new form of excitement.10 Three years later in 1916 Home Secretary Herbert Samuel, together with ‘the opinion of a number of Chief Constables’, professed ‘that the recent great increase in juvenile delinquency [was], to a considerable extent, due to demoralising cinematograph films’.11 So fearful were the censors of the alleged effects of screen crime upon children, in a 1919 report the BBFC announced that ‘no serial in which crime is the dominant feature, and not merely an episode in the story, will be passed by the Censor’.12 In spite of such fears any evidence of such correlations between juvenile delinquency and watching film remained conjecture. Across the Atlantic, economically speaking post-war America after 1918 was a vastly different place. ‘With money flowing in,’ Jonathan Rigby notes, ‘America entered into a hedonistic splurge of consumerism.’13 A consequence of this surge in commercialisation

The Act was initially put in place as a safety measure which could monitor and shut down potential theatres which were considered fire hazards. 9 Censors would later be changed to Classification in 1984. 10 The Times. 12th April 1913, in Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), p. 63; Geoffrey Pearson, ‘Falling Standards: A Short, Sharp History of Moral Decline’, in Martin Barker, (ed.) The Video nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1984a), p. 88. 11 Cited Michael Mitterauer, A History of Youth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4. 12 Cited Smith, 2005, p. 31. 13 Jonathan Rigby, America Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema (London: Reynolds & Hearn LTD, 2007), p. 43. 8

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was a post-war explosion of interest in true crime. Nearly ten years before Bonnie and Clyde would become two of the most renowned celebrity killers in popular culture, America was gripped by the Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb Murder Trial in 1924. Dubbed by the media, ‘The Thrill Killers’, the American public not only became engrossed in every detail surrounding the teenage murderers, but through the medium of film it had a chance to rekindle its love affair with lurid and explicit crime initially whetted by dime novels a century before. By the mid-1920s, visiting a picture house was fast becoming a popular form of cheap and accessible entertainment for young people. Children who relished the action and special effects found a viable form of inexpensive amusement providing them with a form of autonomy over their leisure time as dimes had done before. As there was no form of censorship or any organized restriction upon the entry of minors, children of all ages were admitted without restriction to indulge in a range of films which were deemed increasingly inappropriate though exceedingly popular in the late 1920s. While crime favoured a more explicit form of representation, early horror films or ‘terrors’ as they were initially called, such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), The Golem (1920), Nosferatu (1922), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Monster (1925), relied heavily on Gothic conventions such as atmosphere, setting and tone with little to no explicit violence or sex. Though there had been a certain amount of fuss about the release of films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and F. W. Murnau’s unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1922, the genre had escaped any real controversy in isolation from the rest of the 1920s crime output. The advent of the first horror ‘talkie’ in 1928 changed all of this. Inviting a more somatic dimension to the viewer’s experience, the use of sound compounded burgeoning fears surrounding new technology. Directed by Roy Del Ruth, The Terror (1928) was not only the first of its kind in the horror genre, but it was also the second film released by Warner with sound.14 Even though the ‘innate threat of horror films was their combination of sex, violence and the supernatural, which broke taboos, challenged Christian values and subverted social order’, the real controversy was synonymous with the advent of the talkie.15 The horror film was the perfect model to test out the limits of sound. Working in complete harmony with the tone and thematics of horror, these once-benign films now intentionally carried an increased sense of menace and dread. ‘[A]tmospheric music and sound effects’, as Smith observes, increased the sense of drama, while ‘creepy-voiced macabre dialect and a liberal dose of blood-curdling screams combined to

The Jazz Singer in 1927 was the first feature-length part-talkie. Directed by Bryan Foy, The Lights of New York followed a year later was heralded as the first feature-length full-talkie. 15 Smith, 2005, p. 57. 14

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make these films far more thrilling than their silent counterparts’.16 A year later, however in September 1929, an even greater threat to the American nation surfaced when Wall Street crashed triggering one of the worst economic depressions in US history. From that point on the frivolity and excess of the 1920s faded, leaving in its place a paranoid and deprived cultural landscape. Commenting upon the era US censor Jack Vizzard wrote in his memoirs See No Evil (1970) that with ‘the crash the party was over. In the littered debris of confetti and ticker tape, an enormous sense of guilt set in [. . .]. In a mood of sobriety, a chastened citizenry reacted against those symbols of its great debauch and begin to punish them.’17 In this despondent atmosphere, ripe for religious reflection and intervention, narratives of harm flourished as the nation’s moral hygiene became public discourse amongst religious groups and moral guardians. Conversely, this desolate and restrictive landscape would also facilitate a more transgressive movement which probed the limits of representation and interrogated social anxieties as Hollywood embarked upon its ‘Golden Age’ of horror. With employment scarce, education inadequate and poverty and crime rates rising across the country, the Depression signalled the start of many ‘scientific’ investigations into why the country was failing. Unsurprisingly, along with the crime rates, juvenile delinquency was considered to be on the rise. With few job prospects and limited educational opportunities, children were left hanging around street corners with little to do, often turning to petty crime to supplement both their own and their household’s income. Unfortunately, many overt links between juvenile delinquency and poverty were often neglected in favour of casting blame upon increasingly popular scapegoats, such as the latest cinematic sensation – ‘terrors’. With an increased emphasis on moral decline, inquiries into the causes of juvenile delinquency were frequent and included the League of Nations conferences in 1926, 1936 and 1938. No doubt influenced by their American counterparts, in the UK the National Council of Women gathered in 1930 to discuss the issue of violence in film. Arguably the most influential of these in the United States were the privately funded Payne Fund Studies (PFS) which was a self-styled ‘foundation devoted to the welfare of youth, in financing a nationwide research into the degrees of influence and effect of films upon children and youth’.18 Accusations about the dangers of cinema were nowhere near unanimous, however. Anticipating the calls for harsher legislation around gun ownership in the twenty-first century, social philosopher H. M. Kallen Ibid. Jack Vizzard, See No Evil; Life Inside a Hollywood Censor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 39. 18 Henry James Forman, Inc. Payne Fund, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillan Ltd, 1935), p. 4. 16 17

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questioned the necessity of invoking narratives of harm around the film industry when there were more salient issues to address in America such as ‘crowded slums, machine labor, starved emotions, and unreasoning minds’.19 These issues Kallen argues were far more ‘dangerous to morals, property and life than [. . .] any motion picture’.20 But voices such as Kallen were unfortunately in the minority and cinema became a major focus of public health in the early 1930s. Embroiled within public narratives of harm, scientific research throughout the decade (as is often the case now) was frequently invoked as empirical fact regardless of scrutiny or validity. As illustrated repeatedly throughout the following chapters, these results were often misinterpreted, misleading and quite often deliberately modified to suit a particular agenda and narrative. Before turning to the PFS, however, which arguably set a controvertible precedent for justifying media effects research on horror and its alleged effects, tracing the development of the Production Code in response to the horror genre provides an interesting insight into how the genre was perceived as a threat in the first place.

Formation of the Production Code In response to an increasing unease about the effects of film upon children, having resigned from the role of postmaster general, William Hays became the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and established the Studio Relations Committee which would serve as a self-censoring board for the film industry.21 Wary of the ambiguous social mores reflected in the films of the era, there was a growing pressure from religious institutions and public welfare groups for the reinforcement of federal censorship which they proposed would ultimately save children from the corruption of Hollywood generally and of the horror genre specifically. Emblematic of many of the views at the time, so alarmed by the popularity of the talkie Fr. Daniel Lord, a professor of dramatics, wrote in his autobiography years later: ‘Silent smut had been bad, vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance.’22 In 1929 Lord devised a code which he hoped would put an end to the ‘nation’s corruption’. Reinforcing

H. M. Kallen, Indecency and the Seven Arts: And Other Adventures of a Pragmatist in Aesthetics (New York: H. Liveright, 1930), p. 215. 20 Kallen, 1930, p. 125. 21 See Mathew Bernstein, Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation (London: The Athlone Press, 2000); Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 22 S. J. Lord, Played by Ear the Autobiography of Daniel A: Lord (New York: Loyola Pr., 1956), p. 295. 19

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emerging fears over new technologies and effects on vulnerable minds, Lord viewed the combination of sound with ‘striking visual images’ as an atrocity ‘irresistible to the impressionable minds of children, the uneducated, the immature, and the unsophisticated’.23 Redolent of the castigations levelled at Gothic literature for corrupting ‘weak minds’, while similarly anticipating calls throughout the video nasty era and beyond era to protect children and ‘vulnerable adults’ alike, once instigated the Code ‘would limit the amount of “horrible stuff” which pour[ed] out of Hollywood’.24 It contained strict guidelines which banned nudity, excessive violence, white slavery, profanity, drugs, lustful kissing and a whole range of suggestive actions which could potentially degrade the morals of its audience.25 Once completed, the Code became something akin to that of a cinematic creed amongst the clergy. Often seen by some critics as a way of placating an increasingly intolerant and powerful Catholic Church,26 this list of various ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ was later formalised as the Motion Picture Production Code – more commonly referred to as the Hays Code in January 1930.27 Together with the help of Martin Quigley and Joseph Breen who were PR men hired by Hays (both staunch Catholics), the Code was ‘sold’ to the American public and facilitated by religious organisations, educational boards and women’s clubs – the latter two having influences beyond the domain of the Catholic Church.28 The growing power of the Church within Hollywood facilitated on various levels their desire for tighter controls, especially pertaining to sex, crime and horror all in the name of protecting the morals of the nation’s youth. Seeing the Code as not only a ‘theological prolegomenon’ but also as a ‘cultural guidebook’, with echoes of Victorian rectitude, Thomas Doherty writes that the 1930 Code ‘evinced concern for the proper nurturing of the young and the protection of women’,29 amongst other social issues. With no other evidence other than a dislike of certain thematic representations, the Code was the embodiment of an injudicious correlation between taste and harm dressed up as morality. While Doherty’s view of the Code perceived it as ‘a polished treatise reflecting long and deep thought in aesthetics, education, communications

Black, 1996, p. 40. Lord, 1956, p. 129. 25 Black, 1996, p. 40. 26 Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 131. 27 The following is a list of what was considered unacceptable: profanity, nudity, drugs, sexual perversion, white slavery, miscegenation (sex between the white and Black races), childbirth and ridicule of the clergy. 28 See Anthony Slide, Banned in the USA: British Films in the United States and Their Censorship, 1933–1960 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), pp. 2–6. 29 Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 6. 23 24

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theory and moral philosophy’,30 arguably it also performed as a moral highway between the film industry and the general public, which sought to filter and condemn films apparently at odds with the Catholic ethos. In the construction of the Production Code in 1930, a form of theological morality primarily dictated by the Catholic Church had been woven into the various ‘Do’s and Don’ts’. Thus, as Doherty argues, the ‘amalgam of Irish-Catholic Victorianism coloured much of the “cloistered design” of Classical Hollywood cinema’.31 Straying from the Code, whether intentional or not, essentially represented a corruption of a ‘moral code’ laid down not by industry professionals familiar with the narrative conventions of cinema but by the Catholic Church. However, it was not until the formation of the League of Decency that the Code was enforced with any real conviction. Conversely, while the Code was in development, there was a burgeoning interest in a genre which not only sought to test the Code at every level but also subvert its ideology.

The ‘golden age’ of Hollywood horror Between 1931 and 1934 the horror film formed a popular and profitable new category of entertainment as producers and studios alike recognized the genre as no mere fad.32 People were hungry in more ways than one and while cinema couldn’t provide solutions to the fiscal woes of millions of Americans, the horror film granted audiences an opportunity for revelry and, more importantly, reflection about the state of the nation. As ‘monster movies opened up the possibility of psychic lawlessness’, describing the rise of the monster in the wake of the Depression, David Skal astutely observes how the ‘[c]ataclysmic junctures in history usually stir up strong imagery in the collective mind, and the years following the 1929 economic crash were no exception’.33 In other words, the Hollywood monster in an otherwise barren economy ‘was a gangster of the id and unconsciousness’ within the rich vista of horror movies. With many studios facing financial ruin due to the economic crisis, they were willing to supply the public demand for this ‘psychic lawlessness’, even if this meant disregarding certain aspects of the Production Code. While the methodology of many reports published at the time on the alleged negative effects from watching films was questionable to say the

Ibid. Ibid. 32 Skal, 2001, p. 144. The term ‘horror film’ was not widely used previously and was in many ways an invention of 1931. 33 Skal, 2001, p. 144. 30 31

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least, by the early 1930s narratives of harm were pervasive. Circumventing potential censure, many film producers practised caution by subtly disguising proscribed themes in well-known narratives or invoking transgressive qualities within their creations, which had up until now escaped any formal suppression. Setting the precedent for this new wave of horror films, Tod Browning’s Dracula was seen as a landmark film in terms of casting, special effects and sound quality. But what really excited bosses at Universal was that it offered the public the murder, mystery and sex it so craved in gangster films without fear of reprimand as ‘there was nothing in the production Code about vampires’.34 Released within months of the Austrian national bank failing (thus triggering the economic collapse of Europe), Dracula was a huge box-office success.35 Even in Great Britain, where the film had received an ‘A’ certificate, thus restricting children’s attendance without adult supervision, it still was a major hit. Heralded by numerous marketing ploys as ‘The weirdest story that ever reached the screen’,36 children were drawn by the lurid and colourful advertising and promises that the film would be ‘Horrific’, ‘Scary’, ‘Screamy’ and ‘Terrifying’.37 Yet, contrary to its popularity, within weeks of its opening the MPPDA received numerous objections to Dracula, making it the first in a long line of horror films during the early 1930s which was characterised by its apparent harmfulness to children. ‘I cannot see one redeeming feature in this picture’, complained one anonymous viewer. ‘It is the most horrible thing, [. . .] The author must have had a distorted mind and I cannot understand why it was produced. I cannot speak too strongly against this picture for children.’38 Elsewhere, the film’s apparent immorality was questioned, as one commentator described the film as ‘[u]nwholesome and ghastly, morbid, inhuman [sic] and pointless. In this day of high pressure living, strained nerves and constant excitement it seems too bad that such pictures with [a] strong influence on the emotions should be allowed anywhere.’39 In further denigration of the title, it was lamented how ‘it’s insane horrible details shown to millions of impressionable children, to adults already bowed down by human misery, will do an infinite amount of harm’.40 Echoing the anxieties of Victorian eugenics, in a letter to the MPPDA, PTA report chairman Marjorie Ross Davis wrote how Dracula would not only impact children negatively but also the uneducated working classes, declaring that

Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 115. 36 Cited in Smith, 2005, p. 57. 37 Taken from a 1931 poster for the film. 38 Cited in Skal, 2001, p. 125. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 34 35

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it ‘should be withdrawn from public show, as children, [the] weak-minded, and all classes attend motion pictures indiscriminately’.41 However, much to the grievance of Davis et al. the film was a major hit across the United States and Europe with press releases offering a range of favourable reviews such as The Motion Picture Daily declaration that ‘Tod Browning’s direction is his best yet’.42 Praising its use of Gothic conventions, The N. Y. Graphic professed it ‘One of the creepiest mystery melodramas ever screened. Dracula is the best talking picture of its type ever exhibited.’43 With a slight nod to the controversies surrounding the film’s release, The New York Herald-Tribune stated: Of all the people of the cinema, [sic] only Tod Browning [. . .] was properly equipped to direct this grotesque, fantastic, slightly unhealthy, melodrama with proper forcefulness and conviction. Yet so perverse is the motion picture that it would have surprised no one had some expert in the films who devoted himself to cowboy comedies been assigned the task, rather than this master of shadows. Anyway, thanks to his selection and to the properly terrifying performance [. . .] of Bela Lugosi [. . .] Dracula reaches the Roxy Theatre as an absorbing adventure in morbid fantasy.44 Despite mounting pressure from pro-censorship organisations such as the Catholic Church to rein in the production of ‘this type of entertainment’,45 enthused by the success of Dracula, and the popularity of other horror productions,46 after the release of Dracula, Universal immediately went into production on perhaps the most iconic of all its monster features – James Whale’s Frankenstein. No doubt courting controversy, movie theatres across the United States and Europe decked out their lobbies with life-size cutouts of the monster and parked running ambulances outside the venues ‘just in case’. Some went as far to display titillating slogans such as one from a Toronto theatre which dared the audience to watch the film, having claimed: ‘To see it is to wear a badge of honour.’ Exalted as Universal’s best horror yet, the reviews were positive and plentiful. Touching ‘the highest peak of sensational melodrama’, The Kinematograph Weekly added that its ‘uncompromising depiction of stark horrors and gruesome experiments are

Ibid., Emphasis mine. Motion Picture Daily. 30th March 1931; Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1936–1946. 2nd edn. (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2007), p. 33. 43 Julia Shawell, The N.Y. Graphic. February 1931; Weaver, Brunas and Brunas, 2007, p. 32. 44 Richard Watts Jr, The New York Herald-Tribune. 13th February 1931; Weaver, Brunas and Brunas, 2007, p. 33. 45 Forman, 1933, p. 210. 46 Such as Warner Brother’s Svengali (1931) and Paramount’s Murder By the Clock (1931). 41 42

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calculated to appeal to the unsqueamish’.47 Declared by The Daily Dispatch ‘Brilliant to the point of genius’,48 Variety celebrated it as a ‘new peak in horror’49 while the New York Times confidently alleged that ‘Beside it, Dracula is tame’.50 The allure of the advertising, coupled with encouraging reviews, was enough to motivate not just adults but also children to attend the feature across the world and they did so in their droves.51 What many audiences didn’t know upon its initial release was that a substantial scene was removed from the film in order for it be shown. Considered ‘one of the unprecedented catalogue of charnel-house of horrors’ [sic] the unintentional drowning of a little girl at the hands of the monster was to prove too much for Quigley.52 Not only would the removal of this one scene transform the entire tone of Frankenstein for decades to come, this expurgation arguably had far wider consequences for the horror genre and its position as a form of art capable of meaningful social commentary.​

FIGURE 1.1  Lakeside scene from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) with Boris Karloff and Marilyn Harris. Sourced http://www​.filmsufi​.com​/2020​/12​/frankenstein​ -james​-whale​-1931​.html. The Kinematograph Weekly. 20th January 1932; Tom Johnson, Censored Screams: The British Ban on Hollywood Horror in the Thirties (North Carolina: Mc Farland & Company, Publishers, 1997), p. 40. 48 The Daily Dispatch. January 1932; Johnson, 1997, p. 40. 49 Variety. 8th December 1931; Bryan Senn, Golden Horrors: An Illustrated Critical Filmography of Terror Cinema, 1931–1939 (North Carolina: Mc Farland & Company, Publishers, 1996), p. 24. 50 ‘Mordaunt Hall’, the New York Times. 5th December 1931; cited in Senn, 1996, p. 30. 51 Smith, 2005, p. 70. 52 Rigby, 2007, p. 99. 47

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As a relatively faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic 1818 masterpiece, shunned by his creator and having endured a series of indignities, the monster (Boris Karloff) comes across the overly endearing ‘Little Maria’ (played by eight-year-old Marilyn Harris), happily making daisy chains beside a pond. Unperturbed by the monster’s appearance, she invites him to play with her. Starved of human affection, the monster gleefully accepts and plays alongside Maria throwing daisy heads into the pond, so they would float like little boats. Unable to equate the difference between a daisy’s ability to float and a child’s, the monster throws Maria into the pond believing it’s part of the game. Tragically for the monster it isn’t, and he has now destroyed not only the life of a young girl but also his only chance of companionship which he so craved. Obviously terrified by the disappearance of his only friend under water, the consequences of his actions dawn and he runs back into the woods sobbing. Arguably dismissing the heart-rending poignancy of this scene, a horrified Motion Picture Herald, which at the time was edited by Martin Quigley, fumed that it would not ‘forgive Jr. Laemmle or James Whale for permitting the monster to drown a little girl’. ‘That job,’ the article raged, ‘should come out before the picture is released. It is too dreadfully brutal, no matter what the story calls for.’53 Even studio head Laemmle Snr objected to the scene, angrily informing his secretary how, ‘No little girl is going to drown in one of my pictures.’54​

FIGURE 1.2  Cut scene from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) where Little Maria is thrown into the lake. Sourced http://www​ .filmsufi​ .com​ /2020​ /12​ /frankenstein​ -james​-whale​-1931​.html.

Motion Picture Herald. 14th November 1931; Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla, We Belong Dead: Frankenstein on Film (Baltimore: Midnight Marquee Press, 1997), p. 43. 54 Sourced George E. Turner, (ed.) The Cinema of Adventure, Romance and Terror (Hollywood, CA: The ASC Press, 1989), p. 96. 53

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With the death of Little Maria, Whale had supposedly ‘gone too far’. He had violated the taboo of killing children, and critics would not tolerate such a morally abhorrent transgression. However, Quigley’s denunciation and its subsequent deletion of the scene55 actually reveals a fundamental ignorance on the part of the censors towards the film’s internal motif. In a broader context, it also belies a complete misunderstanding of the horror genre’s efforts to expose monstrosity in man and humanity within the monster. As a pivotal moment in the film, the lake scene seeks to highlight this very complexity, as the monster’s humanity is presented in sharp contrast with society’s perception of him as monstrous. The juxtaposition of the grotesque with the unmollified innocence of the little girl affectionately playing with the monster emphasised his potential capacity for humanity and his desperate yearning for acceptance. Though the monster was indeed guilty of murderous violence and jealous rage, as Barry Forshaw notes, such vices seem eternally ‘foregrounded at the expense of the alienated loneliness’.56 When he accidentally kills Maria, the monster became all the more tragic. Ironically, however, far from representing the tragedy of the monster’s plight, the censored version inadvertently takes on a much more sinister tone as the scene cuts rather clumsily from the monster reaching out to grab the child to her father Ludwig (Michael Mark) carrying the limp body of Maria through the town centre. Resembling a discarded rag in the arms of her father, one knee sock is pulled down around her ankle. Considering the heavy freight of meaning carried by disturbed clothing on female victims, the scene arguably belies a rather darker violation of innocence.57 A decisive moment in horror history, the omission of this scene and its subsequent clumsy editing undermined not only the complexity of the monster, but it also had far wider consequences for the genre of horror as a credible art form capable of great insight and intelligence.58 Here was an opportunity to establish within the mainstream media the horror genre’s unique transgressive ability to represent ‘other’ as a manifestation of society’s own anxieties, fears and perversions. Recalling Gelder’s earlier claim of the monster as a warning and not a danger to society, in cutting such a critical scene from the film much of the transgressive power of Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’ was negated. As a consequence of such myopic and maladroit editing, the monster arguably lost his humanity and became a truly abhorrent figure capable of calculated harm. ‘Quigley wasn’t expected

The scene was not restored until 1986. Barry Forshaw, British Gothic Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 15. 57 See Skal, 2001, p. 15. 58 Indeed, it could be argued that such a position is only now almost a century later gaining momentum in the mainstream with the popularity of texts such as The Babadook (2014), Get Out (2017), Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) considered part of a new wave of socalled ‘elevated horror’. 55 56

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to be aware of details like this,’ Aubrey Malone notes before caustically adding, ‘which is perhaps the saddest thing about censorship, i.e., the people making the decisions, as well as being right-wing, were often quite dim to boot, they certainly didn’t seem interested in the cinema as art.’ 59 In Frankenstein Whale created a film which not only fulfilled the audience’s expectations of horror with monstrous creatures, but equally as a Gothic text, the monster served a ‘useful social and regulative function distinguishing norms and values from deviant and immoral figures and practices’.60 Similar to Judith Halberstam’s observation of Shelley’s novel that the ‘monstrosity of Frankenstein is literally built into the textuality of the novel to the point where textual production is responsible for generating monsters’,61 so too were many of the early horror films. In Frankenstein, Whale had in several senses of the word birthed a monster which transgressed several cultural, thematic and cinematic boundaries simultaneously. As a text which not only posits the central character as an othered creature but also basks in the excess which that monster embodies, Frankenstein is quintessentially a Gothic text. Reading both Frankenstein the film and Frankenstein ‘the controversy’ through a Gothic filter enables certain intertwining characteristics to develop pertaining to their treatment of monstrosity, eugenics and of course children at risk. Drawing upon the dialogue and narrative structure of Peggy Webling’s 1927 theatrical production of Frankenstein, Whale sought to capitalise upon its Gothic origins and utilise a series of tropes and conventions typical of the genre. Unlike Browning’s Dracula which became both domesticated and romanticised, transforming Stoker’s vampiric monster from savage to seducer in a ‘story of the strangest passion the world has ever known!’62 Whale moved in an opposite direction capitalising upon the limitless and as yet unchartered possibilities for gruesomeness within Shelley’s tale. Although there had been earlier adaptations of her novel, none had sought to draw out and intensify the monstrosity of Doctor Frankenstein’s creation, while simultaneously retaining his creature’s humanity. As the 1930 Code had conveniently (for Browning) omitted the restriction of vampires, there also was somewhat of an oversight when it came to ‘gruesomeness’. Highlighting this technicality shortly after Frankenstein’s release, Variety observed that ‘picture producers have discovered what is the first loophole in all forms of censorship as well as in their own Hays Production Code’. Clearly pained by these violations, the author added:

Aubrey Malone, Censoring Hollywood: Sex and Violence in Film and on the Cutting Room Floor (North Carolina: McFarland Publishing, 2011), p. 25. 60 Botting, 2014, p. 9. 61 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 31. 62 Tag line for the 1931 classic. 59

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There is no provision, it is officially conceded, in any censor law which rules on the quality or extent of gruesomeness. Sex, crime, ridicule, politics, church, and school - all are taken care of in the censor book. [Yet] the Hays Office admits that under the Code it is powerless to take a stand on the subject [of gruesomeness].63 Conversely that did not stop state censor boards that were under no obligation to adhere to the MPPDA. In one Kansas case, Frankenstein was banned outright due to its ‘cruelty’ and propensity to ‘debase morals’.64 However, the state’s monopoly on censorship was exposed by one disgruntled cinemagoer who wrote into the Kansas City Star that thousands of Kansans were restricted from seeing it because ‘it is not suitable for children and because three women do not like it’.65 Similarly, in the UK there were calls to have the film restricted due to its supposedly adverse effect on the young. Though the film was hugely successful within all age groups, protests from the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children caused children to be banned from the film in Manchester, London and elsewhere.66 Prompted by a campaign headed by the ‘Order of the Child’, Frankenstein would thus carry a warning which stated, ‘this film is unsuitable for children.’67 Yet, in so much as the monster horrified and disgusted audiences, his childlike demeanour engendered a form of undeniable empathy. While not as articulate as his 1818 counterpart, Forshaw suggests that instead of perceiving this as an attempt to dumb down the narrative for mass audiences: in the context of Whale’s scheme, this is greatly to the benefit of the presentation of Frankenstein’s creation as something of an enfant sauvage, a badly served innocent whose violent actions are the result of taunting (the hunchback Fritz’s sadistic wielding of a flaming torch) or tragic misunderstanding of games (the monster’s inadvertent killing if a little girl by tossing her into the river like the flowers she had been throwing).68 Aside from its visual excess which relied to a great extent upon the disgust felt by the audience towards the patchwork behemoth, Whale’s Frankenstein films transgressed both the laws of science and man, as his texts teemed with

Cited Doherty, p. 287. Ibid. 65 Ibid. Seven years later upon its reissue the film was passed uncut. 66 Smith, 2005, p. 70. 67 Ibid. 68 Forshaw, 2013, p. 15. 63 64

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homosexual undertones and asexual procreation which flew in the face of established Catholic doctrine.69 While the real extent of Frankenstein’s state-wide censorship was minor, narratives of harm which posited the juxtaposition between the horror film, ‘ill health’ and the pathologised child were becoming an increasingly charged issue and one which was growing in momentum. Incidentally, two years on from its release, Frankenstein would also feature in an unpublished PFS report as a major source of concern in terms of its apparent negative effects on children.70 Though unfounded and based upon nothing more than anecdotal evidence and moral outrage, the press repeatedly warned of the potential side effects of watching horror. Extolling Frankenstein as ‘One of the finest picture jobs’ they had ever seen, one critic for The Hollywood Spectator couldn’t help but add, ‘if your tastes run into the morbid you will enjoy Frankenstein. If, however, you have a healthy outlook on life you had better stay away from it.’71 Further pathologising horror film audiences, in an anonymous review of Frankenstein in Motion Picture, while praising Karloff as ‘superb,’ capable engendering a ‘morbid sympathy as well as loathing’, such praise is overshadowed by the critic’s objection of letting children, or ‘nervous people’, see it. ‘Children should not be allowed see this picture’, concludes the reviewer. ‘Nervous people should keep away from it. For the strong-stomached, however, it is a new sensation.’72 Regardless of such rebukes, it was clear that for those children who managed to sneak into theatres and watch Shelley’s adaptation on the silver screen, Frankenstein was a major hit. Speaking of the monster’s appeal with his younger fans, Karloff asserted in the British film magazine Picturegoer in 1933: I wish I could show you some of the fan letters [children] send me, dozens of them. All of them express such pity and sympathy for the ‘poor monster.’ They are particularly sorry for any living thing, human or animal that is ugly. It is the old conception of the ogre who, in fairy stories, turned out to be someone handsome under a spell, I suppose.73

Often having to acquiesce to the demands of the censors, Colin Clive’s now famous line ‘It’s alive. It’s alive’ would be followed by a clap of thunder added in post-production, as the original follow-on line of ‘Oh in the name of God! Now I know how it feels to be God’ was considered too incendiary. 70 Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie and Kathryn H. Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 211. 71 Review of Frankenstein in the Hollywood Spectator; cited Rigby, 2007, p. 100. 72 Anonymous review of Frankenstein, ‘Picture Parade’, Motion Picture. February 1932; cited Rigby, 2007, p. 100. 73 Cited in P. L. Mannock, ‘Building Up the Bogeyman’, Picturegoer. 8th April 1933; as cited in Mark Jancovich and Shane Brown, ‘“The Screen’s Number One and Number Two Bogeymen”: The Critical Reception of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and 1940s’, in Kate Egan 69

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Far from a figure of fear or even harm, when it came to Universal’s most famous monster, as Karloff himself confessed, ‘Kids get it’.74 Following Universal’s success, Paramount’s 1931 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1889), a text which epitomised ‘the close relationship between children’s stories and the literature of horror’,75 became as popular with younger audiences as the earlier films. Surprisingly given the film’s subversive themes, it emerged virtually unscathed in terms of its censorship by the MPPDA and enjoyed great success at the box office.76 However, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) was not as fortunate, perhaps owing to an overt synthesis between sex and the supernatural. Billed as a film which would ‘[M]ake all other terror pictures look like bedtime stories’,77 Universal’s third horror instalment was a new breed of horror film which ‘broke taboos, challenged Christian values and subverted the social order’.78 Though Browning’s Dracula did emanate sexual undertones, for the most part these were either overlooked or went undetected by the censors. Films such as Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Old Dark House (1932) and White Zombie (1932) sought to test the limits of representation when it came to on-screen sexuality. From implied bestiality and sexual innuendo in Murders in the Rue Morgue, to the queering of heteronormative relationships in Whale’s The Old Dark House, to White Zombie’s enslaved and drugged brides, horror and sex both explicit and otherwise had become close companions. But for some this closeness was problematic. Supported by ongoing research from the PFS, concern groups such as the Catholic Church and Parent-Teacher organisations believed this new brand of film carried a triple threat in that it: ●

●

●

Physically effected children through lack of sleep and shock. Mentally corrupted children’s value systems. Sexually destabilised the young with unconventional and transgressive eroticism.

But no matter how badly received these earlier films were, nothing had come close to Browning’s follow up to his smash hit Dracula. No doubt riding on the phenomenal success of his Stoker adaptation, in July of 1932 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released Freaks with a considerable degree

and Sarah Thomas, (eds) Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 243–258, p. 251. 74 Boris Karloff speaking of his 1931 monster’s extraordinary popularity with children. Sourced A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss. First aired 10 October 2010 on BBC 1. 75 Skal, 2001, p. 139. 76 The MPPDA had objected to the line ‘Mucky wench’ and the drowning of a kitten. 77 Ad blurb for the film, 1932; cited Rigby, 2007, p. 100. 78 Smith, 2005, p. 57.

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of apprehension. No doubt anticipating the ferment to come on 9 July 1932 the New York Times summarised their review simply stating that: ‘The only thing that can be said definitely about Freaks is that it is not for children. Bad dreams lie that way.’79 While children who managed to catch the film before its inglorious exodus seemed to escape relatively unscathed, for Browning at least, Freaks did indeed represent something of a nightmare. Still considered to this day one of the most controversial horror films of all times, Browning had overestimated the limits of representation in the 1930s. Apparently stretching the bounds of decency too far, Freaks was pulled by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shortly after its release and remained banned in many countries for decades to come.80 Set against the backdrop of a fairground freakshow, as something of a homage to Browning’s carney past, the film revolved around a love triangle between the avaricious and vindictive beauty Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), her lover Hercules (Henry Victor) and the wealthy though diminutive freak show performer Hans (Harry Earles). Having married Hans for his money, sexually humiliating him at their wedding and emasculating him further by parading her new husband around on her back, Cleopatra plots to kill the besotted Hans, so she can marry her true love Hercules. But her plan is foiled by the rest of the ‘freaks’ who hear of her scheme and seek to punish her for ‘breaking the Code of the Freaks’. Arguably containing one of the most horrific climatic scenes in Hollywood history, the mutations, variations and deformities of the freaks are highlighted to a sinister pitch as they crawl through the wet slime of the fairground hunting their prey.81 With one final close up of a shrieking Cleo, the scene cuts to a crowd gathered around a pen listening intently to ringmaster Barker exclaim: ‘How she got that way will never be known. Some say a jealous lover. Others that it was the Code of the Freaks. Others, the storm. Believe it or not, there she is.’ Half-woman half-chicken, the now transformed Cleo sits amidst the sawdust clucking indignantly at the gasps and sniggers of the bemused crowd. Turning the mirror on its audience, Cleo’s punishment is both a reprisal and a warning. More than a commentary on greed and infidelity, the transmogrification of the starlet from coveted beauty to sideshow freak serves as a disturbing exegesis of the manner in which monstrosity lurks within all mankind. Describing the distinction between terror and horror Devendra Varma suggests that it is ‘the difference between awful apprehension and sickening

‘Review of Freaks’, New York Times. 9th July 1932; cited in Johnson, 1997, p. 69. Freaks was banned in Great Britain and Ireland for over thirty years. 81 In one scene that is now lost, Hercules’s castration is blatantly alluded to as he sings soprano in Madame Tetralini’s new sideshow. The scene was deemed too shocking and was cut before release, replaced with a scene were Hercules is stabbed in the back and dies. 79 80

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realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse’.82 In Dracula, the smell of death was strong; in Frankenstein, it was almost repellent. In Freaks the audience came face to face with the corpse. Arguably exploitative, there was something quite transgressive in his directorship. In coming face to face with the corpse or ‘freaks’ in this case, Browning tapped into an underexplored area within horror cinema at the time concerning voyeurism. ‘[T]he appeal of Freaks,’ writes Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund, ‘is the private view, the peek, into a world that is not usually accessible.’83 Using ‘real’ freak show performers, Browning repeatedly sought to disturb and indeed titillate the audience with demonstrations of their abilities to function as autonomous human beings, and not simply perfunctory sideshow curiosities. For instance, in one uninterrupted shot we see the Human Torso light a cigarette with his teeth and proceed to smoke it. A further example is represented by The Bearded Woman who gives birth to the Human Skeleton’s daughter. In these quite cumbrous scenes which seem a little at odds with the narrative flow of the film, Browning seems to ‘shove’ the audience into worlds seldom seen. Within this exploitive gaze both Browning and his audience ‘are complicit in the same act of exploitation that is being exposed in the film’.84 But perhaps within this gaze there are also moments of uncomfortable recognition between the observer and the observed. While the freaks are decidedly othered, rendered monstrous by their malformed bodies, the most frightening aspect of the freaks is perhaps their similitude. As life and death, love and loss seem to define the narrative; the longer we are forced to look upon the spectacles of freakery, the more human the characters become. ‘Browning,’ writes Doherty, ‘forces a recognition of sentience and humanity in the deformed, while never for a minute flinching from the horror felt in the presence of the in-human looking human.’85 Citing Ivan Butler, Joan Hawkins, similarly claims how in this: extraordinary film, Browning has turned the popular convention of horror topsy-turvy. It is the ordinary, the apparently normal, the beautiful which horrify – the monstrous and distorted which compel our respect, our sympathy, ultimately our affection. The visible beauty conceals the unseen evil, the visible horror is the real goodness.86

Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences (London: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987), p. 130. 83 Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund, The Grotesque (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 85. 84 Edwards and Graulund, 2013, p. 85. 85 Doherty, p. 318. 86 Ivan Butler, Horror in the Cinema (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970), p. 65; Joan Hawkins, ‘One of Us: Todd Browning’s Freaks’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, (ed.) Freakery: Cultural 82

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As a result, the audience is left pondering whether they are ‘one of us’, or perhaps we are one of them.87 Despite such retrospective and progressive readings, there is no escaping the climactic sequence whereby the freaks are portrayed at their most freakish. As a pivotal scene, Hawkins argues how disgust turns the audience’s newfound sympathies away from the freaks, especially when we bear witness to the fruits of their rancorous behaviour.88 Perhaps Browning’s climatic portrayal of the freaks is grounded in an understanding that having engendered pity, he wants them to reclaim their agency as autonomous human beings capable of real revenge. Though othered, the freaks are the ones in control. So fearful was Metro-GoldwynMayer of the backlash, they filmed a revised ending in which Hans reunites with his original lover Frieda (Daisy Earles) in quite a jarring and condescending coda which ultimately undermines the autonomy of both and reduces the deep and dark complexities of their relationship to puppy love. By the end of the film, transgressions have been punished. But more importantly, with the addition of this revised ending the status quo has been restored and the freaks no longer carry a threat to the rest of society, especially its gene pool.

Gothic eugenics Carrying a heavy freight of meaning throughout its long literary history, it’s interesting to see how the trope of otherness pertains to themes concerning eugenics within cinema in the early twentieth century. It’s perhaps no coincidence that in a period marked by its preoccupation with the health and well-being of the nation, its mass media would reproduce current anxieties around reproduction, morality and abnormality in the form of Gothic tales which featured a range of ‘mad scientists’ such as Dr Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, Dr Moreau (Island of Lost Souls (1932)) and Dr Mirakle (Murders in The Rue Morgue). Citing both Leslie Fielder and David Punter, Ruth Bienstock Anolik observes how the Gothic has always been preoccupied with the notion of corporal difference which typically manifests in the ostracism of that which is not part of an established normative hegemony. In other words, ‘the social and psychological empathy that links people through a sense of shared humanity disappears in the face of a deviation that seems to remove

Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 265– 276, p. 267. 87 See Hawkins, 1996, p. 265. 88 Ibid., p. 269.

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the sufferer completely from the human and thus from human intercourse’.89 Something had gone very wrong in America during the Depression and answers for this financial and apparent moral downturn were sought at any expense. Rather than look inward, others were blamed as moral contingents. Coupled with the fact that the Depression ushered in a morally conservative era extolling the virtues of simple clean living, the term ‘unfit’ came to symbolise a range of social ‘misfits’ such as alcoholics, ‘loose women’, ‘sexual deviants’ (anyone who fell outside the heteronormative radar) and of course unruly delinquent teens. A testament to the period’s preoccupation with moral hygiene and genetic prosperity, a number of conferences were held advocating the benefits of selective breeding practices. At one such conference, the Third International Eugenics Congress held between 22 and 23 August 1932 (exactly six months after Freaks was released in the United States), Leonard Darwin, son of naturalist and biologist Charles, declared in his keynote that civilisation as we knew it was doomed unless society looked towards eugenic measures or the ‘elimination of the unfit’.90 At the same event it was further argued that as a result of defective genes the ‘abnormal’ or criminal brain destines ‘him to roam, rob and rape’, thus posing as a menace to society and a ‘threat to men, women and children everywhere’.91 ‘In this atmosphere of blame and victimization’, Jon Towlson notes how: eugenics ideology reached a peak. Many states passed laws authorizing the involuntary sterilization of criminals and the mentally disabled. The propagandizing of eugenics in the Church, education system and media led to widespread discrimination against those perceived to be genetically unfit and fostered an inferiority complex in millions of Americans.92 In such a climate, it didn’t take long before narratives of harm infused with such rhetoric made an appearance within discourses related to cinema and mental health and more importantly the mental ill health of so-called Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ‘Introduction; Diagnosing Demons: Creating and Disabling the Discourse of Difference in the Gothic Text’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik, (ed.) Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (Jefferson: McFarland & Co Inc. 2010), pp. 1–20, p. 3. 90 Cited in Jon Towlson, Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present (Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc., 2014), p. 21. As a controversial subject not all discourse in the media was necessarily pro-eugenics as Angela Smith observes. In one article for the Portland News in 1927 she highlights one excerpt in particular which seeks to confront man-made science: ‘Eugenics is all right – if you wish to breed a fine race of animals – but if you wish to breed a race of brainy people – the best way is to leave it to old Dame Nature . . . who loves the poor – and makes great men and women of their children.’ See Angela M. Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbus University Press, 2011), p. 27. 91 Towlson, 2014, p. 21. 92 Ibid., p. 22. 89

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vulnerable members of society. Invoking centuries-old narratives constructed around the premise that morbid or grotesque material was a base corruptive form of entertainment, now the myth of harm was operating within a eugenics context, and this was reflected within reviews of horror films. In one such review for Freaks it was declared ‘that it took a weak mind to produce it and a strong stomach to look at it’.93 Such pejorative readings not only sought to denounce the film’s direction as puerile but also inferred that those without a ‘strong stomach’ (i.e. vulnerable individuals and innocents) would become ill if ‘exposed’ to the film. Owing to growing anxieties pertaining to issues of influence, immorality and imbecility, as the horror film became popular it conversely became increasingly segregated from other mainstream genres such as romance and Westerns. As one critic in Motion Picture wrote, ‘We must be on the high road to becoming a race of morons. Witness the success of recent horror pictures.’94 Pathologising the pleasure derived from watching horror films inevitably compounded archaic beliefs around the softening of vulnerable minds and juvenile idiocy from repeat ‘exposure’. Indeed, Skal has noted that ‘[t]here is a strong eugenics undercurrent in early horror movie criticism, and much worry about the suggestibility of the lower classes and their overall propensity for degeneration and crime’.95 By way of example he points to the character of Renfield in the 1931 adaptation of Dracula who Skal claims is a ‘pointed example of degeneration by exposure to vampire horror’.96 Indeed Skal’s observation is sustained by Renfield’s plea to Van Helsing that ‘God will not damn a poor lunatic’s soul. He knows that the powers of evil are too great for those with weak minds.’ As a dominant narrative within the myth of harm, the juxtaposition of horror tropes such as monsters and the fantastic with foolishness and lunacy is not, however, a twentieth- or even a nineteenth-century phenomenon. ‘By the end of the eighteenth-century,’ observed Katherine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, ‘an appetite for the marvellous had become, as Hume declared, the hallmark of the “ignorant and the barbarous” antithetical to the study of nature as conducted by the man of “good-sense, education and learning.”’97 Paul Semonin remarks further how ‘[m]onsters came to symbolise the imbecility of popular beliefs, the perfect metaphor for decrying the sheep-like mentality

‘Freaks, Neither Amusing or Entertaining’, Cinema Digest. 8th August 1932; cited David J. Skal, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning-Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 349. 94 ‘Letters from our Readers’, Motion Picture. May, 1932; Rigby, 2007, p. 108. 95 Private correspondence with the author dated 24 July 2012. 96 Ibid. 97 Katherine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century France and England’, Past and Present. 92, 1981, pp. 20–54, p. 54. 93

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of the masses, who were the butt of ridicule by everyone from satirists to scientists’.98 Similarly evocative of the eugenics motif, during his address on 6 March 1936, the year dubbed as the beginning of the ban on horror in the UK, G. M. Garro-Jones raised his concerns about horror films in parliament. Emphasising his distress, the Labour MP asked the Home Secretary whether he was aware of the debate over ‘horrifics’. Garro-Jones categorised the horror genre as a series of ‘films that healthy people have a natural repugnance for’.99 In just that one statement Garro-Jones infers not just a distaste for horror and its alleged ability to corrupt the young, but he also seems to adopt eugenics rhetoric pertaining to the aberrant pastimes of unhealthy individuals. In other words, ‘healthy people’ didn’t enjoy horror films. Due to the apparent outcry which ensued upon its release, Freaks was one of the first films that advertised a disclaimer warning that children would not be admitted to screenings adding that ‘Adults not in normal health are urged not to!’100 Admittingly, this ‘adults-only’ policy could also have been something of a shrewd marketing ploy replicated countless times in the future by film distributors. As one film exhibitor at the time stated, the ‘kids turned out for the show and were let in’, dryly adding, ‘and we haven’t heard of anyone dying from heart failure’.101 Wry remarks aside, overly concerned about the apparent yet undetermined harm a film such as Freaks could inflict, parent organisations, religious institutions and moral entrepreneurs ‘specialising in moral indignation’102 petitioned against Browning’s film. With no cinematic precedent to speak of, Freaks became something of a battlefield in terms of child protection and the limits of representation within the horror genre. While the film was routinely denounced as an ‘abomination’, other critics argued that although distasteful it could do no real harm, unlike other more sexually subversive films at the time. ‘There isn’t anything unwholesome about Freaks’, argued one critic for the New Yorker. ‘Its morbidity lies beyond the boundaries of anything like dear simple sex.’103 Further contradictions arose in terms of the individual reactions to the film. For example, many were surprised when Quigley, the thoroughly orthodox, hard-line Catholic and key architect of the 1930 Production Code, wrote in the Motion Picture Herald that he was neither shocked nor appalled by the film, but actually enjoyed it. ‘If Freaks,’ noted Quigley ‘has caused a furore in certain censor circles the fault lies in the manner in which it was campaigned

Paul Semonin, ‘Monsters in the Market Place’, in Thomson, 1996, p. 71. Johnson, 1997, p. 144 Emphasis my own. 100 Sourced Mikita Brottman, Offensive Films (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), p. 18. 101 Doherty, p. 317. 102 Quoted in Hawkins, 1996, p. 266. 103 ‘The Current Cinema’, New Yorker. 16th July 1932; cited Hawkins, 1996, p. 272. 98 99

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to the public. I found it to be an interesting and entertaining picture, and I did not have any nightmares, nor did I attempt to kill any of my relatives.’104 Anticipating Forman’s concerns less than a year later, Quigley emphasised the issue of disturbed sleep/nightmares and ‘suggestibility hazards’ of which the film was accused and quickly dismissed them as hot air. Not all accusations pertaining to horror films and children were dismissed as easily, however. Preoccupied with the juxtaposition between horror films and harm, reviews in the early 1930s tended to define horror films by their effect on children. In one such review for Mystery of the House of Wax (1932), Motion Picture wrote, ‘it would seem unfair to take away any of your thrills by touching on the story, which is enacted only too well for your peace of mind. See it by all means – but don’t take the kids.’ Considered ‘pompous, badly acted [and] full of absurd anachronisms and inconsistencies’, The Spectator exclaimed there was nothing in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) at the Tivoli to scare a child. In a New York Times review of Dracula’s Daughter (1936), the reviewer playfully reminds the readers: ‘Be sure to bring the kiddies.’ In the two years since the formation of the Production Code (1930), the horror film had shrewdly eschewed and undermined many of its most integral principles and guidelines through subversive and imaginative means. ‘It was a sneaky, slippery thing, this horror.’105 Yet contrary to the proliferation of the horror genre within Hollywood, its halcyon days of unrestricted and unregulated morbidity and grotesquery were coming to an end as a complex nexus of agendas had grown alongside its popularity maintaining that the genre was a harmful, immoral and distasteful intrusion into the lives of American children.106 While both the Catholic Church and various moral crusaders in the guise of ‘women’s clubs’107 actively became involved in federal censorship, it was the publication of the PFS research in 1933 which brought overwhelming attention to the alleged threat of cinema in general and horror and crime films in particular into the public arena. While the PFS was not the only research conducted during the 1930s which focused on children and the effects of film and radio, the studies conducted by the PFS gave shape to one of the most influential publications on children and film of the era. Though proffered as a scientifically rigorous text bound within an accessible format, Forman’s Our Movie Made Children was nothing but a collection of scary stories predicated on a myth.

Martin Quigley, Motion Picture Herald. 23rd July 1932; cited Rigby, 2007, p. 108. Skal, 2001, p. 161. Examples of some of the most controversial being The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Island of Lost Souls, Murders in the Rue Morgue and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). 106 Jason S. Joy to William Hays, 11 January 1932, MPPDA case files; Skal, 2001, p. 162. 107 Ibid. 104 105

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The Payne Fund Studies Comprised of social scientists, psychologists, sociologists and educators, PFS conducted a series of surveys and experiments at the behest of the Motion Picture Research Council (MPRC) which had in the late 1920s become the focal point of educational concerns about the cultural effects of the movies.108 Given its standing amongst the scientific community, its director Congregationalist minister and activist Rev. William H. Short recruited prominent members of the WASP elite to its National Council together with some of the most renowned psychologists and sociologists in the United States. With no shared vision of the society in which the research was supposed to reflect and no clear methodological approach, even by 1930s standards, research was ‘curiously unrhetorical’.109 Neither a scientist nor an academic but a journalist, James Forman was commissioned by W. W. Charters, the chairman of the Committee on Educational Research of the Payne Fund, to gather and organize the evidence supplied by the studies and reproduce the data within layman’s terms for the general public. However, the research which came to be published in Our Movie Made Children, Forman’s ‘anti-movie diatribe’ was problematic from the outset.110 As Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Janvie and Kathryn Fuller have noted: the researchers became increasingly divided between those whose prior doubts about the movies had been reinforced by the data (a majority) and those who concluded that the data gave no cause for alarm and that perhaps the entire approach they had been using was sociologically and psychologically naïve.111 Of most interest to this study, however, is not the actual shortcomings of the qualitative methods or lack of unequivocal evidence but how this research was not only hijacked but also manipulated by a moral crusade

Studies conducted between 1932–1933 included: Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency, and Crime; W. W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth; Paul G. Cressey and Frederic M. Thrasher, Boys, Movies and City Street; Edgar Dale, The Content of Motion Pictures and Children’s Attendance at Motion Pictures and How to Appreciate Motion Pictures; W. S. Dysing and Christian A. Ruckmick, The Emotional Responses of Children to the Motion Picture Situation; P. W. Holiday and George D. Stoddard, Getting Ideas from The Movies; Dorothy Marquis and Vernon A. Miller, Children’s Sleep; Samuel Renshaw, Movie and Conduct; Mark A. May and Frank Shuttleworth, Relationship of Motion Pictures to the Character and Attitudes of Children; Charles C. Peters, Motion Pictures and Standards of Morality; Ruth C. Peterson and L. L. Thurstone, Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children. 109 Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 6. 110 Ibid., p. 103. 111 Ibid., p. 7. 108

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and erroneously repackaged and sold to the public as irreproachable proof that watching films was harmful to children. Though much of the research was flawed, inflated and framed within a morally prejudiced tone, the PFS nevertheless provided strategies for discussing the media as a social concern.112 Recalling Barthes earlier claim concerning the very principle of myth, history in the form of morally proscribed narratives was ultimately transformed into nature as these flawed strategies would influence later studies and debate into media effects without any actual genuine evidential precedent. While Ellen Wartella and Byron Reeves’ short analysis of the PFS is perhaps lacking the more nuanced appraisal offered by Jowett et al. their claim that the PFS is part of a history of media effects research which is ‘biased towards considerations of public opinion, propaganda, public affairs, and voting’113 is integral to tracking the ever-evolving development of the myth of harm. Furthermore, the pronounced similarities observed by Wartella and Reeves between the various ‘epochs’ in which a new technology is substituted ‘as the object of concern’114 is quite a helpful observation. While the actual studies themselves could not provide ample evidence to support Rev. Short’s agenda that films ‘directly, and detrimentally, influenced children’,115 that did not in any way diminish the anti-film tone of Our Movie Made Children. Considered both ‘crusaders and publicity hounds,’116 Short and Forman sought to appropriate the arguably objective and scientific context of the research and reproduce it within a decidedly deterministic frame of reference. Claiming to have used ‘laboratory techniques’117 in the procurement of their data, Forman curiously argued that the primary motivation behind their investigations was to find out whether ‘films as a whole fall below or rise above the mores of the land?’ and ‘[i]f they are as powerful in the impress they leave upon the minds of the spectator, and in especial [sic] the young spectator’.118 While he acknowledged that ‘no one can intelligently defend the complete exclusion of the fundamental and adequate treatment of crime from the screen’, he decried against so large a representation of crime and

Ellen Wartella and Byron Reeves, ‘Historical Trends in Research on Children’, in Joseph Turow and Andrea L. Kavanaugh, (eds) The Wired Homestead: An MIT Press Sourcebook on the Internet and The Family (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003), pp. 53–72, p. 64. 113 Wartella and Reeves, 2003, p. 53. 114 Ibid., p. 64. 115 Ibid., p. 59. 116 Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 9. 117 Forman, 1935, p. 8. 118 Ibid. 112

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sex which would undoubtedly ‘threaten the morals and character of our children and youth’.119 With the intention of delivering the research in a popularised ‘lower key’,120 the text certainly packed a proverbial punch with sensational attention-grabbing chapter headings such as ‘Moulded by the Movies’ and ‘Movie-Made Criminal’s’. Considering that Our Movie Made Children was published before the actual volumes of research, Forman’s publication became ipso facto ‘the representation of the PFS in the public mind and gave the false impression that the researchers had lent themselves to a moralizing crusade’.121 Deemed an ‘anti-film polemic’ due to its tone and tendency towards moralising, as Jowett et al. suggest, ‘Our Movie Made Children was clearly an attempt to coordinate the results of the scientific work with a view to influencing public opinion.’122 The ‘public opinion’ here, they continue, referred ‘not to the views of the man on the street but to the views of the leaders and groups of civil society: politicians, professional people, journalists, people of influence, the clergy and members of religious organizations, civic and fraternal organizations, voluntary agencies and pressure group’.123 It is clear that the primary objective of Forman’s publication was never to elucidate but dictate in the hope of introducing stricter regulation and furthering his own personal agenda. While bringing into focus the shortcomings of the PFS, Forman’s summary of the findings sought to distract readers from the actual results which were most often nominal.124 Consequently, only the most extreme cases were referenced as evidence of moral decline and much of the scientific rhetoric was replaced with emotive and inflammatory language.

The myth of Movie Made Children In terms of locating Our Movie Made Children within the myth of harm, it’s vital to consider the text as part of a larger campaign pertaining to the regulation of children’s pastimes. Highlighting Forman’s influence, Jowett et al. draw attention to a Hollywood Reporter article which wrote of a ‘campaign in favor of censorship which is growing rapidly in all parts of the country’.125 While not a new claim in and of itself, what really ‘horrified millions of concerned parents and rendered [William] Hays speechless’126

Ibid., p. 35. Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 7. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., p. 95. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., p. 7. 125 Hollywood Reporter. 25 May 1934; cited Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 95. 126 Black, 1996, p. 152. 119 120

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was the unfounded aura of scientific expertise and authority which framed Forman’s book. As an integral mechanism of the myth, this pretence of irreproachable scientific expertise exalted by the media would feature heavily throughout future narratives of harm in which negative effects were posited not as an interpretation of media effects research but as irrefutable evidence of harmful effects. Encouraged by the apparent scientific integrity of the book, publications such as the New York Times, The Nation, Parent’s Magazine, the Elementary School Journal and School and Society reprinted excerpts and lauded in great detail accounts of case studies from the book. In an article titled ‘Minds Made by the Movies’ (1933), from a social worker industry publication called Survey Graphic, the author trumpeted ‘here at least [. . .] we have the facts’.127 Ever the conscientious informer, Forman concluded that the aim of Movie Made Children was to present his readers ‘face to face with the facts’,128 furtively forewarning that these facts were indeed ‘grave’.129 ‘Once in possession of the facts’, Forman proclaimed: the public, [. . .] will find the remedies; for, after all, it is the public, it is hoped, that is most vitally concerned. It is a social problem which touches every one of us, a ‘critical and complicated situation’; and by concerted thought and effort, we must imperatively, solve it. [. . .] At all events, the first great step has been taken and now, largely, the facts are known.130 Yet contrary to Forman’s enthusiasm to divulge these so-called facts, Our Movie Made Children favoured the hyperbole of fiction over the sombre reality of fact. Indicative of how Our Movie Made Children was marketed to the general public as a Gothicised fairy tale replete with villainous monsters corrupting youthful innocence, an advertisement for the book curiously called upon a fantasy character famed for his ability to enchant children. This ‘popular exposition of the influence and effects of the motion picture on children’, stated the advertisement, is a book which exposes: the movies for what they really are – a monster Pied Piper, with marvellous trappings, playing tunes irresistibly alluring to the youth of the present day. They have become in fact, a sort of superimposed system of education for the young. The first book of its kind, ‘Our Movie Made Children’ shows the effects – both good and bad – of random movie-going upon Author Kellogg, ‘Minds Made by the Movies’, Survey Graphic 22. May 1933, p. 248; cited Black, 1996, p. 153. 128 Forman, 1935, p. 91. 129 Ibid., p. 283. 130 Ibid. 127

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the young. In entertaining style, it presents without technicalities, for the general reader the results of a nation-wide four-year research by a group of scientists especially selected for the task. Undertaken by the Payne Fund, at the insistence of The Motion Picture Research Council, [. . .] this group of scientists, psychologists, sociologists and educators has made the first comprehensive survey thus far attempted.131 Inciting latent parental anxiety concerning children and the cinema, as a dark tale brimming with paedophilic undertones the ‘Pied Piper’ was the perfect metaphor to capture the public’s imagination. Having punished the town for their malfeasance, the Pied Piper seeks revenge and in a similar fashion to how he drove the rats from the streets of Hamelin, he carries the town’s children away into the mountains never to be seen again. While his origins lay in medieval folklore, read as a Gothic metaphor, the Piper assumes not only the role of villain but also that of harbinger.132 Anything but a static construct, the Gothic, according to Jerrold Hogle, is ‘inherently about deep-seated and large-scale, even national and international, traumas that are intimated and get masked behind hyperbolic symbols of them’.133 Contextualised within Forman’s anti-film polemic, the Piper is a warning to parents that their own carelessness around what they let their children watch will result in corrupted and bewitched children. Correspondingly, the horror film, akin to the hyperbolic symbol of the Pied Piper, is transmogrified into a shadowy, unknowable and arcane threat to the nation’s young. In contrast, Forman is reconfigured as something akin to a guardian angel shielding the innocent from harm. Casting light on the dark shadows of the film industry, Forman presents parents with the fact that their children are not only in danger from the harmful influences of cinema but also at risk from permissive parenting. The greater irony here of course is that parents who were swayed by the teachings of Forman were just as suspectable to his narratives as the hypnotised children of Hamelin. And while their attention was focused on the alleged black magic of films, Depression-era children faced even greater threats to their health, happiness and safety. Throughout Our Movie Made Children or what Richard Barrios refers to as the ‘tidy little package of sensational dynamite’,134 Forman jumped from Cited in Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 96. The story of the Pied Piper has also inspired a Goethe verse, ‘Der Rattenfänger’; a Grimm Brothers’ legend, ‘The Children of Hamelin’; and features in one of Robert Browning’s bestknown poems, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’. The medieval child snatcher will also make an appearance much later in the book as Jack Zipes refers to the looming figure of Slender Man as the Pied Piper for the digital age. 133 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, (eds) The Gothic World (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 72–82, p. 73. 134 Barrios, 2003, p. 130. 131 132

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one presumption to the next in his quest to denounce the movie industry as a primary source of corruption. One of the most striking of these claims is presented in the form of a case study concerning a 23-year-old man convicted for attempted rape, ‘and whose conduct and conviction the movies played a dominant part’.135 Although Forman admits to the tenuous role the movies may have had in motivating the young man to commit rape, he does infer that perpetrator and victim should have realized that watching these types of movies only led to the stirring up of unwarranted sexual desires.136 In another testimonial he references an eighteen-year-old serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery who claimed that he would go to the pictures with the express purpose of getting ‘fired up’. Once sexually aroused he would entice a girl back to his den and rape her.137 In this instance it seems as if the actual act of rape is simplified and reduced to an inevitable consequence of overstimulated juvenile delinquents. Considered ‘movieaddicts’ it appears as if the onus of responsibility is moved from the molester to the movies. Indeed, concluding his chapter on ‘Movie-Made Criminals’ Forman professed: For them the movies constitute an education along the left-hand or the primrose path of life, to the wreckage of their own lives and to the detriment and cost of society. The road to delinquency, in a few words, is heavily dotted with movie addicts, and obviously, it needs no crusaders or preachers or reformers to come to this conclusion.138 Choosing adjectives such as ‘bloodcurdling’, ‘terrible’, ‘gross’ and ‘harrowing’, Forman not only dispensed with the more reserved vernacular of his research colleagues but instead invoked the hyperbolised and emotional language of the Gothic. While he compared the watching of terror or crime films to that of an ‘assault’ by an unknown assailant, perhaps the most sensational aspect of Forman’s polemic was his constant referral to an alleged cabalistic phenomenon known as an ‘emotional possession’. Citing Blumer and Hauser, Forman writes that emotional possession happens when ‘impulses which are ordinarily restrained are strongly stimulated’ leading to a ‘loss of ordinary control over his feelings, his thoughts and his actions’. ‘The individual’, when watching films: Identifies himself so strongly with the plot or loses himself so much in the picture that he is carried away from his usual trend of conduct. His mind

Forman, 1935, p. 226. Ibid., p. 229. 137 Ibid., p. 231. 138 Ibid., p. 232. 135 136

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becomes fixed upon certain imagery, and impulses usually latent or kept under restraint gain expression, or seriously threaten to gain expression. This emotional condition may get such a strong grip upon the individual that even his efforts to rid himself of it by reasoning with himself may prove little avail.139 Employing an outlandish narrative of demonic possession, Forman describes how a film may take control of an individual and alter their perception of reality. In reference to their experience of this overwhelming ‘presence’, Forman asserts that these children had suffered an emotional possession and consequently became immersed in a world of crime and depravity. Imbued with a paranormal resonance, possession narratives such as these act as a means to articulate a sundry of immoral traits within children due to an apparent privation of personal autonomy caused by contact with horror fiction. Predicated upon the myth of harm, possession narratives are a mainstay of child-centric horror controversies. For example, in response to the horror comic boom in the 1950s, Fredric Wertham’s ‘moral disarmament’ acts in a similar hypnotising fashion to possession. Likewise, during the video nasty controversy, the Daily Mail’s fear of children being ‘Taken Over by Something Evil from the TV Set’ posits the imbrication of possession and home entertainment. Comparatively speaking a similar narrative is espoused by the likes of Neils Clark and P. Shavaun Scott in Game Addiction (2009) when highlighting the apparent mesmerising and addictive qualities of video games. While arguing for the reality of emotional possession, Forman did admittingly give credence to emerging theories pertaining to the cathartic properties of violent films. However, his cinematic perceptiveness is quickly dispelled as he immediately negates catharsis in support of his own hypothesis; if violent and horrific films impressed upon the individual enough to elicit a cathartic experience, perhaps they could also impress negatively. ‘It follows,’ Forman deduced, ‘that young being more malleable, are likely to be more subject to influences than adults.’140 Completely neglecting many of the more complex cultural issues Kallen had earlier petitioned for, such as poverty and unemployment which arguably motivated much of the crime during the 1930s, Forman adds that although: all of this does not mean that these young boys and girls have definitely incited to crime by the pictures [. . .] it does show however, how the sharp barriers between right and wrong, built up by other institutions such as in the home, the church and the school, are progressively eroded and

Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 179.

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underminded [sic] and some people are made more tolerant to crime and the criminal.141 As an illustration of such ‘tolerance’, he cites an example of how a young boy declared that ‘crime pictures make me feel sorry for the criminals because the criminals probably do not get the right start’.142 Of course such a perspicacious reading of criminal motivations was lost on the rather blinkered Forman. Evocative of the earlier themes of eugenics, in one chapter titled ‘What do they see?’ Forman inferred that the frequent watching of films or even the enjoyment of them was somehow aligned with deficiency of intellect and impeded socialisation. By way of example, Forman referred to a ‘farmhand, almost a moron, known to the writer’ whose desire to watch movies is stimulated only by the abundance of ‘Shootin’ and kissin’’.143 While much of his polemic is dedicated to the perils of children being exposed to ‘shootin and kissin’, especially pertinent to this book is the fact that Forman dedicated an entire chapter to horror or ‘fright’ films. On first glance, this may seem inconsequential, yet the fact that Forman felt the need to isolate and consequently condemn the horror film as being particularly harmful is indicative of a growing movement within America by 1933. Emphasising the need to examine the effects of horror films, Forman lamented that up until this point ‘[t]he whole problem of terror and excruciating elements in pictures has been conspicuously ignored by producers and censors alike’.144 Equating a child watching a horror film to ‘needless torture’,145 Forman continued in quite an exasperated tone how horror films had the potential to leave a ‘serious wound’ upon a child’s ‘consciousness’.146 While such a sensational view may have left the average reader somewhat sceptical as to Forman’s analytical probity, he was quick to ‘support’ his diatribe with evidence extrapolated from the PFS. Considering how Blumer was ‘the only investigator [at the time] in the research who sought facts pro and con in the matter of children being frightened by pictures’, Forman observed that ‘his samplings found not only that children declared they had been frightened, but that the fright persisted for days or much longer’.147 In another example he includes a report by Blumer who claimed that in 1930 he asked ‘237 school children in the fourth to the seventh grade’ whether they were ever ‘frightened or horrified by any

Ibid., p. 182. Ibid. 143 Ibid., p. 52. 144 Ibid., p. 105. 145 Ibid., p. 111. 146 Ibid., p. 108. 147 Ibid., p. 112. 141 142

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motion picture or scene in any motion picture’.148 He alleged that 93 per cent of them readily answered, ‘Yes!’149 With little context, nuance or clarification, Forman would regularly parade such figures as indisputable fact concerning the harm caused by such films. Putting aside all prudence momentarily, and accepting this was an accurate figure (which is a thorny task in itself),150 this statistic served no other purpose then or now as anything other than an interesting anecdote concerning the popularity of horror films in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Alighting upon the issue of whether fear is in and of itself a harmful or negative effect, Buckingham stresses the point that a child’s entire experience of horror may be summed up as that of ‘Distress and Delight’.151 Thus it’s no great surprise that 97 per cent of the children Blumer interviewed had been scared by a film they saw, as it was probably the case that they actively chose a film which would produce that very effect. While this subject will come up again and again throughout this book, it is of interest to note that given the lack of credentials, few critics in the popular press spoke out against Forman’s fondness such flagrant methods of interpretation. Unfortunately, the few voices that challenged Forman often became lost in the ‘Save our Children!’ fervour.152 Ultimately left to his own devices, Forman became something of ‘an adhoc moral spokesman for right thinking (and Right-Thinking) Americans’, as his ‘more extreme findings’ proved popular with the press who were more than willing to publish alarming yet unsubstantiated claims which no doubt made excellent headlines.153 While Forman courted the press and various organisations preoccupied with the moral hygiene of the nation, it must be noted, albeit with less bluster and bluff, that many within the scientific community and especially those directly involved with PFS did question his approach. Feeling slightly at odds with the tone of Forman’s work and seeking to distance himself somewhat from the more sensational interpretations, in his introduction to Our Movie Made Children PFS chairman W. W. Charters wrote: I have examined Mr Forman’s manuscript. He shows a thorough grasp of the facts in the complicated materials presented in the nearly three thousand pages which constitute the report of the twelve studies. His interpretation of the studies, however, his selection of illustrative material

Ibid., p. 107. Ibid. 150 See Smith, 2005, p. 79. 151 The title of Buckingham’s chapter on horror and children. See Buckingham, ‘Distress and Delight’, 1996, pp. 96–137. 152 Barrios, 2003, p. 130. 153 Ibid. 148 149

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his literary style, his dramatic and emphatic presentation are of necessity entirely his own.154 Discounting those differences in details of ‘interpretation and individuality of style’, Charters agreed with Forman’s fundamental position that movies could be a harmful influence upon children.155 Others involved with the studies, however, were not so forgiving. Having received a draft of the chapter pertaining to his work, sociologist Fredric Thrasher whose own study ‘Boys, Movies and City Street’ was never published in the subsequent ‘Motion Pictures and Youth’ series warned Charters that he and his assistant Paul Cressey would intentionally undermine Forman in any future publications if the manuscript was published as it stood. ‘Neither Mr Cressey nor I can support the chapter’, wrote Thrasher in a letter to Charters: we cannot consider ourselves bound to agree with this chapter after it is published. We will necessarily make the proper qualifications in our own report and shall state our results without reference to the impression conveyed by Mr Forman’s chapter. If Mr Forman wishes to publish this material and take the responsibility for a later contradiction of his interpretations, there is no help for it.156 In a further letter, his assistant Cressey similarly summed up his position towards Forman declaring: It does not present at any time a unified perspective on our study. Mr Forman does not indicate the essence even of the idea of the study of the theatre and the movie in their social role in such a community. More important, except at the very end where he makes an inadequate reference to it, he does not develop the conception of the motion picture as an informal agency of education which contributes to a whole variety of behavior activities. We are seeing the movie as an informal agency for education which conditions activities ranging all the way from criminal exploits to solicitude of one’s aged mother.157 Concerned by such demonstrations of resistance towards Forman’s work, members at the PFS headquarters sought two independent reviewers to examine Forman’s work before it went into general circulation. While one

W. W. Charters, ‘Introduction’, in Forman, 1935, p. vii. Ibid. 156 Thrasher to Charters, 20 March 1933, CP, Thrasher file; Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 107. 157 Paul Cressey, Memo to Fredric Thrasher, 17 March 1953, CP Thrasher file; cited Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 106. 154 155

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of the reviewers was supportive of Forman, the other felt that his manuscript had ‘violated scientific objectivity’, to the extent that revising the actual details would do little, as the major issues lay with Forman’s ‘unfortunate limitation and bias in his point of view’.158 Anticipating the concerns of many critics discussed throughout this book who oppose the deterministic and dogmatic application of scientific research within narratives of harm, the reviewer continued: The material is heavily editorialized and ‘interpreted’ throughout: always, however, from the point of view of one who considers his personal system of moral and ethical values to be unchanging absolutes, believed in and adhered to by all decent people. [. . .] In effect Mr Forman’s book is an emotional appeal to the public spirited middle-class people of America to alarm themselves, and by implication at least, to take some action regarding the present state of the movies . . . The language is much like that of a dry crusader; the attempt obviously is to marshal the crusading spirit of middle-class evangelical America, with all its blindness, prejudice, and intolerance, for a new ‘noble experiment’ of some sort. If this book is published and if it has the effects which I consider probable . . . the excellent and valuable work of the investigators will have been used merely to promote a new orgy of movie ‘reform’ and censorship; that the indicated job of social engineering will not get done; that the Hollywood ex-pantsmakers will emerge for the most part triumph from the melee; that something will probably be gained for the protection and education of children and adolescents, but very little and at a wholly disproportionate cost of social energy.159 Despite such concerns, Our Movie Made Children was a bestseller which led Forman to undertake an extensive publicity book tour throughout America. The facts were in, and they were apparently conclusive; movies harmed children. Although the PFS had in actuality failed to ‘provide support for Short’s beliefs that the movies directly, and detrimentally, influenced children’,160 such shortcomings were glossed over by Forman’s ‘dramatic and emphatic presentation’. Such dynamism filled in the gaps, thus creating a plausible narrative of harm. Yet any confidence in Forman’s polemic was without foundation – a ‘fabricated original’161 which in true Gothic form masqueraded as something it was not.

Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 107. James Rorty to Crendell, 16 January 1933, enclosed with Crendell to Charters, same date, PFP, C67 f1316; cited Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 108. 160 Jowett, Janvie and Fuller, 1996, p. 59. 161 Brewster, 2014, p. 309. 158 159

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The ‘new’ Production Code In a tone evocative of Forman’s moral grandstanding, having originally declared its reservations about the film industry was equally disturbed by the trend in horror films. Urging the city’s 823,000 Catholics to boycott motion pictures, Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia described cinema as ‘the greatest menace to faith and morals in America today’.162 On 23 May 1933, the same month that Forman’s Our Movie Made Children was published, the Cardinal sent out pledge cards to each family in the Philadelphia area along with a letter stating that: A very great proportion of the silver screen production deal largely with sex or crime. The usual theme of these moving pictures is divorce, free love, marital infidelity, and the exploits of gangsters and racketeers [. . .] This sinister influence is especially devastating among our children and youth. Experience has shown that an hour spent in the darkened recessed of a moving picture theatre will often undo years of careful training on the part of the school, the church, and the home.163 In perhaps a more extreme example, newly appointed apostolic delegate to America, Monsignor Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, at the behest of Joseph Breen who had by now taken over from William Hays as president of the MPPDA, agreed to integrate a decidedly puritanical approach to film regulation into his forthcoming speech to Catholic communities. Declaring that a ‘massacre of innocence of youth [sic] is taking place hour by hour’,164 Monsignor Cicognani insisted how ‘Catholics are called by God, Pope, the Bishop and the priests to a united and vigorous campaign for the united purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals’.165 Once again the notion that an intangible yet dangerous presence had descended upon the nation’s youth harked back to familiar denunciations of eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century critics who decried the recent literary trend in barbarous superstition as nothing but ‘Gothic Devilism’.166 Imbued with an almost supernatural capacity to ‘menace’, ‘possess’, ‘torture’ and ‘massacre’ children, though symbolic in its language, narratives of harm were literal in their delivery.

Slide, 1998, p. 2. Stephen Tropiano, Obscene, Indecent, Immoral and Offensive: 100 Years of Censored, Banned, and Controversial Films (New York: Limelight editions, 2009), p. 78. 164 Breen to Quigley n.d., box 1 MQ. 10th March 1949. 165 Ibid. 166 ‘Review of The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole’, Monthly Review. 32, May 1765, p. 394. 162 163

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Roused to action by films such as Freaks and Island of Lost Souls, and the success of Forman’s polemic, as the head financial backer of the film industry, civic leaders of the Catholic Church took complaints directly to the Bank of America’s chairman, A. H. Giannini, who like Hays and Breen was also a devout Catholic.167 Giannini in turn warned producers that they could illafford to alienate the church and by extension the Bank of America, without whose support the industry would struggle to support itself. In opposition to this cinematic menace, the Catholic League of Decency was founded in late 1933168 as a counter to the studio’s ‘cavalier attitude to the Production Code’.169 Weeks after the League was established, Hays relinquished control of his office and named Breen chief censor. The new Production Code Administration (PCA) under the supervision of Breen worked under the assumption that the ‘influence motion pictures can exert over the minds of moviegoers, particularly those of America’s youth, is so profound it is imperative that any violation of God’s or man’s law is not condoned’.170 Though the allegations were baseless, under this new Code, the Office had the power to cut any offending material under twelve different categories: 1. Sex 2. Vulgarity 3. Obscenity 4. Profanity 5. Crimes against the Law 6. Costume 7. Dances 8. Religion 9. Locations 10. National Feelings 11. Salacious, indecent, or obscene titles shall not be used 12. Repellent Subjects.171 With the League acting as a localised agent throughout America, the 1934 Code not only had a dramatic impact upon the Hollywood film as a

It is remiss to claim that horror or ‘terror’ films were the sole target of the Catholic church, as crime dramas such as Scarface (1932) and Public Enemy (1931) and ‘sex pictures’, ‘flavoured with bedroom essence’ (Doherty, 1999, p. 104), such as Laughing Sinners (1931) and Laughter in Hell (1933), were equally reviled. 168 Later changing its name to the National League of Decency in April of the following year. 169 Rigby, 2007, p. 146. 170 Tropiano, 2009, p. 57. 171 Rigby, 2007, p. 146. 167

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whole but was established on the grounds that children must be protected against unwholesome and ‘repellent subjects’.172 Having escaped censure, under these new guidelines the horror film was in trouble.

The British ‘ban’ on horror films As the popularity of horror films in the United States grew, a similar love affair with celluloid monsters blossomed in the UK. However, British censors faced similar pressures to regulate the viewing content of children, especially where horror was concerned. So much so, in 1935 something of a ban was imposed on horror films. It must be observed, however, that critics are quite divided as to whether it actually amounted to an outright ban or simply eschewed in a new, more conservative era in cinema for British audiences. Nonetheless, it represents an interesting period in horror film history and signifies an early precedent in British cinema which no doubt influenced anti-horror (and anti-American) sentiment which fanned the flames of controversy during the rise of 1950s horror comics and of course the video nasty era in the 1980s.173 What the ‘ban’ did effectively illustrate was the manner in which unsubstantiated narratives of harm could influence both policy and the censure of cinema for the viewing public while covertly buffering the child from an even greater threat still – American Imperialism. As the genre grew in popularity, May 1933 saw the introduction of a special BBFC category in the UK. Particularly ‘strong’ horror films could be passed with both an A certificate and the label of ‘Horrific’.174 Unsatisfied with such measures, calls continued from pressure groups such as the Order of the Child for certification which would prohibit children from patronising certain films. As Smith notes, appeals for a third certificate ‘came to focus on horror’.175 Another residing feature of the so-called ban on horror in Great Britain in the 1930s was an increasing distrust of parental authority as ‘expert opinion’ came back into vogue echoing Victorian ideologies regarding childcare. On 7 March 1933, the Home Office ruled that: the Committee’s attention was drawn to a few unusually horrifying films which, it was represented, were particularly unsuitable for children. After viewing these films, the Committee decided that, although they were

‘Repellent subjects’ may have been a euphemism for horror films. For more on this ban see Alex Noyer’s informative article ‘Did British or American censorship end the 1930s Horror Cycle’. Sourced http://iri​shgo​thic​horr​orjournal​.homestead​ .com​/1930shorroban​.html [Accessed 23 January 2020]. 174 Unsuitable for children, however, it did not prohibit their attendance. 175 Smith, 2005, p. 72. 172 173

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passed ‘A’ by the BBFC, some further action was desirable to ensure that parents were especially warned not to take young children to see them.176 That same month The Kinematograph Weekly in Great Britain bemoaned the fact that ‘actual practical experiment has shown that parents are less unsatisfactory judges of what is good for their children than anyone else’.177 Johnson points out how the situation in Britain by 1935 had become so ‘bleak’ that censorship was taught in schools.178 Advocating a better safe than sorry approach, then president of the BBFC Edward Shortt decried with just a hint of imperialist anxiety how it would be ‘wrong for the Board to certify any film which offends a reasonable number of reasonably minded people. Some films, particularly some emanating from America, have been too far in advance of public opinion in the outlook and daringness.’179 Furthering his stance on horrific films at a summer conference of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association (CEA), the director exclaimed: Although a separate category has been established for these [horrific] films, I am sorry to learn that they are on the increase, as I cannot believe such films are wholesome pandering as they do to the love of the morbid and the horrible. Although there is little chance of children seeing these films, I believe they will have a deleterious effect on the adolescent. Some licensing Authorities are already much disturbed about them and I hope that the producers and renters will accept this word of warning and discourage this type of subject as far as possible.180 Challenging the authority of the BBFC to regulate and limit what was accessible to the public, a month later in his review of Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935), Graham Greene emphasised the issue of adult autonomy. Condemning the ongoing controversy over children and horror, he noted that ‘if a horror is bad, as The Bride of Frankenstein was bad, it isn’t horrible at all and may be quite a good joke; if it is a good film, why should Mr Shortt narrow so puritanically the scope of art? [. . .] Must our pet vice be denied all satisfaction?’181 Following the outright ban on The Bride of Frankenstein in Birmingham shortly after it was passed by the BBFC, one angry reader wrote of his disgust at being treated like a child by the Birmingham censor committee stating, ‘[w]ith all due respect to the Committee and its ban on Bride of Frankenstein, one wonders how much longer the Birmingham citizen

‘Children and “A” Film’, 7 March 1933; cited Johnson, 1997, p. 81. The Kinematograph Weekly. 9 March 1933; cited Johnson, 1997, p. 81. 178 Johnson, 1997, p. 103. 179 The Kinematograph Weekly. 4 July 1935; cited Johnson, 1997, p. 81. 180 Ibid. 181 Graham Greene, ‘Review of Mad Love’, Spectator. 9 August 1935; cited Rigby, 2007, p. 161. 176 177

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will put up with being smacked and put to bed.’182 In an 1936 editorial for Today’s Cinema the writer states his irritation over the needless commotion the issue was causing: ‘Of course, horror films are not the things for children. But exhibitors have already discovered that: [sic] exhibitors are unanimous in approving and accepting the regulations which prevent children from seeing horror films. So – what’s all the fuss about?’183 Contributing to the ad hoc nature of regulation and control, throughout the early 1930s in Middlesex, the County Council declared that children would be banned from all pictures deemed horrific by the council regardless of the BBFC certification. Within such a climate of arbitrary regulation and prejudice ‘cinema owners had good reason not to book horror pictures’.184 By 1936 the hostility towards the horror film had reached a crescendo with outright bans being implemented across the country. Establishing one of the first sanctions on horror on 7 January 1936, The Kinematograph Weekly ran with the headline ‘Horrific Ban in Essex – New Regulation Enforced’ as a new ban imposed by the Essex County Council forbade children under sixteen to see ‘horror films’ not passed for universal admission in any circumstances. Somewhat inferring the notion that parental control was inadequate, the paper added, ‘at present the responsibility for allowing children to see “horror” films rested entirely with their [children’s] parents or guardians; and, as there might be a likelihood of the number of such films increasing, the Committee had decided that children should not be permitted to see “horror” films in Essex under any circumstances.’ Stressing the issue further, Today’s Cinema covered the 1936 March meeting for the National Council for Women where the main topic was children and horror films. Representing the council, a Mrs MacRobert reiterated claims against such films when she included in her address the case of a boy of nine who had fallen unconscious at a horror film and once he had regained consciousness had allegedly screamed for an hour. Moreover ‘U’ rated films, she added, were ‘often just as detrimental to the young mind’.185As other localities soon followed suit, unable to fill seats it became tantamount to commercial suicide for a British cinema to book horror films.186 While not strictly an outright ban on horror, without any true clarification around why such sanctions were imposed, such arbitrary regulation arguably compounded concerns that there was something inherently harmful about horror.

‘Reader’s Letters’, Birmingham Daily Mail. 19 September 1935; cited Melvin E. Matthews, Jr, Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality, During the Depression and World War II (North Carolina: Mc Farland & Company, Publishers, 2009), p. 102. 183 ‘Editorial’, Todays Cinema. 24 February 1936; cited Johnson, 1997, p. 144. 184 Johnson, 1997, p. 124. 185 Today’s Cinema. 23 March 1936; cited Johnson, 1997, p. 144. 186 Ibid., p. 142. 182

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The decline of the 1930s horror film By the mid-1930s the feeling towards horror films in Hollywood was mixed. With pressure groups in Great Britain urging local councils to override BBFC decisions, cinemas refusing to book horrors, pressure from an increasingly dominant PCA to cut and censor films, it was with great trepidation that Hollywood studios produced horror films. Though box-office receipts for horror films still topped those of any other genre at the time, horror had in essence become more of a nuisance – the ultimate enfant terrible for studios wishing to make profitable films. Writing to Warner Studios in September 1935, Breen voiced his anxiety about the genre lamenting how: Horror stories of all kinds are a precarious undertaking in these days, especially with respect to their likely reception at the hands of a political censor boards. I think you know that the British Board in London has indicated a disposition not to approve out-and-out horror stories; and a number of boards in this country, and in Canada, have already demonstrated their dislike for this type of story by mutilating a number of ‘horror pictures’ which have been released in recent months.187 The situation finally peaked on 6 May 1936 when Variety published an article stating why Universal’s new management had ceased production of horror films: Reason attributed by U. [sic] for abandonment of horror cycle is that European countries, England, are prejudiced against this type of product. Despite heavy local consumption of its chillers, U. is taking heed to warning from abroad. [. . .] Studio’s London rep has cautioned production exec to scrutinise carefully all so-called chiller productions, to avoid any possible conflict with British censorship.188 Far from the playful dalliances of George Méliès at the turn of the century, horror was now considered by many an insidious fixation, to which the young and ‘weak-minded’ were particularly susceptible. Embroiled within narratives of harm pertaining to morals, faith, physical well-being, sexuality and juvenile delinquency, the horror film by the mid-1930s had become as othered as the creatures it had produced. Having taken a three-year hiatus from 1936 to 1939, it wasn’t until the release of Rowland V. Lee’s rather tame sequel Son of Frankenstein in January 1939 that horror appeared back

Breen to Warner, 26 September 1935, PCA case file for The Walking Dead. ‘Horror Films Taken Off U Sked’, Variety. 6 May 1936; cited Johnson, 1997, p. 7.

187 188

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in the cinemas. However, operating under the yoke of the Code, horror had certainly lost its bite. The fallout of the Great Depression represented amongst many things an ‘emphasis on motion pictures as a social scapegoat’,189 for a sundry of deep-rooted cultural anxieties pertaining to what had gone so wrong in the nation. What anti-horror campaigners failed to recognize was that like the Gothic novel, the penny dreadful and the dime novel before it, the horror film was ‘an expression of that social world’ and not the cause or creator.190 With the economic downturn in America, there was a return to ‘old-fashioned’ attitudes and conservative morals. Modernity, it seemed, had let the American people down. Thus, in an effort to regain control, moral campaigners refused to acknowledge how modern, transgressive and/ or unconventional behaviour could be viewed as anything other than sheer deviancy. With an emphasis upon the monstrous ‘other’, early horror directors such as Browning, Whale and others sought to explore the zeitgeist of their times, incorporating various psychosexual and eugenic themes into their narratives in the figure of female sexual desire, homosexuality, asexual reproduction, abnormality and mutation, all in defiance of patriarchal heteronormativity. Considered peddlers of indecency, these directors were in true Gothic form testing the limits of representation. In the wake of one of the worst disasters in American history, the safeguarding and maintenance of one’s morality and normalcy became paramount. As we now turn to one of the most tumultuous times in horror history in which the comic book became subject to Federal Investigation during the 1950s, the myth that horror could harm was ‘immediately frozen into something natural’ and a distaste for its fantastic and challenging themes was now read ‘not as a motive but as a reason’.191

Skal, 2001, p. 201. S. S. Prawler, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 275. 191 Barthes, 2009, p. 129. 189 190

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2 The horror comics controversy

Introduction On the afternoon of 21 April 1954 William Gaines, publisher and co-editor of the Entertaining Comics Group more commonly known as EC, gave his testimony as part of the two-day Senate Subcommittee Hearings into juvenile delinquency which was dedicated to highlighting the ‘problem of horror and crime comic books’.1 Taking the stand Gaines addressed the controversial issue of horror comics and its alleged connection to juvenile delinquency stating: May I repeat, ‘It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned’ Our American children are for the most part normal children. They are bright children, but those who want to prohibit comic magazines seem to see dirty, sneaky, perverted monsters who use comics as a blueprint for action. Perverted little monsters are few and far between.2 Stressing the zeitgeist of his times, Gaines asked, ‘What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of our own children?’ As the independence generated by ‘teenageage culture’ in the 1950s increasingly came under suspicion, Gaines it seems may have been on to something.

Robert C. Hendrickson, Chairman of the subcommittee, taken from the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency. 21st April 1954. Sourced http://www​ .thecomicbooks​.com​/195​4sen​atet​rans​cripts​.html [Accessed 12th November 2020]. 2 Gaines’ testimony, 21st April 1954. Sourced http://www​.thecomicbooks​.com​/195​4sen​atet​rans​ cripts​.html, [Accessed 12th November 2020]. 1

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Comic books as Gothic texts Ever expanding upon its traditional textual remit, Gothic readings of comics and the contexts in which they were produced have opened up new avenues for critical discussion. Observing that both comics and the Gothic ‘are forms of critique’,3 Punter uncovers further similarities in that: Both Gothic and the medium of comics have an internal history; they both continually recapitulate themselves, seizing from the past upon icons, images which can be made to fit with present concerns. Sometimes these attempts to make things fit are not elegant: neither is the Gothic book in elegant mode. Instead, in both cases there is violence, distortion, disproportion; but the need to address current concerns is still there, perhaps all the more powerful by being relatively unconstrained by convention.4 Focusing on the points of intersection between the comic book experience and the Gothic, Julia Round references the work of Fred Botting and Punter discussing the Gothic’s emphasis on ‘marginalised and excluded cultural elements’.5 The archetypal trope of the excluded other made regular appearances within 1950s horror comics in various guises posing as the abused child, the harangued housewife and the vengeful living dead. As a laceration of the conformity that was endemic to suburban 1950s America, close readings of these texts reveal that these tabooed images, as Gerard Jones observes, represented something far worse; ‘No matter what anxiety one brought to the world, juvenile delinquents, atomic war, sexual license, sexual repression, the Reds, the Klan – they could find a match in comic books’.6 Within 1950s horror, the appearance of zombies, ghouls and murderous teddy bears pointed towards a much more tenebrous and indeed equivocal interpretation of good and evil. Yet ‘[i]n a society frightened by forces running out of control’, observes Jones ‘the sheer uncontrolled information in the comic books was alarming in itself’.7 While not concerned with ‘good in moral, aesthetic or social terms’, the Gothic text as far as Botting is concerned is engrossed with ‘vice’. Consequently:

David Punter, ‘Forward’, in Julia Round, (ed.) Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014), p. 2. 4 Punter, in Round, 2014, pp. 1–2. 5 Ibid., p. 15. 6 Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (London: William Heinemann, 2005), p. 240. 7 Jones, 2005, p. 240. 3

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invoking ideas and objects of displeasure, gothic texts were invariably considered to be of little artistic merit, crude, formulaic productions for vulgar uncultivated tastes. They were also considered anti-social in content ad function, failing to encourage the acquisition of virtuous attitudes and corrupting readers’ powers of discrimination with idle fantasies seducing them from paths of filial obedience, respect, prudence, modesty and social duty.8 Judged to be of little artistic merit, the horror comic similarly represented a side of life which revelled in ‘negative aestheticism’.9 Often interpreted as an indictment towards bad taste, this shared appreciation of vice and negative aestheticism continues to be a core concern which has dogged both the Gothic and horror comic from the beginning. While this afforded both forms the opportunity to evolve in particular ways free from restraint, it also contributes towards its tumultuous reputation. Yet for all its assertions of bad taste, the most damning comparison between comic books and the Gothic was the allegations that they were both somehow capable of harm leaving their young victims seduced, mentally impaired and morally corrupt. While it is important to view each horror controversy discussed as part of an overarching myth of harm, it is equally important to view anxieties related to horror and children as informed and influenced by a very particular set of cultural circumstances unique to the period. A testament to the growing paranoia which stemmed from a matrix of social, political and economic concerns in the 1940s and early 1950s, the controversy which engulfed horror comics was without doubt a product of such cultural displacement which shaped the American psyche at the time.10 Similar to the manner in which a post-Depression environment impacted both the production and regulation of Hollywood horror films, it will become evident throughout this chapter how the comic book controversy in the 1950s was enmeshed within a climate of political disquietude in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Known as the Second Red Scare, the years 1947–54  in the United States were a period of intense political paranoia and social anxiety fuelled by communist witch-hunts, the threat of nuclear annihilation and of course the onset of the Cold War. Though it would be a stretch to consider these political issues on a par with the threat of horror comics, such an anxious period shaped not only the manner in which horror comics were attacked as agents of harm but also the content

Botting, 2014, p. 2. Ibid., p. 1. 10 See Jeff Nuttal, Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968); Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Skal, 2001; Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy, (eds) It Came From the 1950s! Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties (New York: Palgrave & Macmillan, 2011). 8 9

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of the comics themselves. ‘In a strange way’, the literary historian Sacvan Bercovitch has remarked: [n]o 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 the 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 the century as a whole: the details of the Holocaust and the effects of the nuclear bomb.11 Parallel to the more pervasive fears of nuclear attacks and Communism, juvenile delinquency posed yet another perceived threat to Americans. As Gaines would go on to underscore at the hearings, people were afraid of children. In his introduction to The Cycle of Outrage (1986), James Gilbert notes how: [b]y the mid-1950s, growing fear that a whole generation had turned sour overlaid this initial bewilderment and curiosity. [. . .] Stories of mindless gang violence, inspired by such occasions as the arrest and trial of four boys in Brooklyn in 1954 for the murder of a vagrant, led to the widespread impression that vicious and bored youth turned to murder and mayhem for amusement [. . .] debate raged over whether or not mass culture, particularly in the guise of advertising, films and comic books [. . .] had misshaped a generation of American boys and girls.12 Characteristic of changing norms and the displacement of society in the wake of the Cold War, anxiety towards youth culture and teenage delinquency had become ‘something close to a single-minded worry focused on the pernicious culture consumed by [. . .] American adolescents’.13 As a means to articulate these anxieties, the congressional hearings in 1954 was a manifestation of fears regarding youth culture. With the pretence of protecting young people from themselves, in such a paranoid climate, comic books were nothing more than ‘scapegoats for quite other worries’.14 Thus, as Martin Baker notes, ‘[d]eflected ideological concerns made demons out

Sacvan Bercovitch, The Cambridge History of American Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 24. 12 James Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 13–14. 13 Gilbert, 1986, p. 14. 14 Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto Press, 1984b), p. 185. 11

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of pieces of printed paper’.15 Acknowledging the era’s preoccupation with the ‘threat’ of youth culture invading the domestic tranquillity of the home, the established tradition of regulation and restriction towards children and the horror genre served to not only exacerbate tensions surrounding an increasingly autonomous teenage demographic but also highlight how the horror genre has historically been caught up in the spokes of arguments seeking to regulate youth culture. ‘Far from being an isolated instance of Cold War hysteria’, Amy Nyberg observes how: the debate over comic books fits into a broad pattern of efforts to control children’s culture. As film, radio and comic books each were introduced and became part of children’s leisure activities, guardians of children’s morality renewed their attacks on the mass media.16 As a descendent of the dime novel, itself no stranger to controversy, the horror comic was a domed product defined and ultimately destroyed by the paranoia and instability of 1950s America, all under the auspices of protecting the child.

From dime novels to comics books As a cheap alternative to Gothic novels, the penny dreadfuls or ‘bloods’ quickly developed a thirst for the macabre, as its tales became immersed in murder, torture and blood. The penny dreadful and its later American cousin the dime novel were ‘not only the most controversial popular product of its time’, as Harold Schechter observes, they were also ‘direct forerunner[s] of all the most commercial kiddie entertainments that have caused such moral consternation in our own era, from fifties horror comics to contemporary video shooter games’.17 The ultimate in ‘bad taste’,18 infamous for their lurid and graphic descriptions of murder and true crime, dimes were printed on cheap pulp paper and often tinged with a supernatural tone. Due in part to the price, they became synonymous with both children and those who could not afford the more expensive forms of literature available at the time. Locating the origins of the horror comic within late-nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls not only traces the harm narrative throughout the nineteenth

Barker, 1984b, p. 185. Amy K. Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. viii. 17 Harold Schechter, Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2006), p. 144. 18 John Springhall, Youth Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangster –Rap 1830–1996 (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), p. 74. 15 16

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century but it also unearths a further aspect repeatedly invoked within the construction of harm narratives – class bias. As John Springhall notes: [t]he process of establishing taste differentials thereby becomes a symbolic weapon in the struggle between classes and generations for ideological domination. [. . .] the construction process allowed cultural authorities to amplify social anxiety or rejection over popular culture appealing to the young that threatened established ‘good taste’. In this sense, the manufacture of labels such as ‘Penny Dreadful’ and ‘horror comic’ represent the struggle between middle-class moralism and popular demand, assigning taste for the exciting or melodramatic to a permanent lower-class or, as here juvenile ghetto.19 Seen as a corrupting influence amongst the poor, penny dreadfuls became a central player in Victorian bourgeoisie anxieties pertaining to the contaminating effects of cheap literature upon the working classes. Anticipating the pathologised language of invasion and infection employed throughout the video nasty era and further, in a paper delivered to the Religious Tract Society in 1878 by Lord Shaftesbury, horror fiction is reconfigured as a sinister home invader. Terrified that the masses had ‘infected’ the upper classes with a fondness for ‘cheap filth’, he exclaimed that the penny dreadful ‘is creeping not only into the houses of the poor, neglected and untaught, but into the largest mansions; penetrating into religious families, and astounding careful parents by its frightful issues’.20Appearing as single frames in newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century, these images eventually progressed into the comic book we know today. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the dime had become synonymous with working-class American children compounding correlations between such leisure activities and juvenile delinquency.

Early comic book criticism In an early analysis of comic books, Reinhold Reitberger and Wolfgang Fuchs claimed in Comic: Anatomy of a Mass Culture (1972) that: it was because of their fantastically high sales that people first began to investigate comic books. It was only in the fifties, when the hysterical cries

Springhall, 1998, p. 9. Lord Shaftesbury, 1878. Sourced K. Carpenter, Penny Dreadfuls and Comics: English Periodicals for Children from Victorian Times to the Present Day (London: Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, 1983), p. 5. 19 20

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of the guardians of our morals rose to a crescendo, that the searchlight was turned on to the favourite literature of our innocent kiddies.21 Having surpassed the popularity of the dime novel,22 opponents of the comics felt that the constant barrage of satire and vulgarity not only weakened the morale of the country but similarly destabilised its position as an educated and civilised nation. In January 1909, a Ladies Home Journal article titled ‘A Crime against American Children’ condemned the appearance of the ‘Funnies’ claiming that they were educationally regressive and celebrated violence and anarchy: [a]re we parents criminally negligent of our children, or is it that we have not put our minds on the subject of continuing to allow them to be by the inane and vulgar ‘comic’ supplement of the Sunday newspaper? One thing is certain: we are permitting to go on under our very noses and in our own home an extraordinary stupidity, and an influence for repulsive and often depraving vulgarity so colossal that it is rapidly taking on the dimensions of nothing short of a national crime against our children.23 Regardless of such discord, by the time the United States entered the First World War in 1917 the papers were preoccupied with overseas military action and comics were afforded something of a reprieve. Had it not been for Harry I. Wildenberg and M. C. Gaines, father of Bill, comics never would have moved beyond the pages of the newspaper. Realizing how popular the medium had become and how potentially profitable it could be, in July 1934 as part of the Eastern Color Printing Company they published a series of full-colour comics titled Famous Funnies. By the end of the year the circulation had reached a million. On foot of their success, a year later Detective Comics (later DC) launched the iconic Superman in the first edition of Action Comics (June 1938). Of course, not everybody was happy to see the emergence of a new child-ordinated medium. As historians Ellen Wartella and Sharon Massarella note, it was ‘an autonomous peer-oriented leisure-time culture, a culture independent of adults, outside the home, unsupervised, and increasingly commercialised’.24 Cheap and cheerful, at the heart of this new culture, comics afforded children a financial autonomy

Reinhold Reitberger and Wolfgang Fuchs, Comic: Anatomy of a Mass Culture (London Studio: Vista Publishers, 1972), p. 7. 22 Hajdu, 2008, p. 12. 23 Editorial, ‘A Crime Against American Children’, Ladies Home Journal. January. 1909; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 12. 24 Ellen Wartella and Sharon Mazzarella, ‘A Historical Comparison of Children’s Use of Leisure Time’, in Richard Butsch, (ed.) For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (Philadelphia: Temple Up, 1990), p. 178. 21

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seldom experienced before. Though disregarded by parents as cheap and churlish, despite this or indeed because of it, comics became one of the most popular forms of entertainment available to the child.25 ‘To read comics,’ remarks David Hajdu, ‘was to belong to a vast yet exclusive club, one whose membership was restricted primarily by age.’26 Yet, overlooking the early criticism of comic books, he adds how: [l]ow expectations granted comics creators vast license. Sold next to the candy on the newsstands and drugstore racks, comic books were generally thought of as another nutrient-free but essentially harmless confection for kids. They were not just infantile, but something less worthy of adult consideration: junk.27 But as comic book popularity grew, so too did its critics. As a regular commentator on childhood affairs in his role as a reporter for The Chicago Daily News, Sterling North was one of the most vocal. In his article ‘A National Disgrace (And a Challenge to American Parents)’, North appealed to the hyperbolised tabloid rhetoric of infection and pollution synonymous within harm narratives. Imploring the American nation to end the ‘cultural slaughter of innocents’, he wrote: [t]en million copies of these sex-horror serials are sold every month. One million dollars are taken from the pockets of America’s children in exchange for graphic insanity . . . The bulk of these lurid publications depend on their appeal upon mayhem, murder, torture and abduction – often with a child as the victim. [. . .] The old Dime Novels in which an occasional redskin bit the dust were classic literature compared to the sadistic drivel pouring from the presses today. Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed – a stain on young eyes and young nervous systems – the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoil the child’s natural sense of color; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder makes the child impatient with better, though quieter stories. [. . .] The shame lies largely with parents who don’t know and don’t care what children are reading. [. . .] But the antidote to the ‘comic’ magazine passion can be found in any library or good bookstore. The parent who does not acquire that antidote for his child is guilty of criminal negligence.28

Nyberg, 1998, p. 19. Hajdu, 2008, p. 37. 27 Ibid., p. 35. 28 Sterling North, ‘A National Disgrace (And a Challenge to American Parents)’, Chicago Daily News. 8th May 1940; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 359. 25 26

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While gruesome scenes of murder were permitted (as long as the victims were ‘red skinned’), the real problem with comic books, according to North, was the abundance of perverse and lurid images ‘injected’ into the minds of children. Betraying more than a hint of classism towards lower-income families, his antidote for comics was hardbound books of classical literature many parents could ill-afford.29 Invoking a common narrative throughout the myth regarding permissive parenting, North lambasted parents who allowed their children to read comics and for not providing the correct type of literature. Further lamenting the sorry state of children’s pastimes, with a similar air of disapprobation, Thomas Doyle, a reporter for the Catholic World, decried in his article ‘What’s Wrong with the “Comics”’ that children who read comics were not ‘normal’, inferring that this ‘abnormality’ was ‘failure’ on behalf of the parents.30 As the language used to denounce comic books became increasingly pathologised, an article published by the Wilson Library Bulletin went as far as to call the comic book reader ‘damaged’. The so-called ‘damaged child’ was rendered ‘incapacitated for enjoyment for the more serene pleasures of the imagination’,31 due to an excessive indulgence in comic book reading. Anticipating the furore over video game addiction nearly half a century later and with familiar toxoid rhetoric found during the video nasty controversy, by the mid-1940s the idea that children could actually become addicted to comics was gaining traction. Such traction was no doubt aided by then Vogue editor Marya Mannes’s proclamation in an article for The New Republic that her own eight-year-old son who enjoyed reading comics had succumbed to ‘the greatest intellectual narcotic on the market’, potentially stunting his ‘inner growth’.32As condemnation towards the comic book mounted, not all of it was as fevered. Invoking a more ambivalent tone, as early as 1941 researcher Paul Witty conducted a study into the perceived effects of comic books upon children. Contrary to expectations, Witty found that there was no difference between children who read comics and those who don’t.33 Defaulting to a familiar better safe than sorry approach, the academic, however, could not resist from de-emphasising the results of his research in the National Parent-Teacher (1942) citing the possibility of harmful effects yet to be discovered. Unable to conceal his own personal bias towards comics, Witty concluded that

Hajdu, 2008, p. 42. Thomas Doyle, ‘What’s Wrong with the “Comics”?’ Catholic World. February, 1943, pp. 556–557. 31 Editorial, ‘Libraries, to Arms!’, Wilson Library Bulletin. 15, 1941; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 359. 32 Marya Mannes, ‘Junior has a Craving’, New Republic. 17th February 1947, pp. 20–23; cited Hajdu, 2008, p. 93. 33 Nyberg, 1998, pp. 10–11. 29 30

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the taste children have for comics was ‘far from desirable’ and played an enormous role in the ‘decline in artistic appreciation and a tolerance of shoddy experience and language’.34 Employing a more pro-comic stance, staff advisor on children’s books for the Child Study Association of America, Josette Frank avowed that comics could be helpful to a child’s development, adding that they ‘are a waste of time only if we believe that children’s hours must be spent in ways which will be educationally and culturally profitable’.35A more energetic defence came in the guise of child psychiatrist Dr Lauretta Bender. While delivering a paper on comics at the American Orthopsychiatric Association in February 1941, she argued how comics were a ‘means of helping them [children] solve the individual and sociological problems appropriate to their own lives’.36 Concluding her paper Bender added, ‘Well balanced children are not upset by even the more horrible scenes in the comics, as long as the reason for the threat of torture is clear and the issues are well stated.’37 Thus as Bender and fellow psychiatrist Reginald Lourie observed ‘the chief conflict’ over comics was ‘in the adult’s mind’,38 and not in the child’s. Outside of the medical profession, public support for comics was scant. Nyberg, however, does manage to highlight a case where two children’s librarians published an article in Library Journal (March 1942) which argued that comic book opponents were ‘Victorian’ in their criticisms. Children were not now (nor ever have been), they asserted, ‘the wistful-eyed little darlings who are instinctively and innately delicate, untouched by the world’.39 What’s more, the librarians concluded, ‘it is entirely human to be excited about the unusual or the sensational’.40 Although they agreed that comics were a facet of mass literature that was ‘not particularly distinctive’, neither were they ‘harmful’. But with no clear definition of the harm which supposedly underpinned much of the criticism towards comics, devoid of meaning, the myth continued to develop.

Paul Witty, ‘Those Troublesome Comics’, National Parent-Teacher. January, 1942, pp. 29–30; cited Nyberg, p. 200. 35 Josette Frank and Mrs Hugh Grant Straus, ‘Looking at the Comics’, Child Study. 20, 1943, p. 117; cited Nyberg, 1998, p. 189. 36 Cited Hajdu, 2008, p. 44. 37 Ibid. 38 Lauretta Bender and Reginald S. Lourie, ‘The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. II, 1941, pp. 547–548; cited Nyberg, 1998, p. 185. 39 Gweneira Williams and Jane Wilson, ‘They Like it Rough’, Library Journal. 1st March 1942, pp. 204–206; cited Nyberg, 1998, p. 199. 40 Ibid. 34

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The ‘threat’ of juvenile delinquency America in 1942 was a ‘pressure cooker’41 brought to boiling point by a perceived increase in juvenile delinquency. Films such as Youth in Crisis (1943) depicted a generation of post-war children and teenagers immersed in a new ‘spirit of recklessness’. This sentiment was again expressed in a Governor Earl Warren’s letter of appointment to a ‘Youth in Wartime Committee’ in 1943. ‘Normal family life and living conditions,’ he declared, ‘have been dislocated, and as a result, youth problems are greater and more complex than ever before.’42 But even at this earlier stage, agencies such as the Children’s Bureau warned people of becoming too susceptible to media panic due to increased ‘journalistic sensationalism’.43 In a 1943 pamphlet published by the Bureau, they stated that: [w]e cannot say with certainty whether the delinquency is increasing or decreasing throughout the country as a whole because of the absence of reliable and comprehensive data over a period of years. Such statistics as are available have shown no alarming tendency to increased ‘juvenile crime’ as newspapers perennially.44 Emphasising this point, Savage similarly observes how this increase ‘was a reflection not only of a genuine increase in lawlessness but also increased police activity and media attention, much of which oscillated between titillation and overheated censure’.45 Notably as Gilbert remarks, although ‘the line between youthful misbehaviour (according to adult expectations) and youthful crime (according to laws applying to adults also) has never been clear, it was particularly blurred after World War Two’.46 Nevertheless, a small detail like the scarcity of evidence did not impede organisations such as the National Delinquency Prevention Society in 1946 claiming that if America did not take control of the apparent rise in juvenile delinquency a fate worse than the one which had befallen ‘Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan’ awaited the United States. While opposition against comics continued to be a dominant theme throughout the media, the main thrust of the issue waned in import with

Jon Savage, The Creation of Youth 1847–1945 (London: Pimlico, 2008), p. 392. Karl Holton, ‘The California Youth Authority’, Society’s Stake in the Offender Yearbook of the National Probation Association (New York, 1946), pp. 122–123. 43 Gilbert, 1986, p. 26. 44 US Department of Labor, Children’s Bureau, ‘Understanding Juvenile Delinquency’, in Katherine Lernout, (ed.) Children’s Bureau Publications No. 300 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), p. 6. 45 Savage, 2008, p. 406. 46 Gilbert, 1986, p. 41. 41 42

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the introduction of the United States into the Second World War in the last months of 1941. If anything, comics became patriotic symbols, informing children about the difference between the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in simple binary terms. These ‘moral oppositions’ proved common themes within various forms of popular culture including superhero comics.47 As a demonstration of such flagrant metatextual patriotism, Captain America was seen punching a dishevelled Hitler on the front cover of the comics’ March issue in 1941. Influenced by rumours of eugenic experiments on German Jews, three months later the June edition of the same comic featured the story ‘Horror Hospital’. With more than a nod to the emerging rumours coming out of the concentration camps, a chiselled Captain America is seen charging into a Nazi experiment room where infected humans, now monsters, lay thrashing on operating tables surrounded by ugly ape-like Nazi soldiers. Considered a ‘dangerous un-American mix’, fascist ideologies posed a serious threat to the liberal consensus which had emerged post the Second World War.48 Maintaining a familiar trope of ‘us versus them’, this fear would later be supplanted by ‘Red Fascism’ or Communism in the 1950s.49 As Robert MacDougall contends, ‘if at times American’s foes seemed interchangeable, it is at least partly because all, regardless of their differences, were cast in the same indispensable role: the enemy, “the Other,” the opposite of all that the Free World holds dear’.50

The other ‘Other’ The Second World War had deepened the generational gap wider than it had ever appeared before. ‘Simultaneously exploited and condemned’, Savage contends that ‘America’s adolescents had every right to feel misunderstood. They hadn’t started the war, but they were being used as a litmus test for all of America’s social problems, such as “the creeping rot of moral disintegration” which, J. Edgar Hoover warned, was placing the nation in “deadly peril.”’51 As the defining limits of childhood once again shifted, attempts were made

Chris Murray, ‘Popaganda: Superhero Comics and Propaganda in World War Two’, in Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christensen, (eds) Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, 2000), pp. 141–156, p. 142. 48 Robert MacDougall, ‘Red Brown and Yellow Perils: Images of the American Enemy in the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of Popular Culture. 32, (4), 1999, pp. 59–75, p. 72. 49 See James C. Lethbridge, ‘Comic Contentment: No Laughing Matter’, in Annessa Ann Babic, (ed.) Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment (Plymouth: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), pp. 107–122, p. 117. 50 MacDougall, 1999, p. 73. Emphasis mine. 51 Savage, 2008, p. 406. 47

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to bridge the chasm between child, teenager and adult. In 1945 the New York Times Magazine published ‘A Teen-Age Bill of Rights’, which was the culmination of a study put forward by the Jewish Board of Guardians in New York. Instead of asking ‘what is wrong with our children?’ the Board sought to educate parents upon the ways in which children were individuals with their own unique set of problems. Regardless of such rare efforts to understand and communicate with children, the gap between this new breed of teenager and adult had swelled further as young people found new modes of expression in Rock and Roll, fashion, dance, cars, film and comic books. Oppressed by older generations, in the popular culture of the day, children and young adults found a world in which they were the authors of their own lives. As the Cold War came to dominate US and international politics, a particular narrative began to gain momentum. Popular culture had somehow, when the nation’s back was turned dealing with the Second World War, ‘misshaped a generation of American boys and girls’.52 Though nothing about this concern was novel, this sentiment not only infiltrated almost every facet of 1950s life but in many ways emulated a larger cultural fear of helplessness especially in light of the atomic age. The solution for many people was to denounce anything which seemed counter to the prevailing norms of traditional American life. Narratives of harm began to spread concerning a new generation of children who although were growing up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, governmental instability and political paranoia apparently now faced an even great threat to their development as a well-adjusted young Americans.

Formation of the Comic Code The year 1948 was to prove a pivotal year in comic book controversy. Following the formation of the industry trade group, the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP), the first Comics Code, was published. With no actual power to reinforce any guidelines the original Code stated that: 1. Sexy wanton comics should not be published or drawing should show a female indecently or unduly exposed, and in no event more nude than a bathing suit commonly worn in the United States of America. 2. Crime should not be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy against law and justice or to inspire others with the desire for

Nyberg, 1998, p. 19.

52

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imitation. No comics shall show the details and methods or a crime committed by a youth. Policemen, judges, Government officials, and respected institutions should not be portrayed as stupid or ineffective, or represented in such a way as to weaken respect for established authority. 3. No scenes of sadistic torture should never be used. 4. Vulgar and obscene language should never be used. Slang should be kept to a minimum and used only when essential to the story. 5. Divorce should not be treated humorously nor be represented as glamorous or alluring. 6. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.53 Realizing the weight of responsibility for ‘millions of readers of comic magazines’, to keep them out of apparent harm’s way, the Association’s mission statement urged its members ‘to publish comic magazines containing only good, wholesome entertainment or education, and in no event include in any magazine comics that may any way lower the moral standards of those who read them’.54 Following an almost identical trajectory to that of the Hays Code in 1930, it would take a further six years before any meaningful ground was made in the implementation of the Code. In a move which signalled a return to pathologising horror, in Time magazine article titled ‘Puddles of Blood’, a symposium on ‘The Psychopathology of Comic Books’ was featured. It reported that comics were rife with ‘pictorial beatings, shootings, strangling, blood puddles and torturings-to-death [sic]’. Invoking a language of demonic possession, it concluded that comic books ‘not only inspire evil but suggest a form for the evil to take’.55 Though it would take a further two years for horror to emerge fully as a dominant presence in the comic book landscape, in a Collier’s article titled ‘Horror in the Nursery’, Judith Crist condemned the genre which ‘ignored morals’ and appealed ‘to the worst in human nature’.56 Supporting her arguments she made reference to Lafforgue Clinic which specialised in the psychiatric treatment of poor and marginalised children in New York. As she detailed in the article, Dr Fredric Wertham, the founder and head of the clinic, claimed without any hesitation, or exception, that ‘comic book reading was a distinct influencing factor in the case of every single delinquent child we studied’.57All comics as far as Wertham was

Hajdu, 2008, p. 128. Ibid. 55 ‘Puddles of Blood’, Time. 29th March 1948; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 97. 56 Crist, 1948. 57 Crist, 1948 cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 101. Emphasis mine. 53 54

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concerned were a ‘betrayal of childhood’58 which systematically poisoned the ‘well of spontaneity’.59 Invoking the common trope of greedy ‘pusher’, Crist concluded her article with a quote from Wertham in which he argued that this was not about curtailing ‘freedom of speech and of the press’ but about putting the child first: [w]e are not dealing with the rights and privileges of adults to read and write as they choose. We are dealing with the mental health of a generation – the care of which we have left too long in the hands of unscrupulous persons whose only interest is greed and financial gain.60 Seen again and again throughout the myth of harm, discrediting the perceived hollow desires of adults in favour of protecting the needs of the child immediately places one in a position of moral authority. Be it crime, war or superhero, Wertham felt it necessary to remove all of ‘these books off the newsstand and candy stores’.61 Wertham never got his wish for in just a few short years, the supposedly anti-censorship liberal psychiatrist found himself the reluctant leader of an opposition group condemning just one type of comic – the horror comic. Over a year and a half later after Wertham had fired his first real shots, in 1949 sociologist Fredric M. Thrasher, who had published broadly on the topic of juvenile delinquency, came out publicly against Wertham and what he deemed ‘scapegoating’ practices. In ‘The Comics and Delinquency: Cause or Scapegoat’ (1949), Thrasher challenged Wertham’s methodology and conclusions concerning his comic book research.62 Citing Katherine Clifford, a childcare expert for Parent’s Magazine, Thrasher wrote how: Wertham’s dark picture of the influence of comics is more forensic than it is scientific and illustrates a dangerous habit of projecting our social frustrations upon some specific trait of our culture, which becomes as a sort of ‘whipping boy’ for our failure to control the whole gamut of social breakdown.63

The title of Wertham’s paper at the ‘Seventy-Eight Annual Congress of Correction of the American Prison Association’ in August of 1948. 59 F. Wertham, ‘The Comics . . . Very Funny’, Readers Digest. August 1948; cited in Nyberg, p. 198. 60 Crist, 1948 cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 101. 61 Wertham, 1948; cited in Nyberg, 1998, p. 198. 62 ‘The Comics and Delinquency: Cause or Scapegoat’, Journal of Educational Sociology. 195, 1949; Nyberg, 1998, p. 197. 63 Cf. Katherine Clifford, ‘Common Sense about Comics’, Parents Magazine. March, 1949 in Fredric M. Thrasher, ‘The Comics and Delinquency: Cause or Scapegoat’, Journal of Educational Sociology. 195, 1949, p. 195. 58

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Anticipating the more nuanced appraisal of comics offered by Robert Warshow in which he declared that horror comics were perhaps tasteless but certainly not dangerous, Thrasher continued his probe of Wertham declaring how the: current alarm over the evil effects of comic books rests upon nothing more substantial than the opinion and conjecture of a number of psychiatrists, lawyers and judges. True, there is a large broadside of criticism from parents who resent the comics in one way or another or whose adult tastes are offended by comics stories and the ways in which they are presented. These are the same types of parents who were once offended by the dime novel, and later by the movies and the radio. Each of these scapegoats for parental and community failures to educate and socialise children has in turn given way to another as reformers have had their interest diverted to new fields in the face of facts that could not be gainsaid.64 Though Thrasher had pointed out the obvious historical memory loss so indicative of the myth of harm, it did little to stem the tide of anti-horror comic propaganda.

From crime to horror As the comic gained enormous popularity towards the early 1940s, each month thousands of editions covering a vast range of genres including superhero, romance, Western and crime were purchased, swapped and traded. By the end of that decade crime was a clear favourite, as it increasingly featured darker themes. Though relatively rare before 1950 in comic books,65 horror occupied quite a functional role in portraying the bleakness of real life. Though featuring intermittently up until that point, in 1949 EC artist Feldstein snuck the Crypt Keeper into Crime Patrol 15 and the Vault Keeper into War Against Crime 10 and with that the horror comic was born. Fortified by the apparent leniency of the 1948 Code, publisher Bill Gaines and artist and editor Al Feldstein felt confident that the new horror trend would prove popular. Plus, it seemed that this new direction evaded the scrutiny of the ACMP because ‘they were going after crime’.66 In a sentiment similar to the one Skal evokes when he writes of Universal camouflaging

Thrasher, 1949, p. 200. Jim Trombetta, The Horror the Horror: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! (New York: Abrams Comic Arts, 2010), p. 32. 66 Hajdu, 2008, p. 142. 64 65

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explicit themes within horror films,67 Hajdu writes that ‘weird menaces functioned outside the laws of nature. Who on earth had authority over them?’68 Exercising the supernatural loophole given to publishers by the ineffectual Comic Code,69 artists and writers competed with each other to see who could create the most lurid and gruesome stories and images. Commenting upon this intensification in macabre horror imagery, Stanley Morse maintained, ‘Nobody complained, so we gave the people what they wanted until they started complaining about it.’70 By 1954 a quarter of the eight million comic books on sale each month were dedicated to horror themes. Though there were many gems, scores of these titles, not unlike the video nasties to follow, were repetitious, poorly constructed and possessed abysmal plots and undeveloped characters. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, countless children and adults alike clamoured each week for a new issue of The Vault of Horror, This Magazine is Haunted, Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear and Weird Terror. Assigned its predictably lowly status the ‘horror comic became a sort of cultural garbage can into which every unacceptable thought and impulse (including fetishistic porn that was not readily available elsewhere) could be chucked’.71 Thus it appears everything from domestic abuse, bullying, racism, alcoholism, necrophilia, murder, rape and nationalism were thrown into this huge bubbling cauldron of horror comics tales. Teeming with a very particular and stringent internal morality, horror comics of the 1950s became something akin to an apocalyptic landscape through which various fears and taboos were exorcised. Ostensibly serving its function impeccably as a disposable form of entertainment, similar to the horror cycle of the 1930s, horror comics were cognisant of a deep psychological disturbance at the heart of the nation. Joining the ranks of texts attributed to the Gothic genre and its particular mode of analysis, horror comics in essence similarly occupied a purgative space drawing out the most challenging and distressing aspects of life assuaged by a fictional buffer. Reflecting upon the horror comic’s likeness to the Gothic, Round argues how the Gothic tradition: also utilizes its subcultural and subversive status to comment on this social anxiety. To this end its themes may be expressed as underlying messages or morals, as extended metaphors, or even by ‘constitutive otherness’ – in

Skal, 2001, p. 117. Hajdu, 2008, p. 142. 69 Drafted by the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers in 1948. 70 Stanley Morse Interview, Hajdu, 2008, p. 201. 71 Trombetta, 2010, p. 32. 67 68

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itself, an example of the kind of inversion Gothic relies upon, where what is not said and not present nonetheless defines a work.72 While often charged with representing the ‘triumph of evil’, rarely was such a victory celebrated. In one of EC’s ShockSuspense tales called ‘The Patriots’,73 a blind war vet, unable to see the American flag as it passed in a parade and consequently salute, is beaten to death by an anti-communist mob for his apparent unpatriotic gesture. In a further example of bad triumphing over good, ‘The Whipping’ tells the tale of a bigoted father who mistakenly beats his daughter to death after he presumes the sleeping body he kidnaps and wraps in a bag is her boyfriend, not his only child, who has secretly married her Mexican lover. Tales such as these worked on many levels for children and adults alike as they challenged and confronted readers’ expectations of American life.​ Riffing on established parables, horror comics tended to stick to familiar themes of greed and gluttony,74 science run amuck,75 brainwashing and zombification76 and the punishment of sadists both in this life and the next.77 The latter theme played a particular dominant role throughout EC storylines. In ‘Cycle of Horror’ a thief has killed his accomplice, undressed him to conceal his identity and left the corpse in a room full of rats which he hopes will destroy the evidence. However, upon exiting one room he is confronted over and over again in an endless cycle of escaping the gruesome scene only to find the body of his half-eaten accomplice in the next room. Unable to escape this hellish matrix of rooms, half-crazed the thief is eventually informed that he is actually in hell. Killed by an earlier gunshot wound he thought he survived, this is his penance for all eternity – trapped in a hell of his own design. Heavily influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe, the theme of crime and retribution was often embodied by living dead storylines. While cannibalism was usually reserved for the living in 1950s comics, pre-Code zombies were just as much the focus of symbolic

Round, 2014, p. 14. ‘The Patriots’, #2, ShockSuspense Stories, April/May, 1952. 74 See ‘Fed Up’, Haunt of Fear, #13, May 1952; ‘Ample Sample’, Vault of Horror, # 32, May 1953; ‘The Picnic’, Mister Mystery, #16, April 1954. For a breakdown of this theme and others see Stephen Sennett, Ghastly Terror: The Horrible Story of the Horror Comics (Manchester: Head Press, Critical Vision, 1999). 75 ‘Lend Me a Hand’, Vault of Horror, #18, April 1951; ‘Nobody There’, Haunt of Fear, #16, November 1952; ‘Terror of the Stolen Legs’, Dark Mysteries, #18, June 1954; ‘The Living Dead’, Dark Mysteries, #20, October 1954. 76 ‘The Brain-Bats of Venus’, Mister Mystery, #7 September 1952; ‘The Living Dead’, Dark Mysteries, #20, October 1954; ‘Corpses… Coast to Coast’, VOODOO, #14, March–April 1954. 77 ‘No Rest for the Dead’, Journey into Fear, #12, March 1953; ‘The Corpse That Wouldn’t Die’, Web of Evil, #2, January 1952. 72 73

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FIGURE 2.1  ‘Cycle of Horror’, Chamber of Chills Magazine, no. 16, March 1953. Artwork is copyrighted material owned by Harvey Publications. All Rights Reserved.

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consumption as George Romero’s shambolic undead nearly two decades later. With all attention now focused on Korea and the threat of future nuclear war, zombies were not only a ‘reflection of the period’s ideologies’78 but also a stark reminder of the forgotten dead of wars past. Specifically seeking to align the pre-Code horror comics with cultural responses to social trauma, the sheer number of zombies, undead skeletons and decomposition within EC’s comics all ‘can be read as visual metaphors for the victims of the atomic blasts’.79 Here ‘the gothic image’, especially within the context of 1950s horror comics, can be seen ‘as a response to social trauma’.80 These zombies as Jim Trombetta observes were the ones ‘who didn’t make it out of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, the entire Nazi “concentration universe,” the gulags, the airless ship holds in the Pacific, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all the massacres and genocides, all the regimes of hell where people were “broken”’.81 Yet in their quest for revenge, it is often the innocent who would suffer. Such an example is found in the 1954 Dark Mysteries tale ‘Living Dead’, whereby a young man lost in the woods is taken in by a young woman whom he immediately falls in love with. We quickly learn that the women is actually a zombie transformed by the young man’s father when he was a Nazi doctor. Rejecting his pleas that he had nothing to do with his father’s experiments, the zombies embark upon a frenzied attack, laughing as young man sinks to the floor screaming. Remarking upon how the process of looking at traumatic events is characteristically construed through the Gothic, Edwards notes, ‘[t] rauma, like the gothic, follows this pattern – the re-emergence of something terrifying that lies beneath the surface and threatens to forever haunt its host, expectantly rising up from the depth of the self or the community.’82 As an ‘unmistakably Gothic figure’83 the zombie is here prefigured within a sins of the father narrative symbolic of repressed social trauma. What was thought buried is unearthed and what was believed to have died lives again in a constant process of devolution. While the pages of horror comics were haunted by creatures seeking vengeance, arguably the most disturbing narratives focused on themes of domesticity gone wrong. For many the home was sadly a place filled with very real horrors. As the following section will explore, horror comics habitually featured children in peril as a means to both empathise and dramatise the often clandestine abuse which befell many young victims behind closed doors. Traditionally disenfranchised and

Round, 2014, p. 210. Ibid., p. 23. 80 Ibid., p. 14. 81 Trombetta, 2010, p. 171. 82 Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2005), p. 132. 83 Round, 2014, p. 211. 78 79

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infantilised by their gender, status or class, as miserable brides, abused wives or harangued mothers, unhappy women similarity made an appearance throughout the EC horror universe highlighting the often ersatz nature of 1950s domestic harmony. The home was indeed fertile ground for horror comics.

Home is where the heartache is Employing Robin Wood’s analysis of Psycho (1960) as a film which not only internalised horror but also located this internalisation within the heart of the American family, Mark Jancovich observes that within domestic horror ‘it [was] not “abnormal” or foreign elements which [were] the problem, but American definitions of “normality”’.84 Though considered a benchmark film, Jancovich also points to the fact that Psycho was not ‘unique at this time in its depiction of the family’,85 as the source of horror. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House which had come out a year earlier in 1959 was similarly concerned with the relationship between madness, identity and the family.86 However, through their various tales of domestic dysfunction, horror comics had set a precedent a decade previously. As not only a product of 1950s culture but simultaneously a reaction against it, horror comics pierced the veneer of normality and exposed dysfunction and decay, especially within the confines of the suburban nuclear home. In garish hyperbolic narratives, the act of disrupting and destabilising the façade of domestic aspirationalism became a dominant theme for many horror comic storylines. These tales which ran counter to the ‘great American Institution the family’, incensed, as Stephen Sennett observes ‘the sort of stuffy females who comprised the membership of many of the “pressure groups” which were against comics’.87 Arguably Sennett oversimplifies the issue here claiming that these anti-comic protestors were primarily composed of fretful mothers and bored housewives as it was the liberal intellectual Wertham who became the public face of the anti-comics crusade. Sennett does have a point, however, in terms of how anti-comic book campaigners reacted to what they believed was a full-frontal attack on the nuclear family ideal. Horror comics routinely appealed to the trope

Mark Jancovich, American Horror From 1951 to the Present (Staffordshire: Keele University, 1994), p. 16. 85 Jancovich, 1994, p. 17. Horror films such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Bad Seed (1956), Don Siegal’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Charles Marquis Warren’s Back from the Dead all pointed to the disfunction and alienation which had crept into the happy American home. 86 Ibid. Earlier still was Ray Bradbury’s The October Game which as published in Weird Tales in March 1948. 87 Sennett, 1999, p. 14. 84

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of familial dysfunction as a counter to the romanticised portrayals of the mythological ‘perfect family’ regularly flaunted in sitcoms and ‘how to’ manuals. Dispelling many perceived myths surrounding the 1950s, especially those pertaining to the role of the family, Stephanie Coontz explains how the 1950s was composed of a ‘historical amalgam of structures, values and behaviours that never co-existed in the same place and time’.88 As an illustration of such a point, family expert Paul Landis championed marriage in the 1950s as ‘the natural state’, and that everyone ‘except, the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally-defective, almost everyone has an opportunity [read duty] to marry’.89 So marry they did and marry young. State-sponsored GI loans whereby 85 to 100 per cent mortgages were given to returned veterans fuelled demand for housing as owning your own home became something to aspire towards.90 In response to this housing boom, the landscape of America was changed evermore so that by the end of the decade a quarter of the American population lived suburban lives.91 The home and the family became the ‘wellsprings’ of ‘happiness and self-esteem’92 and the root of American life from which everything else stemmed. For instance, in an article for The Women’s Guide to Better Living, it was claimed that ‘the family is the unit to which you most genuinely belong [. . .]. The family is the centre of your living. If it isn’t you’ve gone astray.’93 While the myth of harm seeks to parallel and at times annex various other cultural myths such as the aforementioned myth of childhood innocence, in the 1950s the ‘Myth of Suburbia’,94 a ‘surface gloss of widespread prosperity and domestic bliss promoted by the official ideology’,95 complemented and reinforced harm narratives which sought to deflect inconvenient and unpalatable social issues. Living outside the city limits, away from family and friends, alcohol abuse, depression and adultery were prevalent, though well hidden.96 More than just misanthropic sneering at the institution of marriage, horror comics

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 5. 89 Cited in Stephen Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. 181. Emotionally warped was a coded term for homosexuality. 90 See Jones, McCarthy and Murphy, 2011. 91 Arlene Skolnick, Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 59. 92 Coontz, 1992, p. 25. 93 John A. Schindler, The Women’s Guide to Better Living (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 415. 94 See Bennett Berger, Looking for America: Essays on Youth, Suburbia and Other American Obsessions (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1979). 95 Jones, McCarthy and Murphy, 2011, p. 6. 96 Skolnick, 1991, p. 60. 88

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provided readers with darkly acerbic accounts of the failure of Americans to maintain hurried wartime marriages into a new decade of increased social pressures. Invoking traditional Gothic themes of trapped females under threat from patriarchal oppression within the domestic setting, Gothic novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) reverberated within the lurid pages of horror comics preoccupied with spatial symbolism, madness, female dependence and the representation of female sexuality. For example, in ‘Chef’s Delight’ domestic violence and cruelty result in the dismemberment and cannibalisation of Francois, a famous but ruthless chef.97 Squandering his money on mistresses while his family live in abject poverty, we learn that his avarice has caused the death of his son. When his wife Marie begs for money to bring him to hospital for an operation, Francois refuses, claiming it was a waste of money and beats them both for their insubordination. Crazed with grief, Marie takes an axe to her husband and kills him. The tale ends with a final panel displaying a steaming array of dishes marked ‘Francois’ Famous Baked Kidneys’, ‘Francois’ Famous Fried Brains’ and ‘Francois’ Famous Stuffed Heart’. In ‘Bottoms Up’ Nora,98 the long-suffering wife of alcoholic Lou, finally snaps when their four-year-old son Bobby is killed walking to school alone after his father promised to take him. She similarly takes an axe to her husband, cuts him into small pieces and places these parts inside his Bourbon bottle, which she sells back to Lou’s bootlegger to pay for Bobby’s funeral. Customarily gory in its details, the tale is also quite sympathetic in terms of how it characterises Nora. As the story develops, she becomes increasingly wretched-looking. Working two jobs, while looking after their son, has left her with dark rings under her eyes and a furrowed brow. Married life has not been kind to Nora or Marie; nor was it for many women in the 1950s.​ Early and often loveless marriages, combined with the pressures of economic improvement, put an unprecedented strain on young couples. Commenting upon these dark domestic themes in horror comics, Daniels noted how this ‘was an extreme but not altogether inappropriate counterbalance to the standard mass media presentation of love as a guarantee of a happy ending’.99 Considering that domestic violence wasn’t seen as a ‘real’ crime100 with many psychiatrists in the 1950s maintaining that ‘the battered woman was a masochist who provoked her husband into

Mysterious Adventures, #20, October 1953. Mysterious Adventures, #18, February 1954. 99 Daniels, 1973, p. 64. Nurturing a wholesome family image, shows such as I love Lucy (1951– 60), Make Room for Daddy (1953–64), Father Knows Best (1954–60) and Lassie (1954–74) featured stock characters maintaining the sovereignty of the nuclear family. 100 Coontz, 1992, p. 35. 97 98

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FIGURE 2.2 ‘Chef’s Delight’, Mysterious Adventures, no. 20, October 1953. Artwork is copyrighted material owned by Story Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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FIGURE 2.3 ‘Bottoms Up’, Mysterious Adventures, no. 18, February 1954. Artwork is copyrighted material owned by Story Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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beating her’,101 perhaps ‘the cultural garbage can’ that was the horror comic was conversely one of the few places were domestic violence was given any visible credibility for the cultural monster it was. Not all domestic storylines dealt with overt social issues such as spousal cruelty and domestic violence. Recognized as the linchpin of a functioning society, marriage was for many a trap, and the misery of a ‘working marriage’ was an open often lampooned secret.102 In ‘Hen Pecked’,103 a young browbeaten cuckold finally snaps whereupon he decapitates his nagging sister, wife and mother and displays their severed heads in an arrangement evocative of the three wise monkeys. Complete with its distinctive visceral exorbitance, the more nuanced themes of indifference and coercive control were commonplace throughout the comics. Crushing the ‘happily ever after’ dream sold to newly married couples, horror comics offered a far starker reality of what befell a substantial amount of young people. Evocative of the Gothic genre, in Michelle A. Massé’s discussion on ‘marital Gothic’, the fairy-tale happy ending only compounded false expectations about the woman’s role in marriage. ‘Horror’, Massé writes: returns to the new home of the couple conjured up by the renewed denial of the heroine’s identity and autonomy. The marriage that she thought would give her a voice (because she would be listened to), movement (because her status would be that of an adult), and not just a room of her own but a house, proves to have none of these attributes.104 Typifying this type of marriage, EC’s The Haunt of Fear featured the tale of a boorish and uncaring husband who destroys his wife’s only prized possession: her garden, by holding a BBQ where all the plants and flowers are trampled and destroyed. Realizing he is completely indifferent to her misery she kills him, barbequing his body parts in a final act of defiance. Likewise, in ‘Mother’s Advice’, the Old Witch narrator prefaces the tale with the question, ‘What do you do when you’re horribly in love with your husband and he doesn’t even notice that you’re around?’ In this story Diane, the beautiful wife of apathetic Frank, tries everything to get her husband’s attention.105 Desperate she contacts her mother for help. As the only thing Frank seems to care about is food, Diane’s mother cooks a sumptuous feast for the young couple, giving Diane the credit. When Frank declares it was ‘good, but that he had better’, incensed, Diane’s mother takes a carving

Mintz and Kellogg, 1988, p. 194. Ibid. 103 ‘Hen Pecked’, Mister Mystery, #17 June 1954. 104 Michelle A. Massé, In the name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 20. 105 It is implied that he is not only neglectful emotionally but also sexually to his wife. 101 102

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knife to Frank, sticks it in his stomach and rips out his heart. Handing it to a terrified Diane, she shrieks, ‘Well you wanted my advice, didn’t you? And I gave it to you . . . THE ONLY WAY TO A MAN’S HEART IS THROUGH HIS STOMACH! Here, take it.’ Within the domestic realm, the horror comic also spoke directly to its young readership in the guise of child-centric narratives which were often as scathing. Coontz describes how ‘the family was everywhere hailed as the most basic institution in society; and a massive baby boom, among all classes and ethnic groups made America a “child-centred” society’.106 Accordingly there was a sort of public hypersensitivity around the safety of the child and the sanctity of the institution that produced them. Horror comics were seen as not only challenging the inviolability of the family but also maliciously broadening the generational gap between parents and their ‘pre-delinquent’ children.107 That said this notion wasn’t necessarily felt by all commentators. A decade before, in Books for Children? Guideposts for Parents (1941) Josette Franks had discussed the manner in which children often find certain gory and macabre representations humorous. ‘They think it’s funny, but also they know it to be wicked [. . .] How far such stories meet a deep psychic need of childhood we can only surmise. That they do fill such a need seems evident.’108 In a similar fashion to the manner in which comics sought to underscore the perils of domesticity, they also performed an additional superlative as numerous tales were actually based around the plights of children thus offering the young reader a unique form of expression. Though children may not have picked up on all the various subtle domestic and political nuances peppered throughout their favourite comics, what they did understand was that their era was a time of great anxiety.109 Horror comics granted children a chance to experience, free from condescension, the ‘rumbling realities’ of the adult world.110 Framed within an accessible format, through these tales of horror, children were able to gain an insight into what was often a frightening adult world. ‘For both creators and readers,’ Schechter notes, ‘these unassuming publications were a way – however, unconscious – for purging a sanity-threatening nightmare

Coontz, 1992, p. 24. See Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Thought Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (London: Pluto Press, 1984). 108 Child Study Association of America, Josette Frank, (ed.) What Books for Children? Guideposts for Parents (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1941). 109 Gilbert, 1986. 110 See Carol Tilley, ‘Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comic’, Information and Culture. 47, (4), 2012, p. 387. For original sources on such sentiments see Julia L. Certain, ‘Editorial’, Elementary English Review. 18, 1941, p. 160 and Gweneira Williams and Jane Wilson, ‘They Like it Rough: In Defence of Comics’, Library Journal. 67, 1942, p. 204 in Nyberg, 1998. 106 107

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by turning it into a comprehensible story with an emotionally satisfying climax.’111 While working through the various concerns raised in response to the ‘Gothic novel’, and its similarities to the comic book, Punter muses how ‘comics have served to articulate broad concerns about the alienation of youth’.112 What’s more this social critique has the power to ‘re-valorises the “excluded other”’.113 Identifying the child as an ‘excluded other’ points to their status as a symbolic emotional button habitually ‘pressed’ within harm narratives. Capable of being read as both victim and villain simultaneously, their status as ‘excluded’ also signifies their omission from debates which conversely concern them. With no other form of expression available, historically the horror genre has been on hand as a culturally viable substitute. Horror comics similarly featured a range of child-centric narratives which gave the child an agency removed from their delinquent/victim status. In ‘Fitting Punishment’,114 the young Stanley finds himself the victim of an abusive uncle who works as the local undertaker. Incensed one day by Stanley, he murders him by throwing him down a flight of stairs. Realizing the coffin he seeks to dispose Stanley within is too small, he cuts off his feet and quickly buries him in it. No doubt a homage to Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’, in the days following Stanley’s funeral the undertaker is driven mad with the sound of a ‘horrible thump-thump’. Now hearing the banging on the door, the last frame reveals the face of the undertaker twisted in terror as the footless corpse of Stanley stands on crutches before him propelled by a supernatural vengeance. Parental loss similarly features in ‘Daddy’s Lost his Head’,115 where a little girl is given a man-shaped candy by a neighbourly old woman who is accused of witchcraft by her hateful stepfather upon the death of her mother. Promising not to eat it, little Kathy bites at one of the dolls extremities only to hear her stepfather scream in pain having accidentally cut his hand off with an axe. Demanding he hand the doll over, Kathy demonstrates the seemingly ‘benign’ nature of the doll by biting its head off. You can guess what happens next. While both texts feature horrific themes of violent mutilation and death, they also grant the young protagonist a space in which to exert their own agency. In perhaps one of the most subversive and indeed controversial tales featured within EC’s repertoire, ‘The Orphan’ tells of a little girl who after suffering at the hands of her parent’s abuse frames her mother and her mother’s lover for the murder of her drunkard father. Once her mother and lover were sent to the electric chair, little Lucy is sent to live with her caring and generous Schechter, 2006, p. 157. Punter, in Round, 2014, p. 2. 113 Ibid. 114 The Vault of Horror, #16, December/January 1951. 115 The Vault of Horror, #19 June/July 1951. 111 112

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aunt in a beautiful house surrounded by all the toys she could ever want. Invoking the often-used narrative device of the ‘O Henry Ending’,116 the reader discovers that it was Lucy who had masterminded the entire scenario whereby she shot her father, placed the gun in her unconscious mother’s hand and begins the ‘crying act’ over her father’s body just in time for the police to arrive. Considered emblematic of the barren morality of horror comics, ‘The Orphan’ was singled out in both the US hearings and in UK Parliament. Concerned that children may ‘identify’ with the tenacious Lucy, during his testimony at the hearings, Dr Harris Peck feared that ‘that this kind of material, presented in the fashion that we see in comic books, would give additional thrust to other forces already working on the child’.117 Exploring the narrative dimensions of the character of the orphan Lucy, Barker offers a quite upbeat defence of ‘The Orphan’. ‘Had the strip been drawn in the way the Interim Report tells it,’ maintains Barker, ‘we would have been in on the scheme from the start, watching her making the plans, noting the lover’s cynicism, distrusting their motives, knowing where the gun is, watching for a chance.’118 Yet as Barker maintains, that is just not the case. In order for the ‘O Henry’ plot device to work effectively, Lucy must remain right up until the final panel veiled in innocence. With the explosive realization that it was in fact Lucy which framed her mother, the reader is intentionally shocked by the young girl’s actions. The narrative is therefore governed by a sense of shock logic which ‘question[s] those gooey conceptions of childhood’.119 Consequently, the charge that somehow this story seeks to normalise violence is according to Barker ‘absurd’.120 In order for Lucy’s tale to work as a horror text, the violence contained within must shock or disturb. Consider by Barker to be ‘subversive social comment par excellence’,121 Lucy is the embodiment of ‘pure childhood’.122 However, such notions are upended when Lucy manipulates both narrative and the readers expectations.123 As innocence corrupted, Lucy is a monstrous chimera capable of provoking both sympathy and horror. She is consequently the product of her circumstances, and her actions thus belie the complexity

The ‘O Henry’ ending is a surprise or twist at the end of the story. This was a common feature of the horror comic. The term is derived from William Porter. His pen name O. Henry became synonymous with short stories which typically displayed a twist at the end. Within horror comics they worked by disrupting the expectations of the reader. In ‘The Orphan’ it turns out the little girl is the killer. 117 Cited in Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984b), p. 92. 118 Ibid., p. 167. 119 Ibid., p. 167/8. 120 Ibid., p. 168. 121 Ibid., p. 161. 122 Ibid., p. 169. 123 Ibid., p. 161. 116

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FIGURE 2.4  ‘The Orphan’, Page 8, Panel 7, Shock SuspenStories, no. 14 December 1954. Artwork is copyrighted material owned by William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

of her nature as a ‘Gothic Child’. Working through many of the scenarios in which the Gothic Child is problematised Steven Bruhm interrogates the various constructions of childhood which lead to contradictions and opposing binaries. Never a static image Bruhm maintains that the:​ binary opposition between innocence and possession/corruption [. . .] produces in contemporary culture a panic about who children are and what they know. The contemporary Gothic has a particular emotional force for us because it brings into high relief exactly what the child knows, or what the child may be suspected of knowing. [. . .] Invariably, the Gothic Child knows too much, and that knowledge makes us more than a little nervous.124 As a Gothic Child, Lucy is neither a reflection of childhood nor a composite of many children; she is both ‘everything and nothing’. She knows too much but also nothing. Yet ‘all her wickedness is performed in the name of her right to recover her deserved and proper childhood’.125 While critics of these comics feared that the more children read, the deeper they became enmeshed in the murderous world of comic books, Barker argues that contrary to such claims, the more a child reads the more they become accustomed to the various conventions and thematic

Steven Bruhm, ‘Nightmare on Sesame Street or, The Self-Possessed Child’, Gothic Studies. 8, (2), 2006, pp. 98–113, p. 103. 125 Barker, 1984b, p. 135. 124

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devices utilised by the comic. Thus, in learning how to read the narrative and comprehend the nature of ‘shock logic’ they subsequently engage with what Barker refers to as ‘the teaching paradox’. In order to acknowledge the character as villainous, the reader must acknowledge that he or she has committed a wrongdoing in the first place. For example, returning briefly to the tale of ‘The Patriots’,126 anti-communist violence is quite literally weaponised to beat down perceived anti-patriotism. However, by learning the mortally injured man was blind the reader is left within a teaching paradox. Of course, nobody would beat a blind man to death, but to what extent does an overzealous devotion to anti-communist propaganda benefit society? Thus, the horror comic is not an exercise in depravity but in doubt about the nature of things as we perceive them. When it came to children, however, horror comics were unequivocal about the very real dangers faced by the nation’s young within the so-called sanctuary of the home. A relatively rare topic of discussion in 1950s America, researchers found that even though there were 302 reports pertaining to abused children (including 33 deaths) during that era, the Journal of American Family Sociology published nothing on child abuse.127 Though framed within the fictional extravagance of EC, similar to domestic violence, the tabooed issue of child abuse was given a rare platform for expression. Of course, the real irony here is that the very texts which were perceived as harmful to children were also one of the few voices which championed the child by exposing the very real harm encountered by them. Considered a central concern within Gothic fiction, the trope of near powerlessness felt during childhood possesses a heavy fright of meaning not just for the child reader but also for the adult. Confronted with these images, feelings of helplessness immediately stir up past experiences which then manifest as present anxieties. While Gothic novels have always been about families and the secrets they harbour, Sherry Truffin argues that in contemporary Gothic texts child abuse takes ‘centre stage’; and that this ‘concern with child abuse, [. . .] is a concern not only with the ghosts that haunt the personal past, but also with the construction of new monsters, the childhood experiences that turn victims into victimizers’.128 While Lucy, took matters into her own blood-stained little hands, perhaps one of the most poignant of the EC tales is ‘Shoe-Button Eyes!’129 in which a young blind boy called Billy enlists his closest ally in his darkest hour of need.

‘The Patriots’, #2, ShockSuspense Stories, April/May 1952. Coontz, 1992, p. 34. 128 Sherry R. Truffin, Schoolhouse Gothic: Haunted Hallways and Predatory Pedagogues in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature and Scholarship (New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), p. 8. 129 The Vault of Horror, #35, February/March 1954. 126 127

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Left destitute by the death of his father, his mother is forced to remarry a cruel man who beats her, mocks Billy’s disability and leaves them impoverished. Though detrimental to her delicate health, Billy’s mother must work to feed her son. One day in a fit of rage his stepfather rips out Billy’s teddy bear’s eyes sniggering, ‘Now the bear is blind too.’ Using money she should have spent on medication, Billy’s mother buys shoe buttons to replace the teddy’s torn-out eyes. Though he cannot see them, Billy knows how beautiful they are. Weighed down with sickness and drudgery, one morning Billy’s mother doesn’t wake up and ‘she wasn’t EVER going to again’. Incensed, his stepfather punches Billy repeatedly and throws him to the floor where we are led to believe he has been knocked unconscious. On Christmas morning the following day, having heard screams emanating from the house, neighbours come rushing over whereupon they find the body of Billy’s stepfather who appears to have been ravaged by a wild animal. Beside his crumpled body, lies a blood-stained teddy bear with two missing eyes and a strange smirk upon its face. Upon closer inspection, they discover that someone (or something) has pushed shoe buttons into the eye sockets of the corpse. If the tale had ended there it would have made for a typical EC ‘Just Desserts’ narrative; however, for those astute enough to notice, the story posits a much more melancholic tone. In the last frame, we see Billy smiling. His sight has miraculously been restored. Having prefaced the tale with the knowledge that he does eventually get his sight back, Billy exclaims, ‘That’s why this is the best Christmas I’ve EVER had. I CAN SEE! I can see everything from way up here! And everything is so pretty!’ Closer inspection of the frame reveals the young boy to be floating in what appears to be clouds. Thus ‘way up here’ presumably means heaven and we as readers are meant to interpret the ending as a happy one, although a young boy has died violently at the hands of his stepfather.​ While the ending can be read in multiple ways, similar to the ‘The Orphan’, ‘Shoe Button Eyes’ grants the child protagonist control of their own narrative. While he cannot directly control the events as they unfold, he can dictate to us the manner in which he wants them told. Thus, we are led to believe that his teddy bear, an inanimate object, has murdered his cruel stepfather in the most gruesome way, plucking out his eyes and exchanging them with shoe buttons. Teeming with fairy-tale motifs, ‘Shoe-Button Eyes’ is redolent of the dying child preserved in a state of innocence discussed earlier. Billy dies in a state of purity and assumes his deserved place floating atop a cloud. Yet, Billy equally shares a similar air of indifference bordering on malice with Lucy when he almost gleefully describes how his new daddy was lying on the floor dead: all ripped and bloody like some animal had got to him. His eyes were torn out . . . and in their place where the new shoe button eyes . . . All bright and shiny. They found my teddy bear in a corner . . . without his eyes, all covered with blood . . . And . . . AND HE WAS SMILING.

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FIGURE 2.5  ‘Shoe-Button Eyes!’ Page 7, entire page The Vault of Horror no. 35, 1954. Artwork is copyrighted material owned by William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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In the process of getting what they always wanted, both Lucy and Billy are responsible (however tangentially in the case of Billy) for the deaths of their abusive parents. Both children had wished for a better life and magically through the stringent moral logic of the EC horror universe, their wish was granted. Arguably in the case of Billy the inner morality of the story invoked quite literally the principle of lex talionis or ‘an eye for an eye’, providing both context and pretext for the murder of Billy’s stepfather. In an era preoccupied with narratives of harm, few of these paid attention to the child at actual risk. Instead, a myth was proliferated that a greater threat to the child came not from abuse within the home but something that was brought from outside seeking to seduce them into harm’s way.

Seducing the innocent Tracking the development of the myth of harm down throughout the generations, there have been several individuals who epitomised certain eras within horror history. While Mary Whitehouse arguably personified the anti-video nasty movement of the 1980s and Forman more than played his part in the 1930s, Fredric Wertham almost certainly became the poster boy for the anti-comic book movement in the 1950s. As alluded to earlier, while one must be mindful to respect each controversy under discussion as part of a unique historical period, irrefutable similarities between the controversies arise. As detailed in Chapter 3, Martin Barker’s interest in video nasties was peeked after he came across David Holbrook’s provocative 1983 article for The Sunday Times. In ‘The Seduction of the Innocent’, Holbrook had drawn allusions between the manner in which children were ‘deliberately being shown films of buggery, rape and mutilation’ and Wertham’s popular anti-comic polemic of the same name published some thirty years before.130 By the same token, Forman and Wertham in their respective periods had isolated the medium of film and comics as a corruptive and dangerous presence within the lives of children. Both had published within the popular press conclusions which had apparently been drawn from clinical studies. But the most damning comparison between the two was that both had misappropriated scientific data before investing heavily in subjective and specious narratives of harm. However, unlike Forman’s anti-film polemic or even Whitehouse’s quest to ban anything she considered morally questionable, Wertham neither advocated censorship nor sought to isolate

David Holbrook, ‘The Seduction of the Innocent’, The Sunday Times. 2nd January 1983.

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horror as singularly harmful. As an expert witness in a number of highprofile murder trials and founder of the Harlem-based Lafargue Clinic, the anti-segregation activist Wertham was an unlikely figure to make an appearance in narratives pertaining to moral hygiene and taste.131 ‘Wertham was not a Cato-like- Censor’, James Reibman wrote in his defence of the child psychiatrist, but ‘a responsible physician who believed that children need protection from such violent images’.132 Yet he adds the ‘irony of all this is that F.W, a traditional left-wing intellectual and a product of the Enlightenment tradition, continues to be both castigated and characterised as reactionary’.133 As a star witness during the comic book hearings, Wertham is often credited with single-handedly bringing down horror comics in 1950s America. While such allegations are understandable, they are not entirely justifiable. Representative of many views amongst the comic book community, the historian Catherine Yronwode bristled, ‘He [Wertham] and he alone virtually brought about the collapse of the comic book industry during the 1950s.’134 Compounding his image as the comic book bogeyman, Wertham’s seminal text Seduction of the Innocent denounced the comic book industry so vehemently it was deemed responsible for not only furnishing the hearings with scientific credibility but instigating the ‘Seal of Approval’ which made the production of horror comics close to impossible. Describing Wertham as something akin to a ‘social psychiatrist and mental hygienist’, Carol Tilly writes how he understood ‘mental illness within social and cultural contexts’, not simply as a manifestation of behaviour or physicality.135 Likewise Nyberg notes how Wertham believed that the answer to curtailing antisocial behaviour ‘lay not with treating the individual but in reforming the society that shaped those individuals’.136

His first public denunciation of comics came when he took the stand in May 1948 in defence of a nudist magazine called Sunshine and Health during the Post Office obscenity trial whereby he produced a copy of Crime Does Not Pay and declared comics such as this, which were freely available to children, to be the true agents of pornography and ‘genuine obscenity’. 132 James Reibman, ‘Introduction’, in Wertham, 2004, p. xi. 133 Ibid. 134 Sourced Jeet Heer, ‘The Caped Crusader: Fredric Wertham and the Campaign against Comic Books’, Slate, 4th April 2008. Sourced http://www​.slate​.com​/articles​/arts​/culturebox​/2008​ /04​/the​_caped​_crusader​:html [Accessed 22nd April 2020]. A further example is found in a 2004 documentary whereby the horror director John Carpenter declared with just a hint of personal grievance how Wertham’s allegations that comic books would turn him into a juvenile delinquent were ‘just dead wrong. DEAD WRONG!’ See Dir. Chip Selby, Tales from the Crypt: From Comic Books to Television. 2004. 135 Tilley, 2012, p. 390. 136 Amy Kiste Nyberg, ‘Comic Book Censorship in the United States’, in John A. Lent, (ed.) Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (New Jersey: Associated University Press, 1999), pp. 42–68, p. 51. 131

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Consequently Wertham used comics as means to highlight how engaging in ‘violent’ activities can shape and influence who and what we do. Caught in the cultural versus scientific crossfires, Wertham was ultimately the odd man out. Unfortunately, occupying such a vexed position sought to undermine his research as his quest to save children from comics took on a decidedly unscientific and sermonising tone. The consequences of such contributed towards the myth of harm as it emptied meaning from original concepts related to effects and replaced it with emotive and subjective moralising. Reminiscent of Forman’s emotional possession,137 Wertham argues that ‘[t]he most subtle and pervading effect of crime comics on children can be summarised in a single phrase: moral disarmament’.138 Making the leap that any child may become emotionally disarmed from reading comics he argues that the: more subtle this influence is, the more detrimental it may be. It is an influence on character, on attitude, on the higher functions of social responsibility, on the superego formation and on the intuitive feeling for right and wrong. To put it more concretely, it consists chiefly in a blunting of the finer feelings of conscience, of mercy, of sympathy for other people’s suffering and of respect for women as women and not merely as sex objects to be bandied around or as luxury prizes to be fought over.139 While such moralising was ultimately at odds with the scientific discourse of his peers, Wertham arguably committed the greater sin of repeatedly manipulating his clinical data. Exposing the major flaws in his research, Reibman claimed that ‘Wertham’s contention rests on the interpretation of clinical research’.140 Considered nothing more than speculation by many of his contemporaries, one New York University Professor of Education confessed that ‘[t]he scientific worker in this field can place no credence in his results’.141 Praising his determination, the professor adds, ‘[o]ne feels admiration for the author’s single-mindedness and courage, yet cannot fail to be critical of superficial documentation and his habit of jumping to conclusions.’142 One of the most infamous of these anecdotal conclusions is derived from an account of a child committing suicide. Correlating the death with comics, he writes how one can draw no other conclusions other than comics are to blame when ‘beneath the dead child is found an open

Forman, 1935, p. 113. Wertham, 2004, p. 91. Emphasis mine. 139 Ibid. 140 Reibman, 2004, p. vii. Emphasis mine. 141 Sourced Springhall, 1998, p. 115. 142 Ibid. 137 138

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comic book luridly describing and depicting a hanging’.143 Of course no reference or evidence is provided bar a cursory comment between brackets which states ‘(as has happened in a number of cases)’.144 Analogous to the deterministic predictions of Graham Bright ahead of the clinical reports on video nasties, and the anti-videogame rhetoric surrounding school shootings in the United States, Wertham proclaims that only one course of action is assured when ‘scenes of sadism, sex and crime in comic books arouse the child’s emotions’.145 These actions, he concludes, ‘can only be masturbatory or delinquent’.146 In ‘Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics’ (2012) Carol L. Tilley documents how Wertham ‘manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence’ over and over again especially research he supposedly conducted at Lafargue Clinic.147 Privileging his interests over ‘verifiable science’ Wertham often ‘played hard and fast’ with the research conducted on comics.148 Echoing an earlier sentiment, Barker contends, however, that concentrating on how he conducted his research misses the point of why he conducted it and what made him so determined to highlight the harmful effects of comic books in the first place.149 Reflecting upon his later book, A Sign of Cain (1966), Barker deduces that the psychiatrist had a very polarised view of cultural reproductions.150 While the grotesque horror of Goya and the distorted terror of photomontage artist John Heartfield was for Wertham anti-violence art by nature of its apparent self-conscious intellectualism, the hyperbolic gore-laden ruminations of comics were for him pro-violence. As the fruits from a ‘mass produced system in a mass society’, Wertham would never have acknowledged the comic as demonstrative of anything but senseless violence.151 In his final appraisal of Wertham, Barker concludes that his ‘power to lead and mislead over the comics came precisely from that inchoate moral impulse that drove his vision’.152 Though arguably his heart was in the right, Wertham had gone against the advice of his peers and published for the general public a popularised though deeply flawed account

Wertham, 2004, p. 46. Ibid. 145 Ibid., p. 117. Emphasis mine. 146 Ibid., p. 117. Emphasis mine. 147 Tilley, 2012, p. 383. 148 Ibid., p. 402. 149 Martin Barker, ‘Fredric Wertham, The Sad Case of the Unhappy Humanist’, in John A. Lent, (ed.) Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (New Jersey: Associated University Press, 1999a), pp. 215–233, p. 223. 150 Ibid., p. 223. 151 Ibid., p. 227. 152 Ibid., p. 228. 143 144

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of his research which would have far-reaching consequences for comics, especially those of the horror variety.153 Seduction of the Innocent like Our Movie Made Children was very much a document of its times which spoke of a society vulnerable to paranoia and persuasion. In the role of a child expert, his participation at the hearings became symbolic of a united attack on immorality and un-American values. Just as he had manipulated the data to show that comics were a source for concern, Wertham had arguably been manipulated by the hearings in order to provide an ‘intentionally provocative’ and ‘deliberately sensationalised portrait of the worst that comic books had to offer’.154 Having never advocated censorship, as this chapter will detail, by the end of the hearings his views, contrary to his original wishes, were indiscernible from those of the ‘blue-nosed censor’.155

Horror comic communism Symptomatic of the myth’s palimpsestic structure, horror comics and the campaign against them endured an extremely complicated relationship in the 1950s. Seen to not only internalise the fears of communism and juvenile delinquency, horror comics were also charged with their double advocacy. ‘Delinquency was not related to anti-communism by accident of time,’ wrote Gilbert, ‘nor was the similarity merely metaphoric, denoting a lack of sophistication among those who feared social change. Instead, delinquency and communism were both symbolic of a very genuine concern about social disintegration.’156 Not only did the Red Scare engender an air of paranoia but it also aroused a sense of national duty to root out corruption. Unlike Fascism which could be physically overpowered, Communism was perceived as a more insidious threat. Consequently this ‘misleading analogy’ made the transfer of public hatred and fear from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia very simple, thus obstructing a complex understanding of exactly what the political differences were between the various hostilities.157 Coincidently the term ‘communist’ was imbued with a more malefic connotation far beyond

As a mentor of Wertham, Sigmund Freud had categorically warned the younger doctor that one should never write on psychiatry for the popular press stating that ‘in America no one cares about psychoanalysis’. Wertham evidently dismissed his advice. Sourced Peace Loving Psychiatrist’, MD Medical News Magazine. 11, (7), July 1967, pp. 229–235; cited in Fredric Wertham, The Fredric Wertham Collection: Gift of His Wife Hesketh (Cambridge: Wm Hays Fogg Art Museum, 1990), p. 12. 154 Nyberg, 1998, p. 93. 155 Senator Kefauver, Senate Subcommittee Hearing. 156 Gilbert, 1986, p. 76. 157 Adler and Paterson, 1970, pp. 1046–64; MacDougall, 1999, p. 59/60. 153

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the scope of its once political sphere. Ultimately Gothicised the communist became the ultimate other capable of surreptitiously creeping into your home unnoticed and corrupting the tranquillity of your private space. To call or be called a communist implied an anti-American agenda. As a consequence of this, the narrative of harm which accompanied horror comics and juvenile delinquency did not run parallel to the Red Scare because it had become assimilated by it. For example, the critic Wolcott Gibbs in his review of Seduction for The New Yorker agreed with Wertham’s stance, declaring that within comics there is ‘something more pernicious than simple witlessness and monumental vulgarity’.158 Published by ‘cultural hoodlums’,159 horror comics were an ‘incitement to rebellion against constituted authority’.160 Considering that ‘the most easily accessible and at present most potent method of vilification in the USA’161 was the branding of an individual as a ‘communist’, horror comics had entered very precarious and dangerous territory. Drawing together the two pillars of political and cultural subversion in concert, comic book artist Howard Post maintained, ‘[i]t started to be, if you said you were a comic book artist, people would look at you funny and move away, [as if] you said you were a communist.’162 In a similar tone of exasperation, the cartoonist Al Williamson declared, ‘It was a bad time to be weird. You were either a communist or a juvenile delinquent.’163 Looking back, Post claimed that the ‘witch-hunt psychology’ synonymous with 1950s McCarthyism was advancing ‘and comics were right there in it’.164 Symptomatic of the myth of harm, anti-communist campaigns which were spreading throughout America in the early 1950s internalised a fear of instability and unfamiliarity along with a shared ideology with horror comics that America was under threat from an internal adversary – a foe masquerading as a friend. As neighbours became suspicious of each other’s political inclinations, spurned no doubt by a climate of federal investigation, Senator Robert C. Hendrickson established a committee on juvenile delinquency in November 1953. Modelling his subcommittee on that of fellow Senator Kefauver’s Committee on organized crime in 1951, Hendrickson held hearings on a

Wolcott Gibbs, ‘Keep Those Paws to Yourself, Space Rat’, The New Yorker. 8th May 1954; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 243. 159 ‘Sterling North Reviews the Books’, New York World Telegram. 26th April 1954; cited Hajdu, 2008, p. 243. 160 Cited Hajdu, 2008, p. 244. Conversely Wertham maintained that certain comics had fascist inclinations. For example, defining Fascism as the government’s open use of resources to pursue the interests of the political agendas, he cites Captain America and Superman as those resources. 161 G. Wagner, Parade of Pleasure: A Study of Popular Iconography in the USA (New York: Library Publishers, 1955), p. 107. 162 Cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 210. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid. 158

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broad range of topics which covered gangs, drugs, guns and child prostitution. Within just a few months it became apparent to Hendrickson that a hearing solely dedicated to comic books was necessary. Upon hearing the news, Gaines responded by publishing a piece in keeping with the rebellious spirit of détournement.165 Using Red Scare propaganda to parody his opponents as communist sympathisers, Gaines printed a series of cartoons depicting a KGB officer trampling comics while warming his hands over a comic book bonfire. In a 1953 August edition of The Haunt of Fear, he printed underneath the image: [h]ere in America, we can STILL publish comic magazines, newspapers, slicks, books and the Bible. We don’t HAVE to send them to the censor first. Not YET . . . But there are some people in America who would LIKE to censor . . . who would LIKE to suppress comics. It isn’t that they don’t like comics for THEM! They don’t like them for YOU! Furious that his comics would have to stand trial, Gaines personally sent a copy to Senator Hendrickson, who unsurprisingly did not see the funny side. Taking the piece far more literally than was intentioned, Hendrickson denounced Gaines, declaring, ‘[t]here are evidently vested interests throwing up smoke screens about their activities which would prevent us from even raising a question concerning the impact of crime and horror comics on the young mind.’166 For reasons which one can only speculate had to do with a need to defend not only horror comics but also his own integrity, Gaines volunteered to testify at the hearings – a move which ultimately caused more injury to himself and horror comics than he could ever have anticipated.

The hearings: An introduction Describing how the ‘public outcry’ over comics resulted in the Comic Code in 1954, Nyberg explains how this form of self-regulation is still active to this day.167 Although Nyberg’s claim regarding self-regulation is justified, issue may be found with her claim that a ‘public outcry’ instigated the Code. Not for the first time we are left to ponder who were the ones panicking and crying out? Ever sceptical of the origins of these ‘public outcries’, one

‘Turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself’. For wider definition see Douglas B. Holt, Cultural Strategy Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands (Oxford: University Press 2010), p. 252. 166 Sourced Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 83rd Congress Second Session Volume 100, Part 4 (Washington: United States Printing Office, 1954). All further 1954 congressional citations will be sourced from this publication. 167 Nyberg, 1999, p. 42. 165

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could argue instead that under the rubric of child protection, emotions were manipulated and ultimately weaponised towards a visible and troublesome foe. ‘Once again,’ Crawford notes, ‘the newest form of popular media technology was seen as uniquely dangerous, presenting more extreme material to a more vulnerable audience, and thus possessing a monstrous capacity for corruption absent in earlier forms, requiring it to be subjected to much more vigilant censorship.’168 From a historical perspective it’s always interesting to note the ebb of flow of the myth’s non-linear trajectory as cultural products once deemed harmful to children are replaced in favour of something perceived as far worse. Reflective of these undulating narratives, by the early 1950s the controversy over post-war crime comics had subdued slightly.169 This was due in part to an investigation headed by Senator Estes Kefauver into the effects of crime comic books from 1945 to 1950 upon children, as part of the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Wishing to cover all potential causes of crime, Kefauver initially looked to the medium ‘because of the frequently heard charges that juvenile delinquency has increased considerably during the past five years and that this increase has been stimulated by the publication of the so-called crime books’.170 However, counter to his own narrative, it transpired that juvenile delinquency had actually decreased in these years, so crime comics were ultimately given a ‘clean bill of health’.171For a short period newspapers retracted their denunciations and boasted headlines such as ‘Comics Don’t Foster Crime’ and ‘Study Finds Doubt Comics Spur Crime’.172 When new figures pertaining to a 10 per cent increase in juvenile delinquency were published by the United States Children’s Bureau, the media upped the ante delivering reports on the causes of juvenile delinquency which ranged from broken homes to the Korean War, to not surprisingly horror comics. In the lead up to the 1954 hearings, a moderate victory was won for the anti-comic campaigners with the passing of New York State Legislation which made it a misdemeanour to either ‘publish or sell comic books dealing with fictional crime, bloodshed, or lust that might incite minors to violence or immorality’.173 However, the Bill was vetoed on the grounds that it was unconstitutional due to the ambiguous language. Anxiety surrounding juvenile delinquency had once again reached a stage

Crawford, 2015, p. 39. Hajdu, 2008, p. 154. 170 Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce: Juvenile Delinquency (Washington, DC, 1950). 171 Springhall, 1998, p. 131. 172 Mike Benton, The Illustrated History: Horror Comics (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1991), pp. 77–78. 173 Benton, 1991, p. 80. 168 169

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whereby a study organized and published by the New York Times deduced that the ambiguity surrounding the causes was in itself a probable cause of juvenile delinquency. Emphasising these anxieties, an accompanying article declared how ‘The public gets alarmed in sporadic cycles, perhaps first about sex offenders, then about narcotic addicts, but lacks convictions about the causes of delinquency’.174 In an effort to perhaps placate such ambiguity, with the air still acrid with the smell of burnt crime comics, gangsters were replaced with ghouls as horror comics became public enemy number one. Having either conveniently forgotten his 1950 findings or else considered the horror genre a more insidious threat, by 1954 Senator Kefauver had returned to familiar narratives of harm and was determined to put horror on trial. By the early 1950s, Wertham had resumed his courtship with the media. Finding an ally in the Ladies Home Journal in 1953 he published quite the suggestive and provocative ‘What Parents Don’t Know about Comics’ (1953). In contrast perhaps to writers such as Gershon Legman who declared that the ‘publishers, editors and artists and writers of comic books are degenerates and belong in jail’,175 for all his advocacy, Wertham retained a somewhat nuanced appraisal of the harm caused by horror comics specifically. This approach located Wertham on the axis between America’s ‘two primary fears: communism and juvenile delinquency’.176 In an era where intellectualism was viewed with suspicion and considered an ally of communism, Wertham had deliberately ‘de-emphasized the intellectual roots of his argument’ at the expense of his overall scientific integrity.177 Although Wertham was a key figure in the restriction of horror comics, he was not the doyen of the cause as he believed that all comics were on some level problematic. This wide-ranging stance was lost upon Senator Hendrickson, however, who prefaced the hearings on Wednesday, 21 April 1954, with a clarification of the type of comics under scrutiny. ‘Today and tomorrow’, the Senator announced: the United States Senate Subcommittee Investigating Juvenile Delinquency of which I am chairman, is going into the problem of horror and crime books. By comic books we mean pamphlets illustrating stories depicting crimes or dealing with horror and sadism. [. . .] Thus while there are no more than a billion comic books sold in the United States each year, our subcommittee’s interest lies in only a fraction of this publishing field.

‘Youth Delinquency Growing Rapidly Over the Country’, New York Times. 29th April 1952; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 202. 175 Gershon Legman, Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. 2nd edn. (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1963), p. 45. 176 Reibman, 2004, p. xxvii. 177 Nyberg, p. 87. 174

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Authorities agree that the majority of comic books are as harmless as soda pop. But hundreds of thousands of horror and crime comic books are peddled to our young ones of impressionable age.178 Conversely, while Wertham’s credentials added gravitas to the hearings, the subcommittee was concerned by his ‘extreme position’.179 While beneficial to use an esteemed figurehead like Wertham, whose ‘sober, painstaking, laborious clinical study’180 added an air of clinical authority to the proceedings, the subcommittee was only interested in proffering his studies insofar as they met with their expectations and anti-horror agenda. Manipulating Wertham’s extreme stance, the ‘legislators were more interested in appearing to do something about a problem that had captured the public’s attention than in truly exploring issues of media effects’.181 Considered as nothing more than a ‘symbolic show trial’,182 the hearings were simply a political vehicle which served multiple objectives including: ●

●

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demonstrate political concern in the search for an apparent ‘cure’ for juvenile delinquency. exhort Governmental control over what had been up until now a private sector industry. regulate and restrict both the tastes and interests of minors all under the guise of protecting children from ‘harmful’ material.

Seeking to investigate the entire comic book industry and then simply condemning only one particular area was not only disingenuous, but it also invoked a historical precedent whereby a book about monsters was identified, isolated, and publicly condemned as monstrous. Having just listened to Wertham as part of the evening session on 21 April, Bill Gaines was asked to take the stand. In one of the many terse exchanges between Gaines and Senator Kefauver during the hearings, Gaines corrected the Senator exclaiming that he did not start this ‘crime and horror business’;183 rather it was he who ‘started horror’ in comics.184 Though not entirely true, Gaines had by 1954 become synonymous with the horror genre and the horror genre with EC. Therefore, when he volunteered himself

Opening statement from Chairman Senator Hendrickson at the Senate Subcommittee Hearing. Emphasis mine. 179 Background statement prepared by the Senate, Senate Records, ‘Background Statement’. 180 Wertham testimony. 181 Nyberg, 1998, p. 79. 182 David Park, ‘The Kefauver Comic Book Hearings as Show Trial: Decency, Authority and the Dominated Expert’, Cultural Studies. 16, (2), 2002, p. 261. 183 Senator Kefauver in Gaines’ Testimony. 184 Gaines Testimony. 178

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to present a statement in defence of horror comics, it was generally agreed by those opposing horror comics that the root of all evil would stand trial. Within minutes, Gaines had introduced the first of his passionate arguments in defence of horror comics as he pleaded how: [e]ntertaining reading has never harmed anyone. Men of good will, free men should be very grateful for one sentence in the statement made by Federal Judge M. Woolsey when he lifted the ban on Ulysses. Judge Woolsey said ‘It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned. ‘May I repeat,’ he said, ‘It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned.’ Our American children are for the most part normal children. They are bright children, but those who want to prohibit comic magazines seem to see dirty, sneaky, perverted monsters who use comics as a blueprint for action.185​

FIGURE 2.6  Front cover of EC’s Crime SuspenStories (entire page) no. 22, 1954. Artwork is copyrighted material owned by William M. Gaines, Agent, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Ibid.

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As one of the most critical tenets of the myth of harm, Gaines had failed to appreciate that if an individual is not on the side of those seeking to save children from harmful influences, then they must be on the side that wishes to harm them. Seeking to distance himself from Gaines, George Davis, a publisher of a wide variety of non-crime and horror comics, stated how ‘this whole barrel of apples is not rotten [. . .] anyone who tries to defend [horror comics] is next to crazy, and he is out for something besides helping America’.186 As a consequence Gaines had found himself on the wrong side and shunned by the very community he had worked so hard to build. While highlighting the potentiality of a new generation to disrupt traditional values, Gaines’s most grievous blunder, which arguably was coerced from him, was to introduce the minefield that was taste. Asked by Mr Beaser whether there was a limit to what he would feature in a horror comic, Gaines flatly replied: ‘No, I wouldn’t say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined.’ Asked if a child could be hurt in ‘any way shape, or manner [. . .] by anything that [they] read or see’, Gaines again responded that he didn’t believe so and reiterated that he was only limited by the bounds of good taste’.187 With the introduction of taste, Gaines had unfortunately opened a proverbial can of worms. Leaping upon his chance to undercut Gaines, Senator Kefauver theatrically pulled out a copy of Crime SuspenStories which featured a cover of a man holding a bloody axe in one hand and the severed head of a woman, held by her hair in the other.188 In what would eventually prove a suicidal move, Gaines concluded that this was indeed within the realms of good taste, ‘for a horror comic’. A ‘cover in bad taste’, Gaines explained, ‘might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen as bloody’.189 ‘There was blood coming out of her mouth’, Kefauver snapped back. As the ‘severed-head exchange’ proved, Gaines was never going to win an argument about the limits of taste in horror. Rather it served to reinforce ‘the accusations from Wertham and others that the comic book publishers were unscrupulous, greedy men with little concern for the type of material they published’.190 In an environment which had already found horror comics below contempt, any credible footing the publisher had gained by his astute socio-political commentary was now undermined by a shaky overview of what constitutes good and bad taste.

George Davis Testimony. Gaines Testimony. Emphasis mine. 188 SuspenStories, #22, April/May 1954. 189 Gaines, Testimony. 190 Nyberg, 1999, p. 53. 186 187

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The Taste Trap In an attempt to justify how the limits of taste functioned within horror comics, Gaines had blindly walked into something of a ‘Taste Trap’. Even if Kefauver had agreed with Gaines that the cover was within the bounds of good taste ‘for a comic book’, such an omission consequently implies that there exists worse material clearly within the realms of ‘bad taste’. As the hearings jumped between accusations of harm to indictments of bad taste, it began to seem as if the two were not mutually exclusive and even though the hearings would fail to find horror comics guilty of harm, the alleged potentiality of comics to harm was still somehow bound up in visual representations depicting ‘violations of good taste or decency’.191 In portraying images of murder and mayhem, horror comics may have left a proverbial bad taste in the mouths of many. The splitting of hairs over how much blood was acceptable for children’s consumption was never a debate Gaines could win, principally because the very origins of this particular type of comic lay within the Gothic which had traditionally confronted and taunted the tenets of good taste. Constantly challenging our limits and perceptions, the Gothic deliberately questioned the very notion of good taste as a correlative of virtue. Thus ‘to condemn Gothic for its perceived “bad taste” is, in essence, to condemn it for acknowledging those very alternatives to monolithic orthodoxy’.192 By the same token, considered cheap, mass-produced and countercultural, horror comics challenged perceptions and intentionally featured the worst society had to offer in opposition to dominant mainstream media representations. From the outset, the greatest fear concerning early critics of Gothic was ‘an absence of taste, or rather, the bad taste of the writers’193 and how this would effect young readers. As far back as The Monk, L. Andrew Cooper notes the historical association between the Gothic and allegations of vulgarity ‘condemns not only the writers but also readers who exhibit such a lack of discernment in their choice of subject’.194 Referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979), Jeffrey Brown similarly notes that this fear is a confrontation with aesthetics which do not conform to the established norms of high culture and that that any: practices that do not adhere to the dictates of ‘good taste’ are taken as markers of an individual’s inferiority [. . .] Because pursuing a

Sourced Nyberg, 1998, p. 167. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes, (eds) Queering the Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 2. 193 Margarita Georgieva, The Gothic Child (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 61. 194 Cooper, 2010, p. 50. 191 192

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leisure activity that is in ‘bad taste’ is considered detrimental to one’s development, society often adopts a paternalistic attitude of wanting to save fans from the harmful effects of popular mediums.195 In regulating and restricting that which does not subscribe to the tenets of good taste, these guardians of morality and taste are seen to protect the young and vulnerable from a fate of overindulgence in base conduct. Consequently the charge of bad taste when invoked within a narrative of harm can take on an extremely punitive tone as the issue of taste extends far beyond aesthetics. Considering that such a charge was arguably a deciding factor in the majority of horror comics refused a ‘Seal of Approval’, it is important at this juncture to examine the idea of how taste, or rather a repugnance of bad taste, is arguably perceived as both a moral and social judgement. While Bourdieu didn’t necessarily grant children social agency portraying ‘them as primarily passive in the face of the inculcation they receive’,196 if we were to consider youth culture hypothetically as representational of an emerging class within society afforded a lowly status, the application of Bourdieu’s theories on taste unearths some interesting appraisals of the horror comic controversy in the United States and beyond into further controversies. During the hearings, it wasn’t exactly horror comics that were on trial, as that judgement was a foregone conclusion irrespective of proof. Arguably children who sought to exercise a form of limited autonomy through emerging popular culture were on trial. Anything which seemed to flaunt or stand in defiance of ‘traditional values or common notions of middle-class morality’ came under scrutiny, and comic books, as Bradford W. Wright notes, were prime targets.197 ‘Crime and horror comic books’, Wright continues: epitomized the widening distance between youth culture and traditional adult notions of childhood. Critics of all political inclinations charged that seductive commercial products had intruded between innocent children and proper sources of moral authority. Parents. Teachers, church, and government leaders increasingly had to compete with movies, television, and comic books for influence in the shaping of young minds.198

Jeffrey A. Brown, ‘Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital’, in Ray B. Browne, (ed.) Profile of Popular Culture: A Reader (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 306–326, p. 312. 196 Deborah Reed Danahay, Locating Bourdieu (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 66. 197 Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 156. 198 Wright, 2001, p. 156. 195

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One way of gaining control over youth culture was to question the moral validity and safety of something like horror comics, thus immediately locating a debate on taste within the confines of a harm narrative. Bourdieu’s reading of taste as ‘first and foremost’ a distaste or disgust ‘provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others’199 is especially relevant as an explanation for why comics faced such wrath in 1950s America. Never a static image, good taste is, as Jennifer Tsien argues ‘proof that [. . .] society has successfully emerged from the chaos, even if it is in danger of plunging back into it at any moment’.200 Consequently, as we shall see in the following chapter on video nasties, the pursuit of good taste and the eradication of bad becomes something of a moral enterprise in order to put forward an illusion of social discipline. Moreover, appropriating Bourdieu’s interpretation of taste as ‘strategic tools’, allows us, ‘to set ourselves apart from those whose social ranking is beneath us, and to take aim at the status we think we deserve’.201‘Taste,’ contends Carl Wilson, ‘is a means of distinguishing ourselves from others, the pursuit of distinction. And its end product is to perpetuate and reproduce the class structure.’202 As a result, the class denoted by youth culture is repeatedly signified and ‘problematised’ by its distasteful qualities. In order to enforce tangible and legitimate restrictions upon the avocation of perceived qualities of ‘bad taste’, the indelible myth of harm is employed making credible the restrictions enforced in the name of taste. However, as the following section will detail, taste, as is often the case, can be appropriated in order to strengthen other convictions such as nationalism.

British ban on horror comics While this chapter predominantly explores the American comic book controversy which culminated in 1954, similar to the 1936 ‘ban’ on horror films, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the calls for the restriction and censorship of horror comics in the UK. Unlike both the UK ban and the US Senate hearings in 1954, the controversy in Britain over ‘American comics’ resulted in legislation banning the sale or distribution of such comics under the 1955 ‘The Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act’. While at first sight, the controversy in the UK seemed to mirror the

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Richard Nice (trans.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 457. 200 Jennifer Tsien, The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth Century France (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 74. 201 Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste (Bloomsbury: New York, 2014), p. 90. 202 Wilson, 2014, p. 91. 199

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familiar delineation of the comic book ‘witch-hunt’ in the United States, in A Haunt of Fears (1984) Barker unearths a highly politicised backstory which originally motivated the controversy. Referring once again to Holbrook’s article’s in The Sunday Times, Barker emphasises the deliberate links made by Holbrook between the current threat from video nasties and the campaign against horror comics thirty years earlier. However, ‘[t]hese analogies are not what he thinks’.203 Typical of the internal mechanisations of the myth, ‘the campaign against the comics was not about the comics, but about a conception of society, children and Britain’.204 This point is critical in understanding the role played by the myth of harm within controversies throughout this book, as it denotes a wider social, moral and political agenda almost entirely about something other than the texts under scrutiny. Arguably, at the heart of the British horror comics ban was a perceived threat of American cultural imperialism bound up with issues of taste and decorum. Labelling them as ‘American comics’ inferred quite an obvious distaste and hostility towards both the content of the comics and the culture that produced them. Though grateful to the allies, following the end of hostilities in 1945, David Kynaston observes how there was a burgeoning ‘resentment of a newly risen superpower that seemed unpleasantly inclined to throw its weight around’.205 One way in which these feelings were countered was to produce sanitised British alternatives to American imposters which bolstered national pride. Written and published by Anglican Clergyman Marcus Morris the Eagle comic was one such alternative and seen as ‘a riposte’ to the ‘vulgar’.206 Bound up with such fervent nationalism, there was also an emerging movement against the comics in the form of organisations such as the National Council for the Defence of Children (NCDC) and the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) which later formed the Comics Campaign Council (CCC) in May 1953. Producing many of the publications for the CCC including a pamphlet titled ‘Comics and Your Children’ (1954),207 school teacher George Pumphrey stated that in the opinion of the CCC ‘these bad comics harm all the children who read them’ and ‘promote juvenile delinquency’.208 Reaching almost a shrieking tone of admonishment he continued that ‘a diet of horror and brutal crime taken over a long period will dull the sense of right and wrong and lead jaded appetites to seek even

Barker, 1984b, p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. 205 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–1951 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 133. 206 Marcus Morris, The Best of the Eagle (Middlesex: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1977), p. 3; Kynaston, 2007, p. 505. 207 George H. Pumphrey, ‘Comics and Your Children’, Published by the Comics Campaign Council, 1954. 208 Pumphrey, 1954, p. 6. 203 204

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greater horrors’.209 As a cheap, easily available mass-produced medium the horror comics were perceived as indefensible, probably because, as Barker remarks, ‘nobody would defend them’.210 Capitalising on CCC’s views of the American comic as harmful from both a moral and nationalist perspective, the British Communist Party (BCP) took an active interest in the CCC. Such an interest was mutually beneficial to both groups as it defined ‘the new imperialism as a decline in standards and the corruption of higher feelings’.211 Habitually used as a ‘resource’ and ‘political tool to heighten fears and entrench political stances’,212 as a deeply ingrained ideological construct, ‘the child in danger’ overrides logic and provides the key to understanding how pervasive the myth of harm has been within state legislation. The BCP’s involvement in the comic’s campaign in the 1950s is a prime example of how a politicised effort on behalf of a left-wing party to counter the perceived ‘rising tide of “American world domination”’213 took advantage of the harm narrative in order to mount a public offensive. But of course, in a climate which was thoroughly suspicious if not downright offended by Communism, it was only a matter of time before the communist intervention into the comic’s campaign was ‘rumbled’.214 One of the most important aspects of curtailing and distancing the involvement of the CP was in fact, one of nomenclature. In order to remove any sense that the campaign against comics was somehow bound up with leftwing fears pertaining to imperialism, American comics were now referred to as ‘horror’ comics. ‘That shift,’ Barker notes, ‘can best be characterised as a search for the lowest common denominator which they would bind together all supporters.’215As a perceived propagator of degeneracy, the attack on the horror genre was emblematic of a larger effort on behalf of concerned citizens to keep children free from harm. As a consequence, the ‘case against comics became a moral one: the defence of “national decency”’.216 With an emphasis on ‘literary taste’ horror comics were reduced down to the harmful ‘bad bits’. Broken down and decontextualised it was claimed that the comic’s visual quality allegedly had the ability to impose negative images

Ibid., p. 19. Barker, 1984b, p. 9. 211 Ibid., p. 23. 212 Jennifer Brown, ‘Sustenance for the Body and the Soul. Children as a Vision of the Future of Humanity and a Reflection of its Past Sins in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema’, in Debbie Olson, (ed.) The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema (London: Lexington Books, 2015), pp. 17–40, p. 21. 213 David Barrat, Media Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4. 214 Barker, 1984b, p. 52. 215 Ibid., p. 35. 216 Barrat, 1994, p. 4. 209 210

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upon the mind of the child.217 Thus as taste was ultimately a deciding factor in the manner in which the Comics Code would be constructed in the United States, a repugnance of the horror comic’s apparent bad taste arguably featured as a prominent force in getting the 1955 Bill passed. By 1955 the Harmful Publications Acts was in force because as Barker notes, no one had any reason to not pass it.218 With everyone watching everybody else,219 the passing of the 1955 Bill demonstrated how powerful the myth of harm could be. At the risk of being denounced as reactionary, Pumphrey, like Wertham and Kefauver, wholeheartedly rejected outright censorship as a viable option claiming it would be ‘distasteful to all of us’ and ‘might be misused at some future date’.220 Of course with the introduction of the Harmful Publications Act in 1955, it could be argued that such a ‘distasteful imposition’ became a reality. Though no conclusive research was carried out in order to substantiate the harmful effects of horror comics, enmeshed into the very language of the Act was the word harm, thus validating and legitimising the unqualified spectre of danger within horror comics.

The decline of the horror comic Returning to the Senate hearings, it was surprising that aside from Dr Harris Peck, whose opinion that horror comics influenced only the ‘emotionally maladjusted child’, the subcommittee choose to dispense with any other formal medical opinion. Equally surprising was that after an intensive round of testimonials lamenting the perilous pastime of horror comic books, Kefauver wrote in his interim report: ‘Surveying the work that has been done on the subject, it appears to be the consensus of the experts that comic book reading is not the cause of emotional maladjustment in children.’221 However, Kefauver still managed to stoke the fires of doubt when he hazily summarised the hearings thus: ‘The excessive reading of this material is viewed by some observers as sometimes being symptomatic of some emotional maladjustment, that is, comic book reading may be a

Martin Barker, ‘Getting a Conviction: Or, How the British Horror Comics Campaign Only Just Succeeded’, in John A. Lent, (ed.) Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (New Jersey: Associated University Press, 1999b), pp. 69– 92, pp. 78–79. 218 Barker, 1999b, p. 87. 219 Ibid., p. 89. 220 Pumphrey, 1954, p. 22. 221 Interim Report, 1955. Emphasis mine. 217

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workable “diagnostic indicator” or an underlying pathological condition of a child.’222 Having conducted a series of investigations into whether or not horror comics were a major cause of juvenile delinquency, the subcommittee had found themselves back at the same point they had started out at. This time, however, the subcommittee made their intentions clear. The federal investigation would continue, but the real responsibility rested on the shoulders of those who created the comics with an aim to ‘eliminate all materials that potentially exert detrimental effects’.223 Though nothing conclusive supported the allegations that horror comics ‘demoralised’ or contributed to juvenile delinquency, the spotlight of accusation remained fixed. Employing the now familiar theme that ‘good parents’ protect their children from ‘terrible books’, Myrtle Govley in an article published by National Parent-Teacher insisted that ‘every parent’ who: cares about his child, every adult who cares about his community, to leaf through the crime and horror comics and see for himself the realm through which a child can wander for a dime [. . .] Crime and horror books must be wiped out, removed forever from the reach of children.224 In an unexpected move from the man considered the most responsible for ‘poisoning the minds of children’, Gaines decided to invite high-profile publishers from across the country to a series of meetings with the intention of designing a plan of action to quash allegations of comic books inciting juvenile delinquency. After a number of meetings, the group decided to formalise the arrangement and called themselves the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). After Wertham had unsurprisingly declined the position as director of the CMAA, Charles Murphy, a New York judge was appointed. By the fourth meeting, it had become clear to Gaines that the purpose of the CMAA was to purge and not redeem horror comics and it began to dawn on Gaines that a sacrifice was needed in order to show the comic book industry was genuine in its efforts to ‘clean up comics’.225 Terms synonymous with horror comics such as ‘horror’, ‘terror’ and ‘weird’ would be prohibited. For the EC publisher this spelt the end of his horror line for how can you produce horror without advertising it as such? Storming out of a meeting, Gaines protested, ‘This is not what I had in mind.’226

Ibid. Ibid. Emphasis mine. The subcommittee was supposed to regroup and continue its investigations, but it never did. 224 Myrtle Govley, ‘A Mother’s Report on Comic Books’, National Parent-Teacher. December 1954, p. 27; cited in Nyberg, p. 190. 225 Nyberg, 1999, p. 54. 226 Hajdu, 2008, p. 286. 222 223

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On 4 September in the EC offices Gaines held a press conference whereupon in a symbolic gesture he picked up a couple of titles and theatrically ripped them to pieces. Staring down at the shreds of his once popular, now defunct comics, he lamented that: there has been much clamour against horror and crime comics based on the premise that horror and crime comics stimulate juvenile delinquency, a premise that has never been proved, and which in fact has been refuted by prominent psychiatrists and other experts. [. . .] EC has always been the leader. And so once again we are taking the lead, this time in discontinuing crime and horror.227 Five weeks after the EC press conference, CMAA announced that it had drawn up a code of ethics for comic books. As a ‘monument of self-imposed repression and prudery’, amongst the Code’s many stipulations, ‘[a]ll scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism and masochism’ were forbidden. Taking great pains not to repeat the oversights of the earlier, ‘horror-friendly’ Comic Code of 1948, ‘[s]cenes dealing with, or instruments associated with the walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism are prohibited’.228 As if that wasn’t restrictive enough, identifying and blocking loopholes Murphy added that ‘all elements or techniques not specifically mentioned herein, but which are contrary to the spirit and the intent of the Code, and are considered violations of good taste or decency, shall be prohibited’.229 Ironically crime comics fared a little better. Although there was a similar set of stipulations attached to crime comics including the insistence that ‘good must always prevail over evil’, crime comics were still legitimate; horror, on the other hand, was not. In an obvious dig at the entire affair, Wertham wrote in a 1955 article titled ‘It’s Still Murder’ how after all the fuss over the hearings, ‘it is far safer for a mother to let her child have a comic book without a seal of approval than one with such a seal’.230 All the Code had done, according to Wertham, was ‘disguise the actions in a hypocritical aura of good taste where the ghastly effects of heartless cruelty were never realistically depicted’.231 Without a seal of approval horror comic

Sourced Hajdu, 2008, p. 287. M. Keith Booker, Encyclopaedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010), p. 659. An amendment was made in 1971 which permitted such themes when used in reference retellings of traditional gothic tales such as Dracula, and in the stories of Poe. 229 Booker, 2010, p. 659. 230 Wertham, ‘It’s Still Murder’, Saturday Review of Literature. 9th April 1955; cited in Nyberg, p. 99. 231 Daniels, 1973, p. 86. 227 228

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book production stopped almost overnight as few if any distributors would handle orders. Horror had been purged from the candy stores. Not satisfied with these new restrictions, some campaigners felt that the thousands and thousands of pre-Code horror comics still in circulation remained capable of causing harm. Co-chair of the Child Welfare Department of the Legion Auxiliary, Ruth Lutwitzi, believed it her duty to protect children from a ‘literary diet of crime, horror, and sex comics fed systematically to millions’.232 Hot on the heels of Murphy’s CMAA ‘sweeping purification drive’, Lutwitzi was instrumental in setting up ‘Operation Book Swap’, whereby if children handed over ten or more of their horror or crime comic books they received in return a hardbound classic such as Johann David Wyss’ Swiss Family Robinson (1812) with a letter from Lutwitzi which stated: Dear Reader, who have performed a great service to your country today, by getting rid of those ten crime and horror comic books. Those ten books were like ten enemies who were trying to destroy good American boys and girls [. . .] America is not a land of crime, horror, murder, hatred and bloodshed. America is a land of good, strong, law-abiding people who read good books, think good thoughts, do great work, love God and their neighbour. That’s America.233 When enough comics were collected huge bonfires were lit and the comics were purged with flames. Ironically not only were the burnings reminiscent of a Nazi regime of Fascism in Germany, they also paradoxically pointed towards a culture of communist suppression. Such an irony, however, was lost on those supposedly protecting the traditional American values of family and flag. By 1956 the American horror comic in its original guise had all but disappeared. In an effort to appease the CMAA, comics had reverted back to more unequivocal themes whereby good triumphed over evil. The living dead were reburied and the ghouls exorcised. In a last-ditch effort to retain an element of control over his comic books, Gaines turned to science fiction. Originally published in a pre-Code 1953 edition of Weird Fantasy, postCode Gaines decided to republish quite a subversive and loaded story called ‘Judgment Day!’ which emphasised the unique ability comics could portray complex socials issues in simplistic and accessible ways. In the tale Tarlton, a representative of the Galactic Republic visits a planet inhabited by blue and orange robots.234 Though the blue and orange robots were all made Quoted in Mrs Charles Gilbert, The American Legion Auxiliary Vol. IV; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 297. 233 ‘“Operation Book Swap” Is Launched at Stone Bank against Comic Books’, Waukesha Daily Freeman. 14th March 1955; cited in Hajdu, 2008, p. 298. 234 Weird Fantasy no. 18 (March–April 1953). 232

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of the exact same components, the blue robots were considered rulers of the planet, while the orange were forced to live as second-class citizens. Distressed by what he had witnessed, Tarlton concludes that due to the planet’s discriminatory practices they are not ready to join the Galactic Republic. Having been concealed by his oxygen-supplying helmet for the duration of his visit to the robot planet, once aboard his ship he removes his helmet to reveal that Tarlton was black. Considering that this twist is potentially as loaded today as it was in 1953, Gaines’ use of science fiction as a backdrop to tales with social and political import encapsulates much of what his horror comics had previously sought to do. Ironically one of the main attacks on EC comics was, in fact, a misguided perception that their comics were racist. After a battle of wills in which Gaines and Feldstein tried to get ‘Judgment Day!’ past Murphy uncensored, Gaines finally decided to publish the story unexpurgated in Incredible Science Fiction. It was to be the last comic book Gaines would publish as he turned his attention to his remaining title – Mad, which he deliberately published in a magazine format to sidestep the Code’s stipulations. The demise of not just EC comics but also the popularity of comic books as a pastime cannot be pointed squarely at the Senate hearings or the implementation of the Code, as television had become a prominent feature in the lives of children from the mid-1950s on. What the hearings and Code had in fact done was to challenge youth culture on a range of assumptions pertaining to taste, politics, sexuality and social issues. While EC was not the sole publishers of horror and crime comics, they were exceptional in their ability to provide children and teens with a ‘liberating alternative’ to the culture of their parents in which they saw ‘their own anxieties writ large’.235 Finding horror or crime comics ‘guilty’ of influencing juvenile delinquency or moral corruption was not necessarily the main objective, as others had tried and failed in the past to find irrevocable evidence. Emptied of any meaning and replaced with a sundry of other motivations, the myth that horror harms was solidified as history transformed into nature. Equally evocative of such adhomination, the following chapter on VHS videos in 1980s Britain reveals the manner in which a Gothic tale of monsters and possession commanded a similar, though arguably more intense and politically charged enquiry into horror’s alleged potential to harm children, and even dogs.

Wright, 2001, p. 153.

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3 The video nasty controversy in the UK

Introduction The kidnap and murder of two-year-old James Bulger at the hands of two ten-year-old boys on 12 February 1993 in Liverpool had a seismic effect on not only the British people but arguably the world. In a desperate quest to understand why two little boys would subject a toddler to such a brutal and unprovoked assault, the fallout from the murder signalled a veritable maelstrom of tabloid sensationalism, media commentary and of course expert analysis seeking to provide salves in the guise of possible explanations for why such an abhorrent crime was committed. In the wake of the subsequent court case which followed, Professor Elisabeth Newson released a report titled the Video Violence and the Protection of Children (1994) which alleged a definitive link between fictional representations of violence and violence exhibited by children allegedly ‘exposed’ to such representations.1 Highlighting the immediacy of the issue, she lamented how the situation was far worse now than ever before and called for drastic action before it was too late: [m]any of us hold our liberal ideals of freedom of expression dear, but now begin to feel that we were naive in our failure to predict the extent of damaging material and it’s all too free availability to children. Most of us would prefer to rely on the discretion and responsibility of parents, both in controlling their children’s viewing and in giving children clear

1

The report is often known as the ‘Newson Report’ of 1994.

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models of their own distress in witnessing sadistic brutality; however, it is unhappily evident that many children cannot rely on their parents in this respect. By restricting such material from home viewing, society must take on a necessary responsibility in protecting children from this as from other forms of child abuse.2 Given the anxious climate which befell the British nation in the months following the murder of James Bulger,3 it was referenced by politicians and lobbyists campaigning for an amendment to the Video Recordings Act of 1984 (VRA). Comparable in tone and agenda to both Forman’s and Wertham’s research, Newson’s report proved influential despite its blatant moralising. Like Our Move Made Children and Seduction of the Innocent before it, the 1994 report lent considerable academic and scientific gravitas to the argument that horror and violent films could have detrimental effects on children. Considering the controversy which ensued over Child’s Play 3 (1991) during the Bulger case, it’s arguable that if it wasn’t for the narratives of harm concerning video nasties a decade previously, horror films would not have played such a dominant role in either the Bulger case or the subsequent media circus to follow.

Nasty Gothic Throughout this chapter on the video nasty controversy in 1980s Britain, both the texts themselves and the media responses to these texts will be critically analysed through the prism of Gothic criticism in order to diffuse the ‘vast fog of myths, pseudo-evidence and direct lies’, which ‘pushed through’ the VRA in 1984.4 One of the main obstacles to such an endeavour, however, is the fact that while there exists a large pool of research on video nasties across a range of disciplines, up to now little emphasis has been placed on video nasties from a Gothic perspective. While Round’s work has certainly provided an excellent account of comic book reading as a Gothic experience, there is surprisingly little in the form of a video nasty equivalent. Aside from their customary inclusion in Gothic horror historical trajectories, arguably video nasties have collectively been somewhat overlooked as a Gothic source. Most notably, in Cooper’s Gothic Realities any mention of video nasties is conspicuously absent – an absence which may be explained by its American

Elizabeth Newson, Video Violence and the Protection of Children, Report of the Home Affairs Committee (London: HMSO), 29th June 1994, p. 49. 3 See Barker and Petley, 2001. 4 Martin Barker, (ed.) Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1984a), p. 3. 2

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emphasis.5 In an effort to overcome such an omission, this chapter will be informed by a series of complementary cross-disciplinary sources including Jeffery Sconce’s ‘Trashing the Academy’ (1995) and Kate Egan’s Trash or Treasure? (2007). While these texts will prove useful throughout, there is also a need to return to critics such as Barker and Petley whose ongoing work in cultural and media studies remains of singular importance to any informed reading of the video nasty controversy. Yet from a more zoomedout perspective, there are a number of critics who have delved into the arena of body horror and the Gothic. For instance, in Body Gothic (2014) Xavier Aldana Reyes explores Gothic readings of hyperbolised representations of the body under duress typically found in video nasties. Likewise, Crawford’s work concerning the trope of the ‘terrible text’ (constituting of penny dreadfuls, cinema, horror comics, video games, and of course video nasties) has in a comparable manner attempted to Gothicise controversies relating to the horror genre.6 Building upon the work of these critics, this chapter on video nasties will similarly attempt to broaden the scope of Gothic studies as a means of interpreting text, subtext and most importantly context of the video nasty controversy. Accordingly, as an ever-evolving narrative it would be remiss to underestimate the importance of locating the video nasty controversy within a broader historical and cinematic context especially during the 1980s cycle of British ‘moral panics’.

Background to the video nasty campaign Often extremely amateurish, video nasties were cheaply produced and haphazardly distributed. Unlike the comics of the 1950s, these films were neither bound by nation nor even narrative but rather by time in that they were ‘released on video during the pre-VCR era in Britain’.7 Though many of these titles were upwards of twenty years old by the time they came under the eagle eye of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), for a new technological generation of home movie viewers, these films were reborn. What they did share with comics, however, was a collective impulse to undermine the sovereignty of established norms and tastes. With diverse roots and origins, many of these films were acutely self-conscious of how bad they were. In fact, this was often the allure. Yet for its detractors, the

There never was any form of video nasty controversy in the United States to the degree that existed in the UK. 6 Crawford, 2015, p. 39. 7 Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure: Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 3. 5

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video nasty represented a ‘veritable cornucopia of sleaze’,8 specialising in ‘sadism, mutilation and cannibalism’,9 which allegedly had the ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt, or make morally bad, a significant proportion of the likely audience’.10 The term ‘nasty’ according to Kim Newman was appropriated from literary jargon used to describe horror authors such as James Herbert and Guy Smith.11 Often misattributed to Mary Whitehouse, both Chas Critcher (2009) and Julian Petley (2011) identified the first use of the term in an article published on 23 May 1982 in The Sunday Times.12 Hot on the heels of the Daily Mail’s explosive article ‘The Secret Video Show’ which outlined the alleged dangers of the domestic video, The Sunday Times followed suit with its own sensational exposé – ‘How High Street Horror Is Invading the Home’. Apparently using the term ‘nasty’ for the first time, journalist Peter Chippendale recalled his experience of a visit to a video trade fair, where certain titles were referred to as ‘nasties’.13 Forever more, the term video nasty came to be synonymous with a period in British culture during the 1980s which was often defined by a ‘moral panic’ about the manner in which these videos were capable of allegedly inflicting great harm. Whether we view moral panics through a ‘register of the catastrophic’ in which folk devils are isolated and attacked as harbingers of societal decline or prefer as Claire Valier does to move past moral panics and towards a reading of folk devils as abject figures who have trespassed social boundaries,14 what’s clear is that many of the panics in question are sensationalised, if not often instigated by the media. Observing the dichotomy inherent within the media, Barker finds how ‘newly arriving’ mediums and platforms are often sites of great anxiety while ‘older media’ are typically recognized as ‘carriers and magnifiers’ of these anxieties.15 That said, due to the motivations and agendas of ‘powerful actors and institutions’ to shape latent fears about that which we consider abject, the moral panic can therefore be perceived and utilised as a strategic objective and not an organic inevitability. Taking Nigel Wingrove and Marc Morris, The Art of the Nasty (London: FAB Press, LTD, 2009), p. 11. 9 The Sunday Times. 30th May 1982. 10 Video Recordings Act 1984. Emphasis mine. 11 Kim Newman, ‘Journal of the Plague Years’, in Karl French, (ed.) Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 132–143, p. 134. 12 See Jeffery Sconce, Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2007, p. 185) and Robert Cetti, Offensive to a Reasonable Adult: Film Censorship and Classification in Secular Australia (Wider Screenings TM, 2011), p. 57. 13 Peter Chippendale, ‘How High Street Horror is Invading the Home’, The Sunday Times. 23rd May 1982. 14 See Claire Valier, Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 117. 15 Martin Barker, ‘Forward’, in Siân Nicholas and Tom O’Malley’s (eds) Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media: Historical Perspectives (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp xiii–xvii, p xiv. 8

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issue with the blanket application of the term ‘moral panic’, however, does not necessarily lead to a negation of the fact that for many campaigners cited throughout this book such as moral entrepreneur par excellence Mary Whitehouse, morality or rather the policing of other people’s morality was arguably the driving force behind their work. Each one took it upon themselves to not only protect the nation’s morality but subsequently ‘market’ their own unique form of absolute morality. Demonstrative of such ‘moral entrepreneurship’ was the Nationwide Festival of Light demonstrations throughout the UK in 1971. Appalled by an apparent increase in permissive attitudes within popular culture, the Festival proposed a series of demonstrations in order to mobilise the silent moral majority, against cinematic ‘filth’.16 Led by evangelical missionaries Peter and Janet Hill, the Festival forged strong links with a series of highprofile individuals such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford and Cliff Richard. So influential was this group at a grassroots level that on 25 September 1971, the Festival attracted thirty-five thousand people to a meeting in Trafalgar Square. Taking place over a decade before the VRA, the Festival was a decisive moment in not only the history of British film censorship but in mobilising narratives of harm which began to complement a major paradigm shift in research on political communication which assumed that ‘mass media had strong, long-term effects on audiences, based on the ubiquitous and consonant stream of messages they presented to audiences’.17 With the publication of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s ‘Return to the concept of powerful mass media’ in 1973 coinciding with George Gerbner’s development of cultivation theory, media effects research began to inch slowly away from behavioural changes to subtle changes in how we perceive the world. In no way reliant on such academic research, the ideological underpinnings of the Festival signalled the emergence of a mobilised evangelicalism that crystallised the power of moral entrepreneurship.

The ‘Powerhouse’ that was Mary Whitehouse Predating the Festival, an organisation known as the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVALA) was founded in 1965 by Mary Whitehouse as a consequence of her efforts during the 1964 ‘Clean

Taken from the minutes of a Nationwide Festival of Light rally by supportive Worthing councillor, in relation to a sundry of films release in 1971; cited in Thompson, 2012, p. 225. 17 Dietram A. Scheufele and David Tewksbury, ‘Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models’, Journal of Communication. 57, 2000, pp. 9–20, p. 10. 16

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Up TV Campaign’.18 Her adroit correspondence skills, political reach and flair for public speaking emboldened her position in Britain as something of a moral stalwart charged with the ‘supervision of public morality’.19 Viewing her work as a religious calling, she was militantly concerned with ‘moral normlessness which seemed to characterise the new permissive age’.20 Preoccupied with safeguarding the morality of the British people, Whitehouse confidently asserted in a 1971 mission statement for the NVLA how British people were now faced with the ‘extremism of evil’. In an effort to defeat such evils Whitehouse proposed an ‘extremism of good’.21 Appealing to a form of extremism in which the ‘good’ advocated for the supervision of the public’s morality and the ‘bad’ were those unwilling to supervise the morality of others, Whitehouse would direct her attention towards individuals such as Sir Hugh Green, the BBC’s director general, who she felt were ‘responsible for the moral collapse in this country’.22 Having campaigned against everything from poetry to porn, Whitehouse would eventually find her bête noire – video nasties. ‘Has the time not come,’ she cried, ‘when the gullible should be given some freedom from this assault on their sensibilities, even at the cost of restraining the freedom of the media-men to commit assault in this way?’23 Calling upon an established narrative within the myth of harm whereby the most vulnerable, or ‘the gullible’, are pitted against the insatiable greed of ‘media-men’ immediately positioned Whitehouse in a role of moral authoritarian. Invoking a role not unlike the biblical David who took on the monstrous Goliath, Whitehouse saw herself as the ‘everywoman’ facing off against the monstrous titans of the media industry. As horror cinema embarked upon an extreme new wave in the 1970s, this role would not only see Whitehouse double down on her own form of ‘good’ extremism but as horror got increasingly more visceral and violent, the ethics of what could be shown and what could not became an even more fraught subject especially when contextualised within childcentric narratives of harm.

Still in existence under the moniker of Media-Watch UK. Michael Tracey and David Morrison, Whitehouse (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1979), p. 141. 20 Tracey and Morrison, 1979, p. 40. 21 Whitehouse, ‘Speakers Material’, Internal NVLA Document, dated 1971, cited in Tracey and Morrison, 1979, p. 142. 22 Dennis Barker, ‘Mary Whitehouse: Self-appointed Campaigner Against the Permissive Society on Television’, The Guardian. 24th November 2001. 23 Tracey and Morrison, 1979, p. 155. 18 19

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‘New Horror’: A prelude to video nasties Coined by Ron Rosenbaum as ‘New Horror’, this innovative era was born ready to ‘supplant sex and violence in the hierarchy of mass sensationseeking’.24 Attributed in part to the psychological fallout of the televised imagery of the Vietnam War and rejection of the ‘love generation’ in the 1960s,25 there was a visible trend within mainstream cinema towards darker themes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though motivated by a concern over a growing permissiveness towards all media representations of sexuality and violence, during the 1970s certain films were targeted as being indicative of a wider problem. Perhaps this was true. However, this wider problem may not have been an escalation in cinematic violence for violence sake but a reflection, dissection and interpretation of an historically fractured period. With a penchant for more psychologically disturbing narratives, scathing social commentary and special effects, films such as Straw Dogs (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Exorcist (1973), Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) would epitomise this new wave in horror cinema. While horror would hold a pivotal role in articulating this ‘extreme cultural crisis and disintegration’, not all were as receptive to its liberating yet savage form of social commentary. Regarded by Whitehouse to be a film so ‘sickening and disgusting’ that she had to ‘come out after twenty minutes’,26 A Clockwork Orange was released amidst a sea of consternation for sixty-one weeks until director Stanley Kubrick, under a constant barrage of violent threats, felt it was the best decision to inflict his own form of self-censorship and withdraw the film in Britain.27 Asking uncomfortable questions about society’s ambivalent and apathetic attitude to violence, the film is an uncomfortable analysis of a psychopathic teenage protagonist called Alex (Malcolm McDowell). As voyeurs of his vicious rampage, the viewer’s participation is repeatedly and deliberately challenged as perspective switches from his victims to Alex and back again. For instance, in the home invasion scene a squatting Alex glares down at his gagged and bound victim who is forced to watch the rape of his wife before he giddily insists that we all ‘viddy [look] well’. Heightening the complexity surrounding the social construction of violence versus its representations, later in the film, a bound Alex is likewise made to ‘viddy well’ during his rehabilitative aversion therapy sessions. Destabilising the

Ron Rosenbaum, ‘Goose Flesh: The Strange Turn Toward Horror’, Harpers. September 1979. See Wood, 2003 and Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2013). 26 Daily Mail. 24th August 1973. 27 Tony Parsons, ‘Alex Through the Looking Glass’, in Karl French, (ed.) Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 179–185, p. 180. 24 25

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victim/villain polarity, a terrified Alex gasps and wriggles in his constraints as his eyes are peeled back and he is forced to watch scenes of real-life horror. Subverting this polarity further Alex is transformed into a clockwork automation through aversion therapy. The irony here of course is that Alex was always a man-made product of his environment.28 As a construction of the society in which he lives, akin to the monstrous creation of Victor Frankenstein, Alex is a ‘puppet with no visible strings’.29 While never actually sympathising with the monster, Alex’s viewers are left to consider whether his detestable behaviour is a consequence of his own vapid parents and degenerate environment or something else.30 No longer suffering pangs of aversion-induced nausea he looks into the camera and smirks, ‘I was cured all right.’ Clockwork offers neither resolution nor comfort in its portrayal of the dark human impulses; there are no neat endings here. Unlike Whale’s monstrous creature, in Clockwork the monster doesn’t die at the end because we were never quite sure who it was.​ ‘Having missed the boat’, Guy Phelps observes, ‘where the indiscriminate violence of Straw Dogs was concerned, all kinds of pressure groups, newspaper “campaigns” and all-purpose media commentators [. . .] now latched onto A Clockwork Orange’ as the current site of all evil.31 In defiance of mounting pressure, secretary of the BBFC Stephen Murphy boldly referred to it as ‘one of the most brilliant pieces of cinema, not simply of the year, but possibly of the decade’32 and granted an ‘X’ or over sixteen certification in the UK.33 In what seems like an unending series of ambiguities surrounding horror censorship, PR spokesman for the Festival Peter Thompson professed his admiration for A Clockwork Orange stating that ‘to someone who has committed violent acts and who has been mentally ill, this film seems to have an awful lot to say to society’.34 Failing to register any irony inherent in Kubrick’s denunciation of society’s ills, however, Hastings councillor John Hodgson wailed: [i]f you wish to see every moral aspect of family life torn to shreds before your eyes, sex with everybody and anybody as the order of the day [. . .] If

David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 1986), p. 136. 29 Hogan, 1986, p. 136. 30 Ibid. 31 Guy Phelps, Film Censorship (London: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, 1975), p. 80. 32 Stephen Murphy, secretary of the BBFC quoted in Julian Petley, ‘Clockwork Crimes: Chronicle of a Cause Celebre’, Index on Censorship. 24, (6), 1995, pp. 48–52, p. 48. 33 X was changed to the 18 certificate in 1982. 34 Cited in Mathews, 1994, p. 205. However, Thompson’s dalliance with art-house patronage was short-lived and, after having a ‘change of heart’, A Clockwork Orange was placed on the Festival’s grubby little blacklist. 28

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you want to see all these things then I’m very sorry, you’ve missed a great picture, but you badly need a psychiatrist.35 The press which by now had ‘recognised that film censorship had acquired news value’36 began to pump out a series of reports and articles relating to the rise in violent entertainment. In Ken Eastleigh’s report for The Sun, he proclaimed without any reference to the narrative contextualisation of A Clockwork Orange that it was ‘unparalleled in its concentrated parade of violence, viciousness and cruelty’.37 Compounding the issue further, the Daily Mail saw fit to euphemistically refer to a report on social disobedience, led by Dr William Belson of ‘The London School of Economics’, as the ‘first to study the clockwork orange society in this country’.38 Sizing the opportunity to align themselves with the moral and the good, politicians also became increasingly vocal. Proffering a somewhat literalist reading, Maurice Edelman, Labour MP, admonished an increasingly anxious public that if ‘A Clockwork Orange is released, it will lead to a clockwork cult which will magnify teen violence’.39 As if on cue the media began to conflate tenuous connections between the film and violent crime. In one case reported by the tabloids and broadsheets alike, fourteen-year-old James Palmer had beaten to death a sixty-year-old man who had been sleeping rough. Having initially claimed he had seen the film, during the trial he confessed this was untrue.40 Undeterred, Roger Gray, Palmer’s barrister, continued his now obsolete line of defence arguing to the court that ‘the link between this crime and sensational literature, particularly A Clockwork Orange is established beyond reasonable doubt’.41 It was not just the press, however, which made such connections. When a young teenager viciously beat up another teen, Judge Desmond Bailey claimed that A Clockwork Orange threw up ‘an unassailable argument for a return to censorship’.42 However, in many of these cases the ‘Clockwork excuse’ was overwhelmingly transparent, an observation supported by Keith Purdy who

35 Councillor John Hodgson, extract from the Festival of Light’s A Clockwork Orange press briefing, cited in Thompson, 2012, p. 225. 36 Mathews, 1994, p. 200. 37 Ken Eastleigh, ‘Film Shockerto End Them All’, The Sun. 6th January 1972. 38 Daily Mail. 24th August 1973. Emphasis mine; Consisting of 1565 youths aged between 12 and 17. 39 Maurice Edelman, Labour MP: Quoted in Alexander Walk, ‘The Winding Road to A Clockwork Orange’, Evening Standard. 1st March 2000. 40 ‘Serious Pockets of Violence at London School, QC Says’, The Times. 21st March 1972. Eventually worn out by the constant persecution he stepped down and was officially replaced by James Ferman just four years later in 1975. 41 ‘Clockwork Orange link with Boy’s Crime’, The Times. 4th July 1973. 42 The Times. 24th July 1973.

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worked at the Old Bailey. ‘Most of us who worked at the court’, recounted Purdy: thought this a load of rubbish but unfortunately such cases got a lot of publicity and many judges would impose lesser sentences in these cases. It got to the stage when we referred to these cases as ‘Clockwork Orange defences’ and it became almost boring as one after another tried using this excuse.43 Having passed the film, Murphy was understandably defensive about the allegations. Yet that didn’t stop him from dismissing the copycat claims as nothing but media sensationalism, categorically stating how ‘this is the sort of accusation that has been made dozens of times in the past about plays, radio and television programmes and never has the accusation in the end been justified’.44 Amidst the cries of ‘Murphy Must Go!’,45 the censor stood by his decision to release A Clockwork Orange uncut with an ‘X’ rating. Unfortunately, no sooner had these calls died down, Murphy once again found himself in the middle of further controversy as his decision to pass Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) with an ‘X’ led to a private prosecution by Edward Shackleton against the BBFC for publishing obscene material under the Obscene Publications Act. While the case fell apart, it was the first time that the BBFC had been legally challenged.46 Considered an extremely unlucky man to be caught up in the maelstrom of some of the most controversial films of all time, just a year later The Exorcist was released in the UK. No doubt emboldened by their legal challenge, the Festival Committee and NVALA picketed theatres handing out leaflets which gave out phone numbers of support groups for people who had apparently been left traumatised by William Friedkin’s possession horror. Conversely, one could make the argument that all this fuss simply emboldened cinemagoers in their determination to see the film and provided distributers with free marketing akin to screenings of Frankenstein in 1931 when running ambulances were parked outside cinemas ‘just in case’. It is worth noting that two of the films which the Festival were most vocal about in terms of harm, Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist, were in essence a distillation of teenage disempowerment. Granted Alex and

Mike Purdy, ‘On Kubrick’s Ban of ACC in the UK’, The Kubrick Website. Sourced http://www​ .visual​-memory​.co​.uk​/amk​/doc​/acoban1​.html [Accessed 6th August 2021]. 44 TNA file, HO 300/130, Letter from Stephen Murphy to the Town Clerk’s office, Leeds dated 5th March 1973, cited Sian Barber, Censoring the 1970’s: The BBFC and the Decade that Taste Forgot (London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), p. 68. 45 Barber, 2011, p. 207. 46 For further reading on this case see https://www​.bbfc​.co​.uk​/education​/case​-studies​/last​-tango​ -in​-paris 43

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The Exorcist’s Regan (Linda Blair) were at different spectrums of their adolescence with Regan on the cusp of her puberty at the age of twelve and the seventeen-year-old Alex at the traditional entry point to adulthood.47 That aside, in both films this transition from child to adult is placed under intense adult scrutiny as puberty is ultimately pathologised. While Alex’s autonomy is under threat from both his environment and the Pavlovian aversion treatment he endures, Regan has her bodily autonomy undermined again and again as the subject of medical intervention and patriarchal authority, to say nothing of the demonic possession. Drawing similarities with Polanski’s elfin girl-like Mia Farrow and Friedkin’s Regan, Darryl Jones notes how one of the most disturbing features of The Exorcist is ‘the way in which a young girl’s body becomes a site of contested possession and control for all the film’s competing interests: the Devil obviously, but also the various clinicians who attempt to treat Regan and the exorcists themselves’.48 Whether it’s her blood, spinal fluid, cerebral scans, sexuality or soul, everybody wants a piece of Regan. Poked, prodded and possessed, Regan is portrayed early in the film as a hapless innocent lying on hospital gurneys in blue virginal paper gowns. Similar to Alex, Regan is on the one hand the ‘symbolic victim of the modern age’49 and is forced to sustain a barrage of clinical and psychological tests which escalate in their experimental nature as the film progresses. On the other hand, Regan is the antithesis of victimhood as her burgeoning sexuality is similarly prefigured as monstrous. Reminiscent of EC’s Lucy, Regan is not a child in the traditional sense. Instead, she embodies the trope of the Gothic Child. A complete dichotomy she is simultaneously vulnerable yet dangerous; virginal yet sexually precocious; bound yet in full control. Regan ‘violates the borders that define subjectivities’ while existing ‘between the binaries of human and inhuman, living and dead, female and male, innocent and corrupt, childhood and adulthood’.50 Her adolescence triggers a physic change within Regan and her puberty is transfigured as monstrous – a revolting child who symbolises a crisis in normal development. Yet it is through her possession and subsequent exorcism, Regan is essentially reborn as a woman. Though she awakes from her demonic stupor

In the 1962 novella by Anthony Burgess, Alex is fifteen at the start of the novel just three years older than Regan. 48 Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Hodder Arnold, 2002), p. 187. 49 Gary Hoppenstand, ‘Devil Babies. Images of Children and Adolescents in the Best-Selling Horror Novel’, in Harry Edwin Eiss, (ed.) Images of the Child (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1994), pp. 35–58, p. 49. 50 Andrew Scahill, ‘Demons are a Girl’s Best Friend: Queering the Revolting Child in The Exorcist’, Red Feather Journal. 1, (1), spring, 2010, pp. 39–55, p. 44. 47

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screaming for her mother, it is interesting to note that having remembered nothing of her ordeal, Regan seals her entry into womanhood with a kiss to Father Joseph Dyer. Regan has now become something more than an ‘innocent girl, something more than the endangered victim’.51 Though its exterior gleams with a progressive polish, The Exorcist is at its core a conservative tale. As the embodiment of 1970s second-wave feminism, Regan’s mother Chris MacNeill is a successful single mother. However, as the film progresses and her daughter’s health declines, it becomes increasingly apparent that she is floundering. One could even read Regan’s possession as a punishment bestowed upon the divorced career-driven mother as it seems ‘Regan’s problems stem from the fact that she came from a broken home’.52 Though in the care of a young nanny, Regan is seemingly left unsupervised while her mother works and entertains friends. Left to do as she pleases it’s during this time she falls under the ultimate bad influence – the demonic Pazuzu. Penetrating the matriarchal household, literal fathers who up until this point had been conspicuous by their absence, re-enforce their authority over the home by driving out bad influences and with them the vestiges of feminist meliority. By the end of the film the patriarchy embodied by the Catholic Church has been restored to its rightful place at the head of the household.53 Unsurprisingly The Exorcist proved extremely popular with many Catholics in the United States as it provided an excellent representation of the Church as not only contemporary but, where pubescent girls were concerned, seemingly indispensable. But elsewhere narratives of harm which would be echoed within the video nasty period a little over a decade later touted the existence of a demonic force inherent within the very celluloid of the film. Famously declaring that ‘the Devil was in every frame’, prominent Evangelist Billy Graham anticipated not only the Satanic Panic in the 1980s in which everything from talcum powder to The Smurfs were accused of embodying the anti-Christ, but he also channelled a common narrative found within the myth of harm. With its origins in eighteenth-century denunciations of ‘Gothic Devilism’,54 narratives of harm purporting that the very soul of the person is at stake went on to inform and characterise much of the anti-nasty rhetoric throughout the decade. The British mood, upon the release of the film, at least within the lay Catholic community was decidedly mixed. Scoffing at Christians supporting the film on religious grounds, Catholic Herald journalist Peter Jennings

Ibid., p. 52. Jones, 2002, p. 188. 53 Father Kenneth Jadoff’s writing for The Catholic News claimed that The Exorcist was a ‘deeply spiritual film’. Cited in William Blatty, William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel to Film (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 35. 54 Review of The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, Monthly Review. 32, May 1765, p. 394. 51 52

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claimed that The Exorcist was a ‘thoroughly evil film – terrifying, dangerous and extremely powerful, it has no significant religious message whatsoever’.55 Demonstrating outside cinemas showing the film, the Festival issued leaflets to entrants, hoping they would be dissuaded from watching the film. One such leaflet issued at a Birmingham cinema proclaimed: Fear Fear is contagious, and no fear more so than the awesome dread of disembodied evil. 1974 And if we become gripped by this type of fear, our minds are opened to the psychological suggestion that we too are at risk of invasion by similar powers of evil. We are not immune simply because this is 1974 and we are in Birmingham, we are not immune because our reason tells us such things cannot happen – and we are very vulnerable indeed if we half believe they might.56 Considering the controversy, it wasn’t long before reports pertaining to the film’s apparent effects on its audience started to flood the press. One such report claimed how sixteen-year-old Jonathon Power had collapsed and died the day after seeing the film. It was revealed to decidedly less fanfare a few days later that Power had pre-existing medical problems relating to depression and heart issues. An even more disturbing account surfaced eighteen months after the film was released in the UK claiming that a seventeen-year-old Nicholas Bell had murdered a nine-year-old girl. ‘There was something inside me,’ he explained in court, ‘it has been in me since I saw that film The Exorcist. I felt something take possession of me. It has been in me ever since.’57 However, the possession defence fell apart days later when Bell admitted that he had made the whole thing up.58 Although nobody was essentially acquitted in court on the grounds that the devil made them do it, like Clockwork two years previous, the fact that such a defence was even entertained never mind validated in the courts spoke volumes of the climate in which the video nasty controversy emerged. Although there was a certain degree of controversy upon its release in the UK, it did slip through with an X certification. Its release within the home movie market, however, would take a further twenty-six years, owing

Peter Jennings, ‘Terrifying Reality of The Exorcist’, The Catholic Herald. 22nd March 1974. Thompson, 2012, p. 221. 57 Mikita Brottman, Hollywood Hex: Death and Destiny in the Dream Factory: An Illustrated History of Cursed Movies (London: Creation Books, 1998), p. 97. 58 Mark Kermode, It’s Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (London: Arrow Books, 2010), p. 37. 55 56

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to the fact that James Ferman, the former director of the BBFC, perceived it as having a ‘strange effect on little girls’.59 Expanding upon his claim, he argued that ‘[t]here are certain kinds of images and certain kinds of contexts for images which are worrying’.60 Based on a foggy notion that it was somehow harmful to little girls Ferman’s ban on a video version of The Exorcist effectively sought to regulate both the child’s access to horror and the adult’s private domestic realm. In a letter dated 10 December 1993, following the rerelease of The Exorcist theatrically, Ferman explained that the reason for not granting a video certification for a film, available to watch in cinemas for nearly twenty years, was that: under that act [The Video Recordings Act of 1984] the Board must consider the work’s suitability for viewing in the home, where there is far less control of audience age. [. . .] We have too much evidence of teenagers being disturbed by it in the cinema, particularly girls, as well as advice from child psychologists that it could be seriously disturbing to young people of this age. [. . .] we have concluded that, for the time being, its place is in the cinema rather than the home.61 It’s debatable, of course, whether Ferman actually believed The Exorcist to have harmful effects on children or whether he was simply avoiding the moral backlash. However, what is clear here is that he readily engaged with a form of what Matt Hills refers to as a ‘literalist reading’. Read thus, the film becomes a source of ‘mimetic infection, or of moral pollution’.62 Instead of creating a metaphorical, allegorical or even aesthetic distance between themselves and the narrative, literalist readers bestow texts with an almost magical quality to transgress the fictional limits of film and print. If he had read the text allegorically and not literally, Ferman may not have imbued the film with fresh powers to harm and corrupt little girls every time the play button was pressed. By the mid-1970s, the new wave of ultra-violent horror films had become problematic for both the BBFC and various film distributors trying to get these films into the theatres with as low a rating as possible to maximise ticket sales. Even though organisations like the Festival and the NVLA campaigned rigorously for censorship against films such as Last House on the

Cited in French, 1996, p. 6. Cited in Brottman, 1998, p. 99. 61 James Ferman, letter dated 10th December 1993. Given the year, one could speculate he is referencing the death of James Bulger and the following controversy which ensued over Child’s Play. 3, 1991. Sourced https://darkroom​.bbfc​.co​.uk​/original​/7c0​810a​ba99​5543​8ef8​ 45f7​52e139044​:905​d762​e567​506a​e7e4​f734​5d07f6ccc​/exorcist​-report​.pdf [Accessed 2nd June 2021]. 62 Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 3. 59 60

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Left, Black Christmas (1974) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre there was one film which would anticipate an entirely new approach to film censorship and regulation within the UK. Far from being the ‘agonised scream of total despair’, which the New York Film Festival called Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous reworking of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (1785), upon Salò’s (1975) release, surprisingly Ferman lauded Pasolini’s adaptation. Despite his own feelings he allowed it to pass under the proviso it was shown only in club cinemas. Within twenty-four hours of the film’s opening at the Old Compton Cinema Club in Soho, it was seized by Scotland Yard police and immediately brought before the DPP. The theatre was immediately charged under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which stated that an: article shall be deemed [. . .] obscene if its effect [. . .] if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.63 As far as the DPP was concerned, Salò was guilty on all counts and should be made stand trial.64 Proclaiming the film a ‘Turn off film, and not a turn on film’, in a letter to the DPP Ferman was quick to defend his decision: ‘It seems to me that your advisors have misunderstood the law of obscenity in Britain and have allowed their own sense of outraged propriety to colour their view of the film’s legality. The portrayal of evil in works of art is not the same thing as its endorsement.’65 In an attempt to defend the film, Ferman betrays here an obvious double standard. According to Ferman, obscenity is permissible as long as it is in the name of ‘art’ and only when it is seen by those who recognize the distinction. The problem with such a deduction is of course the eternal question of what constitutes art? And more importantly who gets to decide? If coprophagia is permissible in an art-house film such as Salò, why was a film such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which ironically features very little on-screen killing or blood shed denied a theatrical rating. The issue Ferman found with Tobe Hooper’s lowbudget slasher was how ‘realistic’ it was. Hence, he concluded, ‘you haven’t got that suspension of disbelief’.66 In terms of contextualising both films within narratives of harm, it is important to note that while neither was

Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Sourced http://www​.legislation​.gov​.uk​/ukpga​/1959​/66​/ pdfs​/ukpga​_19590066​_en​.pdf [Accessed 23rd July 2020]. 64 For further reading see John Sutherland, Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960– 1982 (London: Barnes & Noble Books-Imports, 1982), p. 82. 65 Sourced Dear Censor . . . The Secret Archive of the British Board of Film Classification (dir. Matt Pelly, 2011). 66 Cited in Mathews, 1994, p. 228. 63

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intentionally meant for a younger audience, they were both charged with the ability to corrupt and harm ‘vulnerable’ members of the viewing public. Ferman’s likely rationale for advocating one film while condemning the other was arguably steeped in an ideology which venerated the deep intellectual roots which ran throughout Salò. Chainsaw on the other hand came from an entirely different tradition which claimed no such intellectual dynasty forged as it were in the dusty highways and byways of the rural working-class American South. While Pasolini’s adaptation is a highly stylised depiction of fascist Italy, Ferman saw Hooper’s grindhouse feature as a lampoon of cross-dressing, chainsaw-wielding, unemployed hillbilly cannibals. In other words, Salò was considered high art, while Chainsaw was seen as lowbrow. Formulating a criterion for the lower art forms, William Paul argues that: [f]rom the high perch of an elitist view, the negative definition of the lower works would have it that they are less subtle than the higher genres. More positively, it could be said that they are more direct. Where lower forms are explicit, higher forms tend to operate more by indirection. Because of this indirection the higher forms are often regarded as being more metaphorical and consequently, more resonant, more open to the exegetical analyses of the academic industry.67 Although such a ‘positive’ definition seeks to upgrade lower forms to a more ‘direct’ form, directness here can easily be construed as explicit, and we once again arrive at a situation whereby on-screen shit-eating is somehow less direct than inferred off-screen cannibalism. Considered at either end of the spectrum, Salò and Chainsaw are potentially at odds with any neat comparisons, yet contrary to Ferman’s dismissal of Chainsaw there are many to be made. For instance, both films are particularly concerned with the consumption of tabooed abject substances such as excrement and human flesh. Both films intentionally push the audience into an uncomfortable voyeuristic gaze in which the physical, sexual and psychological torture of helpless victims is observed. Most interestingly, however, both films engender political readings. In Salò Fascism is represented by the exploitation of poor youth by a depraved aristocracy. In Chainsaw cannibalism quite literally embodies capitalism, as families are chewed up by the machinations of corporate industry and left to rot as progress is made elsewhere for better profit margins. Furthermore,

William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 32; Joan Hawkins, ‘Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash, and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture’, Film Quarterly. 53, (2), winter, 1999–2000, pp. 14–29, p. 23. 67

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both films play with the metatextuality and intertextuality of their respective plots. Salò was based on the controversial writings of eighteenth-century libertine Marquis de Sade, who, like the openly homosexual Pasolini, was persecuted for his lifestyle. Hooper’s grindhouse horror was essentially based on the life of cannibal, corpse defiler and neighbourhood babysitter Ed Gein. Yet there still remains an apparent gulf between the two films whereby Salò is highly regarded as an art-house classic and Chainsaw a grindhouse spectacle.68 As touched upon previously, taste or rather bad taste can often become embroiled within narratives of harm. As lowbrow or bad taste and lax morality are often conflated, there persists an argument that bad taste is a moral transgression. But who gets to decide? In trying to gauge the manner in which high- and lowbrow controversial films are classified, Joan Hawkins’ reading of Jeffrey Sconce’s ‘paracinema’ proves exceedingly helpful. Although Sconce’s theory pertaining to paracinematic taste will benefit later readings of selected video nasties, he is ‘mainly interested in theorising trash aesthetics’.69 For now, his work simply serves to elucidate upon half the art-house/grindhouse paradigm which is observed throughout the myth of harm. Yet as Hawkins points out, his nod to ‘New Wave’ director John Luc Goddard does direct one to Godard’s own claim in which he ‘repeatedly demonstrated that there is a very fine line between reading strategies demanded by thrash and reading strategies demanded by high culture’.70 Through her exploration of mail-order video companies which cater towards aficionados of paracinema and trash aesthetics, Hawkins observes how ‘high culture trades on the same images, tropes, and themes which characterize low culture’.71 Noticing the manner in which European art and experimental films are interspersed with other grindhouse titles under headings such as ‘science fiction’, ‘Barbara Steel’, ‘Exploitation’, ‘Weird Westerns’ and ‘Horror’, one fanzine, Mondo Video Catalogue, simply listed Salò within its horror category with a brief synopsis stating ‘Left audiences gaging’.72 The point here is that through the process of sublimation, both art-house and lowbrow texts require a similar ‘set of textual reading strategies’. Though long defunct as a means of distribution, by examining the process through which mail-order catalogues made no attempt to differentiate between the high and the low, Hawkins further notes that the former seems to trade in very similar tropes, themes and content as the latter. Thus, unable to find any concrete delineation between the two, perhaps as Hawkins suggests we need to ‘rethink the emphasis we have placed on evaluation and essentialized categorization and replace it with a Mikita Brottman, High Theory/Low Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 85. Hawkins, 1999–2000, p. 21. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 15. 72 Ibid., p. 16. 68 69

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mode of assessment that’s a little more dynamic’.73 In retrospect, as highly exegetical texts of a certain era in film-making, since their release, both films have now been subject to intense academic scrutiny. Yet in 1975 one could posit as Hawkins has, that taste ‘bound up with questions of class’,74 stood at the core of Ferman’s ideological reasoning. In the narrow limits in which art-house was able to flourish under conditional BBFC approval, it seemed that it didn’t matter what horribleness was presented, as long as it wasn’t horribleness for the great unwashed. Unfortunately for Ferman, the floodgates of horror in a kaleidoscope of garish colours were about to hit British homes with élan.

VHS nasties hit British shelves From its earliest incarnations, as a mode of domestic entertainment the video recorder carried an air of ill repute due to its close affiliations with the sale and distribution of pornography for domestic use. Revolutionising the porn industry, along with the mainstream popularity of Deep Throat (1972), the VCR was ‘the most significant event in adult-film history’.75 With Sony refusing to license its Beta technology to the porn industry, JVC fully embraced this new relationship creating something of a correlation between the ascendancy of a specific brand of VCR, JVC’s Video Home System (VHS, 1976), and pornographic videos. To a certain extent, this feat made VHS the most popular brand, as people were beginning to exploit the ease at which they could watch porn discreetly from the comfort of their own homes.76 As popular in the United Kingdom as it was in the United States, sales of JVC’s VCR exploded.77 In just a few years between 1979 (the year VCR was launched in the UK) and 1982 the video retail market had grown from a ‘fledging business to a massive, totally unregulated industry’.78 In a time of limited business opportunities, video rental shops sprung up around the country, offering everything from I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to For the Love of Benji (1977). For the first time British audiences had access to an entire global catalogue of entertainment possibilities which were often steeped in low-budget grindhouse aesthetics. Acknowledging the fact that

Ibid., p. 26. Ibid. 75 John Heidenry, What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 212–213. 76 Kayte Van Scoy, ‘Sex Sells, so Learn a Thing or Two from it’, PC Computing. 13, (1), January 2000. 77 The first VCR, the JVC HR-3300EK, launched in the UK in 1978 and cost £799. 78 Wingrove and Morris, 2009, p. 10. 73 74

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much of what was to offer in these films was something of a novelty for British audiences, speaking in 1979 Ferman claimed how: audiences in Britain never see the worst the world’s filmmakers have to offer. Films glorifying rape, the torture of naked women, the degradation of adolescent girls, the infliction of serious bodily harm through easily copied weapons, the casual slaughter of animals – such things are habitually cut or rejected in the British cinema.79 As a means of evading state intervention, in November 1981 the British Videogram Association (BVA) entered into negotiations with the BBFC. Within a year both organisations were working with relative harmony having drawn up a self-policing code of practice.80 By the following year, however, any voluntary control the BVA believed they held over the distribution and classification of videotapes was effectively taken out of their hands and placed within state control. Overflowing with blood, guts and all manner of abject detritus the video nasty aesthetic was one in which the body was constantly under attack from both external and internal forces. Expanding notions of taste to critically analyse video nasties from a decidedly Gothic perspective, Aldana Reyes broadens traditional conceptions of what constitutes Gothic in order to incorporate a wealth of horror texts traditionally considered outside the remit of the Gothic. ‘In a sense’, writes Aldana Reye: all gothic is body gothic, because, as an artistic mode, it naturally appeals to the body of readers or viewers, as well as their imagination and intellect. The genre is invested in representational excesses of the body, like monstrosity, partly because these are helpful in negotiating larger concerns about humanity and its shifting boundaries.81 In light of such research from the likes of Aldana Reyes, traditionally othered texts such as The Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave have interesting precedents for Gothic readings as stand-alone texts within a larger narrative of harm. While Aldana Reyes seeks to broaden the limits of what constitutes Gothic in order to critically analyse texts which in the past were not deemed suitable candidates due to a corporeal emphasis, Sconce’s

James Ferman, ‘Censorship Today’, Films Illustrated. October, pp. 62–67, cited in Julian Petley, ‘Are We Insane?’ in Chas Critcher, Jason Hughes, Julian Petley, and Amanda Rohloff, (eds) Moral Panics in the Contemporary World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 73–100, p. 75. 80 Mathews, 1994, p. 239. 81 Aldana Reyes, 2014, p. 7. 79

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‘paracinema’ similarly seeks to encompass a diverse range of texts which have been ‘rejected’ or ‘ignored by legitimate film culture’.82 Finding merit in cinema which is typically considered low brow, Sconce praises the various ways in which ‘bad taste’ cinema ‘liberates the audience from a conventional mode of viewing’.83 For Sconce, revaluating ‘trash’ cinema for its cultural significance provides a framework in which films outside the boundaries of good taste may be critically assessed. Looking beyond the texts themselves, in the formulation of an oppositional binary between the ‘academy’ and the paracinematic audience, Sconce seeks to pitch the notion that the act of watching ‘trash’ is in essence an act of rebellion against the parent taste culture.84 However, in seeking to ‘valorise’ video nasties from trash to treasure, there emerges an issue with the actual make-up of his constructed paracinematic audience. According to Sconce, the paracinematic audience is predominantly made up of young white middle-class males, high in cultural capital, who have created their own social space by ‘celebrating the cultural objects deemed most noxious (low-brow) by their taste culture as a whole’.85 However, in 1980s, Britain there was a consensus amongst moral entrepreneurs that video nasties were predominantly the domain of young working-class men and other people’s children. Recognizing these issues, Jancovich observes how paracinema ‘is a species of bourgeois aesthetics not a challenge to it’.86 Thus, revisiting Aldana Reyes’s Gothic mode of analysis seeks not only to facilitate lowbrow horror as worthy subjects for criticism, but it also recognizes the inherent marginality of both text and audience. Although not speaking of the video nasties specifically, Aldana Reyes perspective does seem commodious especially when he observes how: the gothic is particularly well suited to transgress boundaries and play with decorum, but it can also, for this very reason, become the perfect potential scapegoat in debates about the effects of fictional violence. Texts in gothic literature and film that go too far are often accused of being one-dimensional, and may even be connected to puerility and bad taste. [. . .] the types of shock that surrounds body gothic is socially constructed and far from simple in either method or effect.87

Sconce, 1995, p. 372. Ibid., p. 389. 84 Ibid., p. 376. The term ‘parent taste culture’ is one I use with caution. Having spent a large amount of this chapter highlighting the fact that the general consensus did not, at least initially, have a problem with video nasties, I use this term to denote the culture of moral guardianship which overwhelmed video controversy. 85 Ibid., pp. 375–376. 86 Mark Jancovich, ‘Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, (eds) The Cult Film Reader (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2008), pp. 149–162, p. 154. 87 Aldana Reyes, 2014, p. 7. 82 83

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This shift in perspective ‘unchains the gothic from its aesthetic shackles’, thus allowing for new readings which privilege cinematic corporeality.88 Considered one of the most notorious of video nasties, Meir Zarchi’s raperevenge thriller I Spit on Your Grave is one such film which benefits from this unchaining as its status as a contemptible film capable of corrupting those who watch it is called into question. Having based his rape-revenge on a chance meeting with a rape survivor whom he helped in the wake of her attack, when initially released in 1978, Zarchi’s Day of the Woman was greeted with quite a tepid reception. Repackaged for the exploitation market in 1980 by distributer Jerry Gross, the film was given the rather more provocative title of I Spit on Your Grave and rebranded with a hypersexualised seductive poster undoubtedly reworked to emphasise the more sensational aspects of the film. From these humble beginnings I Spit on your Grave went on to become one of the most controversial and talked about films available to the home rental market. In juxtaposition with the swelling tide of second-wave feminism,89 raperevenge films were played in exploitation theatres, drive-ins and even the more mainstream cinemas. For some these narratives were simple, albeit violent forms of entertainment; for others such as writer Julie Bindel, they were an affront to womanhood. Somewhat recanting her protests years later, however, Bindle wrote in the Guardian how she ‘was wrong about I Spit on Your Grave’.90 While still ‘standing by the pickets against the videonasty genre 30 years ago’, though still ‘exploitative’ she now doubts the harmfulness of I Spit on Your Grave. In contrast with a film such as Jonathan Kaplan’s 1988 The Accused, Bindel now admits that when it comes to justice for rape survivors at least Zarchi’s film does not erroneously ‘present the criminal justice system as a friend to women’.91 As one of the most notorious video nasties, I Spit on Your Grave is certainly a film which pushed the boundaries of taste and representation. For many the visual portrayal of Zarchi’s heroine Jennifer dragging her torn and battered body through the Louisiana backwoods is extremely difficult to watch never mind reconcile as entertainment. The ‘total absence of filmic poetry’, observes Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, ‘grinds our sophisticated

Ibid., p. 170. The era saw groundbreaking publications in the form of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1971), Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (1974) and Catherine MacKinnon’s Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1976). 90 Julie Bindel, ‘I was wrong about I Spit On Your Grave’, The Guardian. 19th January 2011. Sourced https://www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2011​/jan​/19​/wrong​-about​-spit​-on​-your​ -grave [Accessed 2ndApril 2021]. 91 Ibid. 88 89

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emotional distancing skills to raw, disoriented dust’,92 as there is an absence of any metaphorical or allegorical insulation from the horrific assaults. Yet for all its twentieth-century grindhouse aesthetics, Jennifer’s rape arguably reverberates within a literary Gothic tradition. So rampant was the implicit risk of sexual violence in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Gothic novels, an anonymous columnist for The Spirit of the Public Journals wrote in 1797 how he believed Gothic romances were capable of stirring up a sundry of undesirable responses in young ladies prompting the author to ask: [c]an a young lady be thought nothing more necessary in life, than to sleep in a dungeon with venomous reptiles, walk through a ward with assassins, and carry bloody daggers in their pockets, instead of pin cushions and needle books?93 What is significant about such an observation, however, is the emergence of a dual persona evident within the female Gothic protagonist at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Repeatedly cast as a victim, the narrative would simultaneously provide her with the tools to exert her own autonomy and often salvation. Aside from some of the more explicit accounts of rape and attempted rape which littered Gothic novels such as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Isabella Kelly’s The Abbey of St. Asap (1795) and Lewis’s The Monk, Allen W. Grove draws attention to the manner in which: formulaic repetitions across the genre create[d] associations and expectations for the Gothic reader so that once the convention is established, a writer can invoke the threat of rape without ever naming or describing the act. The trained reader comes to expect sexual transgression and violation whether they actually happen or not.94 Escaping her city life to work on her manuscript, from the moment we see the urbane writer arrive at the gas station, Jennifer’s elegance, gender and proscribed status as an independent woman of means position her in sharp contrast with the boorish, crass and homespun traits of bumpkins Johnny, Stanley and Andy who immediately pose a threat. Later, a longangle POV shot is focused on Jennifer swimming, inferring she is being watched. However, it is the scene which precedes the protracted rape which

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson: McFarland &Co., 2011), p. 36. 93 E. M. Ledoux, ‘Defiant Damsels: Gothic Space and Female Agency in Emmeline, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Secrecy’, Women’s Writing. 18, (3), 2011, pp. 331–347, p. 331. 94 Alan Grove, ‘Coming Out of the Castle: Gothic, Sexuality, and the Limits of Language’, Historical Reflections. 26, (3), 2000, pp. 429–446, p. 438. 92

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FIGURE 3.1 Original cover art for Meir Zarchi I Spit on Your Grave (1978). Artwork is copyrighted material owned by Meir Zarchi. All Rights Reserved.

locates the heroine firmly within a Gothic horror tradition. Here, Jennifer hears a noise late at night, dons a dressing gown and walks out of her front door into the eerie beat of cicadas and crickets. Scanning the surrounds of her cabin, something is immediately off. The presentation of rape and the more ubiquitous threat of rape is a trope that is repeatedly coded within Gothic texts. As Kate Ferguson Ellis notes one ‘of the real achievements of the Gothic tradition is that it conjures up, in its undefined representation of heroine terror, an omnipresent sense of impending rape without ever mentioning the word’.95 Read through the prism of a Gothic perspective, it’s clear that this implicit sense of dread turns out to be a mechanism through which women register danger in the

Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 46. 95

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presence of any male interaction, especially within the horror genre. True to form, as the film progresses, oppositional binaries between victim and victimiser, abused and abuser, raped and rapist collapse. Following her barbaric assault, Jennifer undergoes a transmogrification in which she not only repairs her physical body which has been torn asunder, but we also see her inner self undergo a form of healing via the reconstruction of her manuscript which has been similarly ripped apart by her abusers. With bandaged hands trembling with pain and shock, Jennifer painstakingly sticks back together the pages of her work. No longer the woman she once was, the torn pages now assembled and reinforced present the essence of who she now is – damaged yet regenerated. Reformed as a powerful Gothic heroine dressed in a white diaphanous robe, Jennifer reclaims and refigures her sexuality not as a vulnerability but as a weapon to lure her rapists to their deaths. Comparing her vengeful resurrection to that of Frankenstein’s Monster, who similarly rises from the ashes to enact revenge, Jennifer owes both her rebirth and callus monstrosity to men who have brutalised her fragility and laid waste to her humanity. Jennifer’s hematic invocation of the lex talionis principle of an ‘eye for an eye’ not only substantiates her Gothic heroine status, but as hunter and victim become one in the figure of Jennifer, she blurs the lines between civilization and savagery.96 Notwithstanding these later readings of I Spit on Your Grave, it would be remiss not to draw attention to the vast amount of criticism levelled at Zarchi upon the release and rerelease of his original film. Capturing the zeitgeist of the era while simultaneously managing to remain timeless, Zarchi’s rape-revenge thriller is a testament to the subject matter which is as challenging now as it was in 1978. Recognizing how problematic the depiction of cinematic sexual violence is, Aldana Reyes explains how ‘these moralistic condemnations necessarily stem from a judgmental system of representational analysis’.97 Moreover, such condemnations also seek to ‘dismantle the symbolic grasp that reduces to objectionable schlock the work of writers and film-makers seeking to push the boundaries of the body through corporeal transgression’.98 In an effort to overcome condemnations at the time, Marco Starr counters readings of the film as misogynistic by claiming that ‘it portrays violent aggression and hatred towards women while simultaneously condemning those very attitudes’.99 Moreover, the idea that women are treated as sexual playthings to be discarded when used up is forcefully refuted by Starr who recognizes that while the rapists do in fact seek to discard their victim, the filmmakers do not. While far from Heller-Nicholas, 2011, p. 73. Aldana Reyes, 2014, p. 11. 98 Ibid. 99 Marco Starr, ‘J. Hills is Alive: A Defence of I Spit on Your Grave’, in Martin Barker, (ed.) The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto, 1984), pp. 48–55, p. 50. 96 97

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heaping praise upon the film, Carol Clover admits that ‘most of the action is registered from her [the victim’s] vantage, and there is no doubt whatsoever that its sympathies lie with her’.100 Be that as it may, few contemporary critics were as sympathetic to Zarchi’s subversive commentary on female empowerment. One early review from Roger Ebert lamented how there was ‘no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering’.101 In his review for Empire, Kim Newman wrote how he found I Spit on Your Grave to be one of ‘the most loathsome films of all time’.102 Denouncing it as the ‘most reprehensible film ever made’, Ralph Darren decried how ‘anyone who defends it must be hopelessly perverted’.103 Believing it to be inherently misogynistic, ‘sick, reprehensible and contemptible’, Ebert wailed that ‘attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life [. . .] At the film’s end I walked out of the theatre quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed’.104 While that may have been the intended effect of a film that deals exclusively with the repeated rape of a young woman, it was Darren’s inference of perversion and Ebert’s claim that it was ‘vile film for vicious sex criminals’ that reflected a common narrative whereby only deviants and perverts would watch and enjoy a film such as this. It wouldn’t be long before the correlation between a film depicting rape and its association with real-life rapists was quickly exploited in the media. In one of the earliest examples, the Daily Mail reported a story about eighteen-year-old Mark Austin, who having been convicted of burglary now faced two counts of rape. He claimed in court that after watching I Spit on Your Grave repeatedly, he got the ‘idea’ to attack these women. Invoking something of a ‘Clockwork Orange defence’ Austin’s solicitor, Robert Francis, was quoted by the Daily Mail claiming that the eighteenyear-old’s ‘moral values were obliterated by seeing women degraded in video films. What he saw made him think that women were prepared to behave in a fashion that bore no relation to reality.’105 Though reported wildly throughout the press, many details were omitted, such as the fact that Austin was a habitual solvent abuser, held previous convictions and had an exceptionally low IQ. Unsatisfied with recounting the facts of the case, The Sun in 1983 added for contextualisation that ‘[N]asties usually include Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 118. 101 Sourced https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/i​-spit​-on​-your​-grave​-1980 [Accessed 10th December 2020]. 102 Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies (New York: Harmony, 1988), p. 57. 103 Cited in John Martin, The Seduction of the Gullible: The Curious History of the British ‘Video Nasties’ Phenomenon (Nottingham: Procrustes Press, 1997), p. 107. 104 Roger Ebert, ‘Why Movie Audiences Aren’t Safe Anymore’, American Film. March 1981, p. 55. 105 Robert Francis quoted in the Daily Mail. 28th June; cited in Martin, 1984a, p. 194. 100

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violent rape scenes which end up with the victims enjoying the assault’.106 If the reporter had taken even a cursory glance at the trailer for I Spit on Your Grave, he would have realized that the repeated rape of the protagonist is represented as a torturous experience from start to finish; an experience that ultimately drives her to kill the attackers. Unfortunately, condemning unwatched films would prove a consistent line of attack throughout the 1980s. While latent socials fears regarding new technology, child protection and taste were no doubt ignited by the press as it championed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s return to traditional Victorian values as part of her 1979 Conservative election campaign, it must be noted that the nasty panic was not necessarily indicative of how the general population felt. Conducted in 1982 Julian Petley cites a What Video/Popular Video survey which places horror films above all other genres as the most popular rentals.107 Symptomatic of this disparity between the press and the actual consensus of the public, Petley draws attention to a further poll from October of 1983 which stated ‘that 92% of those interviewed had never found a rental or retail home video offensive’.108 That said, aside from the popularity of the films amongst the general public, even though the same titles were available on video in the United States, nothing comparable to the outcry ensued upon their release. Therefore, positioning the video nasty controversy within a particular British context is paramount as the political and conservative ideological underpinnings at play throughout the era shaped the manner in which the home video became a site of anxiety.

Nasty scene setting The year 1979 would prove a pivotal year in British politics as the Conservative Tory party took power and went on to dominate internal and external policy for the next eleven years. Drawing a line between the previous governments’ failures and Thatcher’s rise to prime minister, Nigel Wingrove and Marc Morris observe how this assent was ‘supported by a loose collective of radical right-wing theorists, from politicians and think tanks [. . .] to media tycoons like Rupert Murdoch who [. . .] would be an invaluable champion of Thatcherite values’.109 Congratulating Thatcher on

The Sun. 8th June 1983. Julian Petley, ‘“Are we Insane?” The “Video Nasty” Moral Panic,”’ in Julian Petley, Chas Critcher, Jason Hughes, and Amanda Rohloff, (eds.) Moral Panics in the Contemporary World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 73–100, p. 92. 108 Ibid. 109 Wingrove and Morris, 2009, p. 9. 106 107

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her victory, Whitehouse beamed ‘already one senses a lifting of the spirit!’110 The formation of this relationship based on the preservation of traditional moral values and the sanctity of the home would prove mutually beneficial to both women.111 As a result of such an alliance, Thatcher was perceived as an advocate of traditional moral values, while Whitehouse had secured an influential political ally. With rising unemployment exacerbated by the downsizing of industrial factories, the closure of mines, a war which divided both public and political opinion112 and increasing civil unrest, video nasties became a scapegoat for more complex social issues which could not be ‘legislated’ away as easily. In other words, these horror films became ‘general purpose explanations of moral decline’ for 1980s Britain.113 Rendered more susceptible to the alleged negative effects of horror films, both children and the working classes were considered to be high-risk viewers of horror material. But akin to the manner in which horror comic reading was seen as indicative of pre-delinquency, this susceptibility was additionally framed within a fatalistic determinism that Britain was priming an entire generation of perverted psychopaths reared on horror. Unlike the horror comics which were admittedly aimed at children, video nasties never had such ambitions. Yet as the truth routinely lost ground to the sensationalism and hyperbole found in moral crusades, the fact that these films were not aimed directly at children was lost. Thus began a campaign which sought to bring down the merchants who allegedly targeted children directly with their video ‘smut’. Summarising the position of the anti-video nasty campaigners, Barker mused sardonically that these nasties could: damage their minds, soil their souls, inducing a sick love of violence, sadistic sex, torture, maiming, cannibalism – in fact there is apparently nothing at all outside their revolting purview. By letting children see them we may well be depraving a minority, if not more, and turning them into society’s future murders and rapists. No society is worth a grain of salt if it does not protect its children – and the video nasties represent the most urgent danger to them for a very long time. 114

Letter from Whitehouse to Thatcher congratulating her on her election victory, dated 9th May 1979, cited in Thompson, 2012, p. 365. 111 Just over a year into her office, Thatcher bestowed upon Whitehouse a CBE, while the prime minister herself presented an award at the NVALA awards. 112 For its size and duration, the Falklands war of 1982 produced heavy casualties for Britain. In the seventy-four days of conflict from the 2 April to 14 August, 11,030 soldiers were injured, 253 mortally so. 113 Martin Barker, cited in Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape (Dir Jake West, 2010). 114 Barker, 1984a, p. 7. 110

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As the advocation of child protection policies has traditionally proved to be popular and advantageous form of political profiteering, its little coincidence that the necessity to intervene in what up until then had been a relatively harmonious relationship between video distributors, vendors and the BVA happened to fall within the same period as the 1983 Tory re-election campaign. Just a year later following the passing of the VRA, Barker unflinchingly stated that the Tory campaign: lies about its own motives and works hard to create a view of society that is very persuasive but completely absurd. On the back of such mendacity it has laid the basis for one of the most draconian pieces of legislation seen for a long time. The Video Recording’s Bill holds out real threats of political censorship – disguised as moral protection.115 Especially pertinent to this point is the manner in which moral protection is inevitably and inextricably embroiled within political rhetoric concerning class stratification. Having doggedly followed horror censorship since the eighteenth century, the issue of class and the infantilisation of women and the working class has remained a pivotal area of contention within the myth of harm. Grouped together by dint of a perceived vulnerability in society, their need to be protected from themselves has traditionally engendered a strong political response. Similarly, as Ruth Bienstock and others have noted, this infantilisation of a section of society by virtue of their economic, racial or social status has ultimately always been a central concern within Gothic fiction.116 Observing such thematic concerns within the Gothic tradition Hogle asserts how: the Gothic has also come to deal, as one of it principle subjects, with how the middle class dissociates from itself, and then fears, the extremes of what surrounds it: the very high or the decadently aristocratic and the very low or the animalistic, working-class, underfinanced, sexually deviant, childish, or carnivalesque, all sides of which have been abjected at once into figures ranging from Lewis’s monk Ambrosio and Radcliffe’s class-climbing villains [to] Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, Wilde’s Dorian Grey, Stocker’ Count Dracula [etc].117 Given the political rhetoric surrounding the protection of society from the alleged threat of video nasties, it seems this era was to be no different Ibid. See Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard, (eds) The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination (Jefferson: McFarland Inc. Publishers, 2004). 117 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction’, in Jerrold E Hogle, (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 9. 115 116

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especially in its thinly veiled contempt for the working classes. Like the nation’s children, these adults apparently needed protection from their indulgent video vices. Such a sentiment is expressed by Lord Chief Justice Lane who proclaimed that certain individuals are as vulnerable to the apparent dangers of video nasties as children: I find the suggestion that it is only children who should be protected incredible. What our legislators seem not to realise is that it is not merely children who need to be prevented from seeing these frightful publications. There are others upon whom the effects may be even more disastrous. The effect upon that sort of person of this sort of exhibition would be catastrophic. Unless rigid and rigorous censorship is imposed [. . .] it will not be long before these scenes are enacted in real life.118 Though Lord Lane does not explicitly mention the working class in this article, the general tone of the piece infers that it is preciously the ‘underclasses’ and not the ruling class who need protection. In an example of such profound contempt, Carol Thatcher, daughter of Margaret, quoted the NSPCC’s director Dr Alan Gilmore who gives an account of a ‘social worker in a deprived area of Greater Manchester who, after making a call on a family at 9:30AM., had to wait until the whole family had finished watching the rape scene in I Spit on Your Grave’.119 In just this single and completely unsubstantiated account, Thatcher manages to use horror as a means to both problematise and pathologise their viewing as indicative of larger issues. In another instance Daily Mail’s Lynda Lee Potter granted herself the moral authority to denounce the working class as ‘ignorant fools’ and continued by exclaiming how the ‘ impact this sick, beastly, moneymaking corruption is having on illiterate minds is going to make previous anxieties about violence on television look like worries about the impact of Enid Blyton’.120 Such descriptions of the working class in the media were extremely convenient especially at a time when this demographic was suffering the most in terms of unemployment and inequality. Seizing an opportunity, battle-ready moral entrepreneurs were on hand to protect these ‘common folk’ from themselves. One of the most powerful tactics was to engage the media in sensational narratives of harm which were imbued with addiction and predatorial rhetoric. One such article was Richard Neighbour’s ‘Hooking of the Video Junkies’ for the Daily Mail. Having run the gamut of metaphorical verbosity pertaining to the addictive qualities of horror videos, Neighbour chastises

Lord Chief Justice Lane, quoted in the Daily Mail. 9th November 1983; cited Petley 2011, p. 31. 119 Cited in Petley and Barker, 2001, p. 177. 120 Lynda Lee Potter, Daily Mail. 28th June 1983. 118

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both the ‘videoholic public’ and the ‘video dealers’ proclaiming that even though the public demand for videos is high, ‘the public is wrong’.121 When the public got it right, however, as Barker asserts, this wasn’t necessarily indicative of the opinions of a wider collective. ‘In truth, it never was a real “general public” that was appealed to in debates. It was a specially defined group of people with certain qualities who could make up a “proper” general public.’122 Underscoring this point Petley continues: [n]ever mind that the opinions thus presented by newspapers, whose values are predominantly reactionary and illiberal, may be anything but representative of the views of the population as a whole, these are opinions which, in Britain at least, carry the greatest weight with the politicians of all parties. Given that this is demonstrably the case, it doesn’t actually matter what the public really think about subjects which have been given the moral panic treatment by the press.123 While this sentiment is echoed and endorsed by Critcher who argues that when it comes to moral panics, ‘support from the public is a bonus, not a necessity’,124 one must be mindful of the fact that these narratives were tapping into real fears, however nascent they may be. Whether its validating fears or creating scapegoats, there is an undeniable reciprocity at play between the media and its consumer. Be that as it may, as David Miller and Jenny Kitzinger once again point out, when it comes to a moral panic, ‘it’s never very clear who is doing the panicking’.125

Nasty campaigns Well somebody was and as a point of origin for the video nasty controversy, Wingrove and Morris cite a series of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the BVA in 1981 concerning imported horror videos such as SS Experiment Camp (1976), The Driller Killer (1979) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980).126 Interestingly, however, not all of these complaints came

Richard Neighbour, Daily Mail. 13th August 1983; cited in Barker, 1984a, p. 26. Barker, 1984a, p. 6. 123 Petley, 2013, p. 92. 124 Chas Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003), p. 137; Petley, 2013, p. 92. 125 David Miller and Jenny Kitzinger, ‘AIDS, the Policy Process and Moral Panics’, in David Miller, Jenny Kitzinger, Kevin Williams and Peter Beharrell, (eds) The Circuit of Mass Communication: Media Strategies, Representation and Audience Reception in the AIDS Crisis (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 213–222, p. 216. 126 Wingrove and Morris, 2009, p. 10. 121 122

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from anti-nasty sources. John Martin recalls an instance whereby Go Video, the UK distributors for Cannibal Holocaust, decided to ‘anonymously’ tip off Mary Whitehouse. ‘Nobody had heard of Cannibal Holocaust’, Martin mused, ‘once she got in on the act’ they couldn’t keep up with demand.127 Such marketing ploys eventually backfired, however, and the title was singled out as the paragon of VHS depravity.128 Just under two years later artwork from Cannibal Holocaust which featured a crude drawing of a ‘primitive’ male tearing at bloodied guts would become the banner image for the Daily Mail’s ‘Ban the Sadist Videos!’ campaign. The irony here, of course, is that such images were often the worst horror films had to offer. When it came to the video nasties themselves, the ‘frozen moment of violent spectacle’ depicted on the cover rarely lived up to the actual content.129 Coinciding with Thatcher’s electoral regime which was ‘overly committed to rolling back the tide of what it perceived as sixties “permissiveness”’, the papers were all too eager to align themselves with this moral purification drive as it committed to outing the worst perpetrators.130As early as May 1982 The Sunday Times had commented upon the concern expressed by Scotland Yard’s operational head of obscene publications, Peter Kruger, over the use of videos ‘in the home’ which were ‘beyond the bounds of decency’.131 Broadsheets such as The Sunday Times and the more liberalleaning Guardian, which typically advocated a more measured and calculated approach to such sensationalism, decided to essentially exploit any newsworthy feature surrounding the controversy. With a subtle degree of chagrin betrayed within his emphasis on the egalitarianism of the video market, in an article for The Sunday Times Chippendale emphatically raged how ‘uncensored horror video cassettes, available to anyone of any age, have arrived in Britain’s high street stores’.132 No doubt bating an audience arguably unfamiliar with the conventions of horror, Chippendale continues his ‘exposé’ by highlighting the nasties more scurrilous features which were ‘far removed from the suspense of the traditional horror film’ featuring a charnel house of ‘murder, multiple rape, sadomasochism, mutilation of women, cannibalism and Nazi atrocities’.133 Three months later the tabloid publication Tit-Bits, known for its salacious reporting, pushed quite aggressively for legal clarity regarding whether video nasties were liable for prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Failing to recognize the irony, in an article titled ‘The Vile Side of Nasties’, the soft-core

Martin, 1997, p. 45. See Kermode, 2010, p. 39. 129 Egan, 2007, p. 52. 130 Petley, 2013, p. 91. 131 The Sunday Times. 30th May 1982. 132 Chippendale, 23rd May 1982. Emphasis mine. 133 Ibid. 127 128

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porn magazine professed how ‘[B]utchery, cannibalism, rape are taking over from the sex movies’.134 Drawing attention to the ever-increasing concern over the decline of traditional family values, the magazine further alleged how ‘a vast number of ordinary families feed happily on butchery, multiple rapes, castration, cannibalism, mutilation of women, and torture’.135 Though it is unclear who exactly the publication was speaking on behalf of, they continued fretting ‘that unless the Obscene Publications Act is invoked swiftly, the problem will escalate’.136 In what was probably the most blatant correlation between harmful effects and video nasties, in ‘The Seduction of the Innocent’, David Holbrook’s call to action sought to draw attention to the plight of video nasty-consuming children. In a manner reminiscent not only in title but also in tone and context to Wertham’s polemic thirty years previous he shrieked how in: some families, apparently children are actually deliberately being shown films of buggery, rape and mutilation. Many see them because they are lying around the home. This, the NSPCC believe, is a new form of cruelty. The organisation consulted all its doctors and psychiatrists, who agreed that permanent damage, could be done to children’s minds by such pornographic and sadistic material, in which the detail is often powerfully realistic, as in the depictions of castrations or scenes of someone boring through a human skull with an electric drill bloodily.137 Arguably this was something of a turning point within the video nasty controversy as the more reserved Times joined in with the Daily Mail’s ‘We Must Protect Our Children Now’ battle cry.138 In choosing to advocate this anti-nasty stance, the papers were not only creating a marketable story but also airing on the side of caution. ‘Few groups or individuals,’ observed Barker, ‘would be willing to be seen to be unconcerned over proven damage being done to children.’139 Thus the majority of the papers opted for the impression they were on the side of right– the Moral Right. By repeatedly citing Whitehouse, a woman who although had spearheaded a number of child protection campaigns had little if any training or insight into the world of film, the Times editorial team, along with a host of other papers, felt they were backing a safe bet as ‘whoever is not of the side of the good is a representative of evil’.140 ‘Right from the start,’ Barker added, ‘the issue of

Tit-Bits. 7th August 1982. Cited in Martin, 1997, p. 187. Ibid. 136 Martin, 1997, p. 187. 137 Holbrook, 2nd January 1983. 138 Brian James, ‘We Must Protect our Children NOW’, Daily Mail. 25th February 1983 139 Barker, 1984a, p. 4. Emphasis mine. 140 Ibid., p. 8. 134 135

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the video was set in Manichean terms – the “merchants of menace” Vs the moral health of children.’141 This maxim was strongly illustrated by Lord Coggan in his foreword to Video, Violence and Children (1985), where he maintained: [a]nyone concerned for the welfare of children- especially parents, teachers, social workers, leaders of young people’s organisations –would do well to read this book. It does not make pleasant reading, but it compels us to face the reality of a new menace which threatens us.142 Out of all the newspapers, it was to be the Daily Mail, however, whose torch burned brightest for the anti-nasty campaign. On the same day as the video trade press published the DPP infamous list of seventy-two video nasty titles,143 now three weeks into her second term of office, on 30 June 1983 Thatcher drew reference to video nasties stating how she recognized the ‘great concern caused by the matter’. ‘It is not enough to have voluntary legislation,’ she warned, ‘We must bring in a law to regulate the matter.’144 Now confident of Tory assistance and approval, that same day the Daily Mail went on the offence with the ‘Ban the Sadist Videos!’ campaign of fear and sensationalism that surpassed any nasty. Perhaps one of the most compelling if not ironic aspects of the myth of harm is the manner in which the media repeatedly interpret campaigns through a register of horror. As Crawford astutely notes, ‘The rhetoric used over the centuries to critique Gothic media owes a substantial imaginative debt to the very fictions it condemns’, however: [t]his has not been a one way process; for Gothic is a genre wherein corruption, contagion, degeneration and infectious criminality have been thematically and rhetorically inscribed into the texts. Thus the trope of the Terrible Text – a form of media so evil that it damages and corrupts everyone exposed to it – is found both in critiques of Gothic fiction and in the Gothic fiction itself.145 Similarly, Valier’s exploration of media representations as tales of horror which are predicated on both moral and visceral impressions provides an interesting insight into how horror headlines narrate ‘crime and punishment

Ibid., p. 7. Lord Coggan, ‘Forward’, in Geoffrey Barlow and Alison Hill, (eds) Video, Violence and Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985). 143 Thirty-nine of which went on to be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1952, 144 Margaret Thatcher speaking to the House of Commons, 30th June 1983; cited in Barker, 1984a. 145 Crawford, 2015, p. 39. 141 142

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in a sensational manner, accomplishing its potent effects through titillated fascination and excited revulsion rather than the soberly didactic’.146 Channelling Valier’s observation pertaining to the abject, throughout the video nasty controversy there emerged a ‘new language of sickness and corruption, verging at times on pathology and the demonic’,147 which provided the ‘basis for many of the more absurd claims’.148 Reflecting upon the Daily Mail’s infamous ‘Rape of Our Children’s Minds’ headline which was published on 30 June 1983, it’s clear that ‘rape’ here is considered something of a ‘carrier-metaphor’,149 in which video nasties are represented as a violation of ‘the tender consciousness of the child’.150 Evocative of Forman’s emotional possession and Wertham’s moral disarmament, once the child is violated by this vague and caliginous presence, they become tainted and infected; their innocence forever lost. Foreshadowing Newson’s comparison between the addictive qualities of drugs and video nasties, the Daily Mail continued its editorial lament wailing, ‘How much longer will the Government dither and Parliament blather while our children can continue to buy sadism from the video-pusher as easily and almost as cheaply as they can buy fruit gums from the sweetie shop.’151 Invoking images of the defiled playground was one narrative which seemed to permeate the debate and indeed perpetuate the myth. Construed once again through a Gothic narrative, the alleged harm from video nasties, or more specifically from people who watch or deal in video nasties, became all the more heightened and indeed macabre. In other words, the video nasty was reconfigured by the media as an ‘abject’ predator imbued with an uncanny and tenebrous quality, lurking in every sandpit and behind every ice cream van. In one such article for The Daily Star, Catherine Evans described the existence of a ‘“horror grapevine” which has school friends swapping stories of video violence in the playground’.152 According to Evans, nowhere was safe. Inferring that the children of ‘good’ parents still ran the risk of infection from the offspring of video nasty-loving ‘bad’ parents, she warned how ‘even children from “protected” homes – whose parents take them and collect them from school cannot escape the tales of terror and violence traded in the playground’.153 In one of the more sensational reports surrounding the case, on 6 August 1983, the Daily Mail featured an apparent exposé of the business side of video nasties with the

Valier, 2004, p. 117. Barker, 1984a, p. 21. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid., p. 31. 150 Holbrook, 2nd January 1983. 151 ‘Rape of Our Children’s Minds’, Daily Mail. 30th June 1983. 152 Catherine Evans, ‘Video Nightmare’, The Daily Star. 24th November 1984. 153 Evans, 24th November 1984. 146 147

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headline ‘The Men Who Grow Rich on Bloodlust’. Reaching new heights of hysteria, accompanying the piece was an image of Satan, complete with horns and hooves, nonchalantly watching a TV set which was ritualistically adorned with candles and satanic symbols such as an inverted pentagram. Above this image the subheading bellowed ‘Taken Over by Something Evil from the TV Set’. While this imagery quite obviously sought to piggyback and exploit the emerging Satanic Panic which was beginning to bubble out of all proportions in the United States, the Daily Mail had seemingly reached a benchmark in which the hyperbolic language and themes of the Gothic had completely assimilated their ‘Ban the Sadist Videos’ campaign. Now the video nasties were not only guilty of the usual allegations of corruption and depravity but somewhere along the line, video nasties were bestowed with magical satanic qualities which enabled and indeed emboldened them to infect, violate and ultimately possess. A week later the Daily Mail published a drawing by David O’ Conner to accompany Neighbour’s aforementioned ‘Hooking of the Video Junkies’. Presented in quasi-medical fashion to show the effects on the brain from watching nasties, the image featured a side profile of a human head divided up into segments labelled sadism, blood, violence, lust, degradation and gore. The implication was clear; video nasties were addictive and will take over your mind. A firm favourite in terms of news coverage, the video nasties were blamed for everything from ‘night terrors’, to ‘partial amnesia’, to ‘Changing a Boy’s Personality’,154 to murder. In one of the more tenuous examples, Barker cites a report of animal abuse committed on ponies whereby the Daily Mirror quoted a police spokesman who claimed that the ‘maniac could be affected by video nasties or a new moon’.155 Consequently, as the media flowed forth with tale after tale of violation, abuse and infection, it became very difficult to separate the headline from the horror film. In retrospect, it seems almost farcical if not disingenuous that a campaign which sought the censure of horrific themes, such as rape and cannibalism, would not only feature as their banner motif a picture of a cannibal tearing raw flesh but also invoke the trope of rape. While perpetually outraged, the sheer ardour in which the Daily Mail campaign was mounted arguably hinted at a more cynical marketing strategy which revelled in the salacious nature of the very things being condemned. The fact that the Daily Mail choose to perpetuate these images and representations throughout its articles curiously meant that they were inadvertently guilty of the same crime they accused video nasties of committing. The difference, however, is that unlike the horror fan who actively choose a film such as Driller Killer or I Spit on Your Grave, the Daily Mail thrust upon a passive and unconsenting

Mark Berry, ‘Horror that Changed a Boy’s Personality’, the Daily Mail. 18th August 1983. The Mirror. 3rd January 1984, cited in Barker, 1984a, p. 4.

154 155

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audience stills of murder, torture and rape devoid of context. As a result, if children really wanted to experience the worst these nasties had to offer, upon their next visit to the newsagents under the auspices of buying their Beano or Dandy all they had to do was purchase a copy of the Daily Mail and access to the dreaded ‘freeze frame’ was theirs.156

‘The Video Violence and Children Report’ Describing the process in which the Gothic is now considered a mode of both contemporary and retrospective interpretation, Piatti-Farnell and Beville consider how the mutability of the Gothic mode through symbolic imagery is pervasive enough to intersect between ‘literary narratives and their lived contexts’.157 Consequently, it is through a similar lens the events leading up to the VRA in 1984 can be viewed as part of a larger Gothic narrative in which the line between text and context is significantly blurred as a result of fatalistic determinism compounded by proclamations of moral outrage. Quickly the narrative of harm which was imposed upon the video nasties took on mythic proportions which far exceeded any need for tangible or empirical evidence. So pervasive was this particular narrative of harm, prophetic powers were granted enabling individuals to know the outcome of research on the alleged harmful effects of video nasties before it was conducted. Having vigorously lobbied for some sort of legislation which would ‘improve’ upon the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, Whitehouse struck gold with a Private Member’s Bill put forward by MP Graham Bright on 1 July 1983. The fact that this type of legislation not only ‘circumvented any need to consult the video industry’,158 it could also be passed through the House of Commons with great speed and efficiency, especially if it was backed unanimously.159 Such a Bill would further cement the relationship

As Barker observed in Part One of the ‘Video Violence and Children’ (1984) report by the Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry, freeze framing was especially worrisome. See Barker, 1984a, p. 128. As early as 23rd of May 1982, The Sunday Times highlighted the issues when it stated that the use of slow motion, rewind and freeze frame particular to the video player enables viewers to ‘revel in the gory bits as often as they like’. See ‘How High Street Horror is Invading the Home’, The Sunday Times. 23rd May 1982. 157 Piatti-Farnell and Beville, 2014, p. 6. 158 Petley, 2013, p. 85. 159 Placing the Bill in the hands of a private member essentially meant that the Conservative Party could keep a safe distance from any controversy pertaining to incongruities in research or civil rights impingements the Bill may produce but could also ‘reap the moral credit for the Bill’ once it was in place. Barker, 1984b, p. 12. Traditionally serving the progression of civilization, the Private Member’s Bill was a historically significant medium in which human rights were either dignified or established. Acts which began as private members bills abolished capital 156

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between the Conservative political party and the conservative moral campaigners, whose influence was growing considerably. In supporting the Bill, the government was seen as publicly portraying an interest in this ‘Christian concern’, which Whitehouse argued was ‘the health and safety of children’.160 Positing increased DPP involvement in the nasty controversy as a major ‘driver’ in the implementation of the VRA, Petley views the publication of the first report by a group known as the Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry (PGVE) on the 23 November as the ‘second key driver’.161 With the intention of producing ‘factual evidence relating to the effects upon children of their viewing scenes of violence in video films’,162 the PGVE was working under a misnomer. Formed in July of 1983, the PGVE was not in any way affiliated with the actual British Parliament. As Barker suggests, the title was simply a ploy to secure credibility and public support.163 Within a month of Bright’s announcement that he intended to introduce a Bill which would control and regulate video distribution and sales, research began. This research would apparently show, as Bright confidently asserted on a televised interview, ‘that these films not only affect young people but affect dogs as well’.164 Anticipating the dogmatism displayed in much of the media effects research presented on video games, Bright’s confidence is particularly revealing. In Bright’s self-assured assertion of what the research ‘would prove’, he raised serious doubts about not only the credibility of the research but also the credibility of his position. Fortunately for Bright, however, the alleged threat from nasties superseded any actual necessity for proof. The narrative that video nasties were harmful was so morally persuasive and culturally pervasive that research to confirm these effects was almost incidental. ‘[N]othing’, as Edward J. Ingebretsen muses, ‘is as convincing as facts we already know or think we know’.165 Bright’s deterministic, though slightly odd proclamations about the threat to children (and family pets) were indicative of a fatalistic determinism which had sought to strengthen the links between video nasties and harmful effects. In an analogous manner to Our Movie Made Children and The Seduction of the Innocent, ‘The Video Enquiry Report’ which was submitted on 23 November was deeply flawed

punishment (1965), legalized homosexuality and abortion (1967) and abolished theatrical censorship (1969). 160 Mary Whitehouse quoted in Raymond Johnston, ‘Children and Videos: A Danger and a Proposal’ 1983; cited in Barker, 1984a, p. 13. 161 Petley, 2013, p. 83. 162 Taken from the back-page blurb’, in Barlow and Hill, 1985. 163 Barker, cited in Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Video Tape. 164 Graham Bright speaking in 1983 cited in Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape. 165 Edward J. Ingebretsen, ‘Bodies Under Scandal: Civic Gothic as Genre’, in Caroline Joan Picart and Cecil E. Greek, (eds) Monster in and Among Us: Towards a Gothic Criminology (New Jersey: Associated University Press, 2007), pp. 44–64, p. 44.

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and overflowing with spurious material. As Brian Brown, a researcher at the Oxford Polytechnic, observed at the time, in its pursuit of denouncing horror the report ‘fell into the trap of confusing advocacy of a cause with research for evidence’.166 In his introduction to the Video Violence and Children, which published the results and events leading up to and around the report overseen of the PGVE, Martin Roth claimed that the book presented ‘prima facie evidence that the overt sale and dissemination of video films that portray the morbid and macabre forms of violence [. . .] and the exposure of a growing proportion of children to their influence constitute maladies of a similar character’.167 Defining a nasty as ‘films that contain scenes of such violence and sadism involving either human beings or animals that they would not be granted a certificate for general release for public exhibition in Britain’,168 the subsequent research was broken into three sections. In Video Violence and Children Clifford Hill describes how the first section of the Enquiry was to: provide Members of Parliament with an overview of the current social, commercial and legal situation in Britain in regard to video films depicting scenes of explicit violence. The Enquiry was to investigate the phenomenon of violence not pornography and initially to provide a working definition of ultra-violent video films, to obtain information from the video industry in regard to the market, the geographical availability of these films, whether or not they were available to children and who were the distributors of the films. On the legal side the Enquiry would discover whether or not the ultra-violent video films were of such a nature as to render them liable to prosecution under the existing law, namely the Obscene Publications Act 1959.169 The second part of the Enquiry was to produce statistical data relating to films that had actually been seen by children and compare:

Brown, in Barker, 1984a, p. 82. Brown who was initially employed as a researcher was dismissed upon his challenging of the PGVE for ‘fixing’ results. Both Barker and Petley discuss the various circumstances of alleged subterfuge which led to the failings and inconsistencies rampant throughout the interim enquiry report. For further reading on the former issue see Brian Brown ‘Exactly What We Wanted’ in Barker (1984b) and Guy Cumberbatch and Dennis Howitt, (eds) A Measure of Uncertainty: The Effects of the Mass Media (London: John Libby & Co. Ltd., 1989). 167 Martin Roth, ‘The Socio-Psychological Phenomenon of Violence’, in Geoffrey Barlow and Alison Hill, (eds) Video Violence and Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), pp. 1–6, p. 6. 168 Report of A Parliamentary Group Video Inquiry, Video Violence and Children’s Viewing Patterns in England and Wales (London: Oasis Projects, 23rd November 1983), Part one, p. 1. 169 Clifford Hill, ‘Historical Background to the Video Enquiry’, in Barlow and Hill, 1985, p. 26. 166

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this with such British Board of Film Censor’s ratings given to the films or in the case of distributors their own assessment of their target audience. The objective was thus to produce empirical evidence of children’s viewing patterns in relation to the suitability of the films seen. The Enquiry would also investigate the circumstances under which children were seeing video films and the views of a representative sample of parents. The objective of this was to reveal the social situation in the nation as a background to the consideration of a need for additional legislation.170 Lastly, the final and most controversial part of the Enquiry was to investigate the effects ‘upon children of their viewing scenes of violence in video films’.171 Hill explained that ‘[a]lthough this research would have empirical basis it was recognised that this is a complex area where it is difficult to isolate variables and that the data thereby does not easily lend itself to statistical analysis’.172 Unable to discern any conflict of interests, Hill continued that this seemingly ad hoc approach to research would ‘largely be based upon professional opinions, clinical experience and the collation and examination of case study data’.173 When the report was first published, the data read more like a banner headline in the Daily Mail than research which had been conducted with ‘careful and objective scrutiny’.174 Rushed into publication, part one of the interim report stated that a massive 40per cent of schoolchildren had seen a video nasty. Confessing that the report’s publication on 27 November was rushed, Hill proclaimed: incomplete figures which made it vulnerable to misinterpretation and criticism although the Report stressed that the survey was not complete and that the figures were, therefore, provisional. No conclusions were offered but rather a series of questions were posed by the interim results of the children’s data so far analysed.175 Remarkably timed to accompany the second reading of the Bill in the House of Lords, just four months later, an amended publication of the report

Hill, 1985, p. 26. Ibid. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid. 174 Roth, 1985, p. 4. The survey concluded that 45per cent of children in their sample had seen one or more of the films on the DPP’S list. Out of the 45.5per cent of children who had seen one or more video nasties, 18.4per cent said they had seen The Evil Dead, 17. 8per cent Zombie Flesh-Eaters (1981), 15.9per cent The Living Dead (1974), 11.7per cent I Spit on Your Grave and 9.7per cent said they had seen The Driller Killer. 175 Hill, 1985, p. 28. 170 171

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appeared on 7 March 1984. The results were again ‘highly questionable’.176 Considering his enthusiasm for the research at its initial stages, now backpedalling, Bright felt the need to publicly ‘question the validity of the research’, adding that even though it ‘points to the problem[. . .] I do not think one can take that as conclusive evidence’.177 But what’s truly illuminating was the manner in which the media interpreted these results. With scant regard for the veracity of the research, true to form the Daily Mail overestimated by 10per cent that ‘Half of Children See Film Nasties’. Meanwhile the Daily Express stated that 1 in 2 children see “Nasties.”’ Even the Guardian declared that ‘Nearly Half of Children See Video Nasties’.178 Highly suspicious of the high rates accumulated by the Enquiry, Guy Cumberbatch and Paul Bates from the University of Aston conducted their own independent experiment to see what results they would yield. Responding to a Daily Express headline which stated that 40per cent of six-year-olds had seen a video nasty, Cumberbatch claimed he was rather sceptical of the figure as he found it difficult to get hold of nasties for research.179 In his own experiments, five classes of eleven-year-olds were given the same list of films as in the original survey, only this time a number of plausible-sounding, yet fake titles such as Vampire Holocaust, Claw and Zombies from Beyond Space were added to the list. Publishing the results in the Guardian on 25 April, they found that while 68per cent claimed to have seen a nasty, a surprising 82per cent also claimed to have seen a fictitious film.180 The following day in an unusual show of support, The Evening Mail acknowledged how ‘Youngsters Caught Out in Video Nasties Test’, while The Reporter announced, ‘Bloodthirsty school children have been caught out by two Brum boffins over claims that they have been watching video nasties.’181 Despite reservations surrounding the validity of research, by 12 July 1984 the Bill was passed and become the Video Recording Act even though no conclusive evidence could support its foundations. As the governmentdelegated authority to rate and consequently determine whether or not a

Petley, 2011, p. 83. Graham Bright, 8th March 1984; cited in Martin, 1997, p. 204. 178 All headlines refer to the 8th March 1984. 179 Guy Cumberbatch April, 1984; cited in the documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Video Tape. In the same documentary, in reference to the figure of 40per cent, Barker concludes that this figure was deduced thus. He claimed that the Enquiry received just forty-seven replies from six years in the first publication of the report. In the second they only used children who were seven and up. Three said they had seen a video nasty, comprising of a total of seventeen films altogether. Barker continued stating that forty-seven divided by seventeen equalled forty and that’s how they came up with the figure of 40per cent. 180 Guy Cumberbatch and Paul Bates, ‘Sorting Out the Little White Lies from Nasty Pieces of Work, The Guardian. 25th April 1984. 181 The Evening Mail. 26th April 1984; The Reporter. 26th April 1984. 176 177

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film on video would receive a certificate, the VRA essentially meant that the BBFC could now effectively sidestep the need to invoke the more ambiguous Obscene Publications Act of 1959 in favour of the VRA. From this point on, as Junior Home Office Minister David Mellor stated at the time, ‘the only matter of concern to the courts will be whether a video has a certificate’.182 As a result, the actual content of a film became secondary to the necessity of BBFC approval. Anyone caught selling an unrated video was liable to a £20,000 fine and imprisonment.183 Seemingly washing their hands of the matter, what’s clear here is that in passing on the responsibility to the BBFC to determine whether or not a film should receive a certificate, the courts had sanctioned a rather hazy and ill-formed definition of what constituted harmful effects. But was such a definition ever required? Repeatedly circumventing the need to either define or defend claims of harm, when it comes to protecting children, common sense is often touted as the only prerequisite which leads one to intrinsically know whether something is harmful.

Common-sense censorship From the earliest stages of the video nasty controversy there was a preoccupation with the notion that regardless of any scientific evidence to the contrary, it was simply common sense to conclude that watching violent or horrific films made the viewer do and think violent and horrific things ‘provable or not’.184 As history transforms into nature and our own subjective realities shape the manner in which we interpret facts, truth loses its objectivity in favour of a more obscure and emotionally driven narrative. A powerful illustration of such intolerance for empirical evidence is demonstrated by Conservative MP Jerry Hayes during a TV debate late in 1983. Supporting the interim report which by now had been wildly acknowledged as flawed, Hayes declared, ‘Clifford Hill’s report, whether it’s right or wrong, I don’t really know, I don’t particularly care.’185 Equally, the failure of the Enquiry report to deliver actual ‘prima facie’ evidence was for anti-nasty campaigner Bishop Wakefield incidental. Speaking to the House of Lords, he argued that ‘particular doubts about this bit of research should not blind us to the very real dangers that are before us’.186

Cited in Mathews, 1994, p. 244. Mathews, 1994, p. 244. 184 Polly Toynbee, ‘Towards an Interpretation of Christian Ethics’, Tydale Bulletin. 27, p. 66. 185 Conservative MP Jerry Hayes during a televised debate with Martin Barker and Mary Whitehouse, December 1983; cited in Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Video Tape. 186 House of Lords Report, Col. 53; cited in Barker, 1984a, p. 65. Emphasis mine 182 183

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Unlike Forman or Wertham whose respective editorial and psychoanalytic backgrounds possessed a certain intellectual or academic prowess, Whitehouse somewhat fetishised her own unqualified position as a selfconfessed ordinary citizen and mother. With an all-to-familiar whiff of populist rhetoric trumping political credibility, Whitehouse proclaimed herself an advocate for the silent majority, who were apparently being ‘culturally disenfranchised by the onslaught of products emanating from metropolitan liberals’.187 Espousing ‘traditional common sense ideas of knowledge and morality’ over the ‘the tyranny of experts whose views asserted that rational understanding was the slave for society’,188 Whitehouse renounced the more restrained academic approach. Extolling the virtues of moral extremism and common sense, her own ideologies were underpinned by an instance upon ‘adverse effect[s] until [. . .] disproven’.189 So convinced was she of the unproven dangers of video nasties, speaking at a Conservative Party conference in 1986, Whitehouse railed that we must ‘get away from this silly business of having to prove things. We’ve got to start using our common sense and human experience, then we might get somewhere.’190 While she did speak for a large demographic of individuals, such views were by no means unanimous amongst the ‘common people’. Typically rationalised as ‘a relatively organised body of considered thought, rather than just what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows’, Clifford Geertz argued how its tenets are considered ‘immediate deliverances upon experience’ and not ‘deliberated reflections upon it’.191 Thus common sense is a ‘a cultural system, though not usually a very tightly integrated one, and it rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity’.192 In other words, far from a being an a priori knowledge, common sense is arguably another culturally defined narrative which is constantly in flux depending on its historical and cultural context and pretext. Video nasties had become the ultimate political and moral tool for deflection and circumvention during one of the most complex and turbulent eras in British history. Never a means to an end, the VRA had little impact upon future crusades pertaining to the harmful effects of horror on children.

David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 145. 188 Nash, 2013, p. 145. 189 Mary Whitehouse quoting Michael Swann in ‘Time to Face Responsibility’, in French, p. 56. 190 Mary Whitehouse speaking at a Conservative Party Conference 1984; cited in Jason C Bivins, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 1882. 191 Clifford Geertz, ‘Common Sense as a Cultural System’, The Antioch Review. 33, (1), 1975, pp. 5–26, p. 5. 192 Ibid., p. 8. For an expanded reading of Geertz see Gloria Origgi, ‘What’s in My Common Sense?’ The Philosophical Forum. 39, (3), 2008, pp. 327–335, p. 334. 187

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Having emboldened and validated some of its more spurious claims, ten years later upon the death of two-year-old James Bulger, the British media once again facilitated the unfolding machinations of the myth of harm. As symbolic borders between fact and fiction dissolved, one of the most outlandish narratives of harm concerning a doll and the murder of a toddler was sensationalised to obscene proportions in the media.

‘Killing of Innocence’ A tabloid sensation paralleled in the UK only perhaps by the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann in 2007, the horrific death of toddler James Bulger on 12 February 1993 at the hands of ten-year-old Jon Venables and Robert Thompson was presented within an undeniable Gothic narrative which sought to emphasise the ever-present anxiety pertaining to horror and children.193 The tragedy of the Bulger case tore apart traditional assumptions of childhood, in particular ‘the Romantic belief in childhood as a period of innocence and natural purity’.194 Contextualised within a Gothic narrative steeped in moral dialectics, visceral imaginary and inconceivable monsters, in the media and beyond the Bulger case took on mythic proportions. Instead of addressing the perfect storm of abuse and dysfunction which led two very disturbed children to commit murder,195 the media exploited a minor non-detail of the case. A testament to the residual paranoia which remained a generation on from the video nasty controversy,196 the correlation between a killer doll called Chucky which featured in Don Mancini’s Child’s Play horror franchise and the toddler’s murder spoke volumes about the palimpsestic structure of the myth of harm. So pervasive was the notion that horror could ‘infect’ children via the medium of home rentals, as part of the investigation, the video rental records of both parents were examined. It was discovered that some months before the murder, the father of Jon Venables had rented Jack Bender’s Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking – the third instalment in Mancini’s franchise. Irrespective of the fact that Venables was not living with his father at the time of the murder and later admitted that he disliked horror films, narratives were forged relatively quickly in the media that his ‘exposure’ to such a film was a contributing factor in the case.

See David James Smith, The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (London: Faber & Faber, 2012). 194 Buckingham, 1996, p. 20. 195 See Carol Anne Davis, Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-teen and Teenage Killers (London: Allison & Busby, 2003), pp. 131–138. 196 Petley, 2011, p. 88. 193

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The notion that two ten-year-olds could kidnap, torture and murder a younger child was, according to critics Allison James and Chris Jenks unthinkable. ‘Unthinkable’, they deduce, ‘because it occurred within the conceptual space of childhood which, prior to this breach, was conceived of – for the most part and for most children – as innocence enshrined’.197 Commenting upon the socially constructed myth of childhood innocence, Lisa Downing draws issue with such problematic constructions of children which linger well into the twenty-first century: not as individual subjects, future adults with evolving cognitive, emotional and intellectual skills, but as a class apart (the class signifying those whose nature – is innocence) – is damaging for both those children who emerge as social agents as Venables and Thompson did, and for those who emerge as victims of tragedies such as this one.198 The children at the centre of the Bulger case were not just on trial for the murder of a child but also for ‘killing of innocence’.199 Thus the outrage perpetrated against these children was in effect a mourning for the loss of an idealised childhood. Accordingly, ‘as the child villain owes his or her effect to our attachment to an ideal child’, Dominic Lennard observes that ‘cultural responses to child criminality often subject very real children to our misrepresentations’.200 When such events are interpreted through a Gothic register, such ‘unthinkable’ and ‘inexplicable’ actions are somehow rationalised away as two young boys are transmogrified into ‘evil monsters’, who embarked upon ‘twisted sex fantasies’.201 Creating a tension between the worlds of fantasy and fact, within such a context Botting observes how the excesses of Gothic: contaminates all distinctions in the way it heightens the function of forms and conventions in the everyday as well as the fictional world. The hybrid mixing of forms and narratives has uncanny effects, effects which make narrative play and ambivalence another figure of horror, another duplicitous object to be expelled from proper orders of consciousness and representation.202 Allison James and Chris Jenks, ‘Public Perceptions of Childhood Criminality’, British Journal of Sociology. June 1996, pp. 315–331, p. 314. 198 Lisa Downing, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality and the Modern Killer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 173. 199 See Stewart Asquith, ‘When Children Kill Children’, in Chris Jenks, (ed.) Childhood: Critical Concepts in Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 164–181, p. 167. 200 Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 165. 201 Daily Star. 25th November 1993. 202 Botting, 2014, p. 168; Valier, 2004, p. 117. 197

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As a result, instead of probing the wider complex sphere of issues which orbited both Thompson and Venables, their othered status as monsters was compounded. Having waved the young boys right to anonymity, presiding judge Chief Justice Moorland stated in court how it wasn’t for him ‘to pass judgment on their upbringing’ but suspected ‘that exposure to violent video films may in part be an explanation’.203 Corroborated by the judge’s rather offhand and clearly reactionary remarks, Chucky was granted a strange form of agency within the press. Not unlike the online figure of Slender Man discussed later, the fictitious character was both incriminated in and charged with the murder of James Bulger alongside Thompson and Venables. Off the back of these remarks, picking up the baton where the Daily Mail had left off, The Sun mounted a rather salacious campaign to ban Child’s Play 3. While the film was never actually entered into court as it could never be proven to any satisfactory degree that it had evidentiary bearing on the case, the film, or rather Chucky its star, now faced a trial by media. Leaving little to the imagination, each and every detail of the case was reported and exploited in the press, as narratives purporting apparent similarities between Child’s Play 3 and the murder took hold of the public’s imagination. Although articles dedicated to highlighting the more dysfunctional and economically deprived aspects of the boys’ lives were published,204 the inference that bad parents let their bad children watch ‘bad films’ always lurked in the background. Galvanised by the circumstantial evidence scavenged from the Bulger case and the murder of Susanne Capper in December 1992,205 the press forged ahead with reports pertaining to the effects of video violence. According to the tabloids the character of Chucky was a very real threat and the only way to stop him from corrupting other children was to gather up the pitchforks and destroy with fire. However, this belies a rather confused approach to the narrative suggesting a lack of familiarity with both the film and the mechanics of horror in general. While Chucky was seen as an evil force somehow capable of influencing two already quite perturbed young boys, Child’s Play 3 at its core is a film ultimately about overcoming childhood adversity. Arguably, one of the major achievements of the horror genre since its Gothic inception has been the representation of the marginalised and the articulation of anxieties within a fantastical safe space. All be it with varying

Chief Justice Moorland, cited in The Guardian. 25th November 1993. Such as the Daily Mail’s ‘Broken Homes and Shattered Lives’, on 25th November 1993 and The Times ‘Horror-Video Addiction is part of a socially disadvantaged sink culture in which lack of parental supervision is endemic’, on the 11th April 1994. 205 Whereupon it was ‘revealed’ in the press, the teens who murdered the sixteen-year-old had spent the day doing drugs while repeatedly listening to the dance group 150 Volts remix ‘Hi I’m Chuckie’ which featured the infamous line – ‘Hi I’m Chucky. Wanna’ Play’. 203 204

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degrees of success, horror creates this space for audiences to not only challenge and even dulcify anxieties but also ‘confront the limits of their own tolerance’.206 While Jones furthers his discussion to include a reading of these cultural fears as constantly in flux, morphing and mutating to suit the socio-political and historical context unique to each period,207 the anxiety of growing up is perhaps one that although complex remains constant. Defined as a period that is ‘permeated with insecurity’, it’s little wonder that children down throughout the generations are drawn to representations which ‘dramatize such insecurities in fictional form’, thus providing ‘“safe” opportunities for children to learn to cope with them’.208 As already stated, this book is not intended to parse the precarious and often hazardous terrain of ‘children’s horror’. That said many of the texts featured in this book are designed around this very theme of childhood adversity. From Frankenstein’s Monster to EC’s Billy and Lucy and on into the 1970s with Regan and Alex – all of these juvenile characters embody fears and anxieties pertaining to agency, abandonment and abuse. As the teencentric slasher grew in prominence throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, horror and dark fantasy films featuring children as the main protagonists asserting themselves in an adult world grew in popularity also.209 As part of this tradition, the Child’s Play series of films is especially illustrative of such films where children must take matters into their own hands having been failed by ineffectual adults. Picking up from where the previous films left off, in Child’s Play 3 serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) aka Chucky and Andy (Justin Whalin) now sixteen and residing at a military school for troubled youths must do battle once again as Chucky moves in on his latest target – eight-year-old Ronald (Jeremy Sylvers). Though a strong predator subtext runs throughout the film in which children are made to keep the secrets of adults, the plot is designed around punishing and ultimately destroying the character of Chucky for his transgressions against children and childhood. In stark contrast to this pro-childhood narrative, the James Bulger/Chucky narrative which was spun in the media was decidedly anti-childhood as both victim and the circumstances surrounding the case were exploited. Replicating the same zeal which the Daily Mail had displayed during its ‘Ban the Sadist Video Campaign’ ten years earlier, The Sun newspaper energetically picked up the gauntlet and embarked upon a campaign which

Darryl Jones, Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 7. 207 Jones, 2018, p. 21. 208 Buckingham, 1996, p. 3. 209 Examples include The Goonies (1985), Labyrinth (1986), The Monster Squad (1987), and on into the 1990s with IT (1990), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), The Witches (1990) Ernest Scared Stupid (1991), The People Under the Stairs (1991) and Cronos (1994) 206

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beseeched the British public: ‘For the Sake of All our kids . . . Burn Your Video Nasty’. Commencing on 26 November 1993, with a front-page photo of a metal drum filled with copies of Child’s Play 3 on fire, the paper ran multiple reports of organized burnings across the country.210 Just as it had been necessary to destroy Frankenstein’s Monster with fire, the monstrous Chucky must befall the same fate. As reports flooded the tabloids, the figure of Chucky smiling manically with blood dripping from his mouth was juxtaposed with mugshots of Venables and Thompson. Presented as an uncanny childlike creature within the press, Chucky was the ultimate Gothic monster, existing within a liminal borderland between life and death, real and imagined, child and adult, victim and victimiser. Through such a ‘gothic register of horror’, Valier makes the point that ‘a process of mutual implication pertains between the “real” and the “fictive,” through the merging of news and political debate with entertainment as infotainment’.211 In other words, through the process of media implication, Chucky was for all intents and purposes ‘real’ and should be made stand trial in the public court of opinion alongside Thompson and Venables. Perhaps one of the most striking, if not regrettable, examples of this collapse between real and fictive boundaries is illustrated by The Sun’s re-enactment of James Bulger’s murder using stills from Child’s Play 3. Following a headline which stated, ‘Chilling Links between James’ Murder and Tape Rented by Killer’s Dad’, the following page is completely taken up with four frames depicting various events from the film with captions underneath explaining how these scenes correlate to the murder. Alighting upon some of the more disturbing aspects of the crime involving the child’s torture and subsequent death at a railway track, under the captions ‘Led Away to Destruction’, ‘Victim Won’t Stay Down’, ‘Doused with Paint’, and ‘Face Slashed by a Scythe’, stills from the film are presented so as to evoke the last tragic moments of the toddler’s life. As the spotlight burned bright on Child’s Play 3, though unsubstantiated, rejected as evidence in court and ultimately groundless, the narrative that horror may corrupt and deprave young audiences persisted as the media storm surrounding the case was extended to incorporate the entire yield of horror films available on video. Once again set within the language of the Gothic, narratives of harm were repeatedly invoked as investigations into the ‘Corruption of the Video Generation’ took centre stage within the media.212 While infused with a moral resonance reminiscent of the antivideo nasty campaign in the 1980s which condemned lax parenting and Another such article claimed that Scotland’s largest video retailer, Azad Video, ‘torched its entire £10, 000 stock’ of Child’s Play 3. Gordon Stott and John Troup, ‘Video Store Rush to Burn Film Linked with James Murder’, The Sun. 27th November 1993. 211 Valier, 2004, p. 113. 212 Daniel McGory, ‘Corruption of the Video Generation’, Daily Express. 26th November 1993. 210

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renounced ‘shattered’ and ‘broken’ homes, in an attempt to assign blame, all paths seemingly led to video violence. Overlooking the decades of research already poured into the effects debate, in an article for the Daily Express one reporter stressed the lack of ‘a concerted effort to properly investigate the effects’ in order ‘to figure out what the video age has done to our children’.213 In the same edition, an editorial titled ‘Save Children from the Moral Vacuum’ casts its net of blame further. Bemoaning the collapse of society and the disintegration of the home, ‘[m]ore and more children are growing up in a moral vacuum, which for so many is filled with fetid junk from the lower depths of our popular culture – video nasties, crude comics and violent television’.214 Commissioned by MP David Alton the publication of Video Violence and the Protection of Children in April 1994 sought to elevate the video violence debate from the remit of tabloid sensationalism. Widely hailed as a ‘victory for common sense’,215 the report was an attempt to imbue what ostensibly had been a perverse correlation between a doll and a seriously disturbing murder with purpose and academic integrity. Published just in time for the first reading of David Alton’s amendment to the VRA in the House of Commons, Newson rather provocatively cited ‘electronic child abuse’ in the form of violent and horrific videos as a primary contributing factor in not only the death of James Bulger but also in the general decline of children’s mental states. Though she did give credence to the fact that neither of the boys ‘came from happy and nurturing homes’, she immediately dismissed home life as a major contributing factor. Reminiscent of Wertham and Hill in past controversies, Newson made the ideological leap from kids watching violence to kids becoming violent. ‘What then’, Newson pondered, ‘can be seen as the “different” factor that has entered the lives of countless children and adolescents in recent years? This has to be recognised as the easy availability to children of gross images of violence on video.’216 Having finally acquiesced to ‘common sense’, academics who had seemingly proven that ‘Movie nasties DO KILL’217 were treated with less disdain than a decade previously. With headlines such as ‘At Last Experts Admit: Movie Nasties Do Kill’,218 ‘Top Psychologists have finally admitted that violent videos corrupt children’219 and ‘Vid Nasties: We Boobed Say Experts’, video nasties were apparently to blame for not only the death of a child but had also contributed towards yet another generation of supposedly

McGory, 26th November, 1993. ‘Save Children from the Moral Vacuum’, Daily Express. 26th November 1993. 215 Buckingham, 1996, p. 29. Emphasis my own. 216 Newson, 1994. 217 The Express. 2nd April 1994. 218 Daily Mirror. 1st April 1994. 219 Daily Express. 1st April 1994. 213 214

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dysfunctional children. The irony that such a definitive claim was predicated upon an erroneous link between a murder and an unwatched videotape was of course lost and did little to undermine the confidence of such assertions. While the tabloids were confident that a ‘chilling and horrific link exist[ed] between video nasties and real-life violence’,220 with no real evidence, the core thesis of Newson’s report reverted back to ideological common-sense notions buttressed by the myth of harm.221 Opposition to the report came in the form of critics Cumberbatch and Howitt who sought to challenge Newson and her team who they argued were lacking not only in evidence but also in film expertise. Though admitting that certain horror films may cause nightmares in some children, the notion that horror films acted as violent ‘triggers’ was for Cumberbatch and Howitt ‘just speculation’.222 The bottom line as far as Cumberbatch was concerned was that while ‘horror films are designed to horrify, they do not make the children themselves horrific people’.223 More relevant, however, to this argument is the claim by Barker that Newson’s attempts to prove the harmful effects of certain forms of media upon children not only fell back on previously encountered deterministic suppositions, but in all of the claims of harm identified by Barker none of them could be justified.224 ‘Not one’, insists Barker, ‘can be supported by either evidence or logic.’225 Consistently referring to the difficulty in obtaining research on the effects of ‘media violence’, Newson instead invites her readers to view media violence research through a deterministic narrative of harm which presupposes negative effects as the inevitable outcome. As demonstrated in the following chapter on video games, problematic and often-flawed common-sense models such as Newson’s are habitually ameliorated through the media which exalt such claims as fact. When proof alludes those who desire it most, common sense acts as a surrogate. Even though Newson had not produced any evidence pertaining to the ill effects of horror films, her report, like Video, Violence and Children before it, had sufficient rhetoric concerning harm narratives to support the implementation of a new clause to the VRA. Published on 14 June 1994 it stated that: [t]he designated authority [BBFC], shall in making any determination as to the suitability of a video work, have special regard (among the other

Daily Star. 1st April 1994. Barker, 2001, p. 27. 222 Cumberbatch cited in Richard Pendlebury and Michael Seamark, ‘Censor’s Gone Far Enough Say Critics’, Daily Mail. 2nd April 1994. 223 Cumberbatch, quoted in Edward Gorman, ‘Horror Films Do Not Turn Children into Horrific People’, The Times. 26th November 1993. 224 Barker, 2001, p. 31. 225 Ibid. 220 221

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relevant factors) to any harm that may be caused to potential viewers or, through their behaviour, to society by the manner in which the work deals with – [. . .] criminal behaviour [. . .] violent behaviour or incidents; horrific behaviour or incidents.226 In yet another ‘flexi-panic’227 reaction to an appalling set of circumstances, the noose around the sale and distribution of the second generation of ‘nasties’ tightened further still. In an interesting coda to the video nasties controversy, it was discovered in 2009 that the Act was never submitted to the European Commission due to an administrative error and as a consequence never officially ratified.228 As a consequence, the actual legislation, which forced businesses to cease operating, destroyed reputations and chastised countless individuals for their professional and personal interests, was ironically just as baseless. As a result, the original 1984 Act was repealed in 2009 and all of its elements reactivated in the Video Recording Act of 2010, making the legislation enforceable once again.229 Most worrying, however, was the ruling that past convictions and fines could not be challenged.230 Ratified or not, the VRA had a lasting impact on the availability of horror films in the 1980s and 1990s. As a perfect complement to the countless reports in both the media and elsewhere that espoused empty and unsubstantiated evidence concerning the harmful effects of video nasties on children, the VRA turned out to be nothing but a hollow spectre which haunted the horror community. Symbolic of the many technological and cultural changes in the UK, politicians and moral entrepreneurs sought to suppress video nasties through an elusive narrative of harm. In the years to come these narratives would persist in both the United Kingdom and the United States as video games now came under scrutiny as an even greater threat to children.

Cited in Petley, 2011, p. 93. Barker, 1984b, p. 38. 228 Julian Petley, ‘Video Recordings Act was a Blank Tape’, The Guardian. 26th August 2009. Sourced http://www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/libertycentral​/2009​/aug​/26​/video​-recordings​ -act [Accessed 10th July 2021]. 229 It was further amended by the Digital Economy Act 2010. 230 Sourced http://news​.bbc​.co​.uk​/2​/hi​/uk​_news​/8219438​.stm [Accessed 27th September 2020]. 226 227

4 Gothic video games and ‘murder simulators’

Introduction Introducing the ‘Family Entertainment Protection Act’, at a press conference in 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton beseeched her fellow Americans to support an act which would: Limit the exposure of children to violent videogames [because] experimental research and longitudinal research over the discourse of decades show that exposure to higher levels of violence on television, in movies, and in other forms of media in adolescence cause people in the short-term and, after repeated exposure, even years later to exhibit higher levels of violent thoughts, anti-social and aggressive behavior, fear, anxiety, and hostility, and desensitization to the pain and suffering of others.1 Citing various researchers who media effects researcher Christopher Ferguson acerbically adds have since been ‘discredited’,2 Clinton laments how ‘violent videogames increase aggressive behaviour as much as lead exposure decreases children’s IQ scores’. Invoking a centuries-old narrative in which the very essence of childhood is at risk, Clinton continues her emotional appeal claiming, ‘If you put it just really simply, these violent

See ‘Family Entertainment Protection Act’, Govtrack​.us​. Sourced http://www​.govtrack​.us​/ congress​/billtext​.xpd​?bill​=s109​-2126 [Accessed 7th July 2021]; Cited in Cooper, 2010, p. 169. 2 Christopher J. Ferguson and Patrick M. Markey, Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2017) E.book. 1

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videogames are stealing the innocence of children.’3 Now doesn’t this sound familiar? Though Clinton’s Act never saw the light of day, in October of that same year then Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed bill AB1179 which banned the sale or rental to minors of any video game that ‘depicted serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel’.4 Under this law retailers could now face $1000 fine if caught selling such video games to minors. Happy to sign the bill, Schwarzenegger sought to get ‘parents involved in the decision making process’. A proponent of the ratings himself he wanted to ‘make sure that they don’t go into the wrong hands’.5 Supported and written by democratic assemblyman, child psychologist and a former school administrator Leland Yee, the law sought to protect children from the alleged negative effects of ‘violent’ video games. Confident there was sufficient evidence linking the playing of the games by ‘impressionable teenagers and pre-teenagers to acts of violence or hostile attitudes’, Yee wished to make it illegal in the state of California for these impressionable juveniles to purchase these so-called violent games. ‘Study upon study,’ Yee confidently asserted, ‘shows that these ultraviolent games have harmful effects on our children.’6 Unsurprisingly disappointed in the ruling, Entertainment Software Association (ESA) president Dough Lowenstein argued how the bill was not only ‘punitive against retailers’ but was in contravention of the First Amendment and sought to disregard ‘free artistic and creative expression in favor of political expediency’.7 Some six years later, in June 2011 during the Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) case, the US Supreme Court overturned the law ruling in favour of EMA. Video games were found to be covered under the First Amendment, and therefore producers and distributors were free to exercise the freedom of speech. As a result, the court ruled that any governmental interference or regulation of a minors’ interaction with video games was an impingement upon this right:

Andrea Peterson, ‘Hillary Clinton’s History with Video Games and the Rise of Political Geek Cred’, Washington Post. 21st April 2015. Sourced https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/news​/ the​-switch​/wp​/2015​/04​/21​/hillary​-clintons​-history​-with​-video​-games​-and​-the​-rise​-of​-political​ -geek​-cred/ [Accessed 31st August 2021]. 4 Julie Tamaki, ‘Game Industry Vows Fight Over Age Limit’, LA Times. 8th October 2005. Sourced https://www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2005​-oct​-08​-fi​-games8​-story​.html [Accessed 30th July 2021]. 5 Sourced https://www​.gamesindustry​.biz​/articles​/schwarzenegger​-signs​-violent​-videogames​-bill [Accessed 31st June 2021]. 6 Sourced https://www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-2010​-apr​-29​-la​-fi​-ct​-facetime​-20100429​ -story​.html [Accessed 31st June 2021]. 7 Sourced https://www​.gamesindustry​.biz​/articles​/schwarzenegger​-signs​-violent​-videogames​-bill [Accessed 31st June 2021]. 3

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Videogames qualify for First Amendment protection. Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium. And ‘the basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary’ with a new and different communication medium.8 By the time the law was overturned by the Supreme Court six years later, the evidence Yee championed was deemed unpersuasive and methodologically flawed. In light of such evidence, any law regulating the sale of violent games to minors was unconstitutional. Citing a number of legal precedents, delivering the opinion of the court, Justice Scalia stated: [t]he State’s evidence is not compelling. California relies primarily on the research of Dr Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent videogame and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent videogame cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, ‘[n]early all the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant flaws in methodology.’ Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F.3d, at 964. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game.9 Specifically highlighting the rights of the child, Justice Scalia drew parallels with other forms of divisive material such as religious doctrine and asked whether it is constitutionally sound to discriminate against certain activities above others based on the personal prejudices of adults: ‘[m]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them’. Erznoznik v. Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205, 212-213 (1975) No doubt a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, Ginsberg, supra, at 640-640; Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 165 (1944) but that does not include the free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed. ‘Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely

8 9

Brown v. EMA/ESA, No. 08-1448, slip opinion, U.S. Supreme Court, 27th June 2011. Brown v. EMA, 2011, Opinion of the Court, pp. 12–13.

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to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.’ (Erznoznik, supra, at 213–14)10 But over a decade on from this ruling, the myth of harm persists as calls for further research are heard each and every time an act of indiscriminate violence is committed by a minor. Over a single weekend in August 2019 thirty people lost their lives in one of bloodiest spates of mass shootings in America. In the wake of these atrocities, then president Trump responded by trotting out a familiar statement to the one released in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting in February 2018. While calling for prayers for the wrong Ohio city, he condemned ‘gruesome and violent videogames’ for contributing to the ‘glorification of violence in our society’.11 While pointing out Trump’s politically motivated need to obfuscate and equivocate his way past gun control measures is at this stage redundant, this dangerous rhetoric unfortunately does have traction. Responding to Trump’s comments, the Entertainment Software Association, which rates video game content and bills itself as the ‘voice and advocate for the video game industry’, issued a response stating that ‘more than 165 million Americans enjoy videogames, and billions of people play videogames worldwide. [. . .] other societies, where videogames are played as avidly, do not contend with the tragic levels of violence that occur in the U.S’.12 Equally distressed by the barrage of antivideo game allegations International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and the International Game Developers Association Foundation issued a joint statement emphasising the lack of evidence pertaining to video games and real-life violence: [s]ociety has endured too many senseless acts of violence and horrific mass shootings. Blaming videogames distracts from the broader issues at hand. There is an overwhelming amount of research that finds there is no evidence linking videogames to violence. Video games do not cause violence, and we support efforts to discontinue this misguided information.13

Ibid. Jane C. Timm, ‘Fact Check: Trump Suggests Video Games to Blame for Mass Shootings’, NBC News. 6th August 2019. Sourced https://www​.nbcnews​.com​/politics​/donald​-trump​/fact​-check​ -trump​-suggests​-video​-games​-blame​-mass​-shootings​-n1039411 [Accessed 20th August 2021]. 12 James Batchelor, ‘ESA Defends Against Trump’s Proposed Video Game Crackdown’, Games Industry Biz. 6th August 2019. Sourced https://www​.gamesindustry​.biz​/articles​/2019​-08​-06​ -esa​-defends​-against​-trumps​-proposed​-video​-game​-crackdown [Accessed 20th July 2021]. 13 Sourced https://members​.igda​.org​/news​/464174​/IGDA​-and​-IGDAF​-Response​-to​-Recent​ -Tragedies​-in​-Dayton​-OH​-and​-El​-Paso​-TX​.htm [Accessed 20th July 2021]. 10 11

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Though compelling, the fact that there exists an ‘overwhelming amount of research that finds there is no evidence’ is quickly negated when juxtaposed with the ever-looming spectre of the potential to harm especially when these narratives are contextualised within scientific research. As this book has argued, the field of media effects is often suspectable to ‘persuasion research’ in which research is framed to give the data the best possible presentation. ‘Framing,’ Shannan observes, ‘is another way of arguing that content has influences, without seeming to argue that particular propositions in and of themselves, have effects.’14 Even more nefariously, often these reports conflate common sense, morality and taste with actual evidence, therefore leaving one confused as to the ‘difference between the picture and the frame’.15 Consequently, arguments which provide evidence that there are no links between negative media effects and violent media in general and violence and video games specially are helpful but do little to stem the tide of negative effects narratives due to the ubiquitous and omnipotent myth of harm. Having explored the ever-mutating myth which has haunted the horror genre since its inception, this chapter will explore the manner in which video games and the ‘cottage industry’16 of media effects research which has grown up around them has been hijacked by the press, given oxygen by countless political figures and ultimately exacerbated parental anxiety. And who can blame the parents of young children for having their doubts as report after report is published claiming that even if research has not currently found definite links between violent video games and harmful effects, it’s only a matter of time and more importantly funding before it does. Offering a slight departure, the most sustained part of this chapter will concern texts which are not traditionally considered horror. Yet, regardless of the generic make-up of the texts under discussion, the narrative that these games are ‘stealing the innocence of children’ is a familiar one trotted out since Forman and beyond. While horror video games will inform a large portion of this chapter, in a similar fashion to both Round and Aldana Reyes in their respective work on comics and body horror, attempts will be made to critically analyse and probe the limits of what is meant exactly by ‘violent’ video games. As much of the tabloid and scientific rhetoric that surrounds the alleged effects of video games fails to recognize generic variances and instead opts for the more homologised title of violent video games, identifying and textually analysing horror games specifically will form an important aspect of this chapter. Furthermore, having been problematised and indeed pathologised over and over again, this chapter attempts to offer

Shanahan, 2021, p. 47. Ibid., p. 48. 16 Ferguson and Markey, 2017. 14 15

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a reading of violent video games as Gothic texts by virtue of their liminal status as socially proscribed products of potential harm. Drawing parallels between present media effects researchers working on video games and past authorities such as Forman and Wertham, this chapter will highlight the disparity between scientific research and media reportage which arguably has sustained the myth of harm right up to the present day. At this early stage, it is important to highlight the switch in principal focus once again from Britain to America. At various points throughout the horror genre’s turbulent history, there have been occasions whereby controversy surrounding a particular medium has caused a disproportionate amount of debate in either the United Kingdom or the United States. Subsequently, the majority of this chapter will feature a strong American focus. In relation to why this is the case, Buckingham notes how: for a variety of reasons, ‘effects’ research of this kind remains especially popular in the United States. This is partly a result of the continuing dominance in the country of relatively conservative, empiricist academic traditions, which were themselves partly legitimated through the early experimental studies on television violence; and it also reflects a particular set of institutional relationships between academic researchers, government and the media industries. Yet the continuing prominence of such research must be systematic of the deep-seated political paralysis that surrounds the issue of gun control, in a nation where there are more handguns than there are people.17 That said, British and to a lesser degree Irish tabloids will also feature in response to American findings as representative of the manner in which research is being interpreted and narrated.18 A further point of contention which must be addressed is of course the issue of children’s video games versus adult’s video games. Considering that the majority of overtly violent video games are rated ‘M’ for over seventeen in the United States and ‘18’ in the UK,19 the majority of games under discussion are not intended for children. Yet the fact that they are in the world and children have access to them, even indirectly, is enough for a harm narrative to have emerged in the same manner as it did around video nasties. Be that as it may, it is not the intention of this chapter to interrogate the research as to whether or not

David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 130. Cynthia Hendershot, I was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001), p. 107. 18 For context a few cases Irish media reports will feature. 19 MATURE-Content is generally suitable for ages seventeen and up. May contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language. 17

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children under the age of eighteen are actually playing these games. Rather what concerns this chapter is the manner in which the alleged threat of violent video games to children and young adults is symptomatic of how the myth of harm has become a defining narrative within the technological age.20

New technologies; old fears; same myth Jumpstarting one of the biggest entertainment industries of all time, arcade machines and later video games have been a mainstay of our culture since the evening of the 29 November 1972 when Atari’s Al Alcorn installed the first Pong machine (Atari, 1972) in Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. With the exception of 3D cinemas, the odd flirtation with audience participation at cult film screenings and the ‘infiltration’ of VHS into the domestic realm, the manner in which we watch horror films has not changed dramatically since Georges Méliès suspended bats from wire in 1898. The way we interact with video games, however, is constantly in a state of flux. At once interactive, ludic, haptic and simultaneously cerebral, video games have been accused of disrupting our realities as technologies advance, tastes develop and society struggles to keep up. Yet unlike the pervious controversies discussed in which we bore witness to a sensational rise to popularity shortly followed by an inglorious decline, the position of video games as a dominant form of entertainment in the twenty-first century seems for the most part secure. Considering that the full value of the gaming industry now exceeds $300 billion, and estimates claim that there are over 2.7 billion people globally playing video games,21 video games are not going anywhere. As a result, it seems disingenuous in the twenty-first century to refer to any tensions between video games and perceived negative effects as a moral panic akin perhaps to what went before when they were first released and played by children. Instead as this chapter will detail, something more insidious lurks emboldened by the myth of harm, which has evolved over time through a complex cabal of prevarication, misrepresentation and pontificating. While playing video games remains an extremely popular form of entertainment, the increasing pathologisation of gameplay and the proliferation of media effects research only seeks to compound the myth of harm well into the digital sphere of the twenty-first century.

For work on this area see Helene Guldberg, Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear (New York: Routledge, 2009). 21 Sourced https://www​.accenture​.com​/us​-en​/insights​/software​-platforms​/gaming​-the​-next​ -superplatform ​ ? c ​ = acn ​ _ glb ​ _ the ​ n ewg ​ a min ​ g exp ​ b usi ​ n esswire ​ _ 12160747 ​ & n ​ = mrl ​ _ 0421 [Accessed 28th July 2021]. 20

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Racing towards death Arguably video games were born of controversy. From the moment coinoperated arcade machines were installed in American bars in the 1970s, these dens of iniquity spilled forth a veritable cascade of sleaze which found its way into the minds and souls of the nation’s youth. As one of the earliest video arcade games, Carly Kocurek observes that for ‘moral guardians suspicious of or hostile to the budding culture of video gaming, Death Race became the signature example of video games’ depravity and corrupting influence’.22 Aside from the odd scuffle with Atari’s breast-shaped joysticks for Gotcha (Atari, 1973) in 1973 and their unlicenced adoption of Shark Jaws (Atari, 1975) in 1975 in which players were hunted by a shark, Death Race (Exidy, 1976) set a precedent in terms of moral outrage. As a forerunner to Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games 1997–2013), Death Race was a controversial text, not for its violent features but for presenting such violence outside the established culturally defined parameters of cinema.23 In other words, with its garish marque boasting two figures of Death dressed in hoodies and driving hot rods, Death Race represented one of the first instances of game play which combined violence and death – two key tropes which would continue to dominate video game narratives. While cinematic representations of violence had been a controversial mainstay of horror films for over a century, Death Race was something of a vanguard for video game technology and such representations of death and mayhem. Hence the conflation of old fears around children and harm with new and emerging technologies made for a factious climate between those who created the games and those who inherently believed them to be harmful. With no real rating system to speak of throughout arcade centres, as far as moral guardians were concerned children were in harm’s way yet again.24 On foot of the success of their 1975 game Destruction Darby (Exidy, 1975), Exidy arguably capitalised on the relative fuss that was made of Roger Corman’s dystopian thriller Death Race 2000 (1975) upon its release. While Exidy reported that the ‘Death’ in Death Race reflected the stylised figures of Death depicted in much of the marketing graphics, to a certain extent the game does emulate the frenetic anarchism at the core of the 1975 film in which racers travel cross-country at high speed killing as many pedestrians as they can. But instead of human-on-human killing, Exidy swapped out innocent bystanders with ‘gremlins’. With an arcade flyer that read ‘ITS

Carly A. Kocurek, ‘The Agony and the Exidy: A History of Video Game Violence and the Legacy of Death Race’, The International Journal of Computer Game Research. 12, (1), 2012. Sourced http://gamestudies​.org​/1201​/articles​/carly​_kocurek. 23 Kocurek, 2012. 24 Ibid. 22

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FASCINATING! ITS FUN CHASING MOSNTERS’, now the aim of the game was to squash as many of the gremlins as possible. Situated within a ‘field littered with competitor games with equally violent premises’, Death Race was not an ‘isolated incident of violent gaming’.25 It did at the time, however, receive the lion’s share of controversy. Concerned with the games overly graphic and violent nature, in July of 1976 Associated Press journalist Wendy Walker wrote a piece for the Minneapolis Star titled ‘It Offers That Run-Down Feeling’ and ran with the opening line, ‘The latest computerised game is called “Death Race.” For 25 cents you can pretend you are running down pedestrians.’26 Citing behavioural psychologist and manager of the National Safety Council research department Gerald Driessen, later that year the New York Times argued how the pixilated figures were not gremlins or monsters but ‘symbolic pedestrians’. Unlike the passivity of TV violence in which the viewer is simply a spectator, Driessen argues that video games such as Death Race allow players to become ‘actors in the process’. Though admitting that he was sure ‘most people playing this game do not jump in their car and drive at pedestrians’, he fears for the ‘one in a thousand’ or even the ‘one in a million?’27 While there was something of a ballyhoo around the production of Death Race for arcade centres, in a move not unlike Gaines’s doomed rebuttal in which he differentiated between the limits of tasteful and tasteless gore in 1954, the game’s producers did little to help matters. Responding to critics, Exidy’s general manager Phil Brooks argued that the game was not in fact gratuitous; ‘If we wanted to have cars running over pedestrians, we could have done it to curl your hair [. . .] But . . . we wouldn’t build a game like that. We’re human beings, too.’28 While Exidy certainly didn’t do themselves any favours, perhaps the most powerful defence of the game comes in the form of a young player. At just thirteen, he cuts through the morally laden rhetoric calmly explaining that the notion that video games would make him violent and want to run over pedestrians was ‘stupid’, impishly adding, ‘besides I don’t even know how to drive’.29

Body and soul By the 1980s, video games and narratives of harm were synonymous. Ingrained within the fabric of popular culture, such a union no doubt contributed

Ibid. Wendy Walker, ‘It Offers That Run-Down Feeling’, Associated Press. 2nd July 1976. Sourced https://www​.newspapers​.com​/clip​/30498750​/the​-minneapolis​-star/ [Accessed 28th July 2021]. 27 Cited in Kocurek, 2012. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 25 26

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to the ‘persistent “unhappy consciousness” within the video game object’ that Emilie Reed now observes of the twenty-first-century game.30 While concerns about video games had been raised throughout the 1970s within the media, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in a 1982 lecture was one of the first within the medical field to raise concerns about the dangers of video games. Embracing a narrative which pathologised children’s game play, Koop declared that ‘more and more people are beginning to understand’ the relationship between video games and the mental and physical health effects on youth. According to Koop, they created ‘aberrations in childhood behavior’ in which children become addicted to games’ ‘body and soul’.31 Considering the context in which he spoke, it’s interesting to see how Koop somewhat backpaddled once challenged claiming in a statement after his address that his ‘off-the-cuff comment was not part of any prepared remarks’.32 Further distancing himself from earlier criticism he added, ‘Nothing in my remarks should be interpreted as implying that video games are per se violent in nature or harmful to children [. . .] they represented my purely personal judgment and was not based on any accumulated scientific evidence, nor does it represent the official view of the Public Health Service’.33 Distressed by the irresponsibility of such a senior official figure within the medical field to speculate, editor of Electronic Games Arnie Katz denounced the surgeon general stating how addiction: is an emotionally loaded and highly charged word in our society. It conjures up lurid visions of helpless zombies grovelling in the gutter until they summon enough strength to mug an old woman for her welfare check. The use of this word to describe the enthusiasm which millions feel for these games, without offering one bit of scientific verification to back it up is irresponsible and inflammatory, to say the least.34 While Katz attempts to call Koop out on his morally infused pseudoscience may have been met with support from within the video game community, it did little to stem the tide of what was to come. Koop’s ‘body and soul’ argument would become a defining narrative of harm within reports on

Emilie Reed, ‘“I Find This Disgusting but I Can’t Help Myself”: Videogame Panics and Sinister Origins in 1990s sf Media’, Science Fiction Film and Television. 14, (2), 2021, pp. 169–186, p. 171. 31 ‘Around the Nation; Surgeon General Sees Danger in Video Games’, New York Times. 10th November 1982). Sourced https://www​.nytimes​.com​/1982​/11​/10​/us​/around​-the​-nation​ -surgeon​-general​-sees​-danger​-in​-video​-games​.html [Accessed 28th July 2021]. 32 Ibid. 33 UPI Archives. 11th November 1982. Sourced https://www​.upi​.com​/Archives​/1982​/11​/11​/ Surgeon​-General​-C​-Everett​-Koop​-says​-he​-was​-making​/9037405838800/ [Accessed 29th July 2021]. 34 Arnie Katz, ‘The Surgeon General Says…’, Electronic Games. 1, (12) 1983, p. 6. 30

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media effects within the press. As something of an inflection point, Koop’s pathologisation of game play harked back to familiar possession/violation narratives seen in the rhetoric of Forman, Wertham and throughout the press reportage of video nasties. The most damaging aspect of Koop’s personal observations, however, was not what he said but rather who he was. As a medical figure of high esteem, Koop, like Newson and Wertham before him, added gravitas to the debate. Considering that the surgeon general had denounced video games so vigorously that year without need for evidence or research, it’s little wonder that unsubstantiated and multifaceted narratives quickly became popular within the press. In one New York Times article that year, anti-video game activist Ronnie Lamm wailed how the: game rooms teach gambling and breed aggressive behaviour . . . And so many are operated by scum coming out of the woodwork, whose only interest is a fast buck. They say that they do not allow drinking of alcoholic beverages, but I have seen bottles in the parking lots . . . Children snatch purses and gold chains for money to put in these machines.35 Simultaneously capitalising on multiple narratives of harm including correlations between video games and gambling, aggressive behaviour, underage drinking, loitering and of course juvenile delinquency, Lamm was part of a rising tide of anti-game activists who believed such activities were contributing to the social decline of American values. That same year an entire town in Massachusetts banned the public use of video arcade machines. Speaking of the ban, Selectman Richard Levin claimed in the Boston Globe how he personally thought the machines created problems, noting how ‘many residents feared the machines would encourage rowdiness and drug dealing’.36 Voicing his opposition, arcade owner Mitch Snyder rebutted how ‘It was about 150 ultra-conservative people trying to legislate policy for 2000 people’.37 By the late 1980s concerns regarding arcade machines were somewhat supplanted by the anxieties which underpinned the explosion in domestic video game consoles. With the ‘collapse of the American games industry, and the ascendance of the Japanese games companies’ such as Nintendo, Ewan Kirkland notes how this engendered a ‘less military, more toyorientated approach to videogame technology, software, marketing and

Cited in Carly Kocurek, ‘Ronnie, Millie, Lila – Women’s History for Games A Manifesto and a Way Forward’. American Journal of Play. 10, (1), 2017, pp. 52–70, p. 56. 36 Eric Rubin and Alan Sipress, ‘Video Games Banned in Marshfield’, Boston Globe. 17th June 1982. Sourced https://www​.bostonglobe​.com​/metro​/1982​/06​/17​/video​-games​-banned​ -marshfield​/Adf​xwRI​vZEv​LdZj​1LtHh5H​/story​.html [Accessed 20th May 2021]. 37 Ibid. 35

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merchandising’.38 With the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System or Famicom in 1988, the home console quickly became the best-selling toy in North America.39 However, as Kirkland notes this Eastern influence was not just at a technological level but transformed the narrative and aesthetic presentation of video games thus ‘reflecting and enhancing perceptions of video games as a children’s pastime’.40 Though we now ebb dangerously close to that aforementioned minefield of what does and does not constitute child appropriate material, what is clear is that by the 1990s the video game had now entered the domestic realm of the home. Narratives which were once about the antisocial aspect of children loitering in adult-occupied spaces such as bars and arcade centres now became about children ‘zombified’ in front of their home consoles as they neglected friends and ‘become socially isolated’.41 Interspersed with references to ‘Snuff’ movie cults and the ‘Failure of the Government to Turn Back the Tide of Violence’, in an article dated 14 March 1995, the Daily Mail similarly invoked the trope of the undead with the headline, ‘Age of the Zombie’. In the accompanying article, education correspondent Ray Massey warned of the harmful qualities of games which were apparently ‘as addictive as hard drugs, turning some young users into anti-social zombies’.42 Citing examples where children had committed crimes in Norway and the United States, in the article Elizabeth Newson once again laid the blame on fictional representations. This time, however, blame was directed squarely at the ‘easy availability to children of gross images of violence on videogames’. Expanding her repertoire of harm to include video games she warned how her ‘concern is that we have another form of child abuse where children and parents need help’. Without any further reference to how or why video games posed such a threat, the article concluded with a passage about the ‘seductive’ qualities of video games.

Ewan Kirkland, Children’s Media and Modernity: Film, Television and Digital Games (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), p. 213. 39 Kirkland, 2017, p. 213; J. C. Herz, Joystick Nation: How Video Games Grabbed Our Money, Won Our Hearts and Rewired our Minds (London: Abacus, 1997), p. 20. 40 Kirkland, 2017, p. 213. 41 Sarah Wernick, ‘Video-Game Mania’, Working Mother. June 1993. Sourced https://books​ .google​.ie​/books​?id​=jP1athJ​_ngIC​&pg​=PA62​&lpg​=PA62​&dq​=violent​+video​+games​+turn​ +people​+into​+zombies​&source​=bl​&ots​=YW341jXoPP​&sig​=eWa​_pDvXwrsQ6KwdCEpFl​ -aH1dk​&hl​=en​&sa​=X​&ved​=0CC​wQ6A​EwAj​gKah​UKEw​i2ju​rS5b​PHAh​XUBt​sKHYJHCk8​ #v​=onepage​&q​=violent​%20video​%20games​%20turn​%20people​%20into​%20zombies​&f​ =false [Accessed 18th August 2021]. 42 Ray Massey, ‘Age of the Zombie’, Daily Mail. 14th March 1995. 38

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1993 congressional hearings As the Video Violence and the Protection of Children was being drafted in the UK, over two days on 7 December 1993 and 5 March 1994, US Senate Judiciary and Government Affairs Committee hearings concerning the social impact of video games took place. Attributed to the controversy following the release of games such as Midway’s Mortal Kombat (Midway, 1992) and Digital Pictures’ Night Trap (Digital Pictures, 1992), hearings were led by Democratic senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl in an effort to explore regulation and restriction in what had up until this point been an unregulated industry.43 Instead of forming a defiant united front, however, representative of the two biggest gaming platforms, Sega and Nintendo, began to denounce each other’s policies and ethics while also attempting to distance themselves from the rest of the video game producers. Condemning Night Trap, which Sega had rated MA-17, Nintendo chairman Howard Lincoln insisted that it ‘simply has no place in our society’, snidely remarking how ‘small children’ had purchased it.44 Understandably rattled by such an offhand yet loaded accusation, Sega vice president Bill White snapped back at his main competitor that at least they had a system which, as far as they were concerned, worked.45 Exposing the combative nature of both these video game executives did little to quell any concerns about the industry. If anything, such a hostile insight into an industry essentially on trial for its alleged tendency to make one more aggressive didn’t exactly cover video games in glory. On 3 February 1994, after much backbiting, Lieberman introduced the ‘Videogame Ratings Act of 1994’, which sought to establish an external federal commission which would form a ratings system for the entire video game industry in the United States. However, this act was essentially seen as more of an incentive for the video game industry to produce their own selfregulated structure. Preferring self-regulation to government intervention, Lieberman warned the gaming industry to ‘Regulate yourselves or we will have to do it for you’.46 The result was the Interactive Digital Software Association, later becoming the ESA. Divided up into five categories, the ratings consisted of:

See Christopher Ferguson, Adolescents, Crime, and the Media: A Critical Analysis (New York: Springer, 2013), p. 176. 44 Chris Kohler, ‘July 29, 1994: Videogame Makers Propose Ratings Board to Congress’, Wired. 29th July 2009. Sourced http://www​.wired​.com​/2009​/07​/dayintech​_0729/ [Accessed 20th June 2021]. 45 Ibid. 46 140 CONG. REC. S788 (daily ed. 3 Feb. 1994) (statement of Senator Lieberman). Sourced https://core​.ac​.uk​/download​/pdf​/144227048​.pdf 2021 [Accessed 30th July 2021]. 43

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Early Childhood (EC): Suitable for ages 3 and over; educational. Kids to Adults (K-A): May be unsuitable for players under 6. Teen (T): May be unsuitable for players under 13. Mature (M): May be unsuitable for players under 17. Adults Only (AO): Content considered unsuitable for minors.47

Satisfied with the proposal, Congress decided to waive the Act and settle with the newly formed Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rating system which came into effect on 1 September 1994. Once established, a board composed of part-time raters undertook the classification of games. Similar to the Comic Code, submission was voluntary. However, in yet a further comparison to the horror comic’s case, many hardware developers and video game retailers necessitated the ratings. Undeterred, over the next three years, the video game industry in the United States flourished. As popularity grew amongst gamers, so too did the technological advances made by developers. Unfortunately, this proved to be something of a doubleedged sword for the industry.

Doom and gloom Having just managed to evade the first congressional hearing, id’s Doom, though not cited directly at the second hearing, was a literal gamechanger from both a narrative and ludological perspective. Aside from its satanic iconography and dark narrative, Doom (id Software, 1993) set something of a precedent within gaming, establishing the 3D first-person shooter genre. Now the player ‘stepped into the head’ of a marine as he shot his way out of Hell impeded by an army of ghouls. Of special interest to gamers was its multiplayer format in which players could opt out of killing monsters and instead switch to ‘death match’ which allowed them to hunt each other. Regrettably, however, Doom’s most controversial claim to fame would not be its technological advancements, but rather its affiliation with one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. Dubbed a ‘mass murder simulator’ by author Dave Grossman,48 Doom would reignite the video game and harmful effects debate in 1999 with gusto. Amidst a frenzy of

Shortly after, the ESRB system was refined with the addition of an E10+ rating and, changing the K-A rating to ‘Everyone’ (E). Incidentally it is worth mentioning that only a small number of ‘Adults Only’ rated games have been released as many hardware developers have blanket ban polices limiting such titles from being played on their consoles. 48 Dave Grossman and Gloria Degaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence. (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1999), p. 22. 47

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research and outrage, studies (and funding for these studies) on video games and effects increased by 1170per cent in a post-Columbine era.49 On 20 April 1999 eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-yearold Dylan Klebold opened fire on Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado, killing twelve students, one teacher and injuring twenty-four other students. They then turned the guns on themselves. In the aftermath of the massacre, the media frenzy which ensued brought into question a deluge of explanations for why two teenage boys would commit such an atrocity. Every aspect of the boy’s lives was placed under microscopic investigation, and where the story ran dry, myths grew up around the half-truths of the case.50 Though there had been school-related attacks prior to Columbine,51 this particular case and the way in which ‘Goth culture’, horror films, heavy metal music and video games were emphasised as pathological indicators of unstable and unhealthy personality disorders makes it such landmark case.52 Redolent of the Satanic Panic in which counter and not so countercultural products were condemned as harmful to children, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the excessive cavilling levelled at the likes of singer Marilyn Manson and others who were accused of inciting violence by creating music that promotes ‘anger and hate’.53 The same week as the shooting, ten US senators penned a letter to Seagrams,54 requesting that it stop distributing ‘music that glorifies violence’. ‘As you may know’, the letter stated: several news reports have indicated that the young killers often quoted and mimicked one of your artists, Marilyn Manson – as did the young murderers in several other student rampages that occurred last year. Manson’s songs glorify death and human destruction – and his lyrics seem to eerily reflect the carnage of the recent rampage. Out of respect towards the 13 innocent victims of Colorado . . . we ask you to strongly reconsider which lyrics the Seagrams corporation chooses to legitimise and popularise.55

Ferguson and Markey, 2017. Barker and Petley (2001) draw attention to the work done by journalist Dave Cullen. Five months after the Columbine shooting, he published an article called ‘Inside the Columbine High investigation’ for online publication Salon​.co​m. For further reading see Dave Cullen, Columbine (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009). 51 See Nils Böckler, Thorsten Seeger and Peter Sitzer, (eds) School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention (New York: Springer, 2013). 52 See Saul Kassin, Steven Fein and Hazel Markus, (eds) Social Psychology (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2014), p. 464. 53 Paul Brannigan, ‘Columbine: How Marilyn Manson Became Mainstream Media’s Scapegoat’, Kerrang. 20th April 2020. Sourced https://www​.kerrang​.com​/columbine​-how​-marilyn​-manson​ -became​-mainstream​-medias​-scapegoat [Accessed13th March 2021]. 54 The company which owned Manson’s record label, Interscope. Ibid. 55 Ibid. 49 50

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In an equally discriminatory tone, on 24 April 1999, the Irish Times sought to cast the net out a little further. Simultaneously criminalising and pathologising Goth culture in its eternity, the article questioned the potentially aberrant motivations of ad hoc Goth communities such as the teenage ‘Trenchcoat Mafia’ of which Harris and Klebold were part of and ‘drew their social inspiration from’.56 As can be evidenced throughout the case, video games were only part of the various narratives of harm which swirled in the vortex of media reportage in the days and weeks following the shooting. However, the Columbine shooting was a pivotal moment for video games within the myth of harm as they assumed the mythic status of scapegoat. Imbued with generational fears regarding new technology and the apparent divide between parents and their offspring, as the new millennium dawned old fears were incorporated into the decade’s latest public enemy – video games. As the media pressed for answers, in an equally perverse narrative to the one that saw the murder of James Bulger transmogrified into a vulgar media circus involving a puppet called Chucky, Harris and Klebold’s interest in Goth culture and video games was twisted and distorted as correlation and cause blurred within the media. Leading with the headline ‘DOOM GAME ATTRACTED 2 TEENS’ the Chicago Tribune drew direct similarities with the game and the boys high school claiming how ‘its grim twisting hallways and myriad potential targets [. . .] parallels [. . .] the world of Doom and the reality Klebold and Harris likely encountered when they entered the rooms and corridors of Columbine High School’.57 Similarly the Los Angeles Times quoted President Clinton who avowed how games like ‘“Mortal Kombat,” “Killer Instinct” and “Doom,” the very game played obsessively by the two young men who ended so many lives in Littleton, make our children more active participants in simulated violence’.58 Even one of the more measured longform pieces for Newsweek couldn’t help but add that Harris and Klebold had ‘became “obsessed” with the violent videogame Doom – an interactive game in which the players try to rack up the most kills-and played it every afternoon’.59 Simply not enough to have a pair of teens murdering

‘High School Deaths Turn the Spotlight on Teenage Cults’, Irish Times. 24th April 1999. Sourced https://www​.irishtimes​.com​/culture​/high​-school​-deaths​-turn​-the​-spotlight​-on​-teenage​ -cults​-1​.177328 [Accessed13th March 2022]. 57 James Janega, ‘Doom Game Attracted 2 Teens’, Chicago Tribune. 26th April 1999. Sourced https://www​.chicagotribune​.com​/news​/ct​-xpm​-1999​-04​-26​-9904260154​-story​.html [Accessed 20th June 2020]. 58 James Gerstenzang, ‘Clinton Sees Violent Influence in 3 Video Games’, La Times. 25th April 1999. Sourced https://www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-1999​-apr​-25​-mn​-30999​-story​.html [Accessed 18th June 2020]. 59 Matt Bai, ‘Columbine High School: Anatomy of a Massacre’, News Week. 2nd May 1999. Sourced https://www​.newsweek​.com​/columbine​-high​-school​-anatomy​-massacre​-166950 [Accessed 18th June 2020]. 56

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schoolchildren and teachers, stories started to spring up in the press that somehow Doom had given them not only the idea to embark upon such a horrific spree but also the means. Interspersed between the articles seeking to ‘understand’ why the massacre occurred, a myth began to circulate that Harris had created custom ‘mod’ levels to replicate Columbine High School and peopled its hallways with avatars of his fellow classmates instead of zombies and demons. While it is true that Harris had designed his own unique levels in the months leading up to the shooting, the rumour that they replicated his school was misrepresented creating a further unwarranted mystique to the killings which inevitably emphasised the otherness of the culprits. 60 Although it was not the first time that Goth culture was associated with violence, Catherine Spooner notes how the Columbine shooting ‘was the first case to receive full-scale media coverage’, against the backdrop of violent video games, horror films and Goth culture.61 Cognisant of the manner in which Goth culture provides a familiar scapegoat for larger and more complex social issues such as gun control, Spooner highlights the manner in which the American media seized upon Harris and Klebold’s interest in horror and transformed it into a ‘moral panic whereby Goth was a satanic cult with Nazi sympathies, bent on creating horror and mayhem and corrupting the nation’s youth’.62 Trailing the genre since the eighteenth century, Spooner adds how ‘the debates about horror films, violent videogames, and extreme music that are routinely evoked in relation to such events key directly back into old questions about the legitimacy of Gothic’.63 In a similar vein, Cooper evokes the earliest controversies associated with the Gothic genre and correlates them with Columbine. ‘[F]or some,’ observes Cooper, ‘Columbine seems to have fulfilled the prophecies of eighteenthcentury critics who warned that Gothic influences could corrupt the young and cause violent disturbances of social order.’64 Recognizing a complex interplay between the medium, message and moral outcry, Crawford notes how even though ‘new media makes Gothic possible’: Gothic, in turn has provided much of the idiom which the fearful hybridity of such new media can be articulated. This is played out in the

See Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are (New York: Quill, 2003). 61 Catherine Spooner, ‘Goth Culture’, in David Punter, (ed.) A New Companion to the Gothic (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 350–367, p. 354. 62 Spooner, 2012, p. 355. 63 Ibid. 64 Cooper, 2010, p. 161. 60

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form of Gothicised moral panics over new media and – usually rather more playfully – within the very media that is being attacked.65 Such Gothic hyperbole is found in then Tory MP and Shadow Minster for Education Boris Johnson’s portrayal of children ‘beeping and zapping speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore’ [sic] whose ‘souls seems to be sucked down the cathode ray tube’.66 For Kirkland, this is quite an evocative Gothic image of young vulnerable people transfixed and absorbed by something akin to a demonic influence.67 Such a view is likewise shared by Cooper who observes that ‘blaming the Gothic for threatening America’s stability in the twenty-first-century relies on the same mode of thinking that blamed the Gothic for social upheavals in the eighteenth-century’ purportedly imbued with a special ‘power to exert a negative influence on impressionable minds’.68 Cooper’s acknowledgement of the Gothic’s ability to ‘represent and interpret events’ such as Columbine or the Sandy Hook shooting some thirteen years later consequently interprets these incidents as ‘Gothic events’.69 Redolent of the transmogrification of Thompson and Venables into monsters, unable to articulate incidents such as Columbine we must turn to the Gothic as a means of understanding or filling in the blanks thus furnishing us with context and motive where confusion and dread once lay.

Video games as Gothic texts Still comparatively speaking in its infancy,70 the acknowledgement of video games within a Gothic perspective is quite a fruitful arena for Gothic studies and one which is integral to research on narratives of harm concerning video games as it opens up new channels of conversation and debate. Discussing the mutability of the Gothic as a ‘trans-media format’,71 Kirkland identifies that a ‘gothic perspective’:

See Crawford, 2015, p. 46. Boris Johnson, ‘The Writing is on the Wall – Computer Games Rot the Brain’, The Telegraph. 28th December 2006. Sourced http://www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/comment​/personal​-view​/3635699​/ The​-writing​-is​-on​-the​-wall​-computer​-games​-rot​-the​-brain​.html [Accessed 2nd July 2021]. 67 Ewan Kirkland, ‘Gothic and Survival Videogames’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, (eds) The Gothic World (Oxon: Routledge 2014), pp. 454–464, p. 455. 68 Cooper, 2010, p. 163. 69 Ibid., p. 162. 70 According to the video games critic Espen J. Aarseth the study of video games has only been considered by academy as a credible area of research since 2001 when the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject was published. 71 Ewan Kirkland, ‘Gothic Videogames, Survival Horror, and the Silent Hill Series’, Gothic Studies. 14, (2), 2012, pp. 108–122, p. 119. 65 66

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allows greater understanding of those very aspects particular to the videogame. These include the operation of genre, the problematic status of videogame narrative, digital media’s relationship with older analogue culture, and the uncanny nature of video game worlds. 72 However, the imbrication of video games and the Gothic is not inexorably overt. While the events concerning video games and negative media effects may be considered ‘Gothic events’, by Cooper and others, for fear of superficially applying the term Gothic to both context and text, an analysis of the video game medium through such a prism is necessary. In recent years it seems that no contemporary study about the Gothic is complete without a commentary on video games as an innovative means of expressing the genre’s adaptability and influence over emerging technologies. Illustrative of this mutability, Kirkland has cited a range of critics such as Botting (2004), Spooner (2007) and Richard Rouse (2009) who have all posited close ties between video games, its culture and the Gothic. Invoking Botting’s ‘vision of the Gothic’ as something which ‘presents the dissolution of order, meaning and identity in a play of signs, images, and text’,73 Maria Beville’s application of ‘Gothic postmodernism’ not only compliments a reading of video games as Gothic texts but also compliments the seemingly ineffability of the digital universe beyond video games. ‘In Gothic postmodern terms’, Beville notes how ‘this endless expanse of linguistic and imaginative possibilities’ forms the nucleus ‘of the fictional play that is storytelling itself’, thus provoking our ‘Gothic imagination into desiring fantastic realities’.74 Likewise viewing video games through a ‘Gothic perspective’ offers a particular insight into video games and informs the player about a number of key aspects – in which ‘Gothic tropes and preoccupations are not simply translated but transformed in their transition to the digital game’.75 In relation to the survival horror game Silent Hill (Konami, 1999) Kirkland finds that the ‘same sense of unavoidable persecution, inescapability, and inexorable operation of fate’ symptomatic of many Gothic protagonists from Shelley’s Prometheus to Henry James’s unnamed governess are ‘inflicted upon the videogame protagonist and game-player through the restrictive structure of the game’s narrow interactive pathway’.76 More generally speaking, however, in an attempt to move beyond survival horror, Laurie N. Taylor notes that as a ‘form founded on the removal or transgression of boundaries’, video games appropriate the Gothic mode in order to ‘show how borders and boundaries can be erected using cutting edge technology Kirkland, 2012, p. 106. Botting, 1996, p. 14. 74 Beville, 2009, p. 57. 75 Kirkland, 2012, p. 106. 76 Ibid., 110. 72 73

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while also being subsumed into a process that undermines the transparency and hierarchy that technology brings’.77 For example within the open format of the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) universe, hedonistic desire is not only permissible but also encouraged as the player drives around completing missions within a dystopian hyperreality. Moreover, the ability of a player’s avatar to run the gambit of immorality and revel in the misfortune of others runs parallel to Aldana Ryes argument concerning body Gothic. Similar to the zeal people can experience while watching scenes of horror, players can enjoy the mayhem and destruction of GTA not because they are sadists but rather because they are not as such activity lies outside both their comfort zone and experiential limits. Providing multiple opportunities to commit acts of violence extraneous to the actual narrative, in an effort to perhaps épater la bourgeoisie,78 games such as GTA are somewhat akin to the video nasties of the 1980s in their determination to disrupt, destabilise and even ‘shock middle-class sensibilities’.79 Harking back to the traditional tropes of the Gothic genre to challenge and provoke, Kirkland observes that although modern media ‘cannot depict corruption, contamination and random chaos’ in an identical fashion to the media of old, it must therefore ‘employ media forms from previous eras in order to communicate such things’.80 Representations of evil now operate ‘dialogically’, functioning to ‘disrupt discourse and narratives which endorse concepts of homogeneity and wholeness as a means of power’.81 Consequently, video games can act as a form of ‘revolt’ in which ‘moral binaries of good and evil’ are dissolved.82 Thus video games which allegedly espouse representations of immorality, while not thematically Gothic, are by nature of their medium drawn towards the Gothic. Nonetheless, his emphasis on the representation of evil binaries within a new and consistently evolving medium arguably engenders a form of cultural anxiety no doubt exasperated by child-centric narratives of harm. Once again drawing attention to the Gothic’s ability to disrupt and

Laurie Taylor, ‘Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming’, in Bernard Perron, (ed.) Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009), pp. 46–61, p. 52. 78 To ‘shock’ the bourgeoisie or the middle classes. See Kimberly Marwood, ‘Imaginary Dimensions: Woman Surrealism and the Gothic’, in Maria Purvaes, (ed.) Women and the Gothic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 42. 79 Kirkland, 2014, p. 456. 80 Ewan Kirkland, ‘Remediation, Analogue Corruption and the Significance of Evil in Digital Games’, in Nancy Billias, (ed.) Promoting and Producing Evil (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), p. 239. 81 Beville, 2009, pp. 235–254, p. 199. 82 Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in David Punter, (ed.) A New Companion to the Gothic (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 267–287, p. 268; Beville, 2009, p. 200. 77

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dissolve traditional binaries and blur boundaries between ‘idealized victim and monstrous stranger’,83 Crawford writes how ‘demonstrating the ways in which this latest form of media technology can, in fact, be manipulated to stage new forms of disorientation and disintegration, Gothic media had always demonstrated why such media might be something we should regard with distrust and fear’.84 Preferring instead to observe these comparisons between video games and the Gothic as a means to distinguish the various subgenres, in his comprehensive analysis of horror video games, Bernard Perron stops short at any detailed analysis of video games as evocative of the Gothic. Instead, he states that such references to the Gothic ‘point to the size and territory of the videoludic horror genre and reiterate the many roads one can take to explore it’.85 Though insightful, this does highlight further issues at the core of narratives concerning video games and negative effects. While narrative analysis and genre classification are indispensable tools for textual criticism within the field of humanities, in order to furnish readings with appropriate subtext and context, the proclivity for researchers outside this field to disregard such crucial means of appraisal is extremely problematic. Often defaulting to a binary model whereby video games are identified as either violent or non-violent not only undermines the generic differences at the heart of many video games but also seeks to posit a very subjective and temporal understanding of what constitutes ‘violent’. Observing such issues inherent within its use, especially within the context of harm, Carly A. Kocurek notes how violence can be a ‘rather elastic concept, referring to everything from profanity to axe murder’.86 With the collapse of generic labels, a large portion of media effects research defaults instead to an arbitrary form of a binary classification between violent and non-violent. The problem here, however, is that within such a reductive binarism, narrative context evaporates. Therefore, in an effort to assert some form of narrative significance to readings of violent video games, an understanding of what is meant by violent becomes paramount. Yet similar to earlier investigations pertaining to official definitions of harm, upon closer inspection, such a task proves troublesome. With the term violent video game being largely a ‘nonsensical one’, according to Ferguson it’s a term so broad it could encompass ‘almost all video games’.87 Careless labelling can not only distort debate surrounding media effects but compound its moral implications. Drawing attention to

Valier, 2004, p. 112. Crawford, 2015, p. 41. 85 Bernard Perron, The World of Scary Video Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 60. 86 Kocurek, 2012. 87 Christopher J. Ferguson, ‘The Evolutionary Roots of Media-Based Moral Panics’, in J. Breuer, D. Pietschmann, B. Leibold and B. Lange, (eds) Evolutionary Psychology and Digital Games (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 118–130, p. 124. 83 84

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a 2013 murder trial in which researchers advocated a ‘harm view of video games’, it was purported that Pac Man could be referred to as a violent video game. Therefore the term violent ‘lacks any real conceptual meaning’ but is loaded with ‘deep emotional and moral meaning’ for parents and critics alike.88 Attempting to clarify what is meant by violent video games within the context of her article, ‘The Agony and the Exidy’ (2012), Kocurek defines violence ‘as causing deliberate physical harm to people, animals, or property’.89 While such a working definition may serve her analysis, it falls short of providing any stable definition due to an insistence on the morally laden term ‘deliberate’ which imbues the term harm with a sundry of issues concerning motivation, intent and incentive. While the moral implications of supporting something which is labelled violent or harmful have been explored throughout the previous chapters, it’s interesting to note that even from a critical perspective, the term violent as both a generic classification and indication of harm is likewise problematic. With the passing of time, any hope of securing a semblance of what exactly constitutes violence is subject to change from one decade to the next. Even though Murders in the Rue Morgue made ‘all other terror pictures look like bedtime stories’,90 eighty years later the violence and terror is subdued, even farcical. Likewise, considered a ‘byword for violence’ in the 1990s, by today’s standards Doom is regarded as utterly ‘tame’.91 Employing such an unstable term as violent as a springboard for media effects research inevitably is an exercise in futility as the various elements which seem to define violent not only seem to change from one era to the next but also from one person to the next. Depending on an individual’s taste and constitution, the ‘representation’ of violence, be it on-screen, within the panels of a comic book or through a digital avatar, passes through a series of physiological and psychological filters in which any objective conclusions about these representations are rendered impossible. Far from generating a static image of what constitutes violence, fictional representations can never embody the actual truth of this violence as it will always be modulated by the medium and viewer. ‘The truth of a representation lies in the truth of the idea,’ writes Axel Fliethmann, ‘not in the truth of the represented.’92 Explaining the disparity between representation and the significance of an ‘object’, he continues:

Ferguson, 2019, p. 124. Kocurek, 2012. 90 Blurb from the original film. 91 Ste Curran, Game Plan: Great Designs That Changed the Face of Computer Gaming (Mies: RotoVision, 2004), p. 112. 92 Axel Fliethmann, ‘The Violence of Representation’, in Susanna Scarparo and Sarah McDonald, (eds) Violent Depictions: Representing Violence Across Cultures (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), pp. 1–16, p. 5. 88 89

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[i]t seems that even if we could cut through all the layers of representations that have enfolded an ‘object’ over time, the very first representation of something already seems to evade unambiguity and only reveals itself as a representation of a representation. And the problem only intensifies if the means of representation and the represented become a distinct problem within the concept itself: we cannot represent a signification while signifying a representation at the same time. Every representation is also a presentation of its signification. And every signification is a series of representations.93 While such a theory of representation certainly taps into the various Gothic narratives which have bestowed upon the myth of harm its potency, the failure of the represented object to offer any empirical truths about violence subsequently problematises the issue of violent video games. Likewise, the representation of violence can only generate meaning through the viewer and not the other way around. From a zoomed-out perspective, however, the fictive boundaries of video game play are regularly collapsed when placed in juxtaposition with real-life violence, such as in cases reporting on mass shootings and acts of domestic terrorism. Yet, as Fliethmann and others have argued, representations have no agency. Thus, deriving meaning from a fictional representation is entirely contingent upon the viewer and the viewers’ familiarity with the conventions of game play. Accordingly, labelling video games as violent, while disregarding the thematic conventions of its genre, is not only problematic but also serves to compound the narratives of witchcraft described earlier by Barker and Petley. Identifying these thematic conventions in order to organize video games by genre is equally not a straightforward task due to tensions between traditional theoretical concepts and the more neoteric approaches found within video game theory. For some, such as Carl Therrien, the ‘generic models designed to study literature or cinema are not completely relevant in understanding the medium’.94 Similarly, Nick Caldwell observes how the: different genres of game, even different subgenres of game, deployed such representational strategies as to make general claims seem untenable [. . .] Games might share some basic purpose – to entertain – but each new game that appeared on my screen could well have been in a different medium, or a different language, altogether.95

Fliethmann, 2006, p. 6. Carl Therrien, ‘Games of Fear: A Multi-Faceted Historical Account of the Horror Genre in Video Games’, in Perron, 2009, pp. 26–45, p. 32. 95 Nick Cadwell, ‘Theoretical Frameworks for Analysing Turn-Based Computer Strategy Game’, Media International Australia. 110, (1), 2004, pp. 42–51, p. 42. 93 94

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Underlining such a statement, Thomas Apperley maintains how video games cannot be ‘regarded as a consistent medium’.96 ‘Interactivity’, or the manner in which a player interacts with a game, is, according to Apperley, a more productive way of approaching the video game medium.97 Apperley suggests that the ‘primary problem with conventional videogame genres is that rather than being a general description of the style of ergodic interaction that takes place within the game,98 it is instead a loose aesthetic based around videogame’s aesthetic linkages to prior media’.99 Relying on the concept of interactivity as a way of differentiating between the various video games, instead of traditional aesthetic clues, the ergodic form corresponds to how a player ‘traverses[s] the text’.100 As a consequence, games now fall under the categories of simulation, strategy, action and role play, and genre in a traditional sense is supplanted by the term ‘milieu’ which describes the aesthetic or visual aspects of a game. Even when there exists differences and similarities, according to authors Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith and Susana Pajares Tosca, there is ‘no objective way of determining which similarities or differences are the most important’.101 According to such logic, subjective perspective is the only thing that determines which things belong where and as a result generic classification is ‘arbitrary’.102 The authors do, however, acknowledge that ‘the conventions of each genre create expectations’.103 In contrast, Therrien notes how generic labels ‘referring specifically to gameplay elements do exist, and it is interesting to note that horror-themed games have emerged in a great variety of ludic genres’.104 Arguably the most successful of these ‘horror-themed games’ have belonged to the survival horror category which has produced a range of extremely popular titles such as Dead Space (Visceral Games, 2008), the Silent Hill series (Capcom, 2012–), Outlast (Red Barrels Studio, 2013) and The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013). Returning to the aforementioned ‘ludicgothic’,105 Taylor traces its origin to Alone in the Dark (Infogames, 1992) and subsequent expansion within the popular rise and appropriation of the

Thomas Apperley, ‘Genre and Game Studies: Towards a Critical Approach to Video Game Genres’, Simulation and Gaming. 37, (1), 2006, pp. 6–23, p. 6. 97 Apperley, 2006, p. 7. 98 To describe the ‘role of the human actor in the process of creating cyber text’, See Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997). 99 Apperley, 2006, p. 7. 100 Aarseth, 1997, p. 1. 101 Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, Susana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 46. 102 Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, 2013, p. 46. 103 Ibid. 104 Therrien, 2009, p. 32. 105 Taylor, 2009, p. 46. 96

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Resident Evil franchise. While drawing from a range of thematic sources including ‘horror, science-fiction and the Gothic’,106 for Taylor the defining feature of survival horror is not aesthetics or thematics but ‘playability’,107 as the avatar must endeavour to negotiate an environment brimming with an assortment of horror tropes such as zombies and grotesque healthcare workers in order to survive.108 Acknowledging that this definition is in itself problematic, survival horror is nonetheless about engendering affect through play. Positing the Gothic as an integral influence upon survival horror, she continues how: Gothic texts repeatedly obscure vision or show vision to be unreliable, so too do the visual interfaces of Gothic and horror games. Where most games try to ease players into a level of mastery or control over the avatar – so that the game becomes more immersive – survival horror games attempt to prevent mastery following the traditions of the Gothic to increase the power of the horror.109 By extension, Therrien draws attention to the manner in which the video game recreates not only the same tone of anxiety and terror suggestive of the Gothic genre but generates the same ‘visceral revulsion’ evocative of horror films.110 While Therrien seeks to draw a distinction between the anxious tone of the Gothic and the visceral representations afforded by the horror genre, returning briefly to Aldana Reyes’s notion of body Gothic, as a mode of expression, the Gothic is here capable not only of producing disgust but also arousing fear within the player. For as Charlene Bunnell maintains, the ‘audience cannot merely read the Gothic story; they must experience it’.111 Drawing upon Isabel Pinedo’s analysis of what she describes as the ‘bounded experience of fear’,112 Chad Habel and Ben Kooyman observe that ‘horror films and games fulfil similar functions’ by ‘allowing the subject to experience fear, terror, sadism and masochism within a safe setting’.113 Acknowledging the differences between the two mediums, in her widely

Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 49. 108 See The Last of Us and Silent Hill. 109 Taylor, 2009, p. 52. 110 Therrien, 2009, p. 33. 111 Charlene Bunnell, ‘The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film’, in Barry Keith Grant, (ed.) Plank of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (London: Scarecrow Press, 1996), pp. 79–100, p. 81; Kirkland, 2012, p. 109. 112 Isabel Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (New York: State University of New York, 1997), p. 38. 113 Chad Habel and Ben Kooyman, ‘Agency Mechanics: Gameplay Design in Survival Horror Video Games’, Digital Creativity. 25, (1), 2014, pp. 1–14, p. 3. 106 107

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cited essay ‘Hands on Horror’ (2002), Tanya Krzywinska finds how the ‘transition’ from horror film to video game is evident on multiple levels: [h]orror offers death as spectacle and actively promises transgression; it has the power to promote physical sensation, and the genre appeals to the youth market that is central to the games industry. Many constitutive aspects of the horror film genre are also present in horror games, primarily in the way they are marketed, their graphic and iconographic styles, their shock tactics, themes and storylines. Like many horror films, many horror videogames deploy very basic notions of good and evil.114 According to Krzywinska, it is the horror film which deals most ‘overtly with the viewer’s inability to affect the action [. . .] the key to some of its pleasures’.115 Thus ‘[t]he spectator’s experience’, maintains Krzywinska, ‘of a restrictive inability to act on situations is often underlined in horror film thematics’.116 Conversely, it is also her contention that ‘the interactive dimension of horror games enables a more acute experience of losing control than what is achieved by most horror films’.117 ‘Like the fear generated by Gothic cinema through the manipulation of space around a human body’, Kirkland furthers this point arguing that ‘survival horror videogames revolve around the navigation of a vulnerable figure through a three-dimensional threat-filled landscape’.118 Therefore, the film viewer is best regarded as a ‘cinesthetic subject’ making meaning through multiple senses’.119 In support of his argument, Perron cites Steven Shaviro (1993) to demonstrate how these ‘body genres’ such as pornography and horror ‘literally anchor desire and perception in the agitated and fragmented body’.120 As an extension of the body genre, horror is a space traversed by the game inhabiting ‘someBODY’.121 It is through this synthesis of mind and ‘BODY’ the gamer inhabits a landscape made familiar by cinematic horror conventions. Underscoring such a point, Perron maintains: the videogame intensifies the emotional experience of the horror genre and how all those monstrous bodies and the player characters body in the

Tanya Krzywinska, ‘Hands on Horror’, in Geof King and Tanya Krzywinska, (eds) Screen Play: Cinema/Video Games/Interfaces (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2002), pp. 206–223, p. 207. 115 Krzywinska, 2002, p. 207. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., p. 20. 118 Kirkland, 2012, p. 107. 119 Bernard Perron, ‘The Survival Horror: The Extended Body Genre’, in Perron, 2009, p. 123. 120 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 55. 121 Perron, 2009, p. 131. 114

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horrific game-world are needed to capture the imagination of the gamer’s mind and to affect his own body.122 While Krzywinska seeks to draw distinctions between game and film, based in part upon the latter’s lack of interactivity, Perron seeks to emphasise the interactive nature of horror. Invoking Morris Dickstein’s view that ‘the main point of a horror film is to frighten us or rather to play on our fears’,123 the ‘interactive’ and ‘playful’ element of horror films, for Perron, facilitates the utilisation of ‘cinematic conventions and effects’ in horror video games.124 While eliciting emotions such as fear and disgust, the horror film interacts with audiences in a similar though not as overt manner as a video game. While Perron does distinguish between fictional fear and the type derived from ‘gameplay emotions’, two dominant traits link both. In both film and game, fear is a response expedited by the text as interactive which gives rise to issues surrounding control.125

Addicted, desensitised and depraved During the previously mentioned 2011 case, Brown’s legal team argued that ‘videogames present special problems because they are “interactive,” in that the player participates in the violent actions on screen and determines its outcome’.126 In response to this claim, Justice Scalia quoted Judge Poser who, presiding over a separate case, observed that all literature is interactive. ‘The better it is,’ argued Posner, ‘the more interactive. Literature, when it is successful, draws the reader into the story, makes them identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the readers own.’127 However, it is this notion of interaction, so closely linked with ‘identification’, between the young player and their avatar that is habitually framed as problematic within media effects research.

Ibid., p. 141. Morris Dickstein, ‘The Aesthetics of Fright’, in Dennis Giles, (ed.) Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 50–63, p. 65. Underlined by author. 124 Bernard Perron, ‘Coming to Play at Frightening Yourself: Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games’, in Aesthetics of Play: A Conference on Computer Game Aesthetics (University of Bergin, 2005). Sourced http://www​.aesthticsofplay​.org​/perron​.php [Accessed 14th April 2020]. 125 Krzywinska, 2002, p. 19. 126 Brown v. EMA, 2011, Opinion of the Court, p. 10. 127 Justice Scalia quoting Judge Posner in American Amusement Machine Assn. v. Kendrick, 244 F. 3d 572, 577 (CA7 2001) In Brown v. EMA, 2011, Opinion of the Court, p. 11. 122 123

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For Habel and Kooyman, the participative aspect of gaming allows the player to experience the horror story ‘directly through their avatar, and via what we call “agency mechanics” embedded in the game design’.128 As a result, ‘these experiences oscillate between empowerment and disempowerment even more clearly than in film’.129 In horror gaming this has the effect of reducing ‘the plurality of gazes available, alternating primarily between [. . .] first- or third-person identification with the avatar [. . .]’, which in turn ‘narrows the variety of empathetic responses available to the gamer’. This, the critics deduce: simultaneously heightens those responses: the gamer’s sadistic and masochistic experiences while playing are all filtered through the avatar over which they have agency, and that agency is subject to the grim whims of the horror universe, where stability and security are under constant siege.130 Grounding his argument within a narratological framework, Grant Tavinor remarks that even though any critical discussion of video games ‘clearly involves narrative’, there is nonetheless a significant departure from traditional structures as ‘the player often adopts the role within the narrative’.131 Highlighting the Gothic’s capacity for active engagement between the narrative and the reader, Kirkland expands this point further arguing that this dynamic bond between Gothic text and reader is ‘[c]omparable to the physical interaction required by the videogame medium’.132 ‘Such active engagement’, he continues, ‘is central to the production of “suspense,” “shock,” and arousal attributed, not always positively to the Gothic genre’.133 Calling upon the language of the Gothic to describe such engagements between player and avatar, Kirkland astutely notes how such rhetoric invites dystopian notions of ‘cyborgian monstrosity’ and a ‘biotechnological’ muddling or ‘melding’ between ‘player and console, joypad or avatar’.134 Consequently in an attempt to perhaps justify or validate video games, such readings of the mechanics of game play as somehow removed from traditional non-digital media prove something of a double-edged sword in that they both legitimise and further ostracise video games as something quite other.

Habel and Kooyman, 2014, p. 1. Ibid. 130 Ibid., p. 2. 131 Grant Tavinor, The Art of Video Games (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 110. 132 Kirkland, 2012, p. 109. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 128 129

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Though this ‘Cronenbergian’ correlation raises some interesting theories regarding the Gothicisation of the cyborg, it is inherently problematic within the context of media effects as this ‘melding’ between child player and avatar has the potential within broader discourses to be hijacked within the media. A major criticism of this observation is that it firmly consolidates game-playing with player/avatar identification. Disputing such an analysis, ‘no fiction’, asserts Cooper, ‘horror or otherwise, offers singular, unidirectional models for identification’.135 This is an especially important consideration within video games as the child will understand the narrative in various degrees of sophistication and will draw upon their own gaming experiences to inform their response. Moreover, the conflation of so-called violent representations with actual violence effectively points to a misunderstanding of mediated representation. Take for example Andre Dowsett and Mervyn Jackson’s article ‘The Effect of Violence and Competition within Video Games on Aggression’ (2019). While arguably a case of simple scene setting, their opening gambit is a dangerous conflation between fact and fiction. Arguing how the ‘impact of entertainment media on aggression has been discussed for centuries’, they cite concerns about Christians watching gladiator games during the Roman Empire being ‘seduced into sinful bloodlust’, before turning to violent movies, TV and video games as part of this historical trajectory.136 The issue here, however, is that any conflation between real violence and its representation is always going to engender problematic approaches to media effects. If one conflates the barbaric savagery of the Colosseum to a video nasty or the first-person shooter game Unreal Tournament 3: Black Edition (EPIC, 2007) (which they used throughout the study) you can be sure problems with textual analysis and representation will arguably lie ahead. That aside, the theory that children identify with fictional representations is one with a long historical precedent habitually drawn upon by those who advocate it. Illustrating such a point, Barker draws attention to the way in which ‘dangerous’ and ‘redundant’ concepts of identification have been bandied about since nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls. In his chapter ‘The Vicissitudes of Identification’ (1989), Barker outlines seven major problems with the concept of identification. While such observations were made of horror comics, arguably they are just as pertinent to debates concerning video games and player identification. Making ‘no apology’ for the scope of his denunciations, Barker argues that:

Cooper, 2010, p. 13. Andre Dowset and Mervyn Jackson, ‘The Effect of Violence and Competition within Video Games on Aggression’, Computers in Human Behavior. 99, 2019, pp. 22–27, p. 22. 135 136

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1. The concept of identification has no scientific validity as one for understanding the relationship between media and audiences. 2. Its use results in arbitrary readings of the media texts about which it makes claims. In particular, it enforces an unstoppable distinction between textual messages and devices. 3. Historically, it arose from a set of fears about working-class behaviour. However, it displaced those fears and misidentified them. [. . .] 4. It can also, however, take a ‘radical’ form, as a fear that the workingclass are being ‘restrained’ from being radical enough. 5. Although it has been on occasion been used in other contexts, it never sheds the assumptions which prompted its formation and original use. Those assumptions are linked to the common-sense model of human behaviour which see us as devils [and junior devils] constrained by a veneer of civilisation. 6. The implicit politics of ‘identification,’ therefore, is that access to imaginative media should always be mediated and controlled by those who ‘know better.’ And here we nod at least in the direction of the puzzle: why is the greatest fear of media influence always directed towards stories? 7. In sum, it is reactionary, unscientific, and has no further place in serious studies of the possible influences of the mass media.137 What is striking about these points, especially five and six, is that they anticipate the concerns raised within the field of contemporary media effects concerning video games, children and harm. Seemingly desensitised due to an overexposure of violence and horror, identification theories posit that the child may begin to relate or identify with the monster/killer/torturer.138 As a result of his or her experiences with horror texts, the child supposedly adopts certain depraved characteristics and, depending upon their own individual circumstances, acts upon a growing impetus to commit a crime or behave in an antisocial manner. Dispelling the issue of player identification, depending upon the ‘story’ within a game, the player is directed towards certain actions motivated by the generic conventions of that game. If their avatar is a survivor in a postapocalyptic landscape infested with zombies, as in Dead Island (Techland, 2011) or Left 4 Dead (Turtle Rock Studios, 2008), then it will follow that as part of the player’s narrative construction they will kill zombies in all

Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 111–112. 138 Buckingham, 1996, p. 123. 137

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manner of inventive and gory ways. Thus, the imposition of an introspective narrative structure onto a chaotic ludic landscape will drive the player towards certain choices.139 It does not necessarily follow, as Dowsett or Jackson would argue, that acting in this way provides the same or an analogous visceral satisfaction as the death games of ancient Rome. Such a comparison is both reductive and simplistic as it underestimates the players’ agency in the construction of a fictional role and their ability to comprehend the nature of their avatars’ role in the game. Invoking Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of ‘Flow’,140 in the process of playing horror video games, Perron observes that the ‘gamer becomes attuned [. . .] with the game; on the same wavelength as the game, he resonates to the rhythm of the events as they happen – a state close to the well-known notion of psychological flow’.141 While in this state, the player has ‘harnessed his abilities and set them against a difficult but surmountable challenge’.142 However, no matter how immersive the activity may seem to the outsider, as Perron argues, there does lie a distinction between the player and their character. In support of this, he cites Noel Carroll who contends that the player’s familiarity with the genre of horror allows access to the internal logic of both the game and their avatar. From such a perspective, the arguments espoused by the likes of media effects researchers Craig Anderson and Douglas Gentile, who posit that players, especially young boys are required to identify with first-person avatars, are severely challenged.143 Aside from issues related to player/avatar identification, further concerns which have dogged the Gothic genre for over two and half centuries, such as corruption, possession and addiction, have likewise been at the centre of controversies concerning children and video games. Observing how ‘the Gothic and addiction go virtually hand-in-glove, joined at the hip like Dr

See Marc C. Santo and Sarah E. White, ‘Playing with Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill’, in Nate Garrelts, (ed.) Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer (North Carolina: McFarland, 2005), pp. 69–79, p. 75. 140 The concept of ‘flow’ has been an integral part of video game studies over the past twenty years. This concept highlights the all-encompassing mental and physical absorption of a player into a game at that moment in time. For further reading see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2009). 141 Perron, 2009, p. 137; Roger Odin, De la Fiction (Bruxelles: Éditions De Boeck Université, 2000). 142 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, cited in Robert Kubey, ‘Television Dependence, Diagnosis, and Prevention: With Commentary on Video Games, Pornography, and Media Education’, 1996. Sourced http://www​.swlauriersb​.qc​.ca​/schools​/recit​/tlaptop​/Mliteracy​/depend​.pdf [Accessed 12th June 2020]. 143 See Elly Konijn, Marije Nije Bijvank and Brad Bushman, ‘I Wish I Were a Warrior: The Role of Wishful Identification in the Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Adolescent Boys’, Developmental Psychology. 43, (4), 2007, pp. 1038–1044. 139

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Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’144 Davison recognizes the broader cultural implications of such a juxtaposition: [g]iven addiction’s role as a cultural pathology, its location at the crossroads of desire and anxiety, and the possibilities it opens up for exploring human consciousness in extremis, a linchpin of the Gothic, a genre that registers cultural pathologies, it may be said to be a Gothic subject par excellence. That the Gothic itself was demonized by its numerous detractors [. . .] as a pernicious, addictive substance particularly harmful to young women, further connects these seemingly disparate subjects.145 Further pathologising gameplay, in an Independent review for Joel Bakan’s Childhood under Siege (2011) Doug Johnstone begins with rather a sensational disclaimer: ‘This book should come with a health warning because it will turn even the most laissez-faire parent into a paranoid, overprotective nutcase.’146 Surprisingly, this preface is meant as a positive indication of what is to come. After a glowing review of the book, the writer offers his gratitude to Bakan for terrifying a generation of parents into ‘waking up’, lest they allow their children to be abused right under their noses.147 While Bakan’s book does attempt to probe a range of subjects outside the remit of this research, such as gun control, overmedication of young children, childhood obesity and the targeted commodification of childhood, what concerns this chapter most is his analysis of video games. Having made some extraordinary accusations about Whack Your Soul Mate and Boneless Girl, two somewhat asinine online games, he goes into great depth about video game addiction and children. Analogous to the ‘common-sense’ advocates identified throughout the previous chapters, he concludes with a rather sweeping ‘what cannot be doubted is that compulsive gaming and internet use are problems in the lives of many children and teens today’.148 Assisted by the views of psychologist Douglas Gentile, Bakan makes deliberate parallels between addictive substances and video games. While he is careful to point out that unlike a drug like crack which ‘basically hooks everyone, games don’t’,149 he does point to a growing concern for children as ‘[a] number, and it’s not a small number, of people show behaviors that are the same types of behaviors they show when they

Davison, 2009, p. 1. Ibid. 146 Doug Johnstone, ‘For Sale: Youth and Innocence. A Review of Childhood Under Siege’, Independent. 7th August 2011. 147 Ibid. 148 Joel Bakan, Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Ruthlessly Targets Children (London: The Bodley Head, 2011), p. 39. 149 Cited in Bakan, 2011, p. 40. 144 145

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are addicted to a substance’.150 Ever mindful to moderate his conclusions, the deliberate invocation of a culturally anathematised product such as crack cocaine into any conversation regarding video games is at once furtive as it is duplicitous. Evocative of fears pertaining to the antisocial behaviour of children cooped up in their rooms for hours on end reading comics, and the ‘videoholics’ of the video nasty generation, Bakan continues his narrative describing addictive gaming practices leading to ‘grumpiness’, ‘agitation’ and loss of interest in school. Bakan is certainly not alone in his argument that video games can have addictive qualities. In the past two decades, there has been a surge in material across a broad range of disciplines discussing the links between gameplay and addiction. For example, in Game Addiction (2009), Neils Clark and P. Shavaun Scot casually speculate that ‘game addiction [. . .] likely affects a few million internationally – very probably more’.151 In Control the Controller (2014) Ciaran O’Connor describes the way in which video games in the past have been compared to alcohol and drugs. Warning against hyperbolic or sensational rhetoric,152 O’Conner arguably undermines his own advice as he goes on to cite a headline in the Daily Mail which shrieks ‘Gaming now as addictive as heroin’.153 So profound is this narrative of addiction, in June 2018 the World Health Organisation (WHO) included the rather generic ‘gaming disorder’ within the eleventh revision of its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. Raising concerns with the addiction research in general, Daniel L. King, Paul H. Delfabbro and Mark Griffiths in Principles of Addiction: Comprehensive Addictive Behaviors and Disorders (2013) state that: [t]he main problems with tests used to identify video game addiction is that they often (1) have no measure of severity to differentiate clinical from subclinical cases, (2) have no consistent temporal response frame, (3) overestimate the prevalence of problems, (4) take no account of the context of video game use in the person’s life. Furthermore the common practice of using convenience samples in video game addiction research, including first-year university students and users on video game-related Internet sites, may give rise to issues of validity and generalizability of findings.154

Ibid., p. 39. Neils Clark and P. Shavaun Scot, Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009), p. 7. 152 Ciaran O’Connor, Control the Controller: Understanding and Resolving Video Game Addiction (Free Association Books, 2014) E.book. 153 O Connor, 2014. 154 Daniel L. King, Paul H. Delfabbro and Mark Griffiths, ‘Video Game Addiction’, in Peter M. Miller, (ed.) Principles of Addiction: Comprehensive Addictive Behaviors and Disorders. Vol. 1 150 151

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Arguably, the concern surrounding video game addiction is not only similar to the one evoked by Gothic literature in its earliest days but is also transferred through the same Gothic language of addiction, enchantment and disease. Emphasising these so-called enchanted aspects of gaming which apparently ‘bewitch’ innocent victims, Clark and Scot argue how: [g]ame addiction is usually no one thing, but rather a spellbinding firestorm; a satisfying game bombards a gamer’s psyche with those elements it’s always seeking, as well as those it never knew existed. The human eye can have a hard time looking away from some things. The more that a player disregards reality, the greater the storm’s power to enthrall.155 Similar to the manner in which Universal horrors, comics and nasties were cited in criminal hearings, video game addiction is repeatedly called upon to offer simplistic and often reductive explanations to extremely complex crimes. In one rather harrowing case in 2006, Rebecca Christie was sentenced to twenty-five years having neglected her three-year-old daughter Brandi to the point where she eventually succumbed to dehydration and malnutrition. In detailing the case, the media sought to emphasise the role Christie’s ‘addiction’ to World of Warcraft played in the death of the toddler. Detailing ‘How Video Game Addiction Can Destroy Your Life’, one Vice article claimed that Christie allowed her daughter to starve to death as she ‘was preoccupied with World of Warcraft’.156 However, in court documents for the case it states that Christie was ‘not happy with the reality that included responsibility for her infant daughter’ and ‘had escaped into the alternate, virtual reality of a video game, World of Warcraft, where she was a decorated, but childless, warrior’.157 As a result, Christie’s excessive gaming is cited as a symptom and not the cause of her neglect. Most notability, though her anxiety, depression and history of sexual abuse are all cited as mitigating factors, her apparent addiction to the game did not reduce ‘moral culpability’.158 Another extremely problematic case is highlighted by

(San Diego: Academic Press, 2013), pp. 819–826, p. 824. Furthermore citing excessive playing as a disorder and not a symptom may, as Kutner and Olson point out, obscure underlying issues such as obsessive-compulsive disorder prompted by some traumatic experience in the life of the child or issues surrounding anxiety and depression. Kutner and Olson, 2008, pp. 157–158. 155 Clark and Scott, 2009, p. 12. 156 Sourced https://www​.vice​.com​/en​/article​/vdpwga​/video​-game​-addiction​-is​-destroying​ -american​-lives​-456 [Accessed 20th April 2021]. 157 Sourced https://casetext​.com​/case​/us​-v​-christie8?_​_cf​_chl​_jschl​_tk__​=pmd​_72f​8a17​6546​ cda2​660d​8107​a275​08a1​c5badfe1e​-1627914328​-0gq​NtZG​zNAi​Kjcn​BszQi6 [Accessed 13th June 2021]. 158 Ibid.

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Christopher Ferguson and Patrick Markey in Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong (2017) in which media effects researcher Anderson was called to give evidence on the murder trial of Christopher Harris in 2009. Citing it as an example of ‘Grand Theft Fallacy’ or the ‘tendency to link violent crimes to video game habits’ of perpetrators,159 Anderson was called as an expert witness by the Harris defence team. As part of their argument, they maintained that it wasn’t their client who had murdered Rick and Ruth Gee and their three children but the Gee’s fourteen-year-old son Dillen. Harris, his lawyer asserted, was an innocent victim who had killed Dillen in an act of self-defence. Eerily evocative of the James Bulger case in 1993, the motive for Dillen’s sudden murderous spree was his apparent addiction to Mortal Kombat. In quite a perverse move by the defence, Anderson’s testimony about the dangers of violent video games was used to incriminate a dead fourteen-year-old and exonerate the accused who had to apparently defend himself by striking the child fiftytwo times with a tire iron. Harris was ultimately convicted of the crime but not before the entire course of the trial was deliberately stymied. Mercifully Anderson’s testimony ‘feel apart’ under cross-examination when it was revealed that the social psychologist was simply giving an opinion and had no contact with any surviving Gee family members nor had done any of his own independent research. Though the defence was ultimately thrown out, the appearance of media effects as evidence in a murder trial does point to the lingering authority of media effects. One of the most blatant attempts to vilify game play and its players is observed in Death by Video Game (2015). Recalling the tragic circumstances surrounding the death of Chen Rong-Yu lay in 2012, Simon Parkin declares how ‘A young man is dead and if a video game wasn’t the culprit, then it was, at very least, an accessory to the crime’.160 In referencing the death of a 23-year-old Taiwanese man who had apparently been playing League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) for twenty-three hours, Parkin is not just recalling an example of so-called ‘death by videogame’ but capitalising upon the most sensational aspects of a rare and macabre case.161 Though alarmist, nothing quite matches his opening gambit, however, in which he warns how: video games apparently take not only our young people’s attention, but also, every now and again, their lives as well. And in our mortal reality,

Ferguson and Markey, 2017. Simon Parkin, Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession from the Virtual Frontline (London: Serpents Tail, 2015), p. 5. 161 Chen Rong-Yu’s body lay at a computer console in an internet café for nine hours until he was discovered by a member of staff. Parkin, 2015, p. 13. 159 160

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unlike that of the benevolent video game with its interminable supply of lives, there are no second chances.162 Recounting tale after tale of ‘obsession’, he anecdotally cites one a little closer to home. Upon leaving his wife playing a social simulation game called Animal Crossing (Nintendo EAD, 2001), Parkin recalls how he returned many hours later only to find her sitting in the dark in the exact position he left her ‘cold and hungry’ and unable to tear her eyes from the screen.163 Seemingly perturbed by this issue within game play of obsession and lost time, throughout his investigations he rather oddly titles this effect as the ‘chronoslip’.164 ‘Games achieve chronoslip’ replacing ‘the real world with a new one that moves to its own laws of physics and time. This reality engages us totally and we synchronize with its tempo.’165 While all of this is sounding quite pleasant and akin to earlier definitions of flow, Parkin’s pseudoscience takes somewhat of a dark turn as he declares that video games are not the innocent forms of recreation we once thought but instead ‘time-killers’.166 A further example of this kind of sensational rhetoric is found in Benedict Carey’s 2013 New York Times article ‘Shooting in the Dark’. While investigating the claim that violent video games are responsible for school shootings in the United States, Carey’s apparently balanced article is juxtaposed with an image of a male’s head wired up to tendrils resembling game console controllers which are in turn linked to an array of lethal weapons including a handgun, knife, sub-machine gun and a grenade. Suggestive of an image which accompanied the 1983 article ‘Hooking of the Video Junkies’ in the Daily Mail decades previously, the fact that such an image accompanies the article immediately undermines the objectivity of the piece, as the reader’s attention is drawn directly towards the uncanny image of a young man with ‘murder’, or at least the tools to do it quite literally on his mind. Given the last word with the article, pro-effects researcher Anderson imperiously declared that regardless of all the research he and his peers had conducted, ultimately it comes down to values. ‘At the very least,’ he resolved, ‘parents should be aware of what’s in the games their kids are playing, [. . .] think of it from a socialization point of view: what kind of values, behavioural skills, and social scripts is the child learning?’167

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 19. 164 It appears the chronoslip can be now added to the rouges gallery of pseudoscience alongside emotional possession, moral disarmament and mind rape. 165 Parkin, 2015, p. 21. 166 Ibid. 167 Benedict Cary, ‘Shooting in the Dark’, the New York Times. 11th February 2013. Sourced http://www​.nytimes​.com​/2013​/02​/12​/science​/studying​-the​-effects​-of​-playing​-violent​-video​ -games​.html​?pagewanted​=1&​_r=0 [Accessed 4th September 2014]. 162 163

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Such determinist and fatalistic moralising, no doubt, runs counter to the rigour of scientific objectivity. Time and time again, however, as this book has found, the rather subjective arena of values, common sense and morality is considered appropriate rhetoric for media effects researchers allegedly exalting scientific neutrality. In other words, a dislike of something does not inherently mean its harmful nor should taste have any jurisdiction in the arena of science.

‘We’ve got to quit fooling around with this’ After what seemed like a relatively short reprieve in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the Columbine shooting in 1999 media effects research which concentrated on video games increased dramatically. There was no denying the fact that both Harris and Klebold played video games. However, contra to the emphasis placed upon their gameplay in the media, in the 153page report commissioned by then governor Bill Owens that followed in May 2001, video games are mentioned once in a footnote. Lamenting the ‘problems that in fact are generated by modern American society and not the schools themselves’, the footnote that accompanies this claim states that: [s]uch social problems arise, for example, from the culture of violence glorified by popular media, including rap, other popular media, the ready availability of firearms, and videogame that desensitize young people to violence and killing.168 Considering the brevity of this statement, it is remarkable that these issues appear nowhere else in the report, especially in light of the fact that within two months of the attack, then president Bill Clinton announced that a major million-dollar, eighteen-month investigation into violent video games and media was to be conducted. Slamming any objection to the restriction of such popular games, Clinton added quite arbitrarily, ‘I know this stuff sells – but that doesn’t make it right, [. . .] We’ve got to quit fooling around with this.’169 Support for Clinton came in several voices, but perhaps the most vocal was retired army lieutenant Dave Grossman.170

The Report of Governor Bill Owens, ‘Columbine Review Commission’, May 2001, p. 101. Sourced http://www​.state​.co​.us​/columbine​/Columbine​_20Report​_WEB​.pdf [Accessed 19th May 2014]. 169 President Bill Clinton, in an address to the Whitehouse following the Columbine Massacre, 1st June 1999. Sourced http://news​.bbc​.co​.uk​/2​/hi​/americas​/358476​.stm [Accessed 20th May 2014] 170 Grossman used Clinton’s speech as an introduction to his second book Grossman and Degaetano, 1999. 168

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Together with his co-writer Gloria Degaetano, Grossman sensationally compares the process whereby a young person is broken down and desensitised, thus enabling them to kill in warfare scenarios on a par to the repetitious ‘exposure’ of young people to violent video games. Questioning why children pick up guns in the first place, the authors dismiss a ‘myriad of explanations’ such as gun control, bullying and juvenile delinquency without attempting to explore the social implications of any one of these explanations. Favouring explicit connections between horror films, video games and school shootings they argue: [w]e have gone from the benign Pong videogames in the 1970s to games in the 1990s that act more as murder simulators and permit youth to mimic the actual experience of killing. And all of this we have become very good at avoiding the fact that this type of stimulated violence has everything to do with the increasing levels of violence. Why are we alarmed to find out that the killers in Paducah, Jonesboro and Littleton were weaned on violent entertainment?171 Once again invoking the very language of the genre they seek to condemn, in a chapter titled ‘Pretending to Be Freddy Kruger’, the authors argue that ‘long-term exposure’ to violent media makes children ‘easy bait’ for the conditioning effects of violent video games turning young children into ‘killers’.172 Acknowledging that Grossman’s is one of the more extreme views within this debate, there was (and to a large degree still is) a sizable contingent within the scientific and medical community who maintain(ed) that video games had in various degrees of potency serious implications for children who regularly play them. Commenting upon the Columbine shooting, psychologists Anderson and Karen Dill stated that ‘[a]lthough it is impossible to know exactly what caused these teens to attack their own classmates and teachers, a number of factors probably were involved’.173 Given that the authors preface their article with ‘it’s impossible to know exactly’, it’s quite disconcerting that they make the leap immediately to video games as a possible ‘contributing factor’.174 Evocative of Chief Justice Moorland’s comments in the wake of the James Bulger murder when he declared, ‘I suspect that exposure to violent video films may in part be an explanation’,175 Anderson and Dill’s

Grossman and Degaetano, 1999, p. 22. Ibid., p. 48. 173 Craig Anderson and Karen Dill, ‘Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviours in the Laboratory and in Life’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 78, (4), 2000, pp. 772–790, p. 772. Emphasis mine. 174 Anderson and Dill, 2000, p. 772. 175 Chief Justice Moorland, cited in The Guardian. 25th November 1993. 171 172

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assumptions are no less impudent. While the 2010 ruling in favour of lifting restrictions had sought to undermine assertations such as L. Rowell Huesmann’s who just a year previously wished to nail ‘the coffin shut on doubts that violent videogames stimulate aggression’,176 on 14 December 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting thrust video games back into the eye of the storm. The death of twenty-seven children and adults at the hands of twentyyear-old Adam Lanza was again cast within a Gothic narrative of madness, addiction and evil triumphing over good. Leading with a headline that bellowed, ‘A Methodical Massacre: Horror and Heroics’,177 within days of the shooting, the largest daily newspaper in Connecticut, The Hartford Courant framed the case within an oppositional binary between good and evil reminiscent of a Gothic romance. Accentuating the narrative aspects of the case further, the New York Times serialised each and every step of the events in Matt Flegenheimer’s article ‘Report Retraces Six Minutes of Horror, and Every Step a Gunman Took’.178 Reaching even more bizarre and salacious proportions, exploiting a minor detail of the case which related to post-mortem examinations on Lanza’s body, the Daily Mail exclaimed that ‘DNA of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza to be examined for “evil” gene in first study of its kind ever conducted on a mass murderer’.179 Almost immediately video games were held up as a motivating factor in the shooting.180 In an effort to not only characterise Lanza as mentally disturbed but as some sort of monstrous bond villain, the New York Post led with ‘Killer’s basement his eerie lair of violent video games[sic]’.181 In

L. Rowel Huesmann, ‘Nailing the Coffin Shut on Doubts the Violent Video Games Stimulate Aggression: Comment on Anderson et​.a​l.’, Psychological Bulletin. 136, (2), 2010, pp. 179–181. 177 ‘A Methodical Massacre: Horror and Heroics’, The Hartford Courant. 15th December 2012. Sourced http://articles​.courant​.com​/2012​-12​-15​/business​/hc​-timeline​-newtown​-shooting​ -1216​-20121215​_1​_school​-psychologist​-classroom​-special​-education​-teacher [Accessed 20th August 2021]. 178 Sourced Matt Flegenheimer, ‘Report Retraces Six Minutes of Horror, and Every Step a Gunman Took’, New York Times. 25th November 2013. Sourced http://www​.nytimes​.com​ /2013​/11​/26​/nyregion​/report​-retraces​-six​-minutes​-of​-horror​-and​-every​-step​-a​-gunman​-took​ .html?​_r=0 [Accessed 20th June 2021]. 179 ‘DNA of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza to be examined for “evil” gene in first study of its kind ever conducted on a mass murderer’, Daily Mail. 27th December 2012. Sourced http:// www​.dailymail​.co​.uk​/news​/article​-2253797​/DNA​-Sandy​-Hook​-killer​-Adam​-Lanza​-examined​ -evil​-gene​-study​-kind​-conducted​-mass​-murderer​.html [Accessed 18th March 2021]. 180 Examples include ‘Connecticut School Massacre: Adam Lanza “Spent Hours Playing Call of Duty”’, The Telegraph. 8th December 2012; ‘Adam Lanza’s Online Gaming History Probed’, San Francisco Chronicle. 22nd December 2012; ‘Adam Lanza Shooting Renews Debate Over Video Game Violence Among Politicians and Gamers’, The Huffington Post. 19th December 2012. 181 ‘Killer’s Basement His Eerie Lair of Violent Video Games’, New York Post.18th December 2012. Sourced http://nypost​.com​/2012​/12​/19​/killers​-basement​-his​-eerie​-lair​-of​-violent​-video​ -games/ [Accessed 19th April 2021]. 176

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response to the various calls to once again draw video games into question as a harmful influence on children and teenagers, Ferguson published an article in Time magazine titled ‘Sandy Hook Shooting: Videogame Blamed, Again’.182 Displaying more than a little disdain for the constant stream of reports linking Lanza with violent video games, Ferguson stressed in the 2014 article that as a ‘videogame violence researcher and someone who has done scholarship on mass homicides, let me state very emphatically: There is no good evidence that video games or other media contribute, even in a small way, to mass homicides or any other violence among youth.’183 Pointing to the controversial body of ‘evidence’, in an article published later that year, with James D. Ivory, Ferguson maintained: [w]hile the extent to which empirical evidence supports a link between use of violent videogames and some measures of aggression may be a topic of some dispute, there is no reasonable cause to extrapolate from that conflicted body of research that there is a relationship between violent videogame use and serious violent crime. The ongoing debate over the effects of violence in videogames on aggression evidences the difficulties involved in making clear conclusions about societal effects of media violence, but even the most liberal interpretation of the evidence of effects of videogame violence on aggression in users provides little support for concern that videogame violence is a serious risk in violent crime.184 Constantly scapegoated for more complex social issues, an additional cause for concern arises when the issue of video games is put under the microscope of scientific analysis at the expense of mental health. Commenting on the Virginia Polytechnic Institute shooting in 2007, Kutner and Olson similarly point out that such an emphasis distracts from the more serious implications of the case and fails to recognize signs of illness for future reference.185 Correspondingly, the reports which flooded the media following the Sandy Hook Shooting in 2012 sought to blot out, or at least sideline, the very serious mental health issues which were at play the day Lanza killed twentyseven people. Highlighting the sense of panic in the months following the

Christopher Ferguson, ‘Sandy Hook Shooting: Videogame Blamed, Again’, Time. 12th December 2012. Sourced http://ideas​.time​.com​/2012​/12​/20​/sandy​-hook​-shooting​-video​-games​ -blamed​-again/ [Accessed 24th March 2021]. 183 Ibid. 184 Christopher Ferguson and James Ivory, ‘A Futile Game: On the Prevalence and Causes of Misguided Speculation About the Role of Violent Video Games in Mass School Shootings’, in G. W. Muschert and J. Sumiala, (eds) School Shootings: Mediated Violence in a Global Age. 7, 2012, pp. 47–67, pp. 54–55. 185 Ferguson and Ivory, 2012, p. 196. 182

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massacre, Forbes magazine drew attention to one incident where a group called ‘SouthingtonSOS’ organized a mass video game burning. In defence of their decision, a spokesman stated that: SouthingtonSOS is saying is that there is ample evidence that violent videogames, along with violent media of all kinds, including TV and Movies portraying story after story showing a continuous stream of violence and killing, has contributed to increasing aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and is desensitising our children to acts of violence including bullying.186 Though it is true that Lanza had in his possession a selection of ‘violent videogames’, the rather innocuous arcade game, Dance Dance Revolution (Konami, 2011), in which players must move their feet to a set pattern, seemed to occupy the majority of his time. In an article written by Andrew Solomon for the New Yorker, Adam’s father Peter goes on record stating how his twenty-year-old son ‘went regularly to a local movie house to play the game spending up to ten hours at a stretch listening to music and trying to keep up with complex dance moves on an illuminated platform. He was still doing so a month before the shootings.’187 Arguably this link was as tenuous as the one made by the media who placed unnecessary emphasis on the fact that just before fifteen-year-old Brandon Crisp’s tragic death from a tree fall in 2008, he had run away from home after his father had allegedly forbidden him to play his Xbox.188 Furthermore if these reports are true, Lanza’s obsessive interest in Dance Dance Revolution arguably should have been considered symptomatic of a mind under duress and not its cause. At any rate, incorporating a range of diagnoses from autism to Asperger’s, to a diagnosis known as ‘pseudocommando’,189 Solomon’s article is one of the few that probes Lanza’s ‘psychological decay’ from his childhood to troubled adolescence.

Sourced Paul Tassi, ‘Connecticut Town to Buy Back, Burn Violent Video Games’, Forbes. 4th January 2013. Sourced http://www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/insertcoin​/2013​/01​/04​/connecticut​-town​ -to​-buy​-back​-burn​-violent​-video​-games/ [Accessed 11th June 2021]. 187 Andrew Solomon, ‘The Reckoning: The Father of the Sandy Hook Killer Searches for Answers’, The New Yorker. 17th March 2014, p. 43. 188 Yet just one year after his death, on 6 March 2009, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a report on video games titled Top Gun. The programme which featured footage of Crisp’s parents before the discovery of their son’s body and in the aftermath sought to investigate what happened ‘When a videogaming obsession turns to addiction and tragedy’. Though the filmmakers did acknowledge that video games were not directly responsible for his death, the central focus of the report was transfixed upon that very theme. 189 Pseudocommando is a term coined in 1986 by Park Dietz who writes that ‘a preoccupation with weapons and war regalia makes up for a sense of importance and failure’. Ibid., p. 45. 186

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For others such as Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman the cause of such gun violence is a simple matter of conflating video games and gun control and dealing with them as one hot topic to investigate federally and regulate politically. In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, Lieberman asserted that ‘very often these young men have an almost hypnotic involvement in some form of violence in our entertainment culture – particularly violent videogames [. . .] And then they obtain guns and become not just troubled young men but mass murderers’.190 The same day as Lieberman addressed the American Senate on the topic of dangerous violent video games, Ferguson noted in his article for Time, ‘Sandy Hook Shooting: Videogame Blamed, Again’,191 that Senator Jay Rockefeller introduced a Bill in the Senate advocating even more state-funded research into violent media.192 Even now decades on from Columbine, unsubstantiated reports pertaining to alleged negative effects continue to dominant the media. Evocative of the video nasty reportage, one example of a headline taken from the online US paper The Huffington Post dramatically stated how: ‘Access to Violence Alters Boys’ Brains’.193 Incorporating a plethora of socalled social ills such as violent video games, pornography and horror films, author, Gail Gross, haphazardly cites a range of studies, all apparently pointing towards one thing: viewing violent media is detrimental to the psychological development of a young male. Recalling previous work by Anderson, Gross finds that ‘[h]undreds of original empirical studies of the link between media violence and aggression have been conducted and numerous reviews of those studies – both narrative and statistical – have come to the same conclusion’,194 which according to Gross is that exposure to violent media equals an ‘increase in physical and verbal aggression’. The problem here, however, is that out of all those hundreds of reports, it’s hard to say which of them if any posited conclusive results. For example, invoking the work of multiple authors, Steven Kirsh deduced that ‘exposure to media violence does not cause aggressive or violent behavior by itself [. . .] Rather, media violence increases the risks that aggression will occur, often

Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, Senate Address, 19th December 2012. Sourced http:// www​.examiner​.com​/article​/connecticut​-senator​-violent​-video​-games​-may​-have​-influenced​ -adam​-lanza [Accessed 11th June 2021]. 191 Christopher Ferguson noted in his article for Time, ‘Sandy Hook Shooting: Video Games Blamed, Again’, Time. 19th December 2013. 192 Seven months in July 2013, Rockefeller’s ‘Violent Content Research Act’ got the green light from the Senate with a ten million fund. 193 Dr Gail Gross, ‘Access to Violence Alters Boy’s Brains’, The Huffington Post. 20th May 2014. Sourced http://www​.huffingtonpost​.com​/dr​-gail​-gross​/access​-to​-violence​-pornog​_b​_5320995​ .html [Accessed 28th May 2021]. 194 Gross, 2014. 190

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influencing aggression-related constructs’.195 Such subtlety is usually absent in news reports, especially in the wake of Gothic events such as Columbine and Sandy Hook. Highlighting such disparities, Ferguson asserts that: [w]hen these things get reported to the general public, there’s no discussion of what an effect size is and what it means. It’s ‘Study shows a relationship between videogame and aggression’. And people think that’s a very conclusive, important finding. But when you look at the effect size, sometimes it’s near zero.196 Defending the need to draw attention to effect sizes no matter how small, Shanahan compares nominal media effects to how ‘an election can be tipped by only a point or two, resulting in a huge policy change’ or how a minor change in global temperature over time can equate to desertification or ice ages. ‘A small effect size that is experienced over time’, Shanahan deduces, ‘will eventually amount to something much larger’.197 The problem of conflating these often-nominal media effects to something as serious as policy change or global warming is that it creates a false equivalence in the mind of the reader who is led to believe that it’s just a matter of time before things get worse. Unhappy with the nominal findings of increased aggression, further complexities arise when researchers swap out aggression for the more nuanced ‘competitiveness’. Unable to find any direct correlation between video games and ‘aggressive affect’, Dowsett and Jackson’s aforementioned 2019 paper finds that competition and losing in competitive games impacts aggressive affect. For fear of surrendering their own dogmatic narrative of harm, they somewhat confusingly advocate for ‘future studies’, so it can become clearer how ‘videogames impact aggression’,198 even though they admit in the opening paragraph of their paper they could not find any correlation between violence and increased aggressive affect.

Bad science good headlines Painting quite the colourful image on a BBC current affairs show in 2015, Oxford psychologist Andrew Przybylski went head to head with Andrew

Steven Kirsh, Children, Adolescents and Media Violence: A Critical Look at the Research (London: Sage Publications ltd, 2012), p. 15. 196 Christopher Ferguson, cited in Kutner and Olson, 2008, p. 76. 197 Shanahan, 2021, p. 197. For such nominal results see Malte Elson and Christopher Ferguson, ‘Does Doing Media Violence Research Make One Aggressive? The Ideological Rigidity of Social-Cognitive Theories of Media Violence and Response to Bushman and Huesmann (2013), Krahé (2013), and Warburton (2013)’, European Psychologist. 19, (1), 2013, pp. 68–75. 198 Dowsett and Jackson, 2019, p. 27. 195

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Zombardo who was made famous in 1971 for his work on the Stanford Prison Experiment. As old guard met new, Ferguson and Markey parse the lines between good ethical rational media effects research and the bad nonethical irrational kind.199 As is often the case, however, attempts to defend media with media effects research essentially becomes circular as a reluctance to move past media effects as a determining factor in negative behaviour does little to alleviate concerns surrounding children. Promoting his latest book Man Disconnected (2015), Zombardo exclaimed that there was something of a crisis amongst young boys currently taking place compounded by the isolation of game play. No doubt a voice of measured authority in juxtaposition with Zombardo’s rather maladroit alarmist rhetoric, Przybylski immediately points out that his argument is really an issue of causation versus correlation. Arguing over and over that video game play is an extremely normal part of childhood, Przybylski maintains that the evidence is simply not there to support Zombardo’s theory. Refuting Przybylski, Zombardo counters that his work is not a theory but an alarm. Though the host cites a number of viewer tweets defending gameplay before concluding the segment and thanking her guests, doubt remains lingering in the air like gunshot smoke. While Przybylski does offer quite a calm and logical riposte to Zombardo’s incoherent and slightly rambling claims about lonely young boys gaming themselves into sexual and social malfunction, it’s not quite on a par with Gaines thwarted though impassioned attempts to defend horror comics over half a century before. Referencing the 2007 ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’ report which emphasised positivity around emerging technologies in complement with a need to placate parental anxiety with digital literacy, Przybylski blankly states that there is ‘no evidence that there is an enduring change’ to the brain from video game playing. However, Przybylski’s solid attempts to vindicate video games are done so at the expense of other media just a year before. Raising video games from the proverbial gutter of negative effects, he argues that ‘present work supports the idea that gaming is clearly delineated from passive forms of media such as television, films, and music’.200 With no reference to previous research, he continues: [w]hereas observing violence in passive activities such as watching television tends to enhance aggression in the viewers, that did not occur for the interactive activities of game playing in the current studies. The present findings specifically underline the importance of considering

Ferguson and Markey, 2017. Andrew K. Przybylski, Edward L. Deci, C. Scott Rigby, Richard M. Ryan, ‘CompetenceImpeding Electronic Games and Players’ Aggressive Feelings, Thoughts, and Behaviors’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 106, (3), 2014, pp. 441–457, p. 454. 199 200

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how game structure and player skill can and do systematically influence aggression.201 In positing the ‘may’ or ‘tends to’ argument, Przybylski is just as guilty of invoking a narrative of harm as Zombardo is. The only difference here is that he is privileging one ‘terrible text’ at the expense of another, thus compounding the myth of harm instead of denouncing it. A further example of this extrapolation of scientific research as a narrative of harm occurred on 17 August 2015 when news broke across Irish media that based upon the latest report from the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Violent Media, research was available which demonstrated ‘a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behaviour’.202 While the papers were a little more nuanced in how they presented the findings, radio stations gave no reference to the source of this data or how it was procured. A report on one such station was simply reduced to a one-line soundbite that announced to morning commuters: ‘an investigation into violent videogames has revealed that playing them can make you more aggressive’.203 Slightly more expansive, the print and online papers consistently overstated what evidence there was. As a result, the media that week was awash with headlines such as ‘Violent video games DO make players aggressive, research finds’;204 ‘Violent Video Games Are Linked to Aggression, Study Says’;205 ‘Violent video games DO trigger aggressive behaviour, decade-long review claims’;206 and ‘Study links playing violent videogames to aggressive behavior’.207 In an effort to appear objective the media cited extracts from the report which addressed the complexity of the research. For example, both the Daily Express and the Daily Mail referenced the same report which stated ‘with most areas of science, the picture presented by this research is more complex than is usually included in news coverage and other information

Przybylski, et al., 2014, p. 454. Sourced https://www​.apa​.org​/news​/press​/releases​/2015​/08​/violent​-video​-games [Assessed 17th July 2020]. 203 Sourced- Nova Radio news. Aired on 17th August 2015. 204 Ben Endly, ‘Violent Video Games DO Make Players Aggressive, Research Finds’, Daily Express. 14th August 2015. Sourced http://www​.express​.co​.uk​/news​/uk​/598376​/violent​-video​ -games​-players​-aggressive [Accessed 21st August 2021]. 205 Alexandra Sifferlin, ‘Violent Video Games are Linked to Aggression, Study Says’, Time Magazine. 17th August 2015. Sourced http://time​.com​/4000220​/violent​-video​-games/ [Accessed 21st August 2021]. 206 Jack Millner, ‘Violent Video Games DO Trigger Aggressive Behaviour, Decade-Long Review Claims’, Daily Mail. 17th August 2015. Sourced http://www​.dailymail​.co​.uk​/sciencetech​/article​ -3201001​/Violent​-video​-games​-trigger​-aggressive​-behaviour​-decade​-long​-review​-claims​.html [Accessed 21st August 2021]. 207 West Texas News. 19th August 2015. Sourced http://wtexas​.com​/content​/15084245​-study​ -links​-playing​-violent​-video​-games​-aggressive​-behavior [Accessed 21st August 2021]. 201 202

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prepared for the general public’.208And in an equal effort to sound objective Time maintained how the ‘APA says that there’s no single factor that can drive someone toward violence or aggression, but that violent videogames could be classified as one risk factor’.209 The point here is that using such a provocative headline which associates aggression with video games frames the body of the article within a certain narrative of harm thus biasing the reader.210 Citing Ullrich Ecker, a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, Konnikova observes how: drawing attention to certain details or facts, a headline can affect what existing knowledge is activated in your head. By its choice of phrasing, a headline can influence your mindset as you read so that you later recall details that coincide with what you were expecting.211 Consequently, articles such as the ones offered here provide no more of an unbiased or objective account because regardless of the content of the article, the headline automatically provides context. Reminiscent of the previous reports cited throughout this book, little did the readership know that although sensational, the report upon which the data was procured was dead on arrival. As one of the 230 academics who signed an open letter to the APA in 2013 criticising the task force’s predilection towards ideological claims and confirmation bias, Ferguson maintained that the research produced by the APA was heavily problematic on several fronts. Unfortunately, however, such issues are rarely communicated effectively in the media. Speaking of the research within the APA report, Ferguson mused how these were ‘people looking at their own research and declaring it beyond further debate. All of us would love to do that, but we don’t really get that chance, nor should we.’212 Taking issue with both the lack of transparency and ingrained bias throughout the process, Ferguson reveals how the APA ‘stacked the committee with people who had taken pretty clear anti-game positions’.213

Sourced http://www​.apa​.org​/news​/press​/releases​/2015​/08​/technical​-violent​-games​.pdf [Accessed 21st August 2021]; Daily Mail. 17th August 2015. 209 Sifferlin, 2015. 210 Maria Konnikova, ‘How Headlines Change the Way We Think’, The New Yorker. 17th August 2014. Sourced http://www​.newyorker​.com​/science​/maria​-konnikova​/headlines​-change​ -way​-think [Accessed 20th August 2021]. 211 Konnikova, 17th August 2014. See Ulrick Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ee Pin Chang, Ee Pin and Rekha Pillai, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. 20, (4), 2014, pp. 323–335. 212 Sourced http://www​.gameinformer​.com​/b​/news​/archive​/2015​/08​/14​/more​-than​-200​-psychology​ -scholars​-speak​-out​-against​-apa​-video​-game​-aggression​-task​-force​.aspx [Accessed 18th August 2021]. 213 Ibid. 208

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Such concerns were also raised by the open letter to the APA published on 17 December 2013, two years before the report went public. Of the concerns expressed by the letter, ideological positions and publication bias were central: [a]s an important scientific discipline that helps shape the public discourse on issues of behavior, policy statements that are rigid or ideological can serve to stifle scientific innovation and new theories and may inadvertently serve to increase publication bias, particularly given concerns about both disregard for null findings and researcher degrees of freedom (Simmons et. al., 2011).214 While the report by the APA did admit that ‘No single risk factor consistently leads a person to act aggressively or violently [. . .] Rather, it is the accumulation of risk factors that tend to lead to aggressive or violent behavior’,215 the tone of the report is arguably ideological. In an attempt to firmly label video games as a major risk to increased aggression they deduced that ‘the research reviewed here demonstrates that violent video game use is one such risk factor’.216 A major problem with acknowledging the results of violent media researchers generally and violent video games specifically is that there exists a tendency within such research towards confirmation bias. Having already emphatically stated almost a decade previously that watching and playing violent media has a direct influence on future negative behaviour, there seems little doubt what the outcome will be in forthcoming publications from researchers such as Anderson and Huesmann. While acknowledging that violent video games are not the sole cause of violent crimes, Anderson, Gentile and Buckley claimed emphatically in 2007 how: the scientific debate about whether exposure to media violence causes increases in aggressive behavior is over (Anderson, Berkowitz, Donnerstein et. al. (2003); Gentile (2003); Kirsh (2006); Potter (2003) and should have been over thirty years ago (Bushman and Anderson).217

Scholars’ Open Statement to the APA Task Force on Violent Media (Delivered to the APA Task Force, 9/26/13). Sourced http://www​.scribd​.com​/doc​/223284732​/Scholar​-s​-Open​-Letter​ -to​-the​-APA​-Task​-Force​-On​-Violent​-Media​-Opposing​-APA​-Policy​-Statements​-on​-Violent​ -Media [Accessed 13th August 2019]. 215 Sourced http://www​.apa​.org​/news​/press​/releases​/2015​/08​/technical​-violent​-games​.pdf [Accessed 10th August 2021]. 216 Ibid. 217 Anderson, Gentile and Buckley, 2007, p. 4. 214

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With such a deterministic attitude, it’s no wonder that their research produces such ‘positive’ results. Arguably many of these researchers are perhaps guilty of ‘putting theory before data’, along with a bias towards certain publications. Pointing out such bias within the scientific community, Ferguson has argued that violent video games: and the field of media violence research more broadly has, too often slipped into a cargo cult science mode. Although we hypothesize that serious flaws in previous research has related to spurious findings, we also note (as did the Supreme Court in Brown v EMA) that findings in this realm often diverge according to the ‘stake’ particularly research groups have taken on this controversial issue. Scholars who have raised alarms about dire effects tend to consistently report finding evidence to support those warnings, whereas skeptics tend to consistently find null effects. For us, this raises the concern that too much methodological flexibility is hampering the scientific process (Simmons et. al., 2011).218 But it’s not all doom and gloom apparently. As Ferguson and Patrick Markey note rather hopefully, the passage of time ‘fixes’ these so-called panics over media and in another ‘decade or two, the panic over video game violence will seem as quaint as that over Batman and Robin’.219 While their confidence may be a little ill-founded given that video games have been in the eye of a media effects storm for close to thirty years and continues to be a subject of intense scrutiny in the media, Ferguson and Markey do note a slow yet steady movement within the social sciences away from postulations of direct harm.220 For Dmitri Williams, it’s simply a matter of ‘age, time and death’. Decreeing, maybe a little prematurely, that the war on video games is effectively over, he continues how: [i]t’s a massive change in generations and the mainstream of the medium that’s essentially swept this debate off to the side. Teens who were told games were stupid are now parents, teachers and policy makers, and they are out of the gaming closest now. The war is over, and it was won through demographics and simpler, accessible potable technologies.221

Christopher J. Ferguson, Claudia San Miguel, Adolfo Garza and Jessica M. Jerabeck, ‘A Longitudinal Test of Video Game Violence Influences on Dating and Aggression: A 3-Year Longitudinal Study of Adolescents’, Journal of Psychiatric Research. 46, 2012, pp. 141–146, p. 144. 219 Ferguson and Markey, 2017. 220 Ibid. 221 Cited in Ibid. 218

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Citing a number of surveys towards the end of their book, Ferguson and Markey confidently conclude that there has been something of shift in the way researchers think about media effects. Having at one point been in the realms of 90per cent, Ferguson and Markey reference a survey that reports only 35per cent of scientists agree that media violence poses a danger.222 A further survey suggests that only a ‘trivial number’ amounting to 11per cent still argue that video games are a problem for society. But let’s not whip out the champagne quite yet. As Williams, Ferguson and Markey et al. dream of a near future in which young gamers of the 1990s are now grown up unmolested by their countless hours at a console and are now in a position of authority as parents, teachers and policymakers, it’s not quite the Utopian paradise they think is around the corner. While the social sciences seem to be on the back pedal, there appears no let-up in narratives of harm pertaining to video games in the wider and arguably more powerful court of public opinion. Lamenting this sorry state of affairs, in an article for Forbes Erik Kain argues how both of the 2020 American presidential nominees were ‘old out-of-touch white guy[s]’, who still blamed video games for school shootings. While the Republican Trump had denounced video games quite unequivocally throughout his term, Kain references Biden’s interview with the New York Times in the lead up to the 2020 election in which he calls video game developers ‘little creeps’ teaching kids how to kill.223 While Kain does wonder if the anti-game rhetoric of these septuagenarians will ultimately ‘change hearts and minds when it comes time to vote’ he does admit how disappointing it is to see yet another elected official scapegoat the entertainment industry ‘when there are actual, real issues that need tackling’ such as mental health, gun control and the sale of semi-automatic weapons.224 While such comments rarely impact video game sales, fanning the flames of doubt upon which the myth of harm thrives only validates media effects within society. As the following case study on ‘The Slender Man Stabbing’ will detail, sometimes the myth is not only tolerated in criminal cases but elevated within the media to a position of motive at the expense of any comprehensive investigation into other contributing factors such as mental health.

Ibid. Erik Kain, ‘Joe Biden Calls Game and Tech Executives “Little Creeps” Whose “Games Teach You To Kill People”’, Forbes. 21st January 2020. Sourced https://www​.forbes​.com​/sites​ /erikkain​/2020​/01​/21​/joe​-biden​-calls​-game​-devs​-little​-creeps​-whose​-games​-teach​-you​-to​-kill​ -people/​?sh​=2317939bd80f [Accessed 23rd June 2021]. 224 Ibid. 222 223

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5 The slender man stabbing case study

Introduction The majority of this book has retrospectively explored decades-old controversies related to children across a broad spectrum of horror media. At the risk of dismissing these episodes as symptomatic of a reactionary or technologically unsophisticated bygone age, it is necessary to explore how the myth of harm remains a constant disruptive presence in twentyfirst-century life. The mere fact that media effects research persists with its determinist and fatalistic proclamations about popular culture speaks volumes about the hegemony of what arguably amounts to scary tales around the campfire. Unfortunately, this seemingly unwavering enthusiasm to interpret the world literally via narratives of harm regrettably negates or at the very least relegates social issues which are admittingly often as enigmatic. A testament to the ubiquity of the myth in the twenty-first century, the following case concerning the attempted murder of twelveyear-old Payton Leutner in 2014 was a crime committed against a child by two children that completely devolved into a Gothicised narrative of harm in which mental health issues were obfuscated in favour of a horror story about a wood-dwelling ghoul who inveigled his prey to kill in his name. On 31 May 2014, having spent the previous night together at a sleepover with their friend Payton, twelve-year-old Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier stabbed Payton nineteen times and left her for dead in a wooded area in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Allegedly plotting for over a year, it was reported that two girls sought to sacrifice Payton to ‘Slender Man’. Though seriously injured, Leutner survived the stabbing. Psychiatrically assessed and remanded in a juvenile detention centre since the attempted murder, the girls at fifteen were tried separately as adults. In February of 2018, Morgan was sentenced to forty years in a psychiatric hospital having pled guilty

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to attempted first-degree intentional homicide as part of a deal in which prosecutors agreed not to seek prison time. Tried a few months earlier, Anissa previously pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of being a party to attempted second-degree intentional homicide and was sentenced to twentyfive years in a psychiatric hospital. Having filed a petition in an attempt to reverse a circuit court judge’s decision and court of appeals ruling on trying the case in adult court, in January 2020 Morgan’s petition of review with the Supreme Court was denied. Having had her case reviewed, Anissa was released in 2021 from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. While the manner in which these girls were tried and sentenced has generated debate concerning juvenile culpability, arguably what has dominated and defined this case from the start is the alleged correlation between the girls’ actions and a form of digital folklore. As the borders between reality and fantasy once again began to crumble, in the majority of media reports the attempted murder by two disturbed girls would be dubbed ‘The Slender Man Stabbing’.

Cybergothic Considered an oral tradition, folklore has an ability over generations of storytellers to take on a protean almost mercurial quality. Composed of disparate parts which have been added and altered over time, folklore is a living organic entity sustained and enriched by countless voices. In much the same fashion, as digital folklorist Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill argue in their introduction to Slender Man Is Coming (2018), the ‘creepypasta’, a term which was first used around 2007 as means to unsettle and perturb online audiences, is an ‘emergent genre of Internet folklore that involves the creation and dissemination of a particular style of creative horror stories and images’.1 ‘Emanating from the bowels of Internet forums, wikis, social media, and websites like 4chan and Reddit’, akin to the manner in which fairy tales have morphed and transformed from raw indigenous stories into sleek Disney franchises: the creepypasta genre has been sustained in large part by the repeated sharing or reposting/rewriting/reimaging of these stories, and further buoyed by subsequent discursive commentaries and the nuanced qualities of their contents or composition that have arisen in response to their circulation online.2​

Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, ‘Introduction’, in Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, (eds) Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet (Colorado: Utah State University Press, 2018), pp. 3–24, p. 6. 2 Blank and McNeill, 2018, p. 6. 1

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FIGURE 5.1 The first of two original photoshopped Slender Man photographs by Victor Surge featured on the web forum Somethingawful​.co​m. (Reproduced in Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, ed. Slenderman is Coming. Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the internet. Colorado: Utah State University, 2018).

Arguably one, if not the most famous, of all creepypastas, The Slender Man myth grew out of a Photoshop competition on the horror forum somethingawful​.co​m. Posting doctored photographs on 10 June 2009 Eric Knudsen aka ‘Victor Surge’ stated that he wanted to create a character whose ‘motivations can barely be comprehended and [trigger] unease and terror in a general population’.3 Taking two quite benign images, he photoshopped a sinister-looking figure looming in the background watching children playing on a slide. No doubt tapping into parental anxieties concerning the ubiquitous threat of the predatory stranger, almost immediately an internet myth was born. Commenting upon the speed at which the meme spread, Slender Man’s creator observed how it ‘was amazing to see people create their own little part of Slender Man in order to perpetuate his existence. I didn’t expect it to move beyond the SA forums. And when it did, I found it interesting to watch as sort of an accelerated version of an urban legend.’4 Thus, the very artificiality of Slender Man’s past granted internet users licence to continually reproduce his origins in more ‘authentic’ ways to the

2011 interview posted on knowyourmeme​.co​m. Sourced http://knowyourmeme​.com​/memes​/ slender​-man [Accessed 17th September 2020]. 4 Sourced http://whatculture​.com​/history​/why​-slenderman​-works​-the​-internet​-meme​-that​-proves​ -our​-need​-to​-believe​.php [Accessed 17th September 2020]. 3

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FIGURE 5.2  The second of two original photoshopped Slender Man photographs by Victor Surge featured on the web forum Somethingawful​.co​m. (Reproduced in Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, ed. Slenderman is Coming. Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the internet. Colorado: Utah State University, 2018).

point where ‘he’ is woven into the fabric of online life extending far beyond his actual short existence. Suggesting that the Slender Man mythos is indeed a powerful form of ostension, or ‘the acting out of a legend’, Andrew peck writes how ‘the digital age facilitates a transition that turns ephemeral smallscale ostensive interactions into collaborative public practices and enables greater user awareness of generic conventions and variants of the practice with which they are engaging’.5 In essence this form of narrative essentially allows for greater engagement and participation as the boundaries between creator and consumer blur within the digital expanse of the internet.​ As a tale of child abduction, ominous harbingers and sinister featureless ghouls, Slender Man evokes many of the anxieties explored in early Gothic fiction. Yet as a composite of photoshop images, viral posts, threads, Andrew Peck, ‘The Cowl of Cthulhu: Ostensive Practice in the Digital Age’, in Blank and McNeill, (eds) 2018, pp. 51–76, p. 58. 5

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blogs, vlogs and uploaded YouTube vignettes the meme is at the same time stridently modern. To borrow a term utilised by Bryan Alexander, Slender Man is characteristic of the so-called ‘cybergothic’ in which the ‘domain of online life’ is now added to haunted spaces and grotesque bodies as dominant Gothic preoccupations.6 Probing the theoretical limits of the cybergothic, Isabella van Elferen maintains how the ‘expansion of the real with the virtual requires a retheorisation of the Gothic’.7 Therefore, she argues, ‘Cyberspace can be analysed as one of those transdialectical places that the Gothic occupies and challenges’.8 In an attempt to domesticate or at the very least understand the great expanse of the virtual, cyberspace is recast as a narrative space, which in true Gothic fashion seeks to negotiate and traverse cultural anxieties in an ‘active confrontation with feelings of unease’.9 Consequently, visitors of cyberspace ‘build up their own virtual world in a synchretic way, and in the process of building new worlds from old, they may have the feeling they appropriate the unknown’.10 Indeed, adding a further layer of metatextuality, the image of the predatory stranger watching children at play is repeatedly invoked within the myth of harm as the perceived threat imposed by horror is transmogrified into a monstrous villain lurking about playgrounds. Commenting upon the use of semiotic allegory within Slender Man’s narratives, Shira Chess and Eric Newsom observe how ‘Slender Man is a unique collective creation that applies the affordances of the digital age to the age-old storytelling processes’.11 Cast in the role of a Gothic cybervillain, as a grotesque figure haunting uncanny spaces, Slender Man is everything and simultaneously nothing as he roams cyberspace as both mimetic monster and literal harm personified. Indicative of reading the meme as something more than the sum of its pixelated parts, when interviewed for the documentary Beware the Slenderman (2016), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins warns how Slender Man’s popularity acts as a ‘virus of the mind’ and constitutes a ‘very horrific power’. In a similar tone, during the interview fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes notes how Slender Man evokes many societal anxieties explored throughout early fairy tales. Specifically calling upon the Pied Piper of Hamlin, he draws similarities between the two as they hypnotise and abduct

Bryan Alexander, ‘Gothic in Cyberspace’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend’s (eds) The Gothic World (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 143–156, p. 144. 7 Isabella van Elferen, ‘Dances with Spectres: Theorising the Cybergothic’, Gothic Studies. 11, (1), May 2009, pp. 99–113, p. 99. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 100. 10 Ibid., p. 103. 11 Shira Chess and Eric Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 9. 6

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children. Whether a cyber virus or a mesmeric pipe-playing vagabond, both Dawkins and Zipes agree that Slender Man exerts a somewhat nefarious and corruptive influence upon children outside the fictional context of its cyber ontology. Such literal readings of Slender Man as a virus of the mind or predator ultimately hark back to issues found at the heart of earlier harm narratives whereby texts are magically bestowed with an agency far exceeding the limits of their representation. Slender Man in all its manifestations is nothing but a modern folktale about the universal dangers of childhood recited around campfires with the express purposes of scaring and titillating. While the glow of the campfire has now been replaced by the glare of the chatroom screen, the story remains the same. The villains we find in our horror are nothing but harbingers of the real harm in the world and not its carrier. Attempting a more constructive reading, echoing Elferen’s observations of the virtual world as a cathartic space to explore universal fears, Blank notes in the same documentary that as a modern-day bogeyman Slender Man ‘encapsulated symbolically a lot of these societal fears [. . .] and conveniently wraps them up and makes them malleable’. Such a process ‘illuminates’, according to Chess and Newsom, ‘cultural anxieties both ancient and contemporary, engages audiences – who in turn become creators – and helps to develop media literacies through the creative process’.12 While this didacticism does in essence lie at the heart of much of the horror genre, as the Momo Challenge hoax in 2019 illustrated, it is something of a misnomer to credit the creation of cyber myths with facilitating digital literacy as the public are often too engrossed within literal readings of cyber monsters to perceive any allegorical benefit. Arguably the Slender Man Stabbing case not only represents one of the most publicised embodiments of these mythic narratives, but it also crystallises, indeed galvanises the anxieties centred around horror, children and harm considered throughout this book.

The myth that became a man An antecedent to the Momo Challenge panic and reminiscent in some respects of the Bulger case two decades previously, the Slender Man Stabbing invoked similar readings of fictional characters as literal harm. Analogous to the media representations of Chucky, Slender Man was (and to a certain extent continues to be) treated as the personification of a larger threat to children. In one respect, when read allegorically this of course is true. As earlier stated, Slender Man is nothing but a modern-day substitute for the

Chess and Newsom, 2015, p. 9.

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irradicable figure of the bogeyman whose dark and disturbing tales remind children not to talk to strangers or stray too far from the relative safety of their parents. Read from a literalist perspective, however, the idea that Slender Man poses an actual threat to children could not be further from the truth. Just as the Bulger murder was mythologised within the media as part of a broader narrative of harm in which Chucky was not the puppet but the puppet master pulling the strings, here too the facts surrounding the stabbing and the genesis of a fictional character became increasingly blurred. Within days of the Wisconsin case breaking, both online horror fiction forums and the internet in its entirety were framed within narratives of harm as the media sought to get to the ‘truth’ by the most imaginative means possible. On 3 June 2014 The Washington Post sought to unearth the mystery behind the meme with ‘The Complete, terrifying history of “Slender Man,” the Internet meme that compelled two 12-year-olds to stab their friend’.13 A day later The Irish Independent boomed how a ‘Net Demon drove girls (12) to stab pal’.14 Not to be out done, three days after the stabbing The Huffington Post equally invoked Slender Man’s agency with the headline ‘Police Reveal Dark Details About 12-Year-Olds Accused of Stabbing a Friend to Meet “Slender Man”’.15 While admittedly highlighting the fictional status of Slender Man, each one of these reports sought to emphasise the central role an internet meme played in the lives of two very disturbed girls and not the more complex issue of mental illness in children. Just as publishers of horror comics were aligned with anti-Americanism, and in the aftermath of the Bulger murder Chucky doll creator David Kirschner was pilloried as a ‘sick’ and ‘depraved’ ‘tycoon’ who ‘wields enormous power on the minds of millions of children around the world’,16 so too were the creators of Slender Man maligned. Suddenly these storytellers were ‘vilified by fearful parents, media, and authority figures as evil reprobates with the potential to befoul innocent children everywhere via the ubiquity of computers with Internet connections’.17 Calling attention to the allegedly harmful nature of Slender Man, Fox News contributor Dr Keith Ablow ‘implored’ the surgeon general to put a warning on ‘a variety of Internet and social media platforms’. Locating blame squarely at the feet

Sourced Caitlin Dewey, ‘The Complete History of “Slender Man”, the Meme that Compelled Two Girls to Stab a Friend’, Washington Post. 3rd June 2014. Sourced https:// www​.washingtonpost​.com​/news​/the​-intersect​/wp​/2014​/06​/03​/the​-complete​-terrifying​-history​ -of​-slender​-man​-the​-internet​-meme​-that​-compelled​-two​-12​-year​-olds​-to​-stab​-their​-friend/ [Accessed 30th August 2021]. 14 Sourced http://www​.independent​.ie​/world​-news​/americas​/net​-demon​-drove​-girls​-12​-to​-stab​ -pal​-30327203​.html [Accessed 28th June 2021]. 15 Sourced https://www​.huffpost​.com​/entry​/slenderman​-stabbing​_n​_5439667 [Accessed 30th August 2021]. 16 Nick North, ‘I Was Born a Werido’, Daily Mirror. 26th November 1994. 17 Chess and Newsom, 2015, p. 4. 13

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of Slender Man’s creators and appealing to common sense, he opined how ‘traditionally, [horror writers and creators] are shielded by First Amendment rights, your right to free speech. However, in this case, if you watch the Slender Man video, how could somebody create that video and not believe this could inspire a person to kill?’18 Betraying an obvious unfamiliarity with the composite nature of a meme Ablow rather curiously added, ‘If I were a parent and my daughter were dead, I would sue them.’19 Similarly Candace Platter, ‘professional therapist’ and Huffington Post blogger, decried: these girls were heavily influenced by a website they were into – one that I don’t even want to name here [. . .] This information is available if you want to Google it yourself – it’s not something I wish to perpetuate. But I will say this: there is something really sick and twisted about the people who put up websites like this, and something very neglectful about parents who don’t take the time to know where their 12-year-old children are spending their time, both online and off.20 Underscoring the fictionality of the Slender Man universe, a Creepypasta wiki administrator posted a statement on their page offering condolences to the family. In that same statement, they also felt the need to defend their position claiming that there ‘is a line between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult’.21 Just as the media had broadened the scope of their attack on Childs Play 3 to include a denunciation of the entire field of what they considered video nasties, Slender Man’s potential to harm was similarly extended beyond its original Creepypasta origins to incorporate the internet in its entirety as an addictive and dangerous place for children. Redolent of Newson’s symbolic use of infection and addiction throughout her 1994 report, Ablow likewise appealed to the language of addiction when he exclaimed: [t]he Internet is a form of communication that human beings, we are learning, are not immune to, in terms of being able to resist themes that flow to them through this drug portal […] Facebook depersonalizes people. It decreases their empathy. This has been shown by data. And

Cited in Chess and Newsom, 2015, p. 4. Ibid. 20 Cited in Chess and Newsom, 2015, p. 6. 21 Sourced http://fox6now​.com​/2014​/06​/03​/creepypasta​-responds​-we​-are​-a​-literature​-site​-not​-a​ -crazy​-satanic​-cult/ [Accessed 28th August 2020]. 18 19

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when you tell a story via this direct line to your emotional self, it can infect you in a special way.22 Operated by digital storytellers, Creepypasta​.c​om became one of those uncanny ‘bad places’ within cybergothic.23 Without so much as leaving their bedrooms, children were liable to be harmed if ventured alone into such horrific spaces. Invoking this very theme of the internet as a bad place for children, CNN correspondent Miguel Marquez asked, ‘If you push your kid in a room with the Internet and you close the door, it’s the same thing as letting a stranger, a grown man, into your twelve -year-old’s room with them. Why would parents do that?’24 While Marquez arguably echoes the sentiments of many who believe the internet is nothing but a toxic waste land brimming with predatory ghouls, his statement is problematic on a number of counts. Not only is it damaging in terms of its damning generalisation that any man left in a room with a child would immediately pose a risk, but it also correlates the entirety of the internet with the figure of the paedophile. Similarly speaking of the web as a dark and wicked place, Wisconsin police chief Russell Jack remarked how it ‘has also provided an opportunity for potential child predators to reach our children like never before’.25 Without a doubt, it would be remiss to discount entirely the notion that the internet can be used for ill gains and parents have every right to know where their children roam. The problem with narratives of harm from the likes of Platter, Ablow and Marquez, however, is that they do little to inform or furnish parents with tools for digital literacy. Off the back of such narratives we are left wondering who exactly the predator is? The vast expanse of the World Wide Web? The fictional character of Slender Man? The content creators who constitute thousands of men, women and children? Or the young girls who committed the crime in question? However, much to the chagrin of those who seek to invoke such narratives of harm, in the fall out of incidents such as the Bulger murder, Columbine, Sandy Hook and the Waukesha stabbings, the answer is never quite as simple as pinning the blame on one particular devil. Such ambiguity surrounding the actual threat to children is emblematic of the manner in which the myth has operated for generations as it supplants logic, reason and fact with irrational and emotive narratives of fear and harm which are left to fester in the liminal space of doubt and uncertainty. Consequently, instead of mining the complexities of these cases, the myth of harm has us chasing dolls and ghouls.

Sourced http://www​.mediaite​.com​/tv​/foxs​-ablow​-demands​-warnings​-on​-facebook​-slender​ -man​-where​-is​-the​-surgeon​-general/ [Accessed 28th August 2020]. 23 King, 2010, p. 278. 24 Cited in Chess and Newsom, 2015, p. 5. 25 Ibid., p. 4. 22

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Predicated upon such fears the familiar theme of ‘helpless parents’ loomed large as many horror forum sites including Creepypasta were blocked in the Waukesha school district. Writing for the Providence Journal Froma Harrop made the rather disconcerting observation that parents were ‘unable to act as intermediaries between their children and their children’s darkest fantasies’.26 Unfortunately Harrop didn’t elucidate any further as to what these dark secrets were and why children had them in the first place. Seeking to educate parents on the alleged dangers of the meme, on 5 June NBC news show Today posted an article on their home page warning parents: ‘Slender Man: Do your kids know him, too?’ Once more pleading with parents to be more vigilant against such virtual predators, James Steyer of ‘Common Sense Media’27 argued that ‘vulnerable’ children might ‘struggle to understand the difference between fantasy and reality. Playing violent video games, watching scary movies, or getting lost in online horror stories might be fine for some kids, but trigger bad behaviours in others; parents need to be more vigilant with sensitive kids.’28 True to form, the MailOnline sought to exacerbate the situation further with speculative and irrelevant ‘facts’. Echoing a feature of the Bulger case whereby the video rentals of Venables’s father came under scrutiny as potential evidence, the Daily Mail website highlighted the metal and hard rock tastes of Morgan’s father Matt Geyser. Redolent of the fashion in which the Satanic Panic of the 1980s demonised metal music, arguably, seeking to imply something much darker was at play when they ‘revealed’ how Matt Geyser was a ‘death metal fan who uses the Instagram name, Deadboy420’.29 What is striking about the case is that almost every report has either referred to Slender Man or inferred the character’s presence and culpability, yet very few have attempted to offer an alternative explanation or cited the alleged Slender Man obsession as a symptom of a mental break with reality and not the cause. Recognizing such an omission, Anthony Tobia, an associate professor of psychiatry, criticised any suggestion that the Slender Man meme was an influence on the case. Any claims made by the girls concerning Slender Man, he argued, could potentially have been predicated

Froma, ‘What Lurks Deep Down in a Sweet Child’s Online World?’ in Chess and Newsom, (eds) 2015, p. 6. 27 A non-profit media watchdog advocacy group based in San Francisco which rates books, film and video games in order to promote ‘safe technology for children and adults’. Sourced https:// www​.commonsensemedia​.org/ [Accessed 10th June 2020]. 28 Sourced http://www​.today​.com​/parents​/slender​-man​-do​-your​-kids​-know​-him​-too​-2D79759300 [Accessed 18th September 2020]. 29 Sourced http://www​.dailymail​.co​.uk​/news​/article​-2650398​/Stabby​-stab​-stab​-Two​-girls​-12​-knifed​ -schoolmate​-19​-times​-used​-code​-words​-plan​-horrific​-Slender​-Man​-attack​.html [Accessed 10th June 2021]. 26

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upon a ‘shared psychotic disorder’.30 But given the nature of the case, he was cautious of jumping to any conclusions when so many questions remain unanswered such as ‘Were these two girls the victim of bullying? [. . .] What was their self-esteem like? Was it weak enough that they might have been influenced by an outside source? Was one of the girls the leader, and one the follower?’31

He’s behind you In terms of proffering an alternative in the media, Irene Taylor Brodsky’s 2016 documentary Beware the Slenderman is the closest the mainstream media has come to exploring in any great depth the mental health issues which lay at the core of this case. Citing a range of specialist expert opinions in the guise of aforementioned scholars Blank, Zipes and Dawkins, the documentary does appeal to a more quasi-academic analysis of the case. Unfortunately a large degree of emphasis is put on exploring the trope of Slender Man from these academic perspectives when mental health should have been at the forefront of the case. Special praise, however, must be given to Anissa’s childhood friend Maggie as her perspicacious appraisal of her friend’s role in an attempted murder is arguably the most measured, coherent and poignant of all commentaries. Dismissing entirely the figure of Slender Man as a principal or motivating factor in the case, she indirectly poses something of a challenge to the opinions of both Dawkins and Zipes, who argue that the viral nature of Slender Man was a contributing factor in the crime. Reminding Anissa not to smile too much in court, she maintains that she never knew ‘where the whole Slender Man thing started because Anissa never talked about anything like that. Nobody ever talked about Slender Man’. Proffering an alternative, she adds, ‘[Anissa] is easily frightened. [. . .] Maybe she did it because she wanted to be noticed’. Explaining how Anissa would regale her with tales of how popular she was at school when the reality was that she was marginalised and bullied, Maggie continues her analysis of the case with a simple, ‘She was a follower. [. . .] I just think that some kids are big believers. They can’t help but believe everything they hear.’ Astonishingly this simplified diagnosis that some kids just ‘believe everything they hear’ belies an exceptionally astute understanding of a condition which Dr Michael Caldwell, the court-appointed psychiatrist to Anissa describes in the 2016 documentary as a ‘delusional disorder caused

Such as folie à deux. Sourced http://www​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2014​/jun​/04​/slender​-man​ -online​-character​-wisconsin​-stabbings [Accessed 17th September 2020]. 31 Sourced http://www​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2014​/jun​/04​/slender​-man​-online​-character​ -wisconsin​-stabbings [Accessed 17th September 2020]. 30

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by schizotypy’. Considered to be a ‘diminished ability to determine what’s real and what’s not’, Caldwell is quick to add that Anissa did not betray any psychopathic characteristics. When examined, Morgan’s diagnosis was all the more illuminating. Explaining her condition, Dr Kenneth Casmir states in court how Morgan was diagnosed with schizophrenia amongst other issues. Furthering his explanation Casmir continues that her delusions were created by her untreated schizophrenia and manifested in the desire to appease a fictional character upon which she was fixated. While her condition went undiagnosed until the attempted murder, Morgan’s mother does hint early on that she felt something was amiss when Morgan didn’t respond as a young child to the death of Bambi’s mother the way she would have anticipated. Aside from this, having spent the majority of the documentary featuring a slew of experts and academics on the subject of Slender Man, the issue of the girl’s mental health is only raised in any great fashion within the final twenty minutes of the two-hour documentary. Simply paying lip service to mental health seems little more than perfunctory, especially when the majority of that twenty minutes is consumed with unearthing how Morgan’s condition was disturbing, yet not entirely unexpected given her father’s ongoing battles with the same mental illness. In an effort to perhaps sidestep issues of juvenile culpability Beware the Slenderman appeals to the myth of harm by invoking an age-old case for the dangers of media effects. In doing so the documentary misses a valuable opportunity to de-mythologise childhood mental illness. Choosing to locate the fleeting relevance of the meme at the centre of an attempted murder case, arguably the documentary conceals its own brand of sensationalism behind an exploration and exploitation of the genuine grief of two sets of parents and the trauma of a third. As a final aide-memoire, we the viewers are left staring at Joe Coleman’s ‘No One Can Enter the Lords House Except as a Child’. In the painting Anissa and Morgan appear handcuffed wearing grey prison fatigues, with the figure of Slender Man hovering over them, his tentacle-like fingers wrapped around their arms. One would hope that such a painting depicted the insidious nature of mental illness as it snares all in its wake. Yet considering the context, when read literally this painting serves only to compound the unfortunate and misguided correlation between an internet meme and its alleged bewitching qualities. The friendship of Morgan and Anissa was a perfect storm of mental illness and co-dependence – one with delusional schizophrenia and the other with schizotypy. It was a chance meeting in which their respective conditions were compounded until a shared delusion was sadly made manifest. The Slender Man Stabbing case was a clear example of the manner in which the myth of harm exposed the fragility of a society which would rather endorse black magic and witchcraft than give credence to the depths of mental illness the human mind is sadly capable of.

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While both the Slender Man mythos and the myth of harm are similar in terms of their respective contrivances, the ultimate difference lies in the fact that the very medium which created Slender Man is also his undoing. Just a few clicks of a mouse will bring you to his modest beginnings as a patchwork collection of pixels developed into one of the web’s most pervasive memes, reinforcing ‘his’ enigmatic, yet utterly fabricated mythology. On the other hand, the constant references to horror fiction as a motivating factor for juvenile crime and corruption from a broad historical spectrum of sources including but not limited to the media, academics and moral crusades seems to solidify the myth of harm as empirical ‘fact’. Of course, this is not the first time we have seen this bogeyman. He has lurked in the nitrate film of Hollywood horror, the pulp of 1950s comics, between the spools of magnetic tape in 1980s nasties and somehow exists within the pixelated images of video games. Now in the twenty-first century, this misopedist seemingly skulks in cyberspace.

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Having tracked the myth of harm from the 1930s in which an alleged reciprocity between deviant abnormality and horror was understood to have formed thus providing the foundation for negative effects research,1 the myth was again sparked in the burning embers of EC comics. Considered something of a panacea for juvenile delinquency, the eradication of horror comics did nothing to ease concerns about juvenile delinquency but gave shape to our fears. Paradoxically the stories contained within these comics were attempting to do the same thing and for a short time created spaces for children and adults to confront their fears without establishing scapegoats for them. In the 1980s, video nasties were seen to once again crawl into the homes of permissive feckless parents as moral guardians sought to protect us from the corruptive depravity of horror. With the implementation of the VRA came the decree that those who watched such ‘filth’ or let their children ‘foul up their minds’ with nasties were apparently incapable of looking after themselves or their young.2 But rest assured no children were ever harmed by these nasties. Instead, a form of entertainment often capable of profound social commentary was pathologised and its imagery exploited by the media in order to sensationalise a true tale of graphic horror committed by two seriously disturbed children. Embroiled within the myth of harm, as one fatalistic narrative of harm faded out, an equally deterministic narrative lurked ready to supplant old fears with new technologies. Throughout the 1990s and well into the twenty-first century, video games continued to dominate media effects research. Even though we arrive at an impasse whereby two decades of research has failed to produce conclusive evidence about the harmful effects of video games, as this book has outlined, science has only ever played a supporting role in the myth of harm. Evidential research which supports various narratives of harm has been cherry-picked and overstated time and time again. Much to the chagrin of scientific scholars on both sides of the media effects debate, when research cannot support the dominant narratives of harm being espoused, science is demoted in favour

1 2

See Buckingham, 1996, p. 96. Daily Mail. 30th June 1983.

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of common sense. After all isn’t better to be safe than sorry as we strive to ‘get away from this silly business of having to prove things’.3 Although fears pertaining to cyberfiction, pornography and social media have the potential to surpass the concern expressed over video games within the next decade, for now the narratives of harm surrounding video games do not seem to be subsiding. Unlike Crawford’s claim that ‘moral panics die away’ only to reappear within a different context,4 arguably what we have here is a continuation rather than a rebirth of the central narrative of harm. Instead of dissipating, the myth of harm is constantly in a state of flux attaching to whatever happens to be the bête noire of that particular period. From Coleridge’s Mormo to the Momo Challenge, the myth of harm is the prevailing narrative which links over two hundred years of regulation and restriction in the name of protecting children from the perceived dangers of horror. While there will always be those entrepreneurs who seek to control and police taste, cultural norms and moral boundaries, as one of the scariest stories ever told, fear sustains the myth of harm. It’s a fear of the other, a fear of the unfamiliar; a fear of the new; a fear of the unorthodox; a fear that one is not in control; a fear of lost innocence and even a fear of children. Where fear lies, there will always be opportunists all too eager to exploit this fear. In a quest to protect children, their vulnerability has been commodified and appropriated by commentators as a justification for restricting and censoring material which has been rendered harmful. Conversely as this book has laid out Gothic narratives often provide childfriendly strategies ‘for negotiating the terrors of the unknown’.5 While some children are repulsed by the horror genre, others can derive a sense of comfort from it. Yet this was never a book about children’s horror; instead, it sought to explore the child-centric narratives which have grown alongside children and horror and expose these narratives for the mythic tales they have always been. Consistently depicting all manner of abject and horrifying representations, like the indelible portrait of Dorian Grey, across its broad spectrum of media, the horror genre is capable only of reflecting inarticulate and intangible fears and ironically should not be something to fear. In an attempt to negate or even negotiate the myth of harm, we should try to remember that ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written [and] That is all.’6

Mary Whitehouse speaking at a Conservative Party Conference 1984; cited in Bivins, 2008, p. 1882. 4 See Crawford, 2015, p. 46. 5 Spooner, 2006, p. 92. 6 Oscar Wilde from preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890). 3

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Films A Clockwork Orange. Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1971. Beware the Slenderman. Dir: Irene Taylor Brodsky, 2016. Black Christmas. Dir: Bob Clark, 1974. Cannibal Holocaust. Dir: Ruggero Deodato, 1980. Cannibal Terror. Dir: lain Deruelle, 1981. Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking. Dir: Jack Bender, 1991. Curse of The Werewolf. Dir: Terence Fisher, 1961. Dear Censor . . . The Secret Archive of the British Board of Film Classification. Dir: Matt Pelly, 2011. Death Race 2000. Dir: Roger Corman, 1975. Deep Throat. Dir: Gerard Damiano, 1972. Don’t Go in the Woods Alone!. Dir: James Bryan, 1980. Esmeralda. Dirs: Alice Guy and Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, 1906. For the Love of Benji. Dir: Joe Camp, 1977. Frankenstein. Dir: J. Searle Dawley, 1910. Get Out. Dir: Jordan Peele, 2017. Hereditary. Dir: Ari Aster, 2018. Last House on the Left. Dir: Wes Craven, 1972. Last Tango in Paris. Dir: Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972. Laughing Sinners. Dir: Harry Beaumont, 1931. Laughter in Hell. Dir: Edward L. Cahn, 1933. Le Manoir de Diable (House of the Devil). Dir: Georges Melies, 1896. Mad Love. Dir: Karl Freund, 1935. Midsommar. Dir: Ari Aster, 2019. Murder by the Clock. Dir: Edward Sloman, 1931. Murders in the Rue Morgue. Dir: Robert Florey, 1932. Nosferatu. Dir: F. W. Murnau, 1922. Psycho. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. Public Enemy. Dir: William A. Wellman, 1931. Scarface. Dir: Howard Hawks, 1932. Son of Frankenstein. Dir: Rowland V. Lee, 1936. Snuff. Dir: Michael Findlay (uncredited), 1976. Straw Dogs. Dir: Sam Peckinpah, 1971. Svengali. Dir: Archie Mayo, 1931. Tales from the Crypt: From Comic Books to Television. Dir: Chip Selby, 2004. The Beast Must Die. Dir: Paul Annett, 1974. The Black Hand. Dir: Wallace McCutcheon, 1906. The Babadook. Dir: Jennifer Kent, 2014. The Bride of Frankenstein. Dir: James Whale, 1935.

270

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Dir: Robert Wiene, 1919. The Devil Hunter. Dir: Jesús Franco, 1980. The Devil’s Rejects. Dir: Rob Zombie, 2005. The Execution of Mary Stuart. Dir: Thomas Edison, 1895. The Exorcist. Dir: William Friedkin, 1974. The Golem. Dir: Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, 1920. The Hunchback. Dir: Van Dyke Brooke, 1909. The Jazz Singer. Dir: Alan Crosland, 1927 The Lights of New York. Dir: Bryan Foy, 1928. The Love of a Hunchback. Dir: Alice Guy, 1910. The Old Dark House. Dir: James Whale, 1932. The Phantom of the Opera. Dir: Rupert Julian, 1925. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Dir: Tobe Hooper, 1975. The Vampire. Dir: Robert G. Vignola, 1913. Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape. Dir: Jake West, 2010. White Zombie. Dir: Victor Halperin, 1932. Youth in Crisis. Dir: Louis De Rochemont, 1943.

Series I Love Lucy. 1951–1960. Make Room for Daddy. 1953–1964. Father Knows Best. 1954–1960. Lassie. 1954–1974.

Video games Alone in the Dark. Infogames, 1992. Animal Crossing. Nintendo EAD, 2001. Dance Dance Revolution. Konami, 2011. Dead Island. Techland, 2011. Dead Rising. Capcom, 2006. Dead Space. Visceral Games, 2008. Death Race. Exidy, 1976. Destruction Darby. Exidy, 1975. Doom. Id Software, 1993. Gotcha. Atari, 1973. Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar Games, 1997. League of Legends. Riot Games, 2009. Left 4 Dead. Turtle Rock Studios, 2008. Manhunt. Rockstar Games, 2003. Mortal Kombat. Midways, 1993. Night Trap. Digital Pictures, 1992. Outlast. Red Barrels Studio, 2013.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pong. Atari, 1972. Resident Evil. Capcom, 1996–. Shark Jaws. Atari, 1975. Silent Hill. Konami, 1999. Street Fighter. Capcom, 1991. The Last of Us. Naughty Dog, 2013. Unreal Tournament 3: Black Edition. EPIC, 2007. World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment, 2004–.



271

INDEX

abnormality  55, 77, 87, 249. See also eugenics addiction cinema  65 comic books  87, 120 Gothic  215–16 internet  242 video games  5, 66, 87, 194, 196, 211, 216–18, 223 video nasties  163, 168–9 adhomination  25, 28, 133. See also Roland Barthes adultery  100 agents of harm  30, 81 age ratings  11, 16, 27, 144, 148–9, 192, 198, 198 n.47 alcohol abuse  56, 95, 100–1, 195 Alexander, Bryan  239 Alone in the Dark  208 alternative facts  32 American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Violent Media  229–31 Anderson, Craig  182, 215, 219, 220, 222, 226, 231 anti-communist  217 Apperley, Thomas  208 arcade machines  191–2, 195–6, 225 Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP)  91, 94 Atari  191, 192 atomic age, the  91 atomic war, the  80, 98 Baclanova, Olga  53 Bakan, Joel  216–17 ban

‘Ban the Sadist Videos’ campaign  165, 167, 169, 180 (see also Daily Mail) British ban on horror comics  126, 127 British Ban on horror films  37, 58, 73 cinema  74, 75, 112, 144, 148 Barker, Martin  24–6, 53, 107, 109, 112, 115, 127–9, 137, 166, 169, 170 n.156, 171, 172 n.166, 174 n.179, 183, 207, 213 Barrios, Richard  42, 64 Barthes, Roland  19–21, 25–6, 61 battered woman syndrome  101 Becker, Howard  32 Beheading of Mary Queen of Scots (1895)  35 Bender, Jack  177 Bender, Lauretta  88 Bercovitch, Sacvan  82 better safe than sorry approach  30, 33, 74, 87. See also precautionary principle Beville, Maria  21, 170, 203 Beware the Slenderman  239, 245, 246 Biskind, Peter  105 Black, Gregory D.  36, 63 Black Christmas  149 Black Hand, The  37 Blank, Trevor J.  236, 240, 245 Botting, Fred  21, 80, 178, 203 Bourdieu, Pierre  125–6 Bourke, Joanna  37 Brandon Crisp case, the  225, 225 n.188 Breen, Joseph  42, 71–2, 76

INDEX

Bride of Frankenstein, The  59, 74 Bright, Graham  115, 170–1, 174. See also scared dogs British Board of Film Classification (BBFC)  11, 17, 27–9, 38, 73–6, 142, 144, 148, 152, 153, 175, 183 British Communist Party (BCP)  128 Browning, Tod  44–5, 49, 52–5, 58, 77 Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association  186 Bruhm, Steven  108 Buckingham, David  13, 15, 23, 36, 68, 190 Bunnell, Charlene  209 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The  39 Caldwell, Nick  207 Cannibal Holocaust  164–5 cannibalism  96, 131, 138, 150, 161, 165–6, 169 Captain America  90, 117 n.160 Carey, Benedict  20 Carroll, Noel  4, 215 Castle of Otranto, The  2, 156 Catholic Church, The  42–3, 45, 51–2, 58, 59, 71–2, 146 Catholic League of Decency, the  72 Catholic World, The  87 censorship  16–18, 32, 37, 39, 41, 45–6, 49–52, 59, 62, 70, 74, 76, 93, 112, 116, 119, 126, 139, 141, 143, 148, 149, 162–3, 175 Charters, W.W.  60, 68–9 Chess, Shira  239–40 child abuse  80, 109, 112, 136, 196 centred society  105 definitions of  10–16, 178, 182 delinquent  7, 92, 106 Gothic  108, 145 and harm  1, 19, 23–4, 27, 29, 44–5, 49, 51, 66, 73, 86–7, 109, 112, 114, 123, 128–30, 168, 220, 234, 235, 238



273

horror  29, 46, 59, 67, 85–6 as other  90, 106, 181 player  214 protection  3, 19, 32, 38, 42, 58, 83, 93, 119, 160, 162, 166, 196 restrictions on  44, 50 transitions to adulthood  145 child-centric narratives  7, 8, 31, 66, 105, 106, 204, 250 childhood  86, 90, 93, 105, 109, 145, 179–80, 194, 216, 225, 228, 240, 245–6 constructions of  10–12, 14, 16, 19, 90, 108, 125, 177–8, 180, 194 myth of childhood innocence  12, 36, 100, 107 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act (1955)  126, 129 Children’s Bureau  89, 119 children’s horror  7, 8, 108, 250 Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking  136, 177, 179–81 Child’s Play franchise  177, 180 Child Welfare Department of the Legion Auxiliary  132 Christensen, Hans-Christian  90 Christopher Harris murder trial, the  219 chronoslip 220. See also Simon Parkin Chucky  177, 179–81, 200, 240, 241. See also Child’s Play; The James Bulger case Cicognani, Amleto Giovanni, Monsignor  71 Cinematograph Act of 1909  38 Cinematograph Exhibitors Association (CEA)  74 class  10, 12, 16–17, 24, 70, 84, 99, 125–6, 150, 152, 154, 161–3, 178, 204, 214 Clinton, Bill, President  200, 221 Clinton, Hillary, Sen.  185, 186 Clockwork Orange, A  141–4, 147, 159

274

INDEX

Clover, Carol  159 CNN  243 Cold War, the  81–3, 91 Coleman, Joe  246 Columbine Review Commission  221 Columbine shooting, the  199–222, 226–7, 243 comic books British ban  126–9 child abuse, themes of  106–12 Comic Code, the  91, 94–5, 118, 129, 131, 198 Communism  116–18, 128, 132 crime  15, 114, 118–21, 125– 6, 131–3 decline  129–33 domestic abuse, themes of  101–5 Gothic  80–3, 95, 106–7, 124, 136, 189 harm  87–8, 92–4, 99, 112, 114–15, 120–1, 123–4, 127–9, 132, 136, 182, 217, 218 horror comics  6–7, 15, 66, 73, 77, 79–86, 93–6, 98–101, 104–5, 109, 113, 116–20, 122–30, 132–3, 137, 161, 198, 206, 213 juvenile delinquency  89, 92, 130, 133, 161 patriotic symbols  90, 109 popularity  86, 91, 95 Comics Campaign Council (CCC)  127 Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA)  130–2 common sense  3, 33, 175–6, 182–3, 189, 214, 216, 221, 242, 250 Common Sense Media  244 Communism  82, 90, 116–18, 120, 128 confirmation bias  230–1 controversy and children  23 comic books  79, 81, 83, 91, 115, 125–7 Gothic  4, 49 myth of harm  36–7, 82, 112, 190

30s horror  33, 37, 39, 45, 49, 73–4 video games  6, 192, 193, 197 video nasty  7, 66, 87, 135–7, 144, 147, 160, 164–6, 168, 171, 175, 177, 184 Cooke, David  28–9 Coontz, Stephanie  100, 105 Cooper, L. Andrew  124, 201–3, 213 Crawford, Joseph  4, 119, 137, 167, 201, 202, 205, 250 creepypasta, definition of  236, 242–4 Crime SuspenStories  123 Crypt Keeper, the  94 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly  215 n.140. See also flow, theory of culture high  151 low  151, 154 parent taste culture  154, 154 n.84 popular  15, 22, 39, 90–1, 127, 139, 182, 226, 235 teenage  79, 85, 91, 125–6, 133 youth  82–3, 125–6, 133 Cumberbatch, Guy  174, 174 n.179, 183 cybergothic  236, 239, 243 Dacre, Charlotte  1, 2 Daily Mail  143, 159, 163, 167–70, 173–4, 179–80, 196, 217, 220, 223, 229, 244 Dance Dance Revolution  225 Dark Mysteries  96 Darwin, Leonard  56 Dawkins, Richard  239–40, 245 Day of the Woman  155 Dead Island  214 Death Race 2000 (1975)  192 Death Race (1976)  192, 193 Deep Throat  152 Degaetano, Gloria  222 depression  100, 147, 218, 218 n.154. See also mental health Depression, Great, the  37, 40, 43, 56, 64, 77, 81 de sade, Marquis  149, 151

INDEX

desensitised  211, 214, 222 Destruction Derby  192 Detective Comics (DC)  85 détournement  118 Devil’s Rejects, The  4 Dime Novels  83 Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)  137, 149, 167, 171 distinction  124, 126. See also Pierre Bourdieu ‘Distress and Delight,’ 68. See also David Buckingham dogs, scared  133. See also Graham Bright Doherty, Thomas  42–3, 54 domestic aspirationalism  99, 100. See also myth of Suburbia domestic dysfunction  32, 83, 95, 99–101, 104–5, 109, 196. See also marriage domestic violence  101, 104, 109 Don Mancini, Don  177 Doom  198, 200–1, 206 Dourif, Brad  180 Dowsett, Andre  213, 215, 227 Dracula (1922)  39 Dracula (1931)  37, 44–6, 49, 52, 54, 57 Dracula’s Daughter  59 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde  52 Dunblane shootings, the  14, 16 dying child  13, 110. See also Sick Child Earles, Harry  53 Eastern Color Printing Company  85 EC Comics  79, 85, 98, 121–4, 131–3, 249. See also Entertaining Comics Edison, Thomas  35 Edwards, Justin D.  54, 98 emotional buttons  23, 32, 106 emotional possession  65–6, 114, 168. See also James Ferman Entertaining Comics (EC)  79, 85, 98, 121–4, 131–3, 249 ‘The Orphan’  106–8, 110



275

‘Shoe Button Eyes’  109–10 Entertainment Software Association (ESA)  186, 188, 197 Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB)  198 Environmental Policy  30. See also better safe than sorry ethics of representation  9. See also Darryl Jones eugenics  44, 49, 55–6, 56 n.90, 57–8, 67 Exidy  192, 193, 206 Exorcist, The  141, 144–8 Falklands War, The  161 n.112 Famicom  196 Family Entertainment Protection Act  185 Famous Funnies  85 Fascism  90, 116, 117 n.160, 132, 150 federal investigation comics books  32, 41, 77, 117, 122, 130 films  32, 59 video games  32, 197 Feldstein, Al  94, 133 Ferguson, Christopher  185, 205, 219, 224, 226–8, 230, 232–3 Ferguson, Kate  157 Ferman, James  148–50, 152–3 Festival of Light, the  139, 142, 144, 147, 148 Fielder, Leslie  55 First Amendment  186–7, 242 first-person shooter  198, 213 Fliethmann, Axel  206, 207 flow, theory of  215, 215 n.140, 220 Folie à deux  245 n.30 folk devils  138 folklore  64, 236 Forbes  225, 233 Forman, Henry  18, 40, 60–1, 63–70, 112, 176, 190, 195. See also Our Movie Made Children Forshaw, Barry  48, 50 framing  25, 189, 217. See also persuasion research

276

INDEX

Frank, Josette  88, 105 Frankenstein (1818)  49 Frankenstein (1910)  35 Frankenstein (1927)  49 Frankenstein (1931)  37, 45–7, 51, 54, 55, 142, 144 censorship  46, 49, 50 as gothic text  49, 50 harm  51 monster  45–51, 142 Freaks  37, 52–4, 56–8, 72 Friedkin, William  144–5 fright films  37 Fuchs, Wolfgang  84 Fuller, Kathryn H.  60–2 Furedi, Frank  18, 19, 24 Gaines, Bill  79, 85, 98, 121–4, 131–3, 249. See also EC Gaines, M.C.  85 gaming disorder  217 Garro-Jones, G.M.  58 Gelder, Ken  4, 8, 22–3 generational gap  90, 105 Gentile, Douglas  215–16, 231 Geyser, Morgan  235, 244, 246. See also Slender Man Stabbing Giannini, A.H.  72 Gilbert, James  82, 89, 116 Golden Age of Hollywood Horror  5, 7, 33, 40, 43, 82 Golem, The  39 Goth culture  199–201 Gothic addiction  218 child  108, 145, 250 comic books  80–3, 95–6, 98 cyber gothic  236, 238–9, 243 eugenics  55–9 events  136, 177–8, 181, 202–3, 227 film  39, 45, 49, 65, 156, 210 genre  19, 21, 24, 49, 95, 104, 153, 156, 167, 201, 203–4, 209, 210, 212, 215–16, 222 Gothic Devilism  71, 146 harm  1–3, 16, 42, 167, 190, 201 myth of harm  4–5, 19–22, 133, 167, 170, 177–8, 181, 202

novels  1–2, 16, 47, 77, 101, 106, 109, 156, 218 perspective  3, 5, 21–2, 70, 77, 98, 133, 136, 153–5, 157, 162, 170, 177–8, 181, 202–3 postmodernism  203 studies  9, 20, 22–3, 137, 202 taste  124, 154 themes  13, 21, 24, 36, 64, 80, 101, 104, 109, 157, 179, 203, 223, 238, 239 video games  185, 202–11 video nasties  136–7, 153–4, 168–9, 177 Grand Theft Auto  192, 204 Gross, Gail  226 Gross, Jerry  155 Grossman, Dave  198, 221, 222 gun control  32, 188, 190, 201, 216, 222, 226, 233 Hajdu, David  86, 95 harm, definition of  27–30 Harris, Eric  199–201, 219, 221. See also Columbine shooting Harris, Marilyn  47 Hawkins, Joan  54–5, 151–2 Hays, William  41, 50, 63, 71–2 Hays’ Code  42–3, 49, 92. See also Motion Picture Production Code heavy metal music  7, 199, 244 Hendrickson, Robert C., Sen.  117, 118, 120, 121 Hogle, Jerrold  64, 162 Holbrook, David  112, 127, 166 Hollywood  37, 40–3, 53, 70, 72, 76 Horror Golden Age  5, 7, 33, 35, 43, 59, 76, 81, 247 Hollywood Reporter  62 Hoover, J. Edgar  90 horror, definition of  8–10 horror, genre  3–9, 17, 19–21, 23, 27, 31–3, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 46, 48, 58–9, 73, 76, 83, 92, 106, 120, 121, 128, 137, 158, 179, 189, 205, 207, 209, 215, 240, 250 Huesmann, L. Rowell  231 Huffington Post  226, 241, 242

INDEX

identification, theories of  3, 211–15 imperialism  73, 127–8 Incredible Science Fiction  132–3. See also ‘Judgement Day’ infantilisation, of adults  16–19, 24, 162 Interactive Digital Software Association  197 interactivity, theories of  208, 211 International Game Developers Association (IGDA)  188 International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems  217 Irish Times  200 Island of Lost Souls  55, 72 I Spit on Your Grave  152, 153, 155, 157–60, 163, 169 Ivory, James D.  224 Jackson, Mervyn  213 Jackson, Shirley  99 James Bulger murder case, the  135–6, 177–82, 200, 219, 222, 240, 241, 243, 244 Jancovich, Mark  99, 154 Jarvie, Ian C.  60–2 Jazz Singer, The  39 n.14 Jones, Darryl  9, 145, 180 Jones, Gerard  80 Journal of American Family Sociology  109 Jowett, Garth S.  60–2 juvenile delinquency  7, 26, 38, 40, 76, 79, 82, 84, 89, 93, 105, 116–17, 119–21, 127, 130–1, 195, 222, 249 Kain, Erik  233 Kallen, H.M.  40, 41, 66 Karloff, Boris  47, 51–2 Katz, Arnie  194 Kinematograph Weekly  45, 74–5 King, Stephen  9, 20 Kirkland, Ewan  195, 196, 202–4, 210, 212 Kirsh, Steven  213, 226



277

Klebold, Dylan  199–200, 221. See also Columbine shooting Knudsen, Eric aka ‘Victor Surge’  237 Kocurek, Carly A.  192, 205–6 Koop, C. Everett, Surgeon General  194–5 Korean War, the  119 Krzywinska, Tanya  210–11 Kubrick, Stanley  141–2, 144 Ladies Home Journal  85, 120 Lafforgue Clinic  92 Landis, Paul  100 Lanza, Adam  223–5. See also Sandy Hook shooting Last House on the Left  4, 141 Last Tango in Paris  144 League of Decency  43, 72 League of Legends  219 League of Nations conferences  40 Left 4 Dead  214 Legman, Gershon  120 Lester, Catherine  7, 8 Leutner, Payton  235 Lewis, Matthew  1, 156 lex talionis  112, 158 Lord, Daniel, Fr.  41–2 Los Angeles Times  200 McCarthyism  117 McNeill, Lynne S.  236 Mad 133. See also Bill Gaines Mad Love  74 Magnussen, Anne  90 Manson, Marilyn  199 Markey, Patrick  219, 228, 232–3 marriage  100–1, 104 Massé, Michelle A.  104 mass media  55, 83, 101, 139, 214 media effects debate  6, 17, 19, 25, 37, 41, 205, 213, 232, 249 negative  25, 30–2, 189, 203, 236 null/nominal effects  29–30, 62, 227, 231–2 positive  26–7 pro-media effects  20, 26, 29, 220

278

INDEX

research  6–8, 10, 25–6, 28–9, 31, 37, 41, 61, 63, 121, 139, 171, 185, 189–91, 195, 205–6, 211, 213–15, 219, 221, 227–8, 233, 235, 249 media sensationalism  3, 19–20, 24, 32, 45, 62, 67, 88, 89, 135, 138, 144, 161, 163, 165, 167, 168, 182, 217, 219–20, 230, 246 media studies  3, 23, 137 Méliès, Georges  35, 76, 191 mental health, issues  16, 26, 56, 93, 224, 233, 235, 236, 245, 246 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)  52, 53, 55 Momo Challenge, the  2, 3, 3 n.10, 240, 250 Monk, The  1–2, 4, 124, 156, 162 Monster, The  39 moral corruption  4, 12, 17, 23, 27, 29, 30, 41, 43, 65, 108, 119, 128, 133, 163, 167–9, 204, 215, 247 moral crusaders  21, 32, 59–62, 70, 161 moral disarmament  66, 114, 168 moral entrepreneur  3, 32–3, 58, 154, 163, 184, 250 moral entrepreneurship  19, 139 moral guardian  40, 75, 83, 85, 91, 125, 192, 249 moral hygiene  40, 56, 68, 113. See also eugenics morality  2, 5, 19, 20, 23–4, 42–3, 55, 77, 83, 95, 107, 112, 125, 139–40, 151, 176, 189, 221 moral judgments  23 moral panics  6–7, 137–9, 164, 191, 201–2, 250 morbidity  58–9 Morris, Jeremy  4 Morris, Marc  160, 164 Morris, Marcus  127 Morrison, David E.  24 Morse, Stanley  95 Mortal Kombat  197, 200, 219 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)  8, 11

Motion Picture Daily  45 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)  41, 44, 50, 52, 71 Motion Picture Production Code (Production Code)  37, 41–4, 49, 58–9, 71–2. See also Hays’ Code Motion Picture Research Council (MPRC)  60, 64 ‘Movie-Made Criminals’  65 Murders in the Rue Morgue  52, 55, 206 Murnau, F.W.  39 Murphy, Charles  130, 131, 133. See also CMAA Murphy, Stephen  142, 144. See also BBFC Mystery of the House of Wax  59 myth definition of  3–7, 16–19, 22–5, 27, 30, 32–3, 249–50 and the golden age of Hollywood horror  36–7, 57, 61–2, 66 as Gothic  21–4 and Gothic video games  188–91, 200, 207, 229, 233, 235 and the horror comics controversy  81, 93–4, 100, 112, 114, 117, 123, 126–9 as narrative  19–21 and the Slender Man Stabbing case  234, 239, 243, 246–7 of Suburbia  100 and the video nasty controversy  140, 146, 151, 162, 164, 167, 177, 183 myth of harm definition of  3–7, 16–19, 22–5, 27, 30, 32–3, 249–50 and the golden age of Hollywood horror  36–7, 57, 61–2, 66 and Gothic video games  188–91, 200, 207, 229, 233, 235 and the horror comics controversy  81, 93–4, 100, 112, 114, 117, 123, 126–9

INDEX

and the Slender Man Stabbing case  234, 239, 243, 246–7 and the video nasty controversy  140, 146, 151, 162, 164, 167, 177, 183 narratives of harm  2–3, 5, 16, 20–1, 25, 27, 30, 33, 40–1, 44, 51, 56, 63, 70–1, 73, 76, 91, 112, 120, 125, 136, 139–40, 146, 149, 151, 163, 177, 181, 193, 195, 200, 202, 204, 233, 235, 241, 243, 249, 250 narrative theory  20 Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb Murder Trial, The  39 National Council for the Defence of Children (NCDC)  127 National Council for Women  75 National Delinquency Prevention Society  89 National Safety Council  193 National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children  50 National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVALA)  139, 144 negative aestheticism  81. See also Fred Botting Newsom, Eric  239–40 Newson, Elisabeth  135–6, 168, 182–3, 195–6, 242 Newson Report, The  135 n.1, 183. See also Video Violence and the Protection of Children Newsweek  200 New Yorker  58, 117, 225 New York Times, The  19, 46, 53, 59, 63, 91, 120, 193, 195, 220, 223, 233 Night Trap  197 Nintendo  195, 197 Nintendo Entertainment System  196 North, Sterling  86, 87 Nosferatu  39 nuclear family, concept of  99 nuclear war, fear of  81–2, 91, 98 Nyberg, Amy  83, 88, 113, 118



279

Obscene Publications Act of 1959  3 n.9, 144, 149, 165–6, 167 n.143, 170, 172, 175 O Henry ending  107, 107 n.16 Old Dark House, The  52 Order of the Child  50, 73 Our Movie Made Children  37, 59–64, 70–1, 116, 171. See also Henry Forman paracinema  151, 154. See also Jeffery Sconce parenting  1, 18, 28, 52, 58, 75, 86, 127, 130, 189, 216, 242 parent taste culture  154, 154 n.84 Parkin, Simon  219–20 Parkland mass shooting, the  188 Parliamentary Group Video Enquiry (PGVE)  171–2 Pasolini, Pier Paolo  149–51 patriarchy  77, 101, 145–6 Payne Fund Studies (PFS)  40–1, 51–2, 59–62, 64, 67–70 penny dreadfuls  83–4 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte  101 Perron, Bernard  205, 210–11, 215 persuasion research  25, 116, 189 Petley, Julian  17, 24, 26, 137–8, 160, 164, 171, 207 PG-13 rating  8, 16 Phantom of the Opera, The  39 Phelps, Guy  142 Picturegoer  51 Picture of Dorian Grey, The  250 Pied Piper of Hamlin, The  63–4, 64 n.132, 239 Pinedo, Isabel  209 Pong Machine  191, 222 popular culture  15, 22, 39, 90–1, 127, 139, 182, 226, 235 Post, Howard  117 precautionary principle  30–1, 33. See also better safe than sorry approach Private Member’s Bill  170, 170 n.159 Production Code Administration (PCA)  72

280

INDEX

Przybylski, Andrew  227–9 Psycho  99 ‘Puddles of Blood’  92 Pumphrey, George  127, 129 Punter, David  55, 80, 106 Quigley, Martin  42, 46–8, 58–9 R-17 rating  11 rape, themes of  15, 56, 65, 95, 112, 141, 153, 155–60, 163, 165–6, 169–70 rape-revenge  155, 158 Rebecca Christie case, the  218 Reddit  236 Red Fascism  90. See also Communism Reitberger, Reinhold  84 Religious Tract Society  84 Resident Evil  209 Rigby, Jonathan  38 Rock and Roll  91, 244 Romero, George  98 Rose, Jacqueline  7, 14 Round, Julia  80, 95, 189 Salò  149–51 Sandy Hook shootings, the  202, 223–4, 226–7, 243 Satanic Panic, the  7, 146, 169, 244 Savage, John  89, 90 Save our Children  68 scapegoat, horror as  24, 32, 40, 77, 82, 93–4, 154, 161, 164, 200–1, 224, 233, 249 Schechter, Harold  83, 105 schizotypy  246 school shootings  5, 26, 115, 220, 222, 233 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, Sen.  186 Scot, P. Shavaun  217–18 seal of approval, the  125, 131 Seduction of the Innocent (1954)  15, 113, 116–17, 136, 171 ‘Seduction of the Innocent’ (1983)  112, 166 See No Evil  40

Sega  197 Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organised Crime  117 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency  7, 79, 82, 107, 113, 116–21, 124–6, 129–31, 133 Sennett, Stephen  99 Shaftesbury, Lord  84 Shaviro, Steven  210 Shelley, Mary  47–8, 51, 203 shock-logic  107, 109 ShockSuspense Story  96 Short, William H. Rev.  60–1, 70. See also MPRC Shortt, Edward  74. See also BBFC Sick Child, images of  13. See also dying child Sign of Cain, A 115. See also Fredric Wertham Silent Hill  203, 208 simulated violence  200 sins of the father, themes  98 Skal, David  43, 57, 94 Slender Man Stabbing, The  6, 233, 235–47 Smith, Angela  56 n.90 Smith, Guy  138 Smith, Sarah J.  6, 39, 73 Solomon, Andrew  225 somethingawful​.c​om  237 Son of Frankenstein  76 Spooner, Catherine  21, 201, 203 Springhall, John  84 Stevenson, Robert Louis  52, 162 Straw Dogs  141–2 Studio Relations Committee  41 Suburbia, themes of  80, 99, 100 Sunday Times  112, 127, 138, 165 superhero, representations of the  90, 93–4 survival horror video games  203, 208–10 talkies  39, 39 n.14, 41 taste  23, 84, 88, 123, 127, 133, 152–5, 160, 189, 206, 221, 250

INDEX

bad taste  2, 81, 83, 123–6, 129, 151, 154, 193 good taste  2, 84, 123–6, 131, 154 and morality  2, 24, 42, 113, 125–6, 128, 131, 151, 206 taste trap, the  124–6 Tavinor, Grant  212 Taylor, Laurie  203, 208–9 Taylor Brodsky, Irene  245 teaching paradox, the  109 teenage  22, 39, 82–3, 89, 91, 141, 143–4, 148, 186, 199–200, 224 Terror, The  39 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The  141, 149–51 Therrien, Carl  207–9 Third International Eugenics Congress  56 Thrasher, Fredric M.  69, 93–4 Tilley, Carol  115 Tobe, Hooper  149–50 Tobia, Anthony  244 Today’s Cinema  75 Towlson, Jon  56 Trenchcoat Mafia  200 Trombetta, Jim  98 Truffin, Sherry  109 Trump, Donald, President  188, 233 Tsien, Jennifer  126 Universal  44–5, 94, 218 Unreal Tournament 3: Black Edition  213 US Senate Judiciary and Government Affairs Committee Hearings  197–8 US Supreme Court  186–7, 232, 236 Valier, Claire  138, 181 vampires  44, 49, 57, 131 van Elferen, Isabella  239 Variety  46, 49, 76 Varma, Devendra  53 Victor, Henry  53 Victorian values  36, 42, 44, 73, 84, 88, 160 video games



281

as gothic  185, 202–11 player identification  211–15 problem of genre  203, 205, 207–8, 210 Video Recordings Act, The (VRA)  28, 136, 139, 148, 162, 170–1, 175–6, 182–4, 249 Video Violence and Children  172, 183 Video Violence and the Protection of Children, The  135, 182, 197. See also The Newson Report Vietnam War, The  141 violence, representations of  15, 27, 29–40, 42, 48, 80, 82, 85, 101, 104, 107, 115, 119, 135, 141–3, 154, 156, 158, 161, 163, 167, 168, 171–3, 179, 182–3, 185, 188–90, 192–3, 196, 197, 199, 200, 204–7, 213–14, 221–2, 224–8, 230, 231, 233 Virginia Polytechnic Institute Shooting, The  224 Vizzard, Jack  40 Wall Street crash, the  40 Walpole, Horace  2, 156 Warshow, Robert  94 Wartella, Ellen  61, 85 weak minds argument, the  16–18, 42, 45, 57, 76 Webling, Peggy  49 Weier, Anissa  235–6, 245–6. See also Slender Man Stabbing Weird Fantasy  132 Wertham, Fredric  15, 92–4, 99, 112–17, 120–1, 123, 129–32, 176, 182, 190, 195 Whale, James  47–9, 77 Whitehouse, Mary  112, 138–41, 161, 165–6, 170–1, 176 White Zombie  52 Wilde, Oscar  250 Wildenberg, Harry I.  85 Williams, Dmitri  232–3 Wilson, Carl  126 Wingrove, Nigel  160, 164

282

witchcraft  26, 64, 106, 207, 246 witch-hunts  81, 117, 127 Witty, Paul.  87 Wood, Robin.  14, 99 World Health Organisation (WHO)  217 World of Warcraft  218 World War Two  82, 85, 89–90 X rating  142, 144, 147

INDEX

Yellow Wallpaper, The  101 Youth in crisis  89 Zarchi, Meir  155, 158, 159 Zipes, Jack  64 n.132, 239–40, 245 Zofloya; or, The Moor  1 Zombardo, Andrew  228, 229 zombies  80, 96, 98, 174, 194, 196, 201, 209, 214 zombified  196

283

284

285

286