Monday, August 13, 2012
If violent films are bad for some people, at least they've been around since the 50s on TV replays
Do violent movies really do affect unstable people?
I do recall when growing up that my own parents would let me
see anything with violence or murder as the main themes until I was a
teenager. I found out about all those “good
movies” (like the first “House of Wax”) at a summer day camp (despite being called "lazybones" by the "other boys")..
In the early 1960s, the
WTTG station (now Fox) aired a Saturday night series called “Chiller”,
starting at 11 PM. Everything was in
black and white then, and many of the
films followed a predictable pattern, o planting little clues in an ordinary
setting (like a school) until the monster shows up in the last twenty minutes. “Blood
of Dracula” and “The Werewolf” followed that pattern. (Remember the archtypical lady English literature professor in the Dracula movie, writing the names of classics on the board?) But a couple of the sci-fi ones were pretty
graphic, such as a couple of mountain climbing misadventures “The Crawling Eye”
and “Beast with a Million Eyes” (which used the scherzo of the Shostakovich 10th
Symphony, at the time only recently recorded at all). “Invasion of the Animal People” had a curious
mismatch of aliens in Scandanavia (foreshadowing “Troll Hunter”). And there was Roger Corman’s original “Little
Shop of Horrors” (with the famous scene in the dentist’s chair invoking the
Masochist and the Sadist), much funnier than the remake. A few were nasty in
spirit, such as “The Hypnotic Eye”.
Sure, don’t ever let anyone hypnotize you from a television set or stage
show (watch out for that “Prestige”).
And “Donovan’s Brain” probably caused (or capitalized on) the future
2008 financial meltdown.
In the early 50s, we even had Saturday morning “Movies for
Kids” with the serialized “The Clutching Hand” (which did invite copycats), and
“The Woolworth Mystery” which seems to have vanished into thin air.
There was plenty of stuff in the movies then (the late 50s to early 60s), re-aired on
television, that could have further perturbed the already unstable.
See review o Corman biography here Jan. 20, 2012.
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