BEWARE! CHILDREN AT PLAY:

A CARNIVALESQUE ANALYSIS OF THE

CHILD FROM EARLY SLAPSTICK TO THE NAZIFIED

CHILDREN OF MODERN HORROR

Submitted by Craig Alan Frederick Martin, BA (Hons), MA

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8596-6482

A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

March 2020

Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication, Screen and Cultural Studies Program The University of Melbourne Abstract

Monster child narratives often use a formula in which normative power relations between adults and children are temporarily inverted as the child outsmarts the adult, leading to a rupture in the social order. Where children are ordinarily subordinate to adults, this relationship is reversed as the monster child exerts dominance over their elders. Applying

Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory, this thesis argues that the monster child figure commonly thought of as a horror movie began its life on screen in early silent screen comedy. Through qualitative analysis of a range of case study from the silent era through to the emergence of horror-themed monster child films produced in the mid-

1950s, close comparative analysis of these texts is used to support the claim that the monster children in early silent comedies and modern horror films have a shared heritage. Such a claim warrants the question, why did the monster child migrate from comedy to horror? The contention put forward in this thesis is that during World War II dark representations of in Hollywood wartime films played a significant role in the child monster moving from comedy to horror. Although only a brief period, the cluster of Hitler Youth-themed films produced by Hollywood presented the Nazified child as a particularly heinous malfeasant. This new screen villain proved dynamic and durable, resurfacing after the war as a devious Aryan fiend in the horror-themed monster child films that began to emerge in cinema in the mid-1950s.

The monster child seen in contemporary horror is a combination of the narrative formula of early silent comedies featuring child playing pranks on unwary adults, and

2 the dark villainy of the Hitler Youth. In tracing the trajectory of the child monster from comedy to horror, the thesis proposes that its carnivalesque character altered during

World War II as came to be associated with the anti-carnivalesque Hitler Youth. The anti-carnivalesque superficially engages with of the carnival so that where carnival is dialogic, celebrating an explosion of heteroglossia that embraces culture at the margins, the anti-carnivalesque is monologic and seeks to centralise and contain culture within a singular unified worldview. Following the war, the monster child returned to a carnivalesque state by undermining the social order just as it had in early cinema, however the character had radically transformed during the war so that in the postwar period it sported the Nordic physical features of the Hitler Youth and exhibited a sadism that would increase as the monster child moved further into the horror . Yet even as the postwar monster child became noticeably Nazified with its blond hair and contempt for adult authority, the comic origins of the monster child in silent cinema were also legible in its return to carnivalesque narratives in which the monster child overturns the social order.

3 Declaration

i. The Thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD. ii. Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used. iii. The thesis does not exceed the word limit exclusive of table, maps, bibliographies,

figures, and appendices.

Craig Martin

4 Acknowledgements

I begin by thanking my supervisor Professor Angela Ndalianis for her good humour and undying enthusiasm for this project. Her canny insights fuelled by a breadth and depth of knowledge across an exhaustive array of fields is both impressive and intimidating.

Angela’s creativity and coaxing have been invaluable, but mostly I appreciate her friendship. On losing two family members during my candidacy, Angela provided support and sympathy but also stoked my will and determination to continue. I also want to thank my associate supervisor Dr Wendy Haslem for her consistently kind encouragement and provocative questions. To Anna Dzenis at La Trobe University I also offer my sincerest thanks for being that person who somehow knows exactly what to say at the right time. I am also deeply grateful to Drs Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Mark

Freeman, Eloise Ross, and Tyson Wils who have shaped me as a researcher and writer and given me their friendship and support. Thanks also to fellow cinephiles Lee Gambin,

Jarrod McEwan and Aaron Rourke, all of whom are just insane enough to have followed my research journey with interest and enthusiasm. I express love and gratitude for my longsuffering family whose patience and constancy seem to know no bounds, and to my longtime partner Robert Kosic, whose quiet kindness and endless support has been my rock. And finally, to my father Alan Carter Martin and my brother Philip Roy Martin, I dedicate this thesis. I miss you more with each passing day.

5 Table of Contents

ABSTRACT 2 DECLARATION 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS 6 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 8 TEMPLATE FOR LISTING THIRD PARTY COPYRIGHT MATERIAL IN THESIS PREFACE 9

INTRODUCTION 11 THE ROLE OF INNOCENCE 23 CRITICAL SUMMARY OF RELEVANT LITERATURE 30 THEORISING THE CARNIVALESQUE MONSTER CHILD 50 INVERSION AND UNCROWNING 54 MASKS AND PARODY 56 FESTIVAL OF THE GROTESQUE 59 CARNIVAL COMEDY AND HORROR 62 CARNIVAL SYNTAX IN THE MONSTER CHILD 65 METHODOLOGY 68 CHAPTER BREAKDOWN 70

CHAPTER ONE

EARLY FILM AND THE CARNIVAL CONVENTIONS OF CHILD MONSTROSITY 75 1.1 THE CARNIVALESQUE MONSTER CHILD IN EARLY CINEMA 78 1.2 L’ARROSEUR ARROSE AND CARNIVALESQUE CONVENTIONS 86 1.3 COMIC STRIP ORIGINS 92 1.4 HATS AND CARNIVALESQUE UNCROWNING 99 SUMMARY 110

CHAPTER TWO

ADAPTING THE AMERICAN BAD BOY BOOK 111 2.1 ALDRICH’S STORY OF A BAD BOY 118 2.2 TWAIN’S BAD BOYS 130 2.3 TOM AND SID SAWYER ON SCREEN 138 2.4 PECK’S BAD BOY 147 SUMMARY 163

6

CHAPTER THREE

DISNEY IN DEUTSCHLAND: PINOCCHIO AND EDUCATION FOR DEATH 165 3.1 : NAZI SYMPATHISER? 178 3.2 PINOCCHIO, & PLEASURE ISLAND 186 3.3 AND ROTHENBERG 197 3.5 EDUCATION FOR DEATH 206 SUMMARY 218

CHAPTER FOUR

HOLLYWOOD’S HITLER YOUTH AND TOMORROW THE WORLD 220 4.1 TOMORROW THE WORLD FROM STAGE TO SCREEN 231 4.2 EMIL BRUCKNER: THE MOST MONSTROUS HITLER YOUTH 242 4.2 EMIL, ASSIMILATION AND THE AMERICAN MELTING POT 251 SUMMARY 274

CHAPTER FIVE

THE CONTINUITY OF THE MONSTER CHILD: POSTWAR HITLER YOUTH HORROR AND 276 5.1 VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED 278 5.2 THE BAD SEED AND THE MONSTER CHILD FILM 289 5.3 THE INFLUENCE OF EMIL BRUCKNER AND TOMORROW THE WORLD 300 5.4 AND THE ENDURING PRESENCE OF HITLER YOUTH 313 5.5 HITLER YOUTH RHODA 319 5.6 THE CARNIVALESQUE HORROR OF THE BAD SEED 332 SUMMARY 338

CONCLUSION 340

WORKS CITED 347

FILMS CITED 387

APPENDIX A: HITLER YOUTH IN WARTIME HOLLYWOOD 395 I THE MAN I MARRIED (1940) 395 II FOUR SONS (1940) 401 III HITLER’S CHILDREN (1943) 404 IV THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER (1944) 411 V THEY LIVE IN FEAR (1944) 416

APPENDIX B: LIST OF FILMS FEATURING MONSTER CHILDREN 422

7 List of Illustrations

FIGURE 1 CHRISTOPH. “UN ARROSEUR PUBLIC”, LE PETIT FRANÇAIS ILLUSTRÉ, NO.23, 3 AUG. 1989. 94

FIGURE 2 AUZOLLE. CINÉMATOGRAPHE LUMIÈRE POSTER, 1896. 94

FIGURE 3 GIBEY. “FAIT DIVERS” LA CARICATURE, 2 JUNE 1888. 99

FIGURE 4 FIRESIDE DANCE IN THE STOLEN GUY (FITZHAMON 1955) 126

FIGURE 5 FIRESIDE DANCE IN LORD OF THE FLIES (BROOK 1963) 126

FIGURE 6 LAMPWICK’S SHADOW IN PINOCCHIO (LUSKE 1940) 196

FIGURE 7 LAMPWICK’S SHADOW IN PINOCCHIO (LUSKE 1940) 196

FIGURE 8 ROTHENBERG OB DER TAUBER 201

FIGURE 9 NAZI OFFICER IN EDUCATION FOR DEATH (GERNONIMI 1943) 212

FIGURE 10 -LIKE GOON IN PINOCCHIO (LUSKE 1940) 212

FIGURE 11 NAZI OFFICER SHADOW IN EDUCATION FOR DEATH (GERNONIMI 1943) 213

FIGURE 12 SHADOW OF THE COACHMAN IN PINOCCHIO (LUSKE 1940) 213

FIGURE 13 INNOCENT HANS IN EDUCATION FOR DEATH (GERNONIMI 1943) 214

FIGURE 14 NAZIFIED HANS IN EDUCATION FOR DEATH (GERNONIMI 1943) 214

FIGURE 15 WINDOW IN PINOCCHIO (LUSKE 1940) 215

FIGURE 16 SHATTERED WINDOW IN EDUCATION FOR DEATH (GERNONIMI 1943) 215

FIGURE 17 HANS THE NAZI SLAVE IN EDUCATION FOR DEATH (GERNONIMI 1943) 216

FIGURE 18 FRONT AND BACK COVER OF “TOMORROW THE WORLD” IN NO. 10 EDITION OF COMIC CAVALCADE. 241

FIGURE 19 VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (RILLA 1960) POSTER 287

FIGURE 20 RHODA’S CONTEMPT FOR MRS BREEDLOVE IN THE BAD SEED (LEROY 1956) 326

8 Template for Listing Third Party Copyright Material in Thesis Preface

Citation Information for Third party copyright material Location Permission of item in granted thesis Y/N p. 94 N Christophe, “Un arroseur public”, Le Petit Français Illustré, n°23, 1ère année, 3 août 1889. http://www.topfferiana.fr/2010/10/arroseurs-arroses/ p. 94 N Cinematographe Lumiere-COPY (0000-2345-COPY) by Marcellin Auzolle. https://fordimages.archivea.com/perl/frameAndServeImage.pl?imageID=21 3146&imageWidth=350 p. 99 N A. Sorel, « Fait divers », La Caricature, n° 376, 12 1887. Source: Gallica.bnf.fr http://www.topfferiana.fr/2010/10/arroseurs-arroses/ p. 126 N The Stolen Guy. Directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, 1900, British Film Institute. p. 126 N Lord of the Flies. Directed by Peter Brook 1963), DVD, Umbrella Entertainment, 2018. p. 196 N Pinocchio. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Lusky, Walt Disney Production, 1940. DVD. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009. p. 196 N Pinocchio. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Lusky, Walt Disney Production, 1940. DVD. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009 p. 201 N “Plönlein with Kobolzeller Steige and Spitalgasse.” Photograph by Berthold Werner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothenburg_ob_der_Tauber#/media/File:Rot henburg_BW_4.JPG. Public Domain. p. 212 N “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.” YouTube, uploaded by A War to be Won, 16 Apr. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vLrTNKk89Q. p. 212 N Pinocchio. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Lusky, Walt Disney Production, 1940. DVD. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009 p. 213 N “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.” YouTube, uploaded by A War to be Won, 16 Apr. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vLrTNKk89Q. p. 213 N Pinocchio. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Lusky, Walt Disney

9 Production, 1940. DVD. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009 p. 214 N “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.” YouTube, uploaded by A War to be Won, 16 Apr. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vLrTNKk89Q. p. 214 N “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.” YouTube, uploaded by A War to be Won, 16 Apr. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vLrTNKk89Q. p. 215 N “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.” YouTube, uploaded by A War to be Won, 16 Apr. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vLrTNKk89Q. p. 215 N Pinocchio. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Lusky, Walt Disney Production, 1940. DVD. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009 p. 216 N “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.” YouTube, uploaded by A War to be Won, 16 Apr. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vLrTNKk89Q. Comic Cavalcade “Tomorrow the World” [Special Reprint Edition] p. 241 N https://www.comics.org/issue/815638/. p. 287 N “Village of the Damned US Theatre Release Poster.” Wikipedia, 5 Apr. 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_the_Damned_(1960_film)#/media /File:Villageofthedamned1960.jpg. Fair Use. p. 326 N The Bad Seed. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros., 1956. DVD. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2004.

10 INTRODUCTION

In contemporary popular culture the monster child is understood to be a character that resides predominantly in the horror genre where it operates as a threat to normative notions of childhood innocence, undermining adult authority and rupturing the social order. The central claim of this thesis is that the monster child character has been present on screen since the inception of cinema and not always as a denizen of horror. In early cinema, monster children the form of impish boys and girls who played simple pranks on unsuspecting adults. The actions of these children undermined notions of childhood innocence by inverting normative power relations between adults and children, depicting a short-lived rupture in the social order. Wearing performative masks of innocence that mock adult conceptions of childhood while engineering situations that simultaneously elevate the power of children and debase adult authority—and performing it all with a twinkle in their eyes—monster children are carnivalesque characters that take pleasure in turning the world upside down. Crucially, the carnivalesque core of the monster child is present in both the early comedies of bad boys and girls as well as the that has seen the monstrous child character develop into one of the most popular, enduring and lucrative of all horror film monsters. To make plain the monster child’s shift from comedy to horror, this thesis posits that anti-Nazi films featuring Hitler Youth produced by Hollywood during World War II added a new dynamic to the monster child formula that irreversibly changed how they are represented on screen. Fusing monstrosity with Nazism, this change paved the way for the monster child’s entry into the horror film in the postwar period.

11 The monster child is widely recognised as a staple of the horror genre and scholarly interest in the character has historically approached it from this singular vantage point.

This thesis contends that the monster child is at its core a comic character whose roots lie in early slapstick in which the child sets up tricks and traps that catch out unwary adults.

It took the Second World War and its aftermath to propel the monster child towards horror after the character came to be associated with the Hitler Youth in Hollywood wartime propaganda films like Hitler’s Children (Dmytryk 1943) and Education for

Death: The Making of the Nazi (Geronimi 1943). Yet the bad boys and girls of early comedy also continue to make their presence felt in the monster child horror film, demonstrating that comic and horrific incarnations of monstrosity remain compatible in their shared ancestry and common desire to overturn the established order. A characteristic central to both early comedic and modern horror iterations of the monster child film is a carnivalesque logic that turns the world upside down by inverting normative power relations between adults and children. Despite moving from comedy to horror, the monster child narrative has maintained the carnivalesque logic that depicts adults as victims of the child’s ludic schemes. This thesis makes use of carnival theory as outlined particularly in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work in order to show how monster children in horror display the same impulse for reversing hierarchies of power as their silent cinema predecessors.

The early silent comedies explored in this thesis established a narrative formula that has such an elementary structure that it has endured for decades. The first monster child films produced after World War II are credited with establishing the tropes found in later

12 horror films featuring monstrous children. Yet these postwar films do not originate so much as continue well-established conventions. While they maintain the carnivalesque core established in early silent films, they also feature diabolical Aryan children that this thesis argues are a corollary to the propaganda films made by Hollywood during the war in which Hitler Youth and Nazified children are portrayed as heinous . Despite

Allied victory, films continued to apply Hitler Youth iconography after the war so that monstrosity and Nazism remained aligned even though Nazism was no longer an overt presence in monster child films. This effectively pushed the postwar monster child towards the horror genre. Among the first generation of postwar monster child films that exhibit traces of Nazism are The Bad Seed (LeRoy 1956), The Gamma People (Gilling

1956), The Space Children (Arnold 1958), Village of the Damned (Rilla 1960), These Are the Damned (Losey 1961) and Lord of the Flies (Brook 1963). All of these films contain children whose Aryan appearance and subversive behaviour threaten adult authority and undermine the social order. Yet even as the monster child moved into horror via Hitler

Youth iconography, it maintained the narrative formula established in early . This can still be seen at work in contemporary horror cinema in films like The

Children (Shankland 2008) in which the young offspring kill their parents on Christmas

Day by feigning excessive helplessness and vulnerability while leading their unsuspecting adult victims into various improvised homemade death traps. Similarly, in

Makinov’s 2012 film Come Out and Play—a remake of Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s 1976 horror film Who Can Kill a Child? (¿Quién puede matar a un niño?)—an American couple visiting a remote Mexican island discover that following a carnival the children on the island ran from house to house laughing and dancing as they murder all the adults. In

13 both films, children begin their massacre of grown-ups during or soon after a festive event, suggesting that carnivalesque activities in monster child films operate as a catalyst for children overturning the social order in line with Bakhtinian carnival theory.

This thesis analyses a range of films from 1895 to 1960, tracing the origins of the monster child in nineteenth century literary texts that directly influenced the work of early filmmakers. An appendix to this thesis includes a comprehensive list of monster child films from 1895 to 2020 that charts both the changing face of the monster child over time while pointing to a shared lineage between early comedy and later horror starting with the

Lumières’ 1895 film L’Arroseur arrosé that, it is argued herein, represents the first monster child on screen. Subsequent chapters look at wartime films including Disney’s

Pinocchio (1940) and the Hitler Youth film Tomorrow the World (Fenton 1944) and chart their lasting influence on postwar monster child horror cinema. In the final chapter, two postwar films—The Bad Seed (LeRoy 1956) and Village of the Damned (Rilla 1960)— together highlight the influence of the Hitler Youth while also signifying an important shift in representations of monster children as a viable subject of horror. Over time references to Nazism and Hitler Youth in monster child horror films has became less overt, yet the shadow of Nazism as a signifier of evil continues to linger in these films. So too, the early silent films featuring bad boys and girls as comic characters continue to influence monster child narratives in contemporary horror.

Throughout this thesis the term “monster child” is applied to a range of films that present different yet arguably compatible representations of children over time that each in their

14 own way presents a challenge to normative hierarchies of power that subjugate children.

Yet before discussing the monster child in greater depth, some definitions are in order. In this section the terms “monster” and “child” both require clarification, not least because they are seemingly so contradictory.

Within contemporary cinema, representations of children who threaten the established order are most commonly categorised as horror films, even though many examples of these children, like Bart Simpson and Stewie Griffin,1 clearly do not belong to the genre.

This is made evident in Karen J. Renner’s edited collection The Evil Child in Literature,

Film and Popular Culture which certainly includes essays on monster children in horror but also one essay by Holly Blackford on the character of Tom Riddle in J.K. Rowling’s

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and another by Catherine Fowler and Rebecca

Kambuta on coaching parents in effective childrearing techniques in the British reality

TV series Supernanny. Clearly, at least according to Renner’s definition of the “evil child”, examples in popular culture extend well beyond the horror genre. In referring to these children as “evil”, Renner defers to the problematic nomenclature used in popular culture to describe juvenile terrors. She notes two popular examples that clearly demonstrate the common tendency to group together these two words:

The International Movie Database, .com, lets you to search for films using

the keyword of “evil child,” and allows you to cater your “Storylines”

taste preferences to announce that you ‘‘often’’ watch movies that feature “evil

kids”. (4)

1 Bart Simpson is the recalcitrant prepubescent male delinquent in the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons (1989-) and Stevie Griffin is a megalomaniacal infant in diapers wielding a ray gun in the animated sitcom The Family Guy (1999-).

15 Despite consistently using “evil child” in her work, she nevertheless points out that it is

“an inadequate catch-all phrase” because “both parts of the term are problematic” (5) and explains her usage of it. Beginning with “child”, Renner alludes to myriad contradictory definitions attached to the legal ages for the rights afforded adults that mark “the boundary between adult and child” (84), such as voting, drinking, or sexual consent, and declares the child to be “anyone under the age of 18” (5), even though almost all of the examples she discusses are of children that have not yet reached puberty.2

My own definition of the child makes use of the OED Online that among the various meanings of the word, describes a child as “a young person of either sex, usually one below the age of puberty; a boy or girl”. In terms of age, the definition of the child used in this thesis is a young person aged anywhere between infancy and 12 years of age, being the average age during which childhood ends and puberty commences. In his textbook on childhood development John Santrock outlines the periods of development from infancy to adulthood, noting that the period known as “late childhood”

(20) ends at around 10 to 12 years of age when adolescence begins.

At the end of their “tweens”3 most 12 year olds are completing their primary/elementary education and preparing to enter their first year of high school in which, ready or not, they are inducted into teen life. While this age selection seems arbitrary (though no less

2 Among the films Renner mentions are: (Clayton 1961), Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski 1968), The Exorcist, It’s Alive (Cohen 1974), The Omen, Demon Seed (Cammell 1977), Bloody Birthday (Hunt 1981), (Lambert 1989), The Children (Shankland 2008), Home Movie (Denham 2008), (Kiersch 1984) and The Plague (Masonberg 2006). Of these films, all except the final two contain children that have not yet entered puberty. 3 Ivgild Kvale Sørenssen describes “tween” as “a marketing term usually used to indicate children aged 8- 12, an age-group thought of as being ‘in-between’ children and teenagers” (177).

16 so than 18), in surveying monster child films I have tried to avoid those involving teenagers because adolescents in film are typically concerned with a different set of problems to those of a younger age. One does not, for instance, associate childhood innocence, which is so often defined as ignorance about sex and sexuality, with the teenager. Pointing out the difference between “youth culture”, which is concerned largely with teens and young adults, and “child culture”, which refers to minors still in their first decade of life, Henry Jenkins observes that where we commonly “‘celebrate’ the

‘resistant’ behaviours of youth cultures as subversive, the ‘misbehaviour’ of children is almost never understood in similar terms” (2). Timothy Shary states that adolescence and the teen years represent “a meaningful passage from childhood to adulthood” (2) so that while teens are not yet adults they are also no longer children. Dating, sex, peer pressure, employment, increased independence, and issues pertaining to life in high school are most often the activities occupying teenagers in films (and daily life). During adolescence, as Santrock notes, “more and more time is spent outside of the family” (20) and this is reflected in teen-aged films whereas narratives focusing on children under 12 are still very much focused on the family and home life. There is, of course, crossover between child monsters in film and teen rebels, which is the frustration of youth about feeling powerless, excluded and denied self-agency. However, whereas the child is prevented from engaging in activities for their own good because they are defined by their lack of agency, or what Michael Wyness refers to as a “dependent incompetent”

(20), and thus requires adult supervision and protection, the teenager is commonly constrained not so much for their own good but because they are categorised as a legal minor and prevented by law. Yet in monster child films where younger children tend to

17 hide behind their age to disguise themselves as innocent and incapable of violent crime, teens in film generally seek to appear more mature than they are.

On the subject of evil as it is applied to children, Renner expresses her discomfort at using the term and argues that evil connotes a supernatural force external to the child, who is a vessel of innocence. Accordingly, she argues that evil children “don’t actually exist” and that “the history of evil child narratives has largely been a series of efforts to confirm the essential innocence of children” (Evil Children 7). Such a statement reflects a similar view expressed by Merlock Jackson who contends that evil children are allegorical in that their purpose is to provide a “filmic manifestation of much larger social and political problems” (149) and therefore appear during times of crisis, such as the moral panic surrounding juvenile delinquency in the 1950s. One might conclude then that the evil ascribed to childhood in horror cinema has less to do with the child as such than it is an attempt to isolate and understand the problem of evil as central to the human condition. As Renner puts it, “if we can understand why children go astray, perhaps we can remedy the problems of evil in the adult world” (8). Yet evil according to Lance

Morrow is by definition incomprehensible and “aspires to a state of perfect meaninglessness” (120), intimating that once we achieve comprehension of that which we deem evil, evilness becomes demystified and can no longer exist.

Discussing the use of evil as it is applied to actual child felons, Terry Eagleton observes how in the case of John Venables and Robert Thompson, the two 10-year-old Liverpool boys who abducted and murdered 2-year-old James Bulger in 1993, evil was invoked by

18 the media to dehumanise the boys and characterise them as born bad. This was done,

Eagleton asserts, in order to guard against “those who might appeal to social conditions in seeking to understand why they did what they did” (2). By declaring the boys evil, they were thoroughly demonised, but more importantly they were held fully responsible for their crime and prosecuted as adults while society was able to protect itself from having to answer difficult unwanted questions about why the crime happened in the first place.

Chris Jenks likewise observes how the notion of evil is used to evict the offending child from childhood in order to preserve myths of innocence. Referring to this as “conceptual eviction”, he explains how “such expulsion facilitates the restoration of the moral order and re-establishes the discourse of childhood in its traditional ideological form” (128).

The notion of evil thus serves a crucial purpose in protecting and preserving the metanarrative of childhood innocence and providing a place with which to evict children that do not conform to this ideal.

Jenny Kitzinger takes up the subject of the eviction of children from childhood by insisting that the concept of childhood innocence is a weapon wielded against children by the social order to negate their voice and self-agency. She argues that the concept of childhood innocence “should be rejected because it is an ideology used to deny children access to knowledge and power” (80). The myth of childhood innocence thus becomes an impenetrable construct that shares Morrow’s definition of evil as aspiring to “a state of perfect meaningless”, serving only to confine the child to a narrow set of behaviours that meet the needs not of the child but of the social order. Locke’s construction of the child as an empty slate, “void of all character, without any ideas” (51) becomes essential here

19 as innocence constructs the child as voiceless and incompetent, rendering him or her an

“empty signifier, or, rather, an infinitely plural one” (Kincaid Child-Loving 347) that serves adult agendas.

Finding “evil” a loaded and misleading concept to apply to children, several scholars writing on children in horror have sought alternative designations in an effort to more accurately describe the nature of the child that transgresses the innocent ideal. Providing some of the earliest critical analysis of the monster child, Robin Wood’s seminal 1979 essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” avoids “evil” altogether, preferring instead the appellations “terrible child” (17) and the “child-monster” (26). In the introduction to their edited collection Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors, Markus Bohlmann and Sean Moreland stipulate their preference for using the term “monstrous” as it is applied throughout their book and advise that the term “should not be conflated with the moral principal of evil” (17).

Likewise avoiding evil, Andrew Scahill refers to the children in his book-length study as

“revolting” to reflect dual elements of queer monstrosity in children: their corporeal grotesquery as well as their behavioural transgressions against the social order. Jessica

Balanzategui’s recent book on children in horror cinema refers to them as “uncanny others”, drawing on Freud’s concept of the uncanny as an “unsettling cognitive dissonance” (12) because of how their representations contest “normalized ideologies of childhood by interrogating the child’s associations with both personal and historical time”

(9). And situating the liminal child between innocence and evil, Monica Flegel and

Christopher Parkes propose a midpoint they call the “cruel child” whose sanctioned

20 brutality prepares the child for the barbarity of civilised society and to “engage in power relations when they mature into full personhood” (10). Evil clearly lacks the attempts at exactitude that these other definitions of the unruly child seek to enact.

For this thesis, monstrosity serves as a particularly useful term as it can be applied to more than just horror. Where the “evil child” evokes inexplicable images of children terror, the “monster child” focuses on alterity and is a broader, more inclusive term unimpeded by the moral weight and essentialism of evil that seeks to inflict harm for its own sake. In addition, the claim that the child might be evil operates as a buffer by the established order against the potential threat that children pose to the continuity of the social order from generation to generation. Irrespective of whether the monster child inflicts harm or not, it represents a threat to the social order simply because, as Jeffrey

Jerome Cohen affirms, it “refuses easy categorization” (6). As such, the monster challenges ideas concerning differentness and the other, existing as a contradiction to assumptions about the order of things. Qualifying the monster’s resistance to classification, Foucault observes that monstrosity “brings with it natural transgression, the mixture of species, and the blurring of limits and characteristics” (65) within both culture and nature. This idea of mixed species opens up the possibility of viewing the monster child as carnivalesque mésalliance, such as that described by William Paul as “a disturbing combination of precociousness and regression” (283). Noel Carroll points out that monsters appear across a variety of but states that in horror, they specifically represent “disturbances of the natural order” (16), a point similarly elucidated by Wood who, concerned with the problem of constructing normality as natural, presents what he

21 refers to as the “basic formula” of the horror film whereby “normality is threatened by the

Monster” where the monster is necessarily protean: “changing from period to period as society’s basic fears clothe themselves in fashionable and immediately accessible garments” (14).

22 The Role of Innocence

One of the fundamental motifs of the monster child film is the subversion of adult power and control. As carnivalesque texts, the monster child film dramatises this rebellion as the inversion of power relations between adults and children as adults are cast down while children temporarily usurp control. Childhood innocence plays an important part in these films as it is the controlling device used by adults against children to keep them subordinated. In this section the history of childhood innocence as a social construct is explored before looking at the carnivalesque and its role in empowering the child against oppressive forces of innocence.

In their essay on child monstrosity, Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie begin by asserting that in the 21st century the innocent child is a figure of the past. “Gone is the innocence of childhood”, they declare, “enshrined in some imagined Golden Age” (vii). They then ponder whether we have entered “the age of the monster child” or whether “we have just discovered it anew” (vii). Implied in Bacon and Ruickbie’s introduction is an either/or dichotomy based on an assumption that the monster child exists separate from the innocent child. However, the two constructions of the child are co-dependent: alongside the idyllic image of childhood there has simultaneously existed the threat of the inadequately socialised child ever ready to tear down the established order. Dani

Cavallaro highlights the duality of children in gothic texts that play upon the child’s uncanny ambivalence. “On the one hand”, she states, “children are associated with innocence, simplicity, and a lack of worldly experience” and on the other “a threat to the

23 fabric of society” (135). Patricia Holland notes that children “do not respect established boundaries” and “introduce disorder and pollution into a comfortable everyday life” (16).

She goes on to describe how “they roll in mud, have uncontrollable tantrums, cover themselves in paint and bloody their hands and knees in falls and fights. Even worse, they spill out onto the streets, where their behaviour is threatening and sometimes dangerous”

(16). Stephani Etheridge Woodson remarks that, “if a child is unable or unwilling to conform to expected socialization parameters, that child is labelled deviant or poorly socialized. An ‘uncontained’ child then becomes a ‘dangerous child’” (34). In the discourse of childhood, children are framed as monsters when they do not conform to established conventions of innocence that frame adults as all-powerful and knowing and children as weak, vulnerable and ignorant.

The construction of childhood as a time of innocence began to take hold in the eighteenth century during what Hugh Cunningham calls “the long-term secularization of attitudes towards childhood and children” (56).4 This period saw a widespread falling away of belief in original sin that resulted in the transformation of children from “corrupt and innately evil to being angels, messengers from God to a tired adult world” (58). This secularisation began with Europe’s ruling classes in the late seventeenth century before spreading to the bourgeoisie. During the eighteenth century philosophers John Locke and

Jean Jacques Rousseau developed theories on child education that would become highly influential. Both emphasise that the successful creation of the adult needed to begin in childhood. For Locke, the child’s mind is “void of all character, without any ideas” (51).

4 Cunningham explains that this secularization was not a case of people abandoning Christianity, rather “for many their Christianity narrowed in its range, became less all-embracing as an explanation for natural phenomena and a guide to action” (58)

24 His conception of the child as a so-called “blank slate” required filling according to the demands of society. Christoph Houswitschka observes how, “Locke favours the idea of uncorrupted children, but in his understanding it is rather the filling of a void with specific content that transforms the child into a morally responsible and moral adult”

(84).

Although influenced by Locke, Rousseau emphasises the natural development of the child and promotes a sentimental view that aligns childhood with nature while also empowering the child towards self-realisation, suggesting its joys and pleasures should be embraced. In Émile he urges his readers to remember a time, “when laughter was ever on the lips and when the heart was ever at peace” (50) and promotes fostering the child’s development through independence, individuality and freedom. Insisting that “the mind should be left undisturbed until the faculties have developed”, Rousseau discourages

“teaching virtue or truth” at too early an age and instead endorses in “preserving the heart from vice and the spirit from error” (68). He theorises that left to their own devices children have the capacity to continually improve society, making them, as

Houswitschka puts it, “the medium of communicating the ideological projections of freedom and thus proposing a purpose to the modem experience of perpetual social change” (88).

Extolling the virtues of childhood innocence while expressing sentiments that recall both

Locke and Rousseau, nineteenth-century Romantic poet William Wordsworth masterfully moves children from the social periphery and repositions them as key cultural figures,

25 epitomised in his 1802 poem The Rainbow in which he describes how “the child is father of the man” (528). For Wordsworth, the innocence of childhood represents the moral apex of the human condition that he promoted as the condition towards which adults should strive.

The Romantic construction of childhood innocence represents the time in life when the individual is closest to God and most in harmony with creation. “At its heart,” states

Cunningham, Romanticism held “a reverence for, and a sanctification of childhood” (72) that during the Victorian era began to ossify as it was replaced by a desire to fetishise and control the child. Drawing on Peter Coveney’s influential literary study The Image of

Childhood, Ellen Pifer points out how the positivity of childhood innocence inaugurated by the Romantics that celebrated the power and utopic potential of human creativity, over time came to be polluted by what Coveney calls “debased-romantic, Victorian concepts of innocence” (qtd in 46). Thus, Pifer notes, as “emphasis shifted away from creative celebration to ‘negative assertion,’ the romantic image of childhood became associated not with renewal but with moral and psychological retreat” (46). According to Marina

Warner, even though innocence is “constantly tested by experience, and assailed by doubts”, as the dominant social construct, it has nevertheless “still continued to grow”

(45). While innocence is not the only way that childhood has been constructed, it continues to be the most popular, or as sociologist Chris Jenks puts it, this “one particular vision of childhood has been and continues to be exported as ‘correct childhood’” (122).

Jenks refers to a “plurality of childhoods” that exist across classes, ages, gender, disability, ethnicity and environment, but nevertheless asserts that “despite these different

26 social experiences, children themselves remain enmeshed in the forced commonality of an ideological discourse of childhood” (122) that compels, monitors and restricts the child’s freedom and self-agency. He states that “routinely, children find their daily lives shaped by statutes regulating the pacing and placing of their experience” (122) based upon assumptions about the child’s lack of capacity.

Today the protection of innocence is so prevalent that the child’s experiences are akin to

Foucault’s Panopticon5 as every space and movement is perpetually monitored and regulated. In his discussion of the diminishing liberties of contemporary childhood,

Mayer Hillman sees clear parallels between the hypersurveillance and excessive reductions of the child’s personal freedom—putatively for their own safety—and the experiences of prison inmates. He points out that like children, prisoners have food, shelter, recreation, and clean clothes, “but most of their waking hours are spent under surveillance and they are not allowed out on their own” (64). Michael Wyness likewise observes “the degree of autonomy that children are granted—the residual space of the playground and park—has now all but disappeared” (19), affirming how traditional spaces that have long been associated with children’s independent play are today subject to intense surveillance.

One of the most prominent critics of childhood innocence is James Kincaid who argues that while the Romantic construction of the innocent child emphasises positive attributes of childhood, much more are its negatives. He writes:

5 See Michel Foucault’s chapter on the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, p.200-228.

27 This new thing, the modern child, was deployed as a political and philosophical

agent, a weapon to assault what had been taken as virtues: adulthood,

sophistication, rational moderation, judicious adjustment to the ways of the

world. The child was used to deny these virtues, to eliminate them and substitute

in their place a set of inversions: innocence, purity, emptiness. Childhood to a

large extent came to be in our culture a coordinate set of have nots, of negations:

the child was the one who did not have. (15)

Further commenting on how innocence is weaponised against the child, Kincaid adds that the burden of innocence “comes at the child as a denial of a whole host of capacities” or what he calls “an emptying out” (73) that allows adults to assume control and putatively speak and act on behalf of the child, as well as project onto the child their own needs, desires and fantasies. The suggestion here is that contemporary childhood not only constructs the innocent child according to a perversion of Locke’s blank slate conception, it demands that in order for innocence to be preserved, the child must ideally remain blank. A signifier of innocence, blankness comes to be equated with being unadulterated.

One problem with this however is that a great burden is placed upon children and the institution of childhood, as well as the adults entrusted with policing children so that not only is there the expectation to protect innocence, paradoxically they are also expected to safeguard and ensure the continuity of the social order.

Innocence is a critical component of the monster child film because the child uses it as a mask to hide in plain sight while the adult is rendered innocent by their determined faith in the myth of childhood innocence. As Debbie Olson points out, adult dependence on

28 innocence is so strong that they will always “stubbornly deny innocence is a mask”

(Olsen 297). is one of the ways in which monster child films operate as carnivalesque texts in which the normative hierarchy of power between adults and children is inverted and the social order is thrown into disarray. Following the review of existing critical literature on the monster child in film in the next section, elements of the carnivalesque as it relates to this thesis will be discussed in detail, with particular attention devoted to ritual inversion, crowning and uncrowning, masking and grotesquery, and how these are used in the monster child film.

29 Critical Summary of Relevant Literature

This thesis argues that the monster child has been an on screen presence in cinema since its inception when, for much of its first twenty years, became an important comic character whose influence can also be seen at work in contemporary monster child horror.

Viewed alongside the modern horror film, the early silent comedies known as bad boy films share distinct syntactic elements with their later horror offspring, demonstrating a clear lineage. In both early silent cinema and modern horror, the monster child can be understood to be a carnivalesque character that deviously works to undermine the established order and invert power relations between adults and children.

Scholarly accounts of the monster child figure and its place within the history of cinema consistently tend to focus on the horror film, neglecting representations from other genres. As such, most accounts of the origins of the monster child in cinema invariably begin in the postwar period with Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1956), which is commonly discussed as a horror movie text. Although LeRoy’s film is a and not strictly horror, narrative and stylistic elements clearly evoke the aesthetics of horror.

Drawing on the work of Robin Wood, Jessica Balanzategui argues in her 2018 book that

The Bad Seed established the monster child as “the vehicle through which a generic shift from family melodrama to horror plays out” (10). The monster child has not always been the figure of horror that it is thought of today as belonging exclusively to this genre, fitting with Philippe Ariès’ assertion that childhood is a mutable concept. Drawing on

Ariès’ assertion, Chris Jenks highlights the constructed nature of childhood, pointing out

30 how “children have not always existed in the way we now know them, they have not always been the same thing” (63). The following section provides an overview of the existing critical literature on the monster child that demonstrates the necessity for this study, which attempts to reinstate the importance of child monstrosity as a vehicle of comedy in early cinema and its significance in establishing the carnivalesque logic within its narrative that made possible its effortless crossover into horror. Following on from the review of existing literature the thesis will focus on the carnivalesque essence of the monster child figure, making use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the key characteristics of carnival as outlined in his studies Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics and Rabelais and

His World.

The central question driving this thesis asks why the monster child character migrated from comedy to horror and posits that this change came about in part as a response to

Hollywood wartime representations of the Hitler Youth as sinister child monsters who threaten America’s values and way of life. A number of scholars have acknowledged the presence of Hitler Youth iconography in monster child horror films, however there has yet to be an in-depth study focussing specifically on the historical and cultural significance of the Hitler Youth in shaping the monster child in the horror genre. Neither has there been any in-depth study of early silent bad boy cinema that makes an attempt to explore the relationship between the child characters of early slapstick with their descendants in horror. The review of critical literature presented below is particularly concerned with works focusing on the monster child in film that make mention of the

Hitler Youth as part of their discourse, however a general overview of significant texts is

31 included, following chronologic and thematic lines.

In his 2010 essay “Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, Andrew Scahill opens with a brief overview of scholarly work on the monster child film and concludes that it “has yet to be given substantial treatment in critical accounts of the genre” (39). Since 2010 critical interest in the monster child has rapidly increased as emerging film scholars, particularly those with an interest in horror, have turned their attention to this previously neglected field. While research into monster child films in previous decades has generally been spasmodic, the mid-1980s and early 1990s saw a concentration of essays and book chapters on the topic. Prior to this the monster child received almost no critical attention.

One exception comes from the 1955 essay collection Childhood in Contemporary

Cultures edited by Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein. In her essay “The Image of the Child in Contemporary Films” Wolfenstein looks at contrasting cultural representations of adult/child relations in Italian, French, British and American cinema.

While most of the films she cites provide examples of heroic children that remain fundamentally innocent in their experience of adulthood viewed from below, she acknowledges that “malign children sometimes appear in films” but insists that “they are rare” (291). Such a view clearly overlooks the hundreds of bad boy films from the early silent era that will be explored in the first two chapters of this thesis, or the nasty milksops common in 1930s cinema whose interwar malice is attributed to permissive mothers and absent fathers, but are unfortunately beyond the scope of this thesis. Among the examples of “malign children” included in her notes is Leslie Fenton’s 1944 Tomorrow the World, in which “a child of Nazi upbringing” is portrayed as “a

32 wicked, though eventually redeemed, boy” (291). Chapter four of this thesis performs a close textual reading of Tomorrow the World and calls into question Emil Bruckner’s supposed redemption.

In 1973 Robin Wood published his essay “The American Family Comedy: From Meet

Me in St Louis to The Chainsaw Massacre” that has particular relevance to this thesis in its approach to comedy and horror as belonging on a continuum. Wood locates within Minnelli’s film repressed tensions within the family that manage to fuel comedy before the war but increasingly after the war these familial same tensions become the source of graphic violence in the horror genre. According to Wood the repression inherent within the American nuclear family make horror the more fitting home to explore these tensions. Exploring the monster child’s shift from comedy to horror, Wood finds important commonalities between Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the Christmas scene in Minnelli’s film in which Tootie’s spills over into violence when she redirects the anger she feels for her parents—and her own impotence—onto the family of snow people in the yard. He locates similarities to the scene in Romero’s film when girl Karen Cooper (Kyra Schon) eats her father and mutilates her mother with a builder’s trowel. Wood includes his comparison of Minnelli and Romero’s films in his subsequent essay “Images of Children” in his 1976 collection, Personal Views:

Explorations in Film that begins with an analysis of changing portrayals of children in postwar . He begins with Rossellini’s , Year Zero (1948) and its representation of the corruption of innocence as ex-Hitler Youth Edmund demonstrates the extent of the monstrousness of Nazi and its impact on

33 the Hitler Youth generation when he murders his own ailing father, believing it to be the right pragmatic decision for his family. Yet Edmund’s sudden unceremonious suicide indicates the depth of his grief, despair and alienation, prompting Wood to comment that,

“it is difficult to imagine a more desolate culmination” (156). A brief section on Fellini’s

Poe-themed Toby Dammit (1968) 6 compares the director’s depiction of attempting to reach out for a lost idyllic childhood represented as the ‘Umbrian Angel’ in

La Dolce Vita (1960) that in Toby Dammit turns into a grimacing representation of death.

Fellini’s representation of the changing face of childhood in his films mirrors wider changes taking place in depictions of children during the second half of the that, as we will see, later theorists also come to recognise.

Most celebrated among Wood’s contributions is his essay “An Introduction to the

American Horror Film” first published in the program booklet for the 1979 Festival of

Festivals in Toronto (now the Toronto Film Festival). Wood identifies what he terms the

“terrible child” as one of five key motifs recurring in horror films during the 1970s. As with his earlier essay on Minnelli’s film, he views the nuclear family as an instrument of capitalist patriarchy, which it uses to reproduce itself, echoing Louis Althusser’s own assertions about the family State apparatus. 7 Attacks against the family are thus interpreted as revolt against the established order. Employing a psychoanalytic reading of

6 “Toby Dammit” belongs to a triptych of short films under the title Histoires extraordinaires (1968) that includes contributions by Louis Malle (“William Watson”) and Roger Vadim (“Metzengerstein”).

7 Althusser describes how education and the family work in tandem, ”taking children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most 'vulnerable', squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of 'know-how' wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy).” (155)

34 the horror film, Wood describes the monster as representative of the “return of the repressed” and the child as one of a number of oppressed “Others” before asserting that the powerless position of children within the family makes them “the most oppressed section of the population” (10).

Echoing Wood’s reading of Fellini’s changing portrayal of childhood, scholars Kathy

Merlock Jackson (1986), Vivian Sobchack (1987), Sabine Büssing (1987), William Paul

(1994) and Karen Renner (2013) likewise contend that the figure of the child in horror underwent a significant transformation after the war so that by the 1970s, it had shifted from an innocent angel to a destructive demon. In her book Images of Children in

American Film: A Sociocultural Analysis Merlock Jackson conflates the figure of the child in American film with American national identity in which she suggests that the innocence of children and their representation of futurity is reflected in the nation’s newness and sense of optimism. This predictably leads to an interpretation of monster children as expressions of social crisis so that The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned

(Rilla 1960) reflect moral panic around juvenile delinquency. Likewise, the subsequent proliferation of monster child texts in the 1970s embodies American disillusionment following the turbulence of the War and Watergate. Merlock Jackson suggests that the popularity of Spielberg’s innocent children in films like E.T.: The Extra-

Terrestrial suggest a renewed optimism without considering that Americans are not so much newly optimistic as unable to envisage the bright future glimpsed by earlier generations. In his Vietnam to Reagan book published the same year as Merlock

Jackson’s study, Wood writes of the American nation’s nostalgic desire to escape into

35 infantile fantasy and suggests popular cinema from the mid-1970s on catered to this desire.8 As Fredric Jameson puts it in his theorisation of nostalgia, American cinema “set out to recapture … the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era … that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire” (67).

In her 1987 essay “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange”

Vivian Sobchack contends thatm beginning with Rosemary’s Baby,9 the monster children appearing in horror cinema from the end of the 1960s represent “uncivilized, hostile, and powerful Others who—like their extracinematic counterparts—refuse parental love and authority and mock the established values of dominant institutions” (182). These

“extracinematic counterparts” are, for Sobchack, the children of the anti-establishment youth culture whose non-conformity, experimentation and rebellion instigated “the crisis experienced by American bourgeois patriarchy” while also contributing to “the related disintegration and transfiguration of the traditional American bourgeois family” (176). In response to this crisis Sobchack sees a significant generic convergence taking place in

1970s cinema wherein the horror film, and the domestic melodrama cohere around conservative antagonism directed towards the counterculture. She argues that a critical shift took place in representations of children in cinema during this time so that the child was no long portrayed as a helpless victim but as “cannibalistic, monstrous, murderous, selfish, sexual” (182). The child in horror was thus reconfigured as a threat to

“both its immediate family and all adult authority that would keep it in its place— oppressed and at home” (182). Thus, according to Sobchack, Rosemary’s Baby represents

8 Wood argues that for a trauma-weary America, infantilisation offered “an escape from an adult world perceived as irredeemably corrupt, or at least bewilderingly problematic” (From Hollywood 176) 9 Sobchack also includes The Exorcist, The Other (Mulligan 1972) and Audrey Rose (Wise 1977).

36 an important moment in genre cinema as the monster child makes its debut on film, moving from its traditional role as innocent victim to that of villain.

Although Sobchack persuasively argues for the rise of the monster child within a specific sociocultural context, a significant problem with her claims of a shift in representations of children from prey to predator at the end of the 1960s overlooks earlier incarnations of child monstrosity. Most scholars today agree that the monster child made its screen debut in the 1950s with Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film The Bad Seed adapted from Maxwell

Anderson’s play that is itself based on William March’s 1954 bestselling novel. Yet like

Sobchack, twenty-first century film scholars have sought to explain the emergence of 8- year-old killer child Rhoda Penmark in LeRoy’s film within the sociocultural context of

Eisenhower’s middle class suburban America. Several scholars, among them Merlock

Jackson, William Paul and Dominic Lennard, consider the so-called moral panic surrounding juvenile delinquency in the mid-1950s as the most likely explanation for the success of the film. Undermining this explanation is the fact that Warner Bros. replaced the poor performing killer child angle used in initial advertising with the promise of salaciousness by “featuring a woman, clad in a transparent negligee” (Simmons 10) on its posters. Although not featured anywhere in the film, the image of the silhouette in negligee together with the tagline, “The Bad Seed is the BIG SHOCKER!” (10), attracted significantly more business, leading to its listing as “seventeenth on Variety’s 1956 honor roll” (10). In showing that the success of The Bad Seed was in large part due to Warner

Bros.’ prurient advertising campaign, Simmons’ research undermines speculation that the film appealed to 1950s audiences chiefly by trading on juvenile delinquency hysteria.

37

Where Sobchack argues that the figure of the monster child in the early 1970s represents

“an alien force that threatened both its immediate family and all adult authority” (183),

Antoinette Winstead looks at the same period in her essay “The Devil Made Me Do It!:

The Devil in 1960s-1970s Horror Film” and asserts that -themed monster child films Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen encapsulate the satanic panic within conservative Christian American society, whose response to the burgeoning counterculture of the 1960s was to interpret its proliferation as the work of Satanic forces and evidence of an impending . Karen Renner’s investigation of antichrist-as- child apocalyptic horror films, “The Apocalypse Begins at Home: The Antichrist-as-

Child Film” sees a pervasive pessimism within these narratives that differentiate them from other apocalypse-themed films. She notes that while other films invariably reinforce familial bonds and force people into relationships of mutual reliance “the family selected by the antichrist finds itself divided and destroyed” (56).

Renner is currently the most prolific contemporary contributor of critical work on monster children in film and literature. Her most commonly cited text, The Evil Child in

Literature, Film and Popular Culture was published by Routledge in 2013 but originally appeared in a two-part special issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory in 2011. Of the eight essays Renner includes in the collection, four specifically focus on cinema: in a discussion of the monstrous infant in film, Steffen Hantke (2011) asserts that, “each film’s sense of relevance or even urgency is the historical context that gives weight to the metaphor of the monstrous infant” (110). Of Rosemary’s Baby and It’s Alive (1974),

38 Hantke observes that these films were “released on the heels of events that focused public attention upon matters of reproductive technology and its social consequences” (110).

Similarly, A. Robin Hoffman (2011) argues that Rosemary’s Baby, along with Ridley

Scott’s Alien (1979) reflect emerging anxieties in the 1960s and ‘70s about the changing legal status of the foetus in response to advances in procreative technologies, and the impact of these upon women.10 Meheli Sen’s essay on monster children in cinema explores the emergence of lost children and aborted infants that return as vengeful spirits to haunt ’s expanding middle class. And William Wandless’ essay on horror in the new millennium notes how monster child films seek either to reassure audiences by explaining the origins and pathology of the child, such as Orphan (Collet-Serra, 2009) and Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween (2007), or else “implicate viewers in an unsettling, analytical, essentially ethical, exchange from which they cannot run away”

(134). In the latter category are Home Movie (Denham 2008) and Joshua (Ratliff 2007), although I would argue that both of these films concern children that successfully assert their agency against parents who prevent them from thriving. That these films register as horror tells us something about the extent of paranoia inherent within the normative social order that codes truly empowered children as a source of terror. Renner’s introduction provides a brief historical overview that asserts, “stories about evil children began to first proliferate with serious regularity in the 1950s” (1). She also offers a brief taxonomy of possessed and feral children.

10 In an essay published in a collection focusing on disability in Gothic literature, Scahill’s essay, “Devilled Eggs: Teratogenesis and the Gynecological Gothic in the Cinema of Monstrous Birth” is one of several essays particularly concerned with evil or infants in horror films and draws similar conclusions about how these films are representative of anxieties concerning reproduction and associated technologies. Scahill discusses the various ways films featuring demonic pregnancies and mutant births engage with reproductive politics from abortion to eugenics, while David Skal in The Monster Show asserts that monstrous infant films are a response to concerns about the birth-control pill, the horror of thalidomide and guilt over abortion.

39

Renner’s 2016 study, Evil Children in the Popular Imagination covers a lot of the same territory as her introduction in the earlier collection. While it pays little attention to historical context, it greatly expands her taxonomic focus to include chapters on monstrous births, gifted children, ghost children, and changelings. Her chapter on feral children includes a paragraph on the Hitler Youth and mentions in passing Gregor

Zeimer’s book Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi that was the inspiration for the anti-Nazi propaganda films Hitler’s Children (Dmytryk 1943) and Disney’s

Education for Death, analysed in detail in this thesis. Renner does not make any observations about the films themselves nor discusses their place in the history of the monster child in film, however she makes the astute observation that the Hitler Youth movement showed that children could be a genuine threat to the social order as they “not only could be trained for combat but also might zealously volunteer to do so” (137).

In their respective studies of evil children, Sabine Büssing and William Paul stress the significance of the transformation of the child from innocent to evil. Büssing, whose interest is specifically on children in horror literature, examines in her 1987 book Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction the role of the child in horror texts and explains how over the course of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries the child has

“displayed more and more activity, developing from a mere victim to a frequent aggressor, killer, a veritable monster” (xiv). Büssing’s text is specifically relevant to screen studies because of her inclusion of an appendix that lists 152 “horror” films produced between 1900 and 1984 that feature children either in the role of victim or

40 villain. Büssing runs into problems with her discussion of early cinema when she includes such films as the British silent comedies The Gunpowder Plot (Hepworth 1900) and The Stolen Guy (Fitzhamon 1905) on her list of horror texts without adequately defending this move. Yet what is instructive about Büssing’s reading of these early comedies as horror films is how it supports the assertion made in this thesis that the syntactic structure of pranks played by children on adults in early slapstick films on the one and the traps that monster children set for unwary adults in horror on the other share sufficient similarities to be almost indistinguishable, confirming a common heritage.

A selection of the silent films on Büssing’s list are borrowed by Julian Petley in his 1999 article “The Monstrous Child” that provides a general overview of changing representations of monstrosity in children over time. While Petley opens with a discussion of nineteenth century literary texts that include examples of monster children,11 the majority of his discussion is devoted to cinematic monster children in literature and film. Most usefully, he concludes his essay with a discussion of the regressive public response to the James Bulger murder in 1993 that saw unparalleled levels of public vitriol poured out against child offenders John Venables and Robert

Thompson. Despite highlighting the clear differences between fictional representations of monster children in horror, Petley observes how conservative media depictions of the boys consistently alluded to fictional “evil children” in film in order to condemn them, noting that despite modernist rhetoric concerning children changing over time “things seem to have changed so little in certain respects” (105).

11 The most two significant nineteenth century texts Petley discusses are Heinrich Hoffman’s “The Story of Cruel Frederick” included in the German doctor’s 1845 children’s book Struwwelpeter, and the mysterious character of Pearl in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850).

41

Included in his 1993 book Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy

William Paul’s expansive study of the “” aesthetics in 1970s and 1980s

American mainstream cinema employs Bakhtin’s carnival theory throughout, establishing early on that these highly subversive films demand an audience respond verbally and physically to its extreme levels of bad taste and grotesquery (similar to Linda Williams’

1991 “body genre” essay, “Film Bodies” Gender, Genre, Excess”). His large chapter on monster children in horror films titled “The Case for ” focuses on the shift in representations of the child after the 1950s from victim to villain. Paul devotes considerable space to examining LeRoy’s 1956 film The Bad Seed that he claims

“brought horror home, domesticating it by locating what is most horrible within the family” (270). He argues that The Bad Seed provides the template for later monster child horror films and, aligning with Sobchack, makes the bold claim that the emergence of the child monster is “the central defining feature of horror films of the 1970s and 1980s”

(267). Consequently, Paul devotes a significant portion of his book to exploring a range of “evil child” films that include The Exorcist, Halloween, The Omen, It’s Alive, The

Other (Mulligan 1972), and (Kubrick 1980). Throughout, he repeatedly returns to The Bad Seed as the seminal monster child film.

Along with Wood and Sinyard,12 Paul sees the monster child of the 1970s and 1980s as appealing to, valorising, and even exonerating paedophobic impulses within adult

12 In his 1992 book Children in the Movies, Sinyard includes a chapter titled “Little Horrors” in which he looks at both films that represent the fears of children through to paedophobic horror films. He accuses The Exorcist, The Omen and the Nightmare on Elm Street series as representing the “cinema of sadism with the victims being children” (58)

42 audiences as the monster child is often punished with excessive force. James Kincaid similarly sees the monster child film as deliberately representing children as evil and abhorrent, thereby granting audiences permission to legitimately wish for their punishment and destruction. He uses the example of Macaulay Culkin and argues that while audiences embraced the child star’s cuteness and precocity, they also resented him.

Kincaid cites The Good Son (Ruben 1993) in which “audiences across America applauded” (Erotic 141) at Culkin’s violent and spectacular death in the film’s climax.

In his 1986 essay, “The Child as Demon in Film since 1961,” Wheeler Dixon contributes to the popular assumption that monster children are a postwar product by comparing the blond haired children of Village of the Damned with the iconography of ’s

Aryan cult, describing their features as “an instantly comprehensible symbol of destruction” (82). Dixon also cites Damien Thorn from The Omen, describing him as blond-haired when in fact he had dark hair. Scahill’s analysis of The Omen series in his

2015 book The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema: Youth Rebellion and Queer

Spectatorship highlights Dixon’s error but nevertheless uses it to underline how The

Omen is “a film about whiteness and privilege” (103). His study applies the term

“revolting child” to signify how the bodies of monster children are repellent in that they

“violate natural laws and order” (5) but also how these figures rebel against the social order. Making use of Lee Edelman’s polemic on the heteronormative child emblematic of futurity, Scahill argues that the revolting child is fundamentally queer in its challenge to notions of progress, maturity and futurity. He looks at an array of monsterfied children that invert normative constructions of childhood, offering grotesque alternatives. Thus the

43 “Innocent” becomes the “Watcher” whose silence masks “harbored desire or malicious intent” (16). The child of nature is paired with the feral, exemplified by Regan McNeil in

The Exorcist “who cannot (or will not) control herself” (17). The “Destroyer” replaces the child “Dreamer” (17), using its fecund imagination to cause death and destruction.

The superior knowledge of the “Wise Child” brings peace and understanding and becomes the “Alien” (18) who uses their knowledge to invade and control, while the impish becomes a demon.

Dominic Lennard’s 2014 book Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of

Horror Films focuses on “what, for the adult, ‘the child’ means, and more to the point, why we are so disturbed when our definitions of children are contradicted” (3). His book opens and closes with case study films about sexually precocious sociopathic killer children who wear masks of innocence in The Bad Seed and Orphan (Collett-Serra 2009) respectively. Between these two he looks at Village of the Damned and its interest in representing the controlling gaze; monstrous mothers in That Rocks the Cradle

(Hanson 1992), The (Cronenberg 1979), Rosemary’s Baby, and The Ring

(Verbinski 2002); and the ineffectual fathers in It’s Alive, The Omen and The Exorcist.

Curiously, his chapter on children’s fetishistic consumption of toys and the culture of acquisition concerning represented in Child’s Play (Holland 1988) does not make any connection to his earlier chapter on The Bad Seed and Rhoda’s acquisitive disposition.

Lennard’s book is most useful as an overview of existing critical approaches to research on monster child films across the fields of childhood studies, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, gender, and film studies. In light of this, the fact that he opens his

44 analysis with The Bad Seed without discussing any earlier monster child texts attests to the paucity of current historical research content to reach no further back in history for sources of child monstrosity than LeRoy’s 1956 film and March’s 1954 source novel.

Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland include sixteen essays in their 2015 collection

Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors that makes use of the term “childness” to expand the discourse of monstrous children beyond aged-based definitions of the child by avoiding the terms “child-like” and “childish”.

Childness becomes a useful term for the book’s contributors as it works together with the quiddity of the monster to demonstrate how childhood itself is an elusive social construct.

The fifteen essays are too many to discuss in any meaningful way here without taking up excessive room. An alternative is to offer a brief overview of the five thematic sections within which the essays are grouped. Section one, titled “Look Who’s Stalking” considers maternal anxieties about pregnancy, reproductive technologies and teratogenesis in which all three contributors write on Paul Solet’s 2009 zombie baby horror film Grace, while section two, titled “Frankenstein's Kindergarten”, turns to monstrous fathers and applies Shelley’s inventor/creation mythos to a range of films as far apart as The Nanny (Holt 1965) and Blade Runner (Scott 1980). Section three, called

“The Adoption Papers (Adaptations)”, assembles three essays that each analyse various film adaptations of a literary work, namely: Beowulf, Turn of the Screw, and The Shining.

Section four, “ Troubled Teens and In-Betweens” includes essays exploring the interstices of adolescent others and the final chapter “Peek-a-Boo: Future Monstrosities and Beyond” includes two essays that complicate issues of historicity, firstly with ghost

45 children from Spain’s traumatised past who “come to inhabit permanently the

[Deleuzean] any-space-whatever, maintaining an existence outside the bounds of time”

(Balanzategui “Insects” 243) and Joe Wright’s Hanna (2011) that performs a “restating of Anderson’s ‘Snow White’ for the posthuman epoch” (Nagypal 245). While Bohlmann and Moreland’s collection represents an important expansion of critical approaches to child monstrosity in film, despite the impressive scope of the assembled essays, the focus on horror prevents engagement with earlier pre-horror monster child films. Thus, even in the essays on Frankenstein, Beowulf and Turn of the Screw, the historical significance of these texts as representative of pre-twentieth century examples of monster children is not really given any attention.

Publishing as T.S. Kord, Susanne Kord’s Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children

Play on Our Guilt challenges widely held assumptions that the purpose of horror films is to horrify and evoke fear in the viewer. Arguing that fear is fleeting and neither a sustained nor sustainable emotion, she draws on 24 films and references many more in an impressively expansive survey on monster children in cinema. Instead of fear, Kord contends that horror unequivocally blames audiences for the state of the world and the complacent acceptance of the cruelty and barbarity of . Oddly, Kord repeatedly contends that monster children have had a presence in horror cinema since 1900, and yet she does not elaborate on this claim. Rather, she refers readers to Julian Petley’s 1999 essay “The Monstrous Child“ that in turn recycles research conducted by Sabine Büssing.

Effectively undermining her own dogmatic claim about the supposed long history of the monster child film, Kord’s survey of cinema both recent and older explores nothing

46 earlier that 1956’s The Bad Seed, essentially discounting her own claims of longevity within the genre while inadvertently joining with other scholars in affirming LeRoy’s film to be the first of its kind.

The most recent scholarly books to be published on the topic of monster children are

Monica Flegel and Christopher Parkes’ essay collection Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures, and Jessica Balanzategui’s study, The Uncanny Child in Transnational

Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, both published in

2018. Flegel and Parkes include two essays that specifically address the topic of monster children in film: “‘Child Psychopath’ Films of the 1980s and 1990s” by Renner, and

“‘Camping Child’: The Queer Humor of William March’s The Bad Seed on

Page, Stage, and Screen” by Tison Pugh. Of particular interest in Renner’s essay exploring psychopathic child and teen films is the trend in late 20th century criminology textbooks of returning to biology as an explanation for criminal tendencies. Curiously,

Renner does not mention The Bad Seed, which when released in 1956 the idea of an inherited criminal tendency was abruptly dismissed as pure fantasy. Pugh’s article is significant in its exploration of a serious text that has been appropriated and celebrated by queer culture as a camp text, exploring the shift in reception from serious drama to camp comedy.

Balanzategui’s focuses on what she terms the “uncanny child” and its proliferation in transnational texts during the transition into the new millennium. Unlike the monster child whose destructiveness valorises childhood innocence by presenting its binary

47 opposite, the uncanny child inhabits a liminal space in which Romantic notions of childhood and attendant modernist concepts of western progress start to noticeably erode.

Balanzategui argues that during the 1990s and continuing into the new century horror films produced in America, Spain and shared a common set of cultural concerns about the breakdown in traditional binary roles that separate adults and children, seen in how children’s culture and the nightmares of childhood have migrated into the adult world. She posits that the horror films of this period containing monster children “enact a shift in the traditional power balance between children and their adult guardians, whereby

‘childish’ fears become adult ones” (285).

The overview of existing critical literature makes clear that research in the field of monster children in film has increased exponentially over time but that almost all of it concentrates on films produced in second half of the twentieth century and the new millennium. This thesis aims to correct the scarcity of research into the connection between early silent films containing monster children and the child monsters that emerged in films during and after WWII. Included alongside close readings of a range of films from the early silent era through to the early postwar era is an analysis of literary sources that include the novels, plays, short stories and comic strips from which my case study films have been adapted. In addition, the thesis makes considerable use of extratextual sources including archived newspaper reviews, papers, and historical news reports, as well film sites where fans and casual viewers share their thoughts online.

48 The thesis argues that a crucial contiguity exists between early silent cinema featuring bad boys and girls playing pranks on unsuspecting adults and postwar monster child horror films in which children prepare deadly traps for unwary adults. In both, children overturn the social order in which the child is ordinarily located at the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. The monster child works to debase adult authority through pranks targeting the unwary parent, teacher, or priest, or other figures of authority such as the police, statesmen or other members of the ruling class sporting tops hats and tails. In early silent cinema the child’s actions against the established order provided lower class audiences with a comedic vision of the underclass rising up against the ruling class. In the postwar horror film, class struggle is displaced by a generic bourgeois setting in which the monster child seeks to overturn in a manner often depicted as apocalyptic, recalling

Vivian Sobchack’s aforementioned essay that focuses on inter-generational conflict between parents and children. In both the silent comedy and monster child horror film the child figure became an important symbol of powerless and marginalisation casting down the old order responsible for their oppression. Such a vision is carnivalesque in nature.

“Every revolution is a bit of a carnival”, writes Jeet Heer, “where the world is turned upside down as kings are brought low and nobodies become heroes” (“One Reason”).

Drawing on Bakhtin’s work on the carnival, this thesis argues that the carnivalesque is an integral characteristic of monster child films.

49 Theorising the Carnivalesque Monster Child

A key argument of this thesis concerns the historicity of the monster child. Where current scholarship positions the character’s initial appearance soon after World War II, this thesis argues that the monster child has been present on screen since the birth of cinema.

In addition, while the monster child is commonly associated exclusively with the horror film, this thesis argues that the character first emerged in comedy and, furthermore, that the conventions established in early silent slapstick comedies (in which children play pranks on unsuspecting adults) remained intact as the child shifted away from comedy and towards the horror genre in the postwar era. This claim attempts to open up the discourse on monster children beyond horror to show how the trope has relevance in early silent comedy.

As outlined in the previous section, innocence as an adult tool of oppression used against the child plays a critical role in this process as carnival inversion emphasises the of oppressed underclasses and the profanation of the ruling class and social elite. Although the Romantics conceived innocence to be a high ideal to which adults should strive, over time it has transformed into a tool of oppression used by society to subjugate and control children. Henry Jenkins states that innocence is “inculcated and enforced upon children” who are resultantly defined by their “’inadequacies,’

‘immaturity,’ and ‘irrationality,’ on their need for protection and nurturing” (2). Because innocence is characterised by dependence, passivity, and innate vulnerability, the moment a child starts to assert self-agency and independent thought, or expresses an unpopular

50 opinion, innocence can be readily deployed to patronise and ridicule the child and return it to its place at the bottom of the social hierarchy.13 Ruminating on the trouble with innocence Clive Erricker writes that, “the fantasy of childhood innocence legitimates the fantasy of adult power, which is then confirmed by exercising that power over children in order that they might conform, once they are older, to those fantasy ideals of adulthood”

(4). Erricker’s comments a striking resemblance to those made by Robin Wood in his seminal essay on the American horror film. Wood acknowledges that children “are the most oppressed section of the population” and describes this as a generational legacy:

“what the previous generation repressed in us … we, in turn, repress in our children, seeking to mould them into replicas of ourselves, perpetuators of a discredited tradition”

(10). As an underclass subjugated and oppressed by adult constructions of childhood innocence, children represent the lowest rung of the social hierarchy.

In his most well-known and influential work Rabelais and His World14 Bakhtin greatly expands on earlier ideas concerning the “transforming influence of a carnival sense of the world” (Problems 108). In his book on Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin’s chief interest is in the radically unfinalisable or open nature of the Russian author's characters whose complexity and internal contradictions maintain an irreducible truthfulness about the

13 A contemporary real life example of innocence being used to attempt to silence a “child” is US President Donald Trump’s belittling response to Greta Thunberg’s impassioned UN speech calling world leaders to account for their inaction on climate change. Trump sarcastically tweeted about Thunberg’s display of anger, remarking that, “she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” (“’Chill Greta’”) 14 Bakhtin completed working on the book by 1940, defending it as a dissertation in 1946. After overcoming long and tumultuous ideological and publishing problems, the work was first published in 1965 as a book entitled François Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

51 unknowable essence of the human condition.15 Bakhtin also examines the roots of serio- comic genres and the literary mésalliances that characterise Menippean satire, which

“became one of the main carriers and channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature” (113). Likewise concerned with unfinalisability, Bakhtin’s dissertation on

Rabelais explores the carnival in intimate detail, investigating how the French writer appropriated folk culture to challenge the hegemonic power structures of his day. He opens by acknowledging that for contemporary readers Rabelais’ work can seem impenetrable and obscene, and posits that this interpretation is attributable to the profound cultural changes that took place in western society during the enlightenment that broke with medieval thought. He thus contends that the way to appreciate Rabelais’ seemingly inscrutable text is to develop an understanding of the cultural context within which the medieval French author was writing. Bakhtin thus embarks on a “deep study of

Rabelais’ popular sources” (3) while craftily applying literary scholarship to subvert the

16 17 strict monoglossic discourse represented by . Developed under

Stalin, Socialist Realism required all art and literature produced in the USSR to exclusively serve the demands of the State and reinforce official ideology. John Docker suggests that Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais’ gave him the scope to present “a silent

15 In praise of the heteroglossic nature of Dostoyevsky’s work resulting in its removal from soviet education curriculums, Bakhtin writes that “if viewed from a monologic understanding of tone, Dostoyevsky’s novel is multi-accented and contradictory in its values; contradictory accents clash in every word of his creations” (15). 16 Bakhtin explains that monoglossia operates as a repressive centripetal force within the sociolinguistic sphere that seeks to colonise and “unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought" (Dialogic 270). Where monoglossia is a singular unitary approach to language imposed by the social order, it always “operates in the midst of heteroglossia” (271) that reflects the natural chaotic state of human thought and relations. Heteroglossia is centrifugal, emancipatory and diffuse, perpetually threatening to invade and dismantle monoglossia. Carnival represents one of the rare times that monoglossia surrenders to the energy and chaos of heteroglossia as the rejuvenating culture of the marketplace temporarily takes over. Once festivities end the social order reinforces monologic seriousness and control. 17 Susan Reid describes Socialist Realism as the “planned production of art under state patronage, in line with the centralized control of industry and agriculture” (153).

52 comparison of the Holy Roman Empire and Catholic church/state nexus in in the

1530s and the Soviet state in the 1930s” (172). Though it was not silent enough, for when

Bakhtin first defended his dissertation in 1947, at the time titled Rabelais and Folk

Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, his study of the grotesque, open body flew in of the puritanical classical aesthetics of Socialist Realism as well as postwar

Soviet antagonism towards all things cosmopolitan. His thesis thus remained unapproved until the following decade. Drawing parallels between Bakhtin’s critique of Stalinist oppression and Rabelais’ attack on the French ruling class in his own time, Michael

Holquist contends that, “like Rabelais, Bakhtin is throughout his own book exploring the interface between a stasis imposed from above and a desire for change from below, between old and new, official and unofficial” (11). Put another way, Bakhtin’s study of the carnival provided him the latitude to indirectly yet daringly protest the cultural and intellectual strictures under Stalin.

Bakhtin explains how in the Middle Ages people’s lives were divided between the oppressive established order ruled from above and a second carnival life that ideologically belonged to all the people. He explains how

a person of the middle ages lived, as it were, two lives: one as that of official

life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order,

full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the

carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy,

the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar

contact with everyone and everything. (Problems 129-30)

53 The carnival provided a joyous reprieve from the strictures and seriousness of medieval feudal life, marked by a temporary social revolution characterised by sophisticated and all-encompassing symbolic reversals. Stam describes this cultural coup as “a symbolic, anticipatory overthrow of oppressive social structures” (95). Where the official order imposed restraint, piety, conformity, and inequality, the carnival revelled in hedonistic excess, mayhem, grotesquery, and “a special form of free and familiar contact [that] reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (Rabelais 10). Among the features of carnival, this thesis will make use of inversion and uncrowning of authority figures, masks, parody, grotesquery and feasts. Although the carnival is usually associated with laughter, Stam and Paul have shown how the carnival applies to elements of horror that this thesis will also put to use.

In the following section these features of carnival are explained, beginning with the inversion of hierarchies and symbolic uncrowning.

Inversion and Uncrowning

Carnival inversion and uncrowning is a key component of monster child narratives that depict adult authority being deposed by the schemes of the child as hierarchies of power are temporarily reversed. Inversion is likewise the thematic centrepiece of carnival, representing a utopian vision of the world turned upside down where all inequality is expelled and hierarchies levelled. In the Middle Ages every official ecclesiastical feast had its own irreverent carnivalesque counterpart as part of a symbolic pairing and ritual inversion. Where the official feast would be sombre, contained, and pious, the

54 carnivalesque feast would be celebrated with profane laughter, unrestrained excess, and irreverence. A tradition inherited from the Roman Saturnalia in which the roles of masters and slaves were inverted so that “the slave ‘king’ might issue commands to his master ‘subject’” (Bradley 115), ritual inversion presided over every element of the medieval carnival. Stallybrass and White note how countless examples of ritual inversion were made available during the carnival. Thus, “the servant rides the horse followed by the king on foot; the general is inspected by the private; the woman stands with a gun in her arms while sits spinning; the wife hold her husband down and beats him, the daughter feeds her mother, the son rocks his father in the cradle” (57).

The notion of carnival inversion is intrinsically linked to the medieval idea

“topographical connotations” attributed to the human body that align it with a cosmic schema of opposing pairs: up and down, high and low, heaven and earth, soul and corporeal body, inside and outside, front and back. The head is aligned with the upper bodily strata—the mind, spirit and intellect—coinciding with high culture and all things deemed celestial, unchanging and infinite. The “lower bodily stratum” is symbolised by

“the genital organs, the belly and the buttocks” (Bakhtin Rabelais 21) and its concomitant corporeality, temporality, seasonality and earthboundedness. During carnival times the topographical connotations of become the subject of “grotesque realism”, which involves “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (19). Bakhtin provides the example of the whose cartwheels symbolise “the continual rotation of the earth and sky” with “the buttocks persistently trying to take the place of the head and

55 head that of the buttocks” (353).

The casting down of the head is a particularly potent signifier of profanation as it is considered the most sacred part and upon the head is worn the crown. In Problems of

Dostoyevsky’s Poets, Bakhtin notes how the ritual of “mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king” constitutes a “primary carnivalistic act” (124). The mock coronation itself is a profanation of monarchy and its claims of regency as God- ordained, eternal and unchanging nature. By placing the mock crown on the head of a clownish king, the idea of uncrowning is at once established and with it an interrogation of its claims to eternality. Uncrowning can take place in a number of ways, though mostly through the removal of the hat. When a hat is removed, identifiers of status, station and even gender are rendered less clear as uncovered heads share the same social rank; such are hats’ potent hierarchical symbolism.

Masks and Parody

Romantic conceptions of childhood as a time of innocence paint the child as dependent and vulnerable. While the concept of innocence produces reassuring feelings for adults, innocence as it is experienced by the child serves to undermine his or her quest for empowerment and self-agency. The innocent child is framed as helpless, voiceless and vulnerable and as such is expected to behave in ways that demonstrate a lack of knowledge, ability and agency. In other words, the child is assigned a fixed face and identity—that of cuteness, vulnerability, incompetence and dependence—and expected to

56 conform to this role. For the monster child this means donning a behavioural mask of innocence that is pleasing to adults who need to feel in control. While Bakhtin describes the mask as “an external profile” that enables “the shaping of the self not from within but from without” (294), he clarifies that this can be a physical mask but “also refers to any speech or stylistic mask” (Problems 294). Bakhtin’s addition of utterances and behaviour introduces the possibility of the mask representing a reinvention of self. In Rabelais and

His World he describes how the mask plays a vital role in the renewal and regeneration of people as “the individual body ceases to a certain extent to be itself; it is possible, so to say, to exchange bodies, to be renewed (through change of costume and mask)” (255).

Intimately connected with themes of “change and reincarnation”, the mask is according to

Bakhtin “the most complex theme of folk culture” (39).

As the mask “rejects conformity to oneself” (39-40), its users are liberated from their own social identities. During carnival times the mask erases social identifiers such as age, class, rank, sex and gender and allows for “free and familiar contact … among people who were usually divided by barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (10). In effect, the mask operates according to N. Ross Crumrine as “the ritual transformation of the human actor into a being of another order” (1). During carnival, masks serve as

“socially sanctioned role-ridicule” (Grimes 512), mocking the claims made by the established order about social roles and fixed identities by temporarily erasing all forms of hierarchy and inequality, transforming the medieval marketplace into a utopian space of liberation and equality. In her study of masks in horror films, Alexandra Heller-

Nicholas explains how the Latin word for mask is ‘persona’ although its etymology can

57 be traced to “the Arabic maskhara (to transform or falsify), while in Ancient Egypt the word msk referred to leather as a ‘second skin’” (6). Shelagh Weir points out that

“maskhara” is itself a derivation of “sakhira”, meaning “to laugh, scoff, jeer, sneer, ridicule, mock, deride, make fun” (qtd in Picton 185), recalling the importance of carnival laughter and its reliance on debasement and profanation.

In defiance of the established order that asserts itself as heaven-ordained and unchanging, the mask is used during carnival times to make possible the unmasking of claims made by officialdom about its own eternal immutable identity. The carnival mask exposes the myth of fixity and highlights the changing nature of identity by calling attention to the possibility of revolution and freedom from rigid social roles. According to Susan Smith the mask destabilises identity by emphasising duality so that “the masker signifies a double existence” whereby “he is at once himself and someone else” (2). Efrat Tseëlon emphasises how the mask challenges notions of a singular immovable identity in how it

disrupts the fantasy of coherent, unitary, stable, mutually exclusive divisions.

It replaces clarity with ambiguity, certainty with reflexivity, and

phantasmatic constructions of containment and closure with constructions

that in reality are more messy, diverse, impure and imperfect. (3)

For the monster child film the mask becomes a critical weapon used by the child to conceal its true intentions of casting down adult authority and destabilising the social order. The monster child is thus Janus-faced in how it presents what Debbie Olson calls a

“hyperreal mask” (297) of innocence while concealing its monstrous true self. According

58 to W. Anthony Sheppard, masks serve “simultaneously as tools for disguise and as markers of identity” (25) and the monster child’s performance of innocence works as both a cunning disguise of its devious true nature while simultaneously mocking the deep need felt by adults for their children to perform ignorance, helplessness and dependence.

In her analysis of ’ , Pifer takes note of the performative nature of innocence, expressed as “the ability to remain silent, look blank or stupid when adults make contradictory or impossible demands” (43). The performative mask thus offers a critique of innocence that casts its very ontology into doubt.

Festival of the Grotesque

According to Bakhtin, during the Middle Ages every official feast, characterised as pious and sombre, had its riotous carnival equivalent. He writes that “besides carnivals proper, with their long and complex pageants and processions, there was the ‘feast of fools’ (festa stultorum) and the feast of the ass … nearly every Church feast has its comic folk aspect, which was also traditionally recognized” (Rabelais 5). As with every aspect of the carnival, the feast “dispels cosmic fear” (Lachmann 131) as it turns the world upside down and celebrates temporary triumph over the abstemious piety and monologism of the official order. Docker notes that while the official feast was a “consecration of inequality” that emphasised class and rank in its formalities and pious deprivations, the

“abundance of the marketplace banquet was an inclusive , a ‘harvest’ of equality”

(177).

59 The feast most clearly represents the excessive nature of carnival in its elevation of the lower bodily stratum that emphasises corporeality and oneness with the earthly temporal plain as “the somatic membrane separating self from self and self from the world becomes permeable” (Stam 5). The digestive system from mouth to anus is elevated and given new significance as the body becomes one with creation, taking in and passing out the world in a symbolic gesture that acknowledges impermanence and the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. As Paul puts it, “the physical asserts itself over the spiritual and presses its demands to be placed at the top of the hierarchy” (46). Eating and drinking, defecation and urination, shit and piss and vomit together symbolise of an endless cycle of renewal and regeneration. Thus the acts of ingestion and excretion cease to be trivial quotidian necessities, but elevated and given profound significance as the open, unfinalisable, grotesque body overturns and defeats the established order’s ideal of the closed, complete and perfect human form. The carnival feast thus erodes the imposed borders and exclusivity introduced by officialdom, embracing instead a collective material bodily unit that includes all people.

According to Bakhtin, from the seventeenth century onwards the carnival went into “a process of gradual narrowing down of the ritual, spectacle, and carnival forms of folk culture … became small and trivial … [as] festivities were brought into the home and became part of the family’s private life” (33) thus putatively lacking any carnival potential. Common within the monster child horror film are festivities that include fetes and fiestas, birthday parties and Christmas feasts, picnics and banquets, barbeques, family reunions, and so on. These events are organised and controlled by adults so that, from the

60 child’s perspective, they constitute official feasts, or what Camille Paglia’s pithily calls

“the kind of sanitised entertainment paternalistic adults have always though proper for young people” (57).18 However as Ndalianis explains, despite the decline of the medieval carnival that once encompassed all the people, “remnants of the carnival persisted after the Middle Ages” (109) that found expression through various forms of popular culture.

Thus the carnival “adjusted to meet the demands of new commercial needs in the form of amusement parks, penny arcades, burlesques, and film genres such as comedy and horror” (109). For Bakhtin, the feast, or more correctly, “every feast”,19 is “an important primary form of human culture” (8) that has carnivalesque potential to erupt into laughter and chaos. As it happens, almost every official feast according to Bakhtin was accompanied by its carnival equivalent.

In monster child horror films, the party becomes a crucial catalyst for the child breaking free from adult control. It is usually during or soon after the party that carnivalesque reversals start to occur as the child takes control while parents and authority figures are rendered weak, impotent and vulnerable. No such catalyst exists in early silent comedy.

The children in these films interrupt the banal humdrum aspect of quotidian life with their ludic energy and desire to turn the world upside down. They effectively transform the tedium of daily life in a momentary celebration of the carnivalesque. There is no literal party or feast in these films but a carnival atmosphere is created through the child’s festive play as their prank overturns the social order and creates a spectacle of disorder and laughter.

18 Paglia’s comment describes the party celebrating Cathy’s birthday in The Birds (Hitchcock 1963). 19 Emphasis mine.

61 Carnival Comedy and Horror

This thesis makes the claim that Bakhtin’s carnival theory provides a means of showing how early silent comedies featuring children playing pranks on unsuspecting adults are intrinsically connected to later monster child horror films in which the child monster lays a trap for the unwary adult. In other words, during its evolution from slapstick comedy to the horror movie, the monster child character consistently enacts a carnivalesque inversion of adult/child hierarchies of power. Potentially problematic here is the issue of the carnival’s relationship to laughter. Bakhtin cites L.E. Pinsky who writes that for

Rabelais, “laughter was precisely a liberation of the emotions that dim the knowledge of life. Laughter proves the existence of clear spiritual vision and bestows it. … Truth reveals itself with a smile when man abides in a nonanxious, joyful, comic mood” (qtd in

141). How do we reconcile the presence of the carnival in both comedy and horror when laughter is such a quintessential element of the carnival?

One way of approaching the problem is to highlight the close relationship between the comedy and horror genres. In his study of gross out comedy and horror films, Paul suggests that the two tend to be grouped together as lower genre forms that “parallel each other in their dramatic goals” (32) of threatening order and authority. Extolling the virtues of festive laughter, Bakhtin asserts that, “medieval laughter, when it triumphed over the fear inspired by the mystery of the world and by power, boldly unveiled the truth about both” (92). This idea of laughter exposing truths about the oppressive tyranny at the centre of the social order mirrors the aims of horror. As Robin Wood explains in

62 “Introduction to the American Horror Film”, “the true subject of the horror film is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses or oppresses” (10). Clearly there exists crossover between the two genres in their desire to expose, overturn and subvert officialdom, inequality and social control.

Discussing the cinema in the context of the carnivalesque, Stam usefully applies

Bakhtinian discourse to include a broad range of approaches to film. This inclusivity in and of itself mirrors the goal of carnival. Among the ten approaches to reading film texts as carnivalised, Stam highlights the importance of “films that use humour to anarchize institutional hierarchies … or direct corrosive laughter at patriarchal authority as well as films that “privilege, whether visually or verbally, the lower bodily stratum” or else

“aggressively overturn a classical aesthetic based on formal harmony and good taste”

(110). In widening the discourse, Stam notes how “at times we can discern the distorted echoes of carnival even in [its] negation or degradation” (111). Looking to horror, he suggests that “even ‘slasher’ films such as Halloween can be seen as offering inverted, dystopian versions of carnival, in which ‘the phenomenon that had once been the objects of cathartic laughter undergo a kind of sickly mutation, now transformed into morbid and pathological stigmata of merely private terrors” (111). Yet in this Stam neglects the powerful role of laughter within horror.

Paul contends that there is “always something of a carnival atmosphere in the theatre around horror films” (66) that overturns the atomisation of carnival in contemporary culture by reinstating the raucously embodied and highly vocal “communal experience”

63 (67) endemic to carnival. Indeed, as anyone who has watched a horror film with an audience can attest, jumps scares and scenes of shocking violence might elicit shrieks and gasps but these are just as likely to be followed with cathartic laughter. According to horror director Stuart Gordon, cathartic laughter after a period of excessive tension is a critical component of well-made horror, whose audiences experience a build up of and “welcome any chance to laugh” (qtd in Wiater 85). He observes, “you’ll never find an audience that wants to laugh more than a horror audience” and cautions filmmakers that if audiences feel they don’t need to laugh, “then you are basically blowing away the intensity” (84). Discussing Psycho (1960), Gordon claims that

Hitchcock “always described it as a comedy” and considered that “there is a fine line between getting someone to laugh and getting someone to scream” (84), highlighting the interconnectivity of the two responses.

Locating clear connections between humour and horror contributes towards justifying the use of Bakhtin to explore the relationship between early silent comedy featuring monster children playing pranks, and modern horror films in which monster children play for keeps. In both there is the aspect of play: the regenerative ludic force of the child.

Drawing comedy and horror closer together as carnivalesque texts that challenge adult hegemony supports the contention of this thesis that the monster child horror film did not suddenly appear as if out of nowhere but has clear antecedents and is part of a larger enduring discourse on childhood whose longevity clearly predates the emergence of monster children in modern horror.

64 Carnival Syntax in the Monster Child Film

In applying Bakhin’s carnival theory to the monster child character, Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach to genre is useful in showing how elements of carnival outlined by Bakhtin, such as inversion and masking, are present in both monster child comedy and horror films. In his book on American movie musicals Altman discusses existing divergent classification models that on the one hand, group films according to iconography and, on the other, according to structural and thematic determinates. The semantic elements of genre, according to Altman, “depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like”, while syntax is comprised of

“certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders” (95).

Where semantics are concerned with recurring elements within the mise en scene and soundtrack, syntax focuses on narrative and thematic elements. Semantics thus rely upon syntax to organise iconography into meaningful structural relationships.

Altman explains that his model comes into its own when applied to issues of genre history, an field that he argues has been generally neglected by scholars due to the lack of a sufficient model. He notes how “history has been conceptualised as nothing more than a discontinuous succession of discrete moments, each characterised by a different basic version of the genre, that is by a different syntactic pattern which the genre adopts” (97).

Applying his semantic/syntactic model to genre history, Altman claims that the genre scholar is able to locate “the introduction and disappearance of basic semantic elements”,

65 “the development and abandoning of specific syntactic solutions” and “the ever-changing relationship between the semantic and syntactic aspects of the genre” (98).

Altman concedes that a problem with both semantics and syntax is the lack of “general agreement on the exact frontier separating semantic from syntactic views” (95), however this issue is one that Neale notes is inherent within linguistics (204). As Altman’s model borrows considerably from linguistics it inherits the same issues of demarcation between semantics and syntax. Despite this, Neale affirms that the value of Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach is its stress on the “the importance of history, on the recognition of heterogeneity, and on the possibility of difference, variation, and change”

(204). These are, of course, the very elements that this thesis is looking to Altman’s model to explore.

In short, the thesis argues that early silent cinema and postwar modern horror both contain monster children that are connected by a compatible syntax centred on Bakhtin’s carnival theory wherein these children undermine traditional constructions of childhood innocence by asserting their self-agency and overpowering adult figures of authority. In both genres this is achieved through pranks that in the comedy result in short-lived humiliation while the horror film emphasises carnage. Implied here is a dialogic relationship that sees the postwar horror film explore territory previously mined by early comedy and its subversive representation of children undermining and even violently usurping adult authority. The semantic element becomes particularly important in the transition from anti-Nazi Hollywood wartime dramas that demonise the Hitler Youth as

66 arrogant Aryan monsters to the monster children that began appearing with increasing regularity after the war, sporting the same contempt for authority, arrogant attitudes and

Aryan features as their Hitler Youth cousins.

67 Methodology

The focus of this thesis is on filmic representations of monster children that have altered over time yet maintained key narrative tropes concerning a reversal of power structures between adults and children. The primary research method used in this thesis is the qualitative analysis of case study films through close and comparative analysis of these texts. Charting the thematic contiguity of chosen films from early silent cinema to early modern horror, the thesis applies elements of Bakhtin’s carnival theory, making particular use of ritual inversion and masking as strategies associated with carnival that overturns and challenges the social order. Carnival theory is also adapted to propose what I am calling the anti-carnivalesque in which the same elements associated with carnival are in play but used against the heteroglossia of carnival to reinforce monologism and the status quo.

The thesis draws on film studies approaches that favour ideological analysis of primary texts along with extratextual sources that include film reviews, comic strips, and poster art, as well as pragmatic forms of critical reception and audience engagement with key film texts, such as the work of Robin Wood and Andrew Scahill, with particular focus on writers whose research reflects on genre theory, the horror genre, and the monstrous child as a well-established cinema trope. Also put to use is adaptation theory in the comparative analysis of deviations between source novels, books and comic books and their filmic adaptations.

68 The thesis also engages with cinema at an historical level by making use of extratextual sources contemporaneous to the primary film texts analysed in the thesis. This includes drawing on archived newspapers articles, comic books, film industry trade papers and magazines, and film and book reviews. It also includes primary texts that provide insights into Nazism by the Nazis such as Hitler’s , The Nazi Primer for Hitler Youth, and the Nazi film Hitlerjunge Quex, as well as contemporaneous US newspaper articles and editorials, along with the writings of historians focusing on the Hitler Youth and their role in the advance of Nazism in Germany before, during and even after the war.

Finally, the thesis engages with existing critical work on monster child films with the aim of challenging currently held assumptions about the history of the monster child in film.

The following section provides an overview of existing critical literature, focussing on the most significant works within a field that has veritably exploded with interest during the last ten years. The review of literature is organised both chronologically from earliest to the most recent publications as well as thematically, grouping similar approaches and arguments.

69 Chapter Breakdown

Chapter One and Two argue that the early silent bad boy film popular with filmmakers and audiences during the first two decades of the cinema can be seen as the predecessor to the monster child horror films that emerged after World War II. Chapter One analyses the 1895 Lumière film L’Arroseur Arrosé in which a young boy famously plays the hosepipe gag on a gardener before he is caught by the gardener and spanked. Drawing on

Tom Gunning’s analysis of L’Arroseur Arrosé in which he shows how its basic narrative structure involves the preparation and consequence of a gag visible in subsequent slapstick films, I argue that this same structure also applies to the monster child film in horror. In other words, the same momentary inversion of adult child power relations represented in L’Arroseur Arrosé becomes a core narrative element of the monster child horror film. The chapter also explores the nineteenth century European sequential art origins of the hosepipe gag used in L’Arroseur arrosé that spawned an explosion of films in the early silent period involving children playing pranks on adults.

Chapter Two continues the exploration of monster children in early silent cinema and its nineteenth century literary antecedents. In the postbellum period a highly popular genre of semiautobiographical American literature emerged that dominated the latter part of the nineteenth century and came to be known as the “bad boy book”. Breaking with the pre- existing tradition of pious didactic texts for children, the bad boy book contradicted the lessons of earlier moralistic stories about the terrible consequences of bad behaviour and

70 presented instead a form of secularised child who misbehaved and benefited from his crimes. Though commonly set in the antebellum period, the experiences of their young protagonists are suited to life in Gilded Age America. Much like the European sequential art involving the hosepipe gag that inspired L’Arroseur arrosé, the bad boy book furnished early filmmakers with an endless array of comedic stories and situations in which children play pranks on unsuspecting adults. Consequently many of the early silent monster child films retain the designation “bad boy” in their titles, leading to this cycle of films being commonly referred to by film historians as the bad boy genre. The chapter examines three specific bad boy books and the films they inspired, beginning with

Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s 1869 novel The Story of a Bad boy that is credited as the first bad boy novel. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of a pair of short stories along with his first solo novel, The Adventures of . A comparison is made between several of the film adaptations of Twain’s novel with particular attention paid to the character of Sid Sawyer whose form of monstrosity differs from his peers as he is aligned with the world of adults, a move that anticipates the Hitler Youth and hints at an intrinsic darkness within the child that challenges romantic notions of childhood innocence. The final text examined in the chapter is George Wilbur Peck’s 1883 book

Peck’s Bad boy and His Pa, adapted into the 1921 film Peck’s Bad boy directed by Sam

Wood and starring . While the production of bad boy films had diminished in America by 1910 after being superseded by the western, Peck’s Bad boy resurrects the genre and demonstrates its popularity with American audiences.

Chapter Three jumps forward to 1940 with an analysis of Disney’s second animated

71 feature Pinocchio. The chapter argues for the film’s significance in how it demonstrates a symbolic shift in representations of monster children from bad boy comedy to the child- as-monster horror film. This is specifically evidenced in the Pleasure Island sequence in which Lampwick transforms into a donkey. The chapter challenges unsupported allegations against Walt Disney being fascist and anti-Semitic before applying a pragmatic approach to Pinocchio that reads the film as anti-fascist allegory. To this end, the Bavarian costumes and setting are addressed while the Pleasure Island sequence is interpreted as representing the Nazis mass enlistment of children into the Hitler Youth, beginning as seduction and finally coercion. The chapter draws on actual events that took place in Nazi Germany, such as the Kristallnacht pogrom that, I contend, is reflected in the scene in which a mob of juvenile delinquents vandalise a mansion on the island. The chapter also draws on the 1943 Disney animated short film titled Education for Death:

The Making of the Nazi, one of a number of anti-Nazi propaganda films produced by the studio during the war. Directed by and adapted from the 1942 book by

Gregor Ziemer exposing the crimes of the Third Reich against its own people, the short film follows Hans, whose indoctrination transforms him from a sweet little boy into a fanatical Nazi. Elements of the mise en scene in Education for Death and Pinocchio are also compared that support my reading of Pinocchio as an anti-Nazi text.

Chapter Four looks at the 1944 wartime melodrama Tomorrow the World directed by

Leslie Fenton and adapted from the 1943 Broadway play by James Gow and Arnaud d’Usseau. Tomorrow the World is the last of a cluster of films produced by Hollywood that feature Hitler Youth who are all portrayed as utterly monstrous. The representation

72 of Hitler Youth in these Hollywood anti-Nazi propaganda films resembles the portrayal of Sid Sawyer in the film adaptations of Mark Twain’s novel. Like Sid, the Hitler Youth in these films are aligned with the oppressive world of adults as they collude with the

Nazis in routing out dissenters while working to cement the absolute authority of Hitler’s

New Order. Where earlier forms of monster child are shown to be carnivalesque in how they rupture the social order by upending adult/child power relations, the Hitler Youth in

Hollywood’s wartime dramas are anti-carnivalesque. Like the bad boy films before them, the Hitler Youth overturn traditional hierarchies of power centralised in the home, school, and church, however their focus is not the centrifugal push towards the margins that is a crucial element of carnival. Instead the Hitler Youth monster child serves the centre.

Tomorrow the World represents a crucial break with the anti-carnivalesque Hitler Youth in previous films by taking a Hitler Youth fanatic out of his native Germany and transplanting him into suburban America. Emil maintains the Hitler Youth opposition to traditional sites of authority as he maintains his loyalty to Nazism, however his resistance is recoded as carnivalesque, restoring the centrifugal energy of the monster child seen in early bad boy films. With a plot that resembles a contemporary horror film, Tomorrow the World follows an American widower and his family as they adjust to the arrival of his nephew Emil Bruckner from Germany, who they learn is a fanatical Hitler Youth. When the boy finds out that his teacher, who is also his uncle’s fiancé, is Jewish, this sets off a chain of events in which the boy, applying Hitler’s own tactics, seeks to divide and conquer the family, culminating in his attempted murder of his cousin

Chapter Five argues that Village of the Damned (Rilla 1960) and The Bad Seed (LeRoy

73 1960) both feature highly independent Aryan children that behave with contempt towards their elders, clearly demonstrating the influence of representations of Hitler Youth in

Hollywood anti-Nazi films. Yet both films also contain carnivalesque elements similar to those seen in early bad boy films. Where most wartime dramas featuring Hitler Youth portray them as anti-carnivalesque, Tomorrow the World significantly shifted representations of the Hitler Youth back to the carnivalesque and this change becomes an important element of later horror-themed monster child films like Village of the Damned and The Bad Seed. The chapter opens with a close textual analysis of Village of the

Damned (Rilla 1960) that explores the film’s Hitler Youth allegory but also demonstrates the strong presence of carnival features that are likewise fully on display in The Bad

Seed. The chapter also explores the influence of Tomorrow the World on The Bad Seed and challenges existing critical perspectives that view LeRoy’s film as the first monster child horror. Using a template created by William Paul in which he highlights seven key narrative elements in The Bad Seed that he claims recur in monster child horror films produced in the 1970s and 1980s, the chapter shows how these same seven narrative elements can equally be applied to Tomorrow the World. Paul’s argument is that the narrative elements in The Bad Seed that recur in films like The Exorcist and The Omen confirm that these films are directly influenced by LeRoy’s film, as demonstrated by their shared commonalities. Using Paul’s logic, this chapter argues that if the narrative elements he identifies in The Bad Seed that recur in The Exorcist and The Omen indicate a clear ancestry, then the fact that Tomorrow the World contains the same narrative elements means that the heritage credited to The Bad Seed must also include Tomorrow the World.

74 CHAPTER ONE

EARLY FILM AND THE CARNIVAL CONVENTIONS OF CHILD MONSTROSITY

Central to this thesis is the contention that monster child figures are often carnivalesque characters that have made significant and lasting contributions to cinema since its inception. As such, their history on screen has a longevity exceeding that commonly ascribed by existing scholarship that views the monster child’s in film as not occurring until a decade after the end of World War II. Such readings only account for the monster child’s increasing prevalence in the horror film since the mid-twentieth century. While the monster child today is considered a character belonging exclusively to the horror genre, its place within film history is neither clear cut nor stable and has evolved significantly over time.

As part of the monster child’s enduring presence on screen, it has transitioned from roots in slapstick comedy—to which it repeatedly returns—to become a staple of the horror genre. This thesis argues that American film production during World War II prompted this transformation from comedy to horror as Hollywood joined the war effort, channelling its resources to create a constant stream of anti-fascist propaganda films.

Among the myriad propaganda pictures produced during this period is a small cluster of films that include representations of Hitler Youth that adapt the conventions of the child prankster or “bad boy” comedies popular with early silent cinema audiences. Where the carnivalesque antics of prankster children in the silent era made countless flagrant attacks

75 against the ruling class and cultural elite at the turn of the century, by the 1940s

Hollywood’s anti-Nazi propaganda films developed a serious tone in their depictions of monster children, representing them as belligerent Aryan aggressors with a fanatical devotion to Hitler. Such was the shocking power of these representations of children that existing signifiers of child monstrosity were so radically altered and recodified that they endured after the war, influencing subsequent iterations of monster children. In other words, during World War II the signifiers of child monstrosity in cinema cohered around the image of the Hitler Youth, initiating a generic shift towards horror with its own tropes that nevertheless retain clear elements of both the Hitler Youth and the comic monster child from early cinema.

This chapter along with chapter two together establish the foundations for the principal argument of this thesis, showing how monster children have maintained a strong presence in cinema since its inception and how the early incarnation of the monster child as comic prankster established a set of conventions adopted by horror. To this end, the chapter also presents evidence of monstrous children in nineteenth century literary antecedents.

Crucially, these literary sources established a fundamental set of conventions for the representation of monster children that were adapted with seeming ease from the page to the screen where they persist into the present. The current chapter will focus on the importance of the 1896 Lumière film L’Arroseur arrosé and the European comic strips that likely inspired its creation and initiated the craze of bad boy cinema during the first two decades of the early silent era. Chapter two will explore the highly popular nineteenth century American literary genre that came to be known as the “bad boy” book

76 and gave its name to the early silent cinema of the bad boy. Together the following two chapters will show that consistent across representations of child monstrosity in late nineteenth century comic strip art and the American bad boy novel are instances of children using pranks to reverse the power relations that ordinarily define the adult/child dyad, and that this reversal became a popular genre in its own right in early silent cinema.

77 1.1 The Carnivalesque Monster Child in Early Cinema

In approaching the topic of early incarnations of badly behaved children in silent cinema and the later subgenre of monster children in horror, the question of genre arises and with it a dilemma surrounding how to approach their presumed shared history. Is there a perceptible relationship between these two figures and is the impish child of early silent comedy actually a forebear to the monster child of horror? Using Bakhtin’s carnival theory, this chapter asserts that early silent comedies featuring mischievous children often contain carnivalesque imagery inherited from nineteenth century comic strips that later inform the production of monster children in horror cinema. Instances of monster children on screen actively undermining adult authority through ridiculous pranks are carnivalesque insomuch as they subversively expose the fixed and immutable authority of adults over children to be a fiction, constructed by adults to keep the younger generation under control. Bakhtin contends that inversion plays a crucial role in the carnival’s ultimate purpose of renewal and regeneration. He refers to “a reversal of the hierarchic levels” as an “essential element” (81) of carnival. The monster child liberates itself from the status quo of adult rules and restrictions to triumphantly enact an overturning of hierarchies of power that ordinarily work to marginalise and silence children. Although in contemporary cinema the inversion of power relations between adults and children are most commonly depicted in horror films where adults become the casualties of child uprisings against traditional forms of authority, these carnivalesque power reversals by children in film have a long history and occur across a range of genres. Below are five examples of children behaving badly and undermining adult authority taken from a range

78 of horror films produced between the 1970s and the 2000s. In each of them the adult characters are unaware that they are targets of a young child’s attack until it is too late:

• A young girl places her pet tarantula on her sleeping mother’s bed. When her

mother wakes to find the spider on her chest she dies from fright.

• A young girl stealthily approaches a tool shed that she locks and sets on fire,

trapping a man inside who has been looking through an adult magazine.

• A boy who offers help to a wheelchair bound old woman rolls her chair to the

edge of a large sink hole and pushes her in.

• A small boy deliberately drops a hairdryer into his stepmother’s bath and

electrocutes her.

• A group of rabid schoolchildren surround one of their teachers, force him to the

ground and tear him limb from limb.

Presented in chronological order, the scenes described above are from the monster child horror films Kiss of the Tarantula (Munger 1976), The Bad Seed (Wendkos 1985), The

Pit (Lehman 1981), Mikey (Dimster 1992), and Cooties (Milott/ Murmion 2014). Each of the scenes outlined above contains an adult who falls victim to the cunning machinations of a monster child or cabal. The ease with which the child is able to set its trap is largely due to the adult’s otherwise attentive gaze being momentarily directed away from the child. Lowering their guard, the adults in these films typically assume children to be harmless. Whatever attentive gaze the adult normally adopts around the child, it does not involve guarding oneself against the child. For the monster child this blanket assumption

79 by adults that all children are innocent and harmless works to their advantage.

Manoeuvring the adult into a position in which they are rendered vulnerable, the devious monster child dons a mask of innocence.

Discussing how childhood in western culture is tightly monitored and controlled,

Nicholas Rose contends that childhood is customarily “the most intensively governed sector of personal existence” because “it is linked in thought and practice to the destiny of the nation and the responsibilities of the state” (123). So too, Simon Bacon and Leo

Ruickbie note that as representations of futurity, children “must be rigorously controlled and supervised within society” (vii) to ensure their conformity to the status quo. To relax scrutiny of the child is to create opportunities for the potential threat of mischief. They suggest childhood innocence that was once “enshrined in some imagined Golden Age”

(vii) has, in the early years of the new millennium been replaced by the construction of a childhood that is “unrestrained and monstrous” (viii). Such an argument assumes that previously the tendency to represent children in popular culture has been to emphasise their innocence. This is precisely the argument forwarded by Merlock Jackson who contends that early iterations of children in American cinema before World War II were wholly innocent and only after the war did versions of the child emerge that might be deemed monstrous. Yet, a simple comparison of early silent comedies featuring impish children with the above list of monster children in horror films shows that there are more commonalities between these two disparate genres than previously assumed:

80 • A boy puts live crabs in his father’s bed so that when the man climbs under the

covers he gets a nasty surprise.

• An old man quietly reading a newspaper receives a dangerous shock when his

grandson sneaks up unseen and sets the paper on fire.

• Two impish boys “birched” by an old man for their bad behaviour get their revenge

by pushing him down an open coalhole.

• A boy attaches electrical wires to a turkey carcass so that when the maid goes to

prepare the bird she receives a shock that causes her to convulse violently.

• A group of schoolgirls playing basketball with their elderly teacher suddenly pounce

on him, tie him up with ropes and suspend him from the ceiling.

In the order in which they are described, the silent comedy films listed above are Buster’s

Joke on Papa (Edison Manufacturing Company 1903), The Bad boy and Poor Old

Grandpa (American Mutoscope 1897), Young Scamps (Hepworth 1907), A Shocking

Incident (American Mutoscope & Biograph 1903), and Mrs Smithers Boarding School

(American Mutoscope & Biograph 1907). Uncanny resemblances abound between the examples of monstrous children in the horror film and those in early silent comedy. In both, the same carnivalesque inversion can be seen at play where the child deviously crafts a situation that mocks and undermines adult authority. As with the monster child horror film, the unwary adult in early silent comedy is made the victim of the prankster child’s antics. This is a critical detail in the carnivalesque construction of these films for it inverts an essential element that ordinarily differentiates adults and children: innocence.

81 As it is normatively applied to childhood, innocence describes the child’s unblemished and pure nature as a creature untouched by the worries and corrupting influences of the world. Innocent children, so suggest the Victorians, are adorable little cherubs. As angelic beings they require adult protection, and herein lies the paradox of childhood, for innocence also refers to a range of assumptions about the child that differentiates it from the adult and legitimises the controls that adult society imposes on children. Rather than wanting to become more like the child as the Romantics aspired and thereby make the world a place that is closer to God and Nature, the true goal of adult society is to preserve and sustain the social order. While innocence is framed as a virtue, more convenient is its portrayal as lack. Where the adult is knowledgeable, competent and independent, the child is unable to fend for itself and depends on the adult for its survival and protection.

The adult putatively has wisdom and experience while the child is ignorant, naïve and vulnerable. Where the child is weak, the adult is strong, and so on. In the monster child film these oppositions are reversed as the adult, confident in their supremacy and dominance over the child, is rendered naïve and made vulnerable. In other words, the monster child text inverts the adult/child dyad so that the child becomes self-sufficient, strong, knowledgeable and shrewd while the adult, lured by the child wearing a mask of innocence as well as their own misplaced faith in the childhood innocence, is transformed into the “innocent” victim. Importantly, the same inversion of power relations in the adult/child dyad that can he seen in the monster horror film is also evident in the early bad boy comedies of the silent film era.

For Paul, who persuasively argues that The Bad Seed stands as the originary monster

82 child text, LeRoy’s 1956 film provides the template for “how the child-as-victim metamorphosed into the child-as-monster” in the 1970s and 1980s and became “the central defining feature of horror films” (267) of that period, yet the above selection of silent films provides evidence that depictions of children transforming from victims to monsters wielding power over adults have enjoyed a long and enduring history in cinema.

In sharing distinct features despite belonging to different genres, the monster child figure both participates in and transcends genre, recalling Derrida’s challenge to genre purity in which he describes “a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set” (59).

In exploring the changing direction of representations of monster children in film after

World War II, this thesis argues that monster child horror films share a common heritage with early silent era slapstick comedies centred on impish children. To this end, Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach to will be useful in providing a means with which to identify common elements that recur in both the examples of monster children in the horror and comedy films cited above. Altman’s model assists with delineating the difference between the broadly inclusive iconographic building blocks of genre

(semantics) from interpretive definitions that derive meaning from its structures (syntax) that coalesce into themes. Altman contends that genres arise when the semantics of a particular set of films are repeatedly organised into a specific pattern enough times to constitute a generic collective. He notes that while every individual film has its own syntax with which it creates meaning, to locate syntax as a collective phenomenon that repeats across individual texts to create a recognisable genre it must be “reinforced

83 numerous times by the syntactic patterns of individual texts” (160). The examples provided above reveal a consistency that highlights particular similarities pointing towards a shared history. In addition, the above examples reveal the presence of surprisingly consistent semantics involving a familiar set of characters, locations and props. In each, the presence of a child and an adult is always central. Importantly in these films the child becomes the key focus and consistently drives the narrative that invariably involves the adult falling prey to the child’s mischievous machinations.

Typically the monster child film takes place either in a domestic setting such as the family home, school, church, playground or, occasionally, out on the street. These settings represent the places that children’s activities are usually limited to in their everyday lives. The places that children are granted access have changed significantly over time as protectionist anxieties concerning the welfare of children have resulted in ever less space made available to them. Where at an earlier time the child had unsupervised access to the entire town, western culture has by degrees so limited their freedoms that they have, as Wyness puts it, “now all but disappeared” (6).

Where semantic elements of the bad boy film and the monster child horror film share a common set of characters types, settings and situations in which the monster child goes unnoticed as they set up and execute mischief that causes some form of shock or physical injury to the unsuspecting adult, at a syntactic level of “generic ‘meaning’” (D’Acci 115), these narratives symbolise the inversion of power relations that ordinarily position the child at the lowest point of the social hierarchy. Where the weakness and ignorance of

84 children is ordinarily used to keep them under control, the monster child is a carnivalesque figure that is neither weak nor ignorant, though uses these attributes to mask its true self. The face shown by the monster child is not its true face but an innocent disguise that allows the child to move freely and unnoticed among unwary adults. When the child strikes, its adult victims are caught by surprise and rendered powerless. In this moment the child effectively turns the world upside down as the adult is cast down and rendered weak and ignorant. This carnivalesque inversion, as we will see throughout this thesis, is key to most monster child narratives except those of the Hitler Youth who seek to uphold the status quo. Beginning with L’arroseur arrosé this chapter will pay specific attention to the syntax of the early silent prank films featuring monster children, highlighting the recurring presence of carnivalesque inversion and its syntactic role within these early gag films.

85 1.2 L’arroseur arrose and Carnivalesque Conventions

Within the field of cinema studies remarkably little has been written about the role of silent cinema in the formation of the monster child horror film despite the sheer plenitude of monstrous young pranksters that inhabit early cinema. In their respective historical analyses of monster child films from the early silent era, both Sabine Büssing and Julian

Petley begin with British silent film pioneer Cecil . Hepworth’s comedic The

Gunpowder Plot from 1900 in which “a boy puts fireworks under his father’s chair … and blows him to pieces” (Büssing 144). Curiously, both writers approach the film as an example of early horror, overlooking the prevalence of prankster children in early film comedy.20 Counter to Büssing and Petley’s implied assertion that Hepworth’s film is the first of its kind, the monster child made its screen debut half a decade earlier when

20 Büssing argues that “one can retrace a long, continual tradition of horror films in which children play essential parts” (143) and includes in her filmography 28 silent film titles that she categorises as horror, beginning with Hepworth’s 1900 trick film. Although no copies of the film now exist, Hepworth undoubtedly used the same techniques he employs in an existing trick film he made that same year: The Explosion of the Motor Car. In that film Hepworth plays a policeman watching limbs fall into frame after the titular car explodes with passengers on board. While these trick films contain an element of Grand Guignol with their unexpected explosions and falling limbs, they are not intended to horrify. Instead, the obliteration of the car and its passengers is “presented as a joke” (Hornby 39) in which “death is the final gag” (Porter 24). The Gunpowder Plot is also reminiscent of Edwin Porter’s 1903 film, Hooligan’s Fourth of July. Part of the Happy Hooligan series started by J. Stuart Blackton based on Frederick Burr Opper’s cartoon strip, Porter’s film shows Hooligan and his friend Dusty see some bad boys place a large firecracker under a fruit vendor’s cart. Hooligan tries to retrieve it but is blown up along with the vendor whose body parts rain down as the smoke clears. Dusty collects the parts and reassembles them and they magically return to life. Another film Büssing’s considers a product of “the early days of the horror film” (144) is Walter Booth’s An Over-Incubated Baby (1901) in which an infant emerges from incubator doubled in size with long hair and a beard. William Silverman notes that in the fin de siècle period the newly invented baby incubator was exhibited at expositions and theme parks in Europe and America. An Over-Incubated Baby parodies the invention and its public exhibition, constituting what Laraine Porter refers to as “comedies of physical transformation that pitched humanity against machines” (24). Notwithstanding its comedy roots, the film has understandably inspired associations with science fiction, such as Keith Johnston, who sees a clear link between Booth’s film and the narratives of Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde where transformation is a common motif (56).

86 Auguste and Louis Lumière exhibited ten one-shot films projected on their cinématographe at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895, an event commonly considered “birth of cinema”.21 Significantly, the program included four films that privilege child subjects, demonstrating what Vicky Lebeau refers to as “the

Victorian compulsion to represent the child” (8). The four Lumière films featuring children are Repas de bébé [Feeding the Baby], La pêche aux poissons rouges [Fishing for Goldfish], Baignade en mer [Swimming in the Sea], and Le Jardinier [The Gardener], or L’Arroseur arrosé. Of the four, L’arroseur arrosé what Gunning calls a “heavy freight” because of the historical “firsts” attributed to it. Unlike the actualities comprising the rest of the Lumière program (including the three other child-centred films),

L’arroseur arrosé is commonly considered “the first fictional (that is, staged) narrative film and the first film comedy” (Gunning 88).

L’arroseur arrosé opens on the Lumières’ gardener François Clerc (who was the

Lumières’ actual gardener at their Lyon estate), wearing an apron and boater hat as he stands in profile at the far left side of the frame holding a hose with which he is watering something off screen. Entering the frame from the right is Benoît Duval, a young boy who served as an apprentice at the Lumières’ factory.22 Duval creeps up behind Clerc and steps on the hose, stopping the flow of water and only releasing his foot when Clerc holds the hose to his eye, sending a jet of water into the man’s face that knocks off his boater hat. Clerc then catches Duval who tries to flee and drags him back to the centre of the

21 Parkinson observes that for film historians the December 28 screening traditionally marks the birth of cinema as we know it (17). 22 For details on Duval and Clerc, see Lance Rickman’s 2008 article: “Bande dessinée and the Cinematograph”, p. 4.

87 frame where he spanks him soundly before returning to watering the garden, without his hat. As this chapter will show, this simple narrative introduced the bad boy character to cinema and contains within its elementary structure the codes and conventions typically found within the subsequent cycle of early slapstick comedies that historians refer to as the Bad boy films.

As a foundational text, L’Arroseur arrosé shares noteworthy semantic and syntactic similarities with the scenes from the silent comedies and horror films described in the introduction of this chapter. As with these earlier examples, the Lumières’ short film is comprised of a clear causal chain structured around a simple gag. This basic formula of the set up and execution of the gag in which a child is the prankster and an adult the victim of the prank forms the semantic core of a group of early silent films that have come to be referred to as the bad boy genre. In his essay “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy”, Gunning explores the bad boy genre and its role in establishing key conventions of film comedy in their most rudimentary form as a formula of set up and execution of the gag. Gunning’s cinema of attractions highlights a significant component of the formula as the gag, which is staged specifically with the audience in mind. 23 In fiction-based films (as opposed to actualities) spectacle is usually “restricted to gags” and, just as Clerc drags Duval back to the foreground centre of the frame to administer his punishment, “it is the direct address of the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a cinema showman, that defines this approach to filmmaking” (384).

23 Gunning’s earlier foundational essay “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”, describes how the cinema of attractions “directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle” (384).

88

Despite its brevity and simplicity, Lance Rickman insists that L’Arroseur arrosé contains significant stylistic sophistication insomuch as its beginning and ending are almost identical and bookend the narrative to create a “cyclical structure” (6) in which, at either end of the film, the gardener stands alone in the frame on the left hand side of the screen holding a hose and watering plants situated off screen. Rickman notes that the moment

Duval lifts his foot to send a surge of spray into Clerc’s face is located at the precise midway point of the film, aligning style and content as the gag at the centre of the narrative is also situated at the centre of the film’s running time (6). This effectively divides both the narrative (and the reel on which it appears) into two parts so that the set up of the prank occurs in the first half, at which point the gardener receives a face full of water, while the second half involves the fallout from the prank. The action in the first half that sets the scene is slow and still while the action in the second half is kinetic and chaotic.

In his analysis of L’arroseur arrosé, Gunning locates a clear set of semantic conventions that, he argues, provide the prototype for subsequent prankster child films. He contends that Lumière’s film and the of “child rascals” it inspired in early cinema would

“shape the later genre of film comedy” (“Crazy Machines” 89). Isolating the semantic conventions of the early prankster child genre, Gunning systematically sets out the narrative schema organising what he calls “the structure of mischief” (90). He refers to the set up of the gag as the “preparatory phase”, while the prank itself is its “result and effect” (90). Importantly, he identifies two key characters or “basic roles” involved in the

89 action that he calls "the rascal" and "the victim", noting that, “the rascal undertakes the preparatory action, while the victim suffers its consequences” (90). Importantly, the label

“victim” brings with it significant modal implications for the earlier comparison of comedies and horror films featuring monster children, reinforcing the semiotic connection between the two genres where victims form an essential ingredient.

Elaborating on the organisation of L’arroseur arrosé’s narrative, Gunning observes how the phases of preparation and consequence can both be broken down into two stages: “the preparation has two obvious ones—the stepping on the hose, which blocks the flow, and the stepping off, which frees it. Likewise, the result could be divided into two stages: the gardener's examination of the nozzle, and his consequent soaked face” (90). Gunning also notes that L’arroseur arrosé includes an “optional concluding action” in which the rascal is appropriately punished “either by the victim or some figure of authority (parents or police)” (90). While the Lumière film includes punishment, subsequent silent comedies frequently portray the prankster child evading punishment.24

In addition to its narrative structure, Gunning highlights how the hose used in L'Arroseur arrosé initiates the narrative importance of props—various low-tech domestic items like lamps, hoses, umbrellas, buckets, flues and string, as well as flour, water, ash and soot—

24 An example of a child escaping punishment for his prank is the 1899 Biograph film ’s Ringing Good Joke on His Dad where a man dozes on a chair with his feet resting on the stovetop while his wife washes clothes at a laundry tub beside him. The wife leaves the room and while she is gone Tommy sneaks in and ties a string to the man’s chair, attaching the other end to a towel in the tub. He sneaks out as his mother re-enters, feeds the towel into the wringer and begins cranking. As she does, the string attached to the towel pulls over the chair, sending he husband crashing to the floor and tipping the contents of the tub over him. As with L'Arroseur arrosé, the gag attracted imitators. It reappeared a month later in the Edison film A Wringing Good Joke by James H. White, again in Edwin Porter’s 1900 version, and once more in a 1903 Lubin production, also called A Wringing Good Joke.

90 that are repurposed by the child for the task of performing the practical joke. While

Gunning is mainly interested in delineating the semantic elements of these early prank films, in what amounts to syntactic analysis, he applies terms suited to a carnivalesque reading where roles are reversed and the authoritative adult figure is cast down, such as

“paternal dethroners” (98) that evoke the carnivalesque practice of profanation and ritual uncrowning. Further, he rightly describes the vengeful pranks performed by young rascals that “wreak havoc on their adult oppressors” (101) as having a “scatological origin” that amounts to “a -training reversal children inflict on adults” as an expression of “infantile revolt” (91), clearly evoking the body humour and grotesquery of carnival imagery.

In the profanation of an authority figure represented in L'Arroseur arrosé, an essential prop is Clerc’s boater hat that gets knocked from his head by the surge of water at its core, this convention is carnivalesque in its depiction of festive decrowning and how a lowly child turns the tables on an adult in a position of power and authority. Bakhtin refers to crowning and decrowning as “the primary carnivalistic act” (Dostoyevsky 124) because it encapsulates the joyful relativity of carnival life through its casting down and profanation, symbolising “the pathos of shifts and change, of death and renewal” (125).

In the various European comic strip versions of the hose gag that predate the Lumières’ film and upon which it is putatively based, hats worn either by hose operators or their high class victims are so consistently knocked off that this constitutes a convention.

91 1.3 Comic Strip Origins

Along with the various “firsts” described by Gunning, L’Arroseur arrosé can well be considered the first monster child film and, as Liam Burke insists, “cinema’s first adaptation of a comic” (3). Alongside Burke, other researchers that include Donald

Crafton, Thierry Smolderen and Antoine Sausverd have similarly argued that the

Lumières’ film was inspired by comic strips, although French journalist and cinema writer Georges Sadoul is commonly credited with first exploring the comic strip origins of L’Arroseur arrosé. Rickman (10) writes that in an interview with Louis Lumière,

Sadoul asked him if the scenario for the film was inspired by Hermann Vogel’s sequential artwork titled “L’Arroseur” [The Sprinkler] that had been published in

Imagerie Artistique dela Maison Quantin in 1887. When the elderly Lumière insisted that it was his 10-year-old brother Edouard who had suggested the idea—a point corroborated by Clerc—Sadoul countered that Edouard probably had the idea after seeing Vogel’s illustration. While it is more than likely that Edouard Lumière’s idea for L’Arroseur arrosé came from comic illustrations, Sadoul is too fixated on Vogel’s work when actually the hose gag had already become a popular subject among comic artists in

Western Europe. Young Edouard was just as likely to have seen an illustrated version of the water hose gag in any number of publications. Sausverd points out how several of the

Lumières’ comic films were adapted from comic strips and points to several drawn by

German artist Hans Schließmann that were published in German magazine Fliegende

Blätter. One pertinent example cited by Sausverd like L’Arroseur arrosé, involves a cunning mischievous child who succeeds in reducing an adult to a is a comic

92 scenario in three frames called “Der verliebte Kürassier” (“The Loving Cuirassier”) drawn by Schließmann and published in Fliegende Blätter in 1895. The cartoon was adapted by the Lumières in 1897 and released under the title “Bonne d’enfants et cuirassier” (“Nanny and Cuirassier”). In both Schließmann’s drawings and the Lumière film a soldier sits on a park bench wooing a woman tending a small boy. The soldier has placed his helmet beside him and while his back is turned the mischievous little boy replaces his own cap with the soldier’s helmet. When a senior officer appears, the solder leaps to attention and mistakenly dons the boy’s cap, looking ridiculous as he brings dishonour to his uniform.

Published in Fliegende Blätter on 15 August 1886, Schließmann’s version of the hose gag, titled “Ein buben streich” (“A Boy's Prank”) is described by Karasik and Newgarden as “perhaps the first pure ‘Sprinkler Sprinkled’” (169). It features a gangly boy performing the prank on an obese gardener. The boy hides around the corner of a building in the foreground while the gardener is clearly visible in the background. The boy steps on and off the hose and gleefully looks out at the reader while pointing with pride at his saturated handiwork. Schließmann’s version is likely an inspiration for the

Lumière film, however Crafton proposes that the 1889 version of the hose prank titled

“Un Arroseur public” [A Public Sprinkler] by Christophe25 published in Le Petit Français

Illustré on 3 August 1889 was the “definitive source” (37). He suggests that the Lumières

“transposed the cartoonist’s urban setting to the more convenient location of the family garden in Lyon” and even retains “the high background wall that limits the space of the composition” (Before 37). A compelling factor that points to Christophe’s version of the

25 Christophe was the pen name used by French artist Georges Colomb.

93 hose gag is Marcellin Auzolle’s famous 1896 poster advertising the Lumière

Cinématographe and recreating the host gag from L’Arroseur arrosé. In Christophe’s version a street cleaner fixes his hose to a hydrant outlet sunken into the pavement and fastens the stopcock key before proceeding to hose down the street. A young boy sees an opportunity for mischief and closes the stopcock. As convention dictates, the street cleaner looks into the hose when the boy turns the water back on and darts away. The final panel in Christophe’s comic strip shows the street cleaner being drenched while only one leg of the bad boy is visible, indicating his flight from potential punishment. With the exception of the mostly out-of-frame child in the final panel of Christophe’s drawing, the similarities between Auzolle’s poster and Christophe’s artwork are striking, suggesting a direct lineage from the comic strips illustrating the hose prank to the Lumières’ filmed version of this comic scenario (See figures 1/2).

Images not included

The mise en scene in Auzolle’s poster art depicting an audience watching L’Arroseur arrosé (right) has more in common with the final frame in Chrisophe’s Un Arroseur public (left) than the Lumières’ 1895 film. Note the bad boy’s leg disappearing from the left side of the frame in Christophe’s panel.

Other versions of the hose gag appearing in European magazines before the Lumières’

1895 film consistently use young boys to perform the prank, sneaking up behind hose

94 operators and either stepping on the hose or turning off the stream at its source. One of the first known versions of the prank in print is “Arrosage public” (“Public Watering”) by

Uzès’ (Achille Lemot), late-nineteenth-century France’s most “famous, admired and widely read” cartoon artist (Rickman 11). Published in Le Chat Noir no. 182 on 4 July

1885, Uzès’ version establishes the importance of the hat when a boy sneaks up behind a street cleaner and turns off the water at its source. Rather than looking into the nozzle, the street cleaner turns to see the boy and in a rage drops the hose and chases the boy who turns the water back on as he flees, sending a surge of water into the open door of a hat shop. The shop’s unlucky owner is at the door carrying a stack of hats when the jet of water hits him.

A Spanish version of the gag by Cilla (Francisco Ramón Cilla Y Pérez) appeared the same month as Schließmann’s. Titled “Una Picardía” [A Mischief] and published in

Madrid Cómico on 28 August 1886, in terms of framing Cilla’s version is almost identical to Schließmann’s with its thin youth hiding around a corner in the foreground and the fat hose operator in the background. However the story itself has more in common with Christophe’s street scene, showing the street cleaner arriving and attaching his hose to a sunken hydrant. Similar to Cilla’s version is Sorel’s “Fait divers” [sundry story] published in La Caricature (12 March 1887). Drawn in silhouette, Sorel’s version includes the street cleaner and the boy although the view is turned around so that the cleaner is in the foreground while the boy, visible to the reader but concealed to from the street cleaner, conducts his practical joke from around the corner of a building. In the

United States Arthur Burdett Frost included his own version of the gag in the 1888 reprint

95 of Stuff and Nonsense, originally printed in Harper’s Monthly (Gabilliet 5). Karasik and

Newgarden suggest Frost knew of the hose gag trend among European comic artists and

“tossed his formidable hat into the international hose gag ring” (172) with “The Squirt” in which a young dandy holding a hose is drenched by a boy playing with the faucet from behind a bush.

The delinquent child would become an extremely popular subject with American cartoonists and their readers. Representations of juvenile delinquency as an expression of breaking free from the strictures of rank, class and social decorum became highly codified in comic strip artwork that would in turn inspire filmmakers. In 1895 Richard F.

Outcault began Hogan’s Alley (featuring his infamous “Yellow Kid”), published in New

York World and described by Thierry Smolderen as “cacophonous … urban collages”

(107) in which packs of children run riot. One example is Outcault’s illustration, “What

They Did to the Dogcatcher in Hogan’s Alley” (20 Sept. 1896) in which the children of the ghetto viciously assault the dogcatcher en masse. The “Our Gang” short film titled

The Pooch (McGowran 1932) bears a striking resemblance and includes a scene in which the eponymous gang attacks a dogcatcher that attempts to nab Spanky’s dog, Pete. In

1902 Outcault began his Buster Brown cartoon strip that soon after was adapted to film in a 1904 series by Porter, pointing to the clear cross media process taking place between sequential art and cinema in the exchange of codes and narrative conventions.

The Journal began publishing Rudolph Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids strip in

1897 and almost immediately film versions followed, such as the American Mutoscope

96 films The Katzenjammer Kids in School (1898) and The Katzenjammer Kids Have a Love

Affair (1900). Chancy D. Herbert directed a further eight Katzenjammer films for Selig

Polyscope in 1912.26 Dirks’ beloved troublemakers Hans and Fritz were modelled after

Wilhelm Busch’s 1865 German children’s storybook Max und Moritz. David Kunzle explains that representations of power inversions in the European comic strip go back to sixteenth century broadsheets when “European-wide conflicts and challenges to ancient authority became endemic [and] evolved a format for systematically expressing social flux by means of inverted human, animal, and human/animal relationships” (History

231). He points out that this format of inversion that, in carnivalesque fashion, portrays

“the weak taking revenge on the strong” as two small boys perform “a systematic attack on the hierarchy of authority in the village” (Kunzle 244). Amusingly, the opening shot of Porter’s 1906 film The Terrible Kids frames its two boys in a way that closely resembles Busch’s introduction of Max and Moritz, presented as a portrait of them staring cheekily out at the reader. That Porter’s boys randomly include an assortment of middle class types in their seemingly random attacks on a range of adults in ways similar to Busch’s boys suggests that the film took its inspiration from the 1865 story where, as

Kunzle observes, the mischief of children becomes a symbol of class struggle with “the weak taking revenge against the strong” (244).

These comics demonstrate that the prankster child was already well established in nineteenth century comic illustrations and sequential art well before appearing on film.

Although Sadoul is correct in his assertion that L’Arroseur arrosé likely found inspiration

26 The titles directed by Chancy D. Herbert in 1912 are: The Katzenjammer Kids, They Go Tobogganing, They Plan a Trip to Germany, They Entertain Company, They Go to School, School Days, Unwilling Scholars, and The Arrival of Cousin Otto.

97 in these illustrated stories, his contention that it was the work of Vogel that prompted

Edouard Lumière seems misplaced, as there are numerous other examples that are significantly closer in content to the Lumière narrative. In addition, where most of these comic strips illustrate hats being knocked off their wearers’ heads, which is clearly featured in the Lumière film, in Vogel’s version of the gag no hats are displaced at any time. The willing removal of a hat by the wearer is a sign of respect but its forced unceremonious removal by another is a form of humiliation and represents a form of casting down, lending itself to the rich carnivalesque theme of crowning and uncrowning as the next part of this chapter will explore.

98 1.4 Hats and Carnivalesque Uncrowning

The presence of the hat and its fall from the waterer’s head is, for the comic strip artist, an important visual signifier of the power of the blast of water that also works to heighten the humour of the gag, demonstrated in Uzès 1885 drawing “Arrosage public”. Even when the hose gag is performed without a child, it maintains a potent theme of social levelling with the profanation of the existing order as hierarchies of power are inverted, as seen in Gibey’s, “Fait divers” published in La Caricature on 2 June 1888 (figure 3).

Image Not Included

Figure 3: Gibey., “Fait divers” La Caricature, 2 June 1888.

Gibey’s four frame story strip shows a minor incident of class warfare, portraying a wealthy dandy wearing a white tuxedo, top hat and monocle and carrying a cane,

99 nonchalantly walking up and standing on a street cleaner’s hose.27 Turning to the dandy to demand he remove his foot, the street cleaner’s nozzle points directly at the toff as he steps off the hose. The subsequent stream of water saturates the dandy and crucially knocks the top hat from his head while the cleaner, grinning broadly, relishes the moment. Due to the ambiguity of the drawing, readers may interpret the actions of both characters in the strip as either deliberate or unintended. In most of the comic strip versions of the hose prank, the hose operator invariably wears a cap or hat that is displaced by the sudden surge of water blasting his face. Gibey’s version importantly equates the power structure between the adult and child with differences in class (Karasik and Newgarden call it a “socialist plot twist” [171] where they view the aristocrat as deliberately obstructive and is “hoist by his own petard”), explicating the socio-political subtext present across all versions of the gag.

As mentioned earlier, Bakhtin intimates that crowning and uncrowning are a critical component of festive life insomuch as “every feast crowns and uncrowns” (216). With roots in the Roman Saturnalia in which masters and slaves trade places and a mock king

“wearing mock crowns and wrapped in sceptre palls” (Frazer 585) rules for the duration of the festival, carnivalesque crowning and uncrowning is a powerful symbol of the temporary inversion of hierarchies that ridicule the established order with impunity, supplanting the eternal and spiritual with all that is temporal and corporeal. The removal of the hat constitutes a form of uncrowning and temporary suspension of the status quo as

27 Before cartoonists began drawing the trickster child meddling with the street cleaner’s hose, Post- Impressionist artist Georges Seurat made a study of a street cleaner several years earlier. His Conté crayon drawing “Street Cleaner with Hose” (1882-3) depicts its subject in semi-silhouette wearing an apron and wide-brimmed hat (see: Robert L. Herbert, p. 65).

100 the impish child becomes a veritable Lord of Misrule. At the same time, the authority symbolised by headwear is humorously and unceremoniously removed through the profanation of the wearer.

Mack Sennett confirms the intentionality of a subversive symbolic toppling of the established order in his discussion of the significance surrounding the humiliation of a in his slapstick comedies that he calls “the man in the top hat”. In an essay discussing what he has observed makes his audiences laugh Sennett notes that the debasement of authority figures and officials generates the highest levels of hilarity. He contends that audiences “feel vicious towards … the policemen and the man in the top hat” and that “for some extraordinary reason they feel abused if you let a man in a top hat escape unscathed” (46). Symbolising the ruling class,28 Sennett explains that the top hat is

“the final symbol of dignity” and that audiences want to be shown a representational “fall of dignity” (46). Like the attacks on authority signified by the humiliation of the man in the top hat, the humour of the hose gag is derived in part from its portrayal of a character associated with power and elevated status cast down by a person of inferior rank. In our case, this is the physical debasement of an adult by a child observable in early silent comedy and later in the monster child horror film. For Thomas Sobchack, these comically violent actions in early cinema are evidence of “the notion of repressed hostilities, the dynamics of conflict between social strata, and comedy as socially accepted aggression”

28 Hats, according to Colin McDowell, are the “least necessary but the most powerful” (25) of clothing items because of their semiotics of power and status. He notes how throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the top was “found on all the ‘top heads’. Businessmen, bankers, politicians and all upper-class and aristocratic males wore it for all but the most informal occasions” (112). Ariel Beaujot notes that during the nineteenth century, despite their lack of comfort, difficulty to wear and need for daily maintenance, top hats became a crucial fashion accessory among the upper classes and business tycoons, signifying a “physical embodiment of powerful hegemonic ” (64).

101 (15).

Sobchack’s essay on the reception of early silent British comedy identifies anti- authoritarianism as a pivotal theme appealing to its largely lower class audiences disenfranchised by the wealthy and elite ruling classes. Comedies depicting parents, teachers, police officers, businessmen and other authority figures being “outwitted and gulled by rebellious prankster children” (15) were highly popular because the children in these films were perceived as signifiers of the powerless and subjugated turning the tables on their oppressors. Sennett refers to the pleasure that his audiences device from witnessing such debasement that he calls, “the reduction of Authority to absurdity” (King

29). Sobchack argues that lower class film audiences identified with the rebellious child characters in these films as they were “aware in some way that the relationship between the classes was similar to that between parents and children” (17). In other words, disenfranchised and socially marginalised audiences watching early silent cinema recognised themselves within portrayals of children on screen and experienced vicarious pleasure seeing what Wood calls “the most oppressed section of the population” (10) rise up and exact revenge against figures of authority.29

Although his focus is on early British cinema, Sobchack insists an identical trend occurred simultaneously in the and reasons that this was due to early film audiences in America, like those in Britain, being predominantly composed of the

29 This idea of audiences siding with the monster child is taken up by Scahill at the start of his book on the Revolting Child in horror cinema. Scahill explains how queer audiences, who commonly experience feelings of marginalisation and social exclusion, identify with the transgressive monster character child that moves against the dominant social order. He states that in the same way that the revolting child “navigates those experiences of secrecy, rejection, alienation, and rage, so too does the queer spectator” (3).

102 disenfranchised working classes. Sobchack’s claims about the composition of audiences in United States relies on a comment by Rachel Lowe made in 1949 insisting that

“cheapness and accessibility made the film the drama of the masses” (qtd in Sobchack

15). Lowe’s remark is based on suppositions about middle class audiences finding no appeal in early moving pictures yet film historians have challenged this long-held assumption. Richard Butsch certainly affirms that “tradition has characterized nickelodeon audiences as urban immigrant workers” (141) enticed by the cheapness, variety, and sheer abundance of movie houses, however he also states that movie houses were likewise located in middle class shopping precincts and rural townships, indicating their appeal extended beyond the working class. Indeed, audiences across the country were by no means homogenous as Melvyn Stokes points out, stating that American film audiences “remained far from unified, either in terms of their composition or responses”

(9).

Despite Sobchack’s reductive characterisation of American audiences, his point still stands that lower class audiences were likely to have embraced prankster child characters

(and other iterations of trickster) as symbolic underdogs battling against a repressive social order. Charles Musser maintains that the early prankster child films produced in

America were actually intended for a predominantly middle class adult male clientele. He contends that these films sought to engender in its target audience feelings of nostalgia for “the carefree days of childhood” (Emergence 10). One early film that demonstrates the nostalgic aura that these films sought to evoke is the 1907 Selig Polyscope production

When We Were Boys. The film opens on a pair of old men reminiscing about their youth

103 and repeatedly cuts to various flashbacks of their shared childhood when they actively sought to make boyhood mischief, such as stealing food and playing pranks. While filmmakers putatively marketed child prankster films like When We Were Boys to a specifically older middle class male audience, according to Musser, when seen by

“children and working class immigrants”, who responded to the films’ carnivalesque syntax, they became "potentially subversive” (10). Indeed, Musser contends that, “from the filmmaker’s perspective the bad-boy films were a return to carefree days” but that among young nickelodeon audiences, the films “were seen very differently—as schools of crime for American youth” (494). Pearson and Uricchio note that the children from immigrant and working class families represented a “substantial minority of the nickelodeons’ clientele” (64)30 and suggest that the particular emphasis by the ruling class on protecting children from potentially “dangerous” films was really to justify exerting influence and control over the burgeoning new mass entertainment of film and its content. With the moral defence of children in peril on their side, outcry quickly grew against those films representing children playing pranks on figures of authority and the potential impact these images might have on “’formative’ and ‘impressionable’ minds”

(65). As Musser puts it, the fear was that these films were “providing young viewers with undesirable role models” (344), a claim that, though never substantiated, has in any case dogged the film industry and popular culture in general ever since.31 The moral panic

30 Pearson and Uricchio report that increasing public concern surrounding child attendance at nickelodeons was supported by a range of largely unreliable statistical reports on the numbers of children frequenting these venues. John Collier, who served as secretary of ’s civic reform body, the People’s Institute, estimated in 1910 that across America, between “500,000 to 600,000 children attended picture shows daily” while Michael Davis’ report for the Russell Foundation on nickelodeon attendances in Manhattan fount that of the 900,000 people attending each week, 2250,000 were children and of this figure 16 per cent reported attending daily (65) 31 Films and video games are often scapegoated in media effects debates when children commit violent crimes, no doubt in an effort to steer discourse away from larger systemic social issues. McKenzie Wark

104 surrounding early films depicting children outsmarting their elders and reversing power relations between adults and children recognises and inadvertently legitimates subversive readings of the films as representing attacks by the oppressed and marginalised sections of society anticipate the similar the importance of these early films

Through an exploration of L’Arroseur arrosé, this section has shown how the Lumières’

1895 film shoulders what Gunning calls a “heavy freight” as not only is it considered the first narrative film and the first filmed comedy, it might also qualify for being the first film adapted from a comic strip. There is much more that can be said about the history of the comic strip and its role in establishing the bad boy as a stock character, such as

William Hogarth’s child dog torturer Tom Nero in his 1751 printed engraving series The

Four Stages of Cruelty to onwards in establishing the monster child character in sequential art, however this is beyond the scope of this thesis. Along with these “firsts”, this chapter contends that L’Arroseur arrosé is also the first monster child film, confirming that the history of the monster child stretches back to the birth of cinema, informed by a tradition of nineteenth century comic strips depicting children playing devious pranks on gardeners and street cleaners.

The schema of the early prank films first formulated in L’Arroseur arrosé came to be endlessly copied by subsequent filmmakers during the early silent period, inspiring what

highlights how London tabloid the Telegraph Mirror in an article titled “Evil Video” sought to rehash the “video nasties” debate from the previous decade by connecting John Venables and Robert Thompson’s murder of 2 year old James Bulger to the horror film Child’s Play 3 (Bender 1993), noting how “there is a superficial similarity between some scenes in Child's Play 3 and details of the murder” (11). Wark notes that although Venables father had hired the video, “there was no evidence that either of the murderers had seen it .. [and] no evidence connecting Venables' and Thompson's behaviour to videos was entered during the trial at all” (11)

105 Davide Turconi refers to as “a vast generation of films, comic or otherwise, based upon the pranks of youngsters” (155). At its American premier in New York on 29 June 1896 at Keith’s Union Square Theater, L’Arroseur arrosé was retitled The Gardener and the

Bad boy and its exhibition immediately inspired numerous imitations among American film companies. Jane Gaines has idenitified twelve copycat versions of the hose gag produced between 1896 and 1900, while Musser confirms that The Gardener and the Bad boy inspired Edison, who saw how popular the Lumière film was with audiences, to begin commissioning comedies from his filmmakers, including two versions of

L’Arroseur arrosé: one featuring a man in the role of the gardener and another a woman

(Beyond 98). Other studios were quick to get on board with what soon became known as the “bad boy” film. The so-called “bad boy” quickly became an important stock character in early cinema, lending its name to numerous films titles, such as: The Bad boy and Poor

Old Grandpa (Biograph 1897), The Bad boy’s Joke on the Nurse (Edison 1901), Bad boy and the Hod Carrier (Lubin 1903), Two Bad boys in Church (Edison 1904), The Bad boy and the Grocery Man (AMB 1905), Bad boy’s Joke (Charles Urban 1907), Peck’s Bad boy (Essanay1908) and Two Bad boys (Hepworth 1909).

While the majority of “bad boy” films were fittingly about boys behaving badly, the gendered term excludes the many films containing girls behaving badly that clearly also fit within the genre. Early examples include: Seminary Girls (1897), Plaguing Grandpa

(1897), The Sleeping Uncle and the Bad Girls (1898), Little Mischief (1898), A Boarding

School Prank (1903), Children v. Earthquakes - Earthquakes Preferred (1905), The

Tomboys (1906), Mrs Smithers’ Boarding School (1907), The Heavenly Twins (1907),

106 When Mama’s Out (1909), and the popular British Tilly the Tomboy series films starring

Alma Taylor as mischievous Tilly. As with such prankster child films as Our New Errand

Boy (Williamson 1905) and The Terrible Kids (Porter 1906) in which delinquent boys go on a crime spree and are subsequently pursued by their many victims, Tilly and her friend

Sally (Chrissie White) commit numerous misdemeanours against a range of adults and their actions typically result in them being pursued by an angry mob.32 In some cases, bad boy characters were played by girls dressed as boys, such as Lewis Fitzhamon’s 1907 film That Fatal Sneeze in which Gertie Potter dressed as a boy puts pepper in her uncle’s handkerchief, hairbrush and clothing. The uncle’s subsequent sneeze attack is so violent that everywhere he goes his explosive sneezes cause calamity while his ebullient nephew dances about admiring his destructive handiwork. Finally the uncle sneezes so hard he explodes in a puff of smoke. Whereas Musser continually refers only to “bad boys”,

Gunning more inclusively discusses the pranks committed by both “bad boys and girls”

(98) in early film, although the examples he provides of children behaving badly are generally delinquent males.

The term “bad boy” is borrowed from the popular nineteenth century American literary genre referred to as “boy books” or “bad boy books” that will be the subject of the next chapter. Just as the comic strips depicting boys behaving badly and playing pranks inspired early filmmakers, the bad boy literary genre became an essential source for

32 One such example is Tilly and the Fire Engines (Fitzhamon 1911) in which Tilly and Sally steal a horse drawn fire engine and drive it through a fairground, destroying property and narrowly missing pedestrians that are forced to dive out of the way. When they are pursued by an angry mob that includes the firemen who have lost their vehicle, the girls stop at a fire hydrant where they attach the hose and thoroughly douse their approaching pursuers, recalling earlier comic strips like Hermann Vogel’s 1887 “L’Arroseur” [The Sprinkler] in which a young street cleaner with a hose saturates numerous passers-by.

107 filmmakers in the silent era and beyond. In his essay on Hank Ketcham’s postwar cartoon strip Dennis the Menace and its subsequent television and cinematic adaptations, Henry

Jenkins traces its roots to bad boy books that he contends “represented the carnivalization of the child, the celebration of boyhood as a liminal and ludic moment still free from stifling civilisation ” (124). Just as the bad boy books constituted a specific literary genre, the films they inspired have come to be recognised by film historians as an early film genre in its own right. Musser repeatedly refers to these films as belonging to what he terms the “bad boy genre” due to their ubiquity, popularity and well-defined syntax.

Pointing to the repetition and variation of generic codes of the bad boy in silent cinema,

Musser describes how, “the audience know that the bad boys will engage in a series of humorous, mischievous acts”, and that “only the specific form of their mischief is in doubt” (Emergence 4). According to Altman, the repetition and stabilisation of semantics are crucial to establishing the syntactic elements of a genre where its semantics are

“transformed into a syntactic genre by the successive privileging of specific links between semantic elements” (116). The child turning the tables on the unsuspecting adult is so often repeated in bad boy films that this carnivalesque action forms a crucial ingredient of the genre’s coherence. Musser insists that “delinquent kids appear constantly in early film comedies” and that the narrative formula of “one or two boys

[who] disrupt staid adult life and undermine authority” (344) is so common that it can be considered a genre in it own right. King is even more explicit in his claims of a distinct generic category, arguing that the large corpus of comedies featuring badly behaved children “constitute perhaps the earliest important genre in American fiction filmmaking”

(298), while Krämer in strikingly similar terms boldly refers to the films as “one of the

108 most important genres in early American filmmaking” (118). Making particular use of the inversion of hierarchies and the concomitant profanation of adult authority, the early bad boy genre established a narrative formula so elegant in its simplicity that, as this thesis will show, it has stood the test of time and crossed over to the horror genre, giving rise to the monster child character.

109 Summary

In this chapter the influence of the nineteenth century comic book in the development of the bad boy in early cinema is briefly analysed. Rather than conducting original analysis of source texts, this chapter has drawn on recent critical work by researchers into the field of comic book studies and adaptation studies that have conferred on the Lumieres’

L’Arroseur arrosé the title of the first comic book adaptation. This foundational chapter importantly establishes the syntactic consistency existing between the cinema of early silent bad boy (and girl) films and later monster child horror films and their common formulaic use of the inversion of power relations in the adult/child dyad. In so doing the chapter demonstrates L’Arroseur arrosé can be included in the bad boy canon and in fact demonstrates how the monster child was present at the birth of cinema in 1895.

The next chapter moves from comic strips to investigate the literary genre of bad boy books more closely. Just as the hosepipe gag depicted in European comic strips are believed to have inspired the Lumières to make their short film, the bad boy books contain numerous scenarios of children behaving badly, providing numerous comedic situations in their narratives that furnished early filmmakers with a host of examples of lofty adults undermined and debased by child monsters levelling hierarchies of power and challenging the status quo.

110 CHAPTER TWO

ADAPTING THE AMERICAN BAD BOY BOOK

As the previous chapter has shown, L’Arroseur arrosé contains the narrative kernels of what would quickly develop into a popular and expansive film genre with its own stock characters comprising monster children playing pranks on unsuspecting adults. In

America these came to be known as bad boy films named after the nineteenth century literary genre of bad boy books. These books first emerged in the years following the

Civil War and enjoyed immense popularity for almost fifty years. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the bad boy book would finally decline in popularity, ending with ’s Penrod series.33 The bad boy subjects in these books could also be found in painting and theatre34 celebrating through the child figure what

Jadviga Da Costa Nunes describes as “the virtue, vigor, simplicity, resourcefulness and republicanism of American society” (225). Throughout the nineteenth century and the

33 Published in 1914, Tarkington’s Penrod follows its titular middle class bad boy on his adventures at home, school and play. Penrod Schofield is uncontrollable, easily bored and impulsive. When Reverend Kinosling joins the family for supper, Penrod is infuriated at being repeatedly called “Little Gentleman” by him. When their guest calls for his bowler hat, Penrod retrieves it but not before layering the inside with tar. Jacobson argues that the advent of psychoanalysis and the concurrent decline of recapitulation theory (a pseudoscientific theory that the advancement of civilisation is reflected in the stages of childhood) led to the decline of boy books. 34 In painting, the “naughty child” served as a metaphor for the young nation and was a popular genre figure from 1840 until the 1880s. The children in these works were almost always male and “shown in the midst of some prank or mischievous or disobedient act” (Nunes 225). One example is William Sidney Mount’s popular Farmer’s Nooning (1836), which features labourers resting under a tree after lunch, also contains young tickling an African American man’s nose with some straw while he lies asleep against a mound of hay in the midday sun. The child tickling an unwary adult with a straw would be a common motif in later silent comedies like Plaguing Grandpa (1897) and Little Mischief (1899). Exploring American children’s parlour plays performed in middle class homes, Shanan Custer notes that the gendered roles of the boys and girls saw the latter cast as nurturers in domestic settings while boys often played mischievous rascals that were “an extremely popular figure” (83) in plays like Ella Keating’s The Little Baker and Effie Woodward Merriman’s The Stolen Cat. Their crimes were “often resolved neatly” so that the offending boy “grudgingly learns his lesson, repents, and skips away happily, inevitably bound for more trouble” (83).

111 early twentieth century Americans commonly cast the figure of the child as a representation of their nation’s newness and promise. Kathy Merlock Jackson confirms that nineteenth-century American culture used romantic metaphors of childhood innocence to define the nation’s sense of adventure and optimism, recognising itself as

“still in the state of physical and moral growth” (17). During a period of intense optimism in which images of childhood innocence proliferated in American culture, where does the bad boy fit?

The period in which the bad boy became a popular subject in American literature coincides with enormous social, economic and technological changes occurring across the nation that would transform America into the leading global power. Following the

Civil War, the nation sprinted headlong towards modernity. The agrarianism of the previous century was supplanted by an industrial economy. Changes in infrastructure saw the completion of communication and transport systems nationwide, coupled with a boom in mining and manufacture that generated new levels of both wealth and poverty.

As the nation’s fortunes rose steeply, so too did its urban population with mass immigration rising to unprecedented levels. In a nation experiencing such extreme changes it is little wonder that for writers of the period nostalgic for a simpler time,

“boyhood seemed better than manhood” (Brooks 177) and paved the way for the enormous popularity of the bad boy books. Reflecting on his antebellum youth and expressing his feelings of alienation and disorientation in fin de siècle America, Henry

Adams writes “my country in 1900 is something totally different from my own country in

1860. I am wholly a stranger in it. Neither I, nor anyone else, understands it” (qtd. in

112 Jacobson 5-6).

Yet the bad boy characters do not just represent a longing for youth and a return to an antebellum idyll. The fearless young protagonists in the literature exhibit a particular effrontery—adventurism, ingenuity, enterprise and cunning—traits essential if one sought to prosper amidst the competition and corruption of the new American epoch. Marvin

Meyers writes of the mettle and enterprising character expected of the nineteenth century middle class American male. He describes how, “in his urgent quest for gain and advancement … [he] becomes an adventurer steered only by a bold imagination” (qtd in

Bridges 7).

Henry Jenkins alternatively suggests that increased visibility of the child in American art and literature during the nineteenth century documented an historical shift in the structure of middle-class American home life where the husband became increasingly absent. As such the responsibility of raising and instructing children fell increasingly to mothers.

Separated from the masculine influence of fathers, Jenkins borrows the term “boy culture”, a term coined by E. Anthony Rotundo,35 to describe a separate sphere occupied exclusively by boys that existed “just outside the mother’s watchful eyes” and “allowed them to develop the daring, autonomy, and mastery needed to function in a world apart from women” (124).

According to Kenneth Kidd, the bad boy authors demonstrate opposition to the earlier

35 Rotundo writes that during the nineteenth century boys developed a “distinct cultural world with its own rituals and its own symbols and values … outside of the rules of the home and marketplace … [that was] surprisingly free of adult intervention” (15).

113 didacticism and paternalistic “advice writing” found in books for children, and yet contained in the bad boy books are sage teachings gleaned through experience by their perceptive young characters. Perhaps the most famous is Tom Sawyer’s discovery of “a great law of human action” (Twain 14) early in the novel. Saddled with whitewashing the perimeter fences of his Aunt Polly’s property, Tom learns a lesson in motivation gleaned via reverse psychology and some fruitful scamming. He convinces the neighbourhood boys that whitewashing fences is an elite privilege that they willingly surrender their most prized possessions for the opportunity to partake and in doing so comes to the understanding that “in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make that thing difficult to attain” (14). Through this simple story in which Tom amasses great wealth, Twain’s wry humour uses Tom’s resource monopoly and acquisitive business acumen to parody the corporate business bias dominating the American political system and influencing policy that emerged in the late nineteenth century.36 So too, even as Twain shows contempt for the moralistic lessons contained in contemporaneous children’s literature, Tom’s cunning scheme demonstrates the author’s fondness for using life lessons not to teach but to make satirical observations on the paradoxes inherent in the human condition as well as the absurdity of civilised life. Intended as punishment by

Aunt Polly, Tom effectively turns the tables to create a carnivalised view of the world in which, through craftiness, deception and self-agency, he finds great rewards instead. The episode offers thus an embryonic glimpse at the monster child’s early incarnation with both semantic and syntactic elements coalescing in the trickster boy, so thoroughly outsmarting an elder through a series of deviously profitable inversions that symbolically

36 Samuel Eldersveld refers to the emergence during the late 19th century of the infiltration of American politics by corporate interests and its influence on policy through political donation as the “quid pro quo attitude of Big Money” (57).

114 shift existing hierarchies of power.

Kidd affirms that the focus of the bad boy books is a romantic celebration of prepubescent boyhood as “irrational, primitive, fiercely masculine, and attuned to nature”

(53), alluding to the romantic movement that saw the decline of punitive Calvinist attitudes towards childrearing,37 as well as to nineteenth century recapitulation theory.

Emerging from ’s ideas concerning the evolution of organisms from simple to complex life forms, recapitulation theory draws parallels between the socialisation of the child from what was considered its early savagery to development towards a civilised state as akin to the modernist myth of progress and its grand narrative concerning the history of western civilisation. John Trowbridge, editor of short-lived nineteenth century children’s periodical Our Young Folks, stresses recapitulation in his writing:

[As] the race of man has risen from ruder conditions, so the epitome, the

individual, begins with the native wildness of the stock, and develops later

whatever sweetness of humanity he may be capable of. The man is an

enlightened being, the boy is a barbarian”. (qtd. in Jacobson 14)

So too, Charles Dudley Warner who co-wrote The Gilded Age with Mark Twain in 1875, affirms recapitulation theory in his reflections on his own childhood, maintaining that

“every boy who is good for anything is a natural savage … You want to catch your boy young, and study him before he has either virtues or vices, in order to understand the

37 America especially saw significant changes in childrearing during the nineteenth century with increases in permissiveness commented upon by overseas visitors. Complaining about the lack of discipline practised by American parents, an English woman wrote in 1848 that “the indulgence which parents in the United States permit to their children is not seen in ; as soon as he can sit at table he chooses his own food, and as soon as he can speak argues with his parents on the propriety or impropriety of their directions” (qtd in Calhoun 67).

115 primitive man” (qtd in Ziff 68). Thus the bad boy’s behaviour, at least in middle class circles, was idealised as a necessary rite of passage in the male’s advancement towards a desirable form of manliness, described by Theodore Roosevelt as “thoroughly manly, thoroughly straight and upright” (qtd. in Kidd 53). Even so, the young characters in the bad boy books are very different to the children in other nineteenth century literature such as the work of Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott insomuch as the bad boy books usually end before their characters transition to adulthood, a point that Ziff highlights in his differentiation of the American bad boy from other boys in literature whose manhood is noticeably shaped by childhood experiences (33).

In order to better understand the popularity and pranks of the bad boys and girls in early cinema comedies, it is useful to first look at the development of the mischievous child in

American literature from which filmmakers often drew inspiration. In so doing, this chapter seeks to establish that even before the arrival of cinema, the codes of carnivalesque inversion found in early cinema comedy and later in comedy (and later still in the horror film) were already firmly established in the literature of the bad boy.

Throughout this chapter, the argument is made that a key characteristic of the monster child is its defiance of adult authority from its pre-filmic incarnation in nineteenth century bad boy literature and comic strips to its emergence in the early bad boy film genre to its eventual shift into horror. Exploring the motif of carnivalesque inversion in bad boy literature, works by three nineteenth century writers will be analysed and cases made for the influence of these texts on filmmakers, both in the early silent era and later with the

116 arrival of sound. The case studies will begin with Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s seminal 1869 novel The Story of a Bad Boy before proceeding on to two of Samuel Longhorn Clemens’

(hereafter Mark Twain) short stories, “The Story of the Bad Boy That Bore a Charmed

Life” (1865) and “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” (1870) that arguably cemented the prototypes present in the author’s 1876 novel The Adventures of

Tom Sawyer. The second case study provides a close textual reading of Sam Wood’s

1921 film Peck’s Bad Boy, adapted from George W. Peck’s collection of stories Peck’s

Bad Boy and His Pa, published in 1883. Through an investigation of these literary texts and film adaptations, it will be shown how the Bad boy genre of films in the early silent period drew inspiration from the so-called “bad boy books”.

117 2.1 Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy

Literary scholars generally concur that the American bad boy genre began with the publication of Aldrich’s semiautobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy in 1869.

Extolling the author’s originality and innovation in Atlantic Monthly in 1870, its editor

William Dean Howells (who was himself a poet, playwright and novelist who would later publish his own boy books, most notably A Boy’s Town in 1890) insists that “no one else seems to have thought of telling the story of a boy’s life, with so great a desire to show what a boy’s life is, and with so little purpose of what it should be; certainly no one else has thought of doing this for an American boy” (qtd. in Mailloux 112).38 Aldrich’s story follows bad boy Tom Bailey and charts the rebellious and entertainingly destructive tendencies of the nineteenth century American middle class male child in his ingenious attempts to break free from bourgeois social strictures in search of adventure. Alan

Gribben describes how Tom and his friends “slip out of their homes at night, coalesce into a small gang, and play pranks on the upright citizens of their New England town”

(xiv). Through their ludic mischief making, Tom and his friends temporarily overturn the established order as they bring chaos to the commercial shipping town of Rivermouth.

As we will see, through Tom and his cohort, Aldrich establishes at the birth of this all-

American literary genre a set of carnivalesque characteristics that become a key motif of

38 Howells’ comments refer to the proliferation of didactic children’s books and childrearing texts available at the time that nineteenth century American bad boy authors looked upon with derision. While the origins of the boy book and its semiautobiographical inspiration can be traced to Dickens’ David Copperfield (Graeme Smith describes Dickens’ novel as “avowedly autobiographical” (6)), Gribben notes that it is English author and reformist Thomas Hughes who is generally recognised as “launching the investigations of boyish minds with Tom Brown’s School Days (1857)” which were based on the author’s recollections of “loyalties and cruelties at Rugby School” (xiv). Gribben highlights how in the nineteenth century “the very idea that a boy’s thought-processes and actions were worthy of recording in a novel” (xiv) was considered a significant literary innovation.

118 a narrative centred on the child as little monster.

Aldrich’s bad boy story, inspired by his own antebellum boyhood, first appeared in serialised form in Our Young Folks and centres on Tom Bailey. Set in the 1830s, Tom’s story begins in New Orleans where his conscientious father, observing how Tom’s treatment of slaves grows increasingly unkind, sends him to his birthplace of New

Hampshire, a more established and “proper” part of the country. There, he lives with his strict grandfather in the town of Rivermouth39 and commences his formal education at the strict Temple Grammar School. Tom’s episodic adventures detail the chaos he and his peers cause. Sarah Wadsworth contends that The Story of a Bad Boy is “arguably the first full-length narrative to celebrate the ‘bad boy’ as protagonist rather than antagonist”, and describes the character as “decidedly reprehensible yet somehow still loveable” (81).

Such a description could be used for a great many monster children both in the early silent comedies as well as contemporary horror cinema. In the book’s first paragraph

Aldrich clarifies its title with a brief explanation:

Here is the story of a bad boy. Well, not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy;

and I ought to know, for I am, or rather I was, that boy myself. Lest the title

should mislead the reader, I hasten to assure him here that I have no dark

confessions to make. (7)

Indeed, there is nothing malicious about either Tom or his colleagues, even as their actions accrue to form an impressive though amusing catalogue of misdemeanours. Told in first person, Aldrich provides his reader with insight into the workings of Tom’s young

39 Rivermouth is the name Aldrich gives to the city of Portsmouth in Rockingham County, New Hampshire. Larzer Ziff notes that when Aldrich was thirteen he was sent to live with his maternal grandfather in Portsmouth to attend a school in preparation for study at Harvard (34).

119 mind and while his actions may at times seem destructive to adult characters, his motives are never cruel or vindictive.

In their daily search for excitement, or attempts to escape boredom, it becomes clear that

Tom and his friends act with no consideration for consequences. Contained within

Aldrich’s story is a youthful defiant energy that rails against authority. One of the most entertaining examples takes place in chapter seven, titled “One Memorable Night”. In the lead up to the fourth of July celebration to be held in the town square, Tom and his friends can barely contain their excitement. However their anticipation is not just for the official festivities but their own unofficial celebration planned for the evening of the third of July. Distracted by the anticipation of the event, Tom describes how neither he nor his peers can focus on anything else:

There was very little hard study done in Grammar School the week preceding

the Fourth of July. For my part, my heart and brain were so full of firecrackers,

Roman-candles, rockets, pinwheels, squibs, and gunpowder in various

seductive forms that I wonder I didn’t explode under Mr. Grimshaw’s very

nose. … This was not alone my condition, but that of every boy in the school.

(72-3)

The desire felt by Tom and his friends, confined to the stultifying authoritarianism of Mr

Grimshaw’s classroom, mirrors the carnivalesque compulsion to break out and seek liberate from, as Bakhtin describes, “the prevailing view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted”

(Rabelais 34). In Althusserian terms, the boys’ education represents indoctrination into the “rules of , civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of

120 respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination” (6). As if to confirm Althusser’s assertion, in the final chapter of Aldrich’s novel, he describes the fates of several of his school friends, who all move into occupations that quietly serve the establishment and maintain the status quo.40

In this regard Tom’s journey from rebellious youth to conformist adult mirrors the, liminality and short-lived merriment of the carnival, for both childhood and the carnival exist within an interstitial space that seeks to overturn the established order before returning to the status quo. Crucially however, the carnival reveals the constructedness and artificiality of the established order so that, in returning to order, participants of the carnival do so aware that the establishment is not a part of the natural order of things it purports itself to be but a social construct of the ruling class. The bad boy book readily points out the absurdity of the social order and revels in the defiance of youth whose rebellion is tolerated (and even encouraged) as part of a passage towards order. In this sense the bad boy book is carnivalesque in that it celebrates liberation from established norms but also demonstrates how the carnival is time bound and its participants must always return to life under the established order.

In his discussion of the unofficial quality of carnival life, Bakhtin notes “the marketplace was the centre of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology, it always remained ‘with the people’” (Rabelais 153-

40 Aldrich describes how he eventually loses touch with all of his school friends, but shares what little news he has of three of them. His friend Pepper Whitcomb went to Philadelphia to study law while classmates Bill Conway and Seth Rodgers remained in Rivermouth where they established a grocery business. Aldrich himself left Rivermouth for New York where his Uncle Snow held a position for him at his counting house. He writes that his uncle “was afraid that I would turn out to be a poet before he could make a merchant of me” (251). As is the case with many of the boys in the bad boy genre, the boy is—in the words of Ken Parille—forced to submit to the wills of influential and determined adults “grooming him for a life he does not want” (36).

121 4). Where official feasts are characterised by solemn ritual and seriousness, the unofficial space of the carnival is filled with triumphant laughter. In Aldrich’s novel Tom and his friends demonstrate their youthful defiance against the established order by staging an unofficial feast of their own design on the evening before the Fourth of July.

On the evening of the Third of July, Tom and his cohort sneak out from their respective homes at eleven o’clock and assemble in the town square where they build a great

“pyramid of tar-barrels” that they set alight. Although true carnival liberation would involve the entire township celebrating as a single corpus41 in which all hierarchies— those of age, class and gender—are suspended in what Bakhtin calls a “consecration of inequality” (10), the boys’ own festivities are importantly conducted in the centre of the town yet “outside the official sphere” (71) and in defiance of the establishment. Among the boys in this unofficial feast there exist no hierarchies, emphasised by their joining of hands around the fire where they dance wildly and, “shouting like mad creatures” (76), revel in their fleeting unsanctioned freedom from the existing order.

The unofficial nature of the third of July revelries compared to the officialdom of the fourth of July celebrations are highlighted by Tom’s request for permission from his grandfather to attend the official festival (thereby submitting to authority and observing existing power relations) whereas for the unofficial festival organised by Tom and his

41 Although all the citizens of Rivermouth and surrounding villages would gather to celebrate Independence Day, the event is an official festival and, as such, is organized and controlled by local officialdom. Mary Lou Nemanic observes that the Fourth of July had once been carnivalesque in nature, reflecting its spirit of rebellion, but that over time its usurpation by officialdom has led to “the deradicalization of Fourth of July celebrations as Independence Day observances evolved from rites of resistance to solemn civic ceremonies” (13).

122 friends, he seeks no such permission and instead defies his grandfather’s authority, waiting until the old man has retired for the night before climbing out his window to join his fellow nocturnal revellers.

In the town square the boys’ bonfire dies down all too soon, but unwilling for their revelries to end, they have a flash of inspiration that ultimately almost kills classmate

Pepper Whitcomb. Stealing old Ezra Wingate’s derelict stagecoach from a hilltop stable where it has stood disused and decaying for decades, they roll it full speed down the hill and through the main street of Rivermouth, “scattering the people right and left” (80) before sending it headlong into the bonfire where the dry wood explodes into flames.

Pepper, who prefers a free ride over helping push the coach, secretes himself in the cabin and is still inside when it enters the bonfire. Leaping out of the inferno engulfing the coach, Pepper appears unhurt although he is missing eyebrows and much of his hair. The boys think this hilarious and the laughter continues until they are seized and incarcerated in the local jail. However, inmates in an adjoining instruct the boys that their particular cell has a small aperture set high in the wall just wide enough for their smaller bodies to wriggle through, which the boys do and all escape.

The boys’ obsession with fire described by Aldrich represents a desire to break out of the monotony and strictures of everyday life. Bakhtin explains that fire is a common image used in carnival because it is “deeply ambivalent” in how it “simultaneously destroys and renews the world” (Problems 126). Fire provides a means to temporarily overthrow the existing order, symbolically consigning it to the flames. According to Mike Presdee, fire

123 can be used to symbolically “conquer and create” but “also to resist” (74) and observes this latter activity among a group of graduating high school students. Presdee reports that the students ritualistically burned their uniforms, noting that for these youths the fire was a means to “destroy the power of adults and in so doing create a new future they hoped would be theirs” (74). Aldrich’s destruction of the old stagecoach by fire carries with it the symbolism of death and rebirth, though it also vividly recalls Bakhtin’s description of the carriage set ablaze during carnivals in Europe. Bakhtin describes how “in European carnivals there was almost always a special structure (usually a vehicle adorned with all possible sorts of gaudy carnival trash) called “hell,” and at the close of carnival this

“hell” was triumphantly set on fire” (126). Unaware that they are reproducing a significant element of European carnival, Aldrich and his friends burn the stagecoach as a spectacular marker of the end of their festivities with the vehicle itself operating as a clear symbol of the old and its destruction a means of making way for the new.

Among the early Bad boy comedies are several in which children use fire in their pranks.

Fire, smoke and other pyrotechnics were a favoured subject of early filmmakers because of their visual attraction and Lewin Fitzhamon’s 1905 short film The Stolen Guy combines the subject of children with the spectacle of fire that also includes a ritual uncrowning and other carnivalesque imagery. In Fitzhamon’s film a group of boys proudly parade a Guy Fawkes effigy to their pyre but on their way are ambushed by a group of older boys who steal the Guy. A passing drunken aristocrat (played by

Fitzhamon himself) notices the young boys sobbing and offers his help. The boys enthusiastically take up his offer and dress him in a clown costume before leading him to

124 the pyre where they sit their oblivious victim in amongst the combustible material as though he were a human sacrifice.42 Elements of grotesque realism are clearly visible here. Bakhtin describes how the fundamental purpose of grotesque realism is

“degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract … to the material level” (Rabelais 19). Dressed in top and tails as signifiers of wealth and status, the aristocrat is cast down and ridiculed by the children. Like L’Arroseur arrosé and the comic strips portraying prankster children uncrowning various gardeners and street cleaners, the children in Fitzhamon’s film remove the top hat in a symbolic act of profanation, replacing his top hat with a conical clown’s hat. In placing the ridiculous cone-hat on his head, the dandy is crowned as a clownish Lord of Misrule, ready to be led to the pyre and burned. Bakhtin points out the clear connection between the clown as mock king and the effigy consigned to the flames as both encounter ritual abuse as a symbolic form of death. During medieval festivities a clown would be elected as carnival king. He is “mocked by all the people … abused and beaten when his reign is over, just as the carnival dummy … is beaten, torn to pieces, burned, or drowned even in our own time” (197). Fitzhamon’s film literally brings together the figures of carnival king and carnival dummy in the character of the aristocrat. The boys then light the fire and as the smoke and flames rise the man is singed and deftly leaps out rubbing his backside and runs off while the boys’ revelry continues into the night as they dance around the fire. A similar image of children dancing wildly around a fire can be seen in Peter Brook’s black

42 As with the examples of comedy and horror films compared at the start of this chapter that demonstrate clear semantic and syntactic similarities, The Stolen Guy and its comedic approach to human sacrifice is later given the horror treatment, most famously in Robin Hardy’s 1973 film , in which a pagan cult led by Christopher Lee burns police sergeant Neal Howie (Edward Woodward) in a giant man- shaped pyre, and more recently in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror film Midsommar that similarly involves a pagan community that immolates nine people (including five unwary “guests”) in a ritual sacrifice.

125 and white adaptation of Lord of the Flies when the feral boys decorate themselves with war paint and prepare to do battle with the imagined . As with The Stolen Guy, when the children in Lord of the Flies dance around the fire, passing between the camera lens and the bright white flames roaring behind them, they become silhouetted in such a way that the boys are reduced to shapes that lose their individuality (figure 4/5) and markers of status as they become part of a carnivalesque mass.

Images Not Included

Figure 4/5: Silhouettes of children dancing around fire: The Stolen Guy (L) and Lord of the Flies (R).

Along with shared primal images of boys dancing wildly around fires, the two films both contain elements of the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest with the children in

Fitzhamon’s film overpowered by a group of older and stronger boys that is mirrored in the rivalry between Ralph and and their respective cohorts in Lord of the Flies. Paul

Crawford points out in his Bakhtinian analysis of Golding’s novel how the author emphasises Britain’s “long infatuation with social Darwinism” (74) as endemic to the nation’s history of global imperialism. Büssing asserts that “among the first short-short

[sic] motion pictures dealing with children there are representatives which ‘anticipate’

126 later famous film plots” (143) and although her own example is not especially persuasive,43 Brook’s shot of English children dancing like savages around their burning pyre is uncannily similar to the shot in Fitzhamon’s film of children leaping and dancing around a roaring fire. In Aldrich’s chronicle and in both Fitzhamon and Brook’s filmic examples, the elemental character of fire elicits a primal response in the children who, without the repressive constraints of adult authority, display unbridled ecstasy evocative of carnivalesque revelry. For Bakhtin, the orgiastic excesses of the carnival with its wanton gluttony, drunkenness and celebratory elevation of the lower bodily stratum together work to create what he terms “an unbridled atmosphere of carnivalesque freedom” (Rabelais 266) that symbolises the renewal and regeneration central to the carnival. In the same way, the boys dancing before the all-consuming elemental flames undergo their own sense of renewal through an unrestrained celebration of temporary liberation.

Among their many mischiefs, the third of July bonfire in Aldrich’s novel is the most roguish and carnivalesque of the activities in which young Tom Bailey and his friends are engaged. Despite the provocative use of the term “bad boy” in his novel’s title, Tom is not bad in any real sense (as Aldrich explains in his introduction) so much as he is rambunctious and headstrong: qualities valued in boys growing up in the postbellum epoch. In his analysis of Aldrich’s novel, Mailloux notes that its significance especially lies in its conscious rejection of “the idealization of children’s role models in didactic fiction” (111). In the second paragraph of his opening chapter, Aldrich writes, “I call my

43 Büssing argues that the 1910 Edison film The Key of Life “reminds one quite strongly of the various Cat People adaptations” (144) although she never elaborates on this claim.

127 story the story of a bad boy, partly to distinguish myself from those faultless young gentlemen who generally figure in narratives of this kind” (1), clearly distancing himself from edifying boy books such as Jacob Abbott’s parenting guide, Gentle Measures in the

Management and Training of the Young.44 Mailloux notes that among middle class

American readers concerned about correct childrearing strategies, Abbott’s text was “the most famous advice book” in the postbellum decade as it “incorporated the new physiological knowledge of the period and heralded the era of the scientific expert in child training” (110). Aldrich’s book thus enters a dialogic exchange with the didactic children’s literature of his day, carnivalising it through parody and travesty by elevating the bad boy as the child ideal and debunking notions of good behaviour as a beneficial state. For Aldrich and other bad boy writers, the child that challenges the status quo, that pursues pleasure above self-improvement, that actively seeks to disrupt and invert power relations, and that resists and defies control from above—in short, the monster child— should be desired and encouraged. Aldrich’s model child is contradictory at its core, exposing the contradictions imposed on childhood as children are simultaneously constructed as little angels and little monsters.

44 Abbott’s book builds on his highly successful antebellum “Rollo” storybook series (1835-1858) that sought to instruct parents in correct childrearing and socialisation practices. Described by Jani Berry as “more didactic than artistic” in its promotion of “the virtues of obedience, industry, duty, and order” (100), the Rollo series follows the eponymous child from early childhood to early adulthood, providing age appropriate instruction. In terms that mirror Althusser’s observations concerning the purpose of the Ideological State Apparatus to reproduce the means of production, the didactic children’s books such as those of Abbott and his contemporaries (including Lydia Maria Child, Francis Channing Woodworth and Samuel Griswold Goodrich) was to preserve the established order in the face of the social upheaval brought about by America’s rapid industrialisation. Berry writes how, for America’s middle and upper classes, “society's future depends on the proper maturation of children; hence its keepers are intensely interested in child nurturing, especially when the fate of the social order seems in jeopardy” (100).

128 Although Aldrich’s novel is mostly forgotten outside literary circles today, his book has been credited in part with prompting Mark Twain to write his own boy book that would go on to become his most successful, as well as becoming one of the classic American novels. As the next section reveals, even more than Aldrich, Twain goes on the offensive

(literally and figuratively) against didactic children’s books, mounting a frontal assault against the monologic authoritarian control they attempt to exert over the child reader.

129 2.2 Twain’s Bad Boys

Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s 1869 semiautobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy is rightly credited with inaugurating the American nineteenth century Bad boy literary genre with its humorous misadventures of bad boy Tom Bailey and his roguish friends growing up in the fictional port town of Rivermouth, New Hampshire. Yet four years before its publication Mark Twain had already written a short piece titled “The Story of the Bad

Boy That Bore a Charmed Life”, published in the 23 December 1865 edition of The

Californian in San Francisco. Five years later he wrote a companion story titled “The

Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper”. The two stories together parody the cautionary didacticism and irksome piety of ecclesiastical children’s literature while also mocking the questionable reputations of politicians and the ruling elite. Twain’s pair of stories make use of grotesque realism through their inversion and mockery of scenarios commonly found in ecclesiastical texts warning children against disobedience and bad behaviour while also promoting a life of piety and prayer. In essence, Twain’s dialogic approach challenges the cherished puritan orthodoxy surrounding childhood and religion.

“The Story of the Bad Boy That Bore a Charmed Life” concerns a bad boy named who commits all manner of atrocities yet only ever profits from his crimes, undermining the validity of the moral lessons contained in Sunday school stories. Jim steals the key to his mother’s pantry and eats all her jam before replacing it with tar. He climbs into

Farmer Acorn’s apple tree to steal without falling and breaking bones. When the farmer’s dog comes to him away, Jim hurls a brick that “knocked him endways” (Complete

8). Not only does Jim commit crimes with impunity, he prospers from his wrongdoing

130 and sees to it the pious are blamed. At school, Jim steals his teacher’s penknife and plants it in the cap of model student George Wilson, the “good little boy of the village, who always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was fond of his lessons, and infatuated with Sunday-school” (9). The penknife is found in George’s cap and he is whipped while Jim, who hates do-gooders, coolly remarks, “Down on them milksops”

(7). Twain lists numerous further sins that Jim commits yet experiences no repercussions, further satirising puritanical literature in which disobedient children suffer while obedient children prosper. Thus when Jim takes a boat out on the lake on Sunday to go fishing instead of church, Twain highlights how unusual it is that a boy might do such a thing and not drown

Twain ends his story with Jim growing up, marrying and producing a large family that, one evening, he murders with an axe. He subsequently “got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality” to become “the infernalist wickedest scoundrel in his native village” (10). Ending with a sardonic punch line that not only parodies moralistic teaching but also mocks the greed, hypocrisy and corruption of postbellum American politics and commerce, Twain reveals that Jim is today “universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature” (10), intimating that the establishment is full of equally wicked, self-serving and unscrupulous men. The carnivalesque play that characterises

Twain’s story contains Rabelaisian elements of grotesquery and excess that lambasts religion and politics. The text is infused with laughter evoking “grotesque realism” concerned with “lowering all that is high” (Bakhtin Rabelais 19) by ridiculing the monologic values of ecclesiastical teaching. His scathing story presents a preposterously

131 humorous and yet carefully ambivalent commentary on the graft and greed within the

American political system.

As well as parodying politics, Twain’s story satirises ecclesiastical texts targeting children. Anne Trensky identifies two key books commonly “forced upon children” (507) which she asserts Twain satirises, reducing them to “an absurd grotesque” (508): James

Janeway’s A Token for Children, 45 first published in 1709 and continually in print until

1849 and Sarah Rede's 1729 text heavily influenced by Janeway’s writing, A Token for

Youth: Or, Instruction to Children.46 These child conversion texts claim to be the transcriptions of inspirational words uttered by fatally ill, god-fearing children young readers were expected to emulate. Twain had little but contempt for these books and his bad boy story highlights the unlikelihood of actual flesh and blood children ever behaving in the ways described by Janeway, Rede and others. Indeed, there is an unequivocal tone of derision directed specifically at ecclesiastical texts, referred to as “those mild little books with marbled backs” (8). His sardonic tone did little for the story’s appeal outside of the frontier territories that comprised his early chief audience. Twain’s attempt to have his story reprinted in East Coast periodicals proved futile because, according to Stone, it was considered “not ‘literature’ by genteel standards” (34), recalling Bakhtin’s observation concerning the fate of laughter and its place in literature as “belonging only to the low genres” (67). Atlantic Monthly assistant editor William Dean Howells

45 Janeway’s text contains multiple examples of children stricken with illnesses who devote their final days expressing devotion to Christ, such as Sarah Howley, a 14 year old consumptive who implores children is to “get a Christ for your soul while you are young … the devil will tell you it is time enough” (18). 46 Also published as Comfort to Children, Rede’s book purportedly records the words of her daughter Carteret during a chronic illness that ended with her death at “six years, eleven months, and three days” (21).

132 highlights in his rejection letter to Twain that the story was too much a mockery of ecclesiastical texts and would make enemies for the journal. Explaining his readership’s humourlessness, Howells wrote: “A little fable like yours wouldn’t leave [the Atlantic] a single Presbyterian, Baptist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, Methodist or Millerite paying subscriber—all the dead-heads would stick to it and abuse it in the denominational newspapers” (qtd. in Stone 33). Howells, who understood the journal’s subscriber base, saw that Twain’s story made too much a mockery of sacrosanct Christian tracts to be acceptable to his readership. In other words, “The Story of the Bad Boy Who Led a

Charmed Life” was deemed too much in opposition to official culture and ideology. In parodying these venerated children’s texts, Twain questions the width of “the gap between literacy and life” (Stone 35). Such a move would prove too much for the establishment.

Not yet done with decrying the fissure between literature and reality, in 1870 Twain wrote a companion story to his bad boy piece about a highly devout yet deluded child named Jacob Blivens.47 A richly carnivalesque text, “The Story of the Good Little Boy

Who Did Not Prosper” follows a similar format to Twain’s 1865 short story but is in fact an inversion of the earlier text so that Jacob, a would-be child saint who is in fact a buffoon, conscientiously fashions himself on the suffering little innocents he reads about in Sunday School books. Further lampooning moralising ecclesiastical children’s texts,

Twain writes how Jacob “believed in the good little boys they put in the Sunday-school

47 Ruth MacDonald writes that Twain’s story of Jacob Blivens was “more acceptable to eastern audiences than its [earlier] companion” (715). Originally printed in May 1870 in Galaxy magazine, the story was reprinted that same year in Piccadilly Annual and in 1873 in Nast’s Almanac (715).

133 book; he had every confidence in them. He longed to come across one of them alive once; but he never did. They all died before his time, maybe” (Twain Complete 81).

Jacob fantasises about being the subject of one of his beloved stories and delivering from his deathbed a pious soliloquy like those recorded by Janeway and Rede, moving all who read it to prayerful tears. Although the narrative centres on Jacob, Twain actually uses his story to again celebrate and affirm the misdeeds of bad boys. Thus when Twain explains how Jacob “wouldn’t lie … play marbles on Sunday, he wouldn’t rob birds’ nests, he wouldn’t give hot pennies to organ-grinders’ monkeys” (81), he is describing the antics of the Bad boys around him and their predilection for rule breaking. Jacob’s pious attempts to correct their behaviour always backfire. His arm is broken when he stands under an apple tree to scold the boy stealing fruit who slips and falls on him. This confuses Jacob who reads how boys stealing apples always fall and break their own arms.

On his way to Sunday School he sees a group of boys take a boat out on the lake. Having read such boys always drown, Jacob follows them on a log raft ready to save them when their boat capsizes, but instead he almost drowns and spends two months in bed. When he sees a mob of boys push a blind old man into the mud and rushes to the man’s aid, hoping to be praised for his kindness, he is instead mistaken for one of the delinquents and

“whacked over the head” (83). Jacob’s pious plans to emulate his virtuous heroes are repeatedly undone.

After fantasising for so long about a languishing death of great significance and inspiration, Jacob’s actual demise is sudden, undignified and wholly carnivalesque.

134 Twain describes how Jacob is “hunting up bad little boys to admonish” (83) when he comes across some young delinquents playing at a derelict foundry. The boys have gathered up fourteen or so stray dogs and tied them together “in long procession … with empty nitro-glycerine cans made fast to their tails” (83). Intervening, Jacob goes to the foremost dog, takes it by the collar and sits down on a wet can, unaware that nitro- glycerine is soaking into his trouser seat. He glares reproachfully at ringleader “wicked

Tom Jones” just as pompous town councilman Alderman McWelter arrives. While the other boys disperse, honest Jacob calmly approaches the official to explain himself but the enraged councilman, assuming the boy is one of the cruel delinquents, makes a fatal error:

He took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him around, and hit him a whack in

the rear with the flat of his hand; and in an instant that good little boy shot out

through the roof and soared away towards the sun, with the fragments of those

fifteen dogs stringing after him like the tail of a kite. (83)

The explosion is so immense that the foundry is utterly destroyed while the Alderman is blown to smithereens and no part of him is found. Meanwhile, Jacob’s body is scattered across the countryside with the largest chunk landing in a tree in a neighbouring county while other parts are found in five other counties.

Jacob’s vainglorious quest to count himself among those saintly children venerated in his beloved Sunday School texts is folly. As Twain puts it, “he never got a chance to make his last dying speech … unless he made it to the birds” (83). Instead, his explosive demise contains an element of grotesque realism in its hyperbolic violence and absurdity.

135 Indeed, Jacob’s fate shares similarities with Rabelais’ tale of Master Francis Villon, recorded in Book III chapter XIII of Gargantua and Pantagruel, who performs an act of vengeance against Friar Stephen Tickletoby that dashes the cleric to pieces and scatters his mutilated corpse across the countryside.48

Jacob’s sudden violent death is the antithesis of that experienced by the pious children he venerates. Whereas the devout cherubs are gloriously lifted to Heaven when they expire,

Jacob’s body is thrust heavenward before being cast back down to earth in pieces.

Represented in Jacob’s fate is the temporal earthbound motif prevalent within the carnivalesque that emphasises corporeality and the lower bodily stratum rather than the spiritual, eternal and heavenly. Twain inverts popular narratives of child death in which the deceased innocent cherub is taken up to a celestial kingdom. Ordinarily, the death of a child carries with it a particular potency connected to its status as a romantically idealised object of purity and innocence.49 The image of the dying child lifted heavenward has long been popular in literature both religious and secular. James Whistler writes of his fanatically devout mother referring to the encroaching death of one of her fatally ill

48 Functioning as a story within a story, Panurge and Pantagruel are sailing to the island of Catchpoles when Panurge tells his companion about the Lord of Basché and his shrewd debasement of catchpoles. The Lord of Basché is deeply moved by the devotion of his servants and tells them the tale of Master Francis Villon who after a lifetime of service retires to St. Maxent in Poitou where he puts on a Passion play for the townsfolk. The play is rehearsed and all players costumed except for the part of God the Father. Villon asks local sacristan Friar Tickletoby to lend him a cope and stole to dress the actor playing God but he is refused. Outraged, Villon colludes with his cast of devils to get his revenge and they hide as the Friar passes on his horse. As Tickletoby rides by, Villon’s cast of devils emerge from hiding making an enormous ruckus that panics the young filly. The ploy works and the horse, stricken with fear, bolts away with such speed that the Friar falls from the saddle but, with his foot caught in the stirrup, is dragged across so much terrain that when the horse finally returns, there is nothing left of the Friar except “his right foot and twisted sandal” (134). Like Jacob, the rest of the Friar is scattered across the countryside. 49 Under Romanticism notions of childhood purity were fortified by death as children came to be looked upon as what Peter Brooks terms the “very definition [of] unfallen humanity” (35). Anne Higgonet notes that Romanticism introduced the image of the “beautiful child corpse” (29) fated to never grow old, allowing adults “to project the full measure of their longing” (30) onto the child. .

136 offspring as undergoing a “ripening for the skies” (qtd. in Kuhn 178). In Tom Sawyer,

Twain highlights how child deaths inspire tremendous pathos so that even the Bad boy who has been the source of so much vexation is forgiven every sin in death as grief interprets their bad behaviour as saintly.50

“The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” might be thought of as a reworking of “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Led a Charmed Life”, fashioned to make it more palatable to a bourgeois readership. Yet the two stories also operate as inversions of each other where the child who misbehaves is regularly rewarded while the devout child constantly suffers. Just as the two characters operate as an inverse pair, so too Twain crucially inverts notions of good and bad that have implications for later monster child narratives. As the putative good child, Jacob is rendered monstrous, much like monster child horror films in which the child’s behaviour is unnervingly courteous and polite. Rather than commending Jacob for striving to be the idyllic child, Twain highlights his aberrance, insisting that he has “a screw loose somewhere” (81).

50 Twain describes the memorial service held for Joe, where the minister, describing the misdeeds of the three boys, as “noble and beautiful” even though “at the time they occurred they had seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide”. As the minister continued, “the congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners” (118). Earlier Tom eavesdrops on his Aunt Polly, Mary, Sid and Mrs Harper (the mother of fellow runaway, Joe) talking about him and his friends who they presume to be dead. Tom hears Joe’s mother speak of an incident of naughtiness that she now recalls with fond affection: “last Saturday my Joe busted a firecracker right under my nose and I knocked him sprawling. Little did I know then, how soon—Oh, if it was to do over again I’d hug him and bless him for it.” (102-3)

137 2.3 Tom and Sid Sawyer on Screen

The of Good and Bad boys from Twain’s short stories recur in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. While Tom takes after Bad boy Jim, his half-brother Sid has more in common with Jacob, the so-called “Good Boy” who is in fact a monster child quite unlike the bad boys of silent cinema. Twain describes Sid as “a quiet boy”, who “had no adventurous, trouble-some ways” (5) but is nevertheless vindictive and mean-spirited.

Fed up with his half-brother’s spitefulness, Tom tells Sid at the novel’s conclusion, “You can’t do any but mean things, and you can’t bear to see anybody praised for doing good ones.” (262). In the same way that Jacob makes it his business to know when his peers are stepping out of line, Sid diligently monitors Tom’s behaviour. Thus when Tom creeps home after bedtime and retires without having recited his evening prayers, Sid self- righteously makes “mental note of the omission” (27).

Of the many screen versions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,51 David O. Selznick’s

1938 production directed by is perhaps the most well known, even though it draws much of its inspiration from John Cromwell’s 1930 film Tom Sawyer starring Jackie Coogan as Tom. Taurog’s film maintains and even escalates the carnivalesque syntax established in earlier bad boy films, demonstrating that the bad boy

51 Frank Nugent refers to Taurog’s film as the “third edition on screen” (55) however it is the fourth. The first is a highly truncated 1907 debut for the newly formed Kalem Company directed by , and written by Gene Gauntier who considers it “pretty dreadful” (qtd in Stempel 8). Second is Lasky’s adaption into two feature length films: Tom Sawyer (1917) and Tom and Huck (1918), both directed by with 21-year-old as Tom, Robert Gordon as Huck Finn, and George Hackathorne as Sid. The third adaptation is the popular 1930 Paramount production directed by John Cromwell and starring 15-year-old Jackie Coogan as Tom. Mordaunt Hall’s review praises its “extraordinarily conception of the book” that audiences “greeted with howls of delight” (20).

138 character did not disappear with the Nickelodeon. What is changed however are semantic elements that dramatise a power struggle between bad boy Tom and his odious half- brother Sid (played by David Holt) who, though a child, rejects youthful exuberance and rebellion and is instead aligned with the repressive and controlling adult world of discipline, order and seriousness. While Sid is only a minor character in Twain’s novel,

Taurog expands his role significantly in the film so that the feud between himself and

Tom becomes a major narrative thread.

Sid operates as a juvenile proxy for adult authority. He spies on Tom and delights in reporting his half-brother’s misadventures to Aunt Polly and getting him into trouble.

Tom, in turn, relishes opportunities for revenge; casting down and negating Sid’s arrogant superiority with a host of pranks. Sid maintains a fastidiously neat appearance that mirrors his imperious attitude and Tom’s pranks typically aim at besmirching his immaculate presentation. Hurling various foodstuffs, mud, paint, and other substances at

Sid, Tom’s actions represent a form of “grotesque debasement” that according to Bakhtin is “a very ancient gesture” that originally involved slinging excrement and urine in a symbolic elevation of the “material bodily lower stratum” (147). Tom’s debasing pranks on Sid are essential to the film’s carnival spirit, as Frank Nugent’s New York Times review of the film disapprovingly brings to the reader’s attention. Nugent’s veneration of

Twain’s novel prompts him to refer to it as “immortal” and a “classic” that has entered

“deep into the world’s heart” (23). His gripe with the film is that it does not approach

Twain’s material with the same respect but privileges pratfalls and comedy over nostalgic reverence. In protest he asks, “Is it Mark Twain we have been led to anticipate or Mack

139 Sennett?” and lists several of the gags endured by Sid during the course of the film:

“cheap and obvious splashing of tomatoes, fresh cake icing, whitewash, etc” (23).

Nugent’s disapproval of Taurog’s film shares similarities with the scorn William Paul describes was heaped upon “gross-out” films in the 1970s and 80s by “repulsed critics”

(4) who likewise had little but disdain for these disreputable films that elevate low culture.

Fiedler’s essay on the “bad boy” in American literature describes Sid as a “Good Good

Boy” although he uses the term pejoratively. While Sid is always compliant and well behaved, he is also an obsequious milksop that Fiedler goes so far as to call a “villain”

(23). He suggests that the compliance of the “Good Good Boy” is not actually what mothers really desire from boys, hoping instead that bad behaviour will necessitate correction and discipline that bring them closer together and reinforce a maternal bond.

The “Good Good Boy” provides no such opportunities as there is nothing about the child’s behaviour that warrants correcting. Tom provides Aunt Polly with endless occasions to correct and punish and she takes full advantage of them to “forgive him

[and] smother him in the embrace that seals him back into her world” (23). When Tom complains about Aunt Polly’s unceasing punishments and points out that Sid is never struck, she retorts, “Sid don’t torment the body the way you do”. Her allusion to embodiment highlights the tactile relationship she has with Tom. While she is always touching Tom—either spanking his backside or stroking his hair—she rarely touches Sid, nor seems to ever want to. Like a lapdog Sid rarely leaves Aunt Polly’s side. He may never be reprimanded or spanked, but nor is he ever taken into her fond embrace. Aligned

140 with the world of adulthood, Sid serves as an obnoxious watchdog who spies on Tom and scrutinises his actions for evidence of misadventure. Whenever Aunt Polly scolds Tom,

Sid is always present nodding sententiously, adding his own chastisements, and offering suggestions for apt punishments.

David Holt in the role of Sid in Taurog’s film has an obnoxious whine he uses whenever

Tom assaults him. Running inside to report Tom’s latest crimes, Sid wails “Aunt Polly!

Aunt Polly!” His whining is likely based on ’s performance as Sid in John

Cromwell’s 1930 version. Searl had perfected a churlish demeanour and throughout the

1930s became well known for playing insufferable tattletales and obnoxious brats with “a twisted face in a perpetual sneer” (Lee 111-2). In the denouement of Taurog’s film, a party is given for Tom (Tommy Kelly) after he is declared a for saving Becky

Thatcher in McDougal’s Cave and recovering Murrell’s hidden treasure. During the party

Tom steals a strawberry cream cake and throws it with full force in Sid’s face. Covered in strawberries and cream, Sid whines to Aunt Polly who is at that moment singing Tom’s praises to her friends: “Why Tom might even be president some day”. Before Sid can explain Tom’s latest offence she gives him a sharp slap on the cheek and quips, “If they don’t hang him first”. The slap is presented as a humorous and highly satisfying comeuppance for Sid who at last receives the punishment he deserves.

The slap is made all the more gratifying for audiences because throughout Taurog’s film

Sid is revealed to be a loathsome child whose spitefulness anticipates the conventions

Hollywood would soon be using in their wartime propaganda films characterising

141 Nazified children and Hitler Youth as monstrous. Anticipating the devious monster child that would later appear in horror films, Holt’s Sid Sawyer conceals cunning and cowardice beneath a mask of compliance. He is not Fiedler’s “good good boy” from

Twain’s novel but a dissembling villain who impersonates a wholesome model child for

Aunt Polly, but when her back is turned is devious and vindictive. Taurog’s dark representation of Sid is made evident in a scene taken from chapter three of Twain’s book in which Tom is punished when Sid accidentally breaks Aunt Polly’s prized sugar bowl.

While the scene is only minor in the novel, it is given significantly more weight in the film, portraying Sid as Tom’s conniving and cruel nemesis. In Twain’s novel, Tom and

Sid are sitting at the table and Aunt Polly wraps Tom’s knuckles when he reaches into the sugar bowl. Tom complains that she never punishes Sid for taking sugar and Aunt Polly retorts that Sid shows restraint while Tom would “always be into that sugar if I warn’t watching you” (23). When Aunt Polly returns to the kitchen, Sid “happy in his immunity” gloatingly reaches for some sugar, but his “fingers slipped and the bowl dropped and broke” (24). Tom is ecstatic and thinks “there would be nothing so good in the world as to see that pet model ‘catch it’” (24). Instead, when Aunt Polly returns and sees the broken bowl, Tom is sent “sprawling on the floor [and] the potent palm was uplifted to strike again” (24). Still reeling Tom declares it was Sid who broke the bowl and although

Aunt Polly is inwardly sorry for beating Tom without just cause, she instead says “Umf!

Well you didn’t get a lick amiss, I reckon” (24). Taurog’s staging of this scene in his film deviates significantly from the novel and in fact reverses the roles of Tom and Sid.

142 Where earlier film adaptations of Twain’s book stage the sugar bowl scene as an accident,52 Taurog calls this into question. He stages the sequence in two cuts, the first showing Sid in medium close up wearing a self-satisfied smirk as he gets up from the table and reaches for the bowl in front of Tom. Cutting to a matching shot, the camera is positioned to the side and slightly behind Sid, concealing his face as he reaches for the bowl and appears to deliberately push it from the table before quickly returning to his seat. When Aunt Polly investigates, she instantly assumes Tom is the culprit and, unlike the tremendous blow that sends Tom “sprawling” in the novel (an act that cinema audiences would likely condemn), she instead gives his face a sharp slap. Where Tom in the novel defends himself and identifies Sid as the culprit, in Taurog’s film Tom remains sadly silent and his spirit crushed while his cousin Mary (not present in the scene in the novel), sitting opposite and having witnessed the breakage, is visibly distressed at this miscarriage of justice and shrieks that it was Sid who broke the bowl. Taurog does not provide a reaction shot from Sid but instead returns to Aunt Polly awkwardly standing over Tom, wrestling with genuine remorse and a stoic conviction that he needs a firm hand. While Twain wittily describes in the novel how Tom sulks in the corner and heartily indulges in the pleasure of self-righteous , Taurog’s film presents the incident with maximum pathos as Tom suffers his injustice in silence, emphasised by a long take framing his face in close up that shows him fighting back tears before he quietly gets up and slips out of the house. In this moment Tom and Sid switch roles as

Sid becomes the prankster and Tom the victim. Yet where other pranks in the film evoke audience laughter, Sid’s prank brings anger and tears from viewers at what amounts to a

52 In Cromwell’s 1930 film the camera is placed in front of Sid and in a single medium shot clearly shows him reading across the table for the bowl and accidentally knocking it off. He instantly recoils with dismay at his act of clumsiness and sits back down looking frightened at the prospect of being punished.

143 blatant miscarriage of justice. Carnival always seeks egalitarian balance by inverting hierarches—including those of age, class and gender—in what Stam calls “a symbolic, anticipatory overthrow of oppressive social structures” (95). There is no sign of the carnival here as Sid, already in a position of power, intensifies the imbalance.

The treatment of Sid breaking the bowl in Taurog’s film works to further vilify him

(clearly an objective of the film), however the episode also connects to Twain’s stories of

Bad boy Jim and Good Boy Jacob. Where Sid starts out in the role of self-righteous Jacob

Blivens, the sugar bowl episode aligns him semantically with bad boy Jim who plants the stolen penknife on George Wilson. Yet where the syntax in Jim’s prank against George is carnivalesque as Jim symbolically attacks and rebels against the expectations of child piety imposed by the established order, the syntax in the sugar bowl episode in Taurog’s film lacks any carnivalesque potential and represents instead what Bakhtin terms a

“consecration of inequality” (10). Tom, like George, becomes a fall guy and is punished for a crime he did not commit, but again, the film’s syntax in the scene differs from

Twain’s earlier short story because it reinforces rather than inverts the existing hierarchies of power between Sid, who represents the oppressive world of adults authority, and Tom, who is always toiling to escape this world.

Much like Jim’s framing of George for the stolen penknife in Twain’s story, fall guy variations of early silent bad boy films involve narratives in which impish children manipulate situations in which a hapless adult passer-by is blamed from their mischief.

And yet syntactically the passer-by is far from being a hapless victim but is representative

144 of the adult authority and oppression that child rascals struggle against in their carnivalesque resistance of the status quo. These films involve a more sophisticated set up than L’arroseur arrosé’s convention of booby-trapping inanimate devices to accomplish the prank. Taking the gag a step further, the bad boy finds another adult to become their patsy. Concealed and anonymous, the young prankster simply sits back and enjoys watching his chosen victim take the blame and revels in the chaos he or she has caused. The Runaway Knock (Smith 1898) for example shows a boy repeatedly knock on a door and run away before it opens. When an old man knocks, he is mistaken for the little pest and doused with water by the furious occupant. In Edison’s The Bad Boy’s Joke on the Nurse (1901), two boys play a prank on an old man and a nursemaid who is cradling an infant. Both the old man and nurse are dozing on separate park benches that are close to each other. The boys take the baby from the sleeping nurse and replace it with a log. They place the child in the arms of the old man so that when the nurse wakes she assumes the old man is a thief, grabs back the child and summons the police.53 As already mentioned, Sid’s sugar bowl prank against Tom contains semantic elements comparable to those above, yet a critical syntactic difference is that while the prankster children in the early films revel in the spirit of carnivalesque resistance to the established order, Sid does not and in fact, like Jacob Blivens, he seeks to impose this order on Tom and his friends.

53 There are other examples of early prankster child films involving a fall guy. The Runaway Knock and the Milkman (Bamforth 1898) is similar to Smith’s film except that it is the titular milkman who is doused with water. In An Innocent Victim (Mutoscope 1898) a boy vandalises a sign outside a grocery store that reads “Nice Fresh Tomato Catsup for Sale”, changing it to “Nice Fresh Tom Cats for Sale”. The naughty boy conceals himself and watches with delight as the storekeeper assumes that a passing pedestrian who stops to laugh at the message is responsible for the vandalism and the two men get into a fight. In The Peashooter; Or a New Weapon for the Army (Gaumont 1905), a boy uses the titular weapon to blow peas at a major who mistakes a sentry for the offence and has him arrested. And in It Wasn’t Poison After All (Edison 1913) a bad boy in a pharmacy gets revenge on a strict clerk by swapping the labels on bottles. The clerk is arrested when a customer believes he has ingested poison.

145

Aligned with the adult world, Sid lacks any carnivalesque qualities so that when he breaks the bowl and gets Tom into trouble, his actions are not those of a subjugated character symbolically uncrowning a figure of authority. Rather than the tables being turned in a carnivalesque reversal, Sid’s prank only serves to reinforce the status quo.

Three years after the release of Taurog’s film, the United States joined the Second World

War and Hollywood began producing anti-Nazi propaganda films. As later chapters will show, Hollywood’s depiction of Hitler Youth turned the tables on adults so that children had authority over their parents and non-Nazi elders. Yet, as with Sid Sawyer, there is nothing carnivalesque about their actions as they are aligned with the new social order imposed by the National Socialists in which children, despite their newfound authority, devote themselves to enforcing the status quo that serves Nazism. Taurog’s child villain

Sid seems to anticipate the representation of youth that finds a place of power and privilege within the established order that they then work to uphold and preserve, betraying the carnivalesque impulses of youth that seek to break free from the established order.

The final case study of this chapter provides a close look at Henry Peck, one of the most carnivalesque of all the bad boys of nineteenth century literature, as well as the 1921 film that his rebellious persona inspired. Significantly Peck’s Bad Boy resurrects both semantic and syntactic elements of early prankster child films in its depiction of a child committed to carnivalesque reversals in which his father is the victim of numerous practical jokes.

146 2.4 Peck’s Bad Boy

Of the many bad boy characters that became national sensations in late nineteenth century

American literature, child monster Henry Peck rivals Tom Sawyer as one of the most well known, inspiring numerous stage and screen adaptations. newspaperman and politician George Wilbur Peck54 first began writing his bad boy sketches for his weekly periodical Peck’s Sun in 1882. His short stories proved so popular that within three months the publication had amassed a nation-wide circulation exceeding 80,000 readers (Bleiler iv). The following year thirty-six of his stories were compiled into a book titled Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa that likewise proved so popular that it went through numerous reprints and sold over a million copies (Ziff 70), becoming one of the “great best sellers of the nineteenth century” (Bleiler iv). A follow-up book, simply titled Peck's

Bad Bad boy and His Pa, No. 2 (later changed to The Groceryman and Peck’s Bad boy) was also published in 1883 and enjoyed similar success. Peck’s stories became so well known that eventually the term “Peck’s Bad Boy” was absorbed into the American vernacular and can still be found in contemporary use to describe “an unruly or mischievous child” (OED online) or else “a popular byword for pranks and mischief”

(Hinz 121).

Peck’s tales are typically narrated in first person by young Henry, referred to by Peck as

“the boy” and addressed by other characters as “Hennery”. Henry regularly updates a

54 Peck was elected to the office of Mayor of Milwaukee in 1890 though resigned later that year when he led the Democrats to victory in a state election and served as Governor of for two terms between 1890 and 1894. Famous for his newspaper and Bad boy stories, Peck became “notable in the history of American politics for being one of the first candidates to have been elected to prominent offices as a result of a celebrity earned outside of politics or military service” (Ziff 71).

147 bemused grocery store proprietor with stories involving the latest painful tortures and public humiliations he has visited upon his father. Among the various torments his father suffers is a pancake breakfast spoiled when Henry substitutes the maple syrup with a pitcher of cod liver oil. Henry and his friend upset a nest of hornets in a tree that his father is sleeping under. During a hunting expedition Henry shoots the back out of his father’s coattails (while he is wearing them) and later loads a rifle with so much gunpowder that his father virtually breaks his jaw when he fires it.55 And anticipating

Hepworth’s 1900 trick film The Gunpowder Plot, Henry stows volatile fireworks he has purchased in preparation for the Fourth of July under his father’s cosy armchair that explode just as his father sits down and turn the whole house into an incendiary mess.

In late 1883, Charles Pidgin adapted Peck’s stories into a Broadway musical comedy.56

Elsewhere the stories found their way into newspaper comic strips and songs, and even a

1931 serialised radio play in 78 parts titled The Adventures of Peck’s Bad boy (Library of

Congress 149). In 1908 based Essanay Film Manufacturing Company produced a short film called Peck’s Bad Boy that no longer exists, while according to Musser, a group called The Amusement Supply Company, offered “a full program of five films and fifty-two ‘life model’ stereopticon slides on Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, which were meant to illustrate the best-selling book of the same title” (Before 344). Child stars Jackie

Coogan, Jackie Cooper and Tommy Kelly each played the role of Henry Peck in

55 This scenario is similar to one described by Wilhelm Busch in his 1865 book Max and Moritz where the titular rascals fill their teacher’s smoking pipe with gunpowder and it explodes in his face. 56 The musical opened at Haverley’s New York Comedy Theatre on 10 March 1884 but closed after 40 performances. Revised on tour the musical became an enduring favourite with productions perpetually staged for two decades, including an 1891 Broadway that starred young George M. Cohan in the title role. (Fisher and Londré 367)

148 respective screen adaptations produced in 1921, 1934 and 1938. Peck’s creation also inspired female incarnations, first in Peck’s Bad Girl (Giblyn 1918) starring Mabel

Norman in the titular role as Minnie Penelope Peck who “cannot resist slapping flies on bald heads and getting into all sorts of trouble” (“Digest” 24), and in 1959 Patty

McCormack played the role of Torey Peck in the short-lived CBS family sitcom Peck’s

Bad Girl. For the purposes of this thesis, I will be taking a closer look at Sam Wood’s

1921 film, Peck’s Bad boy starring Jackie Coogan in his second major screen role.

Wood’s film is adapted from George Peck’s 1883 bestseller and revels in subversive carnivalesque pandemonium more than any other screen version.

Although Wood’s film performed well in theatres57 and received positive reviews,58 some critics were less enthusiastic, due in part to what was cynically perceived as an attempt to exploit Coogan’s meteoric rise to fame. An acerbic review in called the film “dull and tedious” with “old ideas worked over” (17). Trade journal Harrison’s

Reports is more forgiving in its review of the film, yet it likewise raises the subject of

“old ideas”, stating that, “there are many situations in it, which, although old, create good laughs” (71). While neither review specifies what it specifically means in referring to ideas in the film as “old”, they are likely referring to its nostalgic return to early silent comedies evoked by the semantic structure of simple episodic sketches centring on pranks committed by children on unsuspecting adults. Discussing the nostalgia that his

57 A report by M.F. Meade in Moving Picture World from June 1923 on the run of Peck’s Bad boy at The Olive Theatre in St. , Missouri notes the film attracted full houses and outperformed other cinemas, falling short by only three dollars of “smashing house records” (659). 58 Edward Weitzel’s review in Motion Picture World attributes the superiority of Wood’s film over Pidgin’s stage play to Coogan’s performance as Henry Peck, declaring, “Jackie remains an adorable cherub no matter what he does, and his pranks will delight Ma and Pa and the youngsters” (87).

149 film strives to induce, producer Irving M. Lessing claimed in an interview with Motion

Picture World magazine during filming that Peck’s Bad Boy will “take everybody back to their childhood days and bring back youthful recollection” (“Filming” 1334).

From its opening scene, Peck’s Bad Boy establishes a pattern of carnivalesque inversion that continues throughout the film. A title card adorned with the image of toy zoo animals reads “Circus Day!”, priming audiences to anticipate the thrilling spectacle of a circus show. However, as the iris opens the mise en scene is anything but festive. Instead of acrobats and elephants a banal and static backstage setting is shown where labourers working in the shadow of the unseen Big Top execute unremarkable chores. Rather than lively thrills, the scene is humdrum and inert: one man shuffles across screen with a pair of buckets in the foreground while a second carrying a saddle on his shoulder ambles towards a third man who is quietly brushing down a horse in the background. In the middle distance, between the saddle bearer and the horse are three men checking the tethers along the side of the Big Top glimpsed on the left side of the frame. Working against expectations built by a title card promising the sensation of the circus, the lackadaisical backstage scene drolly delivers the reverse.

Suddenly the scene erupts into chaos as the workers abandon their activities and fall over each other in a panicked attempt to exit the frame. Even the horse makes itself scarce. A cut to a medium shot reveals the source of the pandemonium as two small boys—Henry

(Coogan) and Buddy (Charles Hatton)—and Henry’s dog Tar baby (Queenie) crawl out from under the big top. Before their arrival the circus setting is a latent carnival space—a

150 carnival sans carnival—typified by the mirthless workaday world of adults. However, with the chaotic arrival of Henry and Buddy the carnival spontaneously springs to life, as though their intrusion activates the dormant festive potentialities of the circus. In the moment the children arrive, the labourers suddenly abandon their workaday responsibilities as carnival takes over the space. As Bakhtin says of the carnival, it knows no footlights, rather “everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people”

(7). This shift suggests that a key ingredient required to transform the circus into an active carnivalesque space is the playful presence and wonderment of the child.59 It is both amusing and absurd to consider that a pair of little lads might prove to be responsible for so much commotion, yet their entry directly corresponds with the sudden descent from calmness to chaos. However, all is not as it seems as the real cause for the workers’ sudden flight is revealed to be an angry adult male lion that emerges from the tent hotly pursuing the boys.

While Henry and Buddy are not the source of terror for the workmen that the film initially sets up, their impish actions are certainly the cause, for it is the boys who release the lion, absurdly assuming a “man eater” would have no taste for children. Running for their lives, Henry and Buddy sprint towards a parade wagon with an empty cage and together with their dog, they dive inside and close the cage just as the lion lunges at them.

Raising itself on hind legs to its full height, the beast towers over the boys, roaring as it

59 Gary Cross observes that traditional toys for toddlers usually include “ and circus animals” (3), a practice that associates children with circuses. Paul Boussaic challenges this conflation, claiming “the stereotyped association of the circus with childhood is less a matter of fact than of cultural compulsion” (8) suggesting that the links between the two intentionally trivialise the cultural significance of the circus as an institution that exists “both ‘within’ and ‘outside’ culture” (Circus 7). Curiously, Boussaic does not make the connection between how the conflation of the circus with childhood is itself subversive when children, like the circus, exist at the margins, “both ‘within’ and ‘outside’ culture”, part of the social order yet excluded from it as agents of change.

151 thrusts a great paw in through the bars. Pressed against the far side of the cage, the boys quake with fear until Henry, notices how they are beyond the animal’s reach. With a look of defiance, he stands and stares squarely at the lion and haughtily thrusts his hands on his hips. His stern expression dissolves into a grin as he pulls a funny face and laughs contemptuously at the lion that seems somehow confused by the boy’s sudden boldness.

Dropping to all fours the lion paces moodily in front of the wagon. Emboldened, Henry ties a noose at one end of rope he finds in the cage and lowers it to the ground in the path of the pacing lion. Successfully snaring its hind leg, he tethers the rope to the bars of the cage and the troublemaking duo leap to safety with Tar Baby and flee the scene just as workers arrive to recapture the lion and return it to its crate.

With its abundance of carnivalesque scenarios in which the status quo is temporarily thrown into disarray from below, Peck’s Bad boy’s opening circus sequence literalises the theme of carnival. For Bakhtin, the circus is one of the few surviving manifestations of a

“huge and motley” carnival culture that disappeared with Europe’s emergence from medievalism. He observes how particular circus acts, among them “jugglers, acrobats, vendors of panaceas, magicians, clowns, trainers of monkeys” together preserve the

“sharply expressed grotesque bodily character” that is a key feature of the carnival (352-

3). Stefan Firca likewise sees the circus as typifying the carnival through “a rich network of literal and allegorical images, including but not limited to those of the circus show, the clown, the fairground, the street parade” (64). The frenetic series of reversals that occur throughout the opening scene establish the carnivalesque as a key motif with the

152 children’s initial appearance seemingly causing grown men to quake with fear.60 The reversals continue as the lion roams free while the humans are caged, and again as the lion—the so-called “king” of the jungle61—is symbolically uncrowned and outsmarted by a small boy.

Coinciding with the dramatic entrance of Henry and Buddy, the film activates the festive energy of the circus, thereby conflating the image of the impish monster child with the carnival. Introducing disorder into an otherwise orderly scene, the two boys become

Lords of Misrule, relishing the opportunity to create chaos like a pair of actual circus clowns. Wolfgang Zucker observes how the “disorderliness” of the clown figure is not a matter of “misbehaviour, a lapse or a lack of discipline” but, as with the monster child, the clown’s true agenda is “the expression of a contempt for, and a principle opposition to, all order” (313). Certainly, the chaotic entrance of Henry and Buddy quickly establishes them as clownish figures62 whose antics initiate a motif of inversion that

Stallybrass and White refer to as “the world turned upside down” (56), insisting that

60 The idea that grown men might be afraid of Henry is repeatedly emphasised in his stories. In chapter twenty of Peck’s Bad boy and His Pa, the grocery man expresses alarm when Henry saunters in to share his latest story and ludicrously exclaims, “I am afraid of you. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you go off half- cocked and blow us all up. I think you are a devil. You may have a billy goat, or a shotgun or a bottle of poison concealed about you. Condemn you, the police ought to muzzle you. You will kill somebody yet” (104). 61 Although lions are rarely found in jungle habitats, preferring to live amongst grasslands and plains close to their prey the lion is nevertheless commonly thought of as king of the jungle. On the topic of the lion as a signifier of regal power and dominion, Melewar, Bassett and Simões note that Peugeot’s lion logo “can be likened to the idea of being the king of the jungle, the leader in its field and … associated with strength” (144). The notion of the lion as monarch is also literalised in the title (and story) of Disney’s 1994 animated film, The Lion King, as well as in the studio’s animated version of Robin Hood (Reitherman 1973) where the characters of Prince John and King Richard are both depicted as lions. 62 The presence of Henry’s dog Tar Baby further establishes the boys’ clownish credentials. Paul Bouissac attests that clowns accompanied by performing dogs are “well documented in the annals of the circus” (97). Playing Henry’s black dog Tar Baby is Queenie, who appeared a second time with Coogan in the 1922 feature film Trouble directed by Albert Austin, in which Coogan returns to playing an orphaned little urchin.

153 festive forms of reversal are “one of the essential ways of describing carnival” (183).

They offer the following definition of carnival inversion:

Inversion addresses the social classification of values, distinctions and

judgements which underpin practical reason and systematically inverts the

relations of subject and object, agents and instrument, husband and wife, old and

young, animal and human, master and slave. Although it re-orders the terms of a

binary pair, it cannot alter the terms themselves. (56)

Carnival inversion thus brings into being ways of representing the world that suspend the monologic hierarchical structures of the established order, symbolically reversing power relationships of high and low to institute a temporary utopian equality between all people irrespective of social rankings, class, sex, or age. According to Timothy Hyman carnival inversion ensures that, “everything known to us can be shown in systematically altered relationship” (16), demonstrating this by drawing on a popular medieval print in which the natural world is turned upside down to depict “fishes flying above clouds, birds beneath the waves” (16). Stallybrass and White likewise provide numerous examples of medieval woodcuts that illustrate a “reversible world” (183) that overturns the existing order so that “the pig butchers the butcher; the ass whips its laden master; the mice chase the cat; the deer and the rabbit pursue the huntsman” (57),63 and so on. David Kunzle

63 This last image of the rabbit chasing a hunter with a rifle would become an enduring motif that maintains its carnivalesque qualities well into the twentieth century with the laughter-inducing hijinks and endless anarchic role-swapping queerness of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in Warner Bros.’ Merry Melodies cartoons. Significantly, the rabbit chasing a hunter with a rifle also appears in Heinrich Hoffman’s 1845 children’s book Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder für Kinder 3-6 Jahren (Funny Stories and Strange Pictures for Children 3-6 Years), soon after retitled Der Struwwelpeter. The tale of the rabbit and the huntsman was one of the five original short stories told in rhyming verse in Hoffman’s first edition. The bespectacled hunter falls asleep in the midday sun and wakes to find a rabbit, standing over him on its hind legs, wearing his spectacles and aiming the rifle at him. He flees and is pursued all day by the hare and finally falls down a well near his home. The story is unlike any other in the book as it does not involve

154 writes that in the principle of inversion, “there are two parties, the one dominant, the other dominated, whose roles, in some action typifying their relationship, are simply reversed” (“World” 40).64 Observing the variety of inversion-themed satire represented on medieval European woodblocks, he describes the recurring image of adult/child motifs in which roles are reversed. He notes that the “ubiquitous motif from the family hierarchy show the infant son beating his father and the infant daughter feeding the mother in a cot”

(50). In the schoolhouse, “the pupil or apprentice beats his teacher or master with a birch” where “the birch was the standard emblem in medieval art of the schoolmaster … idleness had to be thrashed out and knowledge thrashed in” (50). Less violent versions of the teacher/pupil inversion involved situations in which “the child lectures his elders and betters” drawing comparisons to the child Christ “teaching the elders in the temple, in which painters often exaggerated the youth of the former and the wizened crabbiness of the latter” (50).

Children instinctively embrace the carnivalesque in response to the lived reality of a world dominated and controlled by adult schedules and agendas that seek to control and contain their ludic appetites. Tasked with socialising and moulding the young into productive members of society, parents, teachers and other figures of authority actively

naughty children, however it provides an essential key that, if observed by the reader, invites a humorously carnivalesque interpretation of the entire text rather than a cautionary one. 64 Kunzle’s 1978 essay observes an abundance of scenarios represented in medieval woodblocks and broadsheets that invert the status quo. A Venetian woodcut from the 1560s titled “Il Mondo alla Riverso” shows, among a host of images, a shearing a shepherd, a mouse chasing a cat, a chicken attacking a fox and a goat attacking a lion (45). Likewise a sixteenth century Dutch woodcut by Ewout Muller shows a range of inverted scenes such as a king walking behind a peasant riding a horse, an ass driving his master, fish nesting in trees, and so on (45). Both woodcuts feature sons beating his fathers, One might add to this list the inversion of children and adults so that the child spanks the adult who is subsequently humiliated and disempowered.

155 repress and discourage unrestrained playfulness in children, revealing the unarticulated adult fear of the child’s destabilising potentialities. As William Paul contends, widespread insistence upon control over youth reveals an underlying social concern that children “possess a power that is threatening to adults” (277).

Emphasising didacticism and self-restraint, the adult world seeks to channel the unbridled energies of children into learning and developmental opportunities that Brian Sutton-

Smith refers to as “play in the category of order and civilisation” (81) aimed at moulding children into compliant adults that maintain and perpetuate the established order.65

Sutton-Smith’s contention echoes Louis Althusser’s assertions concerning the exploitative role of education and the family as Ideological State Apparatuses in the life of the child. Althusser describes how during “the years in which the child is most

‘vulnerable’”, is the period in which he or she is more actively oppressed. Thus the child is:

“squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State

apparatus, [which] drums into them … a certain amount of 'know-how' wrapped

in the ruling ideology”, thereby ensuring “the reproduction of the relations of

production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation” (104).

Children thereby become signifiers of controlled futurity, or the “telos of the social order”, as Lee Edelman puts it, whereby children “come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11). In Althusserean terms, the “perpetual trust” that

65 Sutton-Smith highlights the importance adults place on ensuring children’s play serves to educate and socialise the child, noting that “Most adults show great anxiety and fear that children's play behavior, if not rationalized … will escape their control and become frivolous or become an irrational representation of child power, child community, phantasmagoria, and childish ecstasies” (127).

156 Edelman describes is the means by which the ruling class maintains and perpetuates the existing order. Highlighting the terrible price children must pay in order for society to maintain the status quo, Robin Wood contends that children are the “most oppressed”

(75) of all groups within society. Echoing Althusser, Wood notes how the previous generation seeks to reproduce itself through the repression of its children, attempting to

“mould them into replicas of ourselves, perpetuators of a discredited tradition”

(Hollywood 75). It is this same repressive order that the monster child in film seeks to expose and disrupt through the intervention of carnival inversion. Observing the subversive rhymes and songs performed by children that depict either a violent or humiliating fate for figures of authority, Harriet Korim Hornstein observes how “children see themselves as rebels” who weaponise “irreverent words” for the purpose of

“ridiculing an establishment that demands to be taken seriously” (135).66 As this thesis argues, whether in comedy or horror, the carnivalesque monster child is keenly aware of its powerless place within the social order and looks for ways to undermine adult authority that seeks to subdue and control. Irrespective of the genre, the child’s dream of escape from the existing order of adult control is expressed through the carnivalesque.

Peck’s Bad Boy’s circus opening is significant because of how the figure of the monster child and the carnival setting conveniently coalesce to reaffirm its carnivalesque nature,

66 Paula Lee’s article on the banning of subversive children’s songs explains “the social death of the violent kid parody song” popular a generation earlier but today banned in American schools. With a line like “I shot my poor teacher with a .44 slug”, the parody of the folk song On Top of Old Smokey aptly demonstrates what in today’s climate of school shootings in the United States is no longer tolerated, even in jest. Lee cites a 2006 incident reported in a Georgia newspaper involving 16-year-old Beth Anne Cox at Peachtree High School in Suwanee who was suspended five days after singing the Old Smokey parody to a fellow student. Cox told the newspaper “I was just humming the tune to myself. This kid in front of me asked me about the song. So I told him the words. I didn't say them loudly" (“Song Sends Student Out”). Nothing was said in class but later Cox was officially reprimanded and told she would not be registered at the school the following academic year.

157 where the child’s monstrosity is established through its active rebellion against the established order.

Throughout Peck’s Bad Boy, Henry finds numerous inventive ways to undermine his father’s authority through painful pranks and underhanded schemes, from blackmail67 to the wrongful arrest of an upstanding young doctor accused of patent theft.68 As with

Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa, Wood’s film eschews a single overarching narrative in favour of an episodic structure organised around the various pranks that Coogan’s character plays on his uptight father (James Corrigan). Exploring the historically violent nature of comedy in the United States, William Keough describes “a grand tradition of

American humorous characters who attack hypocrisy by deflating pretension” (142) and

Henry Peck’s assaults on his father’s various affectations epitomise this egalitarian compulsion to ridicule and debase those that seek to raise themselves above their fellow

Americans. Chapter ten of Peck’s Bad boy and His Pa finds Henry telling the grocery man how he found a nest of red ants and collected enough to fill half an old soda bottle that he takes home. Explaining that his father sometimes wears a liver pad69 under his

67 Dressing Buddy as a woman, Henry writes an anonymous letter to his father summoning him to a romantic rendezvous. Henry then “innocently” interrupts the dalliance in order to blackmail his father into giving him hush money for the circus. 68 In the film’s final sequence, curious Henry removes secret patent documents from his father’s desk and, not wanting to be caught with them, plants them in the pocket of Dr Jack Martin (Wheeler Oakman) who is courting Henry’s older sister. Henry’s father believes the doctor is a thief and intercepts him at the train station with the police. When Henry sees how much trouble he has caused he confesses his misdeed, triggering an outburst from his father that frightens Henry who flees the scene on a handcar. The doctor gives chase in a second handcar, saving Henry from a collision course with a train (a stunt Lillian Gale reports would have killed Coogan, whose foot was stuck in the handcar, had Oakman not “derailed the car just in time to escape the oncoming train” (1355)). The near miss has the family grateful that Henry is safe and he again avoids punishment. 69 Popular in the late 19th century, the liver pad was a compress fixed to a belt worn against the skin in the lumbar region. It was claimed the pad, if used correctly, functioned as a “preventative of any disease that attacks the vitals” and “may be relied on to prevent most dangerous maladies” (Fairchild 29) through the absorption of disease-causing toxins through the skin.

158 shirt, Henry notices a hole in the pad and decides “what a good place it would be for the ants” (Peck 56) and empties the contents of his bottle into the pad. Henry’s father wears the pad to church and midway through the service the ants emerge to sabotage his attempts to appear pious and proper, causing him to squirm in the pew “as though his soul was on fire” (57). Finally he rushes out of the church thrashing and cursing. When Henry and his mother return home they find him undressed and stomping furiously on the pad.

In chapter eleven, Henry’s father seeks membership into an exclusive congregation and prepares to attend a prayer meeting. Unimpressed by his father’s newfound piety, Henry offers to help his father look his best for the meeting and fetches the man’s dress handkerchief. Rather than dabbing the cloth with cologne as instructed, Henry douses it with spiced rum and conceals a deck of playing cards within its folds before tucking it neatly into his father’s jacket pocket. Being a newcomer at the prayer meeting, Henry’s father is asked to speak. Addressing the assembly from the rostrum, he is swept up in the drama of his own story and yanks out the handkerchief. As playing cards rain down on the members, the sanctified space fills with the stench of rum, bringing the meeting to an abrupt and premature end. Humiliated in front of the disapproving parishioners, Henry’s father admits defeat and quits religion.

Wood’s film condenses these two episodes from the book into a single sequence so that

Henry’s father must contend with both biting ants and a rum-soaked kerchief full of playing cards while he sits in a pew with his family. As the ants do their worst, Henry’s father attempts to maintain his composure until, reaching his threshold, he leaps to his

159 feet cursing, scratching and hitting himself as shocked worshippers wonder what demon has taken possession. That question is evidently answered when their newest (and briefest) congregant pulls out his rum-soaked handkerchief to wipe his sopping brow and playing cards spill onto the floor, eliciting animated gasps as the Peck family make a swift exit.

Henry’s humiliation of his father at the church functions both as a chastising debasement of his pretence of religiosity as much as a comical interruption of the stuffy ecclesiastical ritual. The meeting opens with such joyless piety that it evokes Bakhtin’s description of the official feasts of the Middle Ages conducted with a “tone of icy petrified seriousness”

(Rabelais 73). Sabotaging his father’s attempts at social mobility through church affiliations, Henry exposes his hypocritical piety while reducing the official religious festival to travesty. The effect is much like the medieval Feast of Fools in which “a grotesque degradation of various church rituals” (74) replaces the sombreness of official ecclesiastical ceremonies with laughter and debauchery, thereby transforming a ceremony characterised by its seriousness and sobriety into a chaotic circus scene resembling the sequence with the lion that opens the Wood’s film.

Similar to the early bad boy silent films discussed in the previous chapter that conjure images of later horror films, for some present-day audiences Wood’s 1921 film inspires comparisons with monster children in contemporary horror. In his review of the 199270

Republic laserdisc release of Peck’s Bad Boy, Jeff Krispow compares the film with “the

70 Krispow’s review was first published in 1992 in the laserdisc infotainment guide, Pond Scum and in 1997 was archived online (see: www.laserrot.com/lrspeaks/archived/1997/lrs9704.html).

160 terror-child films we're used to seeing nowadays”. He describes how Henry “plays pranks on everyone he can think of and gets into unending trouble”, and considers him to be “the original Problem Child”, a reference to Dennis Dugan’s 1990 comedy Problem Child that intentionally employs horror tropes in its story of an anti-authoritarian orphan who plays violent pranks, idolises an incarcerated serial killer, and dresses up as a red devil with horns and a .71 Also significant are comments made by film reviewer Fritzi

Kramer about Peck’s Bad boy on his website Movies Silently. Like Krispow, Kramer sees clear parallels between the monster child in Wood’s film and later horror. He expresses particular dismay at Henry’s destructive pranks, contending that “this child is evil … it’s like someone remade The Omen as a delightful family film”.

At the start of the previous chapter the theme of the carnivalesque was submitted to be a syntactic element shared by both early silent bad boy comedies as well as later monster child horror films. Peck’s Bad boy reinforces this proposition with both Krispow and

Kramer’s comments drawing parallels between the young delinquents in silent comedy and the monster children of horror. More than Aldrich’s Tom Bailey or Twain’s Tom

Sawyer, who both seek out worlds free of the social constraints of adulthood, George

Wilbur Peck’s Henry is a straight-up carnivalesque character who openly attacks and undermines adult society. His influence can be seen in such early child prankster films as those listed in the last chapter, along with their horror progeny.

71 Children dressed as devils were not uncommon in early cinema. Méliès cast children as adorable little demons in The Astronomer’s Dream [La lune à un metre] (1898) and The Devil in the Convent [La Diable au Convent] (1899) while Edwin Porter’s 1906 trick film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend includes a scene in which children emerge from a tiny tureen dressed as devils carrying pitchforks they use to stab the head of the sleeping inebriate dreaming about them.

161 Discussing present-day reception of Peck’s Bad boy and His Pa Blieler acknowledges that modern readers experience the book as cruel, but reminds us that it was “written for a generation that like its humor strong, imaginative and painful—for the other person” (v).

Likewise Keough cites a nineteenth century French visitor to the US—Madame

Bentzon—who disapproved of grotesque American tastes in humour and the popular cult of the practical joke, stating that “there is something in the American spirit, an inclination to gross mirth, to pranks, which reveals that in certain respects this great people is still a childish people” (135). Much like contemporary reactions to Peck’s book, Krispow and

Kramer’s comments about Wood’s adaptation demonstrate how a change in tastes has taken place over time where the brutal and cruel comedy enjoyed by earlier generations is today greeted with a sense of horror. Yet their respective reading of the film as being closer to horror than comedy reinforces the idea that the monster child in horror is the grotesque offspring of the bad boy of early cinema.

162 Summary

Together with chapter one, this chapter introduces the proposition that a cultural shift took place in representations of monster children from the comedy of early bad boy films to the grotesquery and shocks of later child horror films. Analysing the work of Thomas

Bailey Aldrich, Mark Twain and George Walter Peck, the chapter demonstrates the how the influence of nineteenth century bad boy stories influenced early filmmakers with scenarios involving pranks against adults that invert the power relations between adults and children. Applying carnival theory highlights how the pranks by bad boys upend the social order and hierarchy of authority that ordinarily places the child at the lowest rung.

Analysing the various adaptations of Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, this chapter observes how iterations of Sid Sawyer become increasingly mean-spirited, culminating in Norman Taurog’s 1938 Sid Sawyer, played by David Holt, who takes on the role of an anti-carnivalesque bad boy that anticipates Hollywood’s wartime representation of the Hitler Youth as anti-carnivalesque. The anti-carnivalesque makes use of such elements of carnival as ritual inversion, mockery and masking, but is ultimately opposed to the heteroglossia of the carnival. Where the carnivalesque bad boy seeks to level hierarchies of power by inverting hierarchies through misbehaviour that leads to the profanation of the social order, the anti-carnivalesque monster child forsakes its own childhood and is ambitious to enter the world of adulthood. Such children exhibit excessive precocity, like Sid Sawyer and his prototype, Jacob Blevins in Twain’s “The

Story of the Good Little Boy.” Both boys engage with a monologic adult view of

163 childhood, wearing masks of innocence to conform to social expectations of children while deviously seeking power through conformity and gaining favour with adults.

The claim made by this thesis is that early silent bad boy comedy and the monster child horror film are connected by a shared syntax associated with their carnivalesque theme of children undermining the authority of adults. Functioning as a modality that spans the two genres, the carnivalesque child challenges and parodies the established order, inspiring screams of laughter in comedy and screams of fear in horror according to their respective semantics. Yet why did this shift from comedy to horror take place? What trigger took the monster child from laughter to terror? Having established an historical base from which to proceed, the chapters that follow will explore Hollywood representations of the Hitler Youth during the Second World War and how the bad boy came to be Nazified and, in turn, underwent a process of horror film monsterfication.

In the next chapter a close comparative analysis is conducted using Disney’s 1940 classic feature Pinocchio and the studio’s relatively unknown 1943 wartime

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi. Through comparative analysis the chapter will argue that Pinocchio operates as an anti-Nazi text that, due to its openness to interpretive play, can be viewed as an allegory of the Nazis’ enslavement of Germany’s children under the Hitler Youth. Pinocchio also importantly dramatises a shift in representations of bad boys from comedy to horror through the figure of Lampwick whose transformation into a donkey on Pleasure Island is one of Disney studio’s most infamous moments of terror in their animated films.

164 CHAPTER THREE

DISNEY IN DEUTSCHLAND: PINOCCHIO AND EDUCATION FOR DEATH

Central to this thesis is the contention that the monster child trope most commonly associated with the horror subgenre had its beginnings in the silent film. While the previous chapters on silent cinema have established a clear connection between the monster child in horror and early slapstick that is rooted in the carnivalesque, the questions of how and why the monster child migrated to horror is taken up in the following two chapters. The focus of the current chapter is the 1940 Disney animated feature Pinocchio, described by John Canemaker as “one of the darkest” (qtd. in

Kaufman 6) in the studio’s oeuvre. The chapter argues that, despite being an animated family film, Pinocchio plays an important role in changing the genre representation of the monster child figure, shifting the character from comedy to horror in a single sequence both through its engagement with generic iconography and a shift in its representation of carnivalesque inversion. In its exploration of semantic changes in genre, the chapter focuses specifically on the Pleasure Island sequence that begins comically before suddenly and alarmingly shifting to horror as the boys lured onto the island transform into donkeys. Lampwick’s transformation scene in particular is especially nightmarish as the film draws upon horror conventions in its representation of the change. Generic syntax also makes a minor yet significant change in Pinocchio that initially unites the bad boys on Pleasure Island with the bad boys of silent cinema in their open rebellion against oppressive authority. Later when the Pleasure Island sequence makes use of horror

165 iconography, Pinocchio moves away from earlier representations of bad boys as the hapless juvenile delinquents on the island become enslaved. On the surface the Pleasure

Island scene has the appearance of being carnivalesque by virtue of its literal carnival setting, but the carnival presented in the film is ultimately anti-carnivalesque; making use of carnival imagery while enforcing an insidious monologism.

A core claim of this thesis is that the monster child is carnivalesque in how it wears a mask of innocence that mocks the adult need to define itself against childhood. The carnivalesque monster child likewise mocks and undermines adult authority, turning the world upside down by instigating a temporary reversal of power relations. This chapter and the next argue that the carnivalesque syntax central to representations of the monster child underwent a short-lived mutation as the carnival and its “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order” (Bakhtin Rabelais 10) is symbolically overtaken by monologic fascist anti-carnivalism. While Bakhtin does not use the term anti-carnivalesque, his description of “laughter’s degradation” (101) in the face of seventeenth century rationalism and classicism operating under a stable Monarchical rule provides a concept of anti-carnivalism as approximating the binary opposite of carnival.

Bakhtin writes:

In the new official culture there prevails a tendency toward the stability and

completion of being, toward one single meaning, one single tone of seriousness.

The ambivalence of the grotesque can no longer be admitted. (101)

Drawing on Bakhtin, Ilaria Serra suggests his notion of laughter’s negation and degradation leads to a state that sees “regeneration, rebellious and free laughter …

166 absolutely prohibited” (461). Graham Badley equates anti-carnival with forms of elitism and officialdom whose chief concern is with “promoting conformity” (211). Where the carnival celebrates what Bakhtin calls the, signalling momentary relief from “all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (10), the anti-carnival seeks to reinforce order and conformity.

In Pinocchio the anti-carnivalesque presents itself as carnival yet from the outset it is wholly opposed to the carnival as Bakhtin conceives it. There is certainly the appearance of a world turned upside down as the boys are unleashed on the fun park and chaos ensues as they indulge in bodily excess without restraint, but this limitless freedom is illusory and constitutes a sinister deception designed to ensnare the boys. Thus, in

Pinocchio, the impish bad boy child of the silent era who manages to temporarily invert adult/child relations is himself deceived and becomes the subject of the most malicious trick. There is never any true ritual inversion that takes place on Pleasure Island. Instead, the carnival is a terrible trap and the bad boys its victims.

Performing a close textual analysis of Disney’s film, this chapter also sets out to challenge existing scholarship claiming that Pinocchio is a pro-fascist text, proposing instead that it can convincingly read as anti-Nazi. To assist with the reinterpretation of the Disney classic, a second film from the studio will be examined and used to retrospectively interpret Pinocchio as anti-Nazi. This second film text is the 1943 nightmarish Disney propaganda cartoon, Education for Death, directed by Clyde

Geronimi and based on Gregor Ziemer’s bestselling non-fiction book, Education for

167 Death: The Making of the Nazi. Published in 1941, Ziemer’s dramatic personal record of the Third Reich’s eugenics program and paramilitary education system caused a sensation on its release and was described by Time magazine as “the most vivid factual first hand account of Nazi education yet published outside Germany” (71).

In Disney’s adaptation of Ziemer’s book, children that epitomise Romantic notions of innocence become unequivocally monsterfied as a result of their Nazi indoctrination, a strategy that divorces the traditional monster child from its roots in comedy and nostalgia and applies instead aesthetics of expressionist horror. While this shift is clear in

Education for Death, in Pinocchio the connection is less apparent. By performing a close reading of Education for Death alongside Pinocchio the chapter will show how the 1943 short film reproduces shots from the Disney classic in a way that renders more visible the iconography of Nazism and the Hitler Youth embedded in Pinocchio. Like Pinocchio,

Education for Death begins as a comedic text that increasingly draws on expressionism as an important visual ingredient of horror. Horror iconography is deployed to represent the Nazification of youth as nothing short of terrifying. The monster child thus continues its move away from its comedy roots as a ludic trickster whose impish pranks were played for laughs and closer to the threat and fear of horror. In addition, this chapter includes an in-depth discussion of the assumptions concerning Walt Disney’s politics— commonly described as anti-Semitic, racist, sexist and fascist—as well as a close textual analysis of the two animated films produced by the Disney studios.

168 Disney’s adaptation of Gregor Ziemer’s book, Education for the Death: The Making of the Nazi provided the studio with one of its most powerful and frightening propaganda films produced for the United States government to mobilise the home front and secure support for the war effort by scaring audiences with a demonised image of . Americans were well aware of the Hitler Youth, its size and scale, and the fanatical devotion of its young followers, having been exposed to the rapid pace of growth of the movement in newspaper reports that pre-date the Nazis rise to power.72

Ziemer’s highly influential book built on this existing knowledge but revealed the extent of the Hitler Youth’s fanaticism and their crucial role in Hitler’s ambitions for world domination. So too, the book played a significant role in shaping Hollywood representations of Nazism and the Hitler Youth as agents of evil. Zeimer himself lived and worked in Germany between 1928 and 1939. During that time he was the headmaster of the American Colony School in —sponsored by the US Ambassador and Consul

General—and taught the children of American expatriates working in Germany. His book examines the education methods mandated by the Nazis and follows his in-depth tour of

Nazi education facilities. He describes his exclusive meeting in 1938 with the German

Minister for Education (Herr Minister fuer Erzierhungund und Volksbildung) Dr

72 American newspapers first began paying attention to the Hitler Youth in 1932. Throughout the decade reports recorded details of Hitler Youth paramilitary activities and rapidly growing numbers. I include here summaries of four articles, from 1931 to 1941, providing a snapshot of the type of information made available to the American public. On 5 April 1931 Sir Philip Gibbs published a two-page expose in the New York Times (NYT) titled “Youth Knocks at the Gates of Power” that focuses on a global trend by youth pushing for more political influence and involvement. Of Germany he observes: “violence, intolerance, and then discipline and enforced allegiance to a of things dictated by the youth—that is the program of the Hitlerites” (22). A 1936 piece in titled “90% of Youth for Hitler” reports that Hitler Youth leader declared that most German children aged 10 to 14 “now belong to Hitler youth organizations” (2). And on 31 March 1941 the NYT reported on the latest generation of German children to be inducted into the Hitler Youth, describing how “more than a million 14-year-old children joined the Hitler Youth Movement and the Union of German Girls today in nation-wide exercises” (7). In a radio broadcast by Hitler Youth leader Arthur Axman, the children held hands aloft and pledged fealty to Hitler, reciting “I promise to always do my duty in the Hitler Youth Movement with love for and faithfulness to the Fuhrer and our flag” (7).

169 Bernhard Rust73 who, he claims, authorised for him to inspect Nazi schools and training programs. At a Jungvolk school for boys between 10 and 14 years of age, Ziemer describes meeting a teacher who proudly declared with equals parts pride and menace that Nazi education has “taken the lead in world education … which the world had better copy if it knows what’s good for it” (98). He details visits to various Nazi education institutions, including a kindergarten where toddlers are taught songs about laying down their lives for the Fuehrer; a school for the Pimpf (boys aged six to ten) which “lays the groundwork for Party activities in the Jungvolk and the Hitler Youth” (49); the Jungvolk program that included “Nazi boys from ten to fourteen” (95); the Hitlerjunge composed of “German boys from fourteen to eighteen” who are thought of as “Hitler’s secondary army” (135); and the Bund Deutscher Maedel (, aged fourteen to twenty-one) whose singular role it was to be homemakers and “mothers of Hitler’s future soldiers” (114). Whether intended or not, the permit that Dr Rust presented to Ziemer granted him exclusive access to the institutions implementing the Nazis’ eugenics program. This included visits to a Frauen Klinik (Women’s Clinic) where women deemed genetically inferior were sterilised (23-4), a Hitler-Kammern (Hitler ) facility that euthanises “feeble-minded” children unable to serve the Reich (72-3), and a

Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child) facility, now better known as a Lebensborn74 (fount

73 Herbert Hirsch states that as part of Hitler’s plan to assume total control of Germany’s education system, he gave Bernard Rust the role of Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture on 30 April 1934. According to Hirsch, Rust had been a “fanatical” National Socialist from the party’s initial inception and once boasted that, “he would succeed overnight in ‘liquidating the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics’” (65). 74 The homes were midwifery sanatoriums established for single women to give birth. Catherine Clay reports that, in line with of Himmler’s goal of establishing a racial utopia, select members of his SS corps were “ordered to father ‘perfect Aryan’ who would populate the Thousand Year Reich” (ix) and it was these home that the perfect Aryan children were delivered and the children placed with approved families. Clay adds that Himmler’s goal of creating a that “he would have blond, healthy

170 of life) home, a luxurious rest home where “prospective mothers, girls having babies out of wedlock, are here cared for at State expense” (25).

Ziemer recounts events in a matter-of-fact tone that cites places, names and conversations that contribute to a general sense of reliability and authority. In his enthusiastic review,

H.M. Kallen describes Ziemer’s book as:

a straightforward report of what he found, uncolored by any theory of learning

and unclogged by any of the verbal and other pedantica wherewith ‘social

scientists’ too often distinguish their deliverances from more direct and simple

reports and interpretations. (563)

Certainly, places and names are clearly articulated, however Ziemer neglects to include dates and times of the events, conversations and visits to various institutions he recounts, warranting questions from more sceptical readers. His prose contains an undercurrent of journalistic sensationalism intended to shock and appal his readers while the consistently negative portrayal of many of the Nazi officials he meets contain Manichean overtones that make for compelling reading yet undermine attempts at objectivity. For instance, his description of the physical details of the Nazis he encounters employs uncomplimentary language and gives the impression that Germany is populated entirely with ill-tempered grotesques, such as the peevish bureaucrat at a Berlin labour office who he describes as

“a coarse, squat person with a bald head and beetling eyes” (116). However, the drama contained in Ziemer’s account is compelling enough to have inspired at least two films that portray Hitlerised children as monsters: Disney’s short propaganda cartoon,

children stolen from parents in all parts of the nascent Nazi empire and brought to the homeland for “Germanisation’” (9).

171 Education for Death, and Hitler’s Children (Dmytryk 1943), which will be briefly discussed in the following chapter. Significantly, both Education for Death and Hitler’s

Children explicitly reference Nazism and the Hitlerjunge in their representations of monster children so that Nazism is conflated with monstrosity. In other words, the children in these films are portrayed as monsters specifically because they are aligned with Nazism and loyal members of the Hitler Youth.

While Education for Death and Hitler’s Children explicitly attribute child monstrosity to the Third Reich, they are not the first Hollywood films to do so. In 1940 Twentieth

Century Fox released two films that both portray the Nazified child as a monster of sorts:

Four Sons and The Man I Married. Four Sons follows a Czech widow named Anna

(Eugenie Leontovich), the mother of the four eponymous sons who each take very different paths when Germany invades Czechoslovakia. Early in the film one son Joseph

(Robert Lowery) immigrates to the United States where he becomes a successful artist while her three remaining sons are one at a time killed.75 In the film’s final minutes as

Anna is preparing to abandon her now derelict home and join Joseph in America when she sees a platoon of pre-pubescent Hitler Youth armed with rifles and marching in formation. The boys are commanded to halt by their leader and ordered to don gas masks before continuing their march. Although only a brief scene, its imagery is memorable because the young boys training for war become dehumanised by their ghoulish masks

75 Played by Don Ameche, oldest son Chris is with the Czech resistance while his brother Karl (Alan Curtis) joins the . Bad blood exists between them because the woman to whom Chris was engaged (Anna, played by Mary Beth Hughes) falls in love with and marries Karl instead. Hunted by the Nazis in a swamp, Chris shoots a Gestapo officer in the back, not realising he has shot his own brother. Enraged, Anna turns Chris into the Nazis and he is shot and killed. The Nazis conscript Fritz (George Ernest), who is shipped off to war and dies on the battlefield.

172 that erase their identities and transform them from children into Nazi soldiers. For

Bakhtin the mask is “the most complex theme of folk culture” (Rabelais 39) because it powerfully symbolises the motifs of renewal and regeneration that are so central to the carnival. The mask erases fixed social roles in how it “rejects conformity to oneself” (39-

40) and allows “free and familiar contact” (10) among people irrespective of status or class. Where the carnivalesque mask operates as a complex symbol of liberation from social roles and the celebration of an egalitarian domain in which heteroglossia is enriched through the free interaction of multiple layers of festive identity, in Four Sons the Nazi gas mask represents absolute conformity to a monologic order and the forced erasure of identity. The image of masked children in Four Sons is neither festive nor liberating. It is anti-carnivalesque in how the mask, ordinarily an artefact of carnival is repurposed to reinforce power, status and control, replacing the child’s distinctiveness with a singular corporate identity imposed from above that demands the child’s absolute obedience and allegiance. With masks fitted, the boys’ distinctive identities are effectively erased, recalling Thomas M. Sipos’ description of how masks can “not only anonymize and depersonalize, they also dehumanize” (63). While the mask’s erasure of identity can be empowering, as Bakhtin explains in his reference to how the mask has a liberating capacity that allows for “free and familiar contact” (Rabelais 10) among people during carnival times, the erasure of identity in Four Sons is imposed on the boys who are forced to wear the gas masks, demonstrating how a device celebrated by Bakhtin as representing “the most complex theme of folk culture” (39) is appropriated by the Nazis to be an anti-carnivalesque device that erases heteroglossia and imposes monoglossic authority through the false unity of all people under a centralised state imposed identity.

173 As this chapter will show, this same Nazi-inspired monologic dehumanisation of children becomes a chilling motif in both Pinocchio and Education for Death.

The Man I Married is directed by Irving Pichel and stars Joan Bennett as Carol, a successful American marketing woman whose German husband Eric (Frances Lederer) takes her and their young son on a trip to Germany. While there, Eric becomes seduced by Nazism and insists they remain in Germany while Carol is exposed to the dark underbelly of the Third Reich. Driving through Berlin with American newspaper correspondent Kenneth (Lloyd Nolan), she is taken to the Czech quarter where a daily ritual exists of Nazi officers dumping trash in the streets and forcing the Czech locals to pick it up. Appalled by the display, Carol watches in disbelief as a small boy picks up a clump of mud and hurls it at an old man while spewing ugly insults. Later Carol helps with trying to conceal an old man and his grown son from the Gestapo. The son is to be arrested for refusing to serve with the and will be sent to Dachau. Hiding beneath bushes in their front yard, the Gestapo begins to continue searching elsewhere when the old man’s younger son calls out to the Gestapo from an upstairs window. Carol later learns that the father and son she tried to help were taken away and executed. Eric

Rentschler notes that for Germany’s indoctrinated youth “the party superseded family …

[and] assumed the central role in the rebellion of sons against their fathers” (58). This tendency is clearly and disturbingly on display in Pichel’s film where a young boy becomes a deadly tool of the Nazis by providing the Gestapo with the location of his father and fugitive brother. Disney’s Education for Death includes a pivotal classroom scene that will be explored in greater detail later in the chapter in which, during the

174 course of a single lesson, a tender little boy transforms into a Nazified monster who, adopting the National Socialist ideology of might is right, disgorges hate and vitriol in paroxysms of fury against any and all who are weak.

Before the release of both Four Sons and The Man I Married, Pinocchio premiered in

February 1940. Distributed by RKO, Disney’s film likewise revels in the child as monster while indirectly attributing its monstrosity to Nazism. Adapted from The Adventures of

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi,76 Disney’s Pinocchio, it is contended, provides what may well be the first allegorical glimpse of the Nazified child monster in an American feature film, courtesy of the scenes featured on Pleasure Island. Collodi’s original story, written and published in episodic form between July 1881 and January 1883 in the children’s periodical Giornale per i bambini follows the impish wooden boy through a series of dark, fantastical misadventures. Beginning life as a “wilful, often spiteful” (Barrier 239) marionette that in effect continues the tradition of the bad boy, he transforms through the course of the story into a dutiful son who conscientiously and selflessly supports his aging father and is finally rewarded with both wealth and a flesh and blood body.

Disney’s adaptation reduces Collodi’s political allegory and complex meandering bildungsroman to a simplistic and narratively sparse morality tale that emphasises spectacle above its principled coming-of-age story that explores the consequences of our choices.77 David Forgacs observes that even before its release, Disney’s adaptation was a

76 Collodi is the pen name of nineteenth century Florentine writer, Carlo Lorenzini. Lorenzini took the name Collodi from the Tuscan village where his mother was born and where he was sent by his parents to complete his elementary schooling. 77 According to JB Kaufamn, an early key influence on Walt Disney and his animation team was the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) staging of Pinocchio, directed by Yasha Frank. Kaufman describes how Frank’s version of Collodi’s tale was “short on dramatic complexity and long on spectacle and entertainment value” (18), frequently stopping the narrative for “an entertainment featuring authentic circus

175 source of controversy in , where “Italians were quick to react against this travesty of their beloved children’s classic” (371).78 And yet the heavily pared-down narrative of

Disney’s film manages to distil the essence of Collodi’s tale, sustaining a range of interpretations that, like its source material, makes it thematically rich.79 One such interpretation that concerns this thesis has been to view Disney’s rendering of Pinocchio as a Nazi-in-training and the film as a blatantly fascist text, a view inspired by rumours that Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathiser.

Through close analysis, the argument will be put forward that there is insufficient textual evidence to view the film as pro-fascist. In addition, the claims that “Uncle Walt” had fascist inclinations will be addressed. Ultimately it is the contention of this chapter that, if anything, Pinocchio contains an implicitly anti-Nazi message, confirmed by several

performers” or “a colourful ‘underwater’ ballet’ before the plot resumed” (83). Animator Ben Sharpsteen, who saw the FTP play with Disney in June 1937, recalls that Disney, who had been struggling with how to adapt Collodi’s story, “immediately became enthusiastic about the possibilities of it … The idea of Geppetto being swallowed by a whale and incorrigible boys being turned into donkeys and things like that appealed to Walt very much” (qtd in 83). 78 Forgacs acknowledges that much of the protestations against Disney’s adaptation were motivated by “Italian anti-American and cultural chauvinism during the Fascist period” (372). However he notes that there were also commercial concerns raised by Paolo Lorenzini, Collodi's grandson against Disney’s licensee in Italy, Arnoldo Mondadori. Forgacs reports how, on 20 March 1940, “long before the film was commercially released in Italy” (371), Lorenzini “had seen press reports of Disney’s adaptation and he was trying to prevent Mondadori from publishing the story in book or magazine form” (372). 79 Nicholas Perella asserts that Collodi’s tale “follows the nineteenth-century pattern of children's stories in serving as a vehicle of social instruction and, it would seem, of character building in the name of a productive, middle-class ethic” (4) while Forgacs acknowledges that although Disney’s film Americanises aspects of the Italian story, it is “still full of terrors … and it still promotes a Victorian moral about self help, work and the temptations of ‘pleasure’ and the ‘easy life’” (372). A crucial difference between Collodi’s and Disney’s narratives centres on the characterisation of Pinocchio himself. Collodi’s Pinocchio is active and seeks out adventure, while in Disney’s retelling he is passive and adventure seeks out him. Yet in both versions his attempts to save his father from the belly of a shark/whale represents a key turning point in his journey in which he literally stares into the jaws of death for someone else’s sake and emerges fundamentally changed. In terms of their respective characterisations, in Collodi’s tale Pinocchio is a self-centred delinquent who only learns empathy and responsibility through suffering. Disney’s wooden boy is simultaneously Lockean and Rousseauian in that he is empty-headed but good-hearted, naively manipulated by whoever holds his “strings” while representing the quintessence of Romantic childhood that renders children “invisible except as projections of adult fantasies” (Giroux 265).

176 scenes in the film that link it to the studio’s 1943 explicitly anti-Nazi propaganda film

Education for Death. Through a critical analysis of the two films, and by highlighting the

Nazi iconography contained in Pinocchio, it will be demonstrated how Disney’s film can be read not only as a monster child text, but a critical entry within the monster child film canon. Crucially, Pinocchio is an important connective film that demonstrates a clear transitional link between the monster children of comedy and those of horror.

177 3.1 Walt Disney: Nazi Sympathiser?

In this section it will be shown how Pinocchio has been read as National Socialist propaganda. This view will be challenged while an alternative political reading of the film is offered suggesting that the Disney studio’s second animated feature is anti-fascist.

It will be argued that the sequence in Pinocchio that takes place on Pleasure Island can be read as a warning about the dangers of fascism and how Hitler has cleverly seduced and enslaved the youth of Germany. However, before discussing this important sequence from Pinocchio, the claim that Walt Disney was a committed fascist and Nazi sympathiser needs to be addressed as this inextricably complicates the interpretation of

Pinocchio approached by this thesis that reads the film as an anti-fascist text.

In his provocative essay, “The Lion King: A Short History of Disney-Fascism” published in 2006 by online journal Jump Cut, Matt Roth claims that Walt Disney was unequivocally committed to Nazism and reads his films as fascist texts. According to

Roth, the animation mogul’s values and political convictions were so aligned with

Hitler’s that “it comes as no surprise that Nazism resonated with Disney” insomuch as

“he shared its conceit of white supremacy, its antagonism towards independent organized labor, its abhorrence of urbanism, and, above all, its hatred of Jews”. With no reliable evidence to support his claims, Roth insists that Disney was heavily involved with

Nazism in the United States where he “regularly attended meetings of the American Nazi

Party in Hollywood”.

178 Although he does not identify any of his sources, Roth’s adamant claims are drawn from two biographies on Walt Disney. These are The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and

Commerce of Walt Disney, by Richard Schickel, and Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark

Prince, by Marc Eliot. In both books, which seek “to be as critical of Disney as often as possible” (Davis 219), accusations of Disney’s “hatred of Jews” are made and pointedly remarked upon. According to Eliot, during World War II when the studio was hired by the United States War Department to make short animated training and propaganda films,

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who was responsible for monitoring the studio’s use of government funds, was bitterly described by Disney as “that Jew” (165).

The expectation from Eliot here seems to be that his readers jump to assumptions about

Disney feelings about Jews rather than understand the remark within the context it was said, levelled at a man that the studio head resented feeling controlled by. According to

Robin Allen, Disney’s reputation for anti-Semitism only emerged posthumously and can be traced to Schickel’s book, published two years after Disney’s death.80 According to

Schickel, Disney demonstrated “some of the anti-Semitism that was common to his generation and place of origin” and claims that “his studio was notably lacking in Jewish employees” (95). However, as Allen points out, while Disney was still at the helm, his studio “employed a number of Jews in senior positions” (90 n27), including ,

Robert and Richard Sherman, and Marty Sklar. Allen also confirms that Disney

“supported Jewish charities and contributed funds regularly to a Hebrew orphanage” (90 n27) while Grant, a practising Jew who served as a senior story developer at the Disney studios, later stated that, “Walt didn’t care what you were. He’s always labelled anti-

80 Allen writes that “the charge of anti-Semitism was first brought by Richard Schickel” and adds, “in fairness to Disney, some of his closest associates and colleagues were Jewish and unaware of any prejudice” (87).

179 Semitic, anti-this, anti-that. It wasn’t true. … It was talent that was important to him.”

(qtd. in Davis 219). Challenging Schickel, Douglas Brode provides several examples of

Disney’s amicability towards Jews and observes that in his business dealings, he remained either “blithely unaware or utterly unconcerned with the ethnicity of those who treated him poorly, blaming it on orientation and profession than racial identity” (101) and cites a happy incident between Disney and a representative of the Bank of America named Joseph Rosenberg, whose praises Disney repeatedly sang. According to Brode,

Disney met Rosenberg to ask for a significant loan to complete work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He states:

The two men met at a moment of crisis when Snow White could not be completed

in time for the 1937 Christmas season without a further advance of $250,000 …

Rosenberg spent the entire day with him, touring the studio and watching rushes

of the incomplete film, before breathing deeply and, despite gnawing fears that the

enterprise might yet bring them all down, agreed to negotiate a loan. (101)

Brode notes that Disney’s respect for Rosenberg was such that he would recount this tale

“to pretty much anyone who would listen” (101). Despite the reliable sources that counter claims of anti-Semitism, as Roth’s essay demonstrates, there remains a popular willingness to believe in the worst of Walt Disney.81

Sections of Roth’s essay use—almost verbatim—passages from Eliot’s Disney exposé, including excerpts of an interview conducted by Eliot with animator and Disney alumnus,

81 In his 2004 article “Why Disney Scares Us?” Kevin Shortsleeve claims that Walt Disney was “anti- Semitic and accused of being overly friendly to the Nazi party” (9).

180 Arthur Babbitt.82 In his book, Eliot asserts that in 1938 Disney was “accompanying

[studio lawyer, Gunther] Lessing to meetings and rallies” (119), citing as evidence Babbitt’s claim that Disney was involved with the “American Nazi movement”. Eliot writes:

According to Babbitt, “In the immediate years before we entered the war,

there was a small but fiercely loyal, I suppose legal, following of the Nazi

party. You could buy a copy of Mein Kampf on any newsstand in Hollywood.

Nobody asked me to go to any meetings, but I did, out of curiosity. They were

open meetings, anybody could attend, and I wanted to see what was going on

for myself.

“On more than one occasion I observed Walt Disney and Gunther Lessing

there, along with a lot of other prominent Nazi afflicted Hollywood

personalities. Disney was going to meetings all the time. I was invited to the

homes of several prominent actors and musicians, all of whom were actively

working for the American Nazi party.83 I told a girlfriend of mine who was an

82 Babbit had been one of the studio’s highest paid animators in the 1930s and had worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo. His relationship with Disney soured in 1941 when he joined the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild and encouraged other animators to join the union. Babbit was deeply concerned about pay discrepancies, work conditions and other issues at the studio and his decision to join the union was for the sake of his fellow employees and to campaign for greater equity and conditions. Disney felt deeply betrayed by Babbit’s actions and fired him on 27 May 1941, precipitating a strike that began the next morning. Disney despised unions and once stated, “I am convinced that this entire mess was Communistically inspired and led” (qtd. in Mosley 191). Having built his studio from scratch, he deeply resented that any outside labour group might impose conditions on how he ran his studio or the business. Following a Supreme Court ruling, Disney was forced to re-hire Babbit and pay him lost wages backdated to his firing, although Babbit did not stay long and after a year he resigned and went to United Productions of America. For Babbitt’s obituary in the Times, Myrna Oliver describes how Disney was so embittered by what he viewed as Babbitt’s betrayal that he had the animator’s name “omitted from Disney histories and press releases for many years.” Such was the enmity between the two men that it is difficult to substantiate Babbitt’s claims about Disney’s involvement with Nazism, a claim that seems suspiciously like character assassination. 83 Reference to the “American Nazi Party” is a misnomer. It is important to distinguish the American Nazi Party (also called the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, or WUFENS), established in

181 editor at the time with Coronet magazine who encouraged me to write down

what I observed. She had some connections to the FBI and turned in my

reports”. (119-20)84

Roth reasserts Babbitt’s statement that, “you could buy a copy of Mein Kampf on any newsstand in Hollywood”, embellishing it so that the Nazi text “sold like hotcakes at corner newsstands”—a distortion that significantly changes the meaning of Babbitt’s words, suggesting that support for Hitler in Hollywood was rife when, as the strong presence of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League attests, the opposite was true.85 Jon Lewis likewise cites Babbitt’s assertions concerning Disney’s Nazi involvement, insisting that during the late 1930s he “attended meetings held at the houses of American Nazi Party members” (69). How many and for what purpose he does not discuss, but adds, for good measure, sure-fire proof of Disney’s Nazi sympathies: ’s recollection that

Disney “told her he admired her work and briefly considered hiring her” (69). This is likewise included in a footnote in Eliot’s biography in which the author states that Disney only declined hiring Riefenstahl because, “it would damage his reputation” (120), a point that seems to contradict claims of Hollywood’s Nazi sympathies.86

February 1959 by George Franklin Rockwell, from the founded in March 1936 by Fritz Julius Kuhn. 84 Eliot includes a footnote stating that the existence of Babbit’s reports, “has been neither confirmed nor denied by the FBI” (120), making it impossible one way or the other to verify or refute Babbit’s claims. 85 Henry Gonshak provides an alternative image of Hollywood’s position on Nazism that directly contradicts Roth’s claim, pointing out how Hollywood “had always been more anti-Nazi than the country at large, given the large number of Jews and from Hitler within the Hollywood community” (63). 86 Disregarding an edict handed down by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League insisting all studios boycott any interaction with Riefenstahl, on December 8, 1938 Disney spent three hours with the German director at his animation studio where he expressed his admiration for her work. Disney had asked Riefenstahl if he might privately screen Olympia (Riefenstahl had brought three copies with her to America in hopes of finding a US distributor for the film) but then changed his mind, explaining that his projectionists were unionised and they would ensure news of the screening would be leaked. “I’m an independent producer,” he explained, “but I don’t do my own distributing and I don’t have my own theatres. There’s a chance I might be boycotted. The risk is too great” (Riefenstahl 240). On her arrival in America Riefenstahl had initially received a warm reception in New York, which quickly cooled when the non-sectarian Anti-Nazi League

182

Whether or not Disney attended meetings of the German American Bund, and for what purpose, is unclear and a matter for speculation, just as Babbitt’s own questionable motivation for purportedly attending such meetings “on more than one occasion” (120) is unclear. It does however seem contradictory and incongruous that Disney, concerned as he was about maintaining good relations with the major studio distributors and exhibitors, might jeopardise this relationship by attending “open meetings” of a group as famously disreputable and unpopular as the German American Bund.87 What can be confirmed, however, is that Disney and his wife Lillian were present at a reception given for the

Duke of Saxe-Coburg, Charles Edward, by German Consul, Dr Georg Gyssling on 5

April 1940.88 While some writers have singled out Disney’s attendance for criticism, also present at the reception with their spouses were publisher Harrison

Chandler, real estate mogul William May Garland, media mogul William Randolph

insisted on boycotts of Olympia. On the west coast the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League pressured the studios to shun Riefenstahl altogether, falsely claiming her to be “head of the Nazi film industry” (Graham 443). 87 Joachim Remak confirms that although membership of the German American Bund never exceeded 6,000, it’s high profile activities (the largest being a rally held at Madison Square Gardens on 20 February, 1939), which featured prominently in news reports, seemed to suggest “there was a real threat behind the bluster of its leaders' pro-Nazi speech-making” (38). Leland Bell likewise affirms that towards the end of the 1930s when the German American Bund attempted to promote National Socialism in the US, “Americans became alarmed” (585), although their concerns were unfounded as the party was finally disavowed by Germany in March 1938 (a fact withheld from the Bund by its leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn) while the larger population of Americans of German descent expressed little-to-no interest in its activities. 88 Gyssling was an influential figure in Hollywood during the 1930s. Urwand insists, somewhat contentiously, that the Consul’s chief task was “to collaborate with the American studios” (178), vetting American cinematic output on behalf of the National Socialists to ensure German prestige was maintained. He also liaised with the Hays Office in an effort to extend his influence over studio output via the Production Code Administration, and issued warnings and ultimatums to studios concerning distribution deals with Germany. David Denby objects to Urwand’s charge of collaboration between the Nazis and the studios, suggesting that, “the studios didn’t advance Nazism” so much as “they failed to oppose it”. Providing a more balanced account of Gyssling’s influence, Denby describes how the German Consul sent threatening letters to the cast and crew working on Universal’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, The Road Back (Whale 1937), a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone 1930) which was despised by the Nazis and banned in Germany. According to Denby, when Gyssling’s “impudent letter got into the press, an uproar ensued, and the German Foreign Office had to assure the State Department that no further threats would be made against American citizens”.

183 Hearst, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)

Will Hays, and various Hollywood celebrities including High profile actor Gary

Cooper.89

Although the claims that Disney had strong sympathies for Nazism have never been substantiated and more evidence exists to discredit than confirm them, within the public domain they persist as a product of hearsay assumed to be true. Although Schickel’s book, which originated the claims of Nazism made against Disney is an unreliable and often erroneous text, it remains one of the most influential and oft-cited sources by writers and scholars who, as Amy Davis confirms, “have continued to perpetuate these myths uncritically” so that “the accuracy of these sources never seems to be called into question, but is accepted at face value” (219). Roth, and to a lesser extent, Lewis’ vilification of Disney that aligns him with National Socialism adds credence to these claims even as they recycle unreliable sources. Roth also makes the all-too common error amongst Disney scholars—according to Davis—of conflating Disney the person with

89 Much like Disney, Cooper has been variously accused of harbouring Nazi sympathies that include a claim that while he and his wife were in Germany before the war they “would go to Berlin and be entertained by Hitler” (Higham and Moseley 97). Also like Disney, Cooper was highly conservative and just as opposed to communist infiltration of the unions. Both men fronted as “friendly” witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947, adding fuel to claims that they harboured fascist sympathies. According to Cooper’s widow, Veronica Cooper Converse, Higham and Mosely’s claims are a “despicable, bald-faced lie” (qtd. in Safire A27). She recounts how she and Cooper had accompanied her mother and stepfather Paul Shields, a New York Utilities expert and economic advisor to Roosevelt, to Germany on a fact finding mission: “F.D.R. wanted to know about Germany's finances, and my stepfather made contact … to look at some Siemens factories” (A27). On his return to America, rather than defending the Nazis as Higham and Moseley suggest, Cooper shared his thoughts about Germany’s hostile intentions: “There’s no question in my mind that those people want to have war. They’re determined to become a world power and seem to feel that’s the only way to become one. … The atmosphere in Berlin—well, I’ve never sensed such tension” (qtd in Meyers 205-6). Cooper’s sober reflections on the situation in Germany show little support for Nazism and in fact cast significant doubt on the validity of claims of Nazi sympathy.

184 Disney the studio and its films (214). Thus ’s films are often treated as auteurist texts that provide personal insights into the character of Walt Disney. Pinocchio is one such text that is interpreted by Roth as a clear reflection of Disney’s Nazi sympathies, an issue that is discussed in the next part of this chapter as we explore

Pinocchio as an antifascist text that portrays the monsterfication of the child.

185 3.2 Pinocchio, Nazism & Pleasure Island

“Since his death”, states Davis, Disney has been called “racist, staunchly conservative, and sexist90 by his critics, often without any kind of substantiation for these charges beyond selected images to be found within the Disney studio’s films” (227). Davis’ observation applies to the claims made by Roth that draw extensively on the studio’s films as some sort of confirmation of Disney’s racism and fascism. In so doing, Roth confers on Disney a level of status that credits him solely for the films produced by the studio—a move that if applied to MGM, for instance, would bestow on studio boss

Louis B. Mayer the title of auteur. Janet Wasko in her discussion of Walt Disney astutely points out that “we should be cautious about giving one person full credit for the attributes and characteristics of popular cultural products” (133) while Davis, addressing the myths that surround Walt, points out their impact in “clouding scholarly judgment when it comes to understanding the differences between Walt the man and Disney the movie genre” (214). Although Disney always had final word on what ended up on screen, to confuse the man with the films made by his studio risks overlooking the veritable army of artists, writers, musicians and technicians responsible for advancing the art of animation, developing the stories and their characters, and ultimately influencing Disney.

In the previous section, some of the myths concerning Disney’s purported Nazi sympathies were addressed. In this section a close reading of sequences in Pinocchio will

90 In her analysis of Disney’s films, Wasko highlights how some feminist writers attribute the studio’s representations of women to Disney himself, “who was once reported to have said, ‘Girls bore me. They still do’” (132-33). Yet the creation of Disneyland began in his backyard as a mini-railway for his daughters with whom he adored playing. In an interview with Fletcher Markle, Disney lovingly recalls spending recreational time with his girls and states, “Saturday was always daddy’s day with the two daughters. So we’d start out and try to go someplace, you know, different things, and I’d take them to the merry-go-round and different places and as I’d sit while they rode the merry-go-round and did all these things” (94).

186 be undertaken to address Roth’s incendiary claim that it could “very well have served as a

Hitler Youth training film”. Particular attention will be paid to the Pleasure Island sequence in which, it is argued, Nazification and monsterfication converge in the figure of the monster child, providing an important transitional step in the monster child’s generic recodification from a character previously associated exclusively with comedy to one that will eventually become a mainstay of horror.

Roth’s reading of Pinocchio as a fascist text interprets the film’s villains as caricatures of groups identified by the Nazis as enemies of the Third Reich and its goal of racial purification. Thus, Honest John the Fox and Gideon the Cat are “clearly gay”, 91

Stromboli is an “evil gypsy” and therefore “clearly of an inferior race”, and the

Coachman is “everything a Nazi would expect of a Jew”. Here, Roth draws on Mein

91 Roth describes Honest John as “mannered, effeminate, urbane and of the theater”, while “his small, strangely elastic companion, The Cat, constantly slithers around him and through his legs”. His assessment of their is based on how they pretend to be actors, their effete behaviour, and the way “the two of them often become entwined with each other in a chaos of limbs”. Roth’s interpretation appears to have been influenced by Vito Russo’s reading of Pinocchio in which he describes Honest John and Gideon as a “sissy-buddy” pairing who “seduce Pinocchio with the hit song ‘Heigh Diddley Dee’ [sic] (the second line of which is ‘Heigh diddley day [sic], an actor’s life is gay’ and away he goes—twice” (74-5). Russo’s reading of the lyric “gay” is anachronistic insomuch as the term, according to Donald Cory, was largely unknown and not in usage outside homosexual subcultures before World War II (108). This is not to suggest that Honest John and Gideon are not queer, for they conspicuously foster dandyish affectations. However, Jiminy Cricket’s amusing question, “What does an actor want with a conscience anyway?” contextualises Honest John and Gideon who, cast as actors, seem representative of the allure of Hollywood and show business that has seen the moral ruin of many. Extending this reading to include Pinocchio’s imprisonment and enforced slavery by Stromboli suggests a commentary on the seven-year contractual obligations imposed on stars under the studio system. Indeed, Paul advances that it is “not too difficult to regard Stromboli as a burlesque of a Hollywood studio boss, complete with foreign accent” (qtd in Allan 87). According to Kaufman, inspiration for the characters of Honest John and Gideon was drawn from such screen comics as Roscoe Arbuckle and who gleefully parody heterosexual norms and get the better of the stereotypical tough guy (83). Re-watching the Fox and Cat in action, it is apparent that there is something of Laurel and Hardy in the pair with their ludicrous unmasculine pretensions and pratfalls. Scott Balcerzak observes that unlike other male comedy duos in the early sound era, which comprised a (masculine) sober and a (feminised) histrionic halfwit, Laurel and Hardy were “a case of two figures as a defined queered unit … refusing to adhere to heterosexual protocols” (147). Like Laurel and Hardy, Honest John and Gideon do not exhibit the “sexual imbalance” inherent in other comedy duos, despite Gideon’s muteness, clearly a homage to silent comedy as well as an affectionate nod to the sloppy-sleeved Harpo Marx.

187 Kampf and how “Hitler explains the nefarious scheme of the Jews: they lure good, solid

German men—artisans like Geppetto—into the city, to be corrupted by vice and

Communism”,92 although nowhere in the film is Geppetto ever shown to be lured or seduced by anything. Rather, Geppetto abandons his workshop and his hometown, driven by a desperate search to find his missing son. Roth’s interpretation of Pinocchio has proved persuasive for some readers, 93 and yet the film’s narrative is so open to interpretative play that it can just as easily be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of Nazism—an interpretation that this chapter will pursue.

A key sequence in Pinocchio takes place on Pleasure Island, a fantastical playground for delinquent boys where there is no school, no parents, and no rules. When Pinocchio and the boatload of boys arrive on the island, they are ushered into a spectacular no-holds- barred festive world in which they run amok. As well as a variety of generic fairground attractions, the carnival provides an endless supply of candy and cigars, symbolising the boys’ childishness even as they seek to embrace signifiers of mature masculinity. This desire to break the rules imposed from above continues the carnivalesque impulse seen in earlier bad boy silent films in which boys (and girls) target the adults authority figures that are most responsible for enforcing the rules foisted upon them. One of the most conspicuously peculiar “attractions” in the park is a large mansion with an entry sign that

92 In Mein Kampf Hitler describes “the final goal of Judaism” in the following terms: More and more millions of people moved from peasant villages to the big cities in order to earn their daily bread as 'factory workers ' in the newly founded industries. Working and living conditions of the new class were more than pitiful. Even the former working methods of the one-time craftsmen or peasants, carried over mechanically to the new forms, were unsuitable in every respect. (438) 93 Union organiser and labour activist Dave Schneider is one writer who seems to have swallowed Roth’s assertions whole. Writing for Truthout.com, Schneider, who examines the conservative ideological underpinnings of the Disney company’s four Florida theme parks and resorts explains how “Roth's blistering analysis of the fascist ideology underwriting Disney films inspired me to take a closer look at the theme parks inspired by Uncle Walt's own demented worldview.”

188 reads, “Model Home Open for Destruction”. As mobs of jostling boys file into the house, enthusiastically tearing up its furnishings and fixtures, the voice of a carnival barker cries out, “Hurry, hurry, hurry! See the Model Home. It’s open for destruction and it’s all yours, boys! It’s all yours!” Playing outside the mansion, Pinocchio and his newfound tough-guy friend Lampwick are breaking apart furniture and revelling in the unrestricted pleasure offered by juvenile delinquency. Picking up a brick, Lampwick draws

Pinocchio’s attention to a stained-glass window before he hurls the brick through it. Soon afterwards Lampwick and the other boys transform into donkeys that are rounded up and forced to work for the Coachman.

In Roth’s pro-Nazi reading of the Pleasure Island sequence, the coachman who takes the boys to the island is a Jewish Communist and lures the boys—interpreted as “good solid

German men”—to a fantastical amusement park that is symbolic of the city (Roth describes it as “dark and crowded, dense and full of movement”) only to be “corrupted by vice and communism”. He thus reads the destruction of the mansion as symbolic of a bolshevist “attack on private property”. His interpretation is certainly enticing, especially when compared with the 1933 Hitler Youth propaganda film, Hitlerjunge Quex, directed by Hans Steinhoff.94 According to Eric Rentschler, Hitlerjunge Quex was the first Nazi

94 Hitlerjunge Quex opened in on 11 September 1933 at a special premiere at the Ufa-Phoebus- Palast that was attended by Hitler, Göring, and Hess (25). The film played at a single cinema in the US, the Yorkville Theatre on the corner of Third Avenue and 96th Street in Manhattan. According to Thomas Doherty, the cinema was owned by a pair of Jews—Joe Scheinman and Al Schiebar—who “hoped to draw crowds with a provocative line of counterprogramming” that catered to the “estimated 40,000 Nazi sympathizers in and about the city” (179). Doherty reports that the film “tanked” due to its Nazi associations despite the change in title to Unsere Fahn flattert uns voran (Our Flags Lead Us Forward). A balanced review of the film by Harry T. Smith in the New York Times opines that “technically the picture is very well done” while some scenes are “genuinely entertaining” (16). The review also reports that the film “was not welcomed with any special enthusiasm at its initial showing in the Yorkville Theatre” and may

189 feature film “substantially supported by the new government and produced under the protectorate of the Youth Leader of the German Reich, Baldur von Schirach” (24).

Adapted from the 1932 Nazi propaganda novel by Karl Aloys Schenzinger, itself based on 15-year-old Nazi Brownshirt Herbert Norkus who was declared a martyr by Joseph

Goebbels after he was beaten to death by a gang of communist youths for defiantly distributing NSDAP leaflets in the Berlin borough of Moabit that was at the time an inner city communist stronghold.

Hitlerjunge Quex follows a hardworking young blond boy named Heini Völker (Jürgen

Ohlsen) whose violent oafish father is a member of the communist party. Played by barrel-chested Heinrich George, Han’s father has an imposing appearance and demeanour not dissimilar to Stromboli’s volatile gypsy.95 From the window of his apartment located in the communist working class district of Beusselkiez, Heini hears a carnival and is drawn to a busy stall where a pocketknife is the prize for a successful spin on the wheel.

He loses his money at the stall but is met by his father’s friend, a communist youth leader named Stoppel (Hermann Speelmans) who invites him to join the communist youth group on a lakeside camp to celebrate the summer solstice. Waiting for the train the next day,

Heini has his first encounter with a Hitler Youth squad, a uniformed, tidy, self-disciplined unit in a stark contrast to the loud, ill-mannered and bedraggled communist rabble who

hold interest “for persons desirous of getting a pictorial idea of how the Nazi doctrine was spread among the rising generation in Germany” (16). 95 In Collodi’s story, the puppet master is named “Mangiafoco” (Fire eater). According to Kaufman, the writing team had settled on the name Fire-eater, but “by February 1938 he had acquired the name Stromboli, after the active volcano island of Stromboli in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the north coast of Sicily” (89)—no doubt a reference to his volatility.

190 constantly indulge in cigarettes, alcohol and sexual adventurism.96 The parallels between the Pleasure Island sequence in Pinocchio and the communist youth sequence in

Hitlerjunge Quex seem self-evident.97 Indeed, the noisy throng of bad boys travelling on the coach in Pinocchio are reminiscent of the unruly communist youths on the train and at the camp in Steinhoff’s film.

However, equally compelling, and in contrast to Roth’s interpretation, is a reading of the

Pleasure Island sequence as an allegory of the National Socialist’s seduction and enslavement of Germany’s youth. The disturbing scenes of boys turning into donkeys— effectively deceived into slavery—bears more than a passing resemblance to what had really been happening in Germany since the early 1930s. According to Michael Kater,

Hitler “wooed and flattered beyond limits” (1) the youth of Germany, enticing them to join his cause. Mark Roseman likewise describes how “the Nazis used the idea of youthful rebellion to attract youngsters to the Hitler Youth”, and adds that, “not a few members of the Hitler Youth members were able to exploit their position to oppose parents or teachers” (31). Initially modelling the Hitler Youth on the Wandervögel youth counterculture movement, the Hitler Youth took groups of boys on outdoor adventures into the countryside where they participated in singing, marching and camping. In the midst of a continuing economic depression, these boys—many of whom had only known

96 Harry T. Smith’s New York Times review wryly points out the obvious polarities in the portrayal of the two political groups: “Naturally, the Communists are painted in gruesome colors, while all but one of the young Nazis are wholesome, upstanding boys and girls filled with patriotism” (16). 97 It is highly unlikely the Disney filmmakers drew inspiration from Hitlerjunge Quex as the film had only limited release in the United States, as was the case with most Nazi German films. Doherty reports that before the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933 there were about 200 cinemas in the United States screening imported German films—“dubbed ‘German tongue talkers’” (177) in the trade press, whereas by March that year, the number of exhibitors had “plummeted to single digits—three in New York, one in Boston, and a few scattered around the Midwest” (177).

191 squalor and urban drudgery—could escape and socialise freely with other boys and, in contrast to the portrayal of the Hitler Youth in Steinhoff’s film, they could let off steam, swear and roughhouse in a setting where their class and social background had no bearing. As the Hitler Youth movement grew in size and power after 1935, it became a cornerstone of the Nazi party and took on greater regimentation and extreme strictness.

Roseman notes that the generational conflict that had been used to attract members to the

Hitler Youth was, “if not eliminated, then sharply suppressed” (31).

Initially, Hitler Youth membership was voluntary and efforts were made to entice the young with promises outdoor adventure and freedom from rules and authority. Jean-

Denis Lepage notes how the Nazis also offered children physical incentives “that would fascinate and attract them to their cause, such as uniforms, knives, drums and bugles”

(32) before actively encouraging its members to apply peer pressure among their friends to join. Recalling his experiences in the early years of the Hitler Youth, Hans Siemsen states “we boys had been coaxed and implored to join the Hitler Youth. Now it was becoming more and more a matter of compulsion” (57). In 1936 the HJ Law was passed, outlawing all other youth groups and making Hitler Youth membership compulsory, however participation was not made obligatory until March 1939 when Hitler issued a decree to enforce the legislation. Enforcement of the HJ Law, according to Rempel, ensured “the entire generation aged ten to eighteen was now subject to HJ discipline and party controlled” (69). Upon reaching the age of ten, Rempel notes, boys were ritualistically compelled to join the Jungvolk (Young Folk) and girls were required to become members of the Jungmädelgruppen (Young Girls Groups) while “a uniform

192 ceremony marked the swearing in of fourteen-year-olds” (69). The issuing of uniforms, and the practise of endless marching in formation were two crucial features the Hitler

Youth shared with fascism and its aim of intentionally and systematically erasing all signs of individualism while ensuring absolute unity and conformity. In Pinocchio, we see this seduction of boys who are transported to a remote location, separated from their families. Once on Pleasure Island, the novelty of freedom eventually gives way to the nightmare of slavery as all the boys, crying for their mothers, are transformed into donkeys, each indistinguishable from the next—an image that, as will be discussed below, is later exploited to its full effect in Disney’s Education for Death.

The transformation of Lampwick into a donkey is one of the most well remembered scenes in Pinocchio, largely because it is presented as a “full-fledged episode of horror”, making it “the most psychologically harrowing sequence in the film” (Kaufman 224).98 In a shot prior to this sequence Jiminy Cricket is shown wandering through the deserted carnival and remarks, “It’s like a graveyard in here”,99 a point that will be returned to in

98 Kaufman is not alone in his assessment. Golden, Bissette and Sniegoski explore the history of horror films in The Monster Book and conclude, “the most terrifying human to beast transformation of the 1940s appeared in a cartoon: Walt Disney’s Pinocchio traumatized a generation of children when Pleasure Island claimed Pinocchio’s playmate Lampwick” (239). Sara Franks-Allen concurs, writing in an online article titled “10 Traumatic Disney Moments” she posits that Pinocchio “ranks as one of Disney's scariest movies and its most traumatizing scene has to be the transformation of Lampwick”. Lucy O’Brien likewise isolates the transformation of Lampwick in her online article, “Disney’s Most Traumatic Movie Moments”, describing it as “horrifying to watch”. 99 Images of death and horror recur regularly in Disney’s cartoons and the feature length animated films, and even the theme park rides with the “Haunted Mansion” ride at Disneyland and, until January 2017 the “The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror” ride located at Disney Adventure Park (the ride closed in January 2017 and reopened in May the same year as the Marvel -themed ride “Guardians of the Galaxy - Mission: Breakout!”). Gary Laderman notes how regularly graveyards and ghosts feature in Disney’s films, citing Ub Iwerks Skeleton Dance (1929) and the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia (Jackson 1940) as key examples (33-4). Conflating the studio with the man, Laderman writes that Disney’s films portray an obsession with death attributed to an encounter with a fortune teller at a party who told the animator that “he would die at thirty-five” (35). Schickel claims that the event shook Disney and activated his obsession with death. "For the rest of his life”, he writes, Disney “avoided funerals and when forced to attend them, fell into long, brooding depressions. He even avoided

193 the discussion of the Disney animated short, Education for Death. Jiminy finds Pinocchio with Lampwick smoking, drinking, and playing snooker, and indignantly storms out when Lampwick humiliates him and, worse still, when Pinocchio refers to Lampwick as his best friend. After Jiminy’s exit Lampwick ridicules the feisty little cricket and dismisses Pinocchio’s need for a conscience. The notion of being untroubled by conscience was, according to Guido Knopp, a key element of the Nazis’ indoctrination of its youth: “A critical questioning of one’s conscience”, observes Knopp, “was not allowed for in the [Hitler Youth’s] timetable” (60). Significantly, a key strategy of the

Nazis was to desensitise and emotionally harden the young, preparing them for the

Wermacht (the armed forces of the Third Reich) and teaching them blind obedience to the

Fuhrer and hatred for the Jews from the moment they began kindergarten.100 This hatred was unleashed during the horror of Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass. According to

Steinweis, during Kristallnacht, schoolchildren were exploited as “agents of group violence” and their vandalism became so intense that they “were difficult to bring under control once local authorities intervened to put a halt to the destruction” (82).

Lampwick’s metamorphosis is at first humorous as he grows large ears and sprouts a tale that bursts through the back of his trousers as he bends over the snooker table.101 Bit-by- bit he transforms without noticing any of the changes, much like the gradual and

would-be biographers, commenting to more than one acquaintance that ‘biographies are only written about dead people’” (146) and that a biography might “cause his demise” (146). 100 The Nazis systematically marginalised and dehumanised Jews and other groups, including handicapped and disabled , and used mathematics to teach schoolchildren the economic benefits of disposing of those deemed “useless eaters” (Aly and Roth 96) as a means of rationalising and normalising ethnic cleansing and state-sanctioned murder. 101 Sean Griffin’s queer reading of Disney’s animated films argues that Pinocchio “serves as an exemplary text for using both animate and inanimate objects as a source of anal humor” (59) and describes how “when Pinocchio and his friend Lampwick turn into ‘asses’ on Pleasure Island, each gets his own butt shot, so that the audience can witness a donkey’s tail suddenly protrude through the pants” (60).

194 systematic transformation of young German boys into fanatical Hitler Youth. The comedy swiftly turns to horror however as Lampwick looks at himself in a full-length mirror and cries in terror as he sees he has the head and tail of a donkey. Panicked, he runs to Pinocchio, pleading for his help and calling for his mother. As he grabs at the braces of Pinocchio’s lederhosen, his hands transform into hooves. Inspired by the semantics of existing horror film imagery, Lampwick’s transformation is presented in a style that is truly monstrous as Disney mimics the lapse dissolve effect in Universal studios’ The Man (Waggner 1941) in which Lon Chaney Jr.’s feet change from human to werewolf. In so doing, Lampwick doesn’t just change into a hapless beast of burden, for in aligning his transformation with the wolf man, the child becomes a literal monster. According to prolific film fan writer Lee Gambin, in conversation with Joe

Dante discussing his 1981 werewolf film The Howling the director cited Lampwick’s

“genuinely frightening” transformation in Pinocchio as a key influence on the design for

Eddie Quist’s (Robert Picardo) graphic lycanthrope transformation. That Pinocchio became the source of inspiration for the gruesome special makeup effects on an intense comedy-horror film further legitimises the true terror of the sequence in Disney’s film.

Lampwick’s disturbing monsterfication is further intensified by the use of the looming shadows of German Expressionism—recalling especially F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu

(1922). As Lampwick’s monstrous body transforms from bipedal to a quadruped, the change—too troubling to show directly—is cast as a shadow against the wall (Figures

6/7).

195

Images Not Included

Fig. 6/7: Lampwick’s metamorphosis into a donkey is represented in expressionistic shadows

The monsterfication of Lampwick from cynical street-smart bad boy to an enslaved beast of burden indistinguishable from the other caged donkey-boys parallels the Nazification of Germany’s youth, especially when read in tandem with Disney’s anti-Nazi propaganda film Education for Death that shares key visual elements with Pinocchio. Before exploring the parallels between the two animated films that depict the fate of the Hitler

Youth, a final section of Pinocchio will be explored that ties the two films together.

196 3.3 Kristallnacht and Rothenberg

Collodi’s version of the mysterious utopia for boys does not mention the kinds of violence, vandalism and juvenile delinquency that Disney includes in his film. Collodi calls his dreamland for boys “The Land of Toys” (il paese dei Balocchi) and provides a description of the types of activities the young denizens engage in:

This great land was entirely different from any other place in the world. Its

population, large though it was, was composed wholly of boys. The oldest were

about fourteen years of age, the youngest eight. In the street, there was such a

racket, such shouting, such blowing of trumpets that it was deafening. Everywhere

groups of boys were gathered together. Some played at marbles, at hopscotch, at

ball. Others rode on bicycles or on wooden horses. Some played at blindman's

buff, others at tag. Here a group played circus, there another sang and recited. A

few turned somersaults, others walked on their hands with their feet in the air.

(81)

Much like J.M. Barrie’s Neverland, the seduction for boys running away to Collodi’s

“Land of Toys” is that it is always like summer holidays and there is never any school or parents or interruption to their recreational pursuits. The thuggery and violence in

Disney’s version is wholly an invention of the studio and according to Allen, was toned down considerably from the original sketches that showed “Lampwick and the other boys breaking up houses, destroying lampposts, carving names on furniture, breaking effigies of their teacher and of the teacher’s pet and even shooting down police” (88). Allen

197 suggests that these scenes “seem prophetic in their appellation not only to the United

States but also to Europe” (88), yet comparing the scenes of Pinocchio to images of the aftermath of the 1938 pogrom102 in Nazi Germany, called Kristallnacht, would suggest that rather than providing a portent for the carnage of war to come, these scenes are drawn from incidents that had already taken place in Germany, the country in which

Disney’s Pinocchio is set.103

On the pretext of revenge for the murder of the Nazi German diplomat Ernst von Rath in

Paris on November 7, 1938 by Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan,104 the Nazi party coordinated a nationwide pogrom on November 9 and 10, attacking and vandalising

Jewish homes and businesses and burning down synagogues, resulting in the deaths of thirty-six Jews while a further thirty thousand Jewish males were dragged from their homes and sent to concentration camps. Dubbed the Kristallnacht or “Night of the

102 Originating from the Russian word “pogrom” literally meaning “destruction”, the Oxford English Dictionary provides the following explanation: “In , Poland, and some other East European countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: an organized massacre aimed at the destruction or annihilation of a body or class of people, esp. one conducted against Jewish people”. 103 It is important to note that Lampwick—a “street-smart wise guy who seemed to have stepped out of a ” (Kaufman 95) is one of only two characters (the other being Jiminy Cricket) in Pinocchio who are “drawn directly from contemporary American life” (95). Significantly, the music accompanying the Pleasure Island sequence where hoards of boys go crazy destroying the fun park is mostly jazz that likewise adds to the Americanness of the scene. Lampwick is voiced by teen actor Frankie Darrow, who had played tough teen roles in Tough Kid (Bretherton 1938), Boys’ Reformatory (Bretherton 1939) and the gritty pre-code film, Wild Boys of the Road (Wellman 1933), which explores the fate of homeless youth in the early years of the Great Depression. Juvenile delinquency and youth homelessness reached epidemic proportions during the Depression. Dubbed the “Children’s Army”, disaffected nomadic children and teens often eked out an existence roving the continent via its comprehensive rail network. By 1932, the number of homeless child transients was “200,000 strong and rising fast” (Savage 279). Reformers and moralists concerned about a crime wave—“during 1933 … there were 12,000 murders in the United States, 3,000 kidnappings, and 150,000 robberies” (290)—placed the blame on Hollywood, pointing to gangster films like Little Caesar (LeRoy 1931) and The Public Enemy (Wellman 1931)—the latter starring Darrow in an uncredited role—as the culprits that young audiences admired, imitating the tough guy characters portrayed by Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney respectively. 104 Peter Loewenberg explains that Grynszpan was “distraught over the treatment of his parents who had been abruptly deported from Germany to Poland on 27th October” and that the shooting “provided the public ‘trigger’ or pretext for the pogrom” (312).

198 Broken Glass” due to the sheer volume of glass from the shattered windows of Jewish stores and homes that littered Germany’s streets following the attacks, the pogrom had the dual intention of stripping Germany’s Jews of their wealth while purging the Reich of its Jewish population.105 On the topic of Kristallnacht and dehumanisation, Loewenberg insists that the whole point of Kristallnacht was the public staging of a “significant open ritual of degradation and dehumanization” (313). He cites an eyewitness account by

American Consul in Leipzig David H. Buffum who recalls watching the humiliation and debasement of Jews in the city’s Zoological Gardens. According to Buffum, after “the insatiably sadistic perpetrators” destroyed Jewish homes and business and “hurtled most of the moveable effects to the streets, they rounded up Jewish families and “threw many of the trembling inmates into a small stream … commanding the horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight … These tactics were carried out the entire morning of November 10th … and they were applied to men, women and children” (qtd. in 313).

Kristallnacht has come to be seen by historians as a first deliberate step towards genocide106 as the Nazis contemplated what to do with the millions of Jews living in the

Eastern European regions they had invaded. The Kristallnacht pogrom made front-page headlines around the world and for days after, demonstrated by a page 4 New York Times piece titled “American Press Comment on Nazi Riots” that republished editorial commentary from across the country condemning the attacks on Jews in Germany and

105 An editorial piece in the Cleveland Plain Drifter cited by the New York Times surmises that one of the main objects of the Nazi pogrom “is the confiscation of Jewish wealth and property, a revelation of the governments need for new funds” (qtd in “American Press” 4). 106 Calling for cessation to the sackings on November 10, Goebbels chillingly spoke of how “a final answer … will be given to the Jewry by way of legislation and ordinance” (qtd in Tolischus 1).

199 Austria. One example of the many editorial comments republished is from the

Washington Post that typifies how writers dug into history attempting to find equivalent examples to the horror of Kristallnacht. The Post editorial declares:

Probably not since the evening of Aug. 24, 1572, and the bloody days and nights

that followed had the European world seen anything quite comparable to what took

place Thursday throughout greater Germany. It is plain that like the St

Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the recent ferocious reprisals against the German

Jews were officially sponsored. (qtd in “American Press” 4).

Writing in the New York Times on the day following Kistallnacht, Otto Tolischus suggests the violence witnessed in the Nazi pogrom eclipsed that seen during the

Bolshevik revolution two decades earlier and notes that, “by nightfall there was scarcely a Jewish shop, café, office or synagogue that was not either wrecked, burned severely or damaged” (1). Alan Steinweis notes that among the Germans involved in the November pogrom, gangs of children and youths played a prominent part, destroying property and assaulting Jews with impunity. He cites an example where children “aged twelve to fourteen were released from school early on November 10 and mobilized for attacks against Jewish homes and shops, which they carried out with great enthusiasm” (86).

Nowhere in the annals of Disney scholarship are there comparisons made between

Kristallnacht and the juvenile chaos depicted in Pinocchio on Pleasure Island. Any references to Disney and Kristallnacht focus solely on Riefenstahl’s aforementioned tour of Disney’s studio on 8 December 1938, a month after the pogrom. Nor have interpretations been considered that read the fate of the boys who turn into donkeys as an

200 allegory of the Nazification of Germany’s youth, seduced by Hitler and the National

Socialists. Yet the symbolism is clear. Danielle Glassmeyer’s analysis of Pinocchio briefly explores the potential for an anti-fascist reading. She contends that Pinocchio’s

“liederhosen and Bavarian hat” and Geppetto’s “German accent” can be understood as

“the dawning totalitarian commitment of both the Germany his clothes echo, and the Italy from whence his name comes” (109). In Kaufman’s book on Pinocchio, he suggests that the setting for the film is “still nominally Italy, but … expand[ed] into a broader, generically European backdrop … in which the German-accented Geppetto was right at home” (56). Kaufman’s observation is correct insofar as Stromboli and his caravan are

Italian while the Red Lobster Inn is a Dickensian English pub, but Geppetto’s accent is not generically “German-accented”, but specifically Bavarian, having been voiced by veteran actor Christian Rub who was born in the German city of Passau, situated in East

Bavaria on the border between Austria and Germany.

Bavaria is a far cry from the Italy in which Collodi’s Pinocchio is set. Why was this change made? Roth’s interpretation of Pinocchio as a pro-Nazi text assumes that Disney transplanted the story to Germany to ingratiate himself to the Nazis and ensure his film would find distribution in Europe. Attempting to curry favour with the Nazis was certainly a strategy used by some of the major studios keen to maintain a presence in the lucrative German market. Significantly, Bavaria is the German state in which the

National Socialists initially formed and where Hitler’s attempted coup—the so-called

“”107—took place in Munich, the state’s largest city. Even more

107 Hitler’s putsch occurred on November 8 and 9, 1923, the same date as Kristallnacht in 1938, further implying that the nation-wide pogrom was intentionally orchestrated to commemorate this date with the

201 significant, it is the town in which Geppetto and Pinocchio live as it is predominantly based on a town celebrated by the Nazis as the “most German of towns”: Rothenberg ob der Tauber.

Disney’s innovative multi-plane camera developed by studio technician William E.

Garity for its production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs facilitated “increasingly sophisticated animated depth” (Pallant 29). Following the extraordinary success of Snow

White and the Seven Dwarfs, both Disney and his animators were ambitious to do much more with the innovative apparatus. For Pinocchio they “concocted ever more elaborate challenges for the multi-plane” (Kaufman 146). Situated on a track in front of multiple glass panels upon which segments of scenery are painted while other parts of the glass plate are left clear. The camera is trucked forward through a changing depth of field while the painted slides can be simultaneously manoeuvred to create a three-dimensional illusion of gliding through scenery. In Pinocchio the camera moves over and through the turrets, arches, gabled rooftops, and narrow streets of the medieval German village that is home to Geppetto and his wooden son. The picturesque village in the film, designed by

Swedish Disney artist Gustaf Tenggren is modelled after the town of Rothenburg ob der

Tauber (hereafter Rothenburg), situated between Nuremburg and Stuttgart in

Bavaria. Founded in 1274 Rothenburg is famous for its perfectly preserved medieval architecture, making it a popular tourist destination (Figure 8).

symbolic seizure of control from Jewish interests, just as Hitler had earlier attempted the failed coup in Munich.

202

Images Not Included

Figure 8. The medieval Bavarian town of Rothenberg ob der Tauber

Allen writes that entering the walls of Rothenburg is a “curious experience” because “it resembles precisely the town in Pinocchio” (81). However, for the Nazis, the town held particular significance. Joshua Hagen describes how in the 1930s Rothenburg was idealised as a “Nazi utopia” (207) that epitomised German volkish culture. The Nazis’ national culture and tourism organisation, Kraft durch Freude (KdF) described

Rothenberg as “the jewel of the German past … the most German of towns” (209) in a tourist brochure. The KdF encouraged Germans from across the country and the world to visit Rothenburg, proclaiming proudly, “For us, this town has become a unique concept, an everlasting witness to the glorious German history of the Middle Ages, a shining monument to German community in olden times” (qtd in 208). The invitation seemed to work as Rothenburg became a preferred destination of tourists, and particularly popular for the Hitler Youth, who “camped alongside Rothenburg's medieval town wall, including one group of 1,400 ethnic German boys from abroad in 1935” (212).

203 The appeal of Rothenberg to the Nazis was also due to the town’s history of staunch anti-

Semitism. According to Hagen, in a 1520 pogrom Rothenberg successfully expelled its

Jewish population and maintained its Jew-less status until German unification in 1870, after which time the town’s Jewish contingent gradually grew to twenty (219-20). Ahead of the events of Kristallnacht on 8 November 1938, Rothenberg enacted its own pogrom on 23 October whereupon, in a repeat of the 1520 purge, all of the town’s Jews were violently expelled and their property seized or destroyed.108 Whether the October pogrom in Rothenberg inspired the nationwide pogrom in early November remains a matter of speculation. Reflecting on the potential influence of Rothenberg’s pogrom in the lead up to Kristallnacht, Hagen muses, “it seems fitting that a town, which continually strove to be recognized as a role model for a Nazi civic spirit, as a symbol of a German town, indeed the most German of towns, could have played a similar function here” (222). In

Pinocchio although the violence and vandalism perpetrated by the bad boys occurs on

Pleasure Island and not in Geppetto’s village, after Pinocchio escapes from the island and returns to his father’s house in the village, the house is completely deserted. While

Disney’s film combines and condenses various portions of Collodi’s story into these few scenes, it is intriguing that it includes a sequence of story events and startling imagery that recalls Kristallnacht and follows this up with forlorn shots of an empty shop abandoned by its occupant that is suggestive of the tens of thousands of Jews that emigrated from Germany between 1933 and 1939, leaving behind homes, businesses and

108 Citing the 24 October 1938 Fränkische Anzeige (Franconian Newspaper), Hagen writes: On October 24, 1938, local Nazi leaders announced to “thunderous applause” that “the last of Rothenburg's Jews have left the walls of Rothenburg behind them, to be sure it is forever and for eternity” (FA Oct. 24, 1938). After enduring a night of supposedly spontaneous mob vandalism and violence, the last of Rothenburg's Jews left town. Not surprisingly, the expulsion of the Jews was framed in decidedly historical terms. “Our Rothenburg is Jew free,” read the headline, “The centuries long defensive struggle of our ancestors has found its fulfilment”. (221)

204 communities.109 So too, the labelling of Pinocchio as “not a real boy” mirrors the Nazis systematic dehumanisation of Jews who were deemed genetically inferior and therefore not real people.110

109 Although official numbers remain difficult to substantiate, Werner Rosenstock estimates from available records that between the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933 and the middle of 1938, around 150,000 German Jews emigrated from Germany to other parts of Europe or overseas. After the November pogrom, Jewish emigration accelerated significantly with a further 150,000 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany following the November pogrom up until the outbreak of war in September 1939 which severely restricted emigration (374). 110 In her essay, “The Presentation of ‘Self ‘and ‘Other’ in Nazi Propaganda”, Diane Kohl confirms that a key strategy of the Nazis was to encourage a “non-human view of other” (7) intended to reinforce “ingroup cohesion” (7) among Aryan Germans while othering and dehumanising the Jews and any racial and/or differently abled groups deemed inferior.

205 3.5 Education for Death

In the previous section the argument was made that Disney’s Pinocchio is the first

Hollywood film to associate the child monster with Nazi Germany through such strategies as the change in setting from the story’s native Italy to Bavaria. Countering

Roth, it was also argued that the traumatic events on Pleasure Island could be read as a representation of the 1938 Nazi pogrom, nicknamed Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken

Glass”, which took place across Germany in early November and saw the National

Socialists escalate their persecution and dehumanisation of German Jews. Furthermore, the section also explored how the transformation of children into donkeys in Pinocchio functions metaphorically to depict Germany’s youth being seduced into servitude with the Hitler Youth and ultimately sacrificing their lives for the Fuhrer and National

Socialism. In Disney’s wartime propaganda film, Education for Death, released three years after Pinocchio, the monsterfication of the child is unequivocally linked to its

Nazification. While the explicitness of the link between the Hitler Youth and the monsterfication of the child on screen in Pinocchio lacks the directness of Education for

Death—undoubtedly a reflection of the changing relationship between Germany and

America before and after the United States entered World War II—significantly the two films share a number of visual motifs relating to the dehumanisation and monsterfication of the child orchestrated by an ominous adult power. In this section close analysis of

Education for Death will be conducted and key shots compared with Pinocchio, which arguably anticipates Education for Death.

206 During World War II the US Office of War Information (OWI) commissioned Disney studios to produce a series of special animated military training and public propaganda films. Steven Watts notes that America’s entrance into the war meant big business for

Disney’s animation team with more than ninety per cent of its annual animation output commissioned from US government contracts, producing “both a staggering volume and an incredible variety of films” (229). Rising to the challenge, the studio more than quadrupled its per foot output of animated film,111 cheaply and efficiently producing a slew of technical training films used by the armed forces, as well as top secret military briefings, and didactic inspirational films designed to show ordinary Americans how they might best support the war effort. Working with the OWI, Disney also produced a number of propaganda films intended to entertain and reinforce national pride while also encouraging Americans to continue to support the war effort, through such practices as purchasing war bonds and diligently paying taxes,112 and even saving used cooking grease that could be converted into glycerine and repurposed to make explosives.113

In 1943 Walt Disney Productions released Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, a ten-minute animated film adapted from Zeimer’s account of the education system in

111 Watts reports, “before the war Disney’s greatest annual output had totalled some 37,000 feet of film, but production now skyrocketed to over 200,000 feet per year … [which] dwarfed the wartime output of any other Hollywood studio” (229). 112 The 1943 Disney war propaganda cartoon, The Spirit of ’43, directed by Jack King features Donald Duck in a quandary about whether to save his money to pay his increased income tax debt to help the war effort, or spend his hard-earned money on himself. Donald chooses the latter and the remainder of the film shows American factories smelting steel and building , planes and warships while depicting the faceless Nazi enemy being smashed. 113 Minnie Mouse gets a lesson in how to save her used kitchen cooking fats in the 1942 Ben Sharpsteen directed short film Out of the Frying Pan Into the Firing Line. She is instructed on how to strain used fats into a wide-rimmed metal container and keep it in the refrigerator. Once she has collected a pound of fat she sends the container with to the butcher, an “Official Fat Collecting Station”. As Pluto delivers the fat the voiceover (Art Smith) explains how “Your pound of waste fat will give some boy at the front an extra clip of cartridges”, creating a clear message that winning the war is the responsibility of all Americans.

207 Nazi Germany, directed by Disney stalwart Clyde Geronimi. The film paints a grim picture of Germany under Nazi rule with the purpose of mobilising American public support for the war effort to secure Hitler’s defeat. However, unlike the other propaganda cartoons the studio made during the war, the most popular of which was the 1943

Academy Award winning animated short film, Der Fuehrer’s Face, directed by Jack

Kinney and starring Donald Duck,114 Education for Death is a nightmarish apocalyptic vision that lacks any explicit call to action or reassuring comedy. Instead it ends with intense pessimism uncharacteristic for the studio. According to Lisa Ossian, the reception of Education for Death was one of sheer horror. She writes how the film “terrified most

American teachers and parents, even startling a group of ‘tough’ Manhattan kids who had previewed another more realistic film version of the Nazi school system” (33-4).

Unequivocally anti-Nazi in its message, Education for Death follows the cruel indoctrination of a German boy named Hans from his birth, through his schooling, into the Wehrmacht, and, finally, as the film’s title suggests, the grave. Starting off as a sickly little boy whose face embodies Disney innocence, through humiliation and brutality Hans transforms into a toughened soldier committed to nothing other than sacrificing himself for Hitler. His dehumanisation is so absolute that he finally looks more animal than human: a tethered packhorse marching in a vast homologous herd. Intriguingly, the

114 Named after the song “Der Fuhrer’s Face” written by for the film, Disney initially intended to call the film “Donald Duck in Nutzi Land”, but changed his mind when musical satirist Spike Jones and his City Slickers recorded a version of the song in September 1942 that made it an instant bestseller and prompted a run on the sheet music. An article in the November 1942 issue of Life titled “New US War Songs” reports on the song’s popularity and recounts how during the previous month New York radio disc jockey Martin Block ran a campaign to sell war bonds, promising customers who bought fifty dollars worth that they would receive a complimentary recording of the single. The campaign proved so popular that “in one evening this offer helped Block sell over $30,000 worth of bonds” (44). The popularity of Der Fuehrer’s Face extended to the where the film won for best short animated subject in 1943.

208 cartoon contains motifs that align it with Pinocchio released three years earlier115 as well as the sequence in Four Sons, also released in 1940, in which the individual identities of prepubescent Hitler Youth boys are erased when they put their gas masks on.

Education for Death was adapted for the screen by long-time Disney writer and animator

Joe Grant. Grant’s screenplay takes Ziemer’s account of the various Nazi education institutions and condenses them into the story of Hans, who from the time he is born until his death is the property of the Nazi party. Presented in the style of an expository documentary, Art Smith’s bland-mannered narration begins the film by asking, “What makes a Nazi? How does he get that way?” and informs audiences that Nazi control of the German child begins at birth. Focussing on a German couple who have just given birth to a son and must register the child, the film explains how the couple must provide evidence of their Aryan ancestry going back four generations. Turning to the subject of names, the couple’s attention is directed by a ferocious bureaucrat perched atop an enormous rostrum to a long list of forbidden names: Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, Noah—all

Jewish names. Included at the top of the list is also the name Franklin (a reference to the

USA’s wartime president), along with Clyde (after the film’s director) and Elias

(Disney’s middle name), in an obvious poke (one of many) at Hitler who, according to

115 Education for Death also includes the motif of the flame-filled skies seen in the forest fire in Bambi the previous year. Peter Wollen argues that Bambi, released in August 1942, was not only produced and released during the war; it is, in fact, a “” (118). Having been a child during WWII, living in Manchester, England, Wollen recalls the German air raids and comments that, from his perspective, “it is easy to interpret Bambi as a war film, with the hunters as the Nazis, the forest fire as the Blitz, the father as missing, away at the front, and the mother as a casualty of war” (118).

209 Brode, “considered Walt Disney the ‘most dangerous’ of all Hollywood filmmakers”

(100).116 The couple select the name Hans, which is approved by the state.

The narrator states that at kindergarten, Hans is taught Nazified versions of classic fairy tales and the cartoon launches into an absurd comic version of Charles Perrault’s

Sleeping Beauty. In the version of the fairytale reimagined for Education for Death, the titular princess, an obese giggling Brünnhilde, represents Germany while the handsome prince is a histrionic, snorting, red-nosed Hitler who arrives on horseback in time to save the nation from the green-skinned wicked witch of . Perrault’s tale is pared down to the prince arriving, the witch retreating in terror and throwing herself through a window, the prince kissing his beloved princess who wakes, and the pair gracelessly lolloping off on horseback together as the trees lining their path raise their branches to give Nazi salutes. Smith’s voiceover derisively remarks how this is a “distortion of the tale”, an ironic criticism considering the Disney studio’s notoriety for “Disneyfication”117 that prompted Frances Clark to openly criticise Walt Disney and his animators in 1965 for significantly diluting the integrity of the source material for their films by disregarding their “anthropological, spiritual, or psychological truths" (602). Clark complains that whilst the stories are adapted to maximise the potential for animation, this process “destroys the proportion and purpose of the story, the conflict and its resolution. Folk tales are so

116 According to Brode, Hitler resented the popularity of Mickey Mouse in Germany as he felt the idea of making a rodent wholesome and appealing undermined his propaganda campaign of “comparing Jews to vermin” (106). Hitler believed that Disney used Mickey Mouse as “a means of countering all the anti- Semitic prejudices that he—Hitler—had set out to further entrench” (106). 117 Schickel uses the term “Disneyfication”, which he defines as “that shameless process by which everything the studio later touched, no matter how unique of the original from which the studio worked, was reduced to the limited terms Disney and his people could understand” (225). He condemns the studio’s incapacity to faithfully adapt source material, claiming that Walt “lacked the tools, intellectual and artistic, he needed for this task. He could make something his own, all right, but that process nearly always robbed the work at hand of its uniqueness, of its soul … he always seemed to diminish what he touched” (226). However, Schickel’s criticism overlooks the army of animators, writers, musicians and other creative personnel that worked on the studios’ films.

210 marvellous in structure and symbolism that this distortion of the elements is particularly bad” (603). Yet, as the earlier analysis of Pinocchio in this chapter has demonstrated,

Disney’s adaptation of Collodi’s story remains faithful to the overall story yet is clearly open to interpretative play. So too, what Geronimi cleverly presents with his ridiculous

Hitler and Brünnhilde is a caustic allegory intended to demonstrate, through its distortion of the folktale, the Nazis’ appropriation and corruption of völkisch German identity and culture.118

Having absorbed the lesson of the Nazified fairy tales, Hans is then shown lined up in a primary school classroom with other boys all wearing lederhosen like Pinocchio, saluting a portrait of the Fuhrer. Smith’s narrator then reveals that Hans has fallen ill and his mother is desperate to nurse him back to health because “she knows the unfit are taken away by the state and never heard from again”, alluding to the concentration camps and the Hitler-Kammern facilities.119 The allusions to Pinocchio and the fate of the boys on

Pleasure Island who are likewise taken away and never heard from again is made clear by the Coachman’s sinister conversation with Honest John and Gideon at the Red Lobster

Inn when he explains to the two charlatans that once boys go to the island, “They never come back”. In Education for Death the immanent threat of Hans being taken away is

118 A clear example of Nazis perverting German identity and culture is their manipulation of the Nibelungen epic to serve their own purposes. With a headline announcing “Nibelungen Idea Revived to Stir Nazi Youth”, The Washington Post reported in November 1943 how, defiant in the face of inevitable defeat, the Nazi Party revived the Nibelungen saga of Siegfried and Kriemhild. The song written for and adopted by the Hitler Youth is a perverse paean to glorious death and utter annihilation: We rise to battle as a tempest / A hero’s death is out due. / The eath [sic] shall tremble in her bowels / When falls the noblest race of all. / As Etzel’s house was razed to ashes / When he vanquished the Nibelungen / Thus shall flames devour all Europe / At the downfall of the Teutons. (M17) 119 Ziemer recalls travelling to Wittenberg where he visited a Hitler Kammern or “Hitler Chamber” used to euthanise children deemed “a waste of human effort” (73). Ziemer’s Nazi guide Georg Abels describes the Hitler Kammern as “a little white hospital chamber where underprivileged weaklings went to sleep” (71). Aly and Roth confirm that the Nazis’ made prolific use of euthanasia to empty institutions of Germans they deemed “useless eaters” (96).

211 made all the greater with the sudden appearance of a black silhouetted Gestapo officer standing at the door, barking at his mother and insisting that she cease mollycoddling her son as it softens him. Like the black, evil-eyed, ape-like goons on Pleasure Island that perform the Coachman’s bidding, the black shape of the screaming Nazi at the door contains no distinguishing features except for a similar pair of glowering eyes staring out from a face obscured by shadow (Figures 9/10).

Images Not Included

Figure 9/10: The threatening silhouettes of authority in Education for Death (left) and Pinocchio (right) that turn boys into monsters

The imposing monstrous visage of the Gestapo also recalls the Coachman’s shadow in

Pinocchio that engulfs the terrified boys who have not wholly transformed into donkeys

(Figures 11/12). In both films the child’s transformation into a monster is made complete following the interception of the imposing shadow of authority expressing outrage at the lack of progress of his child subordinates. Directly following the image of the

Coachman’s shadow looming over the terrified donkey-boys in Pinocchio, the film cuts to Lampwick’s monstrous transformation in the billiard hall.

212

Images Not Included

Figure 11/12: The shadow of a Gestapo officer looms threateningly over Hans and his mother (left), recalling a similar image of the Coachman’s shadow in Pinocchio (right).

As with Lampwick’s transformation into a donkey in Pinocchio, which immediately follows the shot of the Coachman’s shadow engulfing the enslaved donkey-boys, in

Education for Death, following the Gestapo’s threatening visit Hans likewise suffers a terrible humiliation in a Nazi classroom that prompts his transformation into a monster child. In the classroom, the boys are told a story in which a rabbit is chased and eaten by a fox. When Hans is asked by his brutish teacher to articulate the moral lesson behind the story, he expresses sympathy for the rabbit. His teacher responds with red-faced indignation and Hans is forced to sit in a corner and wear a dunce cap while he listens to his classmates respond with the “correct” answer. One by one the boys reply: “The world belongs to the strong!” says one boy. “And to the brutal” adds another. “The rabbit is a coward and deserves to die. We spit on the rabbit!” declares a third boy. At this the narrator pauses to provide a commentary on the cruel minds of these little child monsters, sarcastically intoning, “Nice kids!”

213 As the boys provide violent and hate-filled responses to their delighted teacher, Hans sits in the corner looking tearful and forlorn. Importantly Hans experiences a significant metamorphosis that is much like the boys turning into donkeys in Pinocchio. As he hears his classmates spewing hate and vitriol mixed with party propaganda and notices the pleasure this gives his teacher, a cruel, ferocious expression appears on Hans’ face

(Figures 13/14) and asked again what the lesson to be learned by the fox and rabbit story is, Hans gesticulates wildly and reiterates the responses of his classmates. Under the tutelage of the Nazis, Hans successfully transforms in to a child monster although it is not until the end of the film that his dehumanisation is finally complete.

Images Not Included

Figures 13/14: “Hans has come around to the correct Nazi way of thinking.”

Following Hans’ transformative lesson at school the film delivers a montage in which

Nazis parade with fiery torches, burn books and vandalise synagogues and churches as a cross morphs into a and a Bible dissolves into a copy of Mein Kampf, reflecting the assertion expressed in the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in December 1993 that, “our Fuhrer’s book … should become the Bible of the German people” (qtd. in

Gangulee 163). In the last shot of the montage a stained glass window shatters as a brick

214 is thrown through it that closely resembles the shot from Pinocchio in which Lampwick takes pleasure in hurling a brick through the ornamental window in the mansion at

Pleasure Island (Figure 15/16).

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Figure 15/16: Smashing windows in Education for Death and Pinocchio

Following the montage, Education for Death returns to little Hans who, having learned the Nazi lesson of the superiority of brute force, is positioned in the centre of a long shot in full profile wearing a Hitler Youth uniform and goosestepping in perfect formation with an army of his young peers, all with their hands raised high in the as Art

Smith’s commentary explains that Hans’ life is spent doing little other than “Marching and heiling. Heiling and marching”. Hans remains in profile in the centre of the frame, ceaselessly marching as a series of dissolves shows him transform from a preadolescent child into a teenager and finally a grown man, marching to his violent untimely death.

Before he dies the frame closes in on marching Hans and comes to rest in a close up profile of his head and shoulders wearing a grimly fixed expression and Wehrmacht helmet. As Smith’s narration states how Hans has grown up learning to be a good Nazi who “sees no more than the party wants him to. He says nothing but what the party wants

215 him to say. And he does nothing except for what the party wants him to do,” visual elements are added to his costume, beginning with a pair of swastika emblazoned blinkers to his eyes, a gas mask covering his face and a steel collar around his neck with a chain connected to soldiers in front and behind (Figure 17).

Image Not Included

Figure 17: Hans dehumanised by a blinker, gasmask and collar and chain

The striking image of Hans blinkered and shackled reiterates the motif of monsterfication through Nazification that operates in both Pinocchio and Education for Death.

Importantly, the props that dehumanise Hans’ profile also give him an animalistic quality.

While Modenessi argues that the features appear dog-like and applies this interpretation to his reading of The Lion King (408), Hans might also be said to resemble the profile of a donkey with its snout and blinkers. In Pinocchio when the Coachman is transporting the boys to the boat that goes to Pleasure Island, pulling the carriage is a pack of six miserable looking donkeys, which in retrospect we appreciate are boys who were transformed into donkeys. Disney’s application of the transformation motif used in

Pinocchio (a marionette into a wooden boy, bad boys into donkeys, a wooden boy into a real boy) in Education for Death (sensitive Hans transforming into monster child Hans,

216 soldiers into chained animals, a huge marching battalion of soldiers into graves with crosses) implies a connection between the two films and, with hindsight, suggests that

Pinocchio contains anti-Nazi elements that equate the Nazification of the child with its monsterfication, making it possibly the first monster child film of the modern era of horror films.

Pinocchio was produced and released at a time when Europe had already been engulfed by war while the United States, still quarrelling about isolationism and, loathe to becoming enmeshed in another geopolitical conflict was, as the next chapter will show, quickly coming to terms with the inevitability of forsaking its neutrality. The shift in tone from comedy to horror in Disney’s 1940 animated feature mirrors the trajectory of the world in the 1930s as global economic recovery was undermined by the growing threat of fascist totalitarianism, the expanding aggression of the Axis powers and, inevitably, world war. Indeed, the studio’s decision to transform the giant shark in Collodi’s tale into a gargantuan black whale called “Monstro” that consumes all in its path seems to aptly reflect the worsening tone of world events and the terrible threat of Nazism and its goal of world domination.120

120 A curious article in the Los Angeles Times from 17 May 1941—seven months before the United States entered the war following the 7 December attack on Pearl Harbor—gives a sense of just how Americans were gearing up for war and how real the Nazi threat of world conquest was being taken by some. Titled “Boy Scouts Told of Tasks Ahead: McNutt Warns of Danger for Youth in Hitler World Victory”, the article reports how Federal Security Administrator Paul McNutt told a meeting of the 31st National Council of Boy Scouts of America that “if the Nazi threat succeeds, the Boy Scout movement will give way to a Hitler Youth movement”. Describing the situation as an “emergency”, McNutt urged Scouts to “be prepared to act on the home front” and “participate in the local plans to be developed all over the nation” (7).

217 Summary

This chapter has shown that Pinocchio—a film about children and childhood—is an important text in the history of monster child cinema as it literally dramatises on screen the shift from comedy to horror in representations of child monstrosity. Disney’s disturbing representation of the transformation of Lampwick from a juvenile delinquent that recalls the impish pranksters who populate the bad boy films (and the books before them), to a literal screaming monster reflects the contemporaneous shifts taking place in representations of children in cinema in response to the news coming out of Germany in

1940 that the Nazis had successfully enlisted over 9 million children into their paramilitary program, training the young up to fight for the Third Reich. Comparing scenes from Pinocchio to those in Disney’s 1943 anti-Nazi propaganda cartoon

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi strengthens the legibility of the anti-Nazi elements present in the former film. Indeed, the monsterfication of young Hans in

Education for Death from innocent little boy to hate-filled Nazi fanatic bears a striking similarity to the monsterfication of Lampwick from boy to donkey in Pinocchio.

Crucially the generic shift from comedy to horror comes in response to the threat of

Nazism and the Nazis’ corruption of childhood through the Hitler Youth program that saw a generation of German children indoctrinated into a violent and aggressively racist ideology.

While this chapter introduces the impact of Nazism on American cinema before the war, the next chapter will explore further Hollywood’s journey from gagging filmmakers and preventing the production of films containing anti-Nazi messages, to its all-out

218 ideological war on National Socialism. As there is not space within this thesis to examine each of the key Hitler Youth-themed films produced by Hollywood during the war, a brief analysis of select wartime dramas is included in Appendix A of this thesis. The case study film featured in the next chapter is Leslie Fenton’s 1944 melodrama Tomorrow the

World. Released just five months before Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the

Allies, Tomorrow the World is the last Hitler Youth film produced during the war but it is also the most influential. Although not well remembered today, Tomorrow the World was something of an event films when it was released through to significant critical acclaim and audience popularity. Following a Hitler Youth orphan adopted by his

American uncle and brought from Nazi Germany to the United States, the film presents a boy who is the most fiendish of all monster children yet presented on screen, paving the way for the monster child’s postwar shift towards horror.

219 CHAPTER FOUR

HOLLYWOOD’S HITLER YOUTH AND TOMORROW THE WORLD

Throughout this thesis the argument is being made that since the silent era monster children in film have been innately carnivalesque and that their antics parody and undermine adult authority, inverting hierarchies of power. Performing a series of subversive acts that go unnoticed by the adult until it is too late, the monster child avoids detection by wearing a mask of innocence that allows it to pass as the vulnerable, dependent cherub that adults find reassuring due to its assumed helplessness and absence of threat. Using the mask of innocence to manoeuvre the adult into a vulnerable position, the monster child strikes, instigating the adult’s degradation and undermining established systems of authority that ordinarily subjugate the child. The cultural construct of childhood innocence is mocked in these films through the inversion of roles. Kincaid’s assertion that, “innocence is a faculty not needed at all by the child but very badly by the adult who put it there in the first place” (73) comes into play here as the adult, unbending in their belief in the innocent child, is rendered ignorant and vulnerable; the very characteristics that are at the core of innocence. Having previously argued that carnivalesque inversion forms a stable syntax that is traceable across monster child films from the slapstick comedies of the early silent era through to contemporary monster child horror films, this chapter explores a contradictory trend that took place during World War

II.

220 Representations of Hitler Youth monster children produced by Hollywood during the war saw the monster child re-coded as aberrantly anti-carnivalesque. The anti-carnivalesque is different to the officialdom of feudal culture that stands diametrically opposed to the carnival yet permits and participates in the festive second life of the people. Bakhtin notes that the official feasts of the established order reinforce “the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, norms and prohibitions” and that their tone was “monolithically serious” (Bakhtin Rabelais 9). The medieval carnival revelled in the temporary emancipation from the seriousness and solemnity of officialdom, marking what Bakhtin describes as “the suspension of all hierarchical privileges, norms, and prohibitions“ allowing “free and familiar contact … among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession and age” (10). In earlier monster child films the carnivalesque is part of a fundamental syntax that defines structural elements of the genre represented by the monster child’s pranks against the unsuspecting adult. The child’s actions against adult authority momentarily undermine the social order by inverting its normative hierarchies of power. During World War II a distinct shift occurred for monster child narratives as Hollywood removed the character from its carnivalesque roots in which it sought to break free from the established norms imposed from above, becoming a Nazified Hitler Youth in Hollywood’s cycle of anti-Nazi propaganda films. Unlike its carnivalesque predecessor, Hollywood representations of

Nazified monster children maintain elements of the carnivalesque but these are transformed to serve the establishment. Instead of revolting against norms, the Nazified monster child of Hollywood cinema becomes an agent and enforcer of social control, oppressive authoritarianism and absolute conformity to Hitler’s New Order.

221

Hollywood’s anti-carnivalesque incarnation of the monster child is based on the Nazis own detestation of the carnival amid a pursuit for order, control and classical Aryan perfection embodied in German youth. From the outset Hitler had seen youth as key to attaining absolute and enduring power with which he planned to protect and preserve his thousand year Reich. He describes in Mein Kampf the “genius of youth” that “furnishes the building material and the plans for the future” (30). At the Reichsparteitag rally in

1935, Hitler told cheering throngs that, “he alone who owns the youth, gains the future”

(qtd. in Patrick 46). Hitler thus embraced the figure of the child as a means to achieve political power, understanding how children could be “shaped and controlled” (Watson 6) in ways that would enact his vision for a New Order. As it happens, the young played such a central role in the success of the Nazi party that in 1933, New York Times correspondent Alice Hamilton wrote a two page article examining the pivotal role of

Germany’s youth in securing NSDAP’s rise to power, provocatively titled “The Youth

Who Are Hitler’s Strength”. Even before the Nazis took absolute control of Germany,

American newspapers recognised the troubling potential the mass mobilisation of youth represented and carefully followed the steady expansion of the Hitler Youth in Germany, publishing updates on their growing numbers and influence over the decade.121 By 1940

Hitler Youth membership had risen to 8 million after it had been made compulsory the

121 In an earlier footnote (n76) I discuss the NYT article from 3 October 1932 titled “20,000 Nazi Children Parade,” explaining that as the nation celebrated von Hindenburg’s 85th birthday on October 2, Hitler and his lieutenants inspected young Brownshirts enlisted “to support the Nazi program in the elections of the future” (8). In June 1933, NYT reported that “Nazi Heads All Youth Groups”, as Hitler named Baldur von Schirach Nazi leader of all Germany’s youth organisations. On 19 April 1936 the Washington Post reported that, “90 per cent of Germany’s young people between the ages of 10 and 14 now belong to Hitler Youth Organisations” (2). Announced in time for Hitler’s birthday on April 20, a ceremony was held in which thousands of ten-year-old boys and girls officially paraded past Hitler as birthday gifts. In October 1940, an NYT article titled “Hitler Youth Face Arrest for Absence From Duty” explains that a new law gave German police powers to compel young people to report for duty and arrest those that did not to comply.

222 previous year, transforming the movement into the single largest youth organisation the world had ever seen. Outside Germany, newspaper reports of the Hitler Youth established a familiar image of children and young people expressing fanatical devotion to Hitler and antagonistic towards parents, teachers, religious leaders and other traditional authority figures. The Hitler Youth thus came to be codified as violent fanatics.122 As Hollywood was granted permission by the Production Code Administration (PCA) to begin producing anti-Nazi propaganda, the figure of the child monster was adapted to represent

Hitler Youth in a series of films that Shull and Wilt classify as “wartime dramas”.

While this thesis makes the claim that monster child films typically and consistently display characteristics of the carnivalesque with their inversion of adult/child relations, the Nazified monster children in Hollywood’s wartime propaganda films brings with it a significant shift in representations of monster children so that the carnivalesque is no longer part of its syntax. This is not to say that the Nazified monster child character no longer inverts extant power relations between adults and children, however unlike its carnivalised predecessor that temporarily overturns the established order for the purpose of liberating itself from the status quo—a key aim of carnival—the Nazified child monster exists as a weapon used to uphold and protect the New Order of National

Socialism. Thus, if the Nazified monster child does happen to invert adult/child power relations, it is because this inversion has been sanctioned by the state so that the child operates within the parameters of state authority. Whereas most films containing monster

122 The second of a two-part report in The Manchester Guardian on 13 Jan. 1936 titled “Germany Now: II” explains how the Hitler Youth movement has secured “the unquestioning allegiance of the younger generation” and, as well as being anti-religious, anti-class and anti-Semitic, the Hitler Youth “are rebellious under parental discipline—the German family is menaced with disruption” (9).

223 children, irrespective of genre, show the child’s impish behaviour undermining the established order, in Hollywood’s representations of Hitler Youth, the young Aryan devotee to the Fuhrer aggressively defends the Nazis’ established order and enforces the status quo. Thus, much like the fascist ideology from which they emerge and to which they adhere, the Hitler Youth monster children in these films are quintessentially and diabolically anti-carnivalesque.

Hollywood wartime propaganda films that specifically feature images of Hitler Youth as anti-carnivalesque monster children include: Four Sons (Mayo 1940), The Man I Married

(Pichel 1940), Hitler’s Children (Dmytryk 1943), The White Cliffs of Dover (Brown

1944), They Live in Fear (Berne 1944), and Tomorrow the World (Fenton 1944). Where some of these films are mentioned briefly in earlier chapters there is not space within this thesis to include in-depth analyses of them. As all of these films are significant because of the examples they provide of anti-carnivalesque monster children, included in the appendix to this thesis is an overview of all but Tomorrow the World, which is the subject of the current chapter.

Despite being released in first run theatres at the end of December 1944, just over four months before Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 5, 1945, Leslie Fenton’s

Hitler Youth motion picture Tomorrow the World squarely belongs among the corpus of anti-Nazi propaganda films produced by Hollywood during the war. However, instead of a message calling for the galvanisation of home front support for the war effort, as was the focus of earlier films made during the war, Tomorrow the World focuses on the

224 United States’ role in rebuilding democracy in Europe after the war. In addition, the film raises the question of what to do with the legions of German children that had been raised under National Socialism to become fanatical Hitler Youth and who knew nothing outside the Nazi ideology of aggression, nationalism and racial superiority. Allied victory over Germany was assured even as Nazi forces continued fighting to the bitter end in what Goebbels called “total war”. Following the failure of the Nazi’s final assault against the Allies in the Ardennes during January 1945, dubbed by the press as the “Battle of the

Bulge”, German resistance became critically weakened and Allied tanks progressed westward in haste towards Berlin as the Soviets closed in from the East. Confident that

Allied victory was assured, American troops deemed no longer essential for the into Germany were redirected to the Pacific where war with Japan still raged. Despite

Allied confidence, a significant obstacle slowing their progress were the Hitler Youth who had, according to Perry Biddiscombe, in some parts of the country usurped control from local Nazi constabularies123 and assumed command of the people’s militia or volkssturm. Organising themselves into guerrilla squads, the Hitler Youth developed a deadly fighting force that, even after Germany’s surrender, continued to fight on and pick off Allied troops in surprise attacks (58). Tomorrow the World attempts to capture the cunning and savagery attributed to the Hitler Youth as well as demonstrates the urgent need to address the issue of how best to rehabilitate the generations of German children that, like Hans in Disney’s Education for Death, have grown up learning only to hate.

123 According to Biddiscombe the Hitler Youth had “risen to power over the party at local levels, and … freely threatened bureaucrats with death should they show any sign of cowardice” (58).

225 Of all the monster children encountered on screen during the war, Emil Bruckner, the 11- year-old fanatical Hitler Youth and the villainous central character in Leslie Fenton’s

Tomorrow the World, most explicitly displays the menacing precocity, Janus-faced treachery and murderousness associated with monster children in contemporary horror cinema. Contributing to the film’s proximity to horror is its reinsertion of the carnivalesque qualities established in nineteenth century literary and silent cinema narratives that today are a key feature of monster child horror films. Throughout the course of Tomorrow the World’s narrative, Emil commits all manner of sins that convincingly present him as a monster that as we will see in the current chapter and in chapter five, has a great deal in common with the monster children of later horror films.

Indeed, many of the conventions of monster child horror films attributed to Mervyn

LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1956) are already visible in Fenton’s film. Emil continually lies and betrays the trust of others. He manipulates and undermines adult authority figures. He sows discord and unhappiness within the lives of his adoptive family. He orchestrates the attempted theft of top-secret US War Department documents, intending to hand them over to the Nazis. He savagely attacks and attempts to murder his kind-hearted younger cousin, and in a brutal fistfight with a boy from his neighbourhood he pulls out a knife with which he tries to kill his opponent. Along with being referred to in the film as a

“problem child”, a “horrible little boy”, a “beast” and a “monster”, Emil’s status as an adoptee further contributes to his otherness while positioning him alongside a host of horror films containing adopted monster children in which the stigma of adoption is inscribed as evidence of monstrosity.124 Writing in 2013 for the film review website

124 Martin and Heller-Nicholas affirm that adoption has “long been a commonly employed narrative trope in the child-as-monster film” (37). Monster child horror films that contain the theme of adoption include:

226 Canadian Cinephile, Jordan Richardson describes Emil as “one of the most terrifying and astonishing young characters put to celluloid”, affirming that Tomorrow the World, like

The Bad Seed, should be counted among the emerging horror films in the monster child canon. Indeed, the depths of his monstrousness became the topic of many of the reviews of the film on its release.

In his review of Tomorrow the World for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther praises the film but complains that, “both in the writing and projection of [Emil’s] character there is overemphasis on the youth's viciousness” that, for his tastes, could have been made “a few shades less monstrous” (12). Such a comment seems more suited to the type of excessive monstrosity associated with later monster child characters in horror cinema, rather than a film released more than a decade before the monster child film apparently made its “official” debut with LeRoy’s film. Yet Crowther is not alone in his comments concerning Emil, played in both the stage production and the film by talented newcomer

Skippy Homeier. Broadway critic Lewis Nichols’ review of the opening night performance of the play in New York mirrors Crowther’s sentiments and establishes that even before its adaptation to the screen, Emil’s Nazified monster child was already fully realised. Nichols writes that Emil is “one of the most virulent characters of the year”, and so much “the personification of all the present evil in the world [that] when he has finished, an audience could see him strangled without a qualm” (22). 125 Nichol’s

The Bad Seed (LeRoy 1956), Curse of the Werewolf (Fisher 1961), The Omen (Donner 1976), The Changeling (Medak 1979), Problem Child (Dugan 1990)*, The Omen IV: The Awakening (Montesi 1991), Mikey (Dimster 1992), Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox 1995), Joshua (Ratliff 2007), Stevie (Goeres 2008), Orphan (Collet-Serra 2009), Case 39 (Alvert 2009), Gisaeng Ryung (Seok-jin 2011), Dictado (Chavarrias 2012), Dark Touch (de Van 2013), and Before I Wake (Flanagan 2015). 125 Nichols’ mention of strangulation is a reference to the Act III climax of the play in which Michael—the perennially calm, reasonable uncle and adoptive father to Hitler Youth upstart Emil—flies into a tirade and

227 suggestion that audiences would derive pleasure from seeing Emil strangled recalls comments made by Sinyard, Kincaid and Paul independently of each other about the physical treatment of monster children in horror films, wherein each writer sees these films as staging a scenario that justifies and even exonerates the adult’s excessive punishment of the child.126

Produced independently by Lester Cowan and distributed by United Artists, Tomorrow the World is an adaptation of the highly successful 1943 political problem play by James

Gow and Arnaud d’Usseau. Running for 500 performances, Gow and d’Usseau’s play became, according to John Warrick, “the longest running, deliberately political play in the history of Broadway production” and inspired “the development of many other films and plays throughout the wartime years” (68). Warrick’s comments testify as to the social significance of the play and the likelihood that it had at least some cultural influence on the development of the monster child character that emerged after the war. Opening at the

Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York on 14 April 1943 and closing 14 months later on

17 June 1944, the play was directed by Elliot Nugent and starred Ralph Belamy and

Shirley Booth. Despite some reviewers’ criticism of its dialogue as “occasionally contrived”, on the whole critical reception of Tomorrow the World was highly positive so

violently chokes his nephew with the intention of killing him. Stage directions in Gow and d’Usseau’s play describe the violence of Michael’s attack in some detail: MICHAEL leaps for the boy and grabs him by the throat … throws him back into the room and goes after him again; again he gets him by the throat … MICHAEL proceeds to choke the boy across the table behind the couch. EMIL struggles, then goes limp. MICHAEL continues to choke him. LEONA appears in the hallway. She stands stricken at what she sees. (635) 126 Sinyard suggests that audiences who harbour “latent hatred of children” (70) are “encouraged to enjoy watching a child tortured on screen” (71). For Paul, these films dramatise “the final willingness of the bigger and stronger to act on their size and strength over the weak” where there is “pleasure in acknowledging [adult] power over children” (285). And for Kincaid monster child films deliberately portray children as “a little less innocent so that we can massacre them” (158).

228 that even reviewers highlighting its faults “consistently recommended attendance” (68) and praised its originality and provocative power. In 1950 the play was included in John

Gassner’s anthology, Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre alongside such works as Tennessee Williams’ , Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story,

Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace and Lillian Hellman’s Watcher on the Rhine.

Tomorrow the World takes its title from a verse in the 1932 Nazi song, “Es zittern die morschen Knochen” (“Brittle Bones are Trembling”). Penned by Hans Baumann, the song’s rousing melody was written for the and became, next to the

“ Lied”, one of the most popular anthems of the Nazis. The song includes lines that suggest world domination:

Wir werten, weitermarschieren wen alles in Scherben fällt denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt

[We shall march ever onward, even if everything crashes down in pieces; for Germany belongs to us, and tomorrow, the whole world]

The final line of the song was published in 1942 in N. Gangulee’s anthology of Nazi quotes titled, The Mind and Face of Nazi Germany. Credited as “a marching song” with no mention of Baumann’s authorship, the line is translated as “To-day we own Germany.

229 To-morrow all the world” (40) which, as Brian Murdoch notes, became “the message taken from it” (121). Truncated to “Today Germany, tomorrow the world”, the phrase became so popular that its true source is all but forgotten and has since been mistakenly attributed to (the line is quoted in English by a ludicrously voiced Hitler in

Edward Dmytryk’s 1943 film Hitler’s Children, accompanying a montage of stock film footage of Nazi parades) as it so concisely encapsulates the Nazi dictator's crazed ambition for global conquest.

230 4.1 Tomorrow the World From Stage to Screen

One of the contentions of this chapter and the next is that the 1956 production of The Bad

Seed, which is commonly thought of as the first monster child film, shares enough in common with Tomorrow the World to suggest that the existence of monster child Rhoda

Penmark is due in part to Hitler Youth terror Emil Bruckner. While Tomorrow the World is a largely forgotten film today, it was on its initial release a highly successful and well- known film that arguably paved the way for the emergence of the monster child in postwar horror films. This section investigates the popularity of Tomorrow the World on its initial release, investing extratextual sources that provide a sense of its contemporaneous significance and the cultural impact of its representation of a child as a bona fide monster.

The play’s popularity, emotional force and germane subject matter prompted independent producer Lester Cowan to purchase the rights in a deal totalling $75,000 plus a twenty- five per cent share of the film’s grosses. Midway through production on Tomorrow the

World, Cowan shrewdly stirred up interest among exhibitors for his product by publicly proposing change of name for the film to The Intruder. He argued that because an end to war with Germany was imminent and the Nazis had all but surrendered, the play’s title now lacked the threat and awe it had in the previous year when conditions in Europe were significantly different. Exhibitors, it turned out, disagreed. Reporting for the New York

Times in September 1943, more than a year before the film’s release on 29 December

1944, Fred Stanley writes that after receiving objections from Gow and d’Usseau who

231 vehemently opposed the name change, Cowen sought the opinion of exhibitors in what was obviously a blatant public relations campaign intended to drum up early interest ahead of its release the following year. Dispatching telegrams that posed the question to

“180 circuit and independent theatre men, representing more than 8,000 theatres”

(Stanley 1), the majority of responses Cowan received recommended he retain the popular Broadway play’s title for the film.

Produced as an ‘A’ picture on a budget of $800,000, on completion the film received an award for “Distinguished Film Achievement” from the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization

(HWM), a collective of over three and a half thousand writers and other film personnel who, during the war, donated their time and talent to produce “hundreds of documentary and short subject films, radio scripts, Army and Navy camp sketches, war bond and blood bank speeches, war agency brochures, feature articles on war activities, songs, posters, and slogans” (Sbardellati 62).127 An announcement by the HWM in the 31 January 1945 edition of Motion Picture Daily magazine explains how the award was intended “to focus public attention of films distinguished for maturity of outlook as well as sound entertainment value” (“Distinguished” 5) and Tomorrow the World was considered the strongest contender by its members. Tighe Zimmers insists that despite the prestige of the

HWM endorsement, Tomorrow the World “did poorly at the box office [with] most viewers feeling it was a bit contrived” (73). However, Zimmer does not supply sources to support his claim of poor box office performance and, if anything, information available on the film’s grosses contradicts Zimmer’s assertion. Richard Maltby notes in his analysis

127 Despite the HWM’s service for the war effort and strong pro-democracy message, the FBI was wary about its liberal agenda and branded the HWM “a completely Communist-dominated organization” (61).

232 of the exhibition release pattern employed by the Hollywood studio system that “an A- feature earned over three-quarters of its box-office income in first- and second-run exhibition” (123) and available reports indicate that Tomorrow the World’s box office performance at first run theatres was considerable. Released on 29 December 1944, the film opened in New York City at the Globe Theatre where it took $32,000 in its first week and remained a solid box office performer throughout its six-week run. Publishing an open letter to Cowan in the trade journal Motion Picture Daily, proprietors of the

Globe, Harry and Lou Brandt express their regret at being unable to extend the film’s six- week run any further due to a pre-existing booking.128 In their open letter the Brandt’s claim, “never in our [31 years of] experience have we ever played a picture that has had the building power and staying quality of Tomorrow the World” (11), adding over the film’s six week engagement there was a consistent trend in ever-larger attendances from week to week so that each subsequent week drew more crowds than the week before, pointing to the film’s strong word of mouth appeal that, contrary to Zimmer’s remarks, indicate that it struck a chord with the public.129 Furthermore, an industry advertisement for Tomorrow the World in the 15 March 1945 edition of Motion Picture Daily claims that the film “is doing outstanding business in its initial engagements all over the

128 Disney’s animated feature, The Three Caballeros (Ferguson 1944) was booked to play at the Globe Theatre from February 3, 1945, ending Tomorrow the World’s successful run. The animated feature was the best in a series of Disney films that emerged from a two-month good will tour of South America. Shale writes that these films intended to “inculcate in Americans the notion of hemispheric unity as explicated in Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy (43-4). 129 Describing the strength of Tomorrow the World’s box office performance, the Brandt’s open letter states: the ‘word-of-mouth’ plus its timeliness makes your picture a real contender for top grosses … the third week was bigger than the second; the fourth week was bigger than the third; the fifth week was bigger than the fourth and the sixth week will top all except the first despite bad weather breaks. (11)

233 country” (Tomorrow 10-11), and lists cinemas across the nation reporting consistently high grosses for the film.130

On its release, Tomorrow the World received ample promotion through various radio and print channels. Jennifer Fay notes that the film was “billed nationally in newspapers … featured in full-page advertisements in Life and Parent's Magazine, while Calling all

Girls ran a cover story on Joan Carroll in connection to her role as Pat Frame” (206). Fay also reports that screen stars Field and Fredric March independently took to the airwaves to champion the film on respective CBS radio shows, Stage Door Canteen and

The Show while “phonographic trailers for the film were distributed to the most prominent national talk shows” (206). On the merchandising front, distributor

United Artists licenced the sale of tie-in products that included “ladies', gentlemen's, and girls' fashions, women's magazines, comic books, … and Harman wristwatches” (206).

The film was also used to promote the purchase of war bonds both in its mise-en-scene and in conjunction with print advertisements.

Adapted for the screen by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Leopold Atlas, the screenplay altered aspects of the stage play to reflect significant changes that had taken place in the conflict with Germany between mid-1943 and the end of 1944. The war in Europe was conspicuously nearing its end as Germany staged a final offensive, drafting men as old as

130 Spread across the two-page advertisement to exhibitors is a graphic of four cinemas, each one at the end of a compass point to represent the film’s nation-wide success. Text written on the marquee for each theatre includes the city in question and the percentage “above average” for the film’s grosses: (North) Springfield, Massachusetts 28% above average. (East) Trenton, New Jersey 20% above average. (West) San Francisco, 15% above average. (South) Miami, Florida, 26% above average.

234 sixty and children as young as ten131 into a people’s army (volkssturm) in a vain attempt to repel the advancing allies into Germany. Consequently, the question of America’s role in Europe after the war grew in importance as the allies turned to the issue of denazification. Although Roosevelt had pressured Churchill in 1943 to agree to imposing terms of unconditional surrender on Germany, believing that anything less than utter defeat would create room for the Germans to again manufacture cause for war, the US president remained reluctant to broach the topic of postwar planning. Indeed, it was not until February 1945, three months before Germany’s unconditional surrender, that

Roosevelt entered discussions for postwar planning with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. It was at this conference that the need for “denazification” was first raised, although, as a concept, Perry Biddiscombe confirms that the phrase “denazification” had been used since 1943 by strategists at the Pentagon developing models for overhauling Germany’s legal system after the war. Biddiscombe notes that by 1944 the term came to be used more broadly to describe the “liquidation of the National Socialist Party … and the elimination of its influence” (9) and, in spite of Roosevelt’s vacillations about postwar planning, denazification and issues concerning the re-education of Germany’s Hitlerised youth began to dominate public conversations. In September of that year Drew Middleton wrote a “Forecast for Germany After the War is Won” in which he asserted that, “the fanaticism of tens of thousands of young Nazis is a sobering fact for post-war planners.

No enduring peace in Germany is possible until they are dealt with by the Allies” (E3).

The New York Times also published a series of graphs under the title “The Generation

That Was Clay in Hitler’s Hands” that separated each year of birth in to its own group to

131 Rempel includes a photograph from the Bundesarchiv Koblenz showing four young Hitler Youth (HJ) boys labeled: “four fighting HJ boys (eight to fourteen years old) captured by U.S. troops” (248).

235 show how there were “twenty-eight age groups in Germany [that] spent their most important formative years—from 6 to 19—at least partly under Hitler” so that “in the case of a man under 20, all of his formative years were spend under Hitler’s influence”

(SM6). Mentioned earlier was Frankel’s article posing the question of whether or not

Hitler Youth is curable. Frankel concludes that while “there are some who say that to make human beings out of this utterly corrupt generation of German youth is an impossible task”, he counters that, “it is not impossible, but it will be very difficult, and it will take years of patience and careful work” (337). For Frankel the first priority is “to teach these children how to love” that needs to begin with teaching these child first “how to love” and next “the urge and ability to think independently” (337).

Tomorrow the World is unique among the cycle of wartime propaganda films of the

1940s in that it focuses as much on the future of Germany and German-American relations after the war as on promoting the public’s ongoing involvement in supporting the war effort overseas to its conclusion. In its promotion of the film, United Artists capitalised on the film’s topical subject matter, emphasising the important contribution it seeks to make concerning the national conversation about how best to proceed with the denazification of Germany after the war is over. The Motion Picture Daily confirms that

Tomorrow the World gained considerable attention when it was exhibited at the

Westwood Theatre in Los Angeles on 31 January 1945 for the specific purpose of

“stimulating discussion of postwar social problems” (“Shotwell” 4) in a forum involving the audience held after the screening. State Department consultant to the Hollywood branch of the OWI, Dr James T. Shotwell was present at the screening and praised both

236 the film and the subsequent forum, commenting that, “this type of public discussion should be instituted in theatres throughout the country” (4). United Artists (UA) seemingly took note of Shotwell’s enthusiastic recommendation, drafting an editorial for local papers where the film was screening, urging civic leaders, clerics and school principles to use their public platforms to get “American audiences to discuss publicly the connections between the film's plot and America's commitment to Germany” (Fay

200).132 In promoting the film to parents, schools and churches, UA clearly sought to capitalise on its pro-American anti-Nazi propaganda message presented with strong family friendly entertainment appeal.

Further contributing to the national conversation about denazification prompted by

Tomorrow the World, a cover story focusing on the film was featured in Senior Scholastic magazine which, in its January 1945 edition launched a national essay writing competition asking students how they might “re-educate a boy or girl of [their] own age who came from Germany to live in America, so that he or she might become an accepted citizen of the world” (qtd in Fay 208). The winning essay by Shirley Deck, a Kansas high school student, paraphrases Michael Frame’s lecture to Emil in the film’s closing moments,133 concluding that, “the Nazis robbed him of his inborn capacity to reason and question, and substituted blind obedience. Our first step then, would be to reverse the

132 Jennifer Fay includes in her essay the editorial copy United Artists sent to local newspapers, sourced in the Tomorrow the World Press Book from 1944: Can we, having defeated in battle an army and a people imbued with the Nazi ideology, turn our backs on our victory and face the possibilities that our children will in twenty years once more face these boys as full-grown enemies? We believe that our attitude towards the Germans, our willingness to accept our responsibilities to the world along with our allies, is the first test of how we understand the issues of this war and the nature of the present German state. (200) 133 In response to Emil’s attempts to understand why the Nazis killed his father and burned his books, Michael asks, “Why were the Nazis afraid of Karl Bruckner? Why Emil? Why? That’s what you’ve got to ask. Every time anyone tells you anything, you’ve got to ask why.”

237 Nazi training and encourage [him] to think and to question” (qtd in 209). Deck’s winning entry demonstrates the effectiveness of the film’s liberal pro-democracy message that it is so clearly understood and reiterated by a schoolchild.

In addition, corresponding with the film’s release, Comic Cavalcade included in its tenth edition a sixteen-page adaptation of Fenton’s film drawn by E. E. Hibbard.134 While both the play and the film end with Emil seemingly on the path to denazification, the comic provides no such clarity and ends with Michael Frame expressing his doubts about whether or not Emil is beyond help. On the final page, Michael confesses, “I admit I do not know the answer”, and asks, “Shall we make another effort to save Emil Bruckner, or do we give it up as impossible?” (see figure 10)135 Immediately beneath the final panels of the story is a national competition open to students from grade 7 through to senior high offering prize money “for the best letters telling us ‘What You Would Do With Emil

Bruckner!’”

134 According to Fay, Comic Cavalcade “boasted a circulation of over 3 million in 1945” (206). 135 Images taken from Heritage Auctions website: comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/non- fiction/comic-cavalcade-giveaway-nn-tomorrow-the-world-dc-1945-condition-vf-a-suburban-father- welcomes-his-german-nephew-to-th/a/752-50179.s

238

Images Not Included

Figure 18. First and last pages of “Tomorrow the World” in #10 edition of Comic Cavalcade

As the examples of Senior Scholastic magazine and Comic Cavalcade indicate,

Tomorrow the World, both in its stage play and film forms, contributed towards making the topic of denazification a national conversation. Indeed, Nichols describes how it

“takes up the question, which is a timely one, of how German children can be brought back into the human race” (22). While the film is not well-remembered today, its reception and influence at the time of release looks to have been substantial. Tomorrow the World was even used after the war in a 1946 sociological study conducted by the

West Coast office for the Bureau of Intercultural Education. According to Wiese and

Cole, the study examined the film’s impact on high school students and whether it had any effect on their attitudes and beliefs “regarding the differences between Nazi and

American ways of living” (151). The study was conducted across a wide variety of schools intended to capture different ethnic, religious and socioeconomic groupings with participation from the Pasadena City Schools, the Los Angeles County Schools, Beverly

239 Hills High School and the Salt Lake City Schools (151).136 Significantly, the origins of the experiment came from discussions among a group of “school leaders who previewed the film and were interested in its educational implications and effects” (151). The fact that Fenton’s film inspired the study suggests that mid-1940s audiences perceived

Tomorrow the World as an important film.

Pertinent to this thesis and its analysis of Tomorrow the World is a finding from the study concerning how, like many Hollywood films, it renders invisible issues of cultural diversity and class in its depiction of melting pot America. Among their concluding remarks, Wiese and Cole note:

The picture appears to have confirmed the majority of students, particularly those

culturally privileged, in an emotional and non-discriminative estimate of the social

and economic scene of America. On the one hand, the film failed to afford youth a

realistic appreciation of the facts about divisive community conditions; and on the

other, it gave youth support for their uncritical conception of an idealized America.

(170)

Wiese and Cole’s assertion that Tomorrow the World supports the conception of an idealised America is certainly consistent with Hollywood’s representation of America in wartime propaganda films that, in line with OWI specifications, sought to bolster national morale and generate home front support for the war effort. Shull and Wilt confirm that

136 The study found that while the Mormon students in Salt Lake City found Emil’s behaviour both confronting and shocking and prescribed an approach of reform that involved “courtesy, patience and kindness” (169), schools with large Mexican and African-American contingents in Los Angeles reported having “dealt with many boys of this type” in gangs and “their treatment is usually roughshod and forthright” (169); a method that Wiese and Cole describe as “the most realistic in their personal approach” (170). The Beverly Hills’ students engaged in a more analytical approach towards Emil, identifying possible psychological causes for his sociopathy, looking to “the powers of reason above camaraderie as a redemptive approach” (169).

240 Hollywood’s wartime propaganda films supplied American audiences with “an idealized representation of America as all that was good and righteous” (143). Yet Fenton’s film provides something unique in the cycle of propaganda films to which it belongs in that beneath the idyllic veneer of small town America, in both its narrative and mise en scene

Tomorrow the World casts a critical eye that interrogates American assimilationism.

Tomorrow the World presents Emil’s monstrousness as chiefly the product of his thorough Nazification, manifested in his dissimulation, divisiveness and violence. Yet inscribed in Emil’s monstrousness is also his refusal to assimilate and adopt the ways of his host country. As such, Tomorrow the World infers that America’s culture of assimilation has fascist implications in its insistence on conformity to a particular set of

Anglo-American sociolinguistic norms. Those that do not conform, like Emil, are othered and, in extreme circumstances like that shown in Fenton’s film, monsterfied. The remainder of this chapter will interrogate the culture clash that takes place between Emil and the community into which he is thrust.

241 4.2 Emil Bruckner: The Most Monstrous Hitler Youth

Set over a two-week period, Tomorrow the World centres on the Frame family, comprising university chemistry professor Michael Frame (Fredric March) who is preoccupied with a top-secret project for the War Department, his spirited carefree 10- year-old daughter Patricia (Joan Carroll), his older unmarried sister Aunt Jessie (Agnes

Moorehead) and their faithful German-American maid Frieda (Edit Angold). The professor is a widower although he is engaged to attractive Jewish schoolteacher Leona

Richards137 (Betty Field) who teaches Patricia at the local elementary school. While

Patricia is delighted about her father’s engagement, Aunt Jessie, who continually fusses over her brother, fears becoming redundant and resents the union. Into this strained and somewhat unconventional family arrives Emil Bruckner, the 11-year-old orphaned nephew of Michael and Jessie who has just arrived from Germany. Emil’s father, Karl

Bruckner, was an eminent German philosophy scholar and Nobel Prize recipient whom the Nazis murdered because they despised his liberal thinking and labelled him a traitor for his role in facilitating the armistice that ended WWI. 138 Karl had been Michael’s philosophy professor when Michael studied at the University of Leipzig and the two men became best friends, and later, brothers-in-law when Karl married Michael’s sister Mary.

After marrying, Mary returned with Karl to Germany where she gave birth to Emil. After

Karl and Mary were arrested and died in concentration camps when the Nazis came to

137 In the play, Leona is the principal of an “experimental school” that Jessie detests because of its liberal approach towards pedagogy. 138 Warrick suggests that Karl Bruckner is based on an amalgam of two German Nobel Prize-winners, Ludwig Quidde and Carl von Ossietzky, the latter a pacifist journalist who died in a German labour camp. (72)

242 power, Michael decided to adopt Emil and bring him to the United States,139 a move that

Jessie opposes due to her resentment of Karl—and all Germans140—whom she blames for

Mary’s death. In of his mentor, brother-in-law, and best friend, Michael keeps a large portrait of Karl in the lounge room.

Soon after Emil’s arrival, the family discover that he is a fanatical Hitler Youth who constantly speaks of the glory of dying in the service of the Fuhrer. Michael is appalled when, on the day of his arrival, he sees Emil dressed in his Hitler Youth uniform—brown shirt with swastika armband, black shorts and long socks, a black tie and a dagger in a leather sheath attached to his belt141—and asks the boy what his father would think. Emil coldly responds, “My father was a traitor to the Third Reich” and recites a list of Karl

Bruckner’s crimes against Germany:

In 1918 Karl Bruckner betrayed Germany on the home front. He fomented

revolution. If it had not been for him and the Jewish Bolsheviks, Germany would

have won the war. He was one of those who made Germany weak. He was

139 Gow and d’Usseau’s play provides considerable expository information concerning Emil’s background and extraction from Germany. In a phone conversation with a Chicago reporter interested in Emil’s arrival, Michael explains that, “it was part of a complicated deal between the German Government and our State Department” (601). Later he provides more backstory on Emil, explaining to Leona when she asks who cared for Emil after his parents’ deaths the following: For a while, a younger brother of Karl’s had him; after that, I don’t know. For a long time we thought he was dead. I tried to get him out in 1938, and our consul in Berlin couldn’t even find him. Then he finally turned up in the custody of an old woman who claimed to be a distant aunt. Apparently she was happy enough to get rid of him. (609) 140 Jessie describes a popular view of the Germans as a race of barbaric warmongers articulated by Robert Vansittart in his book, Roots of the Trouble and the Black Record of Germany—Past, Present and Future? Vansittart performs an assessment of Germany’s bellicose history—“five wars in seventy-five years!” (22), and concludes that Germany is “congenitally incapable of peace” (23). The one German Jessie does not despise is the maid, Frieda. When Jessie insists “all German’s should be exterminated”, Michael asks, “Frieda, too?” 141 A report in the Los Angeles Times from May 1934 titled “Hitler Uniform Prohibited for German Pupils” explains that of all the elements of their uniforms, the Hitler Youth boys are “especially proud to carry their daggers” (2).

243 responsible for the inflation and the Communists. He was one of those responsible

for the Versailles Treaty. My father was a coward.

Emil’s manner of speech during this delivery becomes so mechanical that it prompts

Michael to ask, “Is that the end of the phonograph record?” Michael’s remark aims to highlight Emil’s indoctrination by the Nazis and how it programs the young to mindlessly deliver rote responses authored by the regime. In his discussion of habit and memory,

Henri Bergson explains how through repetition, memory comes to be performed as a seemingly innate reflex so that the time between its recollection and performance becomes imperceptible. Bergson argues, “it is no longer a representation, it is an action” and adds that “the lesson once learnt bears upon it no mark that betrays its origin and classes it in the past; it is part of my present, exactly like walking or writing; it is lived and acted, rather than represented” (91). As with Bergson’s notion of memory as habit,

Emil’s instant recall of Nazi propaganda is continually part of his present; an indoctrination so complete as to seem innate.

The sentiment of Michael’s criticism is later repeated in the school classroom when Emil delivers a speech outlining facts and figures about Brazil and the tactical advantages of its position within a geopolitical context. While the breadth of Emil’s knowledge on the subject impresses some students, as he finishes, one of the boys quips, “We will now take a pause for station identification”, prompting a volley of laughter as Emil’s display of knowledge is likened to a radio report. As with Michael’s phonograph comment, the student’s radio remark draws attention to Emil’s unquestioning recitation of facts drummed into him by the Nazis. When in the film’s final scene Michael is resigned to

244 sending Emil away with the police, he despondently tells his nephew that he is giving up on him because the Nazis “did their job too well” in turning a child into a murderous automaton. In the same speech, Michael compares German Nazism with American democracy, pointing out that the Nazis are fearful and intolerant of critical enquiry as they interpret any question as an unacceptable challenge to their authority,142 Americans are “not afraid of questions … we want people to ask questions.” These type of us/them comparisons run through each of the films analysed in this chapter (Hitler’s Children, as we saw includes a literal us/them comparison in its cross-cutting between American and

Nazi classrooms) and in Tomorrow the World they form the basic structure around which the narrative is built.

Midway through Tomorrow the World, Emil learns that Michael is working for the military on a top-secret project and keeps his files locked in his desk drawer at home, the key for which are always kept in his jacket pocket. Fancying himself a spy, Emil looks for opportunities to obtain the key in order to access the documents and get them to the

Nazis.143 When on the day of the birthday party that Patricia has organised for him, Emil spots his uncle’s jacket draped over a chair and checks for the key. Finding it, he rushes to the desk to open the drawer, unaware that Patricia has hidden behind the door next to the desk so she would not be seen wrapping Emil’s present. When Patricia sees what

Emil is doing, she goes to tell Michael, a move that sends Emil into a panic. He quickly returns the key to the jacket pocket in hopes that Patricia will say nothing and the incident

142 Reflecting on his experiences as a Hitler Youth and the Nazi antagonism towards being questioned, Siemsen writes, “officially the boys were allowed to ask questions after a talk … But it rarely happened in practice. Every boy knew that if he asked questions he would only incur the displeasure of his leaders”(86). 143 The “key” subplot is adapted from the play in which Emil colludes with Fred Miller, a Nazi janitor at Michael’s university.

245 will be forgotten. When Patricia informs Emil that she reserves the right to change her mind about telling her father, Emil’s fear turns to fury and he follows her down to the basement party room where he bludgeons her with an iron fire poker.

Emil’s attack against his cousin is presented in a manner that recalls Lampwick’s transformation in Pinocchio. In the same way that Disney’s refusal to show the transformation directly increases its horror by suggesting it is unrepresentable, so too, in the attack on Patricia, the presentation of the action off screen as a shadow cast on the basement wall elevates the scene to one of horror, intensifying the diabolical nature of the

Emil’s heinous crime. Importantly, the score accompanying the scene adds to the sense of atrocity, building in tension as Emil picks up the poker and steps out of the frame to be represented by his looming shadow. As the shadow lifts the poker high, the music crescendos and stops with a cataclysmic thud as the poker is brought down.

Crucially, the film intensifies Emil’s monstrousness by inferring that Patricia is dead and

Emil is a murderer. This inference is sustained through several subsequent scenes as the film withholds information on Patricia’s condition, beginning when the Frame’s German maid Frieda goes down to the basement with some plates for the party. In the basement,

Fenton composes the shot so that it is identical to the earlier shot in which Emil attacks

Patricia. Descending the stairs with plates in hand, Frieda walks towards the camera and spies something on the ground off screen left. Her expression of puzzlement quickly changes to alarm as she hurries out of frame. With the shot emptied of figures, Frieda’s disembodied screams fill the empty space and punctuate the soundtrack along with the

246 sound of shattering crockery, signifying she has found Patricia’s body and dropped the plates she was carrying. The next shot returns upstairs outside the basement door where

Emil stands nervously with Patricia’s friend Stan and two party guests confused by the commotion. Michael and Jessie race from upstairs, pass the boys and head into the basement as Emil insists that Patricia “must have fallen down”. Michael reappears with

Patricia hanging limply in his arms, followed by a distraught Jessie in tears. The two adults turn and look at Emil with an accusatory expression before they disappear with

Patricia upstairs.

Terrified, Emil pushes past Stan and his friends, knocking them to the ground and fleeing the house as the boys give chase. After an all-night search, Stan finds Emil and the two boys engage in a fistfight that Richardson describes in his online review as being “among the fiercest fights I’ve seen in a movie of this sort”. Such was the lengthy duration and unrestrained violence of the fight that Fay notes that in trailers for the film it became “a showdown that United Artists marketed as ‘The Blitz That Failed!’” (203). During the fight, Emil pulls out the Nazi dagger he keeps concealed—the same dagger he had earlier used against Stan to cut his mother’s clothes line and send his newly washed laundry into the mud—and tries to stab Stan. Stan finally disarms Emil and throws the dagger away.

Importantly, the dagger is the last vestige of Emil’s Nazi identity, it being standard issue with the Hitler Youth uniform. The fight is also synecdochal, emblematic of the larger war being fought on the world stage. Thus, when Stan lands the final punch that knocks

Emil unconscious, the accompanying orchestration builds to a triumphant heroic chord, complete with crashing cymbals, as if to signify a larger victory by the allies. After the

247 fight, Stan drags Emil over to a nearby trough and revives him with a few splashes of water. He asks Emil, “You done? You had enough?” The manner of Stand’s delivery is suggestive of good sportsmanship, but it also reflects Roosevelt’s explicit insistence on

Germany’s unconditional surrender. Robert Sherwood explains in his book on Roosevelt the president’s purpose for enforcing his unconditional surrender policy:

What Roosevelt was saying was that there would be no negotiated peace, no

compromise with Nazism and Fascism, no ‘escape clauses’ provided by another

Fourteen Points which could lead to another Hitler … Roosevelt wanted this

uncompromising purpose brought home to the American people and the Russians

and the Chinese, and to the people of France and other occupied nations, and he

wanted it brought home to the Germans-that neither by continuance of force nor by

contrivance of a new spirit of sweet reasonableness could their present leaders gain

for them a soft peace. He wanted to ensure that when the war was won it would

stay won. (697).

In asking Emil if he has had “enough” then, Stan’s question seems to address both Emil and the embattled German people more broadly. “Enough” translates into a defeat that is absolute, prompting a sincere surrender that ensures lasting peace. Likewise, when Stan disarms Emil it is suggestive of the disarmament of Germany to come. Yet not only does

Stan disarm Emil, he also takes from him the final signifier of his Nazi past. During an argument earlier in the film, Leona tells Michael that although she does not subscribe to corporal punishment, she believes the only thing that could get through to Emil is the same brute force that the Nazis use and prescribes for him a “good licking”. Stan’s trouncing of Emil becomes the “good licking” that Leona feels Emil needs.

248 Unsurprisingly, it is following his humiliation and defeat that Emil appears to begin his slow journey towards denazification.

The character of Stan was created specifically for the film and a large function of his role in the narrative is to demonstrate the American melting pot at work. When Emil and Stan first meet, Emil hears Stan’s surname and remarks, “Dumbowski? That is not an

American name!” Stan counters, “Sure it is, except my old man came from Poland”.

After Emil points out that the Poles and Germans are enemies, Stan bemusedly replies, “I won’t hold it against you. It’s not your fault where you were born”. Emil understands the joke but is unimpressed. While Emil complains that “America is a cesspool” and refuses to assimilate, Stan is presented as a poster boy for American assimilation: he is an honest, conscientious, hardworking all-American boy-next-door who plays American football, is friends with everyone and popular with his classmates. He delivers newspapers in the morning and performs most of the domestic chores at home without so much as a grumble while his absent father fights oversees and his mother works at a munitions factory. All that identifies Stan’s Polish heritage is his surname. Cultural assimilation generally stipulates that in order to become true Americans, immigrants should relinquish the bigotries and ancient feuds of their countries of origin and blend into a cultural melting pot where various ethnicities coexist and contribute to the task of nation-building.

According to Paul Heike, more than any other American foundational myth, the cultural melting pot “evokes a vision of national unity and cohesion through participation in a harmonious, quasi-organic community that offers prospective members a second chance and a new beginning and molds them into a new ‘race,’ a new people” (258). As a

249 Nazified monster child, Emil’s refusal to assimilate demarcates his alien otherness, yet it is also the thing that reinstates the carnivalisation of the Nazified monster child.

250 4.2 Emil, Assimilation and the American Melting Pot

In his analysis of Gow and d’Usseau’s play, Warrick highlights how the issue of assimilation is positioned front and centre and suggests it is a symptom of American indigenous fascism centred around race and gender. The play includes three German characters: the Frame’s loyal German maid Frieda, the janitor at Michael’s university,

Fred Miller, and Michael Frame’s nephew, Emil. Warrick points out that both Frieda and

Fred present opposing attitudes to America and American assimilation while Emil stands at the crossroads (an idea that is illustrated on the first page of the Comic Cavalcade adaption of the film. See figure 10). Whereas Frieda refers to herself as an American, refuses to speak German, and spits at the mere mention of Hitler, Fred is aligned with the

German American Bund,144 he is loyal to Hitler and the Fatherland, and experiences his janitorial role as demeaning. Thus, while both Frieda and Fred work in low paying unskilled jobs that in a strange symmetry both serve the needs of Michael Frame

(consistent with the exploitative conditions facing many new immigrants arriving in

America), Fred is demoralised and resentful. Openly contradicting the myth of the

American melting pot, Fred expresses the ordinarily silenced and hidden misery of the immigrant experience as he defiantly tells Michael:

144 Established in 1936 by Fritz Kuhn, the German American Bund was created following the demise of the Friends of the New Germany, an organisation that sought to align itself with the Nazis but was disavowed by the NSDAP who ordered it to disband in 1935. Leland Bell writes that the Bund perceived that Hitler's rise to power had “reawakened dormant loyalties among Germans everywhere” and believed that “German Americans would not only gain a new racial-political significance but be able to exert pressures on the American government to adopt a policy favorable to Germany and to fight Communism more aggressively at home and abroad” (587). Despite its high profile, the Bund ultimately proved impotent and even before its offices were raided when Germany declared war on the USA on 11 December 1941 its membership had already dwindled and talk of disbanding was rife.

251 “Just because I’m a janitor you think you can wipe your feet on me! Always being

polite to you! Always your messes! Well, some day we’ll see who the

janitors are around here! The war isn’t over yet!” (Gow and d’Usseau 635).

The film’s removal of Fred from its narrative excises the explicit criticisms he makes against American assimilationist culture, yet the absence of anti-American sentiments

(excluding those expressed by Emil) has a curious effect. With Frieda as the only German

American character, and one that fully embraces her Anglo-Americanisation, Fenton’s film shrewdly presents the United States as a rigidly monologic culture that insists on conformity from its citizens even as the nation espouses diversity as a core value. With the film’s removal of Fred Miller’s voice of dissent, assimilation and Americanisation seemingly have no opposing ideology to challenge the endemic oppression that characterises the immigrant experience of melting pot coercion and conformity. Yet it is precisely its absence that emphasises the scarcity of other-voices, or that which Bakhtin refers to as heteroglossia. For Bakhtin, heteroglossia is central to carnival in its unfettered celebration of diversity and temporary release from the monologic seriousness and centralising control of the established order. Tomorrow the World importantly establishes the entrenched fixity of the official monologic culture of American assimilationism.

Historically, immigrant arrivals to America were routinely expected to shed their ethnic roots, language and cultural identities in order to merge with a cultural melting pot that was predominantly Anglo-American in character. Milton Gordon refers to the pressure to relinquish ones own cultural heritage and adopt the dominant culture in America as

“Anglo-conformity”, confirming it to be “the most prevalent ideology of assimilation

252 goals in America throughout the nation’s history” (115). Indeed, the long history of

Anglo-conformity in the United States is demonstrated by Benjamin Franklin’s objections to the scores of German immigrants settling in his hometown of Pennsylvania that chose to maintain their German heritage. Incensed by their refusal to conform,

Franklin asks:

Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements and by

herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours?

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens,

who will shortly be so numerous as to germanise us instead of our anglifying

them? (qtd In Alba and Nee, 17)

Franklin’s comments reflect an attitude of “Anglo-conformity” dictating that, “immigrant groups should swallow intact the existing Anglo-American culture while simultaneously disgorging their own” (qtd in 17). However, the sentiments expressed by Franklin did not represent the attitudes of all his contemporaries, as in fact a variety of views on immigration existed, and continue to exist, that ranged from nativist opposition, cultural pluralism, and contributionism,145 the last of which frames immigration in economic terms, promoting the importation of energetic new blood to help in the arduous task of nation building and providing labour for the country’s rapidly expanding industrial sector.146 Yet whether one was for or against immigration, the expectation that all new

145 Contributionism took root amongst progressive intellectuals and politicians in the mid-1920s who began to recognise the positive role played by new arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe. During the same time however, significant antagonism towards these new immigrants existed, abating over the following decades as contributionism slowly gained currency until, in the postwar period, it became the more popular paradigm. Fleegler describes how contributionism, “emphasized that the United States was enhanced by the ideas and skills brought by eastern and southern European immigrants and expanded the definition of American identity to include this generation of former undesirables” (2). 146 Fleegler points out that industrialists were especially pro-immigration as the new arrivals provided cheap labour for their factories. Even so, industrialists were likewise pro-assimilation, as demonstrated by

253 immigrants embrace the culture and language of their new home country and become

Americanised remained the prevailing attitude.

Writing at the same time as Franklin, Franco-American farmer J. Hector St. John

Crèvecoeur stands as an example of a non-Anglo European immigrant who celebrates his own assimilation and alludes to the idea of a strictly Eurocentric melting pot within which all people’s adopt wholly American attitudes, values and customs. For Crèvecoeur, the American way of life was not altogether Anglocentric but represented an amalgam of various traditions that contributed their distinctiveness toward building a new democratic society that was unlike any on Earth. And yet even as Crèvecoeur asks his readers, “What is an American?” his answer implies that Americanisation occurs through conformity to a pre-existing Anglo-American ideal. Thus, even though Americans are represented by a

“strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country”, he defines an

American as that person who abandons “all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. … Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. (qtd. in Alba and Nee 18). Despite its conformist ethos, Crèvecoeur’s attitude to

Americanisation adheres to the contributionist approach of nation building made by

America’s immigrant population even as this celebration of diversity excludes immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and non-European nations.147

Henry Ford whose factories provided programs to teach employees English language and acculturate them to American social norms. 147 Describing the American melting pot, Crèvecoeur writes, “I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons now have four wives of different nations” (qtd. in 18).

254 Largest among America’s myriad non-British immigrant populations are those of German extraction.148 German-speaking immigrants first began arriving on America’s shores in the early seventeenth century in steady numbers that peaked in the mid-nineteenth century before declining at the end of the 1800s as new arrivals from Southern and

Eastern Europe steadily increased during the period, comprising the largest mass immigration in the nation’s history. According to Frederick Luebke, by 1910 the number of German immigrants in America totalled over seven million (52) and while a proportion of these had assimilated, there also remained a large contingent of discrete German communities that remained resistant to assimilation and sought instead to celebrate and preserve German heritage, teaching in parochial schools and delivering church services in their mother tongue.

When war broke out in 1914, anti-German hysteria emerged in the United States and

German-Americans found their loyalty under intense scrutiny. During the war, former US president Theodore Roosevelt fomented anti-German-American sentiment while emphasising the expectation that all immigrants conform to the Anglo-American ideal when he proclaimed during a speech in New York City on 12 October 1915 that, “There is not room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance” (qtd. in Manning 16). Characterising Germans as barbarians and Huns,

America developed an intense and at times violent xenophobia for everything German.

148 Frederick Luebke contends that although millions of German-speaking immigrants settled in America, German language and culture “has never been congruent with German nationality” (xiii), because German- speaking immigrants came to America not just from Germany, but also Austria, Switzerland, France, Russia, and other Eastern European territories.

255 Luebke describes how America’s “fierce hatred” for Germany had a devastating impact on German culture in the United States as German-American’s renounced their identities and heritage. He states that during the war and much of the decade that followed,

German ethnicity had become a source of social discomfort or deprivation.

Countless families ceased conversing in the German language. Name changes

were common among persons, businesses, and societies. Thousands stopped

subscribing to German language newspapers and periodicals. Memberships in

ethnic organizations of all kinds plummeted. As a group, the German Americans

were embittered, disillusioned, and demoralized, unsure of what appropriate

behaviour should be. For most of them, ethnicity had lost its savor. (52)

In Tomorrow the World, the small town American community into which Emil enters is representative of a nation that welcomes newcomers, contingent on their abandonment of their cultural origins and assimilation into the American melting pot. From the moment he walks through the door of the Frame household for the first time, Emil’s adoptive family immediately begin imposing American language and customs. Greeted by

Michael, Emil clicks his heels together and bows as a sign of respect and Michael tells him he need not be so formal. Emil compliments the family on their home, saying, “You possess here a very extreme house”, and is puzzled when everyone laughs. Patricia exclaims, “That’s not American”, to which Michael adds, “To be strictly American you should have said, ‘Quite a dump you’ve got here’”. Within the Frame household and the small town within which they live there exists a good-humoured yet relentless opposition to heteroglossia as Emil is constantly reminded of his need to become more American.

256 Midway through the film, Leona attempts to talk with Emil about making a better attempt to assimilate and describes how people who come to America routinely cast off the ways of their old countries to adopt a new life as Americans. “In this country it doesn’t matter where you come from”, she explains, “We’re all equal, all alike. We’re all Americans.”

Emil inquires of Leona whether she considers herself American, for from the moment he learns that she is Jewish, he consistently reminds us of this. Yet, like all those around her,

Leona has assimilated to the point where all signs of her Jewishness are obscured. Fay draws attention to her “blond, light-eyed” appearance and notes that and “even her last name, Richards, is ethno-ambiguous” (210).

At school, Emil finds that all of his classmates are similarly dressed in casual clothes with most of the boys wearing jeans and T-shirts or collared short sleeve shirts while the girls all wear floral dresses (a scene in which all the girls sit together eating lunch reinforces the uniformity of their attire). However, what is most evident in the classroom, and throughout the film, is the absence of African American and Hispanic students. While there is a Chinese boy in the classroom named Charlie Lee, his one line in the film is a correction. Hoping to have found an ally, Emil enthusiastically introduces himself to

Charlie and asks if he is Japanese. Charlie replies, “No, Chinese”. While the (unnamed) actor playing Charlie is clearly Asian, there is no hint of yellow face . Rather, his Asianness is downplayed as he is presented with pale skin, wears jeans and a T-shirt and sports a hairstyle similar to that of his classroom peers, suggesting that he and his family are Americanised.

257 Throughout this chapter it has been emphasised how representations of the Nazified monster child in Hollywood wartime propaganda films do not display the carnivalesque qualities of the monster children that populate both the early silent comedies and later horror films. The explanation offered for this sudden and strange departure from the carnival is that Nazism is anti-carnivalesque in its pursuit of absolute control and subservience and, through the Hitler Youth, Nazism colonised childhood and redirected its carnivalesque energy to serve the status quo.149 John McKenzie suggest that childhood is “a time of rebellion against the social order” (87), but for the Nazis, childhood rebellion was harnessed by Hitler as an effective weapon that collaborated with his newly imposed social order that was to last a thousand years.

In the case of Tomorrow the World however, something unusual takes place in the battle of wills between Emil and the small town American community into which he is placed.

Where, as this thesis argues, monster child comedies and horror films feature children that undermine authority and turn the world upside down in defiance of the established order, in Tomorrow the World, Emil’s anti-carnivalesque Nazism that in Germany worked to support the established order, in America clashes with the conformist sensibilities of assimilationism resulting in a carnivalesque rendering of the monster child that has much in common with bad boy comedy and the child monsters in horror cinema.

Bakhtin notes that the carnival provides a period of liberation from “the prevailing point

149 The Nazis did not win the hearts and minds of many of Germany’s youth. Catherine Epstein notes that despite the Nazis’ assimilation of youth there existed disaffected pockets that the party sought to put down and control, such as Munich university students Hans and Sophie Scholl, who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets that led to their execution in February 1943. Some rebellious Hitler Youth were sent to concentration camps and following an incursion in Cologne where youths had risen up against the Gestapo six were publicly hanged in November 1944 (193).

258 of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted” (34). In Tomorrow the World, the “prevailing point of view of the world” as Emil finds it, is one in which the established order insists on cultural conformity. Emil effectively interrupts and undermines the established order, initiating a period of chaos that finally ends with his assimilation. Although Tomorrow the World belongs to the cycle of Hitler Youth-themed Hollywood propaganda films produced during the war, being set in America its representation of the anti-carnivalesque associated with Nazism resituates the monologic within a context in which it becomes dialogic, returning to the dialogism of earlier bad boy comedies as the child works to undermine the hegemony of the social order.

Carnivalesque representations of the monster child revel in adults losing control over children while children outsmart their elders. When Emil starts school, his descriptions of night marches and shooting real bullets from machine guns impresses the other boys in his classroom so much that his influence on them causes consternation in the community.

These boys’ mothers become concerned that their sons have suddenly stop eating their dinner as they practise to become soldiers who, Emil insists must go without food for days. The boys refuse to attend Sunday School because according to Emil, such activities are only for girls. One exasperated mother goes to the school to complain about Emil’s negative influence on her son. Speaking with Leona, the infuriated woman insists,

“there’s only one thing to do with a child like [Emil]: lock him up!” The mother’s complaint demonstrates the effectiveness of Emil’s influence insomuch as she has lost control over her son. Significantly her emotive comments also reinforce Emil’s otherness

259 insomuch that he is painted as a monster that should be put away and prevented from having contact with other children.

Discussing the mask in carnival, Bakhtin asserts that it is “the most complex theme of folk culture” (Rabelais 39), allowing its wearer the opportunity to escape fixed social roles of rank, class, age and gender as the mask “rejects conformity to oneself” (39-40).

In horror films, the carnivalesque monster child will wear a mask of innocence that it uses to avoid suspicion among adults whose vested interest in preserving childhood innocence. Belief in childhood innocence thus renders the adult especially susceptible to the trickeries of the monster child. The concept of masking in Tomorrow the World is introduced early on when Emil appears in his Nazi uniform. Informing the Frame family that he wears his uniform under his civilian clothes, Emil reveals how his true Nazi self is concealed beneath a mask of garments that allow him to pass as a “normal” child.

Learning to adjust his behaviour, Emil dons a mask of innocence around Michael, pretending to take an interest in his uncle’s stories about his father Karl Bruckner in order to gain his trust, while all the time he is looking for opportunities to steal his uncle’s top- secret military research. Emil also uses his mask of innocence to ingratiate himself to

Aunt Jessie, flattering her and winning her affection in order to secure her help in alienating Leona and ending her relationship with Michael.

In his exploration of the carnivalesque in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin contends that crowning and uncrowning represent “the primal carnivalistic act” and notes how “under this ritual act of decrowning a king lies the very core of the carnival sense of

260 the world” (124). Crowning and uncrowning together enact a crucial inversion that takes place during the carnival in which a lowly figure from among the people is elevated in stature. Such crownings are also a testament to the temporary nature of the carnival as a ritual uncrowning soon follows so that, “from the very beginning, a decrowning glimmers through the crowning” (125). The same symbols of death and rebirth represented in the carnival crowning and uncrowning are also reflected in the use of fire where snuffing out and relighting candles highlights change and temporality. Bakhtin turns to Goethe’s

Travels in Italy and his description of the spectacular final night of the Roman carnival in which all participants carry candles, blowing them out and relighting them in a frenzied representation of death and rebirth. Paraphrasing Goethe’s account of the fire festival,

Bakhtin writes that during the proceedings, “a young boy blows out his father’s candle, crying out, sia ammazzato il signore Padre! ‘Death to you, sir father!’” and describes this as a “carnivalesque interjection of the boy merrily threatening his father with death and blowing out his candle” (126). In Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin describes this festive interaction between father and son as “a profoundly symbolic little scene”

(126) as the boy in effect kills his father in an act of profanation that uncrowns the older generation and levels power relations between them. In Tomorrow the World, Emil performs a symbolic patricide when he uses his Nazi dagger to slash at his father’s portrait. Although his father is already dead, the slashing, significantly directed at his father’s head, represents a form or uncrowning and re-killing, much like the relighting of candles in the fire festival, only to have them once again extinguished in symbolic death.

Yet Emil’s slashing of his father’s portrait is also an attack against his uncle, a around whom he feels disempowered. Significantly it is immediately after Emil

261 has been ordered by Michael to change out of his Hitler Youth uniform that he slashes the painting. As Michael is now Emil’s virtual, adoptive father, the boy’s attack on the portrait of his actual father (an object much valued by Michael) becomes emblematic of an attack against Michael-as-father figure.

Arguably, when Emil tries to kill Patricia by beating her over the head with an iron fire poker, this too represents an attack against the power of the father. Patricia threatens to tell Michael about Emil’s theft of his key and in so doing she sides with the father and becomes a symbol of his power and position in much the same way as Sidney Sawyer in

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer aligns himself with the adult world represented by Aunt

Polly. Striking Patricia on the head thus represents a strike against Michael’s power. This is confirmed when Michael retaliates, attacking and almost killing Emil with his bare hands.

While the carnival casts down the official order and reverses hierarchies, it is never permanent. The fundamental purpose of the carnival, according to Bakhtin, is rebirth and renewal. While the official order sees itself as eternal and unchanging and thus strives for absolute control and immutable order, the carnival revels in excess, disorder, grotesquery, temporality and change. Eventually the carnival must end, and in Tomorrow the World that ending comes unofficially, achieved when Stan beats Emil in their fistfight. The more official ending of the carnival occurs only after Michael loses control and attacks

Emil before Leona him pulls away. Michael’s attack comes from a place of powerlessness and is an attempt to reassert his authority and control as an adult, and yet

262 the carnivalesque is still very much in play because, by attacking Emil, Michael has quite literally lost control. Astonishingly, when Emil divulges a recovered memory of torture and abuse, Michael is deeply troubled and asks, “Who hit you, Emil? Who tortured you?” when only moments earlier he would have strangled the breath out of the boy had not

Leona intervened. In the discussion of the final scene in Tomorrow the World that follows, Emil’s sudden shift towards assimilation will be explored. This occurs, it is argued, because he accesses repressed traumatic memories that reveal how his actions have, all along, been a response to trauma.

263 5.3 Trauma, Denazification and the Unhappy Happy Ending

On the day that Leona breaks off her engagement to Michael, Emil had deliberately provoked her to the point where she slaps him. In this moment Leona loses control and acts on a primitive impulse, performing an action that goes against all her values as a progressive educator. The slap represents an important carnivalesque reversal in which

Emil triumphantly asserts his self-agency as he goads, manipulates and outmanoeuvres

Leona, effectively inverting adult/child power relations in which he successfully usurps control. No sooner has Leona slapped Emil than he looks at her with a self-satisfied smirk that recognises he has managed upend the power structure of their relationship and by getting the better of her. As with Michael’s attempted strangulation of Emil, Leona’s slap is a sign that she has lost control and compromised her own self-agency.

The slap comes as the cumulative result of Emil’s explicit antagonism towards Leona’s abilities as a teacher (and a potential mother), beginning that same day with his attack on

Stan whom he pushes in the mud, followed by his threat against Millie in which Emil tells her his uncle works at the prison camp in Germany where her father is being held.

Emil warns Millie that unless she does his bidding, he will send word to his uncle and have him execute her father. It is a cruel deception, but Millie is convinced and overwhelmed with grief and terror. When the truth of the situation comes out, Leona tells

Emil to apologise to Stan and Millie in front of the class. Instead, Emil screeches in protest, “I’m a German and being persecuted because I’m a member of the German race”.

264 He then dashes out of the classroom and scrawls obscenities about Leona on the pavement in front of the school. At the Frame’s house Leona confronts Emil, demanding an explanation for the graffiti. Emil denies it but says, “Whoever wrote it is correct. You are a dirty tramp!”150 In that instant, Leona slaps Emil and immediately appears shocked at her sudden loss of control, describing it to Michael as failure and defeat.

During the subsequent argument between Leona and Michael in which they disagree over how best to handle his nephew, Leona demonises Emil, labelling him monstrous and abnormal. Michael counters, pointing out that she has “handled problem children before”, prompting her to admit that Emil is different to any child she has encountered before. “I could always get to the root of the problem: malnutrition, a drunken father, a neurotic mother”, she explains, “But Emil isn’t a case of maladjustment. He’s perfectly adjusted— to Nazi society”. When Michael then accuses Leona that she’s “ready to credit [Emil] with all sorts of diabolical motives”, Leona retorts:

He has them, Mike. We’ve treated him as if he were a normal human being: a child

like other children. But he isn’t. … That child frightens me. He never cries! No

matter what happens, he won’t cry.

For Leona, tears are a signifier of normality in children, a visible manifestation of childhood innocence. Accordingly, the persistent absence of tears in the child comes to be conflated with aberrance and monstrosity.151 But Emil’s resistance to shedding tears is

150 In Gow and d’Usseau’s play Emil calls Leona a “dirty whore”. 151 Included in this scene in the stage play but missing from the film is a comment Leona makes to Michael that accuses Emil of being the kind of malevolent force usually confined to horror: Leona: There’s nothing spontaneous about his being bad. He plans it. There’s something evil about him. Michael: Sure. He’s a bad boy, but you’re talking as if he were a monster. (Gow and d’Usseau 624)

265 also a symbol of his resistance to acculturation, of refusing to become like the American around him. His tearless demeanour thus becomes yet another reason for his demonisation.

However, there is another reason for Emil’s refusal to shed any tears. While Leona credits his apparent unwillingness to cry as a signifier of monstrosity, it is in truth an inability to shed tears as a consequence of trauma. In the closing minutes of Tomorrow the World, Emil accesses traumatic memories of being beaten and tortured by the Nazis because his father was a high profile opponent of Nazism. Arguably, Emil’s connection to traumatic memories constitutes a form of not shown on screen but experienced and described by Emil. Bursting into tears, he asks his uncle, “Why did they hit me? Why did they lock me up in the dark?” David Martin-Jones contends that the flashback “posits an origin for the present in the past, and ensures a singular history to the narrative” (57). The singular history presented in Tomorrow the World seeks to tidily draw together the narrative strings in the film’s concluding scene. It offers a readily curable incident of trauma that places responsibility for Emil’s aberrant behaviour solely at the feet of the Nazis while disavowing the paradoxical role played by the Frames and their small town community in othering him even as they pressure him to assimilate.

Exploring the representations of trauma in cinema, Kaplan and Wang note that

Hollywood “posit trauma (against its reality) as a discrete past event, locatable, representable, and curable” and suggest that such approaches to trauma are a

“symptom of a culture’s need to ‘forget’ traumatic events while representing them in an oblique form” (9). Yet, as they note, often such attempts at the erasure of trauma have the

266 opposite effect by calling attention to that which it aims to forget. Tomorrow the World is one such film that seeks to offer the “comforting cure” (9) to trauma described by Kaplan and Wang, yet the suddenness of its conclusion works against such neatness, rendering it unconvincing.

The lengthy final scene in Tomorrow the World is a series of comings and goings in the

Frame lounge room that climaxes with Michael’s violent attack on Emil. Michael’s attack ends with Leona intervening and sending him upstairs to cool down. When he returns,

Michael makes a second composed attack against Emil that is more strategically emotional instead of physical, challenging the boy’s ingrained beliefs about his father’s cowardice. Crucially, it is after Michael’s first physical attack that a noticeable change begins to take place in Emil that, with the second attack, culminates in Emil breaking with Bergson’s memory-as-habit where he unthinkingly regurgitates Nazi propaganda.

This break arguably occurs because of another form of memory identified by Bergson, that of attentive recollection, which leads to Emil accessing the repressed trauma of his imprisonment and torture. Drawing on the work of Bergson and Proust, Martin-Jones describes attentive recollection as “the return, or rather the becoming actual, of the past

(which exists as a stored virtual memory–image) when it encounters a corresponding image in the present” (51). Conceiving of memory as an inverted cone, the apex of which represents the subject’s moment-by-moment intersection with the passing present, each moment experienced in time moves up into the cone where it is collated and stored within an infinite series of planes that represent different levels of the memory and the past.

Unlike habit memory, which is instantaneous, attentive recollection “involves an active

267 effort of the mind” (51). The ease with which memories are brought forward through attention recollection often involves the body and its physical position “as it allows the recollection image for the past that is ‘most similar’ to the image perceived in the present, to surge forward” (53). In the case of trauma and memories inaccessible through attentive recollection, Kolk and Hart draw on Bergson to explain that while memories are consciously assimilated through the use of mental constructs or “existing meaning schemes” that collate experience according to their associations, when confronted by extreme situations, “existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences, which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not available for retrieval under ordinary conditions” (160). Michael’s attacks on Emil represent a re-enactment of Emil’s traumatic experiences of torture and indoctrination, facilitating the retrieval of their memory. For Martin-Jones, attentive recollection oftentimes occurs involuntarily in response to stimuli so that “the subject is not always consciously in control of memory recall” (53). Here he reminds us of Proust’s additions to Bergson whereby “involuntary memory recall [is prompted] by the sensory recollections of tastes, sounds and smells”, so that “in these instances times surges forward unsolicited” (53).

The surging forward of time for Emil occurs first with Michael’s physical attack. Michael violently picks up Emil by the throat and bends him over the back of the sofa, placing

Emil in a physical position where his past trauma rushes into the present. Immediately following the attack, Emil’s demeanour changes and it is immediately after this, as Leona sits with him, that he sheds his first tears, much to her delight. For Leona, Emil’s tears are

268 a signifier of normalisation. While Emil is upstairs packing his bags to leave, she tries to convince Michael that the child is finally changing—“He’s been crying, Mike. He was crying like any other child … he shed tears. He’s actually by way of becoming a human being”. Fay notes that Tomorrow the World demonstrates the “inherent mutability of the enemy's disposition such that one of them could become one of us” (199) and nowhere is the change in disposition more pronounced than in Emil’s tears which become a signifier of his assimilation, his becoming “one of us”. Michael is unconvinced, prompting Leona to appeal to the bigger picture, articulating the growing public sentiment of the importance of postwar planning and America’s determination to denazify Germany’s

Hitler Youth: “Mike, don't you see? If you and I can't turn one little child into a human being, heaven help the world when the war is won and we have to deal with twelve million of them”.

When Emil returns with his luggage, he looks forlorn and defeated. Michael asks him again to repeat the Nazi rhetoric concerning Karl Bruckner. Emil obliges but begins to falter. Michael insists: “Go on! You’re father was a traitor to the Third Reich! Go on!”

Emil proceeds but again stops as tears well in his eyes. Recognising that something is changing in Emil, Michael presses him again, applying provocative therapy to disrupt the narrative informed by his Nazi indoctrination. “Go on! Tell us the rest!” he barks,

“You’re absolutely right! Your father was a coward! He Committed suicide … Your father was a stupid man! He was weak! You’re right to be ashamed of him!” Confused by his uncle’s sudden rhetorical reversal, Emil bursts into tears and shrieks, “Uncle Michael, why are you saying this?” Michael harshly yells back, “Because its true! Isn’t it? Karl

269 Bruckner was a degenerate coward!” Shocked into questioning his own learned habitual response, Emil yells back, “No! No! My father was a brave man. He must have been a brave man. Why else were they afraid of Him? Why did they burn his books if they weren’t afraid of him?” and it is here that Emil reveals his experience of being beaten and locked in the dark.

The final shot in Tomorrow the World features Emil, Patricia, Michael and Leona walking towards the camera as they cross from the living room towards the dining room.

The image is that of the American nuclear family: father, mother, daughter and, with

Emil’s sudden assimilation, the son. The shot ostensibly implies a happy family as

Michael cheerfully announces, “Let’s all get some breakfast!” while light-hearted music plays merrily on the soundtrack, accompanying an abrupt crossfade to end credits.

Although the film ends with the image of a harmonious family unit as Emil is reconciled with Leona and Michael and Patricia, there is little in this forced happy ending that is convincingly happy.

If anything, the sudden smiles and cheerful music that end the film are incongruous and contrived, imposed onto the narrative in such a way that, using Tom Ryan’s description of Sirk’s “unhappy happy endings”: “one is left with the sense of an order very unpersuasively restored and characters unconvincingly content with their newly acquired lot, rather than an ending filled with emotional uplift”. Thomas Schatz similarly notes the impact of Sirk’s use of Brechtian alienation in his films, observing that “as soon as the audience is reminded that they are watching a contrived reality, that only within this artificial world are ‘social problems’ worked out so neatly, the prosocial fiction is cast in

270 doubt” (249). Sirk himself points out that the forced happy ending “makes the crowd happy [but] to the few it makes the aporia more transparent” (qtd. in Willemen 131).

While classical Hollywood filmmaking employs devices such as continuity editing so that the formal elements that together comprise a film’s style remain subordinate to and support the narrative unfolding on screen, the abruptness of Tomorrow the World’s ending represents a sudden and unexpected jolt out of a narrative containing complex issues that are never adequately addressed. Resolution is too swiftly and unpersuasively achieved, a point that, as we have already seen, was highlighted in the Comic Cavalcade adaptation of Tomorrow the World in which Michael doubts whether Emil has sincerely changed. Nichols review of the stage play has similar reservations, suggesting that Emil’s behaviour has been “so despicable that his sudden may appear as just another of his tricks to divide and conquer” (22).

Yet Gow and d’Usseau’s play ends with a far more convincing denouement than anything found in Fenton’s film. The final stage directions for the play suggest that Emil has sincerely come to believe the truth about his father’s heroism and execution at the hands of the Nazis. The directions state:

Emil is left alone on the stage. His eyes go to the portrait of his father. He

walks over and stands looking at it irresolutely. Then he pulls the chair in

front of the fireplace. Michael reappears in the hallway and stops to watch

Emil. The boy takes the heavy picture and with difficulty lifts it to the chair,

and then climbs on the chair himself. He is lifting the picture to the

mantelpiece, and Michael is watching him. (640)

271 The directions point to Emil’s elevation of the father, returning him to the pride of place above the mantlepiece. Within the context of the carnival, Emil’s actions establish a return to an established order that has undergone a process of renewal and regeneration.

Nothing so explicitly indicative of closure can be found in Fenton’s film, pointing to its unpersuasive ending that invites audiences to interrogate not just the nation’s plans for denazifying a defeated Germany, but turning a critical eye on America’s own form of fascism pursued through assimilation. That Emil’s (unconvincing) acculturation comes only through his re-traumatisation links the United States and Nazi Germany in ways that are uncomfortably close. As Fay concludes in her analysis of Tomorrow the World “the

United States' intractable image world … refuses to see and value difference and so stubbornly clings to and attempts to impose a unitary universalism” (229).

In the monster child’s journey from comedy to horror, Tomorrow the World demonstrates the extent to which the Nazification of the child contributes to its horrification as a grotesque carnivalised character that seeks to undermine the status quo and turn the world upside down. Where monster children are equally at home in comedy or horror (or indeed any other genre) the Nazified child seems somehow more monstrous. At his worst, Emil shares the carnivalesque syntax seen in later monster child films like The Other (Mulligan

1972), The Omen (Donner 1976), Bloody Birthday (Hunt 1981), Children of the Corn

(Kiersch 1984) Mikey (Dennis Dimster 1992), The Good Son (Joseph Ruben 1993),

Daddy’s Girl (Martin Kitrosser 1996), and many other films.

Where film scholars commonly trace the inspiration for these films back to The Bad Seed, this chapter demonstrates that a full decade before William March published his novel

272 about a killer 8-year-old, Tomorrow the World had already introduced American audiences to the potential for children to be malignant and murderous. The final chapter of this thesis turns to The Bad Seed to show how LeRoy’s film borrows both semantic and syntactic elements from Tomorrow the World, demonstrating the importance of

Fenton’s film as well as how the Hitler Youth played a critical role in the regenrefication of the monster child from comedy to horror.

273 Summary

Hollywood’s representation of Hitler Youth as child monsters had a curious impact on the syntax of the monster child film. Where previous films had commonly shown monster child narratives to be carnivalesque in how the child pitted itself against the social order and turned the world upside down with its anarchic pranks, the Hitler Youth monster child was shown to be anti-carnivalesque in how it remain invested in reinforcing the power of the social order, represented by the Third Reich’s New Order. Responding to the promise of power given to them by the Nazis, Hitler Youth worked with the Nazis to secure their totalitarian authority. Yet as monster children the Hitler Youth also engaged in carnivalesque forms of mockery, masking and inversion in their treatment of traditional forms of authority centred in the home, the school and the church. However these were all made to service to the monologism of the Nazi ideology that sought absolute conformity and power.

Although largely forgotten today, Tomorrow the World is an important picture in the history child monstrosity that, like other films in the cycle of wartime Hitler Youth themed films, applied an anti-carnivalesque motif of conformity to the status quo.

However, Tomorrow the World is unique in how it transplants the Hitler Youth narrative to small town America and in so doing, Nazi conformity to the status quo operates in direct conflict with America’s culture of assimilation to Anglo-American values. Where earlier monster children are anti-carnivalesque in their commitment to the monologism of

Nazism, Emil Bruckner’s commitment to Nazism puts him at odds with his newfound

274 culture, causing a carnivalesque eruption of heteroglossia in the culture. In so doing,

Tomorrow the World displaces the anti-carnivalesque motifs of previous Hitler Youth- themed wartime dramas and effectively restores the carnivalesque qualities of earlier monster child films, preparing the way for the horror films to come that likewise exhibit subversive elements of the carnival.

275 CHAPTER FIVE

THE CONTINUITY OF THE MONSTER CHILD: POSTWAR HITLER YOUTH HORROR AND THE BAD SEED

The final chapter of this thesis ends where it seems most histories of the monster child horror film tend to begin. That is, with the emergence of monster child horror films in the period following the Second World War. Adam Lowenstein tells us that following the

World War II horror films transitioned out of the classical era and the modern horror film emerged, born out of the trauma of war and “when all-too-human threats replace gothic, otherworldly monsters, and graphic violence replaces suggested mayhem”

(7). In our discussion of Tomorrow the World, it was shown that when the anti- carnivalesque nature of the Hitler Youth monster child was resituated from Germany to

America, it returned to its carnivalesque roots to once again mock and undermine the established order. Following in the footsteps of Nazified monster children like Emil

Bruckner in Tomorrow the World, the monster children emerging in horror films in the postwar era made use of Hitler Youth iconography because of the threat they represent to traditional forms of authority such as the family, school and the church. Paradoxically, in the postwar era it is precisely this antagonism against adult authority demonstrated by the

Hitler Youth that characterises monster children in the modern horror film. The major difference between the Hitler Youth monster child and the postwar monster child is that the former works for the social order while the latter works against it.

276 The following chapter explores the enduring semantics of the Hitler Youth and as they continue to represent monster children into the postwar period. Using criteria mapped out by William Paul, the chapter will perform a comparison between

Tomorrow the World and Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film The Bad Seed, which most scholars consider the first monster child film. The comparison will demonstrate that the two films have sufficient narrative elements in common to suggest that the former film in some way influenced the latter, confirming the role that the Hitler Youth had in pushing the monster child towards the horror genre. The chapter opens with a discussion of Wolf Rilla’s 1960 science fiction horror film Village of the Damned and discusses how this iconic film includes legible signifiers of Nazi eugenics and the Hitler Youth yet also contains a strong carnivalesque core that Stam suggests belongs to “dystopian versions of carnival in which phenomenon that had once been the objects of cathartic laughter undergo a kind of sickly mutation” (111). The mutation that occurs in the child’s shift from comedy to horror comes as a result of the changing representation of the child that, using Scahill’s queer taxonomy, sees a shift in the child from the trickster to the demon, who “is no less than the ‘imp’ writ large” (Revolting 19).

277 5.1 Village of the Damned

In an early section of his book Baby and Child Care titled “Accepting the baby you have”, Dr. Benjamin Spock asks the question, “What happens if the child you‘ve got differs from the child you thought you wanted?” (9). Steven Bruhm suggests that in this question Spock allows for “that ancient nature/nurture contradiction to creep in here”

(Nightmare 99). The nature versus nurture argument is one that sat at the centre of eugenics programs that sought to use nature to lesson the importance of nurture. In The

Bad Seed the nature versus nurture argument is made explicit as two aging crime authors share their opposing views on the topic. Nature versus nurture also plays a major role in

Village of the Damned in which earth women impregnated with alien embryos give birth to a race of monstrous human/alien hybrids that seem almost a caricature of Hitler Youth in their presentation and manners.

Wolf Rilla’s 1960 science fiction-horror film Village of the Damned follows events that take place in the rural English of Midwich where an invisible interplanetary force renders its residents unconscious and impregnates all women of childbearing age with alien embryos. In all, twelve children are born. All share the same pale skin and platinum blond hair. They are highly intelligent and entirely self-sufficient. They physically develop at double the growth rate of human children yet they are emotionally detached and have no capacity for empathy. While the people of Midwich feel increasingly threatened, local scientist Gordon Zellaby defends the children and receives government approval to instruct and observe them. Gordon’s wife Anthea is one of the women

278 impregnated with alien DNA and gives birth to David who becomes the leader and mouthpiece of the group. Anthea’s various efforts to emotionally connect with David are ignored or met with indifference. Gifted with telepathy and mind control, the children share a hive mind and manipulate those around them like puppeteers, compelling anyone they consider a threat to commit suicide. As the children’s powers increase, Gordon apprehends the threat they represent to humanity and sacrifices himself in an explosion that destroys the alien brood.

When Rilla passed away in 2005 at age 85, his obituary in The Times revealed how he had resigned himself to the idea that the many films and television episodes he had written and/or directed over a thirty-five year career had all been forgotten with the

“single exception” (76) of Village of the Damned. Adapted from ’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, Rilla’s film made over $2 million on a $300,000 budget, inspiring the 1964 sequel Children of the Damned and a 1995 remake directed by horror auteur John Carpenter. The film’s notoriety is due in part to its polysemic fecundity that encourages significant interpretive play. For Rilla who was born into a German Jewish family in Berlin in 1920 and grew up under the shadow of the Nazis’ rise to power, the alien offspring in Village of the Damned evoke “the Hitler youth, blond-haired Aryan children" (76). Others have offered similar interpretations that highlight the film’s clear allusions to Nazi eugenics and the Hitler Youth movement. Noting how the film’s atmosphere of Cold War paranoia is intensified by images of Nordic children, Jennifer

Kapczynski suggests that Village of the Damned “melds images of National Socialist racial superiority with the specter of Communist contagion to explore the dangers posed

279 by the ‘bad seeds’ of totalitarianism” (163). John Sears observes that the pale skin and blond hair of the Midwich children “gestures back to fascist iconographies of the Aryan ubermensch and invokes memories of the then still recent threats of the early war years” (66). Further confirming the obvious allusions to Hitler Youth in Rilla’s film,

Andrew Scahill refers to the “Hitlerjugend-ness of the alien invaders” (14), Clare Hanson observes how the children “mirror the eugenic ideology of Nazi Germany” (79), and

Steven Bruhm suggests they belong “on a poster for Nazi youth” as they represent “a hymn of praise to Aryan perfection that relies on the generality of type for its particular narrative function” (“Global” 162).

The Hitler Youth became a vivid and readily recognisable symbol of the menace that young people potentially represented to the continuity of the social order. Even as

Americans embraced postwar affluence and the war itself was framed as the “Good

War”152 in terms of a clear Manichean narrative, the horror of the war was still very much alive in the minds of Americans as films like The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Johnson

1956) attested.153 Reflecting on “America’s experience of Nazi Germany”, Robert Kolker proposes that it is a trauma that “the culture has never been able to understand, absorb, or adequately represent” (18). Even after the war Germany (and later Cuba) remained the symbolic epicentre of the Cold War with the nation and the city of Berlin divided along

152 Neil Wynn’s article “The ‘Good War’: The Second World War and Postwar American Society’” outlines American popular perspectives on the conflict along with the immense economic, social and cultural changes it wrought. 153 Nunnally Johnson’s 1956 adaptation of Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel follows WWII veteran Tom Rath who is haunted by his experiences of war, including murdering a German youth because he needed the boy’s coat to keep warm. Despite telling his wife to “Stop harping on about the war. It’s been over ten years. It’s gone and forgotten”, Tom’s traumatic memories of the war conspicuously impact on his life in 1956 middle class America, evoking what Linda Mizejewski calls “a haunting of conscience in the years since World War Two” (4).

280 East/West lines of antagonistic ideological opposition. In the decade following the war, the memory of the Hitler Youth was still very much kept alive by ongoing reports on

Germany’s generation of children who grew up under Hitler’s influence and fought for the Nazis in the war. Drew Middleton’s 1953 article for the New York Times titled “The

Hitler Youth Eight Years After” explores the future of Germany as “increasingly it will rest with men who got their first ideological training with the Hitler Youth” (SM17).154

Village of the Damned belongs to a cycle of late 1950s and early 1960s films in which children are portrayed as a deadly threat to the established order. These include The

Gamma People (Gilling 1956), The Space Children (Arnold 1958), These Are the

Damned (Losey 1961), Lord of the Flies (Brook 1963) 155 and Children of the Damned

(Leader 1964). In all but the final film,156 the children presented are Aryan specimens that, like the Nazified alien brood in Village of the Damned, and the Hitler Youth in

Hollywood’s wartime films before them, represent what Dixon suitably describes as

“inexplicable forces that seek to destroy or control the adults who ostensibly would be their superiors” (78). Dixon’s description highlights the inversion of norms that is an essential motif of the carnival in which hierarchies are reversed and the established order is lampooned and turned upside down. Bakhtin explains in Rabelais and His World that during carnival, the established order is symbolically put to death so that “the old dying world gives birth to the new one” (435).

154 Melvin Lasky wrote a similar exposé two years later titled, “Germany's Greatest Unknown Quantity: It Is Her Youth”. He reminds readers that “fifteen years ago a whole generation of German youth, in arms and uniforms, stood poised on the frontiers of the Third Reich, prepared in their disciplined in their devoted way to overrun on signal their neighbours to the east and west” (SM12). 155 While Lord of the Flies does not include any adults, Ralph represents the social order in his attempts to maintain order and decorum among the castaways while Jack promotes “the suspension and shedding of the stable, ordered conformity of social life” (Crawford 105). 156 The children in Leader’s film represent different races that gather together from around the world.

281

In the monster child film the “old dying world” is that represented by entrenched modernist concepts of childhood innocence. According to Margaret Higonnet, childhood innocence is “emblematic of the future and, therefore, of modernity” (86) and along similar lines Balanzategui describes the child as “one of the most pivotal of modernity’s symbolic constructs, around which … even our very conception of the adult, revolve[s]”

(9). Modern secular society has traditionally relied on the myth of childhood innocence to justify its own existence. In western culture modernism actively contradicts centuries of

Christian dogma that insists humans are born into original sin and that humanity is at its core utterly depraved and dependent on an omnipotent being for its salvation. Rather than being incapable of delivering itself out of barbarity, the humanist impulse central to modernity insists that humans are quintessentially good and that it is the inherited social systems of a corrupted past that continue to undermine and degrade the human condition.

The master narrative affirming the “progress of the human spirit” (Baudrillard 65) becomes the guiding principle of modernity and its claims of continuous advancement and improvement of the human species. Within this context the concept of childhood innocence plays a crucial role for modernity as it establishes that children represent the purest form of the human ideal and that humans are therefore fundamentally good.

The monster child in the postwar era presents a radical challenge to modernism’s claims of progress by presenting a form of child that counters its construction as a signifier of innocence and futurity. Where the myth of innocence defines children along Lockean lines as “having no class, no gender, and no thoughts” (Higgonet 24), the monster child

282 breaks free from the constraints of innocence imposed from above and asserts self-agency and independence. Monster children are antagonistic towards the expectation that the next generation preserves the status quo by continuing the legacies and traditions of the generations before.157 Where the monster child narrative takes on carnivalesque attributes is most evident in its symbolic inversion of hierarchies in which categories of high and low are overturned. In Village of the Damned the British social hierarchy is levelled by the indiscriminate impregnation of women across all social levels. So too, the advanced and mental abilities of the alien children mark them as more competent than adults and serves to invert the traditional adult/child dyad.

Working alongside the inversion of hierarchies is Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque image of the body that inverts and satirises classical ideas invested in what Stam calls the

“fascism of beauty” (159), epitomised by the “static, classic, finished beauty of antique sculpture” (158). The classical ideal is closed, fixed and complete, while the grotesque remains open, mutable and unfinished. Where the classical is inwardly contained, the grotesque grows outward into the world in a perpetual process of becoming. Village of the Damned interacts with elements of carnivalised grotesquery in several ways. Paul contends that the grotesquery of the monster child comes about because of a “confusion of accepted cultural categories” (31) concerning adults and children. This is a point we will return to later in the chapter but for now it is enough to say that the combination of unnerving precocity demonstrated by the independent child together with infantile impulses creates a monster whose hybridised nature undermines the social order. The

157 Describing the rebellious spirit of youth and its frustrated antagonism towards ossified traditions, Sir Philip Gibbs observes how youth is “resentful of these elder statesmen who cling to power in a world that has moved beyond them, … eager for its own right to leadership” (3).

283 human/alien bodies of the children in Village of the Damned are the product of an interspecies/interplanetary rape. Sent to earth with the intention of eventually taking over the planet, these alien/human chimeras, like all children born of war, are hybrid monsters that bear the “stigma of belonging to the enemy” (Mochmann and Larsen 348).158

While the Midwich children’s monstrous alienness is manifested physically, it is their behaviour that becomes the source of terror. In his guide to effective parenting from infancy to pre-pubescence, Matthew Sanders outlines some of the normal behavioural challenges young children commonly exhibit. These include: “crying and fussing, whining and attention seeking, occasional fussy eating habits, bedtime problems, disobedience … clingy dependent behaviour” as well as “getting dressed, having a bath, cleaning teeth” (12-13) and so on. The Midwich children present none of these “problem” behaviours. Instead they are emotionless masters of self. They demonstrate aloof independence and have no need for their parents, again aligning them with the Hitler

Youth who were encouraged early on to sever their ties with the hearth and home.159

When David is packing his suitcase to leave home, his mother Anthea stands by and watches helplessly as he rejects her offer to assist and, talking down to her, rejects any attempt she makes to connect with him emotionally. In this way the film inverts

158 Mochmann and Larsen confirm that where mass rape is used as a “military strategy of ethnic cleansing … whole societies were left traumatised” (352(. They report that the children born of these mass rapes “become the symbol of the trauma the nation went through” and become marginalised and stigmatised with names like “’devil's children’ (Rwanda), ‘children of shame’ (East Timor), ‘monster babies’ (Nicaragua)” (352). This same stigma faced the children born in European countries invaded by the Nazis and have “grown up with hatred, rejection, mobbing and discrimination both in the family and society, often themselves not knowing about their biological background” (352). 159 In his 1946 article addressing the need to re-educate Hitler Youth, Herbert Lewin writes how “the Hitler Youth, in proclaiming the primacy of the national interests over the family and personal interests, has tried to sever the normal emotional dependency of the child to his parents” (453). Middleton cites one ex-Hitler Youth who describes how, “they hammered, hammered, hammered at out little skulls … The wanted to exclude everything else, our church lessons, our schooling, what our fathers had said; everything but Fuhrer and Party” (“Eight Years” SM17).

284 adult/child roles as the adult is re-inscribed as emotional, irrational and ineffectual while the child is composed, self-contained and independent. So too, rather than the problems parents have with ensuring their children are properly bathed and clothed, David and his cohort are always neat and clean and dress immaculately in suit and tie, reflecting the paramilitary discipline drummed into the Hitler Youth. So too, as Rilla observes, the children’s pale skin and mop of platinum blond hair emphasise their whiteness and operate as signifiers of Hitler Youth and Nazi eugenics. However the most monstrous feature of the children is their opaque eyes that are the source of their carnivalesque power.

The controlling gaze of the alien children in Village of the Damned inverts the surveillance and control of children usually imposed from above. Lennard refers to this as a “subversion of the stable and received understandings of childhood that are maintained by the way children are ordinarily looked at” (52). According to Patricia Holland, the controlling adult gaze is fixed upon the imagined ideal of the innocent child and “seeks to put children in their place and to conform their image to expected patterns” (9). Along with the perpetual surveillance, the adult’s controlling gaze extends to control over the child’s body. Leavitt and Power discuss how in early education children are under constant and close scrutiny that involves introducing correctives that shift the child from an “uncivilized” embodied state that is “unconstrained by behavioural norms, prone to immediate physical expression of emotions and to satisfying bodily desires without constraint or regard for others” (43) to one that is civilised in that it demonstrates mastery over “lower” impulses. Bakhtin points out that it is these same unconstrained bodily

285 impulses that are celebrated and embraced during carnival times as a deliberately transgressive act intended to temporarily put to death the sombre repressive forces of the established order. The controlling gaze of the monster children in Village of the Damned serves to mock the adult gaze and its civilising constraints.

As the source of their power the children’s eyes function as a visual signifier of their monstrosity, emphasised in the poster ad for the film that warns viewers to “Beware the stare that will paralyze the will of the world” (see figure 19). The children’s stare carnivalises the relationship between adults and children by entirely reversing existing power relations concerning the controlling gaze, but also control over bodies. One of the features that differentiates adults from children is, as Leavitt and Power’s example above indicates, is that adults have learned mastery over their own bodies while children are not yet able to control their bodies or its functions. Subject to the controlling gaze of the children, the adults of Midwich lose all motor control of their physical bodies as they are either immobilised or forced to self-destruct. Taken over by the children, the adult body ceases to be a signifier of mastery and self-control while the emotionless, self-sufficient children become exemplars of bodily control—both their own and others.

286

Image Not Included

Figure 19: The controlling stare of the monster child

Dixon claims that the allusions to Hitler Youth in Village of the Damned played a key role in establishing the conventions of “a new subgenre in horror and fantasy films” that he calls “children as messengers of destruction” (80). He considers Rilla’s film, along with Losey’s These Are the Damned as representing a new type of subgenre within the horror film within which the Aryan racial purity of the monster child establishes whiteness as “an instantly comprehensible symbol of destruction” (82) that continued to be a central motif in the monster child horror films of the 1970s onward. He goes on to focus much of his attention on Richard Donner’s 1976 Antichrist horror film The Omen in which he describes 5-year-old Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) as “the ‘perfect’ blond Aryan” (82). Dixon’s claims about Damien’s “blond Nazi-like ‘perfection’ (83) are problematic because, as Scahill points out, “it’s fairly obvious from the film or any of the promotional material that he is a dark-haired boy in every incarnation of the role” (“It’s”

98). Yet Scahill ingeniously turns Dixon’s gaffe around, employing it as evidence that supports “a network of meaning that causes a simple slip to become something that structures an argument” in which “whiteness become[s] monstrous” (98). In attempting to

287 establish Hitler Youth iconography as a signifier of monstrosity in Village of the Damned

(and later in The Omen) Dixon overlooks the one film that is considered by most scholars to contain the first iteration of child monstrosity: Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film, The Bad

Seed.160 The remainder of this chapter focuses on The Bad Seed and argues that the significance of LeRoy’s film is the same as that which Dixon (wrongly) attributes to 5- year old Damien Thorn in The Omen: “blond Nazi-like perfection” (83).

160 Dixon briefly mentions The Bad Seed at the beginning of his essay but discounts it in his analysis of horror films because he considers it “more a detective film than a ” that he considers significant only because it’s success prompted the studios to begin considering “the possibilities of children as central characters in the horror of fantasy story” (78). Paul counters that the fantasy element of the film is its presentation of the theory that evil could be a genetic trait, stating that this makes The Bad Seed “as much a fantasy as any contemporary horror film” (269).

288 5.2 The Bad Seed and the Monster Child Film

The Bad Seed contains semantic elements found in anti-Nazi wartime dramas and, even more importantly, the carnivalesque syntax seen in early silent bad boy films. Throughout this thesis the dual claims being made are firstly that the early silent bad boy film established a motif of inversion that is carnivalesque in its mockery of adult power, and that secondly, during WWII Hollywood appropriated the image of the bad boy in its representation of Hitler Youth, thereby Nazifying the bad boy that would later become the basis for the monster child figure in horror. In other words, the Hitler Youth became part of the DNA of the monster child horror film, evinced in the semantics of the subgenre. In addition, as the above analysis of Village of the Damned shows, the monster child horror films emerging after the war demonstrate a return to the carnivalesque as a key syntactic element. Where the Hitler Youth films produced during the war operate as anti-carnivalesque texts in which elements of carnival are manipulated for the purposes of reinforcing the authority and control of the social order. Like the bad boy films of the silent era in which children play pranks on unsuspecting adults that invert existing adult/child power relations, the actions of the monster child in postwar horror threatens the social order as the child subjugates adult authority to its will.

In order to demonstrate how Hollywood’s wartime representations of Hitler Youth as monster children have influenced later horror film iterations of the child monster, a comparison of The Bad Seed and Tomorrow the World will attempt to show how the former film contains semantic and syntactic elements found in the latter. To this end,

289 William Paul’s template of key conventions that he asserts characterise the monster child horror film will be applied to Tomorrow the World to demonstrate how the film conforms to these conventions. Applying Paul’s template to Tomorrow the World achieves two goals. First, it moves closer towards establishing a connection between the Hitler Youth wartime propaganda film and, in so doing, clarifies the influence of the Hitler Youth in shaping postwar iterations of the monster child in horror. And second, it challenges existing assumptions concerning the primacy of Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film The Bad

Seed, showing instead how the film belongs to an ever-changing discourse concerning normative and aberrant representations of childhood. Paul’s analysis of The Bad Seed in his chapter on the monster children of the 1970s and 1980s aims to isolate the codes and conventions pertaining to monster child horror and attribute their origins to LeRoy’s film.

Where Paul uses his analysis of The Bad Seed to explain recurring motifs in monster child films produced in future decades, my own analysis will show how his codes and conventions apply to a film that belongs in The Bad Seed’s past. In so doing I seek to demonstrate the presence of a clear continuity between the two films that has implications for monster child horror films in later decades.

The Bad Seed was the last of six novels penned by American writer William March. The novel was published on 8 April 1954, just over a month before March’s sudden death by heart attack on 15 May. The novel became an instant bestseller and was quickly adapted by into a play that opened at the 46th Street Theatre in New York

City on 8 December 1954 and ran for over 300 performances. Anderson’s play attracted significant attention in Hollywood, resulting in the Production Code Administration

290 (PCA) receiving multiple petitions to approve its production.161 However PCA director

Geoffrey Shurlock considered the material too perverse and explained that the PCA could not “envision any treatment of the story which would make it acceptable under the code”

(qtd in Paul 276). For the PCA, the problem with The Bad Seed was in how a murderous child’s crimes go unpunished, transgressing what Joseph Breen had earlier referred to as the principle of “compensating moral value”. Gregory Black explains that “films that had crime or sin as a major part of the plot must contain "compensating moral value" to justify the subject matter” (178) so that virtue is rewarded, wrongdoers are punished, the established order is restored, and moral lessons are learned. Despite the strict veto against adapting the play, Warner Bros. defied the PCA and acquired the rights for $300,000.

After making significant changes to the script that more than satisfied the PCA’s conservative demands, the studio was given approval to proceed. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards

The Bad Seed follows Penmark, a white middle class stay-at-home wife and mother who learns that she was adopted as a child and that her birth mother was a notorious serial killer. Compounding Christine’s trauma is the terrible revelation that her own perfectly behaved 8-year-old daughter Rhoda has inherited her grandmother’s homicidal sociopathy, effortless dissembling and insatiable acquisitive appetite. The problems at home begin when Rhoda starts venting her fury over a penmanship medal awarded to Claude Daigle that she believes is rightfully hers. “Everyone knows I’ve got the best hand” she fumes in an escalating tantrum. “It was mine”, she screams, “The

161 Paul (275) notes that 20th-Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Brothers all made applications to adapt Anderson’s play for the screen.

291 medal was mine!” At the school picnic by the lake Claude’s body is found floating at the end of the jetty and the penmanship medal proudly pinned to his shirt is missing. Later

Christine finds the medal hidden beneath the lining of Rhoda’s treasure chest and confronts her daughter who quickly constructs an ingenious of lies. After catching

Rhoda attempting to sneak her metal-heeled shoes into the incinerator, Christine finally gets the truth from her. Rhoda explains how she chased Claude onto the jetty to get the medal and although he relinquished it he also promised to tell the teacher. Removing her metal-heeled shoe, she struck Claude repeatedly over the head with it until he fell in the water and drowned. Wanting to protect her daughter, Christine agrees that Rhoda’s shoes are evidence that should be destroyed. Rhoda also confesses to the earlier murder of old

Mrs Post in Wichita who had bequeathed her a glass bauble. Impatient for the object,

Rhoda pretended to slip on an icy step and “accidently” pushed the old woman to her death.

Feeble-minded building janitor Leroy Jessup is Rhoda’s next victim. The pair share a perverse relationship built on his attempts to torment her while she remains aloof. In a ghoulishly depraved and protracted game in which he pretends that she killed Claude

Daigle with a stick, Leroy notices that Rhoda no longer wears her metal-heeled shoes and jokes that she must have killed Claude with them. She nonchalantly tells him she threw them in the incinerator, leading Leroy to make the fatal error of joking that he retrieved the shoes before they burned. Rhoda’s sudden change of demeanour terrifies Leroy who realises he has stumbled upon a terrible truth. Aware that Leroy naps in the basement in

292 the afternoon on a makeshift bed of excelsior162 Rhoda smuggles some matches and disappears for a spell on the pretext of going out to buy a popsicle from a passing ice cream van. When she reappears, Rhoda retreats into her bedroom where she practices her piano while Leroy is heard screaming in the basement, which is billowing smoke.

Christine watches in horror as Leroy emerges from the basement covered in flames and collapses on the lawn. She understands that her daughter cannot continue to live and feeds her an overdose of sleeping pills, telling her they are vitamins. After Rhoda falls asleep, Christine finds her husband’s gun and shoots herself in the head. In both March’s novel and Anderson’s play, Christine’s upstairs neighbours hear the shot and investigate.

Although Christine is dead, Rhoda is revived and continues living unscathed and unpunished and has already set her sights on a new victim.

One of Shurlock’s main problems with adapting The Bad Seed for the screen was that “it would be difficult if not impossible to think up any punishment for an eight year old murderer” (qtd in Paul 276). Certainly no human punishment would suffice, however the solution proposed by LeRoy and his screenwriter John Lee Mahin involved Christine surviving her gunshot wound and Rhoda dying at the “hands” of a non-human entity.

Earlier in the film Christine meets Claude’s grieving mother Hortense Daigle who has unanswered questions about her son’s death, such as the disappearance of his penmanship medal. Afraid that the missing medal is shining the spotlight too much on Rhoda,

Christine sneaks back to the jetty and drops it in the water among the where it can be found and returned to Mrs Daigle. Overwhelmed with pity for Claude’s mother,

162 Also known as “wood wool” and “wood straw”, excelsior is the US term used for fine wood shavings whose softness and density is ideal for packing and protecting fragile objects.

293 Christine forlornly observes that, “She’ll have to live with this until she dies”. The line comes back to haunt Christine when she is revived at the hospital and recognises that she too will have to live out her days tortured by the knowledge that she is the carrier of the polluted bloodline that produced her daughter, and also that her collusion with Rhoda in covering up Claude Daigle’s murder led to poor Leroy’s fiery death.

LeRoy’s ending, which satisfied the PCA but was deplored by reviewers implies that

Rhoda is so diabolical that nature itself cannot abide her existence. Referring to the bolt of that kills Rhoda when she returns to the jetty to retrieve the penmanship medal, Bosley Crowther complains in his review of The Bad Seed that LeRoy’s ending

“lacks the withering irony of the original” (39). Life magazine’s review of the film likewise complains that Warners “timorously … crept away from the play’s end which left the evil elf triumphant on the field of slaughter. For the screen they took refuge in an ending that metes out an odd justice, both unexpected and unlikely, to the little monster”

(141). In the film’s defence, the ending is certainly abrupt but it is neither as unexpected nor as unlikely as Life asserts. Throughout the film clues are provided as to Rhoda’s fate.

During one of the moments when Leroy is tormenting Rhoda he describes the electric chair and introduces a detail about being struck by lighting that is not in March’s novel, nor Anderson’s play.163 More significant is the framing device that LeRoy uses that

163 In Anderson’s play Leroy tries to frighten Rhoda with his description of execution by electric chair: “You know the noise the electric chair makes? It goes z—z—z, and then you swivel all up the way bacon does when you mother’s frying it” (Anderson 54). Mahin and LeRoy’s screenplay alters Leroy’s line, transforming it into a portent: “You the noise the electric chair makes? It goes z—z—z, and when that juice hits you it parts your hair neat, z—z—z, like lightning struck you”.

294 begins and ends his film with the thunderstorm that kills Rhoda.164

The Bad Seed opens in ominous darkness with a thunderclap before the Warner Bros. logo appears on screen in front of a vast mise en scene of menacing clouds flashing with electrical activity. Clearly visible among the clouds is the full moon, illuminating the darkness with its pale light. As the credits crossfade on screen a grimly urgent orchestral variation of the 18th century folk tune “Au Clair de la Lune” repeats. This will be the lietmotif used throughout the film and its presence is always associated with

Rhoda up to no good. That she is playing the tune at the start of the film on the morning she will go out and kill Claude Daigle at the picnic suggests that his murder is premeditated. Later when Leroy is in flames, taking his last burning breath as he thrashes about on the lawn outside the apartment, Rhoda is again playing the tune. Having perfected it during the course of the film she plays it during his violent death with increasing freneticism that has a disturbingly orgiastic quality. The constant repetition of the tune and its associations with the moon, together with the framing device of the opening and closing scenes as well as the description of mysterious “half-moon” markings that were found on Claude’s corpse, introduce a lunar motif that not only draws on the lexicon of horror, 165 it also carries carnivalesque overtones relating to the importance of cycles associated with the change of seasons, death and rebirth, sowing and reaping, and their attendant festive periods that likewise operate in cycles. Bakhtin notes

164 The opening shot of jetty and boathouse also sets up its narrative significance as the site where Rhoda will murder Claude Daigle. On the day of the picnic as Christine and Rhoda arrive, LeRoy privileges a shot of the jetty, zooming in slightly to reinforce its significance. 165 Paul discusses images of the moon in a variety of horror films and how it also is used at the start of both Problem Child (Dugan 1990) and Home Alone (Columbus 1990), leading him to suggest that “the iconography of horror has fully entered the world of comedy” (424).

295 how the carnival and its feasts are “always essentially related to time, either to the recurrence of an event in the natural (cosmic), or to biological or historic timeliness … of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man” (Rabelais 9).

As the final credits appear on screen the camera moves downward, dipping below the treeline until, close to the ground, an opening between two large trees reveals an old wooden jetty and boathouse jutting out over a dark lake as moonlight ripples on the water. As the opening music abruptly ends, a thunderclap seems to discordantly complete the unfinished melody. The camera slowly pans left away from the jetty and peers through a second opening framed by trees where in the far distance the lights of a small town glow while thunder rumbles a warning. Filmed in , LeRoy’s portentous expressionistic opening is deliberately at odds with its otherwise stagey style that shifts the film into the stark daylight of domestic melodrama. Yet, as Brooks explains, melodrama “shares many characteristics with the Gothic novel” (20) that shaped the development of horror. He notes how melodrama “is equally preoccupied with nightmare states, with claustration and thwarted escape, with innocence buried alive and unable to voice its claims to recognition” (20). Tony Williams considers melodrama to be the “sister genre” to what he calls “family horror” because of their shared interest in family-based trauma. He notes that melodramas, like horror films, include “excessive elements” that “often appear at the moment of extreme family tension and breakdown”

(Williams 15). Balanzategui’s discussion of The Bad Seed proposes that the film

“presents the murderous child as the vehicle through which a generic shift from family melodrama to horror plays out” (10). She contends that the film marks “an influential

296 shift in generic preoccupations, as from the late 1950s onwards the family comedy and melodrama started to wane just as the domestic or family-focused horror film emerged”

(10).166 Balanzategui makes use of Robin Wood’s analysis of Meet Me in St. Louis in which he observes how “every sequence in the film is built on tension, constraint and repression within the family” (“American” 10) that by the 1970s is no longer containable and erupts into full-blown horror. The opening of The Bad Seed clearly evokes the shadowy gothic threat of the classical horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, clearly priming audiences for what ultimately promises to be a disguised as melodrama. And The Bad Seed is indeed a monster movie, but not, as Paul notes, like the

B-movie creature features of the era.167

Paul’s position on The Bad Seed insists the film “proved to be the seminal work for the child’s rebirth as monster” (267). Numerous scholars share the view that LeRoy’s film presents the first ever monster child on screen. “First came Patty McCormack, playing a prepubescent killer” (16), insists Marie Winn in her 1980 study Children Without

Childhood. Winn sees McCormack’s performance in The Bad Seed as representing a crucial change in how children are portrayed in film, noting that, ”in the sixties a new

166 Diverging opinions about whether The Bad Seed is a horror film, a melodrama or a combination of the two are in part because neither genre (which also both function as modes) is defined by a stable suite of generic signifiers without, as Altman contends, limiting them to an exclusive corpus epitomising a particular classical approach. Barbara Klinger contends The Bad Seed belongs to a cycle of mid-1950s films she classifies as “melodramas with social, psychological, sexual problems at their core” (40) while Scahill suggests that The Bad Seed is “notable for its categorization within the genre of family melodrama rather than horror” (Revolting 7). At the other end, Cyndy Hendershot declares The Bad Seed to be “a horror film that transgresses the taboo on children murderers” (22) and Peter Hutchings considers it a “family horror” (112) in which the monster is “most clearly manifested through its familial nature” (112-3). Among those who consider the film a combination of the two, Robert Singer describes The Bad Seed as “a genre blending of the melodrama and horror films conforms to established historical practices of the two genres in the American film of the 1950s” (184) and Paul calls it “melodramatic horror” (268). 167 Paul states that because of its naturalist milieu, “It would have been difficult for critics of the period to see any continuity between [Rhoda] and the giant ants in Them!” (1954), however, he argues that the film’s exploration of evil as inheritable renders it equally as fantastical as the period’s creature features.

297 type of motion picture appeared; from a sweet, idealized Shirley Temple or Margaret

O’Brien168 poppet, the movie child grew into a monster” (16). Kathy Merlock Jackson similarly asserts that prior to The Bad Seed children were portrayed as innocent cherubs and that “never before had such an evil image of childhood appeared on screen” (112).

Dominic Lennard declares that in The Bad Seed “we see in originary form a number of the hallmarks” (28) and refers to it as the “archetypal evil child film” (13). Scahill asserts

“the child as Other has a long history in cinema, dating back to the maternal melodrama of The Bad Seed” (“Deviled” 198). Steven Woodward considers it “a landmark film” that presents “the emergence of the child monster in cinema” (305). For Julian Petley Rhoda

Penmark is “the first significant cinematic child monster” (92). Gary Morris writes in

Bright Lights Film Journal that The Bad Seed “seems to be have been dropped into projection rooms from another planet” and that Rhoda Penmark “has no obvious antecedents in movie history”. And Jessica Balanzategui in the most recent book on the

“uncanny child” in cinema reinforces existing claims that “the first sustained cinematic vision of a truly monstrous child occurs in The Bad Seed” (10).

The claim that The Bad Seed has “no obvious antecedents“ and thus effectively emerged from out of the ether contradicts evidence presented throughout this thesis. Chapter one compares examples of five scenes taken from five monster child horror films and another five from five early silent bad boy comedies. Among the examples provided is the 1897

American Mutoscope film The Bad Boy and Poor Old Grandpa in which an old man

168 Winn’s assertion about O’Brien’s cherubic innocence differs considerably from Wood’s observation that her violent attack on the snow effigies in Meet Me in St Louis discussed in the previous chapter. Also, as Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden (Wilcox 1949) O’Brien plays a petulant little terror who eventually softens as she makes friends.

298 engrossed in his newspaper is unaware of the presence of a boy who sneaks up unseen and gives the old man a terrible shock when he sets his paper on fire. This example is paired with Paul Wendkos’ 1985 television remake of The Bad Seed in which monster child Rhoda Penmark locks janitor Leroy Jessup in the wood shed that is also home to flammable chemicals. Like Grandpa before him, Leroy is engrossed in a magazine and does not realise until it is too late that the shed is on fire. Although Rhoda in the 1956 film, following March’s novel and Maxwell’s play, waits until Leroy is taking his customary afternoon nap before sneaking into the basement and setting his bed of wood fibre alight, the scenario is relatively the same and follows the pattern established in early silent bad boy films in which children play pranks on unsuspecting adults.

In a manner that recalls Wood’s comparison of Meet Me in St Louis with Night of the

Living Dead the following section provides a comparison of The Bad Seed with

Tomorrow the World in order to further demonstrate how echoes of earlier monster child films can be detected in The Bad Seed, confirming the obvious pre-existence of the monster child before the arrival of LeRoy’s film and the clear role the Hollywood’s wartime representations of Hitler Youth played in the development of the monster child in horror.

299 5.3 The Influence of Emil Bruckner and Tomorrow the World

In his analysis of the monster child films of the 1970s and 1980s, William Paul identifies a set of conventions that recur across a range of films that include The Exorcist,

Halloween and The Omen. In each, children are featured whose actions undermine adult authority and threaten the social order. Throughout, Paul repeatedly returns to The Bad

Seed to point out how the conventions in these later horror films were first established in

LeRoy’s 1956 motion picture (via Maxwell’s play and March’s novel). Preceding his analysis of these films, Paul conducts an in-depth analysis of The Bad Seed that ends with a list of seven “key elements that are picked up by later horror films” (282). These key elements are:

1. The equation of the child with absolute malignance

Paul’s contends that monster children in film operate as scapegoats in how they are

made to mirror particular social maladies. Rhoda’s murderous impulse in The Bad

Seed, which is activated primarily by greed, can be interpreted as a reflection of

America’s postwar obsession with consumerism. Applying this convention to The

Exorcist, Paul highlights how Friedkin’s film situates Regan’s possession within the

context of the youth rebellion and counterculture of the 1960s.

2. A disturbing combination of precociousness and regression

The child’s sophisticated exhibition of mature behaviour and self-agency violates

notions of innocence that frame children as ignorant and dependent. However, the

child may just as likely use innocence as a mask to deceive or obscure their true

intentions. Rhoda demonstrates precocity in her self-reliance. She is always

300 immaculately dressed and never gets anything dirty. In addition, she excels in every

task she sets her mind to and achieves the highest grades in every subject at school.

Yet she is driven by infantile competitiveness and avarice, which drives her to

commit murder. While Rhoda has the most accomplished handwriting in her school, a

penmanship badge is awarded to Claude Daigle for the most improved handwriting.

Rhoda is livid and insists the badge belongs to her, attacking Claude when he refuses

to give it to her and then killing him when he threatens to tell. Regan’s aggressively

sexual behaviour in The Exorcist is made all the more monstrous by her grotesque

loss of bodily functions, demonstrated vividly when she urinates on the carpet in front

of the few remaining guests at her mother’s party.

3. The age of the child is generally prepubescent or just pubescent

Although this point is specifically concerned with age, the child’s monstrosity is also

often tied to their burgeoning sexuality. In The Bad Seed Rhoda is 8-years- old while

in The Exorcist Regan is age 12. Here Paul highlights how numerous slasher films

involve a childhood trauma experienced by the killer that shapes their pathology and

aberrant sexuality.

4. A desire to see the child punished

This point is at the centre of Paul’s discussion of monster children. The child’s

villainous actions engender strong feelings of outrage and vengeance directed against

the child. The child’s punishment importantly signifies the restoration of the moral

order. In The Bad Seed Rhoda’s punishment occurs twice: first when she is

obliterated by lightning and again when spanks Patty McCormack at the

end of the curtain calls that the film borrows from the Broadway play. This is played

301 for laughs and Paul notes that the laughter is a response by the adult being reassured

that Rhoda is finally receiving her just desserts. In essence, the punishment of the

child reinstates the social order thrown into disarray by the monster child’s behaviour.

Paul suggests that the audience’s paedophobic pleasure is no better sated than in

Friedkin’s film where Regan is tortured for much of the film, first by painful medical

procedures before being repeatedly beaten by both doctors and priests. Pointing out

the distressing levels of violence against the child inflicted in The Exorcist, Neil

Sinyard cites director John Boorman, who found it “extremely tasteless, cruel and

sadistic towards children” (qtd in 70). According to Boorman, cast member Max von

Sydow was similarly troubled by the film’s exhibition of sustained violence towards a

young child.

5. A dramatic strategy of slow revelation that makes us both anxious and pleased at

discovering evil in children

The idea that a child would be a source of monstrosity is both repellent and attractive

as our lived experience of children’s more challenging behaviour, especially other

people’s children, can be negative. Children are symbols of futurity, as Lee Edelman

puts it, but they equally represent impending redundancy and death. With hope for the

future comes an admixture of resentment and fear that translates into paedophobia.

Seeing a child portrayed as a literal monster gives expression to the repressed

negative feelings harboured towards children. In The Bad Seed small clues are

provided throughout the film about Rhoda’s sociopathy but only begin to come

together in the third act when she confesses the earlier murders to her mother and then

burns Leroy to death while he sleeps in the basement. The audience’s feelings of

302 malice are justified and even exonerated by the film’s depiction of the child as utterly

monstrous.

6. Indirectness

Any murders committed by the child tend to take place off screen. One reason for this

relates to the previous point concerning the guilt of the child being withheld. A

second reason concerns the problem of showing a child physically overpowering an

adult without it looking ludicrous. Important here is the adult’s misplaced trust in the

myth of childhood innocence. This belief ensures the child can gain close proximity

to the adult, who is rendered defenceless. Rhoda explains to her mother how she

killed old Mrs Post, deliberately slipping on an icy staircase and falling on the old

woman who in turn tumbled down the staircase to her death. In The Exorcist, Regan’s

murder of Burke Dennings is not shown and only confirmed when the demon

ghoulishly confesses to the crime.

7. The absent parent

This relates to Paul’s first point about equating the child with absolute malignance.

Since the advent of the middle class juvenile delinquent film in the 1950s,

exemplified by Rebel Without a Cause (Ray 1955), children have been signifiers of

the breakdown of the American bourgeois family home. Parental absence, whether

physical or emotional, is generally blamed for delinquent behaviour in children. In

The Bad Seed, Rhoda’s murder of Claude Daigle coincides with her father’s departure

for Washington DC on extended assignment. In The Exorcist, the demon begins to

take hold of Regan after her father misses her birthday.

303 This chapter seeks to demonstrate how The Bad Seed reflects elements of the Hitler

Youth that are present in the 1944 wartime drama Tomorrow the World. Before proceeding it is useful to remind ourselves of the key narrative elements in Felton’s film:

An 11-year-old orphaned Hitler Youth named Emil is adopted by his American uncle,

Michael Frame, a science professor at the local university. Emil’s cousin Pat and her school friends try to befriend him but he refuses to assimilate into small town American culture. Instead he sets his Nazified mind on two goals: break up his uncle’s engagement to a Jewish teacher named Leona, and get his hands on secret war department documents that his uncle keeps locked in his desk drawer. During the two weeks in which the film is set, Emil’s arrogance and animosity has managed to make everyone in his life miserable.

He antagonises Leona so much that she breaks off her engagement with Michael. On the day of his birthday Pat arranges a party for Emil but she catches him sneaking Michael’s key to the desk drawer. Afraid that she will tell Michael, Emil bludgeons Pat and flees the house. A polish boy that Emil hates chases him down and the two boys fight. Emil tries to stab the boy with his Nazi dagger but is knocked out. Emil is taken back to the Frame’s and goads Michael who is so enraged that he strangles the boy. Leona intervenes and presents Emil with the watch Pat bought for him for his birthday. Overwhelmed Emil cries and Leona has a change of heart about him. Pat comes downstairs with her head bandaged and surprises Emil by forgiving him, and he explains to Michael that the Nazis tortured him. Convinced that Emil has reformed, the Frame family head to the kitchen for breakfast.

304 Below are Paul’s seven key elements that he maintains recur in later monster child horror films, formulated from his analysis of The Bad Seed. To demonstrate how Tomorrow the

World can likewise be considered a monster child film, Paul’s criteria have been applied to Fenton’s film:

1. The equation of the child with absolute malignance

In Hollywood wartime dramas, Hitler Youth children were invariably presented as

ruthless servants of the National Socialist State who thought nothing of betraying their

families. As such, they share commonalities with representations of Gestapo and SS

officer characters to whom, “qualities of fanaticism and arrogance were ascribed”

(Koppes & Black 282). As a particularly vicious Nazified monster child, Emil

repeatedly speaks disparagingly about his father and finally attacks the portrait of the

man with his Nazi dagger, cutting it to ribbons. In addition, early in Tomorrow the

World Emil’s American classmates are initially impressed by their new German

acquaintance. They listen spellbound as he brags about Nazi war games and being

taught to handle live weapons. Just as the Nazis won the hearts and minds of the youth

of Germany by appealing to their sense of adventure as well as their innate

egocentrism and desire to feel important, Emil’s seduction of the American minds is

shown to be all too easy. Children are thus shown to be potential threats to the social

order, regardless of whose side they are on in the war. Perhaps even more than The

Bad Seed this theme has pertinence in later horror films like The Exorcist and its

association of the demonic with youth rebellion and the counterculture that threatens

the establishment.

305 2. The disturbing combination of precociousness and regression

From the moment 11-year-old Emil appears on screen, he demonstrates adult

behaviour. Consistent with earlier Hollywood propaganda films containing

representations of Hitler Youth—as well as both The Bad Seed and Village of the

Damned—he demonstrates great intelligence combined with complete self-reliance

and strong contempt for sentimentality. At the start of the film the Frames become

distressed when they go to pick Emil up from the station, only to find he was not on

board the train. Moments later he appears at the front door, explaining that he traded

his train ticket for a plane ticket and caught a taxi from the airport. He engages in adult

conversation with Michael while Patricia looks on bewildered. Like Rhoda, he is

always impeccably dressed and keeps himself neat and clean. Also like Rhoda, he

ensures that he is the best at every task yet he has no concept of fairness or honour,

only the Nazi dogma that might is right. In school, Emil impresses both his classmates

and his teacher when he gives a presentation on the geopolitics and tactical advantages

of South America, demonstrating advanced knowledge of the region. At the same

time, he derides baseball and football, calling these “baby games”. However, like

Rhoda he is pathologically incapable of taking responsibility for his wrongdoings and

instead reverts to claiming that he is being persecuted because he is German. He

becomes afraid and regresses to the behaviour of a young child when Patricia catches

him in the act of stealing Michael’s key to his desk drawer and pleads with her not to

tell. When she refuses to assure him of her silence, he tries to bludgeon her death with

a brass ashtray.

3. The age of the child is generally prepubescent or just pubescent

306 Emil is 11-years-old and has his twelfth birthday during the course of the film. Even

more than 8-year-old Rhoda, Emil fits Paul’s “just pubescent” type and has more in

common with Regan, who also has a birthday during The Exorcist.

4. A desire to see the child punished

The desire to see Emil receive his comeuppance is intensified when he attacks his

cousin from behind while she is in the middle of preparing his birthday party as an act

kindness, even though he has been beastly to her. Audience outrage is so strong that

twice the film justifies serving up extreme physical punishments for Emil. First he is

defeated in an impressively violent punch-up with Polish neighbour Stan Dumbrowski

who hits Emil so hard that he knocks him out. Stan then revives Emil and marches him

home where, during a confrontation with Michael, Emil’s behaviour is so vile that his

uncle loses control of his rage and tries to kill the boy by strangling him to death.

Emil’s punishment also serves as an allegorical microcosm of global events in which

Americans enact their victory over Germany and punish the nation for again thrusting

the world into war.

5. A dramatic strategy of slow revelation that makes us both anxious and pleased at

discovering evil in children

Emil reveals himself early on to be a Hitler Youth when he appears to the Frames in

his Nazi uniform that he wears under his clothes. However the extent of his fanaticism

emerges slowly over the course of film, finally culminating in his attempted murder of

his cousin in the basement in order to silence her. His motivation is the same as that of

Rhoda who kills Claude Daigle to prevent him from telling the teachers that she beat

him until he surrendered his badge. However, Emil’s attack on Patricia also recalls

307 Rhoda’s murder of Leroy. Just as Emil assaults Patricia in the basement, Rhoda waits

until Leroy is taking his customary afternoon nap in the basement before setting

makeshift bed of wood fibres alight and locking him in.

6. Indirectness

Emil’s bludgeoning of Pat is not directly shown on camera but through the use of

shadows that portray Emil lifting the ashtray above his head before forcefully bringing

it down. The use of looming shadows applies the semantics of horror in order to

render Emil’s crime all the more diabolical, recalling Lampwick’s terrifying

transformation in Pinocchio that similarly uses shadows to render the scene all the

more horrific. The horror of Emil’s actions is reinforced when the Frame’s

housekeeper Frieda discovers Pat’s body. Again, the shot does not directly show the

discovery; however blood-curdling scream matched with the denial of vision compels

audiences to imagine the worst. Leroy’s unseen fiery death similarly uses sound to

emphasise the horror of his agonising demise.

7. The Absent Parent

Tomorrow the World plays with the absent parent in two ways. Emil’s father was

killed in a concentration camp as an enemy of the Third Reich, although Emil repeats

verbatim Nazi propaganda concerning his father being a coward and a traitor who took

his own life. His father’s absence is emphasised by the large portrait hanging in the

living room that Emil angrily shreds with his Nazi dagger. Emil readily repeats the lies

about his father as they help him to make sense of his anger at feeling abandoned.

Only when Michael repeats the lies back to Emil does he have a change of mind about

his father. The absent parent is also seen in Michael’s status as a widower who is

308 looking to remarry. Emil easily dupes Michael while his fiancé Leona sees through his

performance as an innocent orphan. When Michael travels to Washington D.C. (like

Rhoda’s father in The Bad Seed), his absence as de facto father figure seems to trigger

Emil’s monstrosity, which worsens in his absence.

According to Paul the above elements that originated with The Bad Seed recur in horror films in the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting a synchronic set of conventions pertaining to the monster child horror subgenre. Their appearance in Tomorrow the World confirms that

Fenton’s film not only needs to be added to the existing corpus of monster child films, but likely played a crucial role in establishing the conventions that Paul attributes to The

Bad Seed. While film scholars are yet to recognise the connection between The Bad Seed and Tomorrow the World, or acknowledge the character of Emil Bruckner as making a significant contribution to the postwar development of the monster child horror film, film audiences conducting their own pragmatic readings of the two texts have identified the parallels between the films and published their observations in online reviews. Below are

“user reviews” and comments about Tomorrow the World found on the Internet Movie

Database (IMDb) demonstrating how multiple viewers have discerned the strong similarities that exist between The Bad Seed and Tomorrow the World. Some of the reviews include their observation about The Bad Seed in their titles while others elaborate, as the following shows:

“Before The Bad Seed, There Was …” (Marcslope, 9 Sept. 2001).

309 “Der Schlechte Samen, Deutscher Stil (That's The Bad Seed, German Style)”

(Blanche-2, 30 Jul. 2007).

“The audience quickly becomes concerned for what will happened to the Frame

family, and the guilty pleasure of watching this pre-Bad Seed demon will keep you

on the edge of your sea” (Mrsastor, 16 Dec. 2005).

In a review titled, “Rhoda Penmark Has Met Her Match!!!” Kidboots writes:

Rhoda Penmark, Patty McCormack's child murderess from The Bad Seed, has

almost met her match. Emil intimidates the other children, threatening to murder

a Jewish classmate unless she backs up his lies and he almost kills Pat with a

blow to the head when she threatens to tell her father that Emile [sic] has been

trying to steal his important documents. (14 Sept. 2012)

Poseidon-3 provides a review with the humorous title, “The Bad Seig”, and describes

Tomorrow the World as “an interesting time capsule and a neat precursor to The Bad

Seed”. Poseidon-3 also describes how:

One minute [Emil is] fairly low-key and the next he's a monster. Much like

Patty McCormack in the later The Bad Seed, his supposed cuteness is never

convincing to the audience. He's always visibly evil to everyone except those

right next to him. (8 Nov. 2005)

310 Enigma43’s review, “The Bad Seed—Nazi Style”, also mentions Joseph Ruben’s 1993 horror film The Good Son starring Macaulay Culkin as psychotic killer child, Henry

Evans:

I saw this movie and found it extremely puzzling. The child, Emil, is the least

sympathetic character I have seen since, The Good Son. Emil is cold,

calculating and manipulates the other characters with no conscience

whatsoever. (6 Nov. 2005)

Enigma43’s observation that Emil Bruckner’s malevolent character shares commonalities with The Good Son’s Henry Evans works to inadvertently confirm

Paul’s argument that the key elements gleaned from his close analysis of The Bad

Seed are relevant to later monster child horror films.

Tomorrow the World clearly exists as an important precursor to The Bad Seed and may well have been an unacknowledged, or perhaps unconscious influence on either

William March, Maxwell Anderson, or Mervyn LeRoy in their development of the various iterations of killer child Rhoda Penmark on page, stage and screen. The Bad

Seed has long been expected to carry a heavy freight, as Gunning (87) puts it, in explaining the history of the monster child on screen. While most explanations focus on the film mirroring national concerns about juvenile delinquency, this chapter contends that Hitler Youth and the abiding trauma of war is an even more significant factor. Where Tomorrow the World stresses the importance of the denazification of

Germany’s youth and the complete eradication of National Socialist ideology, in truth the ambitious project of denazifying Germany that was initiated by the United

311 States after the war was too daunting a task. Within two years the US ceased involvement in the program and handed it to the West German government to continue. By 1951 the program was jettisoned by the Germans and deemed a failure.

Although American foreign policy became consumed by the Cold War and halting the spread of communism, for at least a decade after WWII reports continued to come out of Germany about its Nazified youth.

The following section provides an overview of the postwar period in which the ghosts of Nazism and Hitler Youth somehow refused to be relegated to the past. The

Hitler Youth directly challenged the construction of childhood as a time of innocence by shaping children into a deadly threat. They did not just help in the conflict against the Allies but within Germany they waged war within the family, the schoolhouse and the church. Tomorrow the World captures elements of this threat against traditional forms of authority imported from Nazi Germany to the United States.

Despite the defeat of the Nazi in 1945, the Hitler Youth were, even up to the mid-

1950s, a continuing cause for concern as German youth had not yet surrendered their will to defeat and continued to think of Hitler in positive terms as a leader to follow.

Arguably The Bad Seed draws on this undercurrent while also confirming in its depiction of a child as a threatening monster, a change that took place in representations of childhood that have, since the horrors of WWII, shifted away from innocence.

312 5.4 Denazification and The Enduring Presence of Hitler Youth

In Tomorrow the World the nazification of the child was optimistically portrayed as a reversible condition, signalling that the monster child could effectively be unmade. Yet as the previous chapter points out, Emil’s sudden and complete rejection of Nazism paired with the film’s abrupt happy ending feels contrived and unconvincing. As IMDb reviewer

Marcslope facetiously puts it: “it's fairly easy to deprogram these little monsters; all it takes is a bit of loving kindness and a birthday present”. The happy ending superficially obeys classical formula yet the lack of a convincing resolution points to the overwhelming real life problem of how to overhaul an entire culture. In reality when

America finally began its ambitious denazification program, it was quickly deemed quixotic. Perry Biddiscombe notes in his study of the denazification program that “nearly all historians have arrived at the same conclusion” (217), which is to view denazification as a fiasco in which “too much was attempted; too little succeeded” (217). John Herz’ description of how denazification “began with a bang … [but] died with a whimper”

(569) typifies the common critical response to the demise of the program.

Ideally the program of denazification envisioned by the United States’ would purge

German businesses and bureaucracies of all Nazis. However, the ambitious project proved so monumental that within two years the Americans had mostly become overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of an endeavour that potentially implicated hundreds of thousands of Germans. After two years the Americans handed the program over to

West Germans to administer who finally ended the initiative in 1951. Despite the best

313 efforts of the Allies to denazify West Germany and install a democratic government in

Bonn, Nazism was never actually purged from Germany’s political landscape. While many Nazi bureaucrats were removed from their positions, with some facing incarceration, many more in significant roles were never called to account for their actions and in fact prospered within their respective businesses or bureaucracies.

A key contributor to the failure of denazification was America’s deteriorating Cold War relations with the Soviets, prompting the nation to shift its focus from erasing the possible future threat of Nazism to concentrating its efforts on halting the spread of Communism.

To complicate matters further, Allied denazification was not a single program. Rather, each of the occupying forces had its own program of denazification, applied exclusively to its own occupied territory. Of concern to the US was the Soviet program in occupied

East Germany where the local population putatively traded in one form of totalitarianism for another while its Hitler Youth, with few modifications, became the Freie Deutsche

Jugend (FDJ) or Free German Youth, a movement that so closely resembled the Nazi’s program that it was deemed in 1950 by Time a “near-perfect reincarnation of the Hitler

Youth” (“Kids” 30). Likewise, the New York Times highlighted in a series of articles in

1950 how the FDJ were fashioned after Nazi youth programs. One report published on

April 4 noted how the communist youth in East Germany were “modelled after the Hitler

Youth, with an estimated membership of 2,000,000 youths, who receive paramilitary training” (“Arms” 28) while a second article from May 1 confirmed that the FDJ “sang the old songs of the Hitler Youth movement with new communist words” (“Allies” 3).

Clearly while Communism was a concern, of greater concern was the enduring appeal of

314 totalitarianism for East Germany’s youth—whether it originated from the right or the left—fuelling trepidation in Britain and America that Nazism in one form or another will one day again find its way back into a position of power.

While fears of Communism in the United States were fanned by the pernicious witch- hunts conducted by the FBI, Senator McCarthy, the HUAC and other legislative bodies established to determine the (dis)loyalty of Americans targeted in government roles and other positions of influence, American anxieties concerning fascism were not dispelled with the end of the war. If anything, the moral panic cooked up around Communism after

WWII reminded some people of the Nazis’ violent and defamatory strategies against

German Communists before 1933. In his criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fascist tactics, Ralph Flanders, the Republican senator for Vermont, attacked McCarthy’s extreme right politics, comparing it to Nazism in his address from the floor of the senate in early June 1954. Flanders claimed that American Jews were rightly afraid of McCarthy and accused the Wisconsin senator of troublingly anti-American behaviour that extended to demonstrating a “strange tenderness” for the “Nazi ruffians” who had participated in the infamous “Malmédy massacre” in 1944.169 In the same speech, Flanders iterated that,

Senator McCarthy’s “anticommunism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the heart of any defenceless minority” (qtd. in Vials 90), implying that in pockets of the American psyche, fascism remained a far greater threat than Communism.

169 The “Malmédy Massacre” refers to an infamous war crime that took place on 17 December 1944 during the in which a company of 84 unarmed American GIs who had surrendered to a Nazi combat unit—members of the Waffen SS—were gunned down near the Belgian town of Malmédy. James Weingartner states that the incident caused intense outrage in the US and “entered the consciousness of the American people as an example of Axis barbarity alongside the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Bataan ‘death march’” (1).

315 Indeed, an article in the New York Times from 1953 titled “Nazism Hangs On” further demonstrates public concerns about unchecked right wing extremism and how the horrors of Hitler had not been forgotten but were alive and well in 1950s America. The article insists that “Nazism is not dead in Germany” and instructs readers that “materially speaking Nazism was smashed into a pulp by 1945, but the firm and vigorous roots remain … if we are not careful they will grow into a jungle while we concentrate too exclusively on the Communist danger” (22).

The previous chapter discussed how in the concluding years of the war the Allies had entered into talks about what measures might be imposed on Germany to ensure lasting peace and safeguard against a repeat of the horrors of World War II. Roosevelt’s stipulation of unconditional surrender had provided some direction towards denazification insomuch as orchestrating the full-scale national collapse and division of

Germany was believed would induce within an utterly defeated populace a sense of defeat and finality to decades of national militaristic aggression. Even before the war had concluded, Germany’s youth had been specifically identified as a crucial target for re- education. Taylor notes that young Germans had grown up with nothing but Hitlerism, and “twelve years of brainwashing in the Nazi party’s youth movements and the Reich’s increasingly politicized school system would, it was thought, have turned them into willing tools of last-ditch Nazi bosses” (34). Such concerns were not unfounded as for a number of years following the war small enclaves of Hitler Youth continued to attack

Allied camps and commit acts of sabotage.

316 Referring to itself as the party of youth, the Nazis strongly believed that “he who wins the hearts of youth, wins power” (Middleton SM17) and extreme indoctrination of the young had been a crucial tenet of the party. It was thus recognised that a careful program of re- education would need to be introduced to convince children who had grown up Hitler fanatics to eschew the only belief system they had ever known. However, as Hermann

Röhrs attests, despite initial enthusiasm for re-education, which “represented a particularly promising new beginning” (148), within a nation decimated by war and without adequate infrastructure, education was “placed low on the priority list, following demilitarisation and denazification” (153) so that “a unique opportunity to guarantee peace after the most destructive of all wars by means of a struggle to implement education for peace in theory and practise was thus passed over for the most part” (161).

One of the early key attempts at re-education by the US military had been a program operating through various media channels intended to “acquaint the German people with the extent and nature of concentration camp atrocities” (Janowitz 141) and induce a sense of collective responsibility. While the Allies had been horror-struck at the mass exterminations and inhuman conditions in the concentration camps, they found in the first post-war years that many Germans showed little remorse or moral sensitivity and deflected responsibility for the atrocities on to the party or the SS.

In the ten years following the war, anxieties remained about the future of Germany and whether the nationalist that had allowed for Hitler’s rise could be purged from the German condition. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw Germany’s youth exhibit signs that they still preferred the structure of Nazism and the authoritarian charisma and

317 decisiveness of Hitler’s leadership to the untidy freedom of democracy. According to

Lasky, in 1955 anxieties about Germany’s youth and the remnants of National Socialism were “being raised by all the nations among the NATO alliance” (SM12). Reviewing a series of survey questions targeting postwar German youth, Douglas Porch reveals that there remained positive sentiments for Hitler’s leadership and life under the Third Reich.

He writes:

Surveys taken a full decade after the war discovered that a majority of Germans

still believed that ‘Germany's best time in recent history had been during the first

years of the Nazis.’ A significant minority opined that ‘Nazism was a good idea

badly carried out’ and believed ‘Hitler was a great German leader’. (38)

All of this indicates that despite the war being over for ten years, memories of National

Socialism and universal outrage over Nazi atrocities, as well as anxieties about the possibility of its resurgence were still current a decade later. Close textual analysis of

LeRoy’s The Bad Seed in the next section provides clues to how the film reflects some of these anxieties in its application of Nazi eugenics and Hitler Youth iconography.

318 5.5 Hitler Youth Rhoda

At the end of World War II, propaganda films containing Hitler Youth no longer served any purpose and the character seemingly disappeared from cinema. However, the Hitler

Youth underwent a generic shift from the war drama to horror, resurfacing as the monster child. As Rilla’s alien children in Village of the Damned demonstrate, the and straight-armed salutes may have vanished but other signifiers of the Nazi threat remained deeply embedded in representations of monster children in film: Nordic features, immaculate presentation, self-reliance, contempt for traditional forms of authority, emotionlessness and disdain for sentimentality, a fervent belief in the doctrine of might is right, and a tendency to degrade and dehumanise others. All of these characteristics associated with the Hitler Youth came to typify representations of monstrosity in children. The section that follows will show how particular elements of the Nazified monster child are discernible in the character of The Bad Seed’s Rhoda Penmark.

Early in his novel, as March is introducing Rhoda to the reader, he provides details of her physical appearance that focus specifically on her hair. He describes how her locks were

“straight, finespun and of a dark brown … plaited precisely in two narrow braids which were looped back into two thin hangman nooses, and were secured, in turn, with two small bows of ribbon” (6). March’s Rhoda is a pretty child though her dark brown hair is unremarkable except for how it is fastidiously fashioned. Being a predator, the ordinariness of Rhoda’s hair is crucial if she is to blend in and go unnoticed. Yet something curious occurred when March’s novel was adapted to the stage, and

319 subsequently the screen.

When Reginald Denham produced Maxwell Anderson’s Bad Seed in 1954, he cast the already seasoned 10-year-old television actor Patty McCormack to play the part of

Rhoda. McCormack then went on to reprise her role as Rhoda in LeRoy’s 1956 motion picture adaptation of Anderson’s play. Arguably, McCormack’s naturally platinum blond hair significantly changes how audiences might visually interpret her character.

According to Richard Dyer, “blondeness, especially platinum (peroxide) blondeness, is the ultimate sign of whiteness” (Heavenly 43) where to be white is to signify purity. 170

He highlights how, “in western tradition, white is beautiful because it is the colour of virtue” (White 72). Exploring the conflation of whiteness with purity, Jeannette Delamoir suggests that because many Caucasian children are born with blond hair that changes colour as they age, blondness came to be conflated with the innocence of infancy, characterised by “undeveloped sexuality, fragility and lack of personal authority” (51).

Rhoda’s excessive whiteness creates a sense of cognitive dissonance between blondness as a signifier of innocence and purity while confirming the inherent corruptibility of the

Aryan child that willingly served as a tool of Nazi terror. Confirming how Rhoda’s whiteness operates as a signifier of Nazi eugenics, Perin Gurel describes her appearance as “blonde and Nazi-like” (142).

As Gurel’s comment attests, the change in hair colour from the dark brown pigment

170 Dyer is concerned with the race politics of whiteness and how whiteness, as a signifier of purity, is applied within western culture to exclude itself from notions of race. Because whiteness is held as a cultural signifier of normal, the category “race” is applied to those that are non-white. Such a strategy holds whiteness as the epitome of humanness, implying that non-whiteness occupies a sub-human status.

320 described in March’s novel to the platinum blondness in LeRoy’s film signifies the Aryan ideal Alice Hamilton describes in her 1933 article on Hitler’s immense youth following.

Hamilton describes how Germany’s youth gladly and unquestioningly accepted the

Nazis’ assertion that the Nordic race is superior to all others:

All the young men and girls accept Hitler’s fantastic theories about ‘pure

Germanism’ and the superiority of the Aryan type, and that girl is most envied who

can display two long braids of yellow hair. It is true that yellow hair and blue eyes

are not as common in some parts of Germany as the Nazis could wish, but peroxide

helps and there is said to be a great demand for it now. (16)

The Nazi fixation with the Nordic ideal is made abundantly clear in their description of

Nordic characteristics in the first chapter of The Nazi Primer: The Official Handbook for the Hitler Youth. The primer defines the ideal Nazi specimen in the following terms:

He has, according to our discoveries, limbs which are large in proportion to the

body. That suits our sense of beauty. … The skin is light, rosy-white, and delicate.

In contrast to the skin of many other races it is distinguished by a lack of

pigmentation. The hair is smooth, wavy, thin, and fine. Its color varies from light to

golden blond. (16-18)

The Nazis eugenics program was not limited to physical features but also included “traits of mind and soul” that “concentrate upon entire groups of people belonging to a particular race rather than upon individual representatives” (20). To this end, the Nordic ideal is described as:

uncommonly gifted mentally. It is outstanding for truthfulness and energy. Nordic

men for the most part possess, even in regard to themselves, a great power of

321 judgement … Their energy is displayed not only in warfare but also in technology

and in scientific research. They are predisposed to leadership by nature. (20)

Like the Aryan ideal noted by Hamilton, Rhoda also sports two perfectly formed blond braids. Where young girls will often have someone else, usually their mother, braid their hair for them, Rhoda always insists on braiding her hair herself, demonstrating her total self-reliance. Indeed, Rhoda is so lacking in flaws that it increasingly troubles her mother.

Confiding in Miss Fern, the headmistress at Rhoda’s school, Christine describes how

“there’s a mature quality about her that’s disturbing in a child”, referring not just to her daughter’s autonomy and self-reliance, but also to her emotional opacity.

Paul observes that Rhoda’s monstrousness comes as a result of her precocity and self- sufficiency. He describes how she has “defences so strong she seems to lack any emotional vulnerability” (273). Christine is unsettled by Rhoda’s lack of dependency and tries to gain access into her daughter’s impenetrable inner world. When she drops Rhoda off at the school picnic, Rhoda greets Miss Fern with what the pedagogue describes as a

“perfect curtsey”. For Christine, Rhoda’s mastery of all that she does is disturbing. As

Rhoda is sent off to join the other children, Christine lingers for a moment with Miss Fern to voice her concerns about her daughter. Enquiring after Rhoda, she asks “Is she always as perfect in everything as she was in her curtsey?” When Miss Fern confirms this to be the case, Christine gets to the heart of her concerns, stating:

There’s a mature quality about her that’s disturbing in a child and my husband I

thought that a school like yours where you believe in discipline and old-fashioned

virtues might, well, perhaps teach her to be a child.

322 Paul affirms that the disturbing aspect for Christine is that Rhoda has “taught herself self- control” (274) and needs neither her parents nor teachers. Christine in fact exhibits a similar compulsion to that of the Governess in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw while

Rhoda shares commonalities with Miles and Flora who possess knowledge that violates the reductive and unreasonable Victorian ideal of innocence imposed on children.171

When Christine refers to “old-fashioned virtues”, she is gesturing towards the Victorian ideal of childhood that frames innocence as its most natural state. Contrary to Ariès’ assertion that childhood is a mutable social construct, Christine’s evocation of Victorian childhood demonstrates that its antiquated ideas persist into the present. Kincaid describes this tendency of the Victorians as a form of absolutism wherein adults insist on complete transparency from the child, who must not have any “reservations, no withholding some secret part of itself that is the Right of the Being (not the child) to claim” (81). Rhoda’s independence and opacity revolts against such absolutism and, as

Christine’s conversation with Fern shows, contributes towards her construction as monstrous. Yet among the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany these same characteristics were highly valued and encouraged. Describing how his new order needed to begin with training up children in his youth leadership academy, Hitler explained:

In my Ordensburgen a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back.

A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after.

Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no

weakness of tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride

and independence of the beast of prey. (qtd in Rauschning 252)

171 In The Rise and Fall of Childhood, historian C. John Sommerville writes that, “the Victorian idealization of childhood grew out of repression, and encouraged further repression” (204).

323

In Nazi Germany during the 1930s parental authority was progressively eroded as the

Hitler Youth movement played an ever-increasing role in controlling the lives of the nation’s children. Epstein describes how the Nazis sought to build a “new kind of person

… ‘masters’ of a new world order” (73). According to Rempel, the Nazis actively seduced the young and incited youthful rebellion, harnessing intergenerational antagonism. Describing what he calls “institutionalized Oedipal revolt”, Rempel observes how the Nazis on the one hand paid lip service to youth respecting their parents and obeying traditional models of authority while on the other they were “continually directing the young against the parental home, church, school and other out-dated forms and role models … assum[ing] the central role in the rebellion of sons against their fathers” (28).172 In classrooms educators were infuriated by the behaviour of Hitler Youth students, who “rejoiced in their contempt for school authority and school learning”

(Spielvogel and Redles 167), yet they dared not enforce any disciplinary measures for fear of reprisals.

In The Bad Seed, Rhoda’s contempt for adults is clear. She sweet-talks and manipulates the adults around her but, as Crowther observes, “postures with such calculation” (39) and parades about wearing a mask of innocence. Occasionally she will let her contempt show. When school headmistress Miss Fern calls in to talk with Christine about the death

172 An article in the New York Times from 21 April 1935 titled “Morals of Youth in Reich Deplored” confirms how the National Socialist’s methods sought to drive a wedge between Germany’s youth and traditional forms of authority. The article explains how the Nazis’ youth training programs removed children from “the influence of the home [and] is breaking down the bases of the old Germany modesty and morality, as well as parental authority” (10F). In response to these claims, youth leader Baldur von Schirach denied these accusations, though issued “declarations to his youth groups admonishing them to obey and honor their parents” which, the article notes, has “had little effect” (10F).

324 of Claude Daigle, Rhoda is in her room practising on the piano. The moment Miss Fern mentions that Claude’s penmanship medal is missing, the piano playing ceases and

Rhoda appears from her room. She glides over to the side of the sofa where Miss Fern is perched, looking visibly uncomfortable to be in the 8-year-old’s presence. Rhoda stands over the woman with a smile that also contains a sneer and performs her perfect courtesy to the headmistress before conspicuously ignoring the woman and speaking with her mother in a pleasant though patronising tone about sitting outside to read her book. When she has finished, Rhoda looks down her nose at Miss Fern, repeats her curtsey, and says goodbye using a polite yet thoroughly icy tone.

For Rhoda, sentiment and tenderness have no use except as emotions to be exploited.173

She understands that adults are gratified by displays of affection from children and manipulates them accordingly. Chuck Jackson sees her performance of sentimental emotions as a form of game with “constructed stories and rehearsed scripts that prevent the mother from knowing the evil that lurks beneath her daughter’s cute exterior. For

Rhoda, a ‘game’ is … connected to lying, performing, and power” (72). After Christine learns the truth about Rhoda’s sociopathy, the game she plays with her parents to maintain their affection (What would you give me for a basket of kisses? I’d give you a basket of hugs) shifts from being cute to chilling. In another example, Rhoda reveals early on in the film her disdain for the Penmarks’ self-described “effusive upstairs

173 Incidentally, contempt for displays of emotion are the subject of another monster child film also released in 1956 titled The Gamma People, directed by . Set in a fictitious Germanic Eastern Bloc nation nestled in the Alps, the film draws heavily on Hitler Youth imagery with a group of uniformed young boys who work with an evil dictator to keep the local adult population under terrified control. A young boy named villain betrays his own family when they plead for their lives, snapping back aggressively: “Sentiment has no place in our philosophy”. The scene is reminiscent of a scene in The Man I Married in which a young Hitler Youth betrays his own brother and father to the Gestapo and there are murdered.

325 neighbour”, Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden) is always presenting Rhoda with gifts and on this occasion it is a necklace with a garnet. Ingratiating the old woman with disingenuous affection, Rhoda croons, “Oh, Aunt Monica. Dear sweet Aunt Monica!” and embraces her. With her face momentarily concealed from the old woman but seen by the audience, Rhoda’s sweet expression instantaneously distorts into a hateful grimace that just as quickly disappears when the embrace ends, returning to a sweet smile (figure

20).

Image Not Included

Figure 20: Rhoda’s concealed disdain for needy Mrs Breedlove

Early in The Bad Seed, Christine has lunch with Monica, her brother Emory (Jesse

White), and true crime writer Reginald Tasker (Gage Clarke). Dominating the conversation, Monica shares her experience of meeting Freud and becoming an amateur enthusiast of psychoanalysis. She compulsory pathologises her guests and pushes

Christine to engage in a session of word association. Christine confesses a secret feeling she has had throughout her life that she is adopted and Monica quickly dismisses it as a common infantile fantasy. Discussing his work in true crime writing Reginald shares with the group his fascination with new research into heredity that is investigating the

326 connection between genetics and criminal behaviour. At Emory’s morbid insistence

Reginald rehashes details of a notorious true crime case he covered early in his career involving a serial killer named Bessie Denker who murdered her victims using poison.

When Emery first presses Reginald to re-tell the true-life tale of the murderess, the chilly sound of harpsichord music can be heard faintly under the dialogue. According to Janet

Halfyard, along with the church organ, the harpsichord is heard “more often in horror films than in any other genre” (“Mischief” 21) because “something in the sound and the nature of the harpsichord’s action seems to lend itself to a particular kind of calculated evil in films” (“Music” 179).174 Indeed, the spidery sound of the harpsichord infuses the scene with a sense of something sinister that underlines the importance of Bessie Denker.

Reginald describes her uncommonly charming and that it was this charm that saw her acquitted three times in three separate trials. He calls her “the most amazing woman in all the annals of homicide: she was beautiful, she had brains, she was ruthless and she never used the same poison twice”. At the mention of Denker’s name, Christine becomes visibly unsettled, as though it evokes some long forgotten dream. “Did you say—Denker?” she asks remotely.

The conversation about Bessie Denker stays with Christine and after finding Claude

Daigle’s missing penmanship medal in Rhoda’s treasure box, she invites Reginald Tasker for drinks and probes him about the notion of inherited criminality, under the guise of doing research for a true crime story she plans to write. During their conversation

174 Exploring how the mechanics of the harpsichord contribute to its uncanny aesthetic, Halfyard explains how “the strings are plucked and not struck [which] means that the player cannot expressively influence the sound of an individual note. Unlike the piano, when you strike a note on the harpsichord it simply sounds or does not … There is, by extension, something inhuman in the nature of the instrument: it resists mediation by human agency in a way that a piano does not” (“Music” 179).

327 Christine’s father Richard Bravo (Paul Fix) arrives and the two men lock horns on the topic of nature versus nurture in the production of the criminal mind. Contradicting

Richard, who insists arguments for heredity are flawed, Reginald offers this counter- argument:

Well, I couldn’t prove you wrong sir, but some fellow criminologists, including

some behaviour scientists, have begun to make me believe we’ve been putting too

much emphasis on environment and too little on heredity. They cite a type of

criminal born with no capacity for remorse or guilt, no feeling of right and wrong.

Born with a kind of brain that may have been normal in human fifty thousand years

ago … It’s as if these children were born blind … and you just couldn’t expect to

teach them to see.

Troubled by this news, Christine’s thoughts clearly turn to her daughter and she asks how one might identify such a person. Reginald explains that such a task is near impossible:

“More often they present a more convincing picture of virtue than normal folks”.

Alone with her doting father, Christine finally receives confirmation that she is adopted.

She shares with him a dream she has had throughout her life in which she is a little girl hiding from a woman she knows to be her mother. Although the woman calls out to her sweetly, in the dream Christine is terrified and somehow understands that were she to emerge from her hiding place, the woman would kill her. With a chill, Christine remembers that the name the woman keeps calling her is Ingold Denker and she realises the dream is a repressed memory and that her daughter is the granddaughter of serial killer Bessie Denker. Realising Rhoda has effectively been “born blind”, Christine is

328 overcome with shame and grief. She strikes at her womb with her fists, cursing herself as the carrier of a horrifying heredity. The revelation that Rhoda has inherited her grandmother’s murderous pathology introduces the theme of eugenics, a theme that is central to The Bad Seed.

In America, eugenics had been researched and practiced since the turn of the century and its programs of sterilisation and laws criminalising miscegenation are argued by Edwin

Black to have inspired the Nazi practices of eugenics that included sterilisation, infant abductions, euthanasia and, ultimately, . 175 When the extent of Germany’s atrocities were revealed after the war, inciting calls for extreme measures against the

Germans and denouncing the German national character,176 eugenics became a dirty word and researchers in the field, faced with “a daunting public relations problem” (Gonder 36) disavowed any connection with the derisively retitled “pseudo-science”.177 With the migration away from eugenics, research into the behavioural sciences flourished (Plomin

175 Black explains that the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany were initially inspired by American eugenics research and practices. He describes how, “using the power of money, prestige and international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported their philosophy to nations throughout the world, including Germany” (7). He adds that, “decades after a eugenics campaign of mass sterilization and involuntary incarceration of ‘defectives’ was institutionalized in the United States, the American effort to create a super Nordic race came to the attention of Adolf Hitler” (7). 176 After the war, when the extent of Nazi savagery was revealed to the public, many called for strong punishments against the nation. Maureen Waller describes reactions by Londoners to an exhibition of photographs of the concentration camp atrocities, with onlookers expressing a sentiment that Helmut Böhme asserts was commonly heard in Germany amongst the Allies: “there’s no good German but a dead German” (122). One observer declared, “After seeing the exhibition, I feel we ought to shoot every German. There’s not a good one amongst them”, while another condemned “the rottenness of the whole German race” (113). In a darkly ironic twist, the blanket condemnation of the German character and calls for its annihilation for the betterment of humanity bear a marked resemblance to the eugenics-inspired ideology that the Nazis used to justify their own program of racial purification. The idea that all Germans, as Vansittart would have it (see n122 in chapter 4), are genetically tarnished with the same ruthless warmongering brush is as specious as the Nazis’ claims about the Jews. 177Plomin and Asbury point out how genetic research ceased abruptly after WWII when the world became “sickened by Nazi war crimes and all that was associated with them” (87). They state that the Nazis’ abuse of eugenics was “high-profile and terrifying to a world in mourning, a world whose way of life had been threatened” (87).

329 and Asbury 87). In The Bad Seed Monica Breedlove’s persistently clumsy application of psychoanalysis reflect this change, which ultimately leads to Christine recovering repressed memories and facing her fears about being adopted. Reviewers were quick to discredit March’s use of heredity to explain Rhoda’s teratology. August Derleth criticises the novel’s emphasis on genes determining moral behaviour. He argues that, “the granddaughter of a murderess is no more likely to be a murderess than the granddaughter of a seamstress” and opines that The Bad Seed “would have been a stronger novel without this false premise” (4). Frank Finney likewise declares, “the theme of the novel is based on a questionable premise” and highlights that “much medical opinion is opposed to this deterministic viewpoint” (95). And Joseph Henry Jackson suggests that, “not all readers will accept the author’s putting the whole load on heredity” and refers to this as a “weak spot” (35) in March’s novel.

While the pejorative response to March’s use of biology and heredity as causal factors in

Rhoda’s psychopathy represent a self-conscious cultural shift away from eugenics, Karen

Renner points out in her essay on juvenile psychopaths in 1980s and 1990s cinema that research into genetics in the 1970s onwards played a contributing role in generating filmmaker and audience fascination with child psychopathy, where “violence bred in the bone is so powerful as to be resistant or immune to environmental influences” (“Child

Psychopath” 197). She notes that a resurgence of interest in biological causes for behavioural traits came about with the findings of studies into twins separated at birth that grow up in different environments yet exhibit identical behavioural traits. Eerily recalling the Nazi fascination with twins, the results of these studies imply that “genetics

330 was far more important than environment in determining personality and behaviour”

(197). Although Renner does not mention The Bad Seed, it is clear that in all but its year of release LeRoy’s film fits her criteria of child psychopathy. That the late twentieth century boom of child psychopath films was in part informed by the revival in genetics research works to confirm the significance of Nazi eugenics in explaining Rhoda

Penmark’s deadly pathology.

At the start of this chapter the discussion of Village of the Damned included an exploration of how the film contains a carnivalesque core in which adult/child power relations are inverted as adults become subject to the wills of children. The following final section of this chapter returns to the carnivalesque in order to demonstrate how The

Bad Seed similarly exhibits strong imagery of carnival inversion.

331 5.6 The Carnivalesque Horror of The Bad Seed

Throughout this thesis the argument has been made that monster children are fundamentally carnivalesque characters who turn the world upside down, inverting hierarchies of power as they rebel against the established order. The Bad Seed operates as a rich example of a carnivalesque text in its use of characteristic features of carnival, such as crowning and uncrowning, masks and masquerade, the presence of a “feast” that operates as the catalyst for the monster child’s mischief and, connected to this, the element of cycles and their connection to seasons, and of course the inversion of adult/child power relations.

Throughout his discussion of the medieval carnival in Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin repeatedly impresses on his readers the diametric opposition existing between the medieval cultures of the ruling class and the marketplace. Representing high and low cultures respectively, the stratification of medieval feudal society was understood as ordained by God. To represent the social hierarchy in a way that was instantly comprehensible to all, the human body was imbued with what Bakhtin calls

“topographical connotations” (21). Symbolically dividing the body into sections along lines of class and spiritual authority with “the clergy as constituting the head … [and] the peasants the feet” (Grimm 11) with head being up and the feet down. According to

Bakhtin “upward” and “downward” have strict connotative values here so the up points to

God, heaven and the spirit while down points to the earth, the body and the grave. During carnival times the world is turned upside down so that all that is low is elevated while that

332 which is high is cast down to earth and degraded. The practise of raising up what Bakhtin calls the “lower bodily stratum” and symbolically casting down the upper body and head is a pivotal motif of the carnival. So too, the crowning and uncrowning that takes place during carnival times involves the coronation of a mock king or pope that parodies the ruling class that presides over the established order. At carnival’s end the mock monarch is uncrowned and cast down, staging an ersatz revolution that overthrows the existing order.

The Bad Seed plays with ideas of high and low, of casting down and elevating, which starts on the day of the Fern Country Day School annual picnic by the lakeside. In his analysis of Hollywood cinema, Stam observes that, “carnival motifs at times show up in surprising places” and adds that in some cases “a film’s diegesis may take place against the backdrop of a ‘real’ carnival” (113), such as the fairground in Penny Marshall’s Big

(1988) in which Josh Baskin () makes a wish that turns his world upside down. Stam’s point is important because it opens up the potential of what we might consider carnival motifs. Bakhtin notes how “the feast (every feast) is an important primary form of human culture” (8) and contains carnivalesque potential. He later adds that “every feast in addition to its official, ecclesiastical part had yet another folk carnival part” (82).

Bakhtin writes of the “gradual narrowing down” of the carnival in western culture over the centuries as the feast shifted from the public to the private sphere, yet he also affirms that the carnival has not disappeared and “still continues to fertilize various areas of life

333 and culture” (34). Although the school picnic is an official feast organised and controlled by pedagogues charged with authority over children, the event nevertheless contains carnivalesque potential that is released with Rhoda’s deviousness and her acquisitive appetite that is so insatiable as to be almost Rabelaisian. After Kenneth leaves for

Washington D.C., Christine walks Rhoda to the picnic at the lakeside park. As they arrive, the sound of laughter along with cries of joy and excitement are heard and a shot of the expansive play area shows a swarm of children running and jumping, throwing balls, skipping rope and playing various games. As the children play Christine walks with

Miss Fern while she prepares the picnic tables for lunch with party favours placed beside every plate. The free and familiar atmosphere approximates that of a carnival feast that is then subjugated by bourgeois values that seek to control the behaviour of participants.

One child who attempts to run down to the jetty by the lakeside is caught by a teacher and sternly forbidden to play near the jetty.

Commenting on the commonness of feasts, parties and other celebrations in monster child films, Martin observes that these social events often operate as “the catalyst for the inversion of adult/child power relations” and proposes that “this is because the festive event offers a rare opportunity for children to escape the constant adult surveillance that locks them in to fixed roles of innocence” (207). Already we saw how Emil Bruckner in

Tomorrow the World tries to kill Patricia with the fire poker in the basement. That his act of savagery coincides with his birthday party serves to reinforce Martin’s assertion that the feast unleashes the carnivalesque potential of the monster child. In The Bad Seed

Rhoda explains to her mother how during the picnic she chased Claude Daigle out on to

334 the jetty and, as it happens, beyond the range of adult scrutiny, disregarding the strict rules set down by the feast organisers.

Throughout this thesis, mention has been made of childhood innocence as a vehicle of oppression that favours the weak, dependent, sweet-natured and non-threatening child as the dominant construct of childhood. If, as this thesis maintains, the monster child wages war against the established order and oppressive constructions of childhood, then this revolt against innocence may well place them in opposition against the innocent child. In

The Bad Seed the innocent child is Claude Daigle. During one of her visits to the

Penmark’s apartment, Hortense Daigle describes her son Claude to Christine. She says,

“He was such a lovely, dear little boy. He used to say I was his sweetheart and he was going to marry me when he grew up”. Higonnet notes that within the romantic construction of childhood innocence, death holds a grim yet especially significant appeal.

Because the body of the dead child “is one that never did and never will know desire”, this permits adults to engage in uninhibited fantasies about the innocence of lost children and “project the full measure of their longing” (30).

Even before his death, Claude is elevated with the award of the penmanship medal even though, according to Rhoda, she has the superior handwriting. For Miss Fern and the teachers at Fern Country Day School, Rhoda is unnerving because, unlike Claude, she is more like the alien children of Midwich because she is “too self-reliant a child” and does not behave in a way that is mandated by society. She excels at all she does—a particularly pronounced problem of gender in the postwar period as women were being

335 pushed back into roles of subservience. At the picnic Claude’s “crowning” is soon followed by his uncrowning at Rhoda’s hands, made all the more potent as a carnivalesque symbol because she uses her shoe to repeatedly hit him over the head, literalising the hierarchical reversal of the topographical elements of human body used to signify social status in medieval feudal society.

In Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque reversal of the body, the upper and lower bodily stratum are reversed in “a system of flights and descents into the lower depths” with “the buttocks persistently trying to take the place of the head and head that of the buttocks”

(353). The lower bodily stratum, as we have already seen in Rabelais’ story of Friar

Tickletoby in Book III chapter XIII of Gargantua and Pantagruel demonstrates, also includes the feet as part of the lower bodily stratum. Having fallen off his spooked mare, the friar is dragged head first over rough terrain until his body is dashed all to pieces and only “his right foot and twisted sandal” (134) remain wedged in the stirrup. Medieval historian Harold Grimm also confirms the topographical significance of the feet in the medieval feudal hierarchy, noting how “the clergy is constitutive of the head … the peasants the feet of the corporate body” (11). In Grimm’s medieval conception of the human body as a map of the social hierarchy, the feet are representative of the lowest classes while the head represents the highest. Rhoda’s actions symbolically upend this hierarchy by beating Claude over the head with her shoe. Also, when Claude falls in the water, Rhoda is positioned above him and continues to beat him over the head using a downward motion. The symbolic importance of this downward action is made clear by

Bakhtin as he describes how up and down have “an absolute and strictly topographical

336 meaning. ‘Downward’ is earth, upward is heaven” (21).

Both Village of the Damned and The Bad Seed demonstrate the prominence of carnivalesque motifs in the monster child film, showing also how these films continue the legacy of early silent cinema. In both, ritual inversion plays an important role as the child, wearing a mask of innocence, assumes power and control over unsuspecting adults.

337 Summary

According to Adam Lowenstein 1960 stands as an important date in horror film history.

With the release of Hitchcock’s Psycho, the year is “credited with ushering in modern horror” (7). The new age of horror that emerged from the trauma of World War II saw

“all-too human threats replace gothic, other-worldly monsters and graphic violence [that] replaces suggested mayhem” (7). Also released in 1960, Village of the Damned represents a curious admixture of “other-worldly” and “too human” threats with its human-alien hybrid children that share key commonalities with the Hitler Youth children.

Village of the Damned is also significant as it follows on from the chilling melodrama

The Bad Seed in how it maintains and in fact codifies the semantic iconography of Hitler

Youth and Nazi eugenics that render the monster child a significant threat. Village of the

Damned is evidence of how the Hitler Youth influence seen in LeRoy’s 1956 film was not a one-off affair but came to be codified as an important signifier of child monstrosity.

Other monster child films from the period that likewise reinforce the codification of the monster child as an Aryan threat undermining adult authority include The Gamma People

(Gilling 1956), The Space Children (Arnold 1958), These Are the Damned (Losey 1961) and Lord of the Flies (Brooks 1964).

The Bad Seed importantly represents the first postwar film featuring a monster child and has been cited as influencing subsequent monster child films. This chapter has shown how elements of The Bad Seed have been used by Paul to demonstrate the film’s influence on later monster child horror. However these same key elements also call into

338 question the prototypical originary status commonly conferred on The Bad Seed because the 1944 film Tomorrow the World likewise contains the same key elements so that, in the canon of monster child horror films, it is clearly an important predecessor.

The comparison of The Bad Seed and Tomorrow the World highlights the contiguity between the wartime films and emerging monster child horror. While several scholars have casually acknowledged the presence of Hitler Youth iconography in later monster child horror films, the field has until now remained largely unexplored. However, while both The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned anticipate the emergence of later monster child horror films like The Exorcist and The Omen, they also demonstrate how the carnivalesque syntax of the monster child film (in which the child inverts the social order) point to their connection with the early silent bad boy films that established the formula of hierarchical reversals commonly seen in monster child horror.

339 CONCLUSION

This thesis has charted key changes in representations of monster children in western film from the early silent era when it began as a popular comedy stalwart, to the modern horror film where it is today one of the most infamous and enduring of all horror movie villains. The thesis sought to explain how the monster child changed from being a character associated primarily with comedy to one that is today widely considered a stock horror character and denizen of the dark side of cinema. And yet the monster child’s origins in comedy are still legible in horror films where, as William Paul points out, laughing and screaming go hand in hand.

Starting with a qualitative textual analysis of select nineteenth century literary texts, this thesis began by showing how the monster child was already a highly popular figure in western mass culture before the advent of moving pictures. The nineteenth century

American bad boy books inverted and mocked didactic puritanical representations of the devout boy or girl who dies in childhood piously exhorting his or her fellow children to obey their elders. In so doing, these early bad boy books established a template for monstrous childhoods that parodies the ecclesiastical children’s literature of previous centuries while also serving as a durable model for subsequent monster children. With the arrival of cinema, the bad boys of literature found themselves adapted into early silent comedies. The child monster remained a stock character throughout the silent period and with the coming of sound became more complex, splitting into two categories: the

340 loveable rule-breaking trickster and the precocious nasty child who followed the rules but was a self-righteous and mean-spirited fiend aligned with the adult world.

Existing scholarly work on monster children in film has tended to focus on the horror genre and how the monster child reflects particular social anxieties. While the emphasis on horror is understandable as the majority of contemporary films containing monster children are horrors, the problem for scholars researching the history of monster children in film is a seeming reluctance to look beyond horror. Terminology has played a significant role here, as the most common label used for the child in these films is “evil”.

Furthermore, the “evil child” has come to be so ineluctably associated with horror that all other labels, including “monster child”, are likewise associated with the genre. Indeed, the tendency, as William Paul demonstrates in his chapter on the child in gross out horror films, has been to use the terms “monster child” and “evil child” interchangeably. Rather than attempting to come up with an alternative label as other theorists have done, this thesis has co-opted “monster child” and through a discussion highlighting the differences between evilness and monstrosity, severed its ties to evil. The term “monster child” has thus been expanded to include any child that does not conform to the cultural construction of the child as innocent angel, releasing the child subject from its exclusive associations with the horror genre. This has opened up the discourse on monster children, redefining them as empowered perpetrators of tricks and traps targeting unwary adults.

Where the label of “evil child” cannot be legitimately applied to early silent comedies featuring child rascals, “monster child” is a far more elastic term and has broad application across multiple genres, including both comedy and horror. This thesis has

341 thus enabled a broader approach to the trope that, by putting horror to one side, includes early silent slapstick and anti-Nazi wartime dramas.

The monster child horror film presents a version of childhood that challenges the dominant construction of the child as an innocent cherub. Where childhood innocence was initially conceived as representing humanity in its purest form, over time the idea of childhood innocence has evolved into a tool of repression and social control so that innocence today no longer represents an ineffable quality that is lost as the child matures.

Rather, innocence has become a series of deficiencies that elevate the importance of adults as protectors who police childhood, which in turn makes the child all the more socially significant to the adult.

Innocence performed correctly deprives the child of a mind of its own, ensures it has no capacity to discern what is best for its own good or defend itself. It is constructed in such a way to ensure that the innocent child has no self-agency. Modernism has taken this

Lockean construction of the empty child and ingeniously fused it with the Romantic ideal of angelic innocence in order to justify and disguise a form of oppression that rigidly acculturates the child on the pretext of representing its best interests when all the while the social order is busy serving itself. In other words, innocence and oppression become interchangeable concepts for the child that is denied self-agency and an independent voice. This thesis has argued that in horror films featuring child monsters, the child is made monstrous because it transgresses and undermines social constructions of the innocent child. The monster child exposes the delusion that innocence is a natural state,

342 revealing it to be a social construct through its successful performance of innocence. The monster child mocks adult investment in childhood innocence by using it as a mask that adults all-too readily accept. Monster children are threatening because they are knowing, powerful and exert self-agency that they use to subversively attack the status quo and rupture the social order. Setting traps for unwary adults, monster children invert the normative hierarchies of power as adults, blindly trusting in the ideal of childhood innocence, shift from being competent and knowledgeable to becoming ignorant, vulnerable and incapable. In essence, the adult in the monster child film is transformed into the innocent victim by way of a reversal of power relations with the monster child.

Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory, this thesis has shown that the monster child narrative is carnivalesque in nature with hierarchies reversed, masks used to erase identity and social rank, and the established order thrown into a temporary state of turmoil. The inversion of power relations between adults and children is at the core of narratives featuring monster children who turn the tables on their parents and other adult authority figures.

Where the monster child is commonly assumed to have first emerged on screen in the postwar years beginning with Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film The Bad Seed, this thesis has demonstrated that monster children have been present on screen since the birth of cinema.

The narrative syntax in which children undermine adult authority and invert power relations predates cinema and has remained remarkably consistent over time across various media and genres. Beginning with nineteenth century European comic strips, this

343 thesis has shown how the image of children outsmarting adults has a long history in sequential art popularised during the nineteenth century, and becomes consistently visible in the hosepipe gag repeated across numerous European comic strips from the 1880s on.

The Lumière brothers reproduced the hosepipe gag in their 1895 film L’Arroseur arrosé, screened in a public exhibition that is widely considered as constituting the birth of cinema. The simple comic formula involving a child setting up a prank in which an adult is made the victim quickly became a popular and enduring convention as the scenario was endlessly repeated and varied along genre lines during the first fifteen years of early silent cinema. Advancing through to wartime propaganda films and postwar horror, the thesis maintains that the formula of early bad boy films remains legible in later incarnations of child monstrosity on screen. As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, even in more recent films the bad boy formula and can be seen at work in contemporary horror films like The Children (Shankland 2008), Come Out and Play

(Makinov 2012), and the latest remake of The Bad Seed (Lowe 2018).

The major case study films selected for this thesis necessarily span a long period from

1895 through to 1960 as I have demonstrated the enduring influence of early silent bad boy comedies while also arguing for the significant role played by Hollywood representations of Hitler Youth in pushing the monster child toward the horror genre.

Such a broad time span is clearly a limitation of this study as it has meant that whole decades of cinema have been skipped over that contain films that have made an important contribution to the cinema of monster children. The most obvious example of this is the

1930s in which a number of films containing monstrous children were released, including

344 (Taurog 1931), Peck’s Bad boy (Cline 1934), She Married Her Boss (La

Cava 1935), These Three (Wyler 1936), Ballerina (Benoit-Levy 1937), and Maid of

Salem (Lloyd 1938). While Taurog and La Cava’s films are comedies, the other films listed above contain darker subject matter. In his review of the These Three, Graham

Greene praised “the more than human evil of the lying sadistic child … suggested with quite shocking mastery by Bonita Granville”, that “has enough truth and intensity to stand for the whole of the dark side of childhood” (72). Greene’s review points to something taking place during the 1930s that prompted a shift in representations of children and requires further research. While this thesis makes clear that Hollywood’s representations of the Hitler Youth impacted the horror genre’s portrayal of monster children, these earlier films indicate that other factors need to also be taken into consideration, such as the Great Depression and the arrival of synchronised sound in cinema that importantly gave a voice to the monster child.

This thesis has sought to expand the discourse on monster children beyond horror to include earlier iterations of child monsters that help to explain their origins in mass culture. In moving forward, the hope is that this thesis will inspire further research into early cinema iterations of the monster child as well as the impact of wartime representations of the Hitler Youth. In employing the concept of the anti-carnivalesque, the thesis has sought to complicate the identity of the monster child so that, alongside the carnivalesque monster child that turns the world upside down, there also exists a form of child monstrosity that subscribes to monologic ideas about childhood innocence yet is in

345 fact a far more complex creature that deviates from the very innocence it seeks to fulfil through its knowingness, ambitions to acquire power, and creative sadism.

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393 1899.

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Young Scamps. Directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, Hepworth Manufacturing Company, 1907.

394 APPENDIX A: HITLER YOUTH IN WARTIME HOLLYWOOD

Reference is made in chapters 3 and 4 of the thesis to other Hollywood anti-Nazi propaganda films made during the war that feature images of Hitler Youth and Nazified children. In most of these films Hollywood’s portrayal of loyal Nazi children show them to be utter monsters though there are exceptions where obviously innocent children

(coded as innocent by their gentle demeanours and naïve understanding of the world) are shown to be enthusiastic in their pursuit of being good Nazi children. Contained in this appendix are commentaries of the other Hollywood wartime films

I The Man I Married (1940)

In 1940, Fox also released the anti-Nazi propaganda film The Man I Married directed by

Irving Pichel178 that depicts Nazi Germany as an oppressive police state. An underlying theme in the film is the difference in values between the old and the young. Three times in the film older men are presented as an overlooked minority whose values are out of step with the New Order, while the young are represented as cruel, pitiless monsters.

Adapted by Oliver Garrett from a novel by Oscar Schisgall, the story was initially published in serialised form by Liberty Magazine in 1939 and released in book form later that year. Set in 1938 pre-war Germany, Pichel’s film follows US born art critic Carol

178 Humphries notes that one of Pichel’s previous films, the 1932 adventure The Most Dangerous Game co-directed with Ernst B. Shoedsack, was “an anti-fascist allegory whose main character, Count Zaroff, is a cross between Mussolini and a Gestapo officer … whose ideology of the ‘survival of the fittest’ … applies to human beings: he hunts only the latter” (49).

395 Hoffman (Joan Bennett) and her German-American husband Eric (Francis Lederer) who travel with their young son Ricky (Johnny Russell) to Germany to meet with Eric’s elderly father Heinrich Hoffman (Otto Kruger) and make a decision about the family factory. In the few months the couple are in Germany, Eric’s initial positive impressions of the apparent progress the Nazis are making in Germany transforms into blind fanaticism and he joins the party. Meanwhile, Carol sees disturbing scenes of government sanctioned brutality and grows increasingly afraid for herself and her son. The couple grow increasingly distant until Eric announces his intention to marry attractive blond

Frieda (Anna Sten), a zealous young Nazi. Carol’s plans to return to America with her son are curtailed by Eric who intends to keep Ricky and enlist him in the jungvolk, the junior arm of the Hitler Youth. Dismayed by events in Germany and concerned for his grandson’s wellbeing, Eric’s father Heinrich finally confronts Eric and Frieda and reveals that Eric’s mother was a Jew, making both Eric and his son Ricky enemies of the Third

Reich. Sickened, Frieda abandons Eric who is bereft and full of self-loathing while Carol and Ricky return to America.

Released over a year before America entered the war, The Man I Married was amongst the first batch of propaganda films produced by Hollywood after the Nazis banned all

American films from Germany and its occupied territories. Koppes and Black note that the Nazis’ actions removed any financial incentives the studios had to cooperate with the

Germans so that thereafter “Hollywood took its gloves off” (34) and began producing films containing strong anti-fascist sentiments.179 As a propaganda film, The Man I

179 This of course raised the ire of isolationists seeking to preserve America’s neutrality and prevent the nation from being dragged into another war in Europe. The isolationists, led by Republican Senator Gerald

396 Married addresses itself to American audiences sceptical about the negative reports concerning Nazi Germany. Christopher Vials notes that it was mainly in leftist newspapers that criticism of the Third Reich appeared while among conservatives,

“Hitler was a man who would tame unions and radicals, draw on the talents of the elite establishment, enact necessary economic reforms, and restore a sense of national pride to a worthy people” (39). Contradicting such views, The Man I Married unfolds entirely from Carol’s point of view, encouraging audiences to identify with her as she shifts from experiencing the Nazi regime as peaceful and benevolent to cruel and bellicose. The film opens with highly favourable representations of the New Order in Germany and the achievements of the Nazi party. However, as the veil is slowly lifted, the positive image of Nazi Germany is increasingly revealed to be a fabrication while those who put their faith in Hitler and his party are depicted either as evil thugs or indoctrinated dupes.

Carol is unsure about her first impressions of Nazi Germany, but is carried along by

Eric’s enthusiasm. On the train to Berlin, he reads a German newspaper to Carol, marvelling at the low cost of manufacturing radios and cars compared to America.

However, a German passenger exiting their cabin contradicts the positive claims made in the newspaper, stating that radios made in Germany are programed to only receive Nazi broadcasts, and ridicules Hitler’s unfeasible promise of inexpensive automobiles.180

Crucially, the man’s challenge to the claims made in the Nazi press establish a narrative

Nye were convinced that Hollywood was controlled by warmongering Jews with an interventionist agenda and sought to gag the studios. Nye in fact singled out The Man I Married as pro-war propaganda along with sixteen other films produced between 1940 and 1941 (Shull and Wilt 411). 180 Germany had developed a car model intended for mass production that was displayed in 1939 in Berlin, however Wolfgang König points out that even without the interruption of war the German workers’ income remained so low under the Nazis’ policy of “armament and autarky” that “the essential problems of production costs and affordability for consumers” (260) could never be resolved. Consequently any cars, had they been built in the Nazi economy, would have remained an unattainable consumer item.

397 pattern that repeats throughout the film whereby pro-Nazi propaganda, embraced by Eric, is revealed to Carol to be a deception. Two significant scenes involving young German boys follow this established narrative pattern and portray the pint-sized Nazis as merciless monsters.

The first of these scenes takes place in the backstreet of a Czech ghetto in Berlin and recalls the humiliation of Jews in Vienna in the wake of the 1938 Anschluss. 181 In

Pichel’s film, Carol is driving through Berlin with American press correspondent

Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan) who insists she is “one of those people who prides themselves on being fair to the Nazis” but has instead “swallowed Doctor Goebbels’ hook, line and sinker”. Seeking to strip away her preconceptions of Nazism, he stops in a narrow backstreet where Czech nationals are being forced to clear the street of waste deliberately dumped by a garbage truck. Sickened to learn this is a regular occurrence,

Carol watches as German bystanders ridicule the demoralised Czechs. Passing by is a mother and her small blond son, dressed in lederhosen and a shirt buttoned up to the collar much like the Hitler Youth summer uniform. While his mother is disturbed by the display, her son picks up a clod and hurls it at one of the Czechs. She chastises him but, spurred on by the laughter of onlookers and SS officers, the boy points at the Czechs and roars with laughter before his amused expression transforms into a fierce scowl. Spitting at the workers, he savagely shouts “schwein” at them before his mother grips his arm and

181 During the Anschluss, Jewish families in the Austrian capital were taken from their homes and forced on their hands and knees to scrub anti-Anschluss graffiti from the sidewalks. An article in the New York Times titled “Jews Humiliated by Vienna Crowds” details the aftermath of Germany’s annexation of Austria in which anti-Semitic fervour among the Viennese quickly sprang up and made it necessary for Nazi soldiers to actually protect the Jews forced to scrub the streets of the anti-Anschluss graffiti in which “Heil, Schuschnigg!” was painted on the pavements (8).

398 pulls him away. Steinweis notes that the Nazis used German children as “agents of group violence” (60) and encouraged them to commit acts of brutality with impunity. This brief scene in The Man I Married reflects the barbarism fostered within Germany’s children and implies that had his mother not stopped him, the boy’s actions may have escalated.

Later in the film Carol encounters a second German child whose behaviour terrifies her.

Glancing out her apartment window at night she sees in the neighbouring yard old Mr

Friehof from next door struggling to help his wounded son across the lawn. Alarmed, she goes out to help and learns that Friehoff’s son is one of a number being sent to Dachau that evening who escaped. She assists the old man in concealing his son among some bushes just as the Gestapo arrive. At that moment, Friehof’s prepubescent son calls to the

Gestapo from his window and points to the bushes, betraying his father and brother.

When the Gestapo later interrogate Carol about the incident, she learns that both Friehof and his elder son had both met with “accidents” during the night and died. The young

Friehof boy’s betrayal of his father and brother demonstrates Cohen’s assertion that “the

Hitler Youth Organization was notorious for encouraging children to betray their parents”

(229). Rentschler likewise notes that for Germany’s indoctrinated youth “the party superseded family … [and] assumed the central role in the rebellion of sons against their fathers” (58), a tendency clearly and disturbingly on display in Pichel’s film.

Although The Man I Married was released two years before Roosevelt established the

Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942 to consult with Hollywood on the production of propaganda films, it nevertheless carries many of the same messages the

399 OWI would promote. Mandated to maintain the morale of both the troops overseas and the home front while reporting on the enemy to galvanise support for the war effort, the

OWI required the studios present a cross section of representations of Germans ranging from cruel Nazi fanatics to those who opposed Nazism. The Man I Married carefully presents such a cross section of adult characters yet provides only negative images of

German children, establishing for future films a level of monstrosity that would come to define these young characters.

Normally where the monster child in film seeks to undermine the ruling class, in The

Man I Married, the Nazified monster child sides with the authorities in reinforcing the status quo and purging or punishing those dwelling on the margins. Rather than demonstrating the carnivalesque urge to overturn the oppressive regime, these children gladly collude, establishing themselves as anti-carnivalesque in their willing service to the Third Reich.

400 II Four Sons (1940)

Directed by Archie Mayo at 20th Century Fox, Four Sons is a pro-interventionist film that includes among its final scenes an image of pre-adolescent Hitler Youth marching down a country road carrying rifles on their shoulders. The film is, in the words of Bosley

Crowther, warning against the threat posed by “a country where even the children are taught to obey barked commands” (18). It is the first Hollywood film to depict Hitler

Youth and even though the scene is short, it is especially memorable because it comes near the end of the film when the aggression and madness of Nazism has already been clearly spelled out. The squad of children is stopped and ordered to put on gas masks before they continue their march. With masks fitted, the boys are dehumanised as their individual identities erased. Mayo’s film is an updating of the far more artistically accomplished 1928 silent film by John Ford set during WWI.

Ford’s film follows a beloved widow affectionately known as Mother Bernle (Margaret

Mann) who lives in the fictitious Bavarian town of Burgendorf with her four adult sons.

When her son Joseph (James Hall) is invited to America by a colleague to establish a business, Mother Bernle gives him the savings she has scraped together over years to pay for his fare. Before his departure Joseph has an run-in with the cruel and cowardly Major von Stomm (Earle Foxe) who slaps him violently across the face when some loose hay fall from a wagon he is driving on to the Major. After Joseph’s departure, World War I breaks out and Mother Bernle’s two oldest sons Johann (Charles Morton) and Franz

401 (Francis Bushman) are killed in action. Joseph joins the US army and word of this infuriates the Major who labels Mother Bernle a traitor and enlists her youngest son

Andreas into the German army out of spite. Joseph is fighting in Germany with the advancing Americans and encounters Andreas taking his final breath on the battlefield.

Ford provides a happy ending when Mother Bernle (after some complications on Ellis

Island) is reunited in America with her last surviving son, who is married with a son of his own.

Mayo’s Four Sons remake lacks the creativity of Ford’s film but is a effective melodrama, largely because of the central performance of Eugenie Leontovich as Frau

Freida Bern, a WWI widow and mother to the titular four sons. The scene in which she watches the Hitler Youth pause outside her gate to put in their gas masks is made all the more disturbing because she has just received news of the death of her youngest son.

Glimpsed through her eyes, seeing children recruited for war is made all the more tragic and disturbing. Set in the Sudetenland during its annexation by the Nazis, much of the story is similar to Ford’s film and mostly follows the structure I.A.R. Wylie’s original story. Thus, for instance, with Freida uses her life savings to buy passage for her son

Joseph (Robert Lowery)—this time a talented artist—and losing her remaining sons to the insanity of war.

However the film digresses from Ford’s in its incorporation of story elements from

Phyllis Bottome’s 1937 novel, The Mortal Storm, which was adapted in 1940 by Frank

Borzage at MGM. The Mortal Storm shows a close-knit family in a remote German

402 village torn apart over their differing values and opinions of Hitler and Nazism. Likewise,

Four Sons includes a family schism between the two oldest sons Chris (Don Ameche) and Karl (Alan Curtis) over their differing views on the Sudetenland annexation. Karl joins the Nazis while Chris is a member of the Czech underground resistance.

Complicating their relationship is Anna (Mary Beth Hughes), who is engaged to Chris but then falls for and marries Karl. When Chris gets wind of a Nazi plot to assassinate the town mayor and round up resistance members, he flees and is pursued through a swamp.

Karl is with the Nazi pursuers and shoots at Chris, neither brother recognising the other through . Chris shoots back and mortally wounds Karl who is taken home and dies in Anna’s arms. When Anna learns that Chris was her husband’s shooter, she betrays him to the Nazis and he too is shot and killed.

When Freida’s receives word that her teenage son Fritz (George Ernest), conscripted by the Nazis, has been killed during the Nazi invasion of Poland, that same afternoon she watches the pre-adolescent boys march past her house and done their masks and realises the same fate awaits her grandson. She receives word from Joseph in America who sends for her and convinces Anna to join her and spare her son from the madness of war and

Nazi fury. Crowther notes that while the film is highly effective in parts (he points to a scene in which Freida is “presented with a striped ribbon and medal to compensate for her dead sons”), he contends the film “partakes in more sentimental melodrama than of tragedy” and “never achieves a cumulative emotion” (18) for which it seems to be striving.

403 III Hitler’s Children (1943)

Like Disney’s Education for Death, Hitler’s Children is based on Gregor Ziemer’s 1942 bestselling book. The two films opened nine days apart in cinemas in January 1943 with

Hitler’s Children released on the 6th and Disney’s film on the 15th, prompting Life magazine to rightly observe, “it is a rare occasion when two movies are adapted from the same book at the same time” (40). Published in November 1941, Education for Death:

The Making of the Nazi was “extremely popular” (Shale 63) yet so disturbing that it prompted one dismayed book reviewer to exclaim, “this is almost an unbelievable book!”

(Cunningham 369). It became a bestseller that was eventually published in condensed form by Reader’s Digest in its February 1943 issue, reaching an additional readership that Samuel Beckoff estimates being close to forty million.182 Such numbers demonstrate that American audiences were quite familiar with the Hitler Youth movement, or at least

American understandings of the movement that recruited children into its army, challenging traditional constructions of children as innocent.

Adapted for the screen by Emmet Lavery and directed by Edward Dmytryk Hitler’s

Children became one of the RKO’s most profitable films for 1943. Dmytryk writes in his memoir that the film was made for “a little over $100, 000” and “grossed, by some accounts, over $7,500,000” (55) while Richard Jewell Hitler’s Children attracted rentals totalling $3,355,000 (RKO Story 181), earning the film a net profit of $1,210,000 (“Film

182 Beckoff’s 1943 study of Reader’s Digest, then in its twenty-second year of publication, claims that the “biggest little magazine in the world” had achieved a “national circulation of five millions and a possible reading public of forty millions” (325).

404 Grosses” 45). Intended as a B-release, upon seeing the finished film the studio decided instead to release it as an ‘A’ picture (41) that went on to become one of the studio’s most successful box office performers up to that time. Although Hitler’s Children contains the kind of lurid sexual exploitation fare that made the PCA apprehensive, the film was nevertheless given the MPAA imprimatur as it contained, as Koppes and Black put it,

“enough circumlocutions” (299) to rationalise its inclusion of torture, unwed pregnancy and female sterilisation in its narrative. Andrea Slane notes that although much of the lurid content of Hitler’s Children violated the terms of the production code, “as long as it was the nation’s diplomatic enemy that was perverse and immoral, the code’s logic went, these normally disallowed topics could be openly discussed and portrayed” (56). Robert

Fyne notes that the film’s image of Bonita Granville tied up while a uniformed Nazi thug holds a whip became “the most famous image that Hollywood created in its war films”

(89).

Set in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939, Hitler’s Children follows three friends torn apart by ideology and fanaticism: Professor Nichols (Smith) the film’s narrator and the principal of the American Colony School in Berlin;183 feisty German-American student

Anna Miller (Bonita Granville) who graduates from student to teacher at the school, and

Karl Bruner (Holt), an idealistic and devoted young Hitler Youth who attends the Horst

Wessel Schule across the street. The narrative opens much like Ziemer’s book as

Professor Nichols tries to break up a violent brawl between students from the two schools. The professor learns that the uniformed Hitler Youth students instigated the fight

183 The character of Professor Nichols is based on Gregor Zeimer who served as the headmaster of the American Colony School in Berlin from 1928 to 1939.

405 by hurling rocks and abuse at the American students. Noticing the German boys’ teacher

Dr Schmidt (Erford Gage) watching quietly from the sidelines, the professor quizzes him regarding his inaction. Unperturbed, Dr Schmidt explains that his students have a constitutional right to stage a political protest. The professor barks orders in German and the Hitler Youth quickly fall into line, demonstrating their military conditioning. In a series of crosscuts between the respective classrooms of the two schools, the film contrasts the education styles of the Americans with the Nazis. Gathering his students around a table on the lawn outside, the professor leads them in a discussion about

Germany’s claims of lebensraum and what this means for their European neighbours.

While his students animatedly debate the issues, in the Nazi classroom the Hitler Youth sit silent behind desks in neat rows, stiff and straight-backed with eyes fixed forward as

Dr Schmidt lectures them about the . The cuts between the two classrooms create a propaganda-heavy “us-and-them” motif that continues throughout the film as the freedom of American democracy is juxtaposed against Nazi authoritarianism.

When the professor notices Karl developing reciprocal romantic interest in Anna, he invites him on a picnic. The three become friends and during one sojourn into the country, a peripatetic shift transforms the bucolic idyll into horror when Anna, giggling as Karl chases her through the woods, stumbles upon a young boy lying on the ground whose hands and feet have been stretched out and tethered to . Crowther’s review of Hitler’s Children complains, “there are no actual children in the film” (27),184 yet the child Anna encounters in the woods is one of several Nazified young children. Anna’s

184 Crowther’s complaint is mainly directed towards the casting of 23-year-old Holt, who when he first appears in the film is supposed to be in his early teens.

406 laughter turns to shock at the sight of the tortured child and she begins untying him but the boy insists she leave him alone. Captured in a game of war, the boy gladly accepts his punishment in the hope he will be permitted into the Hitler Youth. Anna becomes even more disturbed when Karl joins the child in insisting she re-tie the ropes. A monster in the making, the image of the boy tethered to the ground is highly symbolic in the way it demonstrates the anti-carnivalesque at work in representations of Nazified child monsters. While the child monsters in early silent comedy and contemporary horror films demonstrate a will to rebel against the status quo through pranks and scheming that, in

Stam’s words, represent “a symbolic, anticipatory overthrow of oppressive social structures” (95), the boy in this scene, as with the boys in The Man I Married, show no desire to defy authority. Promised power by the Fuhrer, these children gladly submit to the monologism of the New Order.185

Convinced that Anna will see the error of her ways and become a Hitler loyalist, Karl informs his Gestapo colleagues of her German heritage and she is forcibly placed on the staff of a lebensborn labour camp for single women procreating for the Third Reich.

Anna’s abduction sends Professor Nichols on a quest to find her. His search leads him to the home of journalist Franz Erhart (Lloyd Corrigan) where he meets Erhart’s young sons: a chilling pair of Nazified monster children. When Franz sees that Professor

Nichols is at his door, he insists they talk outside because his sons are home and, ““What they don’t know, they don’t tell their troop leader.” The professor exclaims, “You mean

185 While Anna highlights the disturbing barbarity of the boy’s punishment, neither the boy nor Karl dare defy or speak against the will of the Nazis. Discussing abusive forms of speech as acts of defiance, Bahktin observes that “abuse and derision” spoken at carnival times confronts deep “fears of superior powers … the sun, the earth, the king, the military leader” (352). Rather than defy the Nazis, both Karl and the boy gladly accept the punishment, deferring to the authority of the established (new) order. Whereas the carnivalesque child seeks to liberate itself from social bonds that keep it subjugated to the will of adult society, the mind and will of the Hitlerised monster child willingly submits to domination.

407 you can’t talk in your own house in front of your children?” As Franz informs the professor that the Nazis are using children as thought police in all homes across

Germany, his prepubescent sons emerge from the house in their Jungvolk (Young People) uniforms. The two men who fall silent as the boys perch on the step above, disdainfully regarding them with an air of superiority while their father fidgets nervously. Cohen notes that the Hitler Youth were “notorious for encouraging children to betray their parents” (229) and Hollywood wartime propaganda films exploited this aspect of Nazi culture as a simple and effective way to represent the extent of the evil of Nazism that corrupts childhood innocence and poisons between children and their parents.

Erhast’s subordination by his young sons has the potential to seem carnivalesque in its portrayal of the inversion of power relations between a father and his children. Yet it is not to his children that Erhast submits to, but the authorities to which his children belong.

Typically in monster child films the child will wear a mask of innocence even as it prepares its impish activities against its unwary adult victim. Bakhtin stresses the crucial role of masks in carnival as a destabilising force that promotes fluid identities, a point that Susan Smith stresses, stating that “the masker signifies a double existence, for he is at once himself and someone else” (2). Unlike the monster children in comedy and horror, Erhast’s children do not wear masks and consequently their behaviour is transparent and predictable so that what they hear said at home is what they report to their troop leader. Despite his children being the ears and eyes of the Nazis in his home, Erhast remains wary of them. His fear is not of his children but of the authorities to whom his children report.

408 Hitler’s Children ends with Karl and Anna executed live on national radio. Karl’s change of heart comes when, learning that because Anna has become a troublemaker at the

Women’ Labour Camp, she is scheduled for sterilisation at a Frauen Klinic (women’s clinic) that is part of the Nazi’s eugenics program. Karl’s commander, Colonel Henkel

(Otto Kruger) has invited the curious professor, still searching for Anna, to inspect the

Klinic and takes Karl along with him. The sequence at the Klinic is the most disturbing in the film and, although bloodless, anticipates the surgical horror that would later be seen in films like Les yeux sans visage (Franju 1960). Lowenstein states of Franju’s film that during the surgical removal of Edna Grüberg’s face, “the stony silence and methodical execution of the sequence accentuate its horror” (48). He points out how the quiet naturalism of the scene borrows from the aesthetic tradition of Grand Guignol that seeks to intensify grotesquerie by imbuing it with a sense of authenticity. Dmytryk’s treatment of the Frauen Klinic sequence is likewise presented in methodical silence. The three men enter the observation deck above an operating theatre and watch the procedures. Dmytryk maintains a bird’s eye view throughout that adds to its disturbing clinical detachment.

Women strapped to gurneys are wheeled into a large white operating room where five teams of surgeons work one woman each, operating in a production line. The only noise is the Colonel’s voice proudly describing the efficiency of the procedure and how women who are deemed unfit to reproduce are prevented from doing so. Momentarily taking over the role of narrator, the colonel’s disembodied voice explains:

We are building a new Germany, a strong Germany. There is no room for the

sick and the weak and the unstable. Of course, although the majority of our

cases are the weak and unstable, our doctors operate for a number of other

409 reasons. They range from eliminating hereditary colour blindness to dangerous

political thinking.

On this last point, the Colonel informs both the professor and Karl that Anna, because of her recalcitrance and refusal to breed for the Reich, is scheduled for sterilisation. The scene is crucial to the narrative for how it works as a kind of shock therapy for Karl that wakes him up to the evils of the Nazi weltanshauung (world view). Throughout the scene

Karl sits in stony silence attempting to conceal his horror that continually keeps creeping across his face as he is finally confronted with the brutal truth about Nazism. Learning of

Anna’s plight further distresses Karl and he seeks to save her, resulting in the two of them facing a firing squad for high treason. In a radio broadcast organised by the Colonel in which Karl has agreed to confess his sins and swear renewed fealty to the Fuhrer before his execution, in a final act of resistance he rejects conformity to the Third Reich and instead makes an act of open and fearless defiance that humiliates the Colonel and his superiors. Crying out “Long live the enemies of the Third Reich” before he is shot, Karl’s triumphant final words ring out over the airwaves as a form of heteroglossia that dares to defy authoritarianism, calling for resistance to the established order and renewing previously unspoken hopes of an end to tyranny.

410 IV The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)

MGM’s 1944 sentimental war drama The White Cliffs of Dover includes a brief scene situated in the mid-1930s featuring a pair of well-mannered young blond boys from

Germany staying in Devon on exchange who are actually members of the Hitler Youth scouting the English countryside for potential future landing sites for Nazi aircraft.186

Remarkably, the two boys are the only representations of Nazism in the film and yet the brief scene is one of most memorable due to its sense of menace. This remains true for contemporary audiences as indicated by several IMDb reviewers that specifically mention the sequence, such as Cincinnati reviewer “jzappa” who describes how it “sends a chill down the spine”. For the purposes of axis and allied propaganda alike, Aryanism, like the swastika, had become emblematic of Nazism and Hitler’s obsession with developing an Aryan master race. The White Cliffs of Dover reveals that along with the swastika and the goosestep, stern young Aryan children had become an iconographic signifier of

Nazism.

Described by Crowther as “a Cinderella story in sweet disguise” (15) The White Cliffs of

Dover is based on ’s sentimental pro-interventionist poem, “The White

Cliffs”. Writing the poem soon after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in late

186 The idea of Hitler Youth benignly disguised as students on exchange while gathering intelligence and “softening up” Germany’s enemies is explicitly articulated in the second of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight wartime propaganda films: The Nazis Strike (1943). Narrator Walter Huston explains that, “for the softening up process, [Hitler] sent his agents all over the world disguised as tourists, students and commercial travellers”.

411 1939, Miller wanted to address the American Anglophobia that had arisen in response to resentments concerning the Brits’ manipulative use of anti-German propaganda during

WWI. Koppes and Black note that Americans were particularly antagonistic towards propaganda during the 1930s, a feeling “reinforced by the suspicion that British propaganda had helped maneuver the country into war in 1917” (49). The strong anti- interventionist sentiment that dominated public opinion throughout the 1930s and into the first year of the war was fed by the country’s realisation that American military intervention in 1918 did little to benefit the nation. Miller’s poem sought to encourage a stronger alliance between the two powers by emphasising their shared cultural similarities and heritage.

Miller’s poem is narrated by the character of Susan Dunne, an American tourist who travels to London in 1914 and meets Sir John Ashwood, a member of the landed gentry with an estate in Devon. John is immediately taken with Susan and shows her the sights of London. Much of the poem lingers on Susan’s heady introduction to English culture and history, with which she falls deeply in love. Susan and John likewise fall in love and no sooner are they married than World War I begins and John goes off to war. Susan gives birth to their son, Percy, whom John never meets as he is killed the day before the armistice signing. Raising Percy to manhood at the ancestral estate, Susan notes with both pride and alarm how much her son is like his father in his patriotic devotion to Britain.

The poem ends with the outbreak of WWII and Susan fearing that Percy, like his father, will also die in battle, sacrificing himself to for the sake of his beloved England.

412 The poem attracted little attention when it was first published by T. R. Coward in August

1940. However, when in mid-October 1940 the English-born American actress Lynn

Fontanne twice performed radio readings of the poem in serial form on NBC’s Blue

Network there was instant demand for the published work such that “total sales in the

United States eventually reached 300,000 and ... another 200,000 copies were sold in

Great Britain” (Short 6). In addition, RCA Victor Records released Fontanne’s NBC radio performance on a three record set in 1941, selling over 30,000 copies (11) while in

July that year a dramatised version of Miller’s story featuring Constance Cummings that expurgated the poem’s criticism of British classism and America’s prohibition-era crime wave was performed on BBC Home Service. Most famously, the poem inspired the song,

“The White Cliffs of Dover” penned by Walter Kent and Nat Burton that was first performed in November 1941 by Jimmy Dorsey before ’s 1942 recording made it “the most popular song of the war” (11).187 Ronald Colman purchased the rights to adapt the poem into a film though he later sold these to Clarence Brown, who in turn sold the rights to MGM on the proviso that he be retained as the film’s director.

Starring Irene Dunne as Susan, The White Cliffs of Dover provides a different ending to

Miller’s poem that nevertheless follows Miller’s tale to its logical bittersweet conclusion.

Released in March 1944 when victory for the Allies had grown more certain and the problem of how to ensure Germany never again drags the world into war needed to be addressed, the film emphasises harmonious cooperation between Britain and America,

187 According to Short, Miller was furious about not being consulted by Kent and Burton when they adapted parts of her poem into the hit song. However, as the song advanced her aim of strengthening relations between the USA and Britain as well as increasing support for the war effort in America Miller ultimately declined taking legal action (11).

413 captured in the person of Susan, an American who shares an equal love of Britain, and the final scene showing American and British troops proudly marching side-by-side.

Unlike the poem, where Percy’s fate remains undetermined, the film—where Percy is renamed John Jr.—confirms that he fights and dies in the hope of achieving lasting peace.

The scene featuring the two German boys is an addition to the film not featured in the poem. In a scene where Susan, her father Hiram, and John Jr. take tea in the manicured gardens of the Ashwood estate with Lady Jean Ashwood, they play host to a pair of two

German brothers, Gerhard and Dietrich von Biesterburg, who are guests at a neighbouring estate. Gerhard seems around fourteen years old while Dietrich looks to be about twelve. While Gerhad makes polite conversation, Dietrich is less practised and utters several comments that cause his older brother to squirm anxiously; behaviour to which Hiram begins to pay close attention. Between mouthfuls of crumpet Dietrich unselfconsciously remarks, "America is materialistic … [and] plutocratic” while

"England is hypocritical and mercenary”. These small slips unthinkingly recited by

Dietrich point to his obvious indoctrination, however Germany’s bellicose intentions are confirmed when he absent-mindedly remarks on how the maintained lawns would make ideal landing strips for German troops to ground their gliders. Hiram becomes increasingly troubled by all he is hearing and sets out to goad the boys in order to penetrate their façade of politeness and loosen their guarded tongues. He casually remarks that it is good to see that Germany has learned its lesson from its defeat in 1918.

Gerhard suddenly explodes and jumping to his feet, snarls at Hiram, insisting that,

"Germany was never beaten. We never accepted the peace, and we never shall. The war

414 was not fought to a finish. The next time we shall not be cheated of victory. We shall be proud and happy to die on the field of honour". There is a Janus-faced monstrousness to

Gerhard and Dietrich, who are in Devon under false pretences performing reconnaissance and spy work for the Nazis. Bakhtin confirms that Janus-faced duality is a characteristic of the carnival, referring specifically to the popular festive language of the marketplace where abuse and praise function simultaneously (415), yet the under-aged spies in The

White Cliffs of Dover, like the Nazified monster children before them, do not seek out liberation from the established order as other monster children do, for they remain servants of the Third Reich. There is a strong sense of chilliness to the scene generated by the boys rehearsed sentiments about peace and goodwill that conceals dark and bellicose intentions.

415 V They Live in Fear (1944)

Directed by prolific short Josef Berne, Columbia Pictures’ mediocre 1944 anti-Nazi They Live in Fear follows a young Hitler Youth teen from

Germany to America where he becomes an advocate for democracy.188 The film follows

Paul Graffen (Clifford Severn), a young German teen who joins the Hitler Youth to draw suspicion away from his anti-Nazi family. Paul has no stomach for Nazism but remains in the movement to keep his family safe and above suspicion. However, Paul reaches his threshold when he and his fellow Hitler Youth peers are taken to Dachau and ordered to kill a group of old men deemed enemies of the Third Reich using nothing but shovels.

While the film does not reveal how he achieves it, Paul manages to spare his prisoner without raising any suspicions, and waits until he is alone before pulling his allotted victim from the mass grave. In an unlikely turn of events, the man he saves is a professor at the University of Heidelberg and, right there in the grave, urges Paul to leave Germany and gives him a letter of introduction to present to the principal of a high school in

America.

188 As unlikely as this story seems, it reflects a 1942 Washington Post report titled “He Was Once a Hitler Youth, But He's in Our Army Now” that focuses on Egon Hanfstaengl, the godson of Adolf Hitler and son of Nazi Foreign Press Chief who in 1937, feared for his life and fled with Egon to England and then American. Described as a “strapping 21-year-old sergeant” (6), the article emphasises Hanfstaengl’s imposing youthful physique and cites his strong American patriotism that motivated him to defer his studies at Harvard the previous year to enlist in the US air corps. Intended to bolster US patriotism while beckoning other young Americans to enlist, the article emphasises the supremacy of democracy over totalitarianism and the obligation that falls on all Americans to defend it. Despite the brevity of the article, Hanfstaengl’s unusual journey from Hitler Youth division leader to Staff Sergeant with the US army contains elements likely used in Berne’s film.

416 In America, the principal welcomes Paul to the school and he quickly makes friends.

However, Johnny Reynolds (Jimmy Carpenter) a star football player for the school takes pleasure in taunting Paul who tutors him in maths to elevate his grades. Johnny’s antagonism intensifies when he sees his crush Pat Daniels (Pat Parrish) growing fond of

Paul. A special school assembly to be broadcast on the radio is organised and Paul is invited to speak about his experiences in Germany. Paul jumps at the chance but wavers when he receives an anonymous phone call warning him his family will be in danger if he speaks out against Nazism. The caller is Johnny playing a cruel prank. At the microphone, Paul shocks listeners by calling for tolerance of Germany and delivering the

Nazi salute before running off the stage. Searching for Paul, the principal finds a letter he has written in German to his mother and, with Pat and Johnny present, translates aloud its message praising America. Overcome, Johnny confesses his phone prank and apologises to Paul. With new resolve Paul boldly returns to the microphone, denouncing Nazism and affirming the need to fight for democracy.

While They Live in Fear is thematically rich, it is the least successful of the films discussed in this chapter. With the exception of seasoned actor Otto Kruger, who earlier appeared in Hitler’s Children, most of the young cast in the film were unknown and had little experience, previously appearing in minor or uncredited roles. Critical reception of the film was poor with most criticism attacking its screenplay and direction by Russian born Josef Berne (who through most of his career worked on short films). Jeremy Arnold notes that the reviewer for complained the film is “inept”, contains too much “patriotic preaching”, and its pace is “slow and lacking in anything

417 that couldn't have been accomplished with a bull whip”. Shull and Wilt note that the

Motion Picture Herald summed the film up as "Nazi Turns Jitterbug" (392) and, comparing the finished film to the “vastly different” synopsis provided in the press book, conclude that its “inconsistencies and abrupt ” were the product of “major last- minute changes in the script” (392).

The tagline for They Live in Fear describes the film’s premise as, “Young America— wise cracking, rug-cutting, gum-chewing—shows the way as an escaped German boy defies the ominous arm of the Gestapo”. Conspicuously targeting a teen audience,189 the description suggests that the film’s plot involves a group of middle class all-American teens, fashioned after the likes of Andy Hardy, who take a Hitler Youth refugee under their wing and orient him to life in American life. Yet it is the soft-spoken young former

Hitler Youth Paul Graffen (Clifford Severn) who finally shakes the youth of America out of their comfortable introversion and inspires them to support the war effort on the home front.

The opening scene of They Live in Fear resembles the classroom sequences in Education for Death and Hitler’s Children where uniformed Hitler Youth sit erect and attentive in neat rows behind their desks as their teacher spouts Nazi jargon. In They Live in Fear the boys are lectured by the Kapitan-Instructor (Frederick Giermann) about the perversion of the United States and the chaos wrought by democracy, compared to the stability and order of the Third Reich. A boy named Helmut (William Yetter, Jr.) is caught with his

189 Shull and Wilt note that during the 1930s Hollywood “began to pay more attention to the youth of America” having come to realize that “an American youth culture was developing, and films began to reflect this” (270).

418 eyes not facing the front like his peers and is instead reading his copy of Mein Kampf.

The Kapitan-Instructor chastises him for not having yet memorised the text. As with

Education for Death, the film replaces Christianity with Nazism as Germany’s new religion. The Kapitan-Instructor reminds the student reading Mein Kampf, “This is your bible … you should know it by heart”. He then asks Paul why Germany is superior to all other nations and Paul answers mechanically, “We are ruled by the divine intuition of the

Fuhrer. Germany is the centre of the Almighty’s plan for the world”, inferring Hitler’s deification. During the classroom scene, the mother of a student is dragged in by a pair of

Gestapo officers and made to stand in front of her son who has informed on her for criticising the Fuhrer. The mother is dressed in black and explains that she is in mourning, having lost two sons to war and now a third to Nazi indoctrination and she is carted away. Paul is agonised by the betrayal of a son against his mother and cannot hold back tears. The Kapitan-Instructor slaps Paul’s face and demeans his tears as signs of weakness. At home, Paul tells his parents that he is at breaking point and cannot continue pretending to be a Nazi. When they plead with him to persist for all their sakes, Paul tells them that tomorrow they are visiting Dachau concentration camp and they all fall silent.

His father becomes ashen-faced and, slumping in his chair, sighs, “Dachau … a postgraduate course in cruelty”.

The Dachau sequence opens on a line of boys marching in single file through the gates of

Dachau with shovels they carry like parade rifles. Greeting them inside the gates is the

Dachau Kommandant (George Sorel) who addresses the boys: “The shovel is an emblem: a noble emblem of the construction of the new order in every part of the world. And it is

419 a weapon, too, to chop down traitors. We don’t waste our ammunition on traitors.

German bullets are too good for them”. The camera pans across to show a group of old men lined up in front of a long pit as the camp Kommandant order the boys to “Execute them with your shovels. Bury them in the graves they have dug for themselves”.

The low-key lighting and claustrophobic studio set used in the Dachau sequence is reminiscent of the production design for Universal’s classic horror films, especially

James Whales’ expressionist landscapes in Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Incidentally, although not credited director Josef Berne worked on the screenplay for Whales’ classical horror film. Bare, blackened trees stand on a short rise, beyond which is a painted backdrop depicting a gloomy, oppressive sky. The film’s use of classic horror aesthetics invites audiences to compare the Nazis with the fictional monsters of film. These early scenes of darkly lit horror stand in stark contrast to the later brightly illuminated scenes set in America, especially the sun-drenched location shots. Despite the obvious artificiality of the Dachau scene it is the most arresting in the film as it depicts young boys murdering harmless old men. As with Whale’s mad scientist, the Nazi leaders in

They Live in Fear are depicted as crazed monster makers, transforming children into cruel killers.

While Berne’s use of horror iconography in his Dachau sequence is stylistically at odds with the rest of his film, importantly his use of these semantic genre elements anticipates the role of monster children in horror films to come. In 1940, before America entered the war, The Man I Married portrayed the monster child as a young Nazi boy betraying his

420 father and brother, leading to their execution. By 1944, the Nazified monster child had grown up to become the executioner himself, demonstrating the child monster’s inexorable progress towards the horror genre.

The Dachau sequence epitomises the anti-carnivalesque in that the execution of the elderly men by the Hitler Youth conjures the destruction of the old to make way for the new but with a horrific un-carnivalesque twist. Bakhtin writes that “the old man is the enemy of gay, popular truth about change and renewal … and so truth, which is in power for one day, had to destroy him” (Rabelais 268). Furthermore, as the old men are killed with a blow to the head, there is an element of uncrowning that would a decade later be used by Rhoda Penmark to kill Claude Daigle in The Bad Seed (LeRoy 1956). However there is no gaiety or renewal contained in the execution scene. This is instead the “sickly mutation” (111) of carnival described by Stam. Nor is there the uncrowning carnivalesque insomuch as crowning and uncrowning refer to the inversion of existing hierarchies leading to the renewal and regeneration of all the people. While the monster child film typically contains carnivalesque inversion in which children empower themselves through the debasement of their elders, there is no empowerment in the execution scene. The boys that kill the old men with their shovels do so not as a form of liberation or self-agency, but entirely out fanatical loyalty and obedience to an oppressive totalitarian order.

421 APPENDIX B: LIST OF FILMS FEATURING MONSTER CHILDREN

Inspired by Sabine Büssing’s list of 157 film titles that she included in the appendix to her 1987 study of children in horror literature, during my thesis I have compiled my own ever-expanding list of film titles from bad boy films of the early silent period through to the most recent releases of monster child films. Secondary sources consulted for the research on early silent film titles include Denis Gifford’s The British Film Catalogue,

1895-1970: A Guide to Entertainment, Donald Willis’ Horror and Science Fiction Films:

A Checklist, and Kemp R. Niver’s Motion Pictures From The Library of Congress Paper

Print Collection 1894-1912. Each of the films listed includes the film title and director (if known), as well as the country (or countries) that produced the film. The genre for each film is also provided and reveals the breadth of films in which monster children appear, as well as changes in genre representations of child villains over time from comedy to horror. Each listing also includes either a brief synopsis or otherwise explains the role of the monster child in the film. Among the films listed are some in which a monster child may feature only briefly, such as the two Hitler Youth boys in a single scene in The White

Cliffs of Dover (Brown 1944), or the little girl vampire in 30 Days of Night ( 2007), with the understanding that even brief appearances of monster children on screen make an important contribution to the oeuvre as they reinforce particular representations of childhood. The list is presented in reverse-chronological order from the most recent monster child titles to the earliest silent films featuring bad boys and girls. For my thesis research the list has proved highly useful in charting the ebbs and flows in the production

422 of monster child films over time, assisting in the selection and contextualisation of what I consider to be key films.

423 FILM TITLE GENRE THEME / PLOT

1 Brahms: The Boy II (William Brent Horror A prepubescent boy exhibiting violent Bell 2020) USA emotional problems finds a mysterious doll with which he forms a dependent attachment.

2 The Turning (Floria Sigismondi 2020) Horror Update of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. UK/EIRE/USA/CANADA

3 JoJo Rabbit ( 2019) USA Comedy A young Hitler Youth who idolises Adolf Hitler discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewess in their home.

4 The Lodge y (Severin Fiala / Veronika Thriller Siblings resentful about their divorced father’s Franz 2014) UK/US/CANADA new fiancé learn of her traumatic childhood and systematically drive her towards a breakdown.

5 Eli (Ciarán Foy 2019) USA Horror A boy taken to a clinic under the pretence of curing his autoimmune disease learns that he is the offspring of the devil.

6 Us (Jordan Peale 2019) USA Horror Killer doppelganger children part of family in nationwide uprising of enslaved underworld.

7 The Hole in the Ground (Lee Cronin Horror Single mother becomes paranoid that her son 2019) USA is a changeling from a mysterious sinkhole near her remote woodland home.

8 Brightburn (David Yarovesky 2019) Horror Sinister superkid from another planet goes on USA an unstoppable gore-filled killing spree.

9 The (Nicholas McCarthy Horror A young boy houses the reincarnated soul of a 2019) USA serial killer. At 8-years-old he shows signs of genius and sadism.

10 Pet Sematary (Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Horror Remake of King’s novel with young girl who Widmyer 2019) USA returns from the grave changed and deadly.

11 Detainment (Vincent Lambe 2018) UK Drama Oscar nominated dramatization of [short film] interrogations in the 1993 James Bulger case.

12 Terror in the Woods (D.J. Viola 2018) Thriller Based on Waukesha Slender Man stabbing. USA Two 12-year-old girls fixated on internet monster ‘Suzerain’ stab a classmate.

13 The Bad Seed (Rob Lowe 2018) USA Thriller Hallmark adaptation of March’s novel produced for the Lifetime channel

14 The Darkest Minds (Jennifer Yuh Action A plague wipes out 98% of all children and Nelson 2018) USA teens. Those that remain develop superpowers and are imprisoned by a fearful adult society.

15 The Hollow Child (Jeremy Lutter 2017) Horror Young foster girl abducted by wood goblins. CANADA Returns home a changeling that tears her family apart.

424

16 The (Huh Jung 2017) South Horror A woman takes in a little girl she finds near Korea Mt. Jang where there appears to have existed a mythical creature that mimics human voices.

17 Prodigy (Alex Haughey / Brian Vidal Sci-fi 9-year-old sociopathic child genius with 2017) USA telekinetic and telepathic powers.

18 Little Evil (Eli Craig 2017) USA Comedy Gary has just married the woman of his Horror dreams but discovers her six-year-old son is the Antichrist.

19 Annabelle 2 (Sandberg 2017) USA Horror After their little girl dies, a dollmaker and his wife take in a nun and orphan girls who are targeted by the dollmaker's possessed creation.

20 Better Watch Out (Chris Peckover Horror A precocious 12-year-old boy commits 2016) USA Comedy multiple murders when his babysitter’s boyfriend and ex both show up at his house.

21 Shelley (Ali Abbasi 2016) Horror Childless Nordic couple ask Romanian maid Denmark/Sweden to be surrogate. Horror pregnancy with evil baby overtones.

22 The Eyes of My Mother (Nicholas Horror Origins of a serial killer. A young girl who Pesce 2016) USA faces the violent loss of her mother develops an interest in gruesome anatomy.

23 Prevenge (Alice Lowe 2016) USA Comedy A pregnant woman hears her unborn child’s voice instructing her to commit murder.

24 Antibirth (Danny Perez 2016) USA Horror Woman drugged at a party wakes to find she is pregnant with monster child

25 Incarnate (Brad Peyton 2016) USA Horror 11-year-old possessed by powerful demon

26 The Devil’s Dolls (Padraig Reynolds Horror Evil curse passes to hosts via dolls following 2016) USA the capture of a serial killer. Hosts become killers, one of whom is a little girl.

27 Blessed Are the Children (Chris Moore Horror After getting an abortion, Traci and her 2016) USA friends are haunted by a sinister supernatural presence seeking revenge.

28 Shut In (Farren Blackburn 2016) Horror Child psychologist with “shut in” son France/Canada/USA terrorized by young boy who comes to stay.

29 Ouija: Origin of Evil (Mike Flanagan Horror Ghost of Nazi doctor who fled to the US 2016) USA where he continued his experiments possesses young girl who plays with a Ouija board.

30 The Boy (William Brent Bell 2016) Horror Spirit of a boy seems to possess life-sized USA porcelain replica. Twist is “boy” has grown to adulthood and lives in the walls of a mansion.

31 Sinister 2 (Ciaran Foy 2015) USA Horror A young mother and her twin sons move into

425 a rural house that's marked for death.

32 The Boy (Craig William McNeil 2015) Horror Intimate portrait of a 9-year-old sociopath's USA growing fascination with death.

33 The Culling (Rustam Branaman 2015) Horror Slasher with convoluted plot featuring little USA girl with killer cult parents and cages containing feral children.

34 Hellions (Bruce McDonald 2015) USA Horror On Halloween night evil spirit children or “hellions” visit a pregnant teen whose foetus they want.

35 Before I Wake (Mike Flanagan 2015) Horror Young couple adopt a boy whose dreams and USA nightmares manifest physically.

36 Closer to God (Billy Senese 2014) Horror Cloned human “Ethan” evocative of USA Frankenstein.

37 Goodnight Mommy (Severin Fiala / Horror “Ghost” brother convinces his living brother Veronika Franz 2014) Austria that their mother is an imposter he must kill.

38 Cooties (Jonathan Milott / Cary Comedy A virus infects an elementary school, Murnion 2014) USA Horror transforming children into feral cannibals.

39 Every Secret Thing (Amy Berg 2014) Mystery White 11-year-old girl and her friend steal a USA black baby feed it only pudding. When the child gets ill they kill it and are jailed 7 years.

40 Out of the Dark (Lluis Quilez 2014) Horror Child ghosts haunt a family in Columbia at an / Spain/USA industrial plant.

41 The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014) Horror Depressed widowed mother resents young Australia ADD son obsessed with titular monster.

42 Delivery: The Beast Within (Brian Horror Found footage film about pregnant woman Netto 2014) USA who fears her baby is possessed by evil spirit

43 Devil’s Due (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Horror Newly married couple fall pregnant. Child is Tyler Gillett 2014) USA Anti-Christ.

44 Dark Touch (Marina de Van 2013) Horror Abused child with psychokinetic abilities kills France/Ireland/Sweden her foster parents.

45 The Complex (Hideo Nakata 2013) Horror Young boy is a ghost who lures the living. Japan

46 Penny Dreadful (Steve Atkinson 2013) Crime Little girl kidnapped for ransom messes with USA [Short film] Comedy captors, gets better of them and shoots one.

47 Speak No Evil (Roze 2013) USA Horror Children in small town disappear before returning en masse possessed and murderous.

48 Hell Baby (Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Comedy New Orleans couple call on the Catholic Lennon, 2013) USA Horror Church to deliver their infant child from evil.

426 49 Ghost Child (Gilbert Chan 2013) Horror Haunting that features an urn containing the Singapore vengeful spirit of an unborn child.

50 Mama (Andres Muschietti 2013) USA Horror Wild child story with a pair of children haunted by spirit of mother.

51 Sinister (Scott Derrickson 2012) USA Horror Ancient spirit prompts little girl to murder her family. Ghosts of other children surround her.

52 The Hunger Games (Gary Riss 2012) Sci-fi In a dystopian future, a lottery selects children USA Action to play game in which they fight to the death.

53 Little Monsters (David Schmoeller Drama Exploits James Bulger case: follows two 10- 2012) USA year-old boys who murder a younger boy and are released on their eighteenth birthdays.

54 Come Out and Play (Makinov 2012) Horror Remake of Who Can Kill a Child? set in Mexico Mexico.

55 Children of a Darker Dawn [Railway Horror Apocalyptic Lord of the Flies story. Children] (Jason Figgis 2012) Ireland

56 Sick Boy (Tim T Cunningham 2012) Horror Diseased child spreads pathogen that USA transforms others into .

57 Byzantium (Neil Jordan 2012) Horror Young female vampires UK/USA/Ireland

58 ( Horror Little girl’s imaginary child friend haunts 2012) India family.

59 Das Kind [The Child] (Zsolt Bács Thriller 10-year-old child is reincarnation of a man 2012) Germany committing revenge murders, with one more victim to kill.

60 Fear Lives Here (Michael Gordon Horror Group of stranded friends are killed by evil 2012) USA ghost boy who died years earlier.

61 The Unbroken (Jason Murphy 2012) Horror Woman is haunted by ghost child in mirrors USA and learns her neighbour murdered the child.

62 The Possession (Ole Bornedale 2012) Horror Jewish possession story involving dybbuk. USA

63 12/12/12 (Jared Cohn 2012) USA Horror Infant born on 12/12/2012 is the antichrist.

64 Paranormal Activity 4 (Henry Horror Small boy (Robbie) from third installment Joost/Ariel Schulman 2012) USA reappears. Followed by small ghost boy.

65 Chernobyl Diaries (Bradley Parker Horror US Tourist group visiting Chernobyl hunted 2012) USA by killer children.

66 Children of the Corn: Genesis (Joel Horror Couple stumble upon child-centered cult. Soisson 2012) USA

67 I Am (Nacho Cerda 2012) Horror Vampire child used to engineer super soldiers.

427 France/Spain

68 We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Drama Mother traces life of unhappy son who goes Ramsay 2011) UK/USA on school shooting spree. Explores nature versus nurture.

69 REC Genesis (Jaume Balaguero, Paco Horror Children infected with zombie virus. Plaza 2011) Spain

70 The Small Assassin (Chris Charles Thriller Short film based on Ray Bradbury story about 2011) USA a couple convinced their infant child is malevolent and attempting to kill them.

71 Go-hyang-i: Look-eum-eul bo-neun Horror Ghost child torments pet groomer. doo gae-eui noon [The Cat] (Sung- wook Byeon 2011) Korea

72 Paranormal Activity 3 (Henry Joost, Horror Young sisters, Kati and Kristie befriend an Ariel Schulman 2011) USA invisible entity in their home.

73 Gisaeng Ryung [Ghastly] (Ko Seok-jin Horror Kidnapped possessed child kills adoptive 2011) Korea parents.

74 The Awakening (Nick Murphy 2011) Horror Ghost hunter sceptic investigates child UK haunting at school.

75 Sop Dek 2002 [2,002 The Unborn Horror Mother aborts child and is haunted by its Child] (Poj Arnon 2011) Thailand vengeful ghost. Based on a real event in which 2002 aborted foetuses were found dumped in front of a temple.

76 Dolfje Weerwolfje [Alfie the Little Comedy Adopted boy turns into werewolf on his 7th Werewolf] (Joram Lürsen 2011) birthday. Helped by brother and pursued by Netherlands shadow organisation he must learn to live a normal life.

77 11/11/11 (Keith Allan 2011) USA Horror Boy fated to become antichrist when turns 11.

78 The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Horror Various child monsters: redneck zombie girl, Goddard 2011) USA faceless ballerina.

79 Citidel (Claran Foy 2011) Ireland / Horror Syringe wielding feral children. UK

80 Dictado [Childish Games] (Antonio Horror Adopted killer child. Chavarrias 2011) Spain

81 Inbred (Alex Chandon 2011) UK / Horror Yorkshire children help torture and kill Germany strangers.

82 Wake Wood (James Keating 2011) UK Horror Dead girl resurrected by parents returns evil.

83 Kick Ass (Matthew Vaughn 2010) USA Action “Hit Girl” is an unstoppable cussing pre- Comedy pubescent superhero assassin.

84 Gonger 2 - Das Böse kehrt zurück (Evil Horror Evil child kills off group of friends.

428 Returns) (Philipp Osthus 2010) Germany

85 Insidious (James Wan 2010) USA Horror Comatose boy possessed by evil spirits/Creepy ghost child.

86 Zwart Water [Two Eyes Staring] Horror Creepy ghost child. (Elbert van Strien 2010) Netherlands

87 I’m Not Jesus Mommy (Vaugh Juares Horror Child cloned from shroud of Turin turns out to 2010) USA be antichrist. Cloned child soulless thus evil.

88 Let Me In (Matt Reeves 2010) USA Horror US remake of Let the Right One In. Vampire child but real monster is school bully.

89 The White Ribbon (Michael Hanake Drama Group of children suspected of brutally 2009) Austria/Germany/France/ sadistic acts/ Systemic domestic violence. Italy

90 Case 39 (Christian Alvert 2009) USA Horror Social worker takes on adoption of little girl who is corporeal demon disguised as child.

91 Yulenka (Aleksandr Strizhenov 2009) Drama Schoolteacher tormented by class of young Russia girls.

92 Within (Hanelle M. Culpepper 2009) Horror Young girl terrorizes her peers and family. USA Befriends child who can see spirits.

93 Blood Night (Frank Sabatella 2009) Horror Young girl committed after killing her family. USA

94 REC 2 (Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza Horror Zombie virus outbreak includes child zombie. 2009) Spain

95 Shattered Lives (Carl Lindbergh 2009) Horror Girl communes with devil dolls and murders USA her mother.

96 Splice (Vincenzo Natali 2009) Sci-Fi/ Child spliced from various DNA including Canada/France/USA Horror human.

97 Orphan (Jaume Collet-Serra 2009) Thriller Adoption/Adult dwarf parading as girl in USA mid/late-childhood/Psychosis.

98 (Ruben Fleischer 2009) Horror Pack of little girl zombies (dressed as fairies USA for a birthday party) attack terrified mother in SUV.

99 The Turn of the Screw (Tim Fywell Horror Adaptation of Henry James’ novella - 2009) UK Fantasies of Possession.

100 Grace (Paul Solet 2009) USA Horror Still born baby revived but only drinks blood.

101 The Shock Labyrinth ( Horror Vengeful comatose girl punishes grown up 2009) Japan friends who left her for dead after a childhood accident.

429 102 Hansel & Gretel (Yim Phil-Sung 2009) Horror Mystical curse/recruiting surrogate parents/ Korea murder.

103 The Unborn (David S. Goyer 2009) Horror Evil child spirit seeking corporeality USA

104 Children of the Corn (Donald P. Horror Remake of 1986 film about a couple driving Borchers 2009) USA through Midwest who get trapped in a town where child cult kills all adults.

105 Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz 2008) Drama French couple lose son in a tsunami. Hire France/Belgium /UK/Australia traffickers to help find him. They get lost in jungle and encounter wild killer kids.

106 Plague Town (David Gregory 2008) Horror Bloodthirsty mutant children terrorise a family USA

107 Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson Horror Lonely boy makes friends with little girl 2008) Sweden vampire. She protects him from bullies.

108 Dorothy Mills (Agnès Merlet 2008) Thriller A young girl who is a conduit for the dead is Ireland/France accused of murdering a baby.

109 Akanbo shôjo [Tamami: The Baby’s Horror Killer baby in a haunted house Curse] (Yudai Yamaguchi 2008) Japan

110 (Ram Gopal Varma 2008) Horror A young girl is possessed as punishment for India her father’s atheism.

111 Quarantine (John Eric Dowdle 2008) Horror Remake of REC featuring children that USA become vicious zombies.

112 Against the Dark (Ricardo Crudo 2008) Horror Stephen Segal battles a mutant cannibal child. USA

113 Eden Lake (James Watkins 2008) UK Horror A couple are terrorised by youth delinquents whose parents are just as bad.

114 Babysitter Wanted (Jonas Horror Devil child wears toy cowboy hat to conceal Barnes/Michael Manasseri 2008) USA horns and eats virgin female flesh.

115 Eskalofrío [Shiver] (Isidro Ortiz 2008) Horror Boy with photophobia moves with family to Spain remote community. Murders committed by feral child living in woods.

116 Trick ‘r Treat (Michael Dougherty Horror Various incarnations of child monstrosity: 2008) USA [portmanteau film] demon killer child, cruel pranksters, a witch, father & son murderers, and a local vandal.

117 Gonger - Das Böse vergisst nie [Evil Horror Ghost child Eric returns to kill off his Never Forgets] (Christian Theede tormentors. 2008) Germany

118 Home Movie (Christopher Denham Horror Disturbed young siblings take revenge on their 2008) USA pastor father and psychiatrist mother.

430

119 Stevie (Bryan Goeres 2008) Spain Horror Stillborn child haunts mother who refused to farewell him. Adopted girl with assumed to be monster child.

120 The Daisy Chain (Aisling Walsh 2008) Horror Couple who lost child in a fire move to remote Ireland/USA village and adopt disturbed orphaned girl that locals believe is a malevolent fairy child.

121 It’s Alive (Josef Rusnak 2008) USA Horror Remake of 1974 Larry Cohen mutant infant film, now in rural setting.

122 The Children (Tom Shankland 2008) Horror Strange apocalyptic virus affecting children UK induces them to become murderous.

123 Hush Little Baby (Holly Dale 2007) Horror Mother loses her daughter in a drowning TV USA accident. Believes her new infant daughter is possessed by vengeful spirit of her first child.

124 Joshua: The Devil’s Child (George Horror Cunning boy finds his parents are dimwits and Ratliff 2007) USA plays games that send them crazy and institutionalised so he can live with his uncle.

125 The (Gregory Wilson Drama Based on 1965 Sylvia Likens case in which a 2007) USA mother and her sons abduct and brutally torture a teenage girl.

126 Born (Richard Friedman 2007) USA Horror A woman pregnant with spawn of Satan is compelled to commit acts of violence to appease her growing foetus.

127 Boy A (John Crowley 2007) UK Drama Cruel young boy beats older kids, tortures animals and kills a little girl. Loosely based on 1993 James Bulger case.

128 El Orfanato (Juan Antonio Bayona Horror Laura returns to childhood orphanage, reopens 2007) Mexico/Spain it for disabled children. Solves mystery of child ghosts poisoned by orphanage operator.

129 Gauri: The Unborn (Aku Akbar 2007) Horror Spirit of aborted girl possesses young sister. India

130 30 Days of Night (David Slade 2007) Horror Little girl vampire with pigtails. USA

131 Whisper (Stewart Hendler 2007) USA Horror A kidnapped boy is taken to wooded spot to wait for ransom. Boy is demon, uses powers to kill kidnappers one by one for amusement.

132 REC (Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza Horror Zombie outbreak in apartment building. 2007) Spain Children infected with zombie virus.

133 Halloween (Rob Zombie 2007) USA Horror Origin story of Michael Myers explores nature vs. nurture in creation of sadistic killer.

431 134 Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth 2007) USA Horror Professional thugs are no match for a lethal gang of .

135 Unborn Sins (Elliot Eddie 2007) USA Horror The spirit of an aborted child returns to take revenge on its murder.

136 The Vanished (Makoto Tanaka 2006) Horror Missing kids return as corporeal ghost Japan vampires.

137 Ghost Son (Lamberto Bava 2006) Horror The ghost of a woman’s recently deceased Italy/S. Africa/Spain/UK husband possesses her newborn son.

138 Fingerprints (Harry Basil 2006) USA Horror Psycho killer child tutored by father/child ghost group.

139 Ils [Them] (David Moreau/ Xavier Horror “Hoodie horror” involving child gang that Palud 2006) France/ terrorise isolated couple.

140 Silent Hill (Christophe Gans 2006) Horror Adaptation of the horror-themed video game. USA Demon in child form/possession.

141 The Abortion [aka Araf] (Biray Horror A woman’s aborted child returns to haunt her Dalkiran 2006) Turkey years later.

142 Imaginary Playmate (Christine Drama A little girl moves with her family to a new Gallager, 2006) USA house where she makes an imaginary friend 16 that turns out to be a ghost of a murdered little girl.

143 Hidden Floor (Il soon-Kwon 2006) Horror A ghost story in which a mother and daughter Korea move into a haunted apartment where previously a mother and son were murdered.

144 The Plague (Hal Masonberg 2006) Horror A town’s children become comatose together. USA When they wake years later they are zombies who hunt and kill the town’s adults.

145 Last House in the Woods (Gabriele Horror Cannibal child. Albanesi 2006) Italy

146 Joshua (Travis Betz 2006) USA Horror Boys raise abandoned baby in secret. As it grows they torture it with increasing sadism.

147 2 (Takashi Shimizu 2006) Horror Return of the vengeful ghost boy and the Japan haunting virus.

148 (Donato Rotunno Horror Adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the 2006) Lux/UK Screw.

149 The Omen (John Moore 2006) USA Horror Remake of 1976 film in which a changeling child is the Antichrist.

150 666: The Child (Jack Perez 2006) USA Horror “Omen-esque” Anti-Christ film.

151 The Woods (Lucky McKee 2006) USA Horror A century ago three children murdered their headmistress. The children are now slaves to

432 the school as punishment for their sins.

152 Wicked Little Things (J.S. Cardone Horror Cannibal ghosts children roam hillsides killing 2006) USA locals.

153 Dark Water (Walter Salles 2005) USA Horror Remake of Japanese film in which the spirit of a child haunts a mother and daughter who move into an apartment building.

154 The Dark (John Fawcett 2005) UK/ Horror Ghost of a girl visits a couple who lost their Germany/Isle of Mann daughter after she drowned. The ghost wants to claim the father for herself.

155 Hostel (Eli Roth 2005) USA Horror Child gang of terrorises streets and kills thugs.

156 The Amityville Horror (Andrew Horror Creepy ghost of Jodie appears to daughter Douglas 2005) USA Chelsea.

157 Boo (Anthony C. Ferrante 2005) USA Horror College students explore abandoned hospital haunted by ghosts including a little girl.

158 Ring 2 (Hideo Nakata 2005) USA Horror Samara returns as Rachel tries to save her son Aidan from the curse.

159 An American Haunting (Courtney Horror Manifestation of a molested child’s rage/child Somon 2005) USA ghost.

160 Constantine (Francis Lawrence 2005) Action/ Young girl possessed by demon is exorcised. USA Horror

161 Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: Comedy Megalomaniacal animated baby obsessed with The Untold Story (Michels/Shin 2005) parricide. USA

162 Cache [Hidden] (Michael Hanake Drama Jealous boy fabricates lie that destroys 2005) France another’s life.

163 Hide and Seek (John Polson 2005) Thriller Imaginary Friend/ Post traumatic stress/ USA Hereditary psychosis.

164 Satan’s Little Helper (Jeff Lieberman Horror Innocence colludes with evil as boy assists 2005) USA Comedy serial killer on Halloween.

165 Godsend (Nick Hamm 2004) USA Thriller Cloning/two souls in one body. Bad soul belongs to compulsive killer who takes over.

166 Dawn of the Dead (Zac Snyder 2004) Horror Zombie child (little girl) / newborn zombie. USA

167 666: The Demon Child (Cary Howe Horror Killer infant hatched from egg in desert stalks 2004) USA and kills group of six adults in their RV.

168 Dead Birds (Alex Turner 2004) USA Horror Demonic children.

169 Vaastu Shastra (Saurab Narang 2004) Horror Ghost children / possession. India

433

170 The Locker (Kei Horie 2004) Japan Horror Students stalked by ghost of abandoned infant.

171 Salem’s Lot (Mikael Salomon 2004) Horror Creepy child vampires attack their thuggish USA school bus driver.

172 The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress 2004) SF/Drama Sadistic and violent pre-adolescent male bully. USA

173 A House of Mad Souls (Sivavut Drama/ Female doctor visited by ghost of boy she Vasang-Ngern 2003) Thailand Mystery bonded with in hospital.

174 Blessed (Simon Fellows 2003) USA Horror IVF twin girls share Satan’s DNA.

175 Identity (James Mangold 2003) USA Mystery/ Group assembled at motel murdered one by Thriller one. Murderer is 10-year-old boy, one of the multiple personalities in a mentally ill patient.

176 Scary Movie 3 (Zucker 2003) USA Comedy Creepy morbid psychic boy/Samara parody.

177 Acacia (Park Ki-Hyung 2003) Korea Horror Infanticide/adoption/vengeful ghost.

178 The Turn of the Screw (Nick Millard Horror Possession narrative based on the Henry 2003) USA James story.

179 Cidade de Deus [City of God] Biopic Sadistic killer gangster child with no moral (Fernando Meirelles 2002) Brazil/ compass terrorises Brazilian favela. France

180 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Adventure Evil wizard child (Tom Riddle) and nasty Secrets (Chris Columbus 2002) USA/ wizard pupil (Malfoy). Strong Nazi overtone. UK/ Germany

181 The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002) USA Horror Ghost of young girl Samara kills anyone who watches cursed videotape seven days later.

182 Frailty (Bill Paxton 2002) USA Mystery Father of two has visions that some people are Horror demons in disguise and kills them. Young son follows father while older (a demon) refuses.

183 Darkness (Jaume Balaguero 2002) Horror Demonic cult / haunting. USA/Spain

184 Les Diables (Christope Ruggia 2002) Drama Homeless, traumatised 12-year-old boy takes France autistic sister on crime spree. Includes marauding gang of homeless children.

185 Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson Horror The Red Queen hologram computer 2002) USA mainframe modelled on a little girl.

185 (David Carson 2002) USA Horror Bullying/Revenge/Witch/Telekinesis.

187 Ju-on: The Grudge (Shimizu Takashi Horror Vengeful ghost (onryou) mother and son kill 2002) Japan all whom they encounter.

188 The Eye (Oxide & Danny Pang 2002) Horror Blind woman recovers sight but sees ghosts,

434 Hong Kong including little boy that haunts her building.

189 Honogurai mizu no soko kara [Dark Horror Haunting with ghost child in search of a Water] (Hideo Nakata 2002) Japan mother.

190 Children of the Corn VII: Revelation Horror Vengeful child spirits / haunted house. (Guy Magar 2001) USA

191 Megiddo: The Omega Code (Brian Horror Sibling rivalry/demon possession/embodied Trenchard-Smith 2001) USA antichrist.

192 Thir13en Ghosts (Steve Beck 2001) Horror Billy Michaels (“The First Born Son”): USA vengeful ghost does not kill victims but scares them to their deaths at hands of other ghosts.

193 Cubbyhouse (Murray Fahey 2001) Horror Possessed children in demonic playhouse. Australia

194 The Darkling (Po-Chih Leong 2000) Horror Malevolent Djinn. USA

195 Amor Brujo [miniseries] (Ricardo Islas Horror Antichrist / demon possession of little girl. 2000) Uruguay

196 Possessed (Steven E. DeSouza 2000) Horror Demon possession (allegedlythe basis for USA Blatty’s The Exorcist).

197 The Little Vampire (Uli Edel 2000) Kid Horror Lonely American boy in Scotland befriended Netherlands/ Germany/USA Comedy by vampire boy who feeds on cow blood.

198 The Calling (Richard Caesar 2000) Horror Antichrist story. USA

199 Lost Souls Janusz Kaminski 2000) Horror Little girl in diner chants that “Jesus is dead” USA

200 Otesánek [Little Otek] (Jan Horror Pinocchio theme as log becomes sentient and Svankmajer 2000) Czech Comedy grows in size, eating strangers. Republic/UK/Japan

201 The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Horror Re-released version of The Exorcist with Never Seen (Friedkin 1973/2000) USA additional footage.

202 (Antonio Aloy 1999) Horror Adaptation of Turn of the Screw. Spain/USA

203 The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan 1999) Horror Boy can see ghosts. Poisoned ghost girl USA haunting.

204 Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Horror Inseminated with evil spawn. Return (Kari Skogland 1999) USA

205 The Turn of the Screw (Ben Bolt 1999) Horror Henry James adaptation with possession UK/USA narrative.

206 Los Sin Nombre (Jaume Balaguero Horror Child indoctrinated by sadistic cult.

435 1999) Spain

207 Children of the Corn V: Fields of Horror Demonic cult / children murder and sacrifice Terror (Ethan Wiley 1998) USA outsiders.

208 Progeny (Brian Yuzna 1998) USA Sci-Fi/ Woman impregnated by aliens. Doctor Horror husband tries to abort fetus.

209 Milo (Pascal Francho 1998) USA Horror Child serial killer. Tagline: “With evil size doesn’t matter”.

210 Ringu (Hideo Nakata 1998) Japan Horror Curse/Vengeful killer ghost child (onryou).

211 Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson Sci-Fi/ Teleport machine feeds on negative energy. 1997) UK/USA Horror Causes woman to see her dead son, lures guilt- ridden mother to her death.

212 The Devil’s Child (Bobby Roth 1997) Horror Antichrist / woman inseminated by devil. USA

213 The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan 1997) Drama Violence normalized/child murderer. Ireland/USA

214 Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier Drama Group of children in small village hurl stones 1996) Denmark and abuse at outcast woman.

215 Pinocchio’s Revenge (Kevin Tenney Horror A young girl with a fantasy relationship with a 1996) USA pinocchio doll becomes homicidal.

216 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 1996) UK Drama/ Dead baby hallucination terrifies detoxing Comedy heroin addict.

217 Trilogy of Terror TV “Bobby” segment Horror Mother resurrects drowned son using black ( 1996) USA magic. He returns sadistic, drives her insane.

218 Amityville Dollhouse (Whilte 1996) Horror Haunted dollhouse. Dream shows boy nail his USA father’s feet to floor.

219 Daddy’s Girl (Martin Kitrosser 1996) Horror Adopted girl kills anyone who comes between USA her and daddy, such as grandma and a teacher.

220 Children of the Corn IV: The Horror Virus/supernatural control/ Adult in child’s Gathering (Greg Spence 1996) USA body.

221 Village of the Damned (John Carpenter Horror Alien invasion/psychic manipulation/ 1995) USA parricide.

222 Kawow tee Bangpleng [Cuckoos at Horror Adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos from Bangpleng] (Kaljaruek 1995) Thailand Thai novelist Kukrit Pramoj.

223 The Young Poisoner's Handbook Drama Matricide/dissociative disorder/based on true (Benjamin Ross 1995) UK story.

224 Toy Story (John Lasseter 1995) USA Comedy Sadistic “Sid” terrorises and executes toys.

225 Children of the Corn III: Urban Horror Two surviving boys (one a demon) from

436 Harvest (James D.R. Hickox 1995) Gatlin massacre are adopted by couple in the USA USA city and start their cult with urban kids.

226 Species (Roger Donaldon 1995) USA Sci-Fi/ Alien human hybrid/child as dangerous Horror “animal”.

227 The Haunting of Helen Walker (Tom Horror Fear of possession (Turn of the Screw McLoughlin 1995) UK adaptation).

228 In the Mouth of Madness (John Horror Children are first to be infected by a spreading Carpenter 1994) evil in a New England town

229 The Smell of Burning Ants (Jay Document Documentary about the socialisation of young Rosenblatt 1994) USA ary boys and the violence and cruelty they inflict.

230 Interview with a Vampire (Neil Jordan Horror Vampire child Claudia a deadly killer. Mature 1994) USA woman trapped in child’s body.

231 The Paperboy (Douglas Jackson 1994) Horror/ Homicidal 12-year-old paperboy wants USA Thriller woman next door to be his mother - kills to protect his fantasy of a perfect family.

232 The Unborn II (Rick Jacobson 1994) Horror Mutant experimental infants. USA

233 Relative Fear (George Mihalka 1994) Horror / killer child. USA

234 Addams Family Values (Barry Horror Wednesday & Pugsley sent to summer camp. Sonnenfeld 1993) USA Meet their match with a horribly entitled girl. Addams infant a handful.

235 Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrera 1993) Sci-Fi/ Little boy pod person infiltrates because of his USA Horror innocence.

236 Body Melt (Philip Brophy 1993) Horror Deformed super foetus explodes from mother Australia Comedy and kills father.

237 The Good Son (Joseph Ruben 1993) Thriller Henry is psychotic born into well-to-do USA family. Drowns younger brother in bathtub and is trying to kill younger sister.

238 (Peter Mannogian 1992) Horror Pregnant cop chases felon into toy warehouse USA where demon in child form controls toys wants to possess foetus and become corporeal.

239 The Turn of the Screw (Rusty Horror Adaption of Henry James’ novella. Lemorande 1992) France/UK

240 Mikey (Dennis Dimster 1992) USA Horror Mikey an adoptee serial killer, killing each new family when he feels they disappoint him.

241 Batman Returns (Tim Burton 1992) Action Birth of Oswald Cobblepot. Monstrous infant USA comedy who kills family cat. Thrown in sewer by rich parents.

437 242 Bébé’s Kids (Bruce Smith 1992) USA Comedy Based on stand-up routine by Robin Harris Cartoon who recounts nightmare date babysitting Bébé’s destructive, brattish kids at Funworld.

243 Child of Rage (Larry Peerce 1992) Drama Violent child / child abuse. USA

244 Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (Chris Comedy Kevin McCallister lures wet bandits to their Columbus 1992) USA peril in apartment building under renovation.

245 Braindead ( 1992) New Horror Infant born from copulation of two zombies. Zealand Comedy Violent zombie baby goes on killing spree.

246 Basket Case 3: The Progeny (Frank Horror Basket-dweller Belial slaughters the police Henenlotter 1992) USA that capture his deformed infant.

247 Children of the Corn II: The Final Horror Demon Possession / Fungal infection in corn Sacrifice (David Price 1992) USA causes homicidal behaviour in Gatlin children.

248 Son of Darkness: To Die For II (David Horror Infant turned into a vampire. Price, 1991) USA

249 The Unborn (Rodman Flender 1991) Horror Super race experiment with foetuses produces USA killer babies.

250 Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare Horror Freddy Krueger as child, kills mouse with Rachel Talalay (1991) USA mallet and taunted by cruel children.

251 Problem Child 2 (Brian Levant 1991) Comedy Pranks and practical jokes as Junior joined by USA unruly girl.

252 Dolly Dearest (Maria Lease 1991) Horror Primeval spirit possesses girl’s doll and in turn USA possesses the girl.

253 The Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld Comedy Wednesday & Pugsley are cute but ghoulishly 1991) USA macabre and murderous children.

254 Child of Darkness, Child of Light Horror Two virgin births spawn the child of God and (Marina Sargenti 1991) USA Satan respectively.

255 Afraid of the Dark (Mark Peploe 1991) Horror Boy with failing eyesight has dark fantasies, USA becomes threat to infant sister.

256 Omen IV: The Awakening (Jorge Horror Damien’s sperm fertilises egg put into mother Montesi 1991) USA of new antichrist. Themes of adoption, surrogacy and Satanism.

257 Flatliners (Joel Schumacher 1990) Thriller Medical students exploring clinical death USA bring back ghosts, including vengeful child who haunts student who bullied him.

258 The Reflecting Skin (Philip Ridley Thriller 8-year-old Seth is victim of abuse. Transfers 1990) Canada/ UK violence he sees onto innocent victims.

259 Kindergarten Cop (Reitman 1990) Comedy “They’re horrible!” Children depicted as USA worse than criminals.

438 260 Problem Child (Denis Dugan 1990) Comedy Prankster boy repeatedly adopted and rejected. USA Dresses as devil and writes to a serial killer in jail, wishing the man were his real father.

261 Home Alone (Chris Columbus 1990) Comedy Kevin McCallister outsmarts a pair of USA bumbling house thieves by devising a series of ingenious though highly sadistic booby traps.

262 Lord of the Flies (Harry Hook 1990) Thriller Bullying/human nature/ murder/savagery. USA

263 Robocop 2 ( 1990) USA Action Ruthless child mob boss/drug trafficking/murder.

264 The Suckling (Francis Teri 1990) USA Horror Woman goes to brothel for abortion. Embryo flushed down toilet and in sewer exposed to toxic waste. Fetus returns on killing spree.

265 Baby Blood (Alain Robak 1990) Horror Gypsy curse produces evil infant. France

266 UHF (Jay Levey 1989) USA Comedy In Jerry Springer parody, maniacal girl scout beats up an axe-wielding killer in a ski mask.

267 Celia [Celia: Child of Terror] (Ann Drama Coming of age story of a young girl with a Turner 1989) Australia dissociative disorder imagines her uncle is a “hobyah” monster and shoots him.

268 Little Sweetheart [Poison Candy] Thriller 9-year-old child blackmailer/seductress/ (Anthony Simmons 1989) UK murderer maintains veneer of innocence. Commits murder but not a suspect.

269 Beware: Children at Play (Mik Horror Cannibal children / wild child motif. A Cribben 1989) USA TROMA disturbed teenager abducts children from their homes and trains them to become killers.

270 Pet Sematary (Mary Lambert 1989) Horror Resurrected little boy returns as a vicious USA killer.

271 Witch Story [Superstition 2 aka Horror Witch mother and young daughter plan Streghe] (Alessandro Capone 1989) revenge but plot point doesn’t go anywhere. Italy

272 Ghosthouse [La Casa 3] (Umberto Horror Visions of deceased girl and her doll bring Lenzi 1988) Italy/USA doom to visitors of a deserted Southern house.

273 Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Drama Satan in child form tempting Christ. Scorsese 1988) USA

274 Waxwork (Anthony Hickox 1988) USA Horror Mutant killer baby wax sculpture reanimates.

275 Poltergeist III (Gary Sherman 1988) Horror Adults afraid of haunted child who they vilify. USA

276 Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Horror Posttraumatic stress and inherited criminal Myers (Dwight H. Little 1988) USA psychosis that is reminiscent of The Bad Seed.

439

277 The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher 1987) Horror Child vampire named “Laddie” in vampire USA Comedy motorbike gang feeding on coastal town.

278 Angel Heart (Alan Parker 1987) USA Horror Voodoo baby revealed as sired by Satan.

279 “Children of the Civil War” segment in Horror Rape of dead woman results in zombie baby From a Whisper to a Scream (Jeff Burr that kills and eats father / Cannibal orphans 1987) USA kill and eat three confederate soldiers.

280 Near Dark (Kathryn Bigalow 1987) Horror Child vampire named “Homer” lives with a USA Western pack of travelling vampires in an RV.

281 Forever Evil (Roger Evans 1987) USA Horror Dream sequence: woman tears open her womb and pulls out red-eyed demon baby.

282 2 (Michael Gornick 1987) Horror Framing story sees bullies chasing boy who USA “Prologue /Epilogue” of uses himself as bait to lure them into trap . portmanteau film

283 It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (Larry Horror Multiple killer infant mutations. Cohen 1987) USA

284 Spookies ( Joseph/Brendan Horror Murderous hooded and fanged son of an evil Faulkner 1986) USA sorcerer.

285 The Bad Seed (Paul Wendkos 1985) Horror Two-faced deceitful killer child. USA

286 Otra vuelta de tuerca [Turn of the Horror Adaptation Henry Jame’ novella. Screw] (Eloy de la Iglesia 1985) Spain

287 Poison for the Fairies [Veneno para Horror A friendship between two young girls curious las hadas] (Carlos Enrique Taboada about witchcraft ends when one kills the other. 1984) Mexico

298 (Mark L. Lester 1984) USA Horror Child born with pyrokinesis triggered by unhinged rage.

289 Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch Horror Children of Gatlin in evil cult murder their 1984) USA own parents.

290 Something Wicked This Way Comes Horror Carnival henchman turns into child who does (Jack Clayton 1983) USA the will of the carnival master – steals life by turning boys into old men on merry-go-round.

291 The Demon Murder Case (William Horror Young boy possessed by a demon – contains Hale 1983) USA TV movie scenes similar to The Exorcist

292 Suffer, Little Children (Alan Briggs Horror A child arrives at a children's home and 1983) UK starts terrorizing the other children with her demonic powers.

293 Mo Tai [Devil Fetus} (Hung Chuen Horror Demon offspring in this crazy film inspired by Lau 1983) Hong Kong a potpourri of horror influences including The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror.

440

294 Creepshow (George A. Romero 1983) Horror/ Framing narrative with thuggish father who USA “Prologue/Epilogue” Comedy bullies son. Boy orders voodoo doll from [portmanteau film] Creepshow comic, tortures father with pins.

295 Twilight Zone: The Movie “It’s a Good Horror Omnipotent child creates an adopted family Life” [portmanteau film] (Joe Dante Comedy that he terrorises. Befriends woman who tries 1983) USA to keep his powers in check.

296 Amityville II: The Possession (Damiano Horror Young girl tries to kill brother drowning him Damiani 1982) USA in bath and suffocating him with plastic bag.

297 Pieces (Juan Piquer Simón, 1982) Horror Boy dismembers strict mother after she finds Spain/USA/Puerto Rico/Italy him with a jigsaw of nude women. Becomes serial killer making jigsaw from real bodies.

298 Don’t Go to Sleep (Richard Lang 1982) Horror Psychotic girl visited by vengeful spirit of USA deceased sister murders her family.

299 The Toy (Richard Donner 1982) USA Comedy Media mogul’s brat son, 9-year-old Eric seeks fatherly love. “Buys” Richard Pryor as toy to entertain him and create havoc.

300 Manhattan Baby (Lucio Fulci 1982) Horror Girl possessed by Egyptian medallion returns Italy to NYC where grisly murders ensue.

301 Omen III: The Final Conflict (Graham Horror Young servants of antichrist kill infants when Baker 1981) UK/USA Damien learns the Messiah has been reborn.

302 The Burning [aka Burned at the Stake] Horror In 1692 a young girl in Salem, Massachusetts, (Bert I. Gordon 1981) USA accuses several residents of being witches, and they are burned at the stake.

303 Kiss Daddy Goodbye (Patrick Regan Horror Two children with psychic powers use them to 1981) USA avenge their father, murdered by a biker gang

304 Nightmares in a Damaged Brain Horror Boy hatchets father in affair. Escapes asylum (Romano Scavolini 1981) USA/Italy years later, kills family and shot by little boy, continuing cycle of trauma and violence.

305 The Pit (Lew Lehmann 1981) USA Horror Boy feeds neighbours to subterranean trolls.

306 Bloody Birthday (Ed Hunt 1981) USA Horror Three 10-year-olds born during eclipse are psychotic killers working together to kill the local sheriff, schoolteacher, and others.

307 The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980) Horror Creepy Grady Twins’ ghosts. USA

308 (Norman Warren 1980) UK SF/Horror Alien twins kill science crew.

309 Macabre (Lamberto Bava 1980) Italy Horror Girl kills little brother/taunts mother.

310 The Children (Max Kalmanowicz Horror Bus drives through radiation cloud. Irradiated 1980) USA TROMA children travel countryside killing adults with their radiation.

441

311 The Godsend (Gabrielle Beaumont Horror An abandoned baby raised by family 1980) USA gradually kills all of her four siblings.

312 Salem’s Lot (Tobe Hooper 1979) USA Horror Creepy child vampires.

313 The Changeling (Peter Medak 1979) Horror Ghost child seeks revenge for infanticide. USA

314 The Visitor [Stridulum] (Giulio Horror Telekinetic young girl an antichrist figure. Paradisi 1979) Italy/USA

315 The Amityville Horror (Stuart Horror Creepy little girl befriends child ghost. Rosenberg 1979) USA

316 The Brood (David Cronenberg 1979) Horror Growths on disturbed woman’s body become Canada mutant humanoids that kill for her.

317 Ring of Darkness [Un'ombra Horror Four women sell their souls. Years later one nell'ombra] (Pier Carpi 1979) Italy has 13-year-old daughter possessed by Satan who exacts revenge for the women’s betrayal.

318 Damned in Venice [Nero Veneciano Horror Blind teen has vision of coming Antichrist. (Ugo Liberatore 1978) Italy Sister fellates devil, gives birth to evil seed.

319 Return from Witch Mountain (John Sci-Fi Alien twin children possess psychic powers. Hough 1978) USA Adventure

320 Halloween (John Carpenter 1978) USA Horror Six year old murders his sister.

321 Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero Horror Zombie children. 1978) USA

322 It’s Alive II: It Lives Again (Larry Horror More mutant babies. Cohen 1978) USA

322 The Redeemer: Son of Satan Horror Boy living under lake colludes with preacher (Constantine S. Gochis 1978) USA to murder members of class reunion for sins.

323 Damien: The Omen II (Don Taylor Horror Damien a prepubescent boy in military school. 1978) USA He comes to accept his antichrist identity.

324 The Haunting of Julia (Richard Horror Child haunting and vengeance. Loncraine 1977) Canada/UK

325 Audrey Rose (Robert Wise 1977) USA Horror Ivy “possessed” by past life personality.

326 Shock [Beyond the Door II] (Mario Horror Possession / haunting. Bava 1977) Italy

327 Cathy’s Curse (Eddy Matalon 1977) Horror Girl possessed by the ghost of another child. Canada

328 Demon Seed ( 1977) Horror AI computer inseminates a woman and keeps USA her captive until she gives birth.

442 329 The Child (Robert Voskanian 1977) Horror Vengeful little girl befriends zombies that do USA her bidding.

330 The Uncanny [“Quebec Province”] Horror Orphaned girl persecuted by cruel cousin uses (Claude Heroux 1977) Canada witchcraft to shrink and crush her underfoot.

331 The Omen (Richard Donner 1976) Horror Antichrist changeling child. USA

332 Kiss of the Tarantula (Chris Munger Horror Little girl achieves psychic connection with 1976) USA tarantulas that she uses to kill her enemies.

333 Alice, Sweet Alice (Alfred Sole 1976) Horror Plays with monster child trope so audience USA suspects Alice is killer when it is an old lady.

334 The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with Drama Oedipal resentment / Animal cruelty. the Sea (Lewis John Carlino 1976) UK

335 Eraserhead (David Lynch 1976) USA Horror Monstrous infant is extreme deformed.

336 The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Thriller Sexually active preteen living alone kills her Lane (Nicholas Gessner 1976) craftily male adult persecutor. Canada/USA/ France

337 ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? [Who Horror Homicidal children kill all adults on island. Can Kill a Child?] (Narciso Ibanez Foetus kills mother from inside womb. Serrador 1976) Spain

338 The Day of the Locust (John Drama Child star brat torments fragile, nervous man. Schlesinger 1975) USA

339 La endemoniada [The Possessed aka Horror Possessed child. Demon Witch Child] (Amando de Ossorio 1975) Italy

340 I Don’t Want to Be Born [The Devil Horror Gypsy Curse creates killer infant. Within Her] (Peter Sasdy 1975) UK

341 Il medaglione insanguinato [The Night Horror Child possession film. Child] (Massimo Dallamano 1975) Italy

342 Devil Times Five [People Toys] (Shean Horror Sociopathic children survive bus crash, invade MacGregor 1974) USA a secluded home and kill its occupants.

343 The Stranger Within (Lee Philips 1974) Horror Barbara Eden impregnated by alien. Richard USA [made for TV] Matheson screenplay based on his short story.

344 All the Kind Strangers (Burt Kennedy Horror Orphans abduct adults to be adoptive parents 1974) USA and eventually kill them.

345 The Turn of the Screw (Dan Curtis Horror Adaptation of Henry James’ story. 1974) USA

346 Seytan [Turkish Exorcist] (Metin Horror Child demonic possession. Erksan 1974) Turkey

443

347 Grave of the Vampire (John Hayes Horror Baby vampire feeds on mother’s breast blood. 1974) USA

348 Non si deve profanare il sonno dei Horror Agricultural machine uses frequency that morti [Let Sleeping Corpses Lie] (Jorge raises the dead. Bloodsucking infant zombies Grau 1974) Italy/ Spain in hospital crèche.

349 Le tour d’ecrou (Raymond Rouleau Horror French TV adaptation of Turn of the Screw. 1974) UK/France

350 Chi Sei? [aka Beyond the Door] Horror Woman pregnant with the spawn of Satan. (Ovidio G Assonitis 1974) Italy

352 It’s Alive (Larry Cohen 1974) USA Horror Hungry Mutant baby goes on killing rampage.

352 Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Horror Child vampires. Supernatural (Richard Blackburn 1973) USA

353 Scream Bloody Murder (Marc B. Ray Horror Boy kills father with tractor but injures arm 1973) USA slasher and must wear a hook that he later uses to kill.

354 Tales That Witness Madness (Freddie Horror Amicus omnibus focusing on psych patients. Francis 1973) UK “Mr Tiger” about boy with imaginary tiger that kills and eats his parents.

355 Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg 1973) Horror Child haunting and killer dwarf. UK/Italy

356 Flesh for Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey Horror Children dissect dolls then graduate to people. 1973) USA/Italy/France Ends as they prepare to dissect man still alive.

357 Libido “The Child” (Tim Burstall Thriller Oedipal jealousy/primal scene/drowning. 1973) Australia

358 Dark Places ( 1973) USA Horror Voices of murdered children haunt old house.

359 The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973) Horror Demon possession/divorce. USA

360 Nothing But the Night (Peter Sasdy Horror Children taken over by dead adults seeking 1973) UK immortality via mind & memory transference. Mother incinerated by killer kids.

361 The Other (Robert Mulligan 1972) Thriller Surviving twin with split personality drowns a USA baby in pickle barrel.

362 Chi l'ha vista morire? [Who Saw Her Horror Child murderer with children’s choral theme. Die?] (Aldo Lado 1972) Italy Elmi’s innocent child is also “knowing”.

363 Ben (Phil Karson 1972) USA Horror Boy befriends rat “Ben”, leader of killer rats.

364 Something Evil ( Horror Demon possessed boy on New England farm. 1972) USA (TV) Phantom baby cries coming from barn stove.

444 365 Diabolica Malicia [Night Hair Horror 12-year-old boy tortures animals, torments Child/What the Peeper Saw] (James stepmother and makes false accusations. Kelley/Andrea Bianchi 1972) Italy

366 A Little Game (Paul Wendkos 1971) Drama/ 13-year-old kills boy at school and makes it USA (TV) Thriller look accidental. Hates his stepfather and tries to separate him from his mother.

367 The House that Dripped Blood “Sweets Horror Amicus omnibus featuring sweet child who to the Sweet” (Peter Duffell 1971) tortures and kills father with voodoo doll. UK/USA

368 Reazione a catena [Bay of Blood] Horror Young siblings shoot scheming murdering (Mario Bava 1971) Italy parents before frolicking down by the bay.

369 The Brotherhood of Satan (Bernard Horror Children in small town recruited to a satanic McEveety 1971) USA cult. Creative use of toys to kill parents.

370 Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard Horror Devil worship and paedophilia. 1971) UK

371 Don’t Deliver Us from Evil (Joel Seria Horror Amicus omnibus that features a little girl who 1971) UK/USA practices witchcraft.

372 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Musical Poor parenting produces spoiled children with Factory (Mel Stuart 1971) USA Comedy appalling manners.

373 (Michael Winner Drama Sex mimicry, torture, deceit and murder 1971) UK imagines events before Turn of the Screw.

374 I Drink Your Blood (David E. Durston Horror Boy puts rabid blood in pies to punish cult 1970) USA group. Deadly rampage in small town ensues.

375 The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah 1969) Western Children torture insects with magnifying USA glass.

376 Bübchen (Roland Klick 1968) West Drama Boy kills his younger infant sister. Germany

377 Night of the Living Dead (George A Horror Zombie girl eats father and mutilates mother. Romero 1968) USA

378 Spirits of the Dead/Histoire Horror In this Poe triptych a man seduced the devil Extraordinaires “Toby Dammit” disguised as little girl. (Federico Fellini 1968) France/Italy

379 Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski Horror Woman impregnated by Satan gives birth to 1968) USA the antichrist

380 Barbarella (Roger Vadim 1968) Comedy Sadistic children take pleasure in unleashing France / Italy killer dolls on innocent Barbarella.

381 Let’s Kill Uncle (William Castle 1966) Thriller Two orphaned siblings trapped on their USA murderous uncle’s island retaliate by using all the tactics he has used against them.

445 382 Operazione Paura [Kill, Baby, Kill] Horror Vengeful ghost child conjured by mother to (Mario Bava 1966) Italy punish townsfolk.

383 The Nanny (Seth Holt 1965) UK Thriller Boy blamed for drowning his sister and professes to hate his parents.

384 Children of the Damned (Anton Leader SF Child visitors with apocalyptic message from 1964) UK the future kill to protect themselves.

385 Lord of the Flies (Peter Brook 1963) Thriller Shipwrecked schoolboys revert to savagery UK and kill the weakest among them.

386 Kötü Tohum [The Bad Seed] (Nevzat Thriller Turkish adaption of The Bad Seed. Pesen 1963) Turkey

387 Lolita (Stanley Kubrick 1962) Drama Sexualised seductive child. UK/USA

388 (Arthur Penn Drama Based on , an uncontrollable 1962) USA blind and deaf child who seems savage until understood. Basinet scene filmed as horror.

389 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Thriller Baby Jane is a precocious child star. Dir. 1962) USA

390 These are the Damned (aka The Thriller Master race experiment using radioactive Damned) (Joseph Losey 1962) UK children in preparation for nuclear war.

391 The Innocents (Jack Clayton 1961) Horror Chilling possession-themed ghost story based USA on Henry James’ novella.

392 The Snake Woman (Sidney J. Furie Horror Pregnant woman injected with snake venom 1961) UK gives birth to reptilian girl.

393 Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher Horror Child adopted by wealthy man who learns the 1961) UK boy will grow up to become a werewolf.

394 The Children’s Hour (William Wyler Drama Nasty child fabricates a lie that defames her 1961) USA teachers and leads to a suicide.

395 Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla Sci-Fi/ Alien children take over town, using telepathy 1960) UK Horror to force any posing a threat to kill themselves.

396 Suddenly Last Summer (Joseph Drama Hoard of children pursue and eat predatory Mankiewicz 1959) USA homosexual paedophile.

397 Kathy O’ (Jack Sher 1958) USA Comedy Studio publicist tries to hide bratty behaviour Drama of 10-year-old child star Kathy O’Rourke from a magazine writer who is also his ex.

398 The Space Children (Jack Arnold Sci-Fi Alien telepathically colludes with children to 1958) USA sabotage rocket launch.

399 The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy 1956) Melo- Genetic homicidal psychosis in 8-year-old girl USA drama whose grandmother was serial killer.

446 400 The Gamma People (John Gilling Sci-Fi Army of Aryan children in totalitarian state 1955) USA/UK given advanced intelligence through exposure to gamma rays.

401 Little Fugitive (Ray Ashley, Morris Family 7-year-old Joey flees to Coney Island after Engel and Ruth Orkin 1953) USA drama cruel prank convinces him he shot and killed his 12-year-old brother Lennie.

402 Tony Draws a Horse (John Paddy Comedy 8-year-old draws anatomically correct stallion. Carstairs 1950) UK All hell breaks loose. Histrionics from parents with opposing childrearing ideas.

403 The Window (Ted Tetzlaff 1949) USA Crime Boy who cries wolf is eyewitness to murder by upstairs neighbour and his life is in danger.

404 Johnny Holiday {aka Boys Prison] Drama Tough preteen felon sent to boys’ home. (Willis Goldbeck 1949) USA Defies authority at every turn until he finds a natural aptitude for working with horses.

405 The Secret Garden (Fred M. Wilcox Drama Mary is wilful and rude. Colin keeps his 1949) USA servants in a state of terror. The both throw vile tantrums and overturn furniture.

406 The Boy with Green Hair (Joseph Drama A boy’s hair turns green when he learns his Losey 1948) USA parents died in the London Blitz.

407 Curley (Bernard Carr 1947) USA Comedy Curley mistakes an old curmudgeon as new [produced by Hal Roach] teacher and has his gang set up pranks to make her first day at school a living hell.

408 Germany Year Zero (Roberto Drama Edmund means well when he poisons his sick Rossellini 1947) Italy father. Shaken by the magnitude of his actions and his bleak existence, he kills himself.

409 The Strange Woman (Edgar G Ulmer Drama/Noi Girl tries to drown boy who cannot swim. 1946) USA r When an adult intervenes she blames another child, pretends to save boy and lauded heroic.

410 Little Iodine ((Reginald LeBorg 1946) Comedy Iodine thinks her father is being unfaithful. USA Tries to fix things but makes them worse.

411 (Alberto Cavalcanti Horror Young girl in mansion befriends weeping boy 1945) UK who she later discovers is the ghost of child murdered by sister years earlier.

412 Tomorrow the World! (Leslie Fenton Melo- 11-year-old Hitler Youth adopted by uncle in 1944) USA drama USA. Divides family, tries to kill cousin, and draws a knife on another boy during a fight.

413 Meet Me in St Louis (Vincente Musical Distraught Tootie violently destroys snow Minnelli 1944) USA effigies of her family. Throws dummy in front of trolley car causing it to brake and derail.

414 They Live in Fear (Josef Berne 1944) War drama Hitler Youth turns mother into Gestapo. Boys USA use spades to kill old men at Dachau.

447 415 The White Cliffs of Dover (Clarence War drama Hitler Youth brothers pretend to visit Devon Brown 1944) USA on exchange but spy for Nazis. Older boy baited into spouting bellicose Nazi rhetoric.

416 Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise Drama Little girl communes with the ghost of her 1944) USA father’s first wife.

417 Education for Death: The Making of a Animated Young German boy indoctrinated into Nazi Nazi (Clyde Geronimi 1943) USA short ideology in short Disney propaganda cartoon.

418 Hitler’s Children (Edward Dmytryk Drama Hitler Youth spy on parents and one boy tied 1943) USA up as punishment for failure refuses rescue so that he can learn to be a better Nazi.

419 Yankee Doodle Dandy ( Musical George Cohan plays Henry Peck and is 1942) USA Comedy thrashed backstage when claims during his performance he could lick any boy in town.

420 The Blue Bird (Walter Lang 1940) Drama Temple plays moody young girl who never USA Fantasy wins audience sympathy. Goes on adventure with her brother and receives moral lessons.

421 Four Sons (Archie Mayo 1940) USA War Prepubescent Hitler Youths don gas masks in Drama marching drill. Masked boys dehumanized.

422 Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen & Animated Juvenile delinquency and allusions to Hitler Hamilton Luske 1940) USA musical Youth. Lampwick’s transformation into donkey conjures classical horror.

423 The Man I Married (Irving Pichel Drama Nazified German boys are monsters who 1939) USA torment Czechs and betray family to Gestapo.

424 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Comedy/ Tom gets into much mischief, made worse by (Norman Taurog 1938) USA Drama milksop cousin Sid who is nasty adult ally.

425 The Beloved Brat (Arthur Lubin 1938) Drama Rich girl causes head on crash that kills other USA driver. Chauffer jailed. She confesses and reforms at special school.

426 Maid of Salem (Frank Lloyd 1937) Drama Salem witch trials. Young Virginia falsely USA accuses slave girl of witchcraft out of spite.

427 Ballerina / La Morte du Cygne (Jean Drama A child ballet pupil who hears her favourite Benoit-Levy 1937) France ballerina is to be replaced causes an accident that cripples the replacement for life.

428 These Three (William Wyler 1936) Drama Nasty schoolgirl spreads rumour her kindly USA teachers in ménage a trois with local doctor, destroying their careers.

429 Little Lord Fauntleroy (James Drama US boy heir to British fortune. Sent to UK to Cromwell 1936) USA live with Lord overseeing trust. Woman with obnoxious son claims kinship but unmasked.

430 Pepper (James Tingling 1936) USA Comedy 10-year-old Pepper leads NY kids gang. Outsmarts embezzler parading as a baron by

448 disrupting his wedding to an heiress.

431 She Married Her Boss (Gregory La Comedy Spoiled unruly monster child softens from a Cava 1935) USA violent little liar to a sweet child.

432 Peck’s Bad boy (Edward Cline 1934) Comedy Bill unaware he’s adopted. Nasty cousin USA Drama Horace comes to stay, takes Bill’s bedroom, tells him of adoption, frames him for mischief.

433 Hitlerjunge Quex (Hans Steinhoff Drama Nazi propaganda film about boy who lives in 1933) Germany communist family killed when he joins the Nazis and warns them of a bombing plot.

434 Baby Burlesks (Lamont 1932-33) USA Comedy 8x11 minute films starring 3-year-old kids cast in raunchy adult roles but dressed in oversized diapers, parodying popular dramas.

435 (Norman Taurog Comedy Jackie Searl plays Sid Sawyer, a minor 1931) USA character in this adaptation of Twain’s novel.

436 Finn and Hattie (Norman Taurog Comedy Precocious Mildred (Green) and surly Sid 1931) USA (Searl) play pranks on each other. Sail to Paris where they foil two con artists’ schemes.

437 Tom Sawyer (John Cromwell 1930) Comedy Tom tormented by cousin Sid (Jackie Searl). USA Jackie Coogan as Tom Sawyer. as Becky Thatcher.

438 Knockout Buster (Francis Corby 1929) Comedy Buster’s troublemaking friend stows away for USA picnic, uses “No Campfire” sign for firewood and steals goods from a local farmer.

439 The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni 1928) Drama Gwynplaine, the young son of executed Lord USA Clancharlie is disfigured, wearing a permanent monstrous grin.

440 Penrod and Sam (William Beaudine Comedy Penrod and his gang evicted from clubhouse. 1923) USA Drama Penrod’s dad buys the land for him

441 Penrod (Marshall Neilan 1922) USA Comedy Penrod protects kids from strict parents and Drama nasty neighbours. He’s the ire of all until two outlaws arrive and Penrod saves the day.

442 My Friend, The Devil (Harry Millard Drama Boy disavows God when mother killed by 1922) USA lightning. As an adult his daughter is ill and he calls on God.

443 Grandma’s Boy (Fred Newmeyer Comedy Weakling bullied by children: first an infant 1922) USA [Lloyd/Roach production] girl, then a boy steals his lunch and beats him.

444 Peck’s Bad boy (Sam Wood 1921) Comedy Henry (Jackie Coogan) plays prank after USA prank on his Pa.

445 We Should Worry (Kenean Buel 1918) Comedy Jane & Katherine Lee are kidnapped but cause USA nothing but grief for their abductors.

449

446 Trouble Makers (Kenean Buel 1917) Comedy/ Jane & Katherine’s naughty antics drive their USA Drama mother crazy until their uncle is found guilty of murder. Girls save the day.

447 Two Little Imps (Kenean Buel 1917) Comedy Jane & Katherine get up to mischief on their USA trip to the seaside with their uncle.

448 Huck and Tom (William Desmond Drama Film covers second half of Twain’s novel. Taylor 1917) USA Injun Joe kills Doc and sequence in the caves.

449 Tom Sawyer (William Desmond Taylor Comedy Highlights from first half of Twain’s novel. 21 1917) USA Drama y.o Jack Pickford as Tom. Ends with Tom appearing at his own funeral.

450 Bad boy Billy (Charles Weston, 1915) Comedy Pranks committed by a naughty boy and his UK very smart dog.

451 Buster Brown and the German Band Comedy Buster gets group of musicians to play under (Charles H. France 1914) USA parlour window upsetting his mother’s party. His goat gets loose and destroys parlour.

452 Buster Brown on the Care and Comedy Buster’s pet goat and his faithful dog Tige Treatment of Goats (Charles H. France cause pandemonium 1914) USA

453 Buster Brown’s Education (Charles H. Comedy Buster’s mother hires a tutor for him and France 1914) USA Mary. Buster is bested by Professor von Blitzen who is immune to his pranks.

454 Buster Brown Picks Out the Costumes Comedy Buster picks ballet tutus for portly maids (Charles H. France 1914) USA Edison Annie and Bridget to wear at a ball. Releases Tige and his goat into house, causing a riot.

455 Buster Brown’s Uncle (Charles H. Comedy Buster and Mary fix roller skates to their France 1914) USA sleeping Uncle’s feet and yell fire. Later they place alarm clocks beneath his pillow.

456 Buster and His Goat (Charles H. Comedy Buster invites child next door to ride his goat. France 1914) USA He brings the goat inside and it reacts to a fake beard Buster is wearing, causing riot.

457 Buster Brown Causes a Commotion Comedy Buster acquires sneezing powder causing riot (Charles H. France 1914) USA at home. Dreams of more pranks but when dream includes punishment, he wakes wiser.

458 A Deal in Statuary (Charles M. Seay Comedy Lazy artist tries to pass off his valet and 1914) USA gardener as statues for payment. Boy sticks a pin in the valet’s ankle, foiling scheme.

459 Andy Goes on Stage (Charles H. France Comedy Andy delivers telegram to theatre, gets cast in 1914) USA a role. A boy hurls a tomato at Andy who leaps off stage to fight him. Gets rave reviews.

460 Andy Goes A-Pirating (Charles H. Comedy Andy reads Penny Dreadfuls about pirates and France 1914) USA fantasises violent revenge against adults.

450

461 Andy and the Hypnotist (Charles H. Comedy Hypnotised, Andy thinks he is an Indian chief. France 1914) USA Hypnotist arrested, leaving Andy to make mischief until mother arrives and he is cured.

462 When the Hurricanes Visited the Comedy Children visit a bakery and cause a fight with Doughnuts (Lewin Fitzhamon 1913) flour and eggs. UK

463 It Wasn’t Poison After All (C.J. Comedy Pharmacy clerk arrested after he sells man Williams 1913) USA poison, not medicine. Boy confesses he swapped labels to punish clerk and is spanked.

464 Greedy George (Charles H. France Comedy Boy stuffs himself with sweets. Has nightmare 1913) USA in which he is force-fed and falls through a giant piecrust. Wakes up on floor.

465 Enoch and Ezra’s First Smoke (Charles Comedy Boys fishing see gypsies smoking. Drop rods, H. France 1913) USA race home and smoke Pa’s pipe. Pa sees gypsies with ‘stolen’ rods and goes to beat them when boys appear sick from smoking.

466 Sweep! Sweep! Sweep! (Percy Stow Comedy Three children play tricks on a chimney sweep 1913) UK

467 Unwilling Scholars (Chauncy D. Comedy More of Selig’s Katzenjammer hijinks at Herbert 1912) USA school.

468 The Arrival of Cousin Otto (Chauncy Comedy Hans and Fritz Katzenjammer torment their D. Herbert 1912) USA cousin Otto when he comes to stay.

469 They Go to School (Chauncy D. Comedy Hans and Fritz Katzenjammer hate school and Herbert 1912) USA try various tricks to get out of going.

470 The Entertain Company (Chauncy D. Comedy The boys cause havoc at a dinner party held to Herbert 1912) USA honour Momma Katzenjammer.

471 They Go Tobogganing (Chauncy D. Comedy Katzenjammer kids throw ice at their uncle, Herbert 1912) USA lure him on the snowy roof and cause damage, then sabotage the family toboggan causing downhill strife.

472 School Days (Chauncy D. Herbert Comedy Hans and Fritz Katzenjammer are compelled 1912) USA to go to school against their wishes and take revenge through a series of pranks.

473 The Katzenjammer Kids (Chauncy D. Comedy Hans & Fritz throw bread dough at Uncle Herbert 1912) USA Heini and wreck the Captain’s room before following him to the gym to spoil his workout.

474 Bébé fait du spiritisme (Louis Comedy Bébé's mother and her friends conduct séance. Feuillade1912). France They feel presence of evil and panic before realising it’s a prank.

475 Little Boys Next Door (Percy Stow Comedy Neighbouring children use a hosepipe.to play 1911) UK pranks.

451

476 The Baby’s Ghost (Lux Compagnie Comedy Servants abandon babysitting after parents go Cinématographique de France 1911) to party. Burglars enter but flee when they see France a ghost that the abandoned child under a sheet.

477 Willie Plays Truant (Joseph Faivre Comedy Willie fights with classmates, turns over desks 1911) France and runs off. Chased by other boys he hides in laundry hamper, gets drenched and runs home.

478 Willy Fantôme / Willy the Ghost Comedy Willy dressed as a ghost under a sheet (Joseph Faivre 1911) France frightens his household.

479 Tilly and the Fire Engines (Lewin Comedy Tomboys drive fire engine through fairground Fitzhamon 1911) UK and spray the firemen. Chased down by angry mob but the girls spray mob with the fire hose.

480 Tilly the Tomboy Goes Boating (Lewin Comedy Tilly and Sally go boating and cause trouble Fitzhamon 1910) UK on the river.

481 Tilly the Tomboy Visits the Poor Comedy Tilly and Sally do good deeds: they upset their (Lewin Fitzhamon 1910) UK elderly neighbour Mrs. Smith, steal a laundry van, and cause a flour fight in a bakery.

482 Daddy’s Little Diddums Did It (Wilfred Comedy Boy wakes father with a feather. Father chases Noy 1910) UK son under bed. Boy crawls out and jumps on bed. It breaks trapping father as boy laughs.

483 The Children’s Revolt (Vitagraph Comedy Two young siblings stifled by overbearing 1910) USA parents and nurse break free and go on a day of play until they are caught.

484 The Kid (Frank Powell 1910) USA Comedy Cheeky boy plays matchmaker for widowed father, removing a ladder and stranding his dad and a young lady alone up a tower.

485 Gilson and Those Boys (Lux 1910) Comedy Shoeshine urchins offered £1 to the first to France shine Mr Gilson’s shoes. They mob the old man all day with polish and brushes.

486 The Freak of Ferndale Forest Fantasy A strange beggar woman transforms a child (Warwick Trading Company 1910) UK prince into a hideous beast.

487 Pranks (D.W. Griffith 1909) USA Comedy Tom and Ethel separately decide to go bathing in a river. Child pranksters switch their clothes and they have to dress as the opposite sex.

488 Quicksilver Pudding (Alf Collins 1909) Comedy A bad boy puts quicksilver in the Christmas UK pudding and it rolls away.

489 The Patent Glue (Walturdaw1909) UK Comedy A boy with a bottle of fast-drying glue plays pranks putting victims in sticky situations.

490 Father's Baby Boy (Percy Stow 1909) Comedy A baby that is fed Bovril suddenly grow to UK enormous size.

491 Sorry, Can’t Stop (David Aylott 1909) Comedy Two bad boys put roller skates on sleeping

452 UK aunt and wake her up.

492 My Word, If I Catch You Smoking! Comedy A policeman enforcing anti-smoking laws (A.E. Coleby 1909) UK confiscates cigarettes from children who get him back with an exploding cigar.

493 Professor Puddenhead’s Patents–The Fantasy Children steal an airplane and suck up food Aerocab and Vacuum Provider (Walter using the vacuum. Booth 1909) UK

494 The Butcher’s Boy and the Penny Comedy A boy reads while he is cycling and repeatedly Dreadful (A.E. Coleby 1909) UK smashes into people who then chase him.

495 The Boys and the Purse (Frank Wilson Comedy Two boys steal a purse and hide it in old 1909) UK man’s bath chair

496 Why Tommy Was Late for School Comedy Boy plays pranks on way to school. (Walter Booth 1909) UK

497 Two Bad boys (Frank Wilson 1909) Comedy Two boys play pranks with fireworks. UK

498 Baiting the Bobby (Lewin Fitzhamon Comedy Boys play pranks on a policeman using 1909) UK fireworks, a dummy girl, glue, and so on.

499 Two Naughty Boys (David Aylott Comedy Two boys play pranks and are chased. 1909) UK

500 Uncle’s Day With the Children (1909) Comedy Poor Uncle is target of his nephew’s pranks. UK/USA

501 Dancing Tabloids (A.E. Coleby 1909) Comedy Miraculous pills cause people to dance. Boy UK feeds them to a policeman, a beggar, a teacher, and some chickens.

502 The Four Tomboys (Alf Thomas 1909) Comedy A group of four young girls play pranks on UK their elders.

503 Those Boys! (D.W. Griffith 1909) USA Comedy Two boys find father’s pistol and line up a target, unaware their sister is on the other side of the door. Parents avert disaster in time.

504 The Letter Box Thief (James Comedy Tramp steals letters but caught by policeman Williamson 1909) UK who runs into boys playing with fireworks.

505 Scratch as Scratch Can (Dave Aylott Comedy Bad boy sprinkles itching powder on a people 1909) UK then sits back and watches the mayhem

506 When Mama’s Out (T.J. Gobbett 1909) Comedy While mother is away, her four daughters UK wreak havoc around house and in garden.

507 The Young Redskins (Dave Aylott Comedy Group of boys play pranks dressed as red 1909) UK Indians.

508 Only a Mouse (Empire Films 1909) Comedy Boy causes mayhem at dining table when he UK puts mice in dishes to be served.

453

509 In the Bogie Man’s Cave (Georges Fantasy Bogie Man cuts up boy and puts him in frying Melies 1908) France pan. A fairy, four imps and boy emerge from pan, seize Bogie Man and put him on the fire.

510 Oh Those Boys! (Arthur Cooper 1908) Comedy Two bad boys are chased after they play some UK messy pranks using paint.

511 The Adventures of a Watch (Walter Trick/ Boy steals a watch that he uses in various Booth 1908) UK Comedy pranks, such as tying it to a poor dog’s tail.

512 Only a Dart (Dave Aylott 1908) UK Comedy A bad boy plays painful tricks using an airgun and some darts.

513 The Schoolboys’ Revolt (Lewin Comedy Two boys play various pranks at school. Fitzhamon 1908) UK

514 Two Tough Kids (S. Wormald 1908) Comedy Bad boys steal a swimmer’s clothes while his UK African American servant is sleeping.

515 Banana Skins (Frank Mottershaw Comedy Bad boys use banana skins to cause mayhem 1908) UK with a fop and robber as well as a pair of furniture movers carrying a piano.

516 An Ingenious Revenge (A.E. Coleby Comedy Two boys throw life size dummy into London 1908) UK shipping docks in order to fool a policeman.

517 What Willie Did (Frank Mottershaw Comedy Willie plays pranks on different people. 1908) UK

518 That Nasty Sticky Stuff (Frank Comedy Various pranks performed by a naughty boy Mottershaw 1908) UK who plays pranks with super glue

519 Jack in the Letterbox (Lewin Comedy Boy conceals himself inside a letterbox to play Fitzhamon 1908) UK pranks on posters inserting their mail.

520 Fly Paper (Edwin S. Porter 1908) USA Comedy Two boys cause havoc with flypaper. They torment a dog and play pranks on people. They are caught and wrapped in it.

521 Two Little Motorists (Walter R. Booth Comedy Two children in a miniature car steal a real 1908) UK car, chased by its chauffeur. They alight and run away when the engine bursts into flames.

522 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edwin S. Comedy Children emerge from a pot dressed as devils. Porter’s 1908) USA Armed with pitchforks, they jab the head of a man nursing a hangover

523 Peck’s Bad boy (Essanay Film Comedy Episodic one reel based on vaudeville play Manufacturing Company 1908) USA adapted from G.W. Peck’s story. Henry pesters a grocery clerk and throws food.

524 The Scandalous Boys / The Scandalous Comedy Students suspend water jug over teacher’s Boys and the Fire Chute (Percy Stow chair, dousing him. He falls through hole in 1908) UK floor boys hide with rug. He chases pupils down fire chute and lands in tub.

454

525 Willie’s Dream (Frank Mottershaw Comedy Willie falls asleep and dreams about all the 1907) UK pranks he will play on people.

526 Mrs Smithers Boarding School Comedy Girls fill teacher’s hat with ash, nail shoes to (Biograph 1907) USA floor, hang him from ceiling and trick him into proposing to pupil dressed as Mrs Smithers.

527 The Orange Peel (James Williamson Comedy A boy deliberately drops orange peel on a path 1907) UK causing a series of mishaps for pedestrians.

528 Young Scamps (Lewin Fitzhamon Comedy An old man whips a pair of boys with a birch. 1907) UK The boys then push the man down a coalhole.

529 Bad boy’s Joke [aka Bad boy’s Joke at Comedy Boy punished for stepping on train of bridal a Wedding] (Charles Urban Trading dress causing bride and groom to fall back. He Co. 1907) UK blows itching powder down necks of guests.

530 The Boy, the Bust and the Bath Comedy Boy puts bust of woman in boarding house (Vitascope 1907) USA bathroom, luring male tenants (including a priest) to peep in keyhole as boy enjoys prank.

531 Johnny’s Rim/Johnny’s Run (Frank Comedy A boy gets up to mischief with a “hoop”. Mottershaw 1907) UK

532 The Doll’s Revenge (WB&E 1907) Trick Film Boy breaks sister's doll. It mends itself , grows USA enormous, tears boy apart and eats him.

533 The Truants’ Capture (Percy Stow Comedy Truants by creek taunt copper who chases one 1907) UK boy. He hides under washerwomen’s laundry but discovered by police.

534 Catch the Kid (Alf Collins 1907) UK Comedy Parents chase fleeing toddler until he finds a gun. He becomes the chaser as parents flee.

535 Terrible Ted (Joseph A. Golden 1907) Comedy Boy reads Terrible Ted comic and fantasises USA being the villain. His mother enters and slaps him out of his daydream.

536 When We Were Boys (Selig Polyscope Comedy Two old men reminisce about their youth. 1907) USA Film flashes to mischief they made as boys stealing fruit and pies and playing pranks.

537 The Boys’ Half Holiday (Arthur Comedy Two boys play tricks and save a girl from Cooper 1907) UK drowning in a pond.

538 Baby’s Peril (Charles Urban Trading Comedy Parents attempt to disarm a toddler playing Company 1907) UK with a loaded pistol

539 Willie’s Magic Wand (Walter Booth Trick/ Little Willie uses his magician father’s magic 1907) UK Comedy wand to conjure mischief.

540 Schoolboy’s Pranks (Tom Green 1907) Comedy Two boys play pranks on people including a UK grocer, an old woman, and a policeman.

541 Tommy’s Box of Tools (Harold Hough Comedy Tommy is inspired by what he finds in a

455 1907) UK toolbox to play a variety of pranks.

542 The Tricky Twins (Arthur Cooper Comedy Two boys cause a panic when they tie a rope 1907) UK attached to horse cart to a baby carriage in which they place a doll.

543 Under the Mistletoe (Dave Aylott Comedy A bad boy who has hidden a hose in amongst 1907) UK a bunch of mistletoe saturates a pair of lovers who stop to kiss under the foliage.

544 Rebellious Schoolgirls (Lewin Comedy A group of schoolgirls pour on their Fitzhamon 1907) UK teacher and whip her with a birch.

545 The Boy Bandits (R.W. Paul1907) UK Comedy “Halfpenny blood’ influences boys to rob motorist.

546 The Sticky Bicycle (Lewin Fitzhamon Comedy Two boys put wet paint on a bicycle seat. 1907) UK

547 Johnny’s Gun (Lewin Fitzhamon 1907) Comedy Boy plays pranks using his toy gun and a bow UK and arrow set.

548 The Heavenly Twins (Fitzhamon 1907) Comedy The sweet girls play pranks down at the beach. UK

549 That Fatal Sneeze (Lewin Fitzhamon Comedy Boy laces man’s hanky with pepper. His 1907) UK sneezing disrupts town while the boy enjoys the spectacle. Finally the old man explodes.

550 The Tomboys (Gilbert M. Anderson Comedy Two young girls skip school and play pranks 1906) USA on various people. Pull the chair out from old man who falls in bucket of water.

551 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edwin S. Comedy After over-indulging, a man dreams of a trio Porter 1906) USA of child demons that emerge from a bain- marie with pitchforks and poke his head.

552 Oh! The Limburger: The Story of a Comedy Bad boys hide cheese in their father’s coat Piece of Cheese (Vitagraph 1906) USA pocket. At work he offends everyone and is beaten. At home he spanks the boys.

553 A Poet and His Babies (Lewin Comedy A mother runs off, leaving her husband with Fitzhamon 1906) USA three babies. Unable to cope, he gives them to a Lieutenant who palms them off, and so on.

554 Captain Kid and His Pirates (Urban Comedy Captain Kid and his gang of naughty pirate 1906) UK play a bunch of tricks on various people.

555 Those Boys Again (Percy Stow 1906) Comedy Naughty boys pin a 'kick me' sign on a man's UK coat.

556 Grandpapa’s Revenge (Walturdaw Comedy A boy laces his grandpa’s beer with vinegar, 1906) UK loads his snuff with pepper and stuffs his smoking pipe with cheese.

557 The Four Hooligans (Alf Collins 1906) Comedy Boys play pranks on people including elderly

456 UK man, street musician and an ice-cream vendor.

558 A Catching Story (Arthur Cooper 1906) Comedy A bad boy attaches his sister’s skirt to maid’s UK washing, creating confusion.

559 Our Boyhood Days (Frank Mottershaw Comedy Two elderly men fondly remember the pranks 1906) UK they played as boys.

560 The Terrible Kids (Edwin S. Porter Comedy Two boys and their dog play pranks. A chase 1906) USA ensues, the boys are caught and locked in a police wagon but their dog breaks them out.

561 Down By the Old Bull and Bush (Tom Comedy Boys spy on their father. They dress as girls Green 1906) UK and follow him to a rendezvous with a girl.

562 Those Boys Again (Percy Stow 1906) Comedy Naughty boys pin 'kick me' label on a man's UK coat.

563 Children v. Earthquakes - Earthquakes Comedy An impish young girl creates havoc. Preferred (Lewin Fitzhamon 1905) UK

564 Schoolboys Practical Jokes / Farce Comedy Schoolboys play pranks in a classroom d’écoliers (Pathé 1905) France

565 Grandfather’s Tormentors (Arthur Comedy Grandpa is the victim of a pair of boys and Cooper 1905) UK their pranks.

566 Two Young Scamps / The Young Comedy A pair of bad boys play a series of pranks. Scamps (Cricks & Sharp 1905) UK

567 The Peashooter; Or a New Weapon for Comedy Boy uses peashooter to blow peas at a major the Army (Alf Collins 1905) UK / who thinks it is a guard and has him put in Gaumont bonds.

568 Mixed Babies (Frank Mottershaw Comedy A paperboy thinks it’s funny to swap babies 1905) UK from two prams while the mothers are distracted.

569 Father’s Picnic on the Sands (Cricks & Comedy Father’s lunch on the beach is spoiled when Sharp 1905) UK his children misbehave.

570 The Two Imps (Lewin Fitzhamon 1905) Comedy Boy’s use a kitten that they lower down from UK above to pull off a man’s wig

571 Two Young Scamps (Frank Mottershaw Comedy Boys play pranks on different people. 1905) UK

572 The Electric Goose (Alf Collins 1905) Comedy A boy sends electric volts through roast goose UK that reanimates it to everyone’s shock.

573 The Stolen Guy (Lewin Fitzhamon Comedy Children’s Guy stolen by older boys. Drunk 1905) UK dandy poses as Guy until children put him on pyre and light it. Runs off as children dance.

574 Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (AMB Comedy Loosely based on nursery rhyme. Boy steals 1905) USA pig at fair and runs off, chased by the crowd.

457

575 Our New Errand Boy (James Comedy A boy creates havoc while on an errand, Williamson 1905) UK making others the victims of his pranks. He is chased and locks his pursuers in a chicken coop.

576 The Bad boy and the Groceryman Comedy Bad boy sabotages a dishwashing machine In (AMB 1905) USA a kitchen and later demolishes shelves in a grocery store.

577 Buster Brown series (Edwin S. Porter Comedy 5 short films with Buster and Tige: 1. Attack 1904) USA balloon vendor. 2. Steal cookies. 3. Humiliate dandy. 4. Scare off women at haberdasher. 5. Punish tramp that won’t share jam.

578 The Dear Boys Home for the Holidays Comedy Two brothers wreak havoc at home, filling top (James Williamson 1904) UK hats with flour, tying tablecloths to coat tails, painting beards and moustaches on infants.

579 Lover’s on the Sands / A Stroll on the Comedy Two boys dig a hole in the sand and an Sands (Alf Collins 1904) UK unwary couple fall in while the boys laugh.

580 Tommy’s Revenge (Warwick Trading Comedy Tommy ties fireworks to coattail of his sister’s Co. 1904) UK boyfriend.

581 The Stolen Puppy (Lewin Fitzhamon Comedy A boy steals a little girl’s puppy and stuffs it 1904) UK in man’s pocket.

582 The Mischievous Kid, the Duck and the Comedy Boy plays pranks on policeman. Gendarme (Parnaland and Ventujol 1904) France

583 Those Troublesome Boys (James Comedy Boys place a bucket of mortar on a plank that Williamson 1904) UK falls on a workman’s head.

584 Boys Will Be Boys (Frank Mottershaw Comedy Two boys perform pranks in the country. 1904) UK

585 Two Bad boys in Church (Edison 1904) Comedy Two boys in church play pranks on USA congregants.

586 The Hoop and the Lovers (Biograph Comedy A boy and girl ambush lovers on a hammock, 1904) USA snaring them with a hoop. The lovers fall backwards attempting to free themselves.

587 Father’s Hat; or, Guy Fawkes Day Comedy Father poses as a Guy Fawkes dummy and the (Percy Stow 1904) UK children try to set him alight.

588 Drat That Boy (R.W. Paul 1904) UK Comedy Mother cleaning chimney gets soot in her face when boy blows bellows up flue. She spanks him then falls in a tub as the boy laughs.

589 The Story the Biograph Told (AMB Comedy Office boy at Biograph learns to work camera. 1904) USA Films boss kissing secretary. Boss’s wife sees film and replaces secretary with a man.

458

590 Hooligan’s Roller Skates (AM 1903) Comedy Two boys attach roller skates to Hooligan USA while he sleeps. He wakes, loses control, knocks over a policeman and is taken to jail.

591 A Shocking Incident (AMB 1903) USA Comedy Young Willie wires a battery to the legs of a roasted turkey. When Bridget picks up the turkey she receives a shock, thrashes about.

592 The Knocker and the Naughty Boys Comedy Boys knock on a door and hide so the maid (Percy Stow 1903) UK throws water on her mistress.

593 Willie’s Camera (G,W,Bitzer Comedy Two boys make a fake camera from stovepipe [Vitagraph] 1903) USA and a box. Invite woman to be photographed. As she poses camera spews soot all over her.

594 Why Foxy Grandpa Escaped a Comedy Bucket over door gag backfires when Grandpa Dunking (AM 1903) USA connects string on bucket to bell that the boy's pull and get doused.

595 You Will Send Me to Bed, Eh? (G.W. Boy gets revenge on widowed mother for Bitzer [AMB] 1903) USA sending him to bed by pulling of her wig in front of a suitor as he is about to propose.

596 How Tommy Got a Pull on His Comedy Tommy ties rope from Grandpa’s chair, Grandpa (Biograph 1903) USA through wall to a drawer in next room. When maid opens drawer Grandpa falls from chair.

597 A Boarding School Prank (AM 1903) Comedy Schoolgirls fill oil lamp chimney with soot. USA When schoolmarm comes in to light lamp she is covered in soot.

598 Mischievous Boys (Lubin Co. 1903) Comedy Two bad boys stand pail of water with string USA on board over door from which an old farmer emerges. String pulled and farmer drenched.

599 The Mischievous Girls (Selig 1903) Comedy Two girls tie ends of long string around ankles USA of cop and sleeping tramp. Tell tramp cop is after him. Cop and Tramp tumble repeatedly.

600 Gardener Sprinkling Bad Boy (Lubin Comedy Follows Lumière film except at the end of the 1903) USA film the gardener douses bad boy with water

601 Pulling Off the Bed Clothes (G.W. Comedy A small boy ties a string to his older sister’s Bitzer 1903) USA bedding and attaches the other end to a door. When the door opens the bedding flies off.

602 Krousemeyer Kids (Selig Polyscope Comedy Boys play pranks and receive a spanking. 1903) USA

603 Buster’s Joke on Papa (Edison studio Comedy Buster hides live crabs in Papa's bed so he gets 1903) USA a surprise when he goes to bed.

604 Hooligan’s Fourth of July (Edwin S. Comedy Happy and "Dusty" see boys put explosives Porter 1903) USA under sleeping peddler's cart. Hooligan tries to help but he and peddler are blown up. Dusty

459 reassembles parts.

605 Bad boy and the Hod Carrier (Lubin Comedy Patsy Hooligan loads hod with bricks, climbs 1903) USA ladder. When half way up a boy pulls ladder down. Hooligan falls on man and they fight.

606 Heavenly Twins at Odds (Edwin S. Comedy Baby boys hit each other like professionals as Porter 1903) USA their little hands move quickly.

607 Mischievous Willie's Rocking Chair Comedy Willie ties string from sleeping grandpa’s Motor (Robert K. Bonine [AMB] rocking chair to gold fish bowl overhead. As 1902) USA he starts to rock, fishbowl water spill on him.

608 A Lively Scrimmage (Lubin 1902) USA Comedy Boys blow spit balls at woman spinning wool. She chases them to window and gets stuck.

609 The Photographer’s Fourth of July Comedy Boys put firecrackers in a photographer’s (AMB 1902) USA camera while his back is turned. Camera is destroyed in a large explosion.

610 The Mischievous Boys and the Washer Comedy Boys throw firecrackers at washerwoman Woman (Edison 1902) USA from window. She hurls wet linen at them and they throw it back. She panics and upends tub.

612 Baby in a Rage (AMB 1902) USA Actuality Baby has tantrum that quickly intensifies with screaming and stamping of feet.

613 A Patient Sufferer (AMB 1901) USA Comedy Boys take dead cat to doctor who drives them away. Patient raps at door but doctor thinks it's the kids and hits patient with club.

614 An Unexpected Knockabout (AMB Comedy An old man watches two boys arguing over a 1901) USA game. One boy swings bag of flour at his opponent who ducks and bag hits old man.

615 The Tramp’s Unexpected Skate (Edwin Comedy Boys put skates on tramp and wake him. He S. Porter 1901) USA chases them but collides into various people.

616 The Bad boy’s Joke on the Nurse Comedy Nurse naps on bench with infant, opposite (Edison Co. 1901) USA sleeping old man. Boys place baby in man’s lap. Nurse has police arrest the old man.

617 An Over-Incubated Baby (Walter R. Comedy An infant put into professor’s incubator is Booth 1901) USA subjected to too much heat and emerges a minute later a boy with long hair and beard.

618 Love in a Hammock (James H. White Comedy Boys see lovers in a hammock. One climbs 1901) USA tree to overhead branch that breaks, sending boy, hammock and lovers crashing down.

619 A Close Shave (AMB 1901) USA Comedy Boys tie man to barber’s chair and shave his whiskers. Barber rushes in doused by water.

620 Tommy’s Trick on Grandpa (AM 1900) Comedy Boy fills grandpa's pipe with gunpowder. The USA old man sits for a smoke but pipe explodes.

460 621 The Katzenjammer Kids Have a Love Comedy Two boys fight for little girl affections when Affair (AMB 1900) USA mother comes in and breaks up the ruckus.

622 A Wringing Good Joke (Edwin S. Comedy Grandpa dozes on chair. Grandma at tub. Boy Porter 1900) USA ties string from chair to towel in tub. Grandma wrings towel that tips both chair and tub.

623 The House That Jack Built (George Trick Film A little girl has erected a house from blocks, Albert Smith 1900) UK which her brother joyfully to demolishes.

624 Grandma and the Bad boys (James Comedy Boys fill lamp with flour. Grandma goes to Henry White 1900) USA light lamp and is covered in flour. She picks up boys and dunks them headfirst in flour.

625 Maude’s Naughty Little Brother (James Comedy Boy sneaks in and ties tablecloth to sister’s Stuart Blackton 1900) USA date’s coattails. Dad enters and date rushes out, upending the table. Dad spanks boy.

626 How He Saw the Eclipse (AMB 1900) Comedy Small boy interrupts an astronomer's vision by USA pouring a bucket of water into his telescope.

627 Ein Bier (AMB 1900) USA Comedy Boy fashions barrel to look like a seat. A fat man with beer and a sandwich sits and the barrel collapses beneath him.

628 The Tramp Gets Whitewashed (AMB Comedy Two young boys cause a fight between a black 1900) USA man and a tramp.

629 The Black Storm (AMB 1900) USA Comedy Boys fill sleeping woman’s closed umbrella with soot and sprinkle her with water. Waking she opens umbrella and is covered with soot.

630 The Gunpowder Plot (Cecil M. Comedy A boy puts explosives under his father’s chair. Hepworth 1900) UK Father is blown to pieces.

631 The Biter Bit (Bamforth films 1899) Comedy One of numerous British remakes of UK Lumières’ L'arroseur arrosé. Here the prankster is a teen rather than a child.

632 When Babies Quarrel (AM & Biograph Actuality Infant girl in high chair has tantrum while a 1899) USA boy infant eats oblivious to the fuss.

633 Little Mischief (James Stuart Comedy Young girl sneaks up behind father reading Blackton/Albert E Smith 1899) USA. paper and tickles him repeatedly with a straw. Father shoos at the fly and falls off his chair.

634 Little Willie in Mischief Again Pa (AM Comedy Cook places potatoes in pan then exits. Willie 1899) USA puts them in fridge and fills pan with water on high shelf. Cook drenched reaching for pan.

635 As in a Looking Glass (AM 1899) USA Comedy Boy ties rope from a rocking chair through wall to a drawer in next room. When a maid opens drawer, man in rocking chair falls out.

636 How Little Willie Put a Head on His Comedy Boy paints face on sleeping Pa's bald spot. Sis Pa (AM 1899) USA slams into woken Pa as she chases bad boy.

461

637 The Tramp and the Giant Firecracker Comedy Boys find tramp sleeping on a park bench and (AMB 1898) USA wake him up with a large firecracker.

638 Little Willie and the Minister (AM Comedy Boy plays prank on a minister who is blamed 1898) USA and beaten by washerwoman with a mop.

639 Tommy’s Ringing Good Joke on His Comedy Boy ties string from sleeping Pa’s chair to Dad (Biograph 1899) USA towel in tub. Mother cranks wringer that pulls over chair and tips tub on father as boy laughs.

640 A Wringing Good Joke (James H. Comedy Boy ties string from sleeping Pa’s chair to White 1899) USA towel in tub. Mother cranks wringer that pulls Pa’s chair over and tips tub on him.

641 The Devil in the Convent [Le Diable au Fantasy Children dressed as devils appear in a convent Couvent] (Georges Méliès 1899) at the devil’s bidding. France

642 The Astronomer’s Dream [La Lune à Fantasy In a dream about a giant moonface, devilish un mètre] (Georges Méliès 1898) young twins emerge from moon’s mouth and France dance about till they are thrown back in.

643 Tribulations of a Country Schoolmarm Comedy Classroom dunce uses a poker and nail to tug (AMB 1898) USA off teacher’s wig. The other children collapse into hysterics at the prank.

644 The Sleeping Uncle and the Bad Girls Comedy Two girls torment a sleeping man. (AM 1898) USA

645 An Innocent Victim (AM 1898) USA Comedy Boy changes sign from “Nice Fresh Tomato Catsup for Sale” to “Nice Fresh Tom Cats for Sale”. Amused rube blamed for defacement.

646 The Farmer’s Mishap (AM 1898) USA Comedy Two boys throw tomatoes at farmer and daughter in rowboat. Farmer tries to hit boys with his umbrella but overturns the boat.

647 The Runaway Knock and the Suffering Comedy Boys knock at door and run away. When Milkman (Riley Bros/Bamforth 1898) milkman knocks he is blamed for the prank. UK

648 A ‘Moving’ Picture (AMB 1898) USA Comedy Family move into new home. Father sets up flue for new stove. Son plays prank resulting in father’s sooty face

649 Wicked Boys and the Teacher's Comedy Boys suspend bucket of water above door so Unexpected Bath (AMB 1898) USA that as teacher enters it drenches him while all the boys laugh.

650 The Katzenjammer Kids in School (AM Comedy When teacher steps out, two boys tie string 1898) USA between desks. Returning, the teacher trips and falls and is pelted with schoolbooks.

651 Birdnesting (RW Paul 1898) UK Comedy A boy climbs tree, falls out and lands on a farmer who chases him.

462

652 Burglars in the Pantry (William Comedy Three children break into the kitchen pantry Dickson 1898) UK and steal jam.

653 When the Cat’s Away (RW Paul 1898) Comedy When teacher exits classroom bad boy clowns UK until his return.

654 A Practical Joke [aka A Joke on the Comedy Repeat of the Lumière hosepipe gag. Gardener] (GA Smith 1898) UK

655 Two Naughty Boys Upsetting the Comedy Boys play a prank on their aunt’s suitor that Spoons (James Williamson 1898) UK causes him to fall over.

656 Two Naughty Boys Sprinkling the Comedy Two boys hand their aunt’s suitor a hosepipe Spoons (James Williamson 1898) UK instead of his cane then turn on hose.

657 Two Naughty Boys Teasing the Comedy Boys throw peas at cobbler who angrily hurls Cobbler (James Williamson 1898) UK a boot and hits a woman.

658 The Runaway Knock (GA Smith 1898) Comedy Boy antagonises resident with door knocking. UK Gets old man to knock for him. The old man is doused with a bucket of water.

659 The Rainmakers (AM 1898) USA Comedy Two boys put sign over hole in fence saying “Drop Nickel in Slot and See it Rain”. A farmer follows directions and is doused.

660 The Minister’s Wooing (AM 1898) Comedy Minister woos young lady on a bench as boy USA dangles spider in his face. Minister jumps up, upsetting bench as girl topples then storms off.

661 The Near-sighted School Teacher (AM Comedy Schoolmaster at his desk lets class run riot. A 1898) USA child ties an artificial spider to a ruler, and shakes it in front of the teacher’s face

662 The Schoolmaster’s Surprise (AM Comedy Two boys fill lamp chimney with flour that 1897) USA spills over schoolmaster as he goes to light it.

663 Plaguing Grandpa (AM 1897) USA Comedy A impish little girl tickles her grandpa with a straw while he tries to read his evening paper.

664 L'arroseur arrosé (Alice Guy 1897) Comedy Boy plays prank on gardener with hose France

665 The Bad boy and Poor Old Grandpa Comedy Grandpa peacefully reads his newspaper when (Biograph 1897) USA little boy creeps up unseen and sets it on fire.

666 Seminary Girls (James White 1897) Comedy Similar to Pillow Fight but coded as naughty. USA A woman walks in to stop the fight. One child scrambles under a bed and is dragged out.

667 Pillow Fight (James White 1897) USA. Novelty Four girls enjoy an animated pillow fight as the pillows split and feathers fly about.

668 Children in the Nursery (Paul 1896) Comedy Children fight with pillows in a bedroom. UK

463

669 Arroseur et arrosé (Francis Doublier Comedy Another version of the bad boy playing the 1896) France hose prank on a gardener.

670 The Bad boy and the Gardener [aka Comedy Boy performs hosepipe gag on woman Bad boy and the Garden Hose] (James watering garden. Woman’s husband arrives to White 1896) USA see what has happened and chastises the boy.

671 Childish Quarrel (Louis Lumière Actuality Two infants in high chairs fight over toys. One 1896) France begins to cry.

672 The Twins Tea Party (Robert W. Paul Novelty Toddlers fight over a piece of cake and one 1896) USA them bursts into tears.

673 L'arroseur arrosé [The Sprinkler Comedy Boy steps on hose of man watering garden, Sprinkled] (Louis Lumière 1895) cutting off flow. He releases foot when the France man looks into the nozzle and is drenched.

464

465

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Martin, Craig Alan Frederick

Title: Beware! Children at Play: A Carnivalesque Analysis of the Monster Child from Early Slapstick to the Nazified Children of Modern Horror

Date: 2020

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/241533

File Description: Redacted thesis file

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