With every generation, there are new fears that people latch
onto. New things come into the culture
that scare parents, politicians, police, and anyone else in a position of
authority. We can see that right now
with the vape culture. Signs have gone
up at establishments that say both not to smoke and not to vape. Commercials have been played before movies at
the cinema to warn people about the potential side effects of vaping. It’s the new scare that has found its way
through western culture.
When a major scare hits the culture, it will inevitably
creep its way into media and entertainment industry. Movies become one of the major outlets to
spread the fear. Propaganda movies sway
the thoughts of a population by manipulating their outlook on life. Other movies that aren’t blatant propaganda sneak
thematic messages in or use the villain as a vessel for the scare. Studios and filmmakers know how influential
their work can. They end up using it as
an influence to propagate the scare.
The biggest of the scares to hit movies would be communism
and Russia which caused a lot of issues both in front of and behind the camera. Joseph McCarthy was a senator who had put
together a commission to try and weed out the communists in Hollywood. People lost careers over it. The Hollywood blacklist was created, with the
names of “known” communists. People were
no longer sought out to work on the big pictures. On screen, there were many Russian villains
and cold war thrillers that came out of the era. It lasted well into the 1980s until the fall
of the Berlin Wall.
Cold war thrillers were a big source of the communism scare
in movies. They were mainly spy flicks
where it was the CIA or FBI against the KGB. They weren’t the only source for putting this
sort of fear into American audiences, however.
Though the McCarthy trials happened in the 1950s, the action movies of
the 1980s were just as fearful. They
were filled with Russian villains. Take,
for example, the film Red Dawn. It was about teenagers forming a resistance
against the Russian army that invaded America.
It brought the threat of Russia and communism to American soil. The Americans still came out on top, but it
was a movie warning people about how bad the Russians and their communist ways
could be. When the remake was released
in 2012, the Russians had been replaced with North Koreans. The North Koreans were a quickly edited
cover-up for the originally intended Chinese villain. Either way, the villains were communist or
dictatorships, so it was an extension of the Russian villains that populated the
films of the 1950s through the 1980s.
Communism wasn’t the first scare that American film
audiences would experience, and it wasn’t the last. Christian movies are all about putting fear
into people in order to make them believe.
There are many instances where Christian films have used fear tactics to
attempt to convert people, or play into the steadfast opinions of the already
converted. Take the first two films in
the God’s Not Dead series as an
example. The first movie was about a
student’s beliefs being taken away from him by a teacher who no longer
believed. The teacher died in the end
because he didn’t believe. There was a
reporter who lost her faith, and she ended up with cancer. By the second movie, her cancer was cured
because she believed in God again. Bad
things happened to the people who didn’t believe. Good things happened to those who did.
Another scare that managed to find its way into film was the
AIDS epidemic. This was a huge thing in
the 1980s and 1990s where people were afraid of the because it was new and unknown. There were connotations that came with it. It was mostly happening to gay people, and
the idea of AIDS made people automatically conclude that someone suffering it
would be gay. That’s not always the
case. It can be shared through needles,
sex, or blood. It didn’t have to be gay
sex. We all know that by now.
A few movies took on the AIDS epidemic. Philadelphia
was probably the most critically acclaimed of the early 1990s, putting the
audience in the shoes of Tom Hanks’s character as he died from the
disease. The movie depicted the ways
that society worked against him. It
showed how people were treated differently when they had the disease. Then there was the movie Kids. It was about teenagers
in New York dealing with sex, drugs, and alcohol. AIDS was a major part of the movie, leading
to a particularly shocking finale.
People feared the disease. Some
movies propagated that fear while others normalized the ailment so that the
people suffering from it would be treated like people.
Then there was the biggest scare of them all. It was bigger than the Russian communism
scare. It was bigger than the World War
II scare. It was bigger than AIDS,
though it tied into that. And it was
definitely a bigger scare than what Christian movies put out there. This scare was drugs.
There is a reason to fear drugs. Opioids are killing numerous people on a
daily basis. They go to the doctor to
get cured, end up hooked on pills, and then drown in a empty pill bottles. Countless celebrities have died from drug
overdoses. River Phoenix, John Belushi,
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heath Ledger, Chris Farley, Peaches Geldof, Margot Kidder,
Marilyn Monroe, Brittany Murphy, Dana Plato, and Amanda Peterson are only some
of the actors that died from drugs related causes. It’s no wonder the drug scare has been going
on for nearly a century.
The war on drugs was a big part of the 1980s, leading into
every decade that has come since. The
United States of America, and many other places, cracked down on drug use. Or they said they were going to. Most of the efforts in the United States came
down to a few of the big-name illegal drugs.
They went after cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and meth. They didn’t really crack down on the pills
that people could get at the local pharmacy.
People were warned about what smoking or injecting could do, but they
weren’t warned about ingesting pills.
One of the biggest movies to come out against drugs was
released decades before Nancy Reagan’s big push in the war on drugs. It was a 1936 film called Tell Your Children that played more like
an afterschool special or driver’s ed warning video than an actual movie. If you don’t recognize the name, the movie
now goes by the title Reefer Madness.
Reefer Madness was
about all the bad things that could happen when people were involved in
marijuana. If they were dealers or
buyers, marijuana ended up being one of the worst possible substances. Everyone on both sides of the transaction
were affected. They all smoked marijuana
and it led to bad things. Some of them
hallucinated. Others attempted rape. Some sessions even ended in murder. It was a bad drug that led to bad
things. Or so the movie depicted.
This was clearly propaganda.
More than 80 years after the movie’s release, people know that marijuana
was never that bad. It didn’t drive
people to murder or rape. If they were
going to do that, they were going to do it regardless of marijuana. The drug just gave them an excuse to commit
the atrocities without taking personal ownership. Reefer
Madness tied marijuana to those activities in order to give it a bad name
because the filmmakers didn’t want people smoking the grass. Alcohol was fine. Weed wasn’t.
Looking back on it now, Reefer
Madness was laughable. They went so
over-the-top on the side effects that it turned everything into a joke. The way the people laughed, the violent
lengths they would go to after smoking the slightest amount, and their rapidly
decreasing minds were heightened to the point where it felt like a parody, even
though it wasn’t. The propaganda they
tried to shill didn’t land. There are
better, subtler ways to do it.
Films meant to scare audiences about certain societal topics
have been around for ages. From the drug
warnings of films like Reefer Madness
to the Cold War communism scare of movies like The Manchurian Candidate and Red
Dawn all the way to recent Christian non-believer scares like God’s Not Dead and God’s Not Dead 2, filmmakers use their platform to get across ideas
that they feel people should be turned off of.
Want them to fear AIDS? Use Kids as an example. The platform was made for telling
stories. Sometimes the stories come with
warnings.
There’s a new thing to fear in our culture with every
generation. Movies have been one of the
major outlets for getting fear messages out, but there are other ways as
well. There is the basic word of mouth
that has been a thing for centuries. One
person tells another person something and it spreads. The news is a major factor in building
fear. Toys, television, radio, books,
advertisements… Almost anything can spread fear. It’s up to every person to figure out for
themselves whether they want to believe the fear or learn something and make
their own decisions.
Now let’s get some notes in here and go on with our days:
- This post mentioned God’s Not Dead (week 230) and God’s Not Dead 2 (week 230).
- Have you seen Reefer Madness? What other movies do you think tie into the whole building fear about something? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
- The comments and Twitter are also good places to let me know about what I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Drop me a line and tell me about the bad movies you want to see featured here.
- There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies where some fun things are happening. Check it out.
- This was week 339 of the Sunday “Bad” Movies, which means that next week will be a franchise week. What will I be watching? In the past few years, there has been a trend to make direct-to-video sequels to family-oriented action movies of the 1990s. One of those franchises is ready to go up to bat. Cop and ½ and Cop and a Half: New Recruit are ready to be covered, and they are what I’ll be checking out. I’ll see you next Sunday for that post, whatever I have to say about the movies.
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