'From grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers': prestige horror, female audiences, and allegories of spectatorship in The Spiral Staircase (1946)

This paper examines the prestige ‘shocker’ The Spiral Staircase (1946), suggesting that it challenges the perception of the decline in quality in the horror genre in the 1940s, as well as assumptions in scholarship that the genre has historically been addressed to a male audience. Whilst the film is usually discussed as a woman’s film, on release it was centred as part of a distinct shift in the horror genre from ‘grade B thrillers to deluxe chillers’. The reclassification of films like The Spiral Staircase as woman’s films could be seen as an attempt to make text fit established theory – the film is addressed to a female audience and thus cannot be a horror film. Through an analysis of textual and extra-textual discourses, including reception and publicity materials, this paper will challenge the pervasive theories that suggest female pleasure or identification is unattainable in horror spectatorship. Whilst the theory is that women refuse to look at horror, averting their eyes or turning away, in 1946 The Spiral Staircase asked a predominantly female audience to take a closer look and question the very act of looking at the cinema screen

Old Horror, New Hollywood and the 1960s True Crime Cycle

This article focuses on a cycle of late 1960s true crime films depicting topical mass/serial murders. It argues that the conjoined ethical and aesthetic approaches of these films were shaped within and by a complex climate of contestation as they moved from newspaper headlines to best-sellers lists to cinema screens. Whilst this cycle was central to critical debates about screen violence during this key moment of institutional, regulatory and aesthetic transition, they have been almost entirely neglected or, at best, misunderstood. Meeting at the intersection of, and therefore falling between the gaps of scholarship on the Gothic horror revival and New Hollywood’s violent revisionism, this cycle reversed the generational critical divisions that instigated a new era in filmmaking and criticism. Adopting a historical reception studies approach, this article challenges dominant understandings of the depiction and reception of violence and horror in this defining period

The Influence of ‘Psychiatrist Friends’ on British Film Censorship in the 1960s

This article will demonstrate the significant influence that psychiatric consultants exerted on the policy of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and, as a result, on cinematic representations of mental illness and psychiatric practices during what Arthur Marwick (2005) called the 'long 1960s'. Drawing upon extensive research at the British Board of Film Classification archives, this article complicates dominant narratives of British censorship in highlighting how John Trevelyan, appointed as Secretary of the BBFC in 1958 and frequently depicted as a liberalising force, deferred to psychiatric expertise outside the BBFC in making decisions about film censorship and certification and, in some instances, scriptwriting and editing. This article will explain how a proliferation of American and, later, British films dealing with mental illness caused BBFC examiners to lose confidence in their ability to make censorship decisions in the mid-1960s. Initially, this loss of confidence prompted consultation with the influential British mental health organisation, the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH) and, subsequently, a small group of trusted medical professionals, referred to as 'psychiatrist friends', who decided on cuts and certification of films including The Caretakers (1963), The Collector (1965) and Repulsion (1965). As a result, the BBFC moved from a default position of prohibition to one of enabling 'serious' films that promoted mental health awareness and discussion of contemporary mental health issues. This article aims to offer new insights into the policies, processes and practices of the BBFC, to contextualise censorship within historical debates about mental health representation and to highlight the mutually productive interactions that took place between the fields of mental health and cinema

From In Two Minds to MIND: The circulation of ‘anti-psychiatry’ in British film and television during the long 1960s

This article explores the circulation of ‘anti-psychiatry’ in British film and television during the long 1960s, focusing on the controversial BBC television play In Two Minds (1967) and its cinema remake Family Life (1971). These films were inspired by R. D. Laing's ideas on the aetiology of schizophrenia, and were understood as uniting the personal and political motivations of progressive film-makers (Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, David Mercer) and progressive psychiatrists (Laing, David Cooper, Aaron Esterson). Drawing upon practitioner interviews with producer Garnett and director Loach, and extensive archival research on the production and reception of these films, this article contests previous scholarship on the popular circulation of anti-psychiatry and the movement's perceived polarisation from mainstream British psychiatry. While the reception of In Two Minds and Family Life did intensify an adversarial relationship between ‘rebel’ anti-psychiatrists and hard-line behaviourists such as William Sargant, the wider psychiatric field largely welcomed the films' contributions to mental health awareness and used the publicity to counter the idea of a ‘battle’ within the profession. This included leading UK mental health organisation the National Association for Mental Health looking to Loach and Laing as models for engaging contemporary audiences as it rebranded to MIND in 1972. This article contributes to historical understandings of the complex interactions between the fields of media and mental health, as well as recent scholarship challenging the idea of a clear split between anti-psychiatry and British medical orthodoxy

‘Look at What We Made’: communicating subcultural value on London’s Southbank

This article sets out key findings of an interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project that uses Long Live Southbank’s (LLSB) successful campaign to retain London’s Southbank Undercroft for subcultural use – skateboarding, BMXing, graffiti art etc – as a case study to generate discussions about young people’s experiences and engagements with (sub)cultural heritage and political activism. At the heart of this inquiry is the perceived contradiction between the communicative practices of subcultures and social protest movements: the former typically understood to be internally-oriented and marked by strong boundary maintenance, and the latter, to be successful, to be externally-oriented to a diverse range of publics. In explaining the skaters/campaigners negotiation of this contradiction, we look to the inclusive and everyday concepts of ‘inhabitant knowledge’ (Ingold 2000), ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess 2009) and ‘affective intelligence’ (Van Zoonen, 2004). In eschewing the exclusionary and contestatory language of (post)subcultural and spatial theories, this article proposes new frameworks for thinking about the political nature of young people’s bodily knowledge and experiences, and the implications of this for the communication of (sub)cultural value

Engaging youth in cultural heritage: time, place and communication

Debates about heritage have posed questions about what is of value and who can ascribe value. These debates often centre on the types of places that are afforded official heritage value as well as the kinds of ‘experts’ who are sufficiently trained and educated to be able to ascribe this official value. At the root of all of these debates is a desire to try and understand why something is so valuable that it should be retained for future generations. Contained within this is a belief summed up by the National Trust that heritage is “forever” and by English Heritage that it belongs to “everyone”. These totalising statements provide the impression that access to heritage is equal and in the name of the greater good of future generations. However, certain groups remain disadvantaged within this system. Young people are one of these groups as they “remain largely anonymous from heritage conservation policy and practice” (Azevedo, 2012: 3). Similarly, the role of heritage within the youth sector more generally is also undervalued as “(youth) organisations were found to not immediately connect heritage to youth work, with heritage viewed as an abstract construct” (CPI, 2015: 37). However, research carried out on the “world’s oldest surviving skateboard spot” as well as documentary analysis of the Young Roots programme funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund has illustrated that engaging young people with heritage can have wider benefits for both the heritage and built environment sectors. This report will examine some of the ways in which young people both form and powerfully express their value of historic places. In doing so it is intended that the views of young people can inform the ongoing evolution of the heritage sector in the UK. To achieve this the report will focus on how the relationship between young people and heritage develops and in particular the role of place and time within this. In doing so it is intended that the abstract nature of heritage will be broken down with the aim that the findings can provide “youth workers and professionals the right tools to engage young people with heritage and encourage them to think about heritage projects” (CPI, 2015: 37)

Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction

Delinquent Daughters:Hollywood's war effort and the 'juvenile delinquency picture' cycle

This paper examines a short-lived cycle of ‘juvenile delinquency pictures’ that have been almost entirely ignored in scholarship on the teen film, perhaps in part because they focus on female rather than male youth. Whilst individually unremarkable, collectively these films were central to political debates about the role of Hollywood in wartime. This paper maps the widespread discursive struggles between Hollywood, the middlebrow press, industry regulators, and various government agencies over the production of this cycle. It moves on to analyse the New York reception of these films, highlighting how this ‘cycle of sensation’ was debated in relation to the very local contexts of New York's ‘bobby soxers’ and ‘victory girls’ and the strategies to police them in and around Times Square. It demonstrates that focusing on the localized and contested terrain of discourses surrounding historically situated media cycles reveals the complexity and local specificity required of micro-historical enquiry