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MOVIES AND CONDUCT
This type of fear is, however, one which might conceivably be prevented in all but the most sensitive children if parents took the trouble to prepare the child in advance by impressing on it the make-believe character of the cinema. In any case, familiarity would soon achieve a similar result.
Much more significant is the fear which is occasioned in children who are accustomed to cinema technique by incidents on the screen which are in themselves horrible or terrifying, or at least may appear to the children to be so.
Out of 237 younger school children questioned on this point, Professor Blumer reports that 93 per cent said that they had experienced fright while watching films. Among the 458 high school accounts, 61 per cent refer to similar experiences.
One type of film which seems to be particularly liable to induce intense horror is the kind which presents something monstrous or supernatural. One account after another refers to films like The Phantom of the Opera (original version), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Gorilla, and so on. The last of these seems to have been outstanding in this respect : its theme is that a scientist transfers the brain of a dead murderer to an ape, and the animal then proceeds to perpetrate the crimes which the murderer would have committed had he lived. The idea of the mixture of human and animal has some particularly horrifying effect on the mind, as does also the idea of a semi-human machine. One boy of nineteen describes how he saw as a child a film in which a young man kept a machine endowed with life in a mummy case, and was throttled by it in a dark room. The boy went home after the film in 'a perfect paroxysm of fear', and for many years had a distrust of being alone in the dark. He continues: 'Strangely enough, it was never the thought of something natural that frightened me, such as a man, a burglar, for instance, but it was the fear of something entirely outside the physical field. For the same reason I have never yet been able to feel comfortable among the mummies in a museum, and I instinctively look at them with revulsion and disgust'.
The most common result of seeing films of this kind is nightmares and a fear of sleeping alone. One girl saw a film about a mountain feud which involved numerous tortures and killings, and she states that for two or three weeks she continued to be so frightened that she would not be alone.
Enquiry was made of 47 children aged seven to nine as to what objects in films alarmed them: the answers covered ghosts, phantoms, devils, gorillas, bears, tigers, bandits, grabbing hands and
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