FILM CHRONICLE
291
by
the promotion blurbs: "In her eyes
DESIRE!
in her veins-the blood
of a
MONSTER!"
(Blood of Dracula);
"A Teenage Titan on a Lustful
Binge that Paralyzed a Town with Fear"
(Teenage Monster).
It is
probable that these crimes are performed less reluctantly than is sug–
gested and that the adolescent spectator is more thrilled than appalled
by this "lustful binge" which captures the attention of the adult com–
munity. The acquisition of power and prestige through delinquent sexual
and aggressive activity is a familiar juvenile fantasy (the same distribu–
tors exploit it more openly in films like
Reform School Girl
and
Drag–
Strip Girl),
one which we can see frequently acted out by delinquents
in
our city schools. In the Teen-age Monster films, however, the hero
is
absolved of his aggressive and libidinous impulses. Although he both
feels and acts on them, he can attribute the responsibility to the mad
scientist who controls his behavior. What these films seem to be saying,
in
their underground manner, is that behind the harmless face of the
high-school chemistry teacher and the intellectual countenance of the
psychoanalyst lies the warped authority responsible for teen-age violence.
The adolescent feels victimized by society-turned into a monster by
society-and if he behaves in a delinquent manner, society and not he
is
to blame. Thus, we can see one direction in which the hostility for
experimental research, explicit in the Mad Doctor films, can
g~it
can
be
transmuted into hatred of adult authority itself.
Or it can go underground, as in the Atomic Beast movies. The Mad
Doctor movies, in exploiting the supernatural, usually locate their ac–
tion in Europe (often a remote Bavarian village) where wild fens, spec–
tral
castles, and ominous graveyards provide the proper eerie background.
The Atomic Beast movies depend for their effect on the contemporary
and familiar and there is a corresponding change in locale. The mon–
ster (or "thing" as it is more often called) appears now in a busy
American city-usually Los Angeles to save the producer money–
where average men walk about in business suits. The thing terrorizes
not only the hero, the heroine, and a few anonymous (and expendable)
characters in Tyrolean costumes, but the entire world. Furthermore, it
has
lost all resemblance to anything human. It appears as a giant ant
(Them!),
a prehistoric animal
(Beast From Twenty Thousand Fath–
oms),
an outsized grasshopper
(Beginning of the End)
or a monstrous
spider
(Tarantula).
Although these films, in their deference to science
fiction, seem to smile more benignly on scientific endeavor, they are un–
consciously closer to the anti-theoretical biases of the Mad Doctor
series than would first appear.
All these films are similarly plotted, so the plot of
The Beginning
