In examining the development of 1940s horror, specifically as it relates to child audiences, it is important to first go over the history and mandate of the Hollywood Production Code—otherwise known as “the Hays Code”—that became compulsory in 1934 (Brown 2010, 13). The code, named after Will H. Hays, the head of Hollywood trade office the MPPDA (The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) was intended to make all films universally acceptable in an attempt to pacify the conservative religious watchdogs that were clamouring for the clean-up of Hollywood following the Fatty Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe scandal.[iii] The Hays Code cemented the burgeoning concept of the “family film”—which did not imply, or require, that the films were made for children, but that they were safe for children. At the time, there was pressure to make motion pictures acceptable for all audiences because in the absence of a ratings system (which would not come into place in the U.S. until 1968), children were identified as being exposed to salacious and violent content on a regular basis. Children formed a large percentage of the cinematic audience, and then—as now—acted as unknowing pawns for conservative watchdog groups in creating politically motivated moral panics.

In his dissertation, Hollywood, The Family Audience and the Family Film, 1930-2010 (2010), Noel Brown points out that the stirrings of the family film had already begun as early as 1910, and that in 1915 the Supreme Court ruled that films were not protected by the First Amendment, because, unlike the press, they could not prove to exist for any reason other than financial gain. This meant that filmmakers had no legal recourse on the grounds of artistry should any censorial agency wish to exert its authority over their content, thus leaving them at the mercy of moral watchdogs.  “The ruling was a landmark,” Brown says, and it would hold until 1952, when it would finally be overturned by the Supreme Court in the case surrounding Roberto Rosselini’s 1948 film The Miracle, which had been deemed sacrilegious by the National Legion of Decency (Brown 2010, 49). In the early cinema, while the threat of censorship merely loomed, Hollywood producers still went into the 1920s favouring films that glamorized violent and licentious behaviour, and the box office numbers showed that audiences supported this, which made it hard for Will Hays and his religious supporters—as influential as they were—to gain a foothold in terms of moral reform. Hollywood was not interested in producing sanitized films for a youth market. That is, until the end of the decade, when it suddenly felt competition coming from the educational sector. When the first 16mm projectors were introduced in 1912 (Alexander 2010, 15), they were quickly adopted by churches and schools as educational aids, and by the late 1920s their manufacturers were offering subsidization programs to schools that wanted the equipment, thereby creating a demand for more child-friendly content. Originally Hollywood studios responded by trying to cull “safe” content from their existing films to repackage them for the educational market, but eventually the demands created by this market bolstered Hays’ support for the establishment of the Hollywood Production Code in 1930. The code would become mandatory in 1934, aimed at upholding “a higher level of wholesome entertainment for all the people”.[iv]

The children’s matinee movement started as early as 1913, with screenings usually organized by local community groups, but Alice Miller’s 1929 study Children and Movies indicated that they were not only unpopular with children but also “a sloppy, semi amateur industry” (Brown 2010, 54). By 1925 the Hays Office was heavily pushing a national Saturday Matinee Program through advertising in schools and garnering considerable grassroots support from community organizations, which Richard DeCordova’s 2007 study—in contrast to Miller’s assertion—claims was inaugurated on April 25, 1925 with “great success” (DeCordova 2007, 236). But regardless of whether or not the Saturday Matinee program was popular with children, it is important to remember that at the time, kids could get into pretty much any film they wanted to attend, and they exercised that right.  As DeCordova points out:

In an era which increasingly worked to separate children from adults through institutions such as children’s hospitals, juvenile court systems, and reform schools, the cinema mixed ages indiscriminately, providing the same entertainment for adults and children alike. The ideal of preserving childhood by maintaining a childhood culture distinct from adult culture was disrupted by the cinema as the boundaries between children’s films and adult films became blurred. (2007, 234)

While the different states varied on the rules surrounding child attendance at cinemas, in all cases children had to navigate through an adult world to see films. In some states there were restricted hours for children, and others prohibited entry to unaccompanied children. But as Sarah J. Smith notes in her book Children and Censorship (which, it must be noted, focuses on 1930s audiences) underage audience members would circumvent regulations by having strangers accompany them into the theatre. They would bargain with their parents, they would get odd jobs to save money to see films, and they would barter with the theatre owners, sometimes bringing food or other items in lieu of cash payment (2005: 43). Many kids would just sneak in through the alternate exits or bathroom windows. Although adults were supposed to police their entry into the theatre, they rarely did, partially because kids formed a major part of the cinematic economy, with the neighbourhood theatres or “nabes” especially relying on the younger demographic.[v] Smith goes on to assert that the cinema provided children a means of “ownership and control over a public space,” and that it “offered liberating escapism through films and a warm, dark, virtually adult-free environment for engaging in ‘wild’ and ‘subversive’ behaviour” (2005, 172). Youth participation in cinema culture also extended beyond the theatre; they collected film magazines and trading cards, with some kids as young as 12 even making their own films and running their own underground cinemas (Smith 2005, 171).

The pre-code gangster and horror films were immensely popular with children, who tended to go to the theatre once or twice a week and served as one-third of the US film audience. They went to neighbourhood theatres—distinct from the larger, more opulent picture palaces—which often showed B-movies and second-run films, which explains the Poverty Row studios’ interest in film cycles that would engage young audiences. Children idolized the hoodlums that were the anti-heroes of many gangster films, and their imitation of the streetwise dialogue (“OK”, “Youse guys”) was responsible for bringing many expressions into the vernacular (Smith 2010, 150). But if movies like Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) made kids want to be tough guys when they grew up, in 1937 they were given role models their own age that made the theoretical gateway that much more accessible: just as the squeaky-clean Shirley Temple was becoming Hollywood’s adopted daughter, Sidney Kingsley’s popular 1935 stage play Dead End was adapted by William Wyler for the screen. The film was cleaned up slightly—references to syphilis were removed, among other things—but nonetheless the film still negotiated a number of censorial boundaries; it was overtly critical of social inequality and the juvenile reform system, as well as referencing both prostitution and police brutality against women. It was an underdog picture through and through. And at the center of it all were a gang of juvenile delinquents who were about to become superstars: The Dead End Kids.

Wyler and Producer Sam Goldwyn rounded up six of the original 14 kids from the theatrical production to appear in the film version, including Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and Bobby Jordan, who would be the staples of the gang as they went through various incarnations (The East Side Kids, The Little Tough Guys and The Bowery Boys) from the 1930s through the 1950s. According to David Hayes and Brent Walker’s 1984 book The Films of The Bowery Boys, the young actors were actual juvenile delinquents and destroyed enough property on set during the shoot that their two-year contract with United Artists was sold to Warner Brothers, who made five more ‘Dead End Kids’ films, including their most famous, Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) alongside James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. When Warner Brothers released them from their contracts—also due to shenanigans on set—Sam Katzman from Monogram Pictures picked them up and created the East Side Kids series in 1940, with the first official film being Boys of the City.[vi] Monogram was a Poverty Row studio and the budgets for these films were about $30,000 each, which often meant quick turnovers for scripts and shooting schedules in comparison to their bigger studio counterparts. They would make 20 East Side Kids pictures in all.

But while the Dead End Kids films were serious and hot-topic social dramas with a real grittiness, the boys were domesticated significantly at the height of their fame; by the time they moved over to Monogram in 1940, a lot of the hard-knock realism of their former roles had been stripped away, and they became more family-friendly, comedic caricatures of their earlier roles. They were still portraying mostly orphans, foster kids and at-risk youth, but were transformed from a hoodlum gang into a kind of mystery-solving gang. This allowed them to delve into more genre-heavy plotlines, including horror pictures very much modelled on the early ‘old dark house’ films of the late 1920s and early 30s,[vii] which featured slapstick comedy, secret passageways, trap doors and even horror icon Bela Lugosi as a sinister stranger playing everything from a hiding-out Nazi scientist (Ghosts on the Loose, 1943) to a suspected serial killer (Spooks Run Wild, 1941). Ironically, the 1920s old dark house films have not been discredited to the degree of their 1940s counterparts.

The horror explored in The Bowery Boys films—while always draped in the trappings of old dark house shenanigans as their East Side counterparts were—was also one with an increasing tendency to feature monstrous mad scientists (Spook Busters, William Beaudine , 1946; Master Minds, Jean Yarbrough, 1949; The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters, Edward Bernds, 1954), which coincided with the horrific revelations of the Nuremberg trials starting in late 1945.[xii] The American press had been reporting on Nazi atrocities as early as 1933, and were fully aware of ‘the Final Solution’ by 1942 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), but playwright Arthur Miller, who was working in a Navy shipyard at the time, suggests that, as they were largely focused on the Pacific conflict, the average American did not grasp the magnitude of it (Novick 1999). Miller noted “the near absence among the men I worked with … of any comprehension of what Nazism meant—we were fighting Germany essentially because she had allied herself with the Japanese who had attacked us at Pearl Harbor” (Novick 1999, 26). But the evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials could not be ignored: the tribunals revealed actual  documentation of inhuman medical experimentation—as well as U.S.-shot footage of the discovery of the Dachau concentration camp by Allied forces. This footage was shot by a team headed up by George Stevens, then a member of the U.S. Signal Corps, but later to become the director of A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), among others.[xiii] While Stevens’ footage was not widely seen until after his death in 1975 (Hartl 2004), the murky aesthetic of the documentary newsreels in rotation at cinemas combined with the traumatic experiences of returning vets[xiv] would affect the trajectory of what we now know as film noir, a darker, more morally ambiguous breed of film after the war.

Though the term, “film noir,” was coined in the late 1940s by French critics, it would not come into widespread use in the U.S.A. until the genre’s resurgence in the early 1970s.[xv]  While noir was emerging in the early 1940s with films like Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)and The Maltese Falcon (1941), late 1940s noir became much more influenced by the realism of documentary newsreels, as well as by the documentary-inspired aesthetic of Italian Neo Realist film (Luchino Visconi’s Ossessione, considered the first Neo Realist film in 1943, was itself an adaptation of James M. Cain’s pulp novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, whose 1946 adaptation would become a noir staple). The effects of wartime newsreel footage rippled out into the realm of seedy fiction, contributing to the paranoid tone of late 40s noir. In a 1946 essay, Siegfried Kracauer writes of the increasing realism in Hollywood thrillers post-war: “Nightmares are seen in bright daylight, murderous traps are sprung just around the corner…Thus, the weird, veiled insecurity of life under the Nazis is transferred to the American scene…that panic which in the anti-Nazi films was characterized as peculiar to life under Hitler now saturates the whole world” (1946, 105-6). Kracauer suggests that the war left the American cinema with “a sickness of the psyche” (1946, 108). This ‘sickness’ permeates the world of the film noir, with its chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets and characters, by turns anti-social, sociopathic and psychotic.[xvi] In a 1971 essay, Paul Schrader writes that “never before had films dared to take such a harsh, uncomplimentary look at American life, and they would not dare to do so again for twenty years” (1971, 2). It is hardly surprising that the critical reappraisal of film noir coincides with another psyche-crushing overseas conflict, the Vietnam War. Despite being positioned as ‘liberators’ in the arena of WWII, veterans of both conflicts shared a palpable post-war disillusionment, those of the latter returning to an especially volatile political climate in which America’s anger turned inward.

While The Bowery Boys would grab onto some of film noir’s more easily identifiable characteristics for parody in films like Spook Busters (William Beaudine, 1946), Hard Boiled Mahoney (William Beaudine, 1947) and Private Eyes (Edward Bernds, 1953), film noir was no place for kids. Those rare instances where kids did play a part showed that the genre played no favourites; even children could meet their doom at the hands of a sweaty, unsmiling villain. Reflecting the grim realities of the war, the film noir was a world of dehumanization and determinism (Bould 2005), where chances of survival were slim, and any kid unlucky enough to make it into the narrative would have to fend for themselves. But despite the noir world being almost completely devoid of children, the concept of ‘the child alone’ was too tempting for some of the genre’s filmmakers to ignore, creating especially fertile ground for the horror-noir hybrid film. Fritz Lang’s M (1931) can be seen as a clear precursor to this admittedly tiny sub-strand of horror-noir (while its LA-set remake by Joseph Losey in 1951 comes in at the heyday of noir). Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is related, though comparatively sunny, and its teenager in peril—who fancies herself the spiritual ‘twin’ of her serial-killer uncle—is positioned as a young woman more than a child.

Lew Landers’ 1948 Inner Sanctum (produced by the independent M.R.S. pictures, and not to be confused with the Universal series, although based on the same radio show)[xvii] is a key horror-noir crossover that features child actor Dale Belding as Michael Bennett the sole witness to a murder. It takes the dopey kid half the movie to realize that the man staying in his mother’s small-town boarding house is the murderer.  At first the kid takes a shine to the mysterious stranger, as he has no father-figure (the only men at the boarding house are the elderly local doctor and the town drunk), and even once he susses out the killer’s identity, he is reluctant to tattle since he witnessed the murder as a result of disobeying his mother’s orders to stay away from the railyard. Immediately we can see a shift in how the child is presented; as with many noir protagonists, Michael is hesitant, unconfident, emasculated. Unlike his East Side Kids counterparts who negotiate their world with full agency, he is afraid of authority figures—so much so that he is more terrified of his own mother than he is of the murderer sleeping in the next bed. The child sees, but is marginalized by his size and age, forced to witness traumatic events and to live in fear of the encroaching danger to which he has been left vulnerable.

In Ted Tetzlaff’s under-appreciated horror-noir The Window—a film that deserves a reappraisal by horror scholars—Bobby Driscoll’s character Tommy has this precise problem. It is not just that someone wants to kill him, but that, as a child, he has no credibility, a situation that is exacerbated by the fact that he’s a known teller of tall tales. “Noir, which is so often about powerlessness, is the perfect vehicle for this story” (2012, 42), writes Jake Hinkson in his article “Children of the Night: Noir and the Loss of Innocence. Based on the story “The Boy Cried Murder” (1947; a.k.a., “Fire Escape”) by noir staple Cornell Woolrich—whose books were adapted for Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943), Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, (1954) among others—The Window is incredibly bleak, and is one of several stories Woolrich wrote from a child’s perspective.[xviii]

Lead child actor Driscoll was becoming a hot youth property at the time, on loan here from Walt Disney Pictures, who had featured him in Song of the South in 1946. He would go on to be the model for Disney’s animated Peter Pan (1953), as well as providing the winsome character’s voice, which creates a poignant counterpoint for his terrorized turn in The Window. While horror-noir would not typically be targeted to young audiences, Driscoll’s presence ensured that certain kids would seek out the film, and The Film Noir Foundation has a letter posted on their website from a man who remembers seeing The Window in a small-town Kansas cinema as a child. “I idolized Bobby Driscoll,” he writes, “I identified with this child star as he avoided the killer’s schemes. I wondered what I would do in the same situation. My heart raced. My eyes were glued to the screen and [I] wanted somebody to believe him before it was too late.” [xix]

Like Peter Pan, Tommy (named Buddy in the original story) is a boy with a boundless imagination, and spends his days wandering through the rubble of crumbling tenements—filmed on location (a staple characteristic of noir, especially in the latter half of the forties) in New York’s Lower East Side, home of The Dead End Kids and their ilk—making up stories for a gaggle of unimpressed post-war waifs. As Woolrich writes in the original text:

He lived in two worlds at once. One of them was a small, drab, confined world; just two squalid rooms, in the rear of a 6-story tenement, 20 Holt Street; stifling in summer, freezing in winter…the other world had no boundaries, no limits. You could do anything in it. You could go anywhere. All you had to do was sit still and think hard. Make it up as you went along. The world of the imagination. He did a lot of that. But he was learning to keep it to himself  (144).

As the camera pans over the bleak urban landscape of his neighbourhood in Ted Tetzlaff’s film adaptation, we can see why Tommy likes to tell stories. Even before the film noir elements of the story set in, Tommy’s world is a dangerous one, which he navigates without trepidation precisely because he has that wild imagination to keep him safe. Thus, the grim horror-noir context is disempowering to children like Tommy only in a traditional sense. As Tyrus Miller asserts in his investigation into childhood memory and trauma in his essay, “The Burning Babe: Children, Film Narrative and the Figures of Historical Witness” (2013), there are different types of agency, and a retreat into imagination is itself a wilful act of self-preservation that cannot be discounted. Miller writes that “the intensification of sensory experience that compensates for the loss of active agency and the dream-like indiscernibility of subjective and objective dimensions of the experience point beyond passive witnessing towards a new domain of agency residing in imaginative processes”(2003: 213). Tommy’s imagination frequently gets him into trouble perhaps because of the subversive potential that others realize in it. He doesn’t understand why his parents are no longer charmed by his stories, and instead call him a liar, shaming him. In other cases, his stories, true or not, carry potential for disruption and change. When he tells some neighbourhood boys that his family will be moving away to their big ranch in the country, his parents are beset upon by other tenants wanting their soon-to-be vacated apartment.

The story of The Window takes place in the middle of a particularly sticky summer, and when Tommy goes out onto the fire escape to sleep in the cooler night air, he witnesses his upstairs neighbours murdering a man. Tommy frantically wakes his mother up and tells her everything. Convinced he is just overreacting to a nightmare, she tells him to stop it before she “takes a hairbrush to him.” As with Dale Belding’s character in Inner Sanctum, telling the truth holds the threat of punishment. And if physical punishment doesn’t work, there’s always guilt. “You don’t want me ever to be ashamed of you, do you?” his father asks. “People are gonna say that Ed Woodry’s son doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.” The unfair pressure these parents place on Tommy regarding their own social standing once again suggests fear of the potential power of the child as an agent of change.

Tommy goes through a series of attempts to report the crime—including a trip to the local police station—all of which are met with outright dismissal because of his age. Tommy’s is a world in which no adult is on his side: strangers, police, even his own parents. In fact these figures of official authority all seem to be corrupt allies against childhood itself. As his counterpart says in Woolrich’s text: “Wasn’t there anyone in the whole grown-up world believed you? Did you have to be grown up yourself before anyone would believe you, stop you from being murdered?” (184). However, some people do believe the boy: those who have the most to lose if his story is believed. When his mother takes him upstairs to apologize to his neighbours, the Kellersons, for spreading malicious lies about them, Tommy’s cover is blown. That night, with his mother called away to visit a sick relative, and dad working the night shift, Tommy is locked in his room, left alone to wait out his own murder. In Cornell Woolrich: From Pulp Noir to Film Noir, author Thomas C. Renzi has pointed out that the Kellersons act as doubles to Tommy’s parents (2006, 312)—a point illustrated nicely when the Kellersons abduct Tommy and posit themselves as his parents to a probing policeman (312).  One of the reasons the film’s suspense is so taut and unnerving is that the distinction between the ‘good’ parents’ and the ‘bad’ parents in such an analogy is shattered by the fact that both are equally horrid to Tommy. The Kellersons want to kill him, but his real parents may as well want the same thing for all the support they give him.

Tommy’s knack for make-believe momentarily saves him; while he pretends to be asleep, his assailants let their guard down just long enough for him to dart up the fire escape to the abandoned tenement next door, where the Kellersons have stashed their previous victim’s body. As Tommy is pursued by the Kellersons through the ruined domestic spaces and corridors of the tenement (a dark double of his own building), the whole structure starts to crumble under him, which not only provides the film with a fantastic spectacle, but also offers up a great metaphor for all of Tommy’s fictions falling away, until he’s left on a single precariously creaking beam, hanging over a gaping precipice. If he makes the choice to jump into the safety net down below, where his parents await alongside the policemen and firemen, he will be making another kind of choice as well. Tommy’s big lesson is to give up his imagination. “I’ll never tell a story again!” he promises, to which his parents respond with pride and affection. After the resolve this brave and resourceful child has shown throughout the film, this is the most cynical and heartbreaking denouement possible. Just who owes who an apology here? His neglectful parents are able to deny their guilt and convince the child that his imperilment was his own fault. The viewer is left only with the lingering memory of the release Tommy felt earlier in the film when escaping into his imagination. But this downbeat ending was only the beginning of the real Bobby Driscoll’s heartbreak.

Just as his character would find the murder victim’s body in an abandoned tenement, this is how Driscoll himself would be found years later. His body was discovered by two children playing in a dilapidated Greenwich Village tenement in 1968, dead from hardened arteries following nearly a decade of intravenous drug use. Attempts to identify him turned up nothing, and it wouldn’t be until two years later that his mother came searching for him, and a fingerprint match gave that John Doe a name. But it was too late; Driscoll had gone from being the voice of Peter Pan—the little boy who refuses to grow up—to his very own Neverland: an unmarked pauper’s grave on New York’s Hart Island.

While it remains a little-known component of the horror-noir canon, The Window left an imprint: John Hough remade it in 1970 as Eyewitness, starring Oliver!’s Mark Lester; and Australian director Richard Franklin remade it in 1984 as Cloak and Dagger with E.T.’s Henry Thomas. In both cases the story’s claustrophobic domestic microcosm is given a makeover, strewn across a wider canvas to be reshaped into a tale of international intrigue. There would be a few subsequent examples of kid-noir in the 1950s (e.g., Shadow on the Wall [1950], Talk about a Stranger [1952]), but only Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955) compares to The Window for its atmospheric crossover with the horror genre. As Hinkson points out, both of these films hark back to much older stories, ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, respectively. “These origins point to a certain severity regarding childhood that existed prior to the Hollywood model of the cheerful American youngster,” he writes, “and it also points to the modern whitewashing of those gruesome old fairy tales” (2012, 43). Indeed, the film noir showed that things were rough all over, even—and sometimes especially—if you were a kid.

As an era that was divided between wartime neglect and post-war trauma, the 1940s were daunting psychological terrain for kids. A key semantic element of the East Side Kids and Bowery Boys cycles, as well as those rare examples of kid-centric horror-noir, is the protagonists’ ability to master his or her environment on their own terms, even (and often) with adults acting as roadblocks. The trajectory from the horror-comedy of Boys of the City to the devastating horror-noir of The Window can be likened to a coming-of-age, an intertextual map of obstacles and how to get around them, either with laughter or ingenuity.

Significantly, the horror-comedies of the 1940s—from the East Side Kids to Abbott and Costello and the “monster rally” films (those which pit several classic Universal monsters against each other)—would become staples of the Saturday matinees in the 1950s, kicking off the “monster kid” craze that was bolstered further by the release of the Universal horror back-catalogue on television later that decade. Despite the dismissal of 1940s horror in much popular genre film criticism—criticism that is often specifically targeted at horror-comedy—these films were hugely influential, and the cinema culture surrounding them was a vibrant one that allowed children to investigate questions concerning identity, agency and safety.