Cinema: Catharsis

Brooding over so-called horror movies and their influence on adolescents, Variety pointed out, in its most scholarly diction, that many psychiatrists disagree with “that element of the public which ascribes juve delinquency to crime pix and the harmful effect of horror pix on the young mind.” Among the dissenters: Dr. Martin Grotjahn, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, who thinks that / Was a Teenage Werewolf, Blood of Dracula, etc. provide a means of “self-administered psychiatric therapy for America’s adolescents.” His cathartic argument: “Certain childhood anxieties never die. Fear of ghosts, fear of witches, fear of the dark, the sinister and the mysteriously terrible—these stay with the adolescent. There are three ways to overcome them: psychoanalysis, nightmares, and terror movies, [in which] old childhood anxieties are activated, given life and a form of objective reality on the screen, and then dispelled.”