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Religious Theatre: From Medieval Times to Slasher Movies By Bradley
Pierce In the 15th
and 16th centuries, the Catholic Church used drama as
a tool to enhance Christian virtues in everyday life. The
plays, which became known as Moralities, contained “…moral truth[s]…by
means of the…action of characters which [were]…figures representing
vices and virtues, qualities of the human mind, or abstract conceptions
in general” (Warren 1). The main goal for these presentations
was to teach certain truths of the faith. The aim was to produce
correct conduct and attitudes in the lives of believers that could
be accessible and easy to understand. One of the earliest
plays of this sort is one pertaining to “The Lord's Prayer,” from
the 14th century, “in which all manner of vices and sins were held
up to scorn and the virtues held up to praise” (Warren 1).
The religious
theatre of the medieval church has heavily influenced modern drama.
In the early 15th Century, religious plays, which showcased
the battle between good and evil in individuals, were extremely
popular in Europe (Blue 3). The Morality eventually became
a symbol with which most of Western society came to associate a
particular interpretation of the concept of decency and ethics.
In time, these symbols of right and wrong carried over into the
consciousness of secular Western thinking and became a framework
and narrative blanket permeating the world of entertainment well
into the 20th Century. Strangers in the Night With the popularity
of the motion picture industry in America in the early 20th
Century, the nation faced many concerns about the influence of movies
on the minds of their audiences. Moral conservatives were
putting pressure on Hollywood to produce a censorship code, which
provided guidelines and standards of acceptable screen material.
Throughout the mid-to-late 1930s, films followed the Production
Code without variance and usually had an upbeat, formulaic approach.
Movies produced during this era, such as the 1939 films Gone
With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and The
Wizard of Oz, were inspirational and light-hearted without presenting
vices to be punished. But, with the advent of WWII, movies
took a much more sinister tone. By the 1940s,
films gradually became less about the optimism and hope expressed
during the Great Depression and focused more on the dilapidation
of man and the despair that resulted. John Belton, author
of American Cinema/American Culture notes: …America
was…peopled by characters caught in the grip of passion, lust,
greed, jealousy, and other naturalistic drives…the Pre-war classical
Hollywood Cinema…had given way to a subversive strain of behavioral
deviance…now dominated by crime, corruption, cruelty, and…[an]
interest in the erotic (226, 237). In Post-World
War II America, many Hollywood movies began to take on a noticeably
darker thematic element than had been presented in the 1930s.
Film noir, a term meaning “black film,” has come to be the phrase
by which most of these movies are identified. These films
present gritty realities of hard-boiled detectives, often with a
fallen hero who lives an enticing life but usually pays for it with
ghastly consequences. Amid the self-censorship imposed by
the Hollywood Production Code of the 1930s, films dealt subtly and
cautiously with mature content like violence and sex and often pushed
the boundaries of sensibilities of the times, but perhaps the heavy
material functioned to voice a conservative message not readily
apparent in the filmmakers' initial intent. Audiences of
this time period, whether consciously or unconsciously, had accepted
a standard of right and wrong. Although film was mainly used for
entertainment purposes, it had become a fixed narrative paradigm
interwoven into the fabric of audiences' psyche through which punishment
was expected for deeds of unrighteousness. Criminals, in movies,
were never to go unpenalized. Adulterers were not to be shown
getting away with their actions, nor were their actions supposed
to seem excessively enticing to immature viewers. The connection
between these highly didactic themes and the religious undercurrent
of the medieval Moralities is evident. The significance of
the “bad girl/guy gets punished, and the good girl/guy gets rewarded”
motif in popular entertainment of the mid 20th Century
is wholly interrelated with the presupposition of a previous system
of morality agreed upon by the majority of society. This Bloody Mess By the 1960s,
change was bound to come in Hollywood as America was confronted
with an unprecedented amount of real life,on-screen violence from
images of the Vietnam War. The counter-culture ideals of the hippie
movement that included an “everything goes” attitude began to wear
on the rigid conservativism of the now outdated Hayes Production
Code. As the 1950s came to a close, films like Some Like
it Hot (1959), directed by Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho (1960) were stretching the boundaries of the code
to the point of rupturing. By 1968, the
Hollywood Production Code was replaced with a version of the modern
ratings system in place today. A slew of films were released
that relied mainly on exploitation and shock value to bring out
the masses. Horror arguably experienced the most dramatic
change. However, against the backdrop of extreme decadence
in the horror genre as a whole, the films that became the descendants
of Hitchcock's classic Psycho carried a detectable strand
of morality stemming from Christian influence. Trick or Treat Psycho
propelled an emerging trend of psychological horror to the mainstream
in the early 60s. After the success of the film, it did not
spark any noticeable copycats immediately. However, in the
late 1970s, horror directors began to blatantly borrow from Hitchcock's
innovative plot devices and formed a new genre in horror based on
his original outline in Psycho. The new genre would
be known as “slashers.” Slasher movies
of the late 1970s and early 1980s typically followed the same narrative
pattern. Peter Hutchings, author of The Horror Film,
states, “Young teens, especially girls, are shown engaging in 'immoral'
activities like sex and drugs [and]… are killed”. This basic
narrative structure was present in Psycho, but it was John
Carpenter's Halloween that served as the direct predecessor
of the morality link that followed in the countless slasher movies
thereafter. An underlying theme of right and wrong, good and evil,
sin and punishment, was being pushed onto the audiences under the
guise of mere fright-filled entertainment. The significant
point about Halloween is the murderer's choice of victims.
Laurie's friends, Linda and Annie, are promiscuous, use marijuana,
and are openly disrespectful to elders. These girls and their
boyfriends parade on the screen in a state of sexual fervor and
seem to want to do nothing but drink, smoke, and make love.
The fact that they are brutally murdered, with accolades from the
audience, alludes to their use as a symbol for immoral behavior
in young people of Western society. The slasher movie then
serves as a moral guide for young people on what kinds of things
will ultimately lead to destruction. The Moral of the Story Rhetoric provides
many functions in today's world. The primary goal of any establishment,
be it an ideological system or an entity, is to present its beliefs
and aspirations with the utmost attractiveness and propriety.
The film industry undoubtedly, at one time, wished to harmonize
the main points of their movie content with the overall majority
views of absolute goodness and definitive evil. Based primarily
on Walter Fisher's proposal that cultures, and individuals, are
born into a unique and integral story that is shared by their homogeneous
environment, it becomes apparent through the study of film noir
and slasher movies that Christian theatre has played a considerable
role in the formation of an ethical scheme for Western society.
The fabric of America's Christian ideals can be felt even in the
darkest recesses of Hollywood entertainment. © 2008, Brad
Pierce --------- Brad Pierce
is a youth leader at Apostolic Church in North Little Rock, Arkansas
where he also serves as the band leader of their youth band,
Revolution Praise. Brad is currently finishing his Master's
Degree in Professional and Technical Writing at the University of
Arkansas in Little Rock where he works as a teaching assistant for
the resident film professor. Works Cited Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. Second Edition. McGraw Hill: New York. 2005. Blue, Tina.
"The Morality Play in English Drama." eSSORTMENT. 2002.
31 Mar 2008. <http://www.essortment.com/ Chandler,
Daniel. "Intertextuality." Semiotics for Beginners. 2003.
30 Mar 2008. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/ Glazer, Mark. “Structuralism.” 1996. May 1 2008. Hays, William.
"The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930." ArtsReformation.com.
2006. 31 Mar 2008. http://www.artsreformation. Hutchings, Peter. The Horror Film. Pearson Longman: Harlow, England. 2004. Leydon, Joe. Movies You Must See if You Read, Write About, Or Make Movies. Michael Wiese Productions: Studio City, CA. 2004. Warren, K.
M.. "Moralities." Catholic Encyclopedia. 1911. New Advent.
31 Mar 2008. http://www.newadvent.org/ Wilder, Billy. Double Indemnity. DVD. Universal: Hollywood, CA. 1944. www.downwarden.com. 1 May 2008. www.lib.berkeley.edu. 1 May 2008. |
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