Decentring monstrosity in The Children’s Hour (1961)

Video essay with creator's statement

The Children’s Hour (1961) is the first commercial film distributed by a major US distributor that features a lesbian character in a leading role. Depicting the scapegoating of two schoolteachers following accusations that one of them is a lesbian, the film immerses us in a world where lesbians and gay men had been newly re-demonized following the lavender scare. Produced at the late end of the ‘social problem’ cycle of post-War US films, The Children’s Hour was marketed as a realist drama; however, in paratextual and publicity materials, horror themes come to the fore, particularly in mainstream critical reviews of the film (which were peppered with words like “chilling” and “evil”) and in hate mail received by director William Wyler (where one viewer went so far as to accuse him of depicting cannibalism!). In the text of the film itself, the deployment of horror elements is somewhat more ambivalent: the movie soundtrack, for example, contains eerie, discordant musical motifs and short, tinkly piano notes resembling the theme song of the popular US television show The Twilight Zone (1959–64); however, this music cues in unpredictable ways, not to the movie’s lesbian character/s but rather to moments of homophobic panic, suggesting an imbrication of queerness and monstrosity that is unruly, counter-discursive, and potentially disruptive.

The aims of this video essay are to re-engage themes of queerness, monstrosity, and homophobic moral panic, as they are evident in paratexts surrounding the 1961 film, to see how they can, in Darren Elliott-Smith’s formulation, “break free from the limiting associations with monstrosity that heteronormativity imposes upon it” (2016, 192). How might these elements be re-used, re-purposed, and set in counterpoint against the pro-queer aspects of the film text? What are the tensions between pro-queer elements of the movie soundtrack and homophobic letters, and how can this be drawn out? Methodologically, this work will emerge from a collaboration between a moving image, collage, and sound artist and an academic, who will work together to create a new image- and soundscape – the video essay. Materials to be re-used include horror-themed archival materials (critical commentary about the movie; letters received by director Wyler; elements of the movie soundtrack), re-mapped with heteronormative images from the film (Ahmed’s “norms of conduct” [2019]). The aim is to take forward Elliot-Smith’s claims, to speculatively consider re-using archival horror to imagine a world beyond such themes.