1. Hoodies strike fear in British cinema
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/05/british-hoodie-films
If you want to scare a British moviegoer, you don't make a film about zombies
– you cast a kid in flammable sportswear and a hoodie
Who's afraid of the big bad hoodie? Enough of us, certainly, that the smart
money in British cinema is going on those films that prey on our fear of urban
youths and show that fear back to us. These days, the scariest Britflick villain
isn't a flesh-eating zombie, or an East End Mr Big with a sawn-off shooter and
a tattooed sidekick. It is a teenage boy with a penchant for flammable
casualwear.
What separates hoodies from the youth cults of previous moral panics – the
teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the punks, the ravers have all had their day
at the cinema – is that they don't have the pop-cultural weight of the other
subcultures, whose members bonded through music, art and customised
fashion. Instead, they're defined by their class (perceived as being bottom of
the heap) and their social standing (their relationship to society is always seen
as being oppositional). Hoodies aren't "kids" or "youngsters" or even "rebels"
– in fact, recent research by Women in Journalism on regional and national
newspaper reporting of hoodies shows that the word is most commonly
interchanged with (in order of popularity) "yob", "thug", "lout" and "scum".
Greg Philo, research director of Glasgow University Media Group and
professor of sociology at the university, traces our attitudes to hoodies back
to the middle classes' long-held fear of those who might undermine their
security. That is what they see in what Philo describes as "a longterm excluded
class, simply not needed, who often take control of their communities through
aggression or running their alternative economy, based on things like drug-
dealing or protection rackets".
"If you go to these places, it's very grim," says Philo. "The culture of violence is
real. But for the British media, it's simple – bad upbringing or just evil children.
Their accounts of what happens are very partial and distorted, which pushes
people towards much more rightwing positions. There's no proper social
debate about what we can do about it. Obviously, not all young people in
hoods are dangerous – most aren't – but the ones who are can be very
dangerous, and writing about them sells papers because people are innately
attracted to what's scary. That's how we survive as a species – our body and

2. brain is attuned to focus on what is likely to kill us, because we're traditionally
hunters and hunted."
Once the images of the feral hoodie was implanted in the public imagination,
it was a short journey to script and then to screen – it's no surprise that
hoodies are increasingly populating British horrors and thrillers, generating a
presence so malevolent and chilling that there are often hints of the
supernatural or the subhuman about their form.
Daniel Barber's debut feature film, the much touted Harry Brown, is the latest
and possibly the grisliest movie to exploit our fear of the young, but it follows
a steady stream of British terror-thrillers including Eden Lake, The Disappeared
and Summer Scars, as well as a seedier breed of ultraviolent modern nasties
such as Outlaw and The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. Soon we'll get
Philip Ridley's Heartless, a visceral supernatural horror in which the howling,
snarling hoodies who terrorise the estate turn out to be genuine demons
dealing not in crack cocaine but in diabolical Faustian bargains. Harry Brown's
hoodies, however, are still very much human, and like most cinema hoodies,
the ones who circle the eponymous vigilante hero (played by Michael Caine)
hunt in packs and move in unison, commandeering the gloomy underpasses
and stairwells of the concrete and steel London estate they inhabit. To Barber,
the threat they present is very real and was, he believes, the motivating factor
for Caine to make the film.
"I'm scared of these kids in gangs," says Barber. "They have no respect for any
other part of society. It's all about me, me, me. Life is becoming cheaper and
cheaper in this country." And from a director's point of view, hoodies are gold
dust. "We're afraid of what we don't understand or know, and there's so much
about these kids we just don't understand," he says. "That's a good starting
point for any film baddie."
When we first see the bad guys in Harry Brown, they are an amorphous mob
of hooded creatures cast in shadow, smoking crack in an under-lit tunnel.
They shoot at a young mother pushing a buggy in a park, then batter an old
man to death. They show all the hallmarks of the stereotypical youth of
"Broken Britain" – the tracksuits, guns and dead eyes – and Barber's overhead
framing and murky lighting of them as they swarm over a vandalised car or
close in on a passing couple invite comparison with those other cinema
villains who gather strength in the dark – vampires and zombies.
The hoodies of the celebrated British horror Eden Lake have a similarly
vampiric quality, though we quickly understand – through the deployment of
the Rottweiler, the white van dad, the tracksuits and the Adidas gear – that
these are the great British underclass. We know the territory we're in when a

3. mass of disembodied bodies and grabbing hands surround a holidaying
young couple's car. "The film isn't an attack on a particular social group," says
Eden Lake's director, James Watkins. "But if you had a bunch of public school
kids in blazers, it just wouldn't be that scary. There's an element of, 'these are
feral kids let off the leash.' The films that stay with you exploit the fears closest
to you – like Jaws, the sense that there might be something underneath the
water. It's a very primal fear, the fear of the dark or a fear of violence, fear of
children – these are very real fears which go very deep in today's society."
Johnny Kevorkian, the 33-year-old director of last year's The Disappeared, an
atmospheric supernatural thriller about a young boy who vanishes on an
estate populated by prowling hoodies, agrees. "Although it's a ghost story,
much of the fear in The Disappeared is real," says Kevorkian. "These
threatening nasty gangs run these estates. The film is exploiting the fact that
things like gangs killing little kids really happens. So of course, in the film, you
wonder if these guys are the cause of the boy going missing, and that is really
scary."
The Disappeared, like Harry Brown, is set on an estate in south London. In
both films hoodies set up camp on a favoured spot and punish trespassers –
in Harry Brown they seize the underpass, in The Disappeared it's the children's
playground. The noises that echo around the estates – car alarms, barking
dogs, gunshots and loud, taunting shouts – are crucial elements in the films'
relentlessly forbidding atmosphere.
"That's the reality of living on these estates," Daniel Barber says. "There are
hundreds of homes all on top of each other, all with paper-thin walls. There is
no way of escaping the noises other people make around you. You get this
terrible claustrophobia. The architecture itself has gone some way to creating
the attitudes among the kids who live there. It helps create their personalities
– it's not just lack of family involvement or lack of education. They're like
prison cells. But whole families live in them in squalor."
Barber is also aware of the visual power of the hood itself, an icon that has
long had sinister connotations, most with the Ku Klux Klan and the Grim
Reaper. "You have gangs of hooded kids roaming around and it is precisely
the way they dress – disguising themselves, they cover their faces, mask who
they are – which scares us," he says. "But of course behind this mass of
awfulness there are real people, real individuals." To be honest, there's not a
great deal of interest in these real people in most of the hoodie-horror genre.
As Watkins says, baddies are more effective if they're "withheld" – getting to
know them means empathising with them and losing our fear, and that's not
how scary films work.

4. It's interesting that when British cinema has made a genuine attempt to
engage with hoodies on a one-to-one basis, the result is rarely a thriller.
Within the last year we have had Penny Woolcock's sensitive and funny 1 Day;
Andrea Arnold's Loach-inspired and deeply moving Fish Tank; Duane
Hopkins's debut, Better Things; or Wasted, which was nominated for a Scottish
Bafta.
In those films, the audience's empathy depends on the authenticity and
vulnerability of the young actors' performances and the camera closes in on
their faces with a curiosity and open-mindedness that the hoodie-horror
doesn't share. Each makes a convincing argument that behind the hoodie is a
person with the capacity for love, whether it's Fish Tank's hard-drinking Mia or
Wasted's surprisingly tender-eyed rent boy, Connor.
"The more I know, the less fearful I am," says Caroline Paterson, director of
Wasted, a love story centred around two homeless drug addict teenagers in
Scotland. "When we were filming in Glasgow, the actors actually got regularly
picked up by the police and told to move on. These kids looked like the
people we cross the street to avoid and I know that most people make snap
decisions – you're a thug, you're a junkie, you're a lager lout. I wanted to make
a film that said these people are human beings, they count, there is love and
human connections in these people's desperate lives. I wanted to make
people take a second look."
For Woolcock, whose 1 Day focuses on gun-toting, rap-slamming gangster
boys in Birmingham, the urge to "dig behind the headlines" was pressing.
"These stories about gang crime and these faceless thugs, scum who are
ripping us all off – I thought, that can't be true. I knew if you look a bit harder,
you'll find the funny one, the baby, the bully, the sensible one, the one who
loves someone who doesn't love them. These are the things that humanise
these excluded kids. It's very rare to find genuinely evil or psychotic people –
most people are doing the best they can under the circumstances.
"People have families and relationships and deal in silly mundane things all
the time – they're real people. I wanted to show the fun of these people, too.
These are the things that humanise these excluded kids."
From bong-smoking delinquents to renegade skaters: Xan Brooks charts
the history of the teen menace film
Way back in the 1930s, a US church group released a film called Tell Your
Children, depicting the corrosive, devastating effects of marijuana on the
nation's young. Tell Your Children was a cry from the heart, a clarion call. How
tragic, then, that this movie was later recut and retitled for the exploitation

5. circuit. In its new guise, the film now known as Reefer Madness would become
a favourite of the very bong-smoking, trash-talking delinquents it meant
to condemn.
In its unwitting fashion, Reefer Madness set the template for all the teen
menace films that followed. Shrewd producers discovered they could have it
both ways: decrying each fresh wave of youthful transgressors while
simultaneously pandering to the fanbase. What message do we take from The
Wild One (1953)? That biker gangs are bad, or that Marlon Brando looks cool
in his leathers? If Blackboard Jungle (1955) was such a harsh expose of high-
school delinquency, how come its arrival in the UK sparked exultant riots
among its teddy boy audience?
A similar tension can be found in the moral panic movies of the late 1960s.
The Happening (1967) is about a band of hippies who kidnap a mob boss;
Wild in the Streets (1968) the tale of a pop singer who force-feeds LSD to the
general public. Both appear at least halfway in love with the culture they
purport to detest. The same goes for those scare-mongering 1970s gang
movies such as The Warriors and Over the Edge, the latter cited as an
inspiration by Kurt Cobain ("It pretty much defined my whole personality").
These days, perhaps, there is no director who represents the genre so well as
Larry Clark, a sixtysomething film-maker gone native in a perilous world of
renegade skaters and oversexed adolescents. Clark, if nothing else, seems
passionately, intensely interested in his subject matter – and maybe that's the
problem.