Brides of Dracula PosterIn an earlier post I described how my childhood fears were ignited and flamed by this film. When I recently watched the trailer it all seems silly and make believe yet as a child I had no filter to discern reality from unreality and no adults explained so I thought everything in the movie was real and that were I not careful I could end up with fangs where my front teeth were. Funny now but terrifying then as I suffered in lonely isolation- I could never speak about this to anyone. I could not tell the adults that my babysitter Pat had taken me to this movie against my grandmothers instructions and that I lived in fear of the vampires. What a revelation it was when many years later I found out that vampires are not real but only after their reality plagued my childhood. I suppose this is one reason I have zero interest in the new Twilight movies. I can't help but wonder what movies and televisions do to the hearts and minds of children today.
We all know that violent shows and movies increases violent behavior in young people. I recently heard about a new book titled Remotely Controlled:How Television is Damaging Our Lives by Aric Signman and was amazed to hear of a culture where television was only recently introduced. Before TV they had no prisons. You can guess whether they have places to incarcerate violent criminals now. This is hard to believe but check out the book.
Sigman analyses numerous examples of how television has destroyed societies in recent years: the erosion of cultural and civic values and the explosion of crime that occurred in the nation of Bhutan after it introduced television is one example; the 11 per cent spike in self-induced vomiting to control weight gain that occurred amongst teenagers in Fiji (a country in which dieting and eating disorders were virtually non-existent) within three years of the introduction of television in that country in the mid-nineties is another, but possibly the most chilling statistic that one encounters in this book comes from a study published in The Journal Of The American Medical Association in which the prevalence of murder and rape in the US and Canada was studied in the terms of the spread of a disease such as AIDS or SARS. The results of the study noted that murder rates in the US and Canada doubled after the introduction of Television, which led the authors of the study to conclude that, "If, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Violent crime would be half of what it is." (P.120)
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