In the early 1950s there was a certain amount of anxiety in the Britain about the influx of American imported ‘horror comics’ such as The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear, both published by EC comics. Fuelled by the arguments of American psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and critic Geoffrey Wagner’s Parade of Pleasure: A Study of Popular Iconography in the U.S.A. (1955) both of which linked such reading material to juvenile delinquency, concerns grew over what the effect of the comics may be on the minds of British youth.
Discussions of the subject in the press were frequently framed in such terms, with psychologised language and discourse common elements of the debate. In a letter to The Times published 15th November 1954, the art historian Herbet Read wrote that ‘The only effective defences against the “horror comics” must be built within the mind of the child’. Furthermore, when addressing the Society of Education in Art on the subject in January 1955, Read argued that the horror comics were part of a ‘collective neurosis’, symptomatic of the callousness and imaginative poverty of society (The Daily Telegraph, Jan 4 1955).
In his letter to The Times Read argued that the root of the problem lay in education:
It is assumed that it is merely a problem of the commercial exploitation of the defenceless mind of the child, but the real problem is that state of defencelessness. The mind of the child may not be wholly innocent, but it is as pliable as any growing shoot, and the reason why it grows in the direction of sadism is because, in our educational system there is no effective counter-influence (Read, 1954).
Read’s statement that the ‘mind of the child may not be wholly innocent’ reflects psychoanalytic understandings of childhood as governed by self-interested drives and aggression, while his belief that it ‘is as pliable as any growing shoot’ suggests a faith in a behaviourist model. Such a psychologised reading is used to make a political critique, and Read suggests that children turn to the horror comics because of the wider social atmosphere of the 1950s. His comments here anticipate later ideas that understand horror as the symptom of a sick society.