In the 1950s, the teenager was king. As Hollywood found itself in a battle with the burgeoning television industry for the hearts and minds of Americans, it needed to come up with new ways to lure audiences to movie theaters. And teenagers were the biggest demographic that reliably went to the movies. Energetic, freshly independent, and flush with the kind of cash that only coming of age in the midst of a post-war boom can bring, they were crowned the tastemakers of American culture. As a result, studios would spend the 1950s in humiliating desperation trying to predict what these rebellious kids, culturally distinct from previous generations for perhaps the first time in American history, would latch onto next. But as much as they wanted to woo these young influencers, the types of films they created for teens revealed how little they understood this new generation.
Teens of the 1950s, unlike their parents and grandparents, had never known anything but prosperity. When many young families moved to the suburbs after World War II, kids of the late 1940s and early 1950s grew into adolescence with a certain amount of independence, given free reign over their miniature fiefdoms, even as the older generations looked upon their youthful hijinks with suspicion. Studios, if they did their job right, could take advantage of the fact that these kids had disposable income, transportation, and few responsibilities. The first rule was that films aimed at teenagers needed to be about teenagers. And not just in a roundabout way, either – they needed to depict teenagers as distinct entities separate from a larger community. Theaters would plan double bills around the idea of coupling, showing one film for the boys and one for the girls to make it more appealing for dates. And studios would endlessly cycle through trends, sometimes trying to recreate the success of an unexpected hit, other times just guessing what might catch their attention. They may as well have thrown darts at a wall of ideas: Youth culture moves at the speed of light, and teenagers can smell from a mile away stuffy men in suits trying to manipulate them.
First, there were the melodramas centered around juvenile delinquency, desperate bids to capitalize on the popularity of The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. Studios seemed to believe that teenagers were drawn to these types of stories, with their rebellious attitudes and desire to express their own unique identities. (After several years of churning out cheap youth crime dramas, it may perhaps have been time to concede that they weren’t half as effective without the magnetism of a Marlon Brando or a James Dean.) But the fact that they made so many of these movies depicting teens as violent, immoral, and antisocial also speaks to their overall impression of the younger generation – they fundamentally mistrusted them.
Soon, it became obvious that horror and science fiction were a natural fit for teens. The thrilling stories would captivate excitable adolescents, and by creating a subgenre that we can affectionately refer to as “I Was a Teenage Blank,” they would appeal to their egos by centering them within each of their narratives. They separate teenagers from the general population, and come up with some reason or another for them to either be targeted by aliens or monsters, or for them to be inhuman creatures themselves. The trick was to, whenever possible, put the word “teenage” or “teenager” in the title of the film. The possibilities were endless: I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Teenage Cave Man, Teenage Monster, Teenage Zombies, Teenagers from Outer Space. No story was too ridiculous to be optioned, filmed in a week or two on a shoestring budget, and shoved into theaters. Teenagers’ money was valued by the studios, but their tastes were not believed to be particularly discerning.
The metaphor linking young audiences to the violent creatures on screen was not particularly subtle. In fact, in many ways, it was simply an extension of the juvenile delinquent dramas from earlier in the decade. What is a classic teen monster movie, with a hairy 17-year-old in grotesque makeup wreaking havoc all over town, but a crime drama where an adolescent is grappling with their changing body and a barely suppressible rage caused by way too many hormones? Let’s take I Was a Teenage Werewolf, for example – the film that introduced the “I Was a Teenage” format that would be riffed on for decades. Michael Landon stars as a boy with anger issues who is sent to a psychiatrist in order to work through his problems. (A plotline that, in and of itself, is a novelty – a tacit acknowledgement of the unique emotional needs of the young adult that was just beginning to play a larger role in cinema.)
But things go awry when the doctor experiments on his patient, injecting him with a serum and hypnotizing him so that he becomes a werewolf. Throughout all of these, we see themes that are designed to make teenagers identify with the monstrous lead character – not just the disturbing changes to his body, but an overwhelming sense of alienation, the feeling that whatever he is growing into, he no longer belongs. That I Was a Teenage Werewolf ends with the character’s death is again fitting with the larger juvenile delinquency trend – it demonstrates that this raw, youthful violence is ultimately self-destructive. This film perhaps represents the best the genre has to offer. Although the makeup is schlocky and some of the plot elements are ridiculous, there’s an authenticity to the teen characters that help it rise above most of the other teen creature films released around the same time. Landon’s moody demeanor and his unexpectedly sweet relationship with his girlfriend both feel more inspired by something like Rebel Without a Cause than Monster on the Campus.
Still, it has its moments. It could hardly be a 1950s teen movie without a requisite rock and roll scene, where studios and filmmakers grasp at what they think the kids are into, and probably never felt older in their entire lives. I Was a Teenage Werewolf is hardly the worst offender, though. Frankenstein’s Daughter has a runtime of 85 minutes, and at least a third of that is devoted to teen partying and musical numbers. It’s interesting that filmmakers didn’t quite trust in the appeal of horror to draw in teen audiences – they insisted on further gilding the lily with these frankly embarrassing attempts at capturing the attention of youth.
Perhaps the most cynical of these are the films that just include a reference to teenagers in their title, but have nothing really to do with the younger generation. Teenage Monster is set in the Old West, where there are no characters who resemble a modern teenager – the “boy” in question is played by Gilbert Perkins, who was nearly 50 years old when he appeared in the film. Others, like Teenage Zombies and Teenagers From Outer Space, have no clue what to do with their storyline beyond what they’ve put in the title. By the time the last two came out, teen audiences saw through the blatant attempts to win them over – schlocky horror was on its way out, anyway, to be replaced by more gruesome British horror courtesy of Hammer Film Productions and teen beach movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.
All of this reflects a tough situation for Hollywood studios. They relied on teen audiences for their very survival, but never quite got who they were as a generation. The focus on crime and violence in their films reflects perhaps an attempt to lure them in with salacious, adult material, but also demonstrates an unshakeable suspicion directed towards 1950s teens. As we’ve seen since time immemorial, grown-ups distrust what they don’t understand – only for the first time, teens not only existed as their own cultural subgroup completely distinct from other generations, but they held the power of disposable income. As a result, all of these films are imbued with various notes of cluelessness, contempt, and outright dislike, made all the more ridiculous by the stench of desperation.
In the decades since, youth has continued to be a Holy Grail for studios, from the disillusioned young adults of late 1960s in The Graduate to the 1980s preteen hijinks of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies. More recently, youth culture has become less exclusive to teenagers through the widespread use of social media, and many film audiences are experiencing a prolonged adolescence that leads them to seek out the exact same adrenaline hit that studios marketed to teens in the 1950s. The only difference now is that, where 1950s teens were eager to watch films that were “dangerous” and “adult,” the preference now is still youth-friendly, but much more childlike: Simple, comforting morality tales dressed up in capes and hyper-fitted super-suits. 
