Just back from seeing Jurassic World, which I have to admit I enjoyed – I’m a sucker for nostalgia. I was also amused by the meta-discussions about needing to create bigger monsters to impress audiences that endlessly demand greater visual stimulation. I actually don’t think this is true of movie audiences and the argument highlights the disconnect between Hollywood right now, and spectators who still appreciate good storytelling.
Movies and amusement parks share quite a history – they grew up together. In Lauren Rabinovitz’s book: Electric Dreams: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernism, Rabinovitz outlines how: “Amusement parks and movies appeared simultaneously.”
Amusement parks helped contribute to the “rise of movies as a cultural institution… [as] cinema and the amusement park both celebrated each other” (22). Early examples of movies that embraced amusement parks include:
- Boarding School Girls Visit Coney Island (1905, Thomas Edison)
- Speedy (1928, Ted Wilde)
- The Crowd (1929, King Vidor)
- Coney Island (1939, William Castle)
Speedy (1928). At Coney Island, New York.
In the final chapter of her book, Rabinovitz identifies a divide between the cultural significance of amusement parks in the first half of the twentieth century, and their transformation, corporatization, or ‘disneyfication’ into the theme parks of the ‘post-war’ years (Disneyland first opened in 1955). It seems to me contemporary representations of amusement parks have taken on a sinister dimension. While early films focused on the physical and audiovisual pleasures that amusement parks offered visitors, later films have depicted amusement parks as sites for oppressive working conditions, kidnappings, murders, vampire attacks and a zombie apocalypse.
Below are just a few examples of disturbing scenes set inside amusement parks.
- The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
- Strangers on a Train (1951)
- The Lost Boys (1987)
- Fatal Attraction (1987)
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- Itchy and Scratchy Land (1994, The Simpsons, TV)
- Silent Hill 3 (2003, VG)
- Adventureland (2009)
- Zombieland (2009)
- Escape from Tomorrow (2013)
- Jurassic World (2015)
My favorite of the above is the horror film Escape from Tomorrow, which was shot on location at both Disneyland and Disney World (without Disney’s knowledge!). I first saw the movie at the Crosby Hotel, NYC, where the director attended a Q&A discussion after the screening and talked about the logistics of covert, guerrilla filmmaking. Escape from Tomorrow is currently available on Amazon Prime.
One might posit that the prominent placing of amusement parks in recent movies demonstrates a working through or mourning as movie spectatorship and more generally entertainment become less and less an embodied, crowd experience.