1. Hoodies strike fear in British cinema<br />Jane Graham , guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009<br />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.<br />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 quot;
kidsquot;
or quot;
youngstersquot;
or even quot;
rebelsquot;
– 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) quot;
yobquot;
, quot;
thugquot;
, quot;
loutquot;
and quot;
scumquot;
.<br />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 quot;
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 racketsquot;
.<br />quot;
If you go to these places, it's very grim,quot;
says Philo. quot;
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 brain is attuned to focus on what is likely to kill us, because we're traditionally hunters and hunted.quot;
<br />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.<br />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.<br />quot;
I'm scared of these kids in gangs,quot;
says Barber. quot;
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.quot;
And from a director's point of view, hoodies are gold dust. quot;
We're afraid of what we don't understand or know, and there's so much about these kids we just don't understand,quot;
he says. quot;
That's a good starting point for any film baddie.quot;
<br />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 quot;
Broken Britainquot;
– 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.<br />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 mass of disembodied bodies and grabbing hands surround a holidaying young couple's car. quot;
The film isn't an attack on a particular social group,quot;
says Eden Lake's director, James Watkins. quot;
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.quot;
<br />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. quot;
Although it's a ghost story, much of the fear in The Disappeared is real,quot;
says Kevorkian. quot;
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.quot;
<br />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.<br />quot;
That's the reality of living on these estates,quot;
Daniel Barber says. quot;
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.quot;
<br />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. quot;
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,quot;
he says. quot;
But of course behind this mass of awfulness there are real people, real individuals.quot;
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 quot;
withheldquot;
– getting to know them means empathising with them and losing our fear, and that's not how scary films work.<br />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.<br />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.<br />quot;
The more I know, the less fearful I am,quot;
says Caroline Paterson, director of Wasted, a love story centred around two homeless drug addict teenagers in Scotland. quot;
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.quot;
<br />For Woolcock, whose 1 Day focuses on gun-toting, rap-slamming gangster boys in Birmingham, the urge to quot;
dig behind the headlinesquot;
was pressing. quot;
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.<br />quot;
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.quot;
<br />