Additional References
EWFF, July 2005
According to The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior, two dominant bear market movie themes are anti-heroes and Horror. Among the few successful offerings are Batman Begins and. The lineage of both films fits right in with the start of a major bear phase. Batman goes back to 1939 when the comic book version of "The Dark Knight" first appeared as an antidote to the classic bull market hero of Supercycle I, Superman. A campy TV version emerged at the end of Cycle III in 1966, but Batman Begins "positions its hero at the dark end of the street. It's a film noir Batman, a brooding, disturbing piece of work." In a nod to more down-to-earth bear market sensibilities, the latest Batman's lack of "super powers" is part of the marketing appeal.
George Romero's Land of the Dead is Romero's "long-awaited return to the Horror genre he invented, beginning with the seminal Night of the Living Dead" in October 1968, shortly before an all-time peak in the Value Line index that stayed in place for 15 years. Back in 1999, EWFF cited the box office success of a single scary movie, The Blair Witch Project, as "the strongest evidence that a sudden social mood trend change" was in the cards. Now the same signal is flashing, only many times stronger, as Horror has become Hollywood's one reliable money-maker. "The genre's raging success has led to some almost frightening developments of late," says The New York Times. "Horror is now very much filmdom's stylish inner track." "You'd be shocked at who's calling and wants to be in these movies," says a producer.
EWFF, August 1999
Evidence of a BIG Social Mood Reversal
Perhaps the strongest cultural evidence of a sudden social mood trend change is the surprising box office success in July 1999 of a what one film critic called "old-fashioned Horror, the kind that taps into our deepest subconscious fears and draws on universal myths and the iconography of fairy tales." The Haunting was No. 1 at the box office even though some reviewers panned it for not being scary enough. The true strength of this trend is signaled by the sleeper hit of the summer, The Blair Witch Project, a $60,000 independent film that opened to a mixed reaction just six months ago. In the weekend after the high, it was pulling in a record $5 million from 30 theaters. "We wanted to make a Horror movie based on the reality-based programming that freaked us out as kids," said the film's producer. "We wanted to really scare and truly horrify people. There hasn't been anything in recent memory that's disturbed people like such films as The Omen or The Exorcist.
"All the recent Horror films have been sex-ridden and cool to watch. We didn't want that." When The Elliott Wave Theorist first looked broadly at cultural trends and the stock market in 1985, one of the most striking patterns observed was the relationship between bear markets and Horror movies. "While musicals, adventures and comedies weave into the pattern, one particularly clear example is provided by Horror movies." We cited two periods, the classic Horror films of the early 1930s, when as the Dow crashed to its low of 41, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, King Kong and Mr. Hyde made their debuts, and the slasher and zombie films of the 1970s, a big bear market decade in inflation-adjusted terms. "Hollywood had to horrify us to satisfy us, and it did!" Don't look now, but these new "reality" Horror movies are just the beginning. Ten more "thinking man's Horror" films are set to debut in coming weeks. On some level, bear markets are that simple. People want a good fright, and they get it. Later, they want a good fight, and they will get that, too.
The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior
Horror movies descended upon the American scene in 1930-1933, the very years that the Dow Jones Industrials collapsed. Five classic Horror films were all produced in less than three short years. Frankenstein and Dracula premiered in 1931. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was released in 1932, the year of the great bear market bottom and the only year that a Horror film actor (Frederick March, for that film) was ever granted an Oscar. The Mummy and King Kong hit the screen in 1933, on the test of the low in stock prices and right at the trough of the Great Depression. These are the classic Horror films of all time. Ironically, Hollywood tried to introduce a new monster in 1935 during a bull market, but Werewolf of London was a flop. When film makers tried again in 1941, in the depths of a bear market, The Wolf Man was a hit. Producers made sequels to these films, featuring Frankenstein monsters, vampires, werewolves and undead mummies, for about a decade, into the bottom of wave II in 1942.
Shortly after the stock market bottom of 1942, films abandoned dark, foreboding Horror in the most surefire way: by laughing at it. When Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein in 1948, it showed that Horror had lost its power. The cheesiness, mildness and comedy of the Horror-based films of the ensuing bull market years and the limited extent of their innovation, influence and popularity stand in stark contrast to the films of the bear market years. For example, 1957's I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, released in the middle of an extended Cycle degree bull market, earned "the somewhat dubious distinction of being named one of the worst Horror films ever made."
When social mood reentered a major bear trend in 1966, so did ground-breaking Horror movies. Night of the Living Dead debuted in 1968, the year after the last of that era's Disney cartoon classics. It was so influential that it spawned two sequels (both produced during the bear market), several derivations and two books. A breakthrough in gore entitled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released in 1974, as stocks made their nominal price lows.
In 1974, the year of the low for wave IV, Horror-writer Stephen King burst upon the scene with his first novel, Carrie. His novels provided fodder for a number of Horror-movie scripts, including the Hollywood slasher movie, The Shining, in 1977. At the darkest extreme of the trend, when PPI-adjusted prices were approaching bottom in 1978, the industry introduced so-called slice-and-dice films, or "splatter movies." Friday the 13th and Halloween were so influential that they have spawned many sequels, none of which are rated by critics as highly as the originals. Not to be overly outdone, Broadway introduced the slasher play, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in 1979, the same year that King's Dead Zone sat for six straight months on the New York Times bestseller list.7
Since 1982, and particularly since 1984, a bull market has been in force. Since that time, Horror films have once again become increasingly derivative, muted or comic, just as in the years following 1942.
Nuances
All the subjects discussed in this chapter have countless coincidences of parallelism with social trends. While we do not want to get lost in the nuances of popular culture, a few observations should communicate the richness of the correlation. Here are a few examples relating to this one genre.
I observed years ago, and have often remarked, that the initial deterioration in the stock market during the fourth wave sets the stage for the ultimate reversal (see "Wave Personality" in Elliott Wave Principle). Apparently, this is true across all manifestations of social mood, not just the stock market. For instance, the fourth-wave social-mood correction of one smaller degree immediately preceding the two major bear market periods gave advance indications of the style of Horror that would be produced in the ensuing bear market. In 1920 and 1921, at the bottom of the preceding Cycle degree bear market, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with John Barrymore, and Nosferatu, the German vampire film that we all study in film class, presaged the monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1962, at the bottom of the preceding Primary degree bear market, Psycho, the famous Hitchcock knife-in-the-shower shocker, presaged the slasher movies of the 1970s.
One pop record stands out in the annals of Horror: "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett. It became the #1 record in the country on October 20, 1962 and stayed there for two weeks. The exact date of the orthodox end of the three-year bear market labeled Primary wave 4 was October 23, 1962, another perfect coincidence of mood and expression. While this record echoed the old Horror style, it was a comic treatment because mood in the larger trend was so elevated. The recording returned to the charts twice: in August 1970, right off the bottom of the deepest bear market in thirty years and again in May 1973 in the midst of the bear market of 1973-1974. (As that bear market deepened, the comic approach of "Monster Mash" became outmoded, and Horror got serious again.)
Why was the Hammer Films company of England able to release a series of fairly successful Horror films in that country from 1957 through 1974? The reason is that, unlike the soaring American stock market, the London stock market was in a mild bear market from 1959 to 1966. After a brief two-year rise, it joined with gusto the American downtrend from 1968 to 1974, suffering a decline nearly as deep as that of 1929-1932. Through the first half of the 1970s, as stocks and mood collapsed their hardest, Hammer released vampire films at five times the rate it did in the 1960s. As soon as the British stock market turned powerfully up in 1975, demand for Hammer's output fell so abruptly that the company folded. Was that the end of a nearly perfect social-mood parallelism? Perhaps not. Suddenly, after 23 years in which Hammer has languished as but a memory, advertising mogul Charles Saachi has purchased the name with the aim of transforming Hammer "from a debt-ridden relic into a global empire." Says an on-line site dedicated to vampires, "The future for Hammer looks promising for the first time in more than twenty years."
The correlation between bear markets and Horror holds before the days of movies. For example, America's master Horror writer Edgar Allen Poe flourished in the Supercycle degree bear market of 1835 to 1842, during which time, according to The World Book Encyclopedia, "he produced several of his finest tales." Poe died in 1847, "after five years of illness," five years that just happen to coincide with a rapid rise in social mood that began in 1842. That uptrend in public mood was not as well suited to his style, and the dissonance between them may have pressured his already weak constitution.
We may presume, with reverse wave analysis, that Shakespeare's Macbeth, the first modern slasher play, debuted in a bear market as well. The history of popular Horror has traversed from plays to books to films, as once again, history repeats in mood but not necessarily mode.
The two books on Horror movies that I have on my shelf (Horror Movies and The Horror Film Handbook) were published in 1974 and 1982, the exact years of the lows for stock prices in Cycle wave IV in nominal and PPI-adjusted prices respectively. Also on my shelf is a ten-volume set of books entitled, The Works of Edgar Allen Poe, which I find was published in 1933, the bottom year of the depression. These are the times that people are interested in such topics, and the writers and publishers oblige. |
