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Sweeney Todd first appeared in 1846, the middle of a bear market of Supercycle degree, as the key character in The String of Pearls or the Fiend of Fleet Street, a melodrama based on a Victorian pulp horror book. According to Larry Brown’s Sondheim Notes, Todd represented something of a breakthrough in the theater world as he possessed no redeeming qualities whatsoever. “The appeal of the piece rested primarily in its nefarious protagonist,” says Brown. “While criminals had become the center of attention in melodrama since the appearance of Mack the Knife in The Beggar's Opera, these antiheroes usually had possessed some admirable characteristics, until Sweeney. In notes to the play, Montagu Slater says, ‘[author George Dibdin] Pitt made the great discovery that there was no need to whitewash the criminal; on the contrary he were better black-washed. The important thing is to make him a supreme criminal, a demon.”  His devilish nature was intensified by the fact that he showed no remorse for his evil deeds. His motivation was entirely selfish; he seemed to live by his own warped standards of morality, if such concepts even entered his mind. He was a villain one could love to hate, for he evoked no sympathy from anyone.” In short, Sweeney Todd is a character only a deeply bearish audience could love. Thus his arrival on the big screen in the person of Depp, whose knack for connecting with the sinking mood of movie goers was demonstrated by his summer hit as Jack Sparrow (see entry of July 12). For the HSB's low-down the bull/bear dynamics behind movies and a long term-chart see the Additional References below.

Another secret to Sweeney Todd's bearish appeal is its attack on the industrial world and its focus on “obtaining and keeping profits.” The irony noted Robert McLauglin in a 1991 article for Journal of American Drama and Theater is that Sweeney Todd and the beggar woman, “who haunts the play as a reminder of our tendency to dismiss and deny the humanity of others,” end up doing the same thing, objectifying people, “first denying their humanity by using them for their own purposes and then literally turning them into objects: meat pies.” Bears love meat pies.

The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior
Trends in Movies
The timing of the production and success of film genres is instructive as to social mood expression. The chart below plots the PPI-adjusted Dow-Jones Industrial Average marked with the acknowledged classics in two types of film entertainment: Disney cartoons and horror movies. If you are with me so far, you can probably guess in which direction of social mood trend each style of film has been innovative and popular.

The Walt Disney Company released its first feature-length cartoon in 1937, the year of the top of a roaring five-year bull market that accomplished the fastest 370% gain in U.S. stocks ever. As shown here by the titles listed on the top side of the graph, these films stayed popular for thirty years, culminating with the ultra-sunny Mary Poppins in 1964, and to a lesser degree, The Jungle Book in 1967. The end of this period of success was essentially coincident with the great stock market top of 1966. For the next sixteen years, as stock prices fell along with social mood, most people thought Disney’s feature cartoons were silly and sentimental. Indeed, the studio’s productivity fell by more than 50%. With the possible exception of The Jungle Book, not one cartoon film from this period is considered a classic. When the bull market returned in the 1980s and 1990s, so did feature-length Disney cartoons that have been both acknowledged classics and box-office blockbusters. In the last eleven years of bull market, Disney has produced ten feature cartoon films. In the briefest possible terms, Disney cartoons are bull market movies, reflecting the shared mood of both their creators and their viewers.

Now we will examine the other end of the spectrum, whose titles are listed on the bottom side of the graph. 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.3 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.