How An Anti-Drug Propaganda Film Became One Of The First So-Bad-It’s-Good Movies
“Marijuana, the burning weed with its roots from hell...”
Nobody sets out to make a so-bad-it’s-good movie. No director hopes that their passion project will become something that people laugh at in midnight screenings while throwing related objects at the screen. Tommy Wiseau thought he was making a Tennessee Williams-esque masterpiece with The Room. Canon Films believed The Apple would be the musical smash of the ‘80s. The truth is that earnestness gone wrong is simply funnier than someone who thinks they’re in on the joke. The laughs are even more satisfying when the so-bad-it’s-good movie was intended to scare its audience through a display of moralizing propaganda.
First released in 1936, Reefer Madness was meant to be a P.S.A. to concerned parents of good teenage boys and girls about the primal menace of marijuana. It was financed by a church group and given the title Tell Your Children, and the aim was clear: to keep kids off of that most dangerous of drugs. It did that by portraying the mere act of puffing on a cigarette one time as a direct pipeline to a life of rape, murder, and insane asylums.
Innocent students Bill (Kenneth Craig) and Jimmy (Warren McCollum) are led astray by Mae and Jack (Thelma White and Carleton Young), a pair of no-good dope dealers who are also — gasp — living in sin. It only takes one puff for both boys to fall apart: low test scores, affairs, hallucinations, and car accidents. Being high also makes them cackle incessantly like hyenas, wide-eyed and manic in a way that literally no person on pot has ever been. The film ends with a lecture at a PTA meeting where scared parents are told to tell their kids the truth of this evil substance, then the audience itself is told off. "The next tragedy may be that of your daughter... or your son... or yours or yours... Or YOURS!"
The film came and went in cinemas, too low-budget and poorly made to make much of an impact. Two years later, however, the rights were bought by Dwain Esper, a notorious exploitation filmmaker whose works had salacious titles like Sex Maniac and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband. As the Hays Code put the stranglehold of censorship over Hollywood, low-budget indies became the denizens of sex, violence, and shamelessness. He knew that this odd duck of an anti-weed movie had potential, so he added some juicy insert shots, changed the title, and took it on the road. Now, audiences were encouraged to proudly gawk at the shrieking nightmare of addiction, complete with the kind of violence one would expect to find in Scarface.
But it took a good three decades for Reefer Madness to enter cult movie status. In 1971, Keith Stroup, founder of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), bought a print of the film and started showing it at pro-marijuana events. Soon, it became a must-see laugh riot on student campuses, then midnight movie screenings alongside favorites like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The agenda had been flipped on its head: all the potheads were mocking the transparent lies of a flimsily made propaganda flick that seemed to have been made by people who had no idea what marijuana was.
Two straight-A students are led astray.
Really, it feels like a film made by aliens who have never seen how a human being behaves. Everyone is bug-eyed and grinning like an evil clown. Characters go from straight-A, Shakespeare-reciting golden boys to oversexed, jitterbugging lunatics after one smoke. All of the teenage characters look 30-plus and talk with the labored “how do you do, fellow kids” energy of church pastors. It’s no wonder the film was adopted by shlockmeisters and pro-pot nerds: Reefer Madness feels more like high fantasy than gritty realism.
Perhaps the cherry on top of the cake of the film’s reclamation from a rotten agenda is its musical adaptation. The off-Broadway show, which became a TV movie starring Kristen Bell and Alan Cumming, played up the nonsensical premise with satirical bite and a ton of toe-tapping songs, including one where Jesus himself sings a show-tune to get one kid clean (spoiler: it doesn’t work, and even Satan is disappointed in him). One big change the musical made was that it ended with a message that got to the heart of the film’s initial purpose: this was all a distraction, a means to scare people and make them go after any “alternative” groups who could be positioned as anti-family values. The ginned-up fear of marijuana leads the town to burn books and leave marginalized families running scared. That was always the point.
This is what makes the 90-year evolution of Reefer Madness so satisfying. We’re so used to being besieged by propaganda that leaves people feeling fearful and isolated, from podcast bros to AI deepfakes. With Reefer Madness, the scaremongering was so aggressively inept that it exposed the seedy truth at play, and the best way to defang it is to laugh, although maybe not quite as maniacally as the potheads in the movie. Nobody actually laughs like that!
