Horror and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This chapter points out that horror films seem to be built on a set of recurring themes: parents and children, sex and blood, secrets from the past, loss, repetition, trauma, death. Unlike other genres built on recurring cataclysms of violence, horror films may perhaps be typified by the idea that their violence is motivated by sexual aberrations with roots in the past. In reference to horror film, psychoanalysis is as close to essential as any conceptual model can get. Sigmund Freud's model of normal human consciousness connects to horror cinema through his vision of abnormality: the origin and effects of the monstrous, the disgusting, the hidden, the murderous, the perverse. Since horror cinema and psychoanalysis have more or less grown up together, it seems natural to apply them to one another. The most common route of psychoanalytic inquiry into horror cinema is through considerations of the monster's gender and sexuality.

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