THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

By far the most common accounts of horror's appeal are grounded in concepts drawn from Freudian theory, and I shall approach them by focusing first on simple repression models and then on the more elaborate analyses offered by “structural psychoanalysis.” This psychoanalytic emphasis is not recent – though the Lacanian turn in cultural theory has lent it additional force – and it is tempting to speculate as to why, more than with any other popular genre, those puzzled by horror should so often have turned to psychoanalysis in search of enlightenment. In some part, of course, the genre itself invokes psychoanalytic considerations, at times borrowing its imagery from the symbolic apparatus of dream interpretation as well as allowing fictional characters to advance pseudo-Freudian accounts of their own and other's motivations. Thus, where its typical monsters have been compulsive murderers, as so often in the past thirty years, the genre's common presumption has been of a psychopathology rooted in the psychosexual dynamics of childhood. In this respect, at least, Norman Bates long ago escaped the confines of Psycho to leave his distinctive imprint on modern horror.

However, although the genre's self-conscious borrowing from psychoanalysis is not without significance for the theoretical frameworks invoked in its understanding, such an emphasis does not entail any specific theoretical consequences and so hardly explains psychoanalytic theory's predominance.