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Horror and Psychoanalysis An Introductory Primer

Chris Dumas

Something is terribly wrong. People are not themselves: they seem to have changed, to be controlled by mysterious forces. Who is killing everybody? What do these weird runes mean? What happened to the original governess? Why is that pale little girl standing at the end of the hallway, and what’s that dark liquid dripping off her? A man in a mask is stalking teenagers, mostly the sexually active ones; some say that there’s something dark in his past, maybe an incident (a neighborhood legend) involving a babysitter and a knife. Someone is hung on a hook while still alive; the freezer is stuffed with bodies, and the sausages at the local barbecue joint have a familiar, uncomfortably intimate taste. There is something creepy and disturbing about these old family photographs — and why does this long-dead little boy look just like your son? The locals say that something horrible happened in the old mental hospital, up there on the hill; I don’t remember exactly what, but maybe you should check the old newspapers in the library. (Don’t worry, they’re all on microfilm.) I apologize for our children’s behavior; they don’t normally behave so strangely, but things have been different around here since the priest died — and in such a horrible fashion! I wouldn’t open that old wooden box if I were you: there’s something, how you say, ancient about it. What’s this weird mucosal goo all over the banister? Wait a minute, are those eggs? Mother — oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!

Please forgive this burst of clichés; I have chosen to begin this way in order to point 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 — the action thriller, say, or the combat movie — horror films may perhaps be typified by the idea that their violence is motivated by sexual aberrations with roots in the past. Perhaps this is too obvious a way to put it; maybe we should just say that horror films break down doors that

A Companion to the Horror Film, First Edition. Edited by Harry M. Benshoff. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Figure 2.1 A family portrait. Halloween (1978). Directed by John Carpenter. Produced by Compass International Pictures and Falcon International Productions.

are chained shut, disclose secrets that were thought permanently forgotten, open up containers that are meant to keep their contents forever hidden. What escapes from its confines is, of course, the Monster — whatever that word means. And it is not just the body that is in danger in horror films: it is the sexual body, the pubescent body, the all-too-mortal body with a vulnerable personality inside it. If horror films resemble nightmares, it is not just because they generate (or, mostly, just try to gener- ate) fear, repulsion, panic, and other feelings remembered from childhood. Whether you are watching a film about human monsters or non-human ones, about venge- ful spirits from the past or psychotic madness in the present, horror cinema always trades on irrationality, and irrationality, in psychoanalytic terms, is always sexual in origin.

It may simply be an effect of history, but horror cinema — from its very earliest moments, more than a century ago, to the latest made-for-cable slasher flick — is soaked in ideas that came to it from the work of Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis. The historical claim is generally justified by the fact that Freud’s the- ories and the cinema appeared at more or less the same time: Edison premiered the Kinetoscope in 1893, right around the time that Freud, along with his early colleague Wilhelm Fleiss, made a crucial breakthrough in the diagnostic etiology of hysteria. Freud’s subject was human behavior, and in contradistinction to previous theories of mind, Freud essentially postulated that human rationality is an illusion, that every person is “civilized” only insofar as they have managed to repress, or censor, their worst impulses, and that most mental illness — previously imagined to be biological in origin — was, in fact, the result of traumatic disturbances in childhood. For a world torn apart by the First World War, Freud’s theories made a new kind of sense: surely a race of creatures capable of such awful violence was not truly rational or in control of itself. Freud’s influence on American popular culture, in particular, was strongest in the 1940s and 1950s (during the years of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, McCarthyism, atomic weaponry, Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, and the Kinsey reports). Its direct influence has waned over the years, but its ideas and vocabulary linger, even

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today, in the basic assumptions we make about ourselves, other people, and human motivations in general.

The film scholar Noël Carroll has called psychoanalysis a “cultural myth, like Christianity,” which “pervades the thinking of literate Westerners (and many non-literate ones as well)”; he notes that “we can see its concepts, scenarios, and imagery in the work of filmmakers and authors with no express commitment to psychoanalysis.” (2004: 258). When he calls it a “cultural myth,” Carroll is addressing the pervasive discourse about the logical system called psychoanalysis, not the truth-value of that system; its basic ideas and its vocabulary are omnipresent in our lives, so much so that its influence is, in many ways, invisible. Whether or not one “believes in” Freud’s theories, one cannot ignore the ways in which his system of thought impacted the cinema during the twentieth century, or the ways in which the cinema, in turn, impacted the development of psychoanalysis during Freud’s lifetime and afterwards. (It is widely reported that Freud himself disliked movies, but — anecdotally speaking — it seems that most psychoanalysts in his wake have been positively obsessed with them.) You can see the influence of Freud’s thinking, for example, in the mise-en-scène of the classics of German expressionism, in the onscreen behavior of nearly every character in American films noir, in melodramas of the 1950s, in “new wave” films from most of the countries where those waves occurred, and even — if you look closely enough — in the last few winners of the best picture Oscar.

In reference to horror film, psychoanalysis is as close to essential as any conceptual model can get. You may or may not be convinced of the veracity of Freud’s theories, but when you talk about horror cinema, you really cannot avoid them — and if you try, you miss the very heart of the genre itself. Perhaps one reason for this is that when you invoke ideas like “anxiety” or “desire,” you are already in the realm of the psychoanalytic, and horror cinema is all about anxiety and desire — indeed, these are the bases of the entire genre. When you watch a horror film, part of you fears the destruction that you know is coming, while another part of you wishes to participate in that destruction: in the slasher film, for example, you want the breasts, and then the blood. Other genres may be predicated on suspense, but defilement is the province of the horror film. One asks: Why is that so? Where do these images of violence and sexuality come from, and what makes us, as viewers, react to them so deeply?

Freud: Trauma, Memory, Violence

Sigmund Freud was born (in 1856) into a world divided between the modern physi- cal sciences and a pre-modern morality. Trained as a physician, Freud was interested in the science of the brain, and initially studied organic brain disorders such as cere- bral palsy. After a period in training with the French neurologist Jean-Martin Char- cot, Freud became fascinated by hysteria, a nervous disorder that mainly affected women. At this historical moment, persons suffering from hysteria (a disorder that affected the body but seemed to have no biological origin), were thought either to be

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malingerers, or afflicted by some mysterious innate female madness. Freud, working with his colleague Josef Breuer, found his way to a new understanding of the disor- der by simply listening to the patients and paying close attention to their speech — not only their memories, their descriptions of their dreams, and the odd mistakes and slippages in the way they organized their thoughts, but in their words themselves. He found that engaging the patients at the level of language allowed him access to parts of their personalities that they themselves could not see, and this very fact — that peo- ple were split against themselves — led him to reconceptualize subjectivity in a rad- ical new way. When personality disturbances do not have a biological origin, where exactly do they come from? Freud’s major discovery was that they come from the past. As he put it, persons with emotional disturbances “suffer from reminiscences” (1919: 16; italics mine).

To describe Freud’s discoveries as briefly as possible, one must resort to gross oversimplification — the advanced student might scoff at how reductively I sketch these theories, and rightfully so. Freud’s writings can be a tough slog for the begin- ner (I would recommend that the completely uninitiated start with Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, a short book comprised of talks that Freud gave at Clark Univer- sity in Massachusetts in 1909), but they can perhaps be generalized into a set of very simple ideas and observations about human behavior. First: sexuality pervades every aspect of human life and behavior. Second: sexuality is not just sex (i.e., heterosexual coitus, committed in marriage with an aim toward procreation, is not the definition of sexuality, but merely an instance of it). Third: sexuality arises within, and can only be understood in reference to, the experiences of childhood and the family. Fourth: where sexuality is concerned, there is no “normality” — only varying degrees of social acceptability.

Freud’s masterstroke was opening up the idea of sexuality to include nearly any behavior that works toward achieving some kind of pleasure (or even displeasure). Indeed, sexuality is involved in nearly the entire range of human behavior, from the bedroom to the town hall, and it begins with the infant’s feelings of satisfaction and need at the mother’s breast. In the first part of the twentieth century, Freud scan- dalized the West by insisting that children do, indeed, have sexual feelings, although it is not until late childhood that eroticism becomes localized in the genitals (or, in the case of perversion, elsewhere in and on the body). What we understand as adult sexuality — both “normal” and “abnormal” — therefore has its behavioral roots in the fulfilled and unfulfilled desires of childhood. Of course the very young child has no understanding of sexual difference, of what makes men and women themselves and not each other; they do not understand their own bodies or the bodies of their par- ents or caregivers. At the very beginning, the child does not even distinguish between itself and the mother’s body. But as the child grows and enters language (and there- fore society), it also enters a phase of negotiation, a kind of research into the nature of the closed world it inhabits — a phase in which it must come to terms with the fact that it cannot be at its mother’s breast forever. Something must tear the child away from the mother, and that something — usually the father — therefore becomes a kind of primitive rival. This phase is Freud’s notorious Oedipus complex, and all

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children pass through it — most of them successfully, but some not. The passage through this phase optimally results in the child giving up part of him- or herself, some part of his or her desire for satisfaction in the mother, in exchange for a satis- faction that will arrive sometime in the future (“when you are an adult, you can have a family of your own”); when this phase is not completed successfully, emotional turbulence in adulthood is virtually guaranteed. The Oedipus complex is what gives horror cinema its particularly familial cast: the traumatic knot of children’s relation- ship to their parents, in horror, unleashes a violence that can only be understood as an archaic response to a primal dissatisfaction. (The Oedipus complex is one of the most counter-intuitive of Freud’s ideas, and students often have a lot of trouble with it, especially when it is understood too literally: “you mean that when I was a kid, I wanted to murder my father and marry my mother? That’s disgusting!” In such an instance, the easiest beginner’s guide to the notion of the Oedipus complex is found in Nasio, Oedipus: The Most Crucial Concept in Psychoanalysis.)

As a person, your earliest experiences shape you irrevocably; you may not remem- ber them, but all your memories live inside you, not exactly forgotten but, rather, shoved aside. Your parents are objects of fear and love, of hatred and desire — of all emotions, of all affects — and all the other persons you encounter in your life will (to varying degrees) activate, or be framed by, the emotional residue of those earliest experiences of your parents and the rest of your family. What is difficult to grasp is the extent to which these experiences have effects on the body and, therefore, on sex- uality. For example, you might or might not have a penis; perhaps it makes no actual difference whether or not you have one, but the ways in which the people around you (such as your parents) think about the issue of having or not-having a penis will affect the way that you think about it. Children are curious about their bodies, and as they think about other people, they also question the impact that other people will have on their bodies, and that their bodies will have upon other people. Since we live in a culture in which certain parts of the body are supposed to be covered and certain bodily functions are supposed to be hidden, the way in which children learn these rules (rules about hidden vs public, clean vs dirty, and so on) will influence the way that they behave for the rest of their lives.

The most scandalous aspect of Freud’s discoveries was the way that he began to think of childhood development, which he saw as necessarily traumatic. At the beginning of his search, Freud heard so many patients tell stories about being sexually abused by their parents that he thought that there was an epidemic of molestation in Vienna; later, he realized that many (but not all) of these stories were fantasies, retroactively constituted in order to make sense of the trauma of attaining consciousness. He came to the conclusion that whether or not an individual narrative of abuse was true (and of course sexual abuse does occur, far more often than most people would like to admit) or not, that fact is, for diagnostic purposes, immaterial: what matters is the fantasy that each person constructs around his or her experiences of early sexuality (and around his or her theories about the sexuality of adults), a fantasy that will determine their entire personality structure. Note that the term fantasy, when used by Freud, is not the opposite of fact: it refers not to the

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truthfulness of a storyline, but the mere fact that a narrative has been constructed, a narrative that undergirds a person’s entire self-conception and unconsciously determines the way that they understand reality itself.

Freud concludes that the results of the child’s negotiations with meaning (espe- cially sexual difference) are the basis for all adult behavior. Most adults manage to acquire a more or less stable concept of sexual difference, and they are therefore afflicted with the ordinary disorders of personality that typify life in an industrial age. These are the neurotics (you are probably one of them), and while neurosis comes in many flavors, it only registers as a condition to be treated when it makes daily life unbearable. (Obsessive-compulsive persons — you probably know a few — fall into this category.) Other persons, however, do not achieve this level of stability: this is where madness occurs. And madness — what Freud, like other physicians of his time, called psychosis — is always typified by disturbances in meaning (especially around the concept of gender) and can generate violence. Horror cinema, of course, is also typified by disturbances in meaning, especially around issues of gender; and of its violence, one might perhaps assert that it is the symptom that gives the genre its meaning.

For students of horror cinema, one of the central Freudian ideas is the concept of castration. Yes, this means exactly what it sounds like — and yet it does not. Castra- tion can be understood literally (and in horror cinema, it often is), but it is usually a metaphor for some kind of loss, an absence that each one of us must undergo in order to be accepted into society. Perhaps it is less common today than it was a century ago for parents (or teachers or guardians) to react to a male child’s transgressions by threatening to cut off his penis; in Freud’s time, masturbation was understood to be a terrible sin (and a primary cause of adult sickness), and very young children were prevented, in any way possible, from being too curious about their genitals. Maybe parents are more enlightened today, and maybe they are not. But given that the penis is invariably invested (by parents, by culture and society) as a symbol of power, ten- sions in the child’s own sense of power and potency will always register within the child’s sense of his or her body. The way that Freud applied this line of thinking to girls and women — who, after all, already do not have a penis — remains controver- sial today, and indeed the most significant weakness in Freud’s model of personality development is centered on the way he thought of women and female sexuality. (His idea of “penis envy” is very difficult to accept for a number of reasons.) All the same, there is something about the ubiquity of phallic symbols in our culture that must have an effect on any woman who grows up in it. Certainly it has an effect on men: one does not need to look very far (in horror films, or in culture in general) to see evidence of male fears of the female body, which is seen to be already castrated and, therefore, potentially castrating to men who encounter it. Indeed, one might say that all violence in horror films is always about castration and punishment, and therefore always about gender.

How is it that such strange and violent fantasies can operate in each of us without our being aware of it? If this model of development applies to each of us, then how can we possibly function normally? Freud speaks of the mind operating in several

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Figure 2.2 The son inside the mother; the mother inside the son; the maternal remnant. Psycho (1960). Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Produced by Shamley Productions.

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different registers at once — that is, that in any person, there is always and inevitably a permanent split between one’s self and one’s real motivations. There is the con- scious mind, where your everyday thoughts occur: this is that part of you which you perceive as “yourself,” that is, your everyday thoughts and reveries, the part of you that speaks (or so you think). Behind (under? within? against?) the conscious is the unconscious, where your desires live and where your dustiest memories are stored. The conscious speaks (it calls itself “I”), but the unconscious speaks too — in mis- takes, in dreams, in fantasies and little everyday delusions. As for memories, Freud postulates that the mind does not forget anything; everything is recorded, and while some things are edited out or partially forgotten, they cannot be erased. (Neurology seems to support this idea.) Early traumas, and other bad feelings and memories, undergo a process that Freud called repression: they may be shoved aside (out of sight, out of mind), but it takes constant energy to keep these things hidden, and this energy, while expended within the unconscious, has ripple effects in the conscious.

Like an old sandwich in the refrigerator (or a corpse buried in a backyard garden), repressed feelings or memories will eventually cause unusual occurrences in other places, and the more extreme the memory or trauma, the more noticeable the effects. Freud calls this set of effects the symptom: the marker of sickness. Eruptions of irra- tionality into everyday behavior can signal that something repressed has returned, or is threatening to return to consciousness. This is what Freud means when he writes about the compulsion to repeat: traumas return in the form of symptoms, which is why some people get locked into patterns of incomprehensible behavior — or why killers return to the scene of the crime. What makes the repetition compulsion so strong is the fact that enjoyment is tied up in the symptom; the neurotic, like the killer, takes a kind of pleasure (conscious or unconscious) from this repetition — it is one way for the libido to express itself, even if it is a strangled kind of expres- sion, dependent on certain forces not achieving their goal. Why do smart people repeat stupid behaviors? Why do some nice persons always choose to get involved with abusers? What keeps us trapped in cyclical patterns? The answer, for Freud, has to do with the way each of us, as a child, learns to handle pleasure and pain, satis- faction and disappointment: as children, we teach ourselves to repeat behaviors for reasons that later, as adults, will remain opaque to us. What else is the typical slasher film about, after all, but the fact that its central scenario must happen over and over and over?

Later in his life, Freud moved away from the consciousness/unconsciousness model (one area of the mind behind or under another one, with a sort of gatekeeper or doorway between them) and toward an understanding of the self as a set of forces and resistances. In this second model, he postulated three entities within the self: the id contains all the desires, all the rage, all the frustration and the need, while the superego is the set of restrictions imposed upon, and internalized by, each of us, behavioral chains which can be both practical (“do not kill people”) and irrational (“do not ever look anyone in the eye”). The third entity is the ego, the self, the stage upon which this central opposition plays out; often the self has no knowledge of the nature or purpose of this drama, even as it affects everything it

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does, sometimes to the point of illness or incapacitation. The id, of course, is central to the entire horror genre: awful pleasures that must be locked away (sometimes literally, as in the puzzle-box at the heart of the Hellraiser series begun in 1987) erupt through the barriers that keep ordinary folks, like you and me, safe from the awful things that lurk outside (and within) us. Since the id is within us, how does it appear outside us? Freud suggests that all of us, to varying degrees, project our fears outside ourselves, as if our worst impulses are not ours, but instead belong to others. This is what the scholar Margaret Tarratt postulated in her germinal article about science-fiction cinema, “Monsters from the Id”: conflicts within the protagonist are externalized as battles with “sinister monsters,” reflecting “the individual’s anxiety about his or her own repressed sexual desires, which are incompatible with the morals of civilized life” (1970: 38). This obviously relates to the common horror trope of people encountering their doubles (a theme Freud explored in his famous essay, “The Uncanny”), and the genre’s common body-snatcher theme is also an expression of this idea.

One line of film theory notes the resemblance between films and dreams: essentially, you relax and they happen to you. Since your conscious mind does not control what you experience when you watch a film, spectatorship also resembles an encounter with the unconscious itself. In this regard, the terminology that Freud introduces in The Interpretation of Dreams is useful. For Freud, all dreams are expressions of repressed wishes, and bits of memories and old feelings always wash up inside them; these are the dream thoughts, and the process by which wishes are expressed and memories knotted together — that is, the way that potentially dangerous unconscious material is censored for the conscious mind — is called dream work. One component of this is condensation (in which two or more ideas are represented by an image) and another is displacement or substitution, whereby one thing stands in for another. These are metaphorical operations: in a dream, a spider could represent a smashing-together of multiple ideas, or it could be an image covering over, and substituting for, another image — it depends on the person dreaming. (A spider will signify differently for one dreamer than it will for another.) Freud cites these two operations, condensation and displacement, as being typical of the unconscious in general: symptoms, being a sort of coded message from the unconscious, are always metaphors. Freud further concluded that what matters in dreaming is not the specific content, but the way that the various images relate to one another, that is, the specific narrative that the dream constructs out of the elements within it. The single most useful term in all of Freud’s writing on dreams — at least for the student of horror cinema — is overdetermination: if an object or image (or motion, or sound, or color) comes to symbolize multiple themes, then its meaning cannot be unpacked without reference to multiple sources — that is, many determinations. Think of the penis-like, turd-like “monsters from the id” that plague the apartment complex in Cronenberg’s They Came From Within (1975) or the crashed spaceship in the original Alien (1979) with its vaginal openings, and you can see how overdetermination is part and parcel of how horror often achieves its effects. In fact, one might suggest that the whole process of dream work — the

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displacement and condensation of dangerous ideas, and the revision that makes them intelligible — has a certain resemblance to the process of creating a horror film.

Psychoanalysis and Horror

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. Why are so many horror films about chil- dren? Why is there such turbulence around issues of sexuality? Why do so many horror films present the return of some kind of trauma from the past, and why would something from the past be the cause of so much fear? (And what is fear, anyway?) To choose an example: rationally, we know that zombies do not actually exist, so if we are afraid of zombies, we must be afraid of something else, something that zombies represent. What would that be? Logically, you might assert: “I’m not afraid of zombies per se, but I am afraid of being bitten, and I’m definitely afraid of dying” — to which the proper response would be, “So why are you afraid of being bitten? — and if you’re afraid of dying, then why are you particularly afraid that it might come from being bitten? What is it about the mouth, the teeth, that is particularly frightening? Is it a fear of being eaten, consumed by another person? Why is that such a powerful fear?” It does not take much imagination to extend this kind of inquiry in all directions.

Since horror cinema and psychoanalysis have more or less grown up together, it seems natural to apply them to one another. Siegfried Kracauer wrote the first convincing use of Freud, applying psychoanalytic categories to the Weimar silent cinema [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) for example]. For film students of my own generation, the classic scholarly work in this vein was done by Robin Wood, a British film scholar who wrote some of the earliest and best English-language treat- ments of Alfred Hitchcock and who later turned his considerable intelligence to the matter of zombies and vampires. The central plank in Wood’s reputation, and perhaps his single most powerful gesture as a film scholar, is a set of essays that he wrote for various publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (later republished as “The American Nightmare”), “Neglected Nightmares,” and “Return of the Repressed.” (These essays later appeared, enlarged and refined, in his classic book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, and many of the other chapters in that book are extensions of its basic inquiry.) Wood’s point, in all of these essays, is that horror films necessarily oper- ate on principles described by Freud (and, for Wood, developed further by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s): sexuality is pervasive, and is especially subject to traumatic punishment; objects of fear arise out of the unconscious, and obey rules antithetical to rationality; forms of desire that run counter to the “normal,” masculinist rules of Western society — homosexuality, for instance, or feminism — are always identified with the monstrous; and so on. Wood frames these ideas with a larger political idea, that is, that civilization (specifically, Western capitalism) must punish certain human energies in order to protect itself and its values, and that this punishment — this

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repression — has powerful repercussions on individual lives. Thus, for Wood, what happens to the characters in horror films is always metaphorical for what happens to persons living within capitalism, and what happens in (for example) American hor- ror films has to do with what is happening, at any given moment, in America itself. Therefore, there is a potentially (and paradoxically) revolutionary component to any horror film, since that which erupts is always that which has been repressed. This jux- taposition of aesthetics, politics, and psychoanalysis was not new to Wood, but his inventiveness — and his willingness to watch the most extreme cinema for the sake of scholarship — was unprecedented, and his methodology is still highly influential.

Wood distilled his interpretive methodology into a wonderfully suggestive six-word rule, with which he defined the entire horror genre: “Normality is threatened by the Monster” (1986: 78). This is a powerful claim (all the more for its extreme simplicity), and Wood applies its logic rigorously. Normality is repression, personal and social; the monster is what returns, that is, what is created by normality and that which seeks to shatter it. Perhaps, reading “The American Nightmare,” the advanced student will notice the ways in which Wood’s understanding of Freud might be said to be limited (or simply dated); she may also disagree with his conclusions — for example, many scholars are dissatisfied with Wood’s reading of the films of David Cronenberg (myself included). And other scholars have since offered subtler readings of many of these same films, using a more nuanced methodology. However, Wood’s work remains, for me, the best starting point for the film student interested in psychoanalysis and its relationship to horror; if you read him with some imagination, you can see that most (if not all) of his basic principles and methods are still valid, even thirty years after he first published them.

In lieu of simply inserting 20 paragraphs’ worth of Wood’s writing, I will use his methodology to offer a brief sketch of some of the ways in which psychoanalytic questions may be useful in the study of horror films. I will concentrate on four par- ticular American movies, all chosen because they were enormous popular successes: Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978), and the American version of The Ring (2002). Psycho is probably the paradigmatic work of horror cinema, at least in regard to the amount of scholarly attention it has received, and each of the other three has inspired more than its fair share of academic writing. Each one also begat an entire subgenre (sicko loner movies, demonic possession movies, slasher films, J-horror remakes), and you could reasonably apply the discussion below to any film made in the shadow of these classics.

First, let us consider the way that each film constructs a monster, and how that monster is gendered. Psycho plays the game of allowing the first-time viewer to think that Norman Bates’s vengeful, jealous mother is the murderer; when it is revealed that Mrs. Bates died long ago, the viewer is cued to wonder: if she is dead, then who is killing on her behalf? The answer, of course, is Norman himself, whose fragile ego was shattered long ago and who has since internalized the voice of his mother — in a way, he has become his own mother. (A forensic psychiatrist makes an appearance at the end, explaining that Norman is not exactly a transvestite, even though he some- times wears his mother’s clothes.) The monster of The Exorcist is a young girl on the

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verge of womanhood who begins acting strangely; by the film’s climax, she is seen to spray a priest with green vomit, speak in the voices of dead persons, and turn her head completely around on her shoulders. It turns out that she is possessed by an ancient demon; she is only saved when said priest sacrifices himself for her — it is his way of atoning for the sin of abandoning his elderly mother, who dies midway through the film (of natural causes, one assumes). Halloween presents a little Mid- western boy who murders his promiscuous older sister with an enormous carving knife; years later, he escapes from a mental hospital and returns home on Halloween night, butchering all the sexually active teenagers he can find. (Only the virgin sur- vives, with the help of the boy’s gun-toting former psychiatrist.) And in The Ring a monstrous little girl with potent supernatural powers, abandoned to die in a well by superstitious adults, avenges herself against the living through the medium of a VHS tape; the clues to the nature of her trauma are encoded in the images on the tape — clues that, when unraveled, reveal a story of parental abandonment and pure, murderous otherness. Note that in each of these instances, the monster is created in the home; something happens there, something in the past, that creates and/or unleashes a rage against (as Wood would say) normality itself.

The most common route of psychoanalytic inquiry into horror cinema is through considerations of the monster’s gender and sexuality. The canonical trio of articles on this theme — “canonical” not only in the sense of definitiveness, but also because they are so commonly anthologized and read together — are Linda Williams’s “When the Woman Looks,” Barbara Creed’s “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imagi- nary Abjection,” and Carol Clover’s “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” All three of these articles concern the gender of the monster, and all three use psycho- analytic interpretive methods, although to three very different ends. (Note that these articles all first appeared in the mid-1980s, during what some would call the Golden Age of psychoanalytic film criticism; this was the era of Reagan, when a backlash against the feminism of the 1970s made the study of horror — especially misogynist horror of the slasher variety — particularly urgent.) What is central to all three is the place of woman in the horror film — as object of the camera’s gaze, as monster, and as victim. Williams writes of the use of woman as victim (and as object, and occa- sionally subject, of the gaze) in the genre, while Creed and Clover discuss opposite manifestations of the monster/victim binary: Clover discusses the figure of the “final girl” in the slasher film, who survives the attack of the (male) monster by becom- ing male in some way, while Creed observes the ways in which woman becomes monstrous and disgusting, that is, the barely-human (or too-human) object that produces horror.

Creed uses the ideas of the post-Freudian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who writes about abjection — the process by which a person can come to identify with blood, excrement, and other forms of waste and filth. To this end, consider The Exorcist, which gives the clearest example of woman-as-abject-monster in all of horror cin- ema: Regan vomits, bleeds, masturbates, and blasphemes, and her victims — a friend of the family and two priests — are all men, destroyed by the uncontainable power that is feminine sexuality. Similarly, The Ring is built around the image of a drowned

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woman, her face covered by a curtain of slimy black hair, who crawls out of a TV set, dripping with water, to annihilate her victims — a vision that depends on a sense of woman as pure otherness and pure, inexorable, murderous desire. On the other hand, Halloween contains the paradigmatic instance of the “final girl” discussed by Clover: the virginal girl, shrieking and bruised, can only survive the unmistakably phallic attack of the monster because she has not yet acquired sexual knowledge. And in Psycho, naturally, the character of Marion Crane is set up to be sacrificed because she is seen, in the movie’s first moments, to be an adult, sexual being — albeit unmar- ried and, therefore, outside the bounds of proper sexual propriety. Note that all four of these films can easily be read as conservative visions of sexual roles — women who have sex outside of marriage, who have desires of their own, who express sexuality in any form, are either victims or monsters — and Robin Wood, indeed, questions whether all of horror cinema is, by its very nature, conservative. (If there is a liber- atory or anti-repressive impulse in horror, it is paradoxically embodied in the mon- ster: thus the difficulty in assigning cut-and-dried political positions to these films.)

What creates these monsters? Psycho assigns blame purely to familial trauma, while Halloween obscures the childhood origins of Michael Myers’s psychosis and, at the very end, raises the specter of some kind of supernatural interference. (Rob Zombie’s symptomatic remake, released in 2007, dives into the childhood-trauma theme with remarkable abandon; you may judge for yourself whether this explic- itness results in a better, or truer, film.) The Exorcist gets God and Satan involved, but the local, familial themes are still there: Regan’s father is absent from the scene, for example, and — given that this is the early 1970s, during the first large-scale hangover from the sexual revolution of the 1960s — we, as viewers, are cued to assign significance to his absence. (On his daughter’s birthday, he is vacationing in Rome and out of contact; Regan witnesses her mother’s expletive-laced tirade upon being unable to reach him by telephone. The visible signs of possession begin in the very next scene: a single mother is not powerful enough to protect her family from such pressures.) And The Ring works hard to make it impossible to tell where parental failures end and supernatural evil begins. In each of these films, something malign passes from an older generation to a newer one; children are destroyed, and in turn, children destroy. Priests are flung from windows and policemen down staircases; naked women are stabbed to death; teenagers in the bloom of their youth are found rotted away from the inside, their faces locked in an awful scream. At the center of the film, the monster: a lonely, smiling psychotic in a gingham housedress and white wig; a girl with a pasty, lacerated face and orange eyes; a man in a mask; a wet, slithering female form with syrupy black hair. Each one has a causal relationship to some kind of long-ago violence against (and within) the family that has been purposefully hidden or forgotten, a repressed trauma that returns, erupting like a cyst into the midst of normality. (Even the monster in The Exorcist — supposedly thousands of years old — speaks to the priest in the voice of the priest’s dead mother.)

In keeping with Freud’s theories about childhood sexuality — or, to be slightly more precise, regarding the impact of infantile desires upon early consciousness,

34 Chris Dumas

and therefore upon adult behavior — the trauma, whether it is revealed or kept hidden, always expresses itself sexually, that is, in a certain kind of highly charged, very private violence. (Without this element of violence, most horror films would simply be family melodramas.) Norman Bates — or the Mother inside him — kills women, specifically the women that he finds attractive (and which therefore arouses the jealousy of the Mother within him); he/she famously kills Marion Crane in the shower, the most private of private spaces. Michael Myers, reenacting the murder of his sexually active sister, kills only those with raging hormones: he leaves the young children, those in their latency period, quite alone. The demonic presence in The Exorcist (a horrible old man living inside a girl’s body) urges the priests to bugger each other, and — most memorably — forces Regan’s mother’s face into her bleeding crotch. (She/he has just masturbated, violently, with a crucifix.) And the undead woman-thing of The Ring comes at her victims inexorably, like a repressed memory (or like a rapist), leaving only a broken shell of a person behind. Of these films, only The Exorcist allows the erupting trauma to be solved (or re-repressed); once it is all over, Regan, true to form, remembers nothing of her possession. The other films suggest the ultimate powerlessness of normality to contain the monster (the monster escapes, or goes into hiding, or survives imprisoned). But, of course, all four films have sequels.

There are other psychoanalytic inquiries one could pursue with these films. There is the God problem, for example. Freud, an atheist, considered all religious feel- ing (and especially religious activity) as essentially delusional, that is, entirely built on fantasies of security and punishment with roots in earliest childhood. There- fore psychoanalysis, at its deepest levels, is profoundly anti-spiritual: God is literally understood to be the father. In other words, theories about the Creator (or angels, or demons, or ghosts) are nothing more than childish theorizing about the role of parents — and mankind, being resolutely irrational, will always be plagued by this delusion. (See Freud’s monograph The Future of an Illusion.) Attention to the super- natural aspects of any of these films, then, requires an inquiry into these remnants of childhood; the moment that any horror film passes into the supernatural, one may be sure that fantasies about parents and origins are being invoked — The Exor- cist is most explicit in this regard. Hitchcock’s Psycho, on the other hand, is a purely psychoanalytic movie: it takes place in a Godless world, in which any person’s behav- ior is no more meaningful or productive, in the long run, than the squirming of an insect on a pin. (The advanced student could use Psycho to understand the affinity between psychoanalysis and existentialism: watch it and then read Civilization and its Discontents.)

Additionally, there are many subgenres of horror, each with its own set of com- mon preoccupations (and mutual differences). Consider the haunted-house film. What is the relationship between domestic architecture — bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, staircases — and the nightmares of childhood? It is a complex one, no doubt, and films like The Shining (1980) or The Woman in Black (2012), given their insistence on the fear of being indoors (and on the distinction between inside and outside, public and private), take place on the borderline between childhood

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Figure 2.3 Abjection, or how Child becomes Woman. The Exorcist (1973). Directed by William Friedkin. Produced by Warner Bros and Hoya Productions.

36 Chris Dumas

fantasy and the incomprehensible, cadaverous sexuality of adult life. Somehow, the darkest childhood traumas linger on, inhabiting these houses, hotels, abandoned hospitals; that is why so many of them are haunted by children. There is also the rural family-of-monsters subgenre, epitomized by Tobe Hooper’s original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); what is this subgenre about, if not the determining effects of familial trauma? (Note that monster-family movies seem to be a staple in every film-producing country in which there is a severe divide between the wealthy cities and the impoverished rural countryside, guaranteeing an economic/political subtext as well.) And what about the problem of ex-human monsters, or non-human ones? Vampires, werewolves, zombies are all ex-human, while flesh-eating blobs and mutant plants are not human; in all instances, the earliest childhood questions are being invoked: What has a mind, and what does not? What wants to hurt me, and why? The paradoxical bodies of ex-humans reflect questions about the body, especially the strange changes that befall each of us: transitions between childhood and adulthood, between sickness and death, between ignorance and knowledge (of sexuality, for instance). The bodies of the elderly, the bodies of siblings who died too young, the bodies of parents laid out in coffins: these reappear in movies, thirsty for blood, reflecting again the infant’s confusion about the borders between the animate and the inanimate.

Finally, there is a lot of scholarship that uses psychoanalysis to address the idea of the audience for horror films: What is it in people that makes them want to watch these movies? Are horror spectators sadistic, or masochistic? What is their relation- ship (social or personal) to this sort of material? This kind of scholarship often (but by no means always) has a faintly judgmental tone to it, a tone that does not appear in regard to most other genres: no one assumes that fans of musicals or romantic comedies are pathological, and yet of course they could be. (See, e.g., the first four essays in Schneider, ed, Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare.) Leaving aside the judgment factor, one runs up against the fact that each person is a different kind of spectator; filmgoers (and neurotics) are like snowflakes, all alike and yet each one different. A personal anecdote: years ago, a good friend of mine — an adult in his late thirties, and by no means an immature or emotionally unhealthy person — was so unsettled by a horror film that he had nightmares for weeks. That film was The Ring, which I saw with him; I enjoyed the film and was on edge while watching it in the theater, but I was amused that he was so deeply and atypically affected by it — until, just a month or two later, I watched Brad Anderson’s Session 9 (2001), which truly freaked me the hell out. (I heard those warbly, tape-scrubbed voices in my dreams for nearly a year.) The two films resemble each other in some ways — analog recording devices, family trauma, certain stylistic gestures, and so on — and yet they worked differently on my friend and myself, since after all we are different persons and have different fears. I offer this mundane observation in order to advise you to take seriously your own reactions — indeed, anyone’s reactions — to any horror film. Even if you are the kind of devoted horror fan who will watch any- thing and does not scare easily, you should still ask what any run-of-the-mill horror film is trying to accomplish inside your head and why; and on the rare occasion that

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one genuinely gets to you, you should pay very, very close attention. If anything, psy- choanalysis demands attention to the details. Anyway, in an essay this short, I can only scratch the surface of what Freud’s system offers the film student — and I have not even mentioned the other psychoanalysts working in Freud’s wake, whose own ideas have relevance for horror film, such as Jacques Lacan or Melanie Klein. Further research is up to you.

Acknowledgments and Dedications

Thanks to Tabitha Lahr for processing the frame grabs. This essay is dedicated with gratitude to Pat Day, Susan Fischman, and Dan Goulding.

References

Carroll, N. (2004) Afterword: psychoanalysis and the horror film, in Horror Film and Psy- choanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (ed. S.J. Schneider), Cambridge University Press, New York.

Creed, B. (1986) Horror and the monstrous-feminine: an imaginary abjection, reprinted in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (ed. B.K. Grant), University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996.

Clover, C. (1987) Her body, himself: gender in the slasher film, reprinted in The Dread of Dif- ference: Gender and the Horror Film (ed. B.K. Grant), University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996.

Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, Bard/Avon, New York. Freud, S. (1910) Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 1977. Freud, S. (1919) The uncanny, reprinted in The Uncanny, Penguin, New York, 2003. Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents, Norton, New York, 1989. Gay, P. (ed.) (1989) The Freud Reader, Norton, New York. Hobson, J.A. (2005) Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York. Nasio, J.-D. (2011) Oedipus: The Most Crucial Concept in Psychoanalysis, SUNY Press,

Albany, NY. Tarratt, M. (1970) Monsters from the Id. Films and Filming, 17 (3), 38 – 42. Williams, L. (1983) When the woman looks, reprinted in The Dread of Difference: Gender and

the Horror Film (ed. B.K. Grant), University of Texas Press, Austin 1996. Wood, R. (1986) Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, Columbia University Press, New York.