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The American nightmare Horror in the 70s

R O B I N W O O D

[. . .]

In the previous chapter I briefly introduced the distinction between basic and surplus repression, developed out of Freud by Marcuse, and given definitive expression in a book that should be far better known than it is: Repression, by Gad Horowitz. The book’s subtitle is “Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich, Marcuse”; it is dense,

often difficult, very closely and cogently argued, and the account offered here is necessarily bald and simplified.

Basic repression is universal, necessary, and inescapable. It is what makes possible our development from an uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and

convulsions into a human being; it is bound up with the ability to accept the postponement of gratification, with the development of our thought and memory processes, of our capacity for self-control, and of our recognition of and consideration for other people. Surplus repression, on the other hand, is specific to a particular culture and is the process whereby

people are conditioned from earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles within that culture. In terms of our own culture, then: basic repression makes us distinctively human, capable of directing our own lives and co-existing with others; surplus represssion makes us into monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists (“bourgeois” even if we are

born into the proletariat, for we are talking here of ideological norms rather than material status)—that is, if it works. If it doesn’t, the result is either a neurotic or a revolutionary (or both), and if revolutionaries account for a very small proportion of the population, neurotics account for a very large one. Hardly surprising. All known existing societies are to some degree

surplus-repressive, but the degree varies enormously, from the trivial to the overwhelming. Freud saw long ago that our own civilization had reached a point where the burden of repression was becoming all but insupportable, an insight Horowitz (following Marcuse) brilliantly relates to Marx’s theory of alienated labor. The most immediately obvious

characteristics of life in our culture are frustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety, greed, possessive- ness, jealousy, neuroticism: no more than what psychoanalytic theory shows to be the logical product of patriarchal capitalism. What needs to be stressed is that the challenges now being made to the system—and the perceptions and recognitions that structure those challenges and give them impetus—become possible (become in the literal sense thinkable) only in the

circumstances of the system’s imminent disintegration. While the system retained sufficient

511

conviction, credibility and show of coherence to suppress them, it did so. The struggle for liberation is not utopian, but a practical necessity.

Given that our culture offers an extreme example of surplus repressiveness, one can ask

what, exactly, in the interests of alienated labor and the patriarchal family, is repressed. One

needs here both to distinguish between the concepts of repression and oppression and to

suggest the continuity between them. In psychoanalytic terms, what is repressed is not

accessible to the conscious mind (except through analysis or, if one can penetrate their

disguises, in dreams). We may also not be conscious of ways in which we are oppressed, but

it is much easier to become so: we are oppressed by something “out there.” One might

perhaps define repression as fully internalized oppression (while reminding ourselves that

all the groundwork of repression is laid in infancy), thereby suggesting both the difference

and the connection. A specific example may make this clearer: our social structure demands

the repression of the bisexuality that psychoanalysis shows to be the natural heritage of every

human individual and the oppression of homosexuals: obviously the two phenomena are

not identical, but equally obviously they are closely connected. What escapes repression has

to be dealt with by oppression.

What, then, is repressed in our culture? First, sexual energy itself, together with its possible

successful sublimation into non-sexual creativity—sexuality being the source of creative

energy in general. The “ideal” inhabitant of our culture is the individual whose sexuality is

sufficiently fulfilled by the monogamous heterosexual union necessary for the reproduction

of future ideal inhabitants, and whose sublimated sexuality (creativity) is sufficiently fulfilled

in the totally non-creative and non-fulfilling labor (whether in factory or office) to which our

society dooms the overwhelming majority of its members. The ideal, in other words, is as close

as possible to an automaton in whom both sexual and intellectual energy has been reduced

to a minimum. Otherwise, the ideal is a contradiction in terms and a logical impossibility—

hence the necessary frustration, anxiety and neuroticism of our culture.

Second, bisexuality—which should be understood both literally (in terms of possible

sexual orientation and practice) and in a more general sense. Bisexuality represents the most

obvious and direct affront to the principle of monogamy and its supportive romantic myth of

“the one right person”; the homosexual impulse in both men and women represents the most

obvious threat to the norm of sexuality as reproductive and restricted by the ideal of family.

But more generally we confront here the whole edifice of clear-cut sexual differentiation that

bourgeois-capitalist ideology erects on the flimsy and dubious foundations of biological

difference: the social norms of masculinity and femininity, the social definitions of manliness

and womanliness, the whole vast apparatus of oppressive male/female myths, and the

systematic repression from infancy (“blue for a boy”) of the man’s femininity and the woman’s

masculinity, in the interests of forming human beings for specific predetermined social roles.

Third, the particularly severe repression of female sexuality/creativity, the attribution to

the female of passivity, and her preparation for her subordinate, dependent role in our culture.

Clearly, a crucial aspect of the repression of bisexuality is the denial to women of drives

culturally associated with masculinity: activeness, aggression, self-assertion, organizational

power, creativity itself.

Fourth, and fundamentally, the repression of the sexuality of children, taking different

forms from infancy, through “latency” and puberty, and into adolescence—the process

moving, indeed, from repression to oppression, from the denial of the infant’s nature as

sexual being to the veto on the expression of sexuality before marriage.

26 ROBIN WOOD

None of these forms of repression is necessary for the existence of civilization in some

form (i.e., none is “basic”)—for the development of our human-ness. Indeed, they impose

limitations and restrictions on that development, stunting human potential. All are the

outcome of the requirements of the particular surplus-repressive civilization in which we live.

Closely linked to the concept of repression—indeed, truly inseparable from it—is another

concept necessary to an understanding of ideology on which psychoanalysis throws much

light, the concept of “the Other.” Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot

recognize or accept but must deal with (as Barthes suggests in Mythologies) in one of two ways:

either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it,

converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself. The concept of Otherness can be

theorized in many ways and on many levels. Its psychoanalytic significance resides in the fact

that it functions not simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what

is repressed (though never destroyed) in the self and projected outward in order to be hated

and disowned. A particularly vivid example—and one that throws light on a great many

classical Westerns—is the relationship of the Puritan settlers to the Indians in the early days

of America. The Puritans rejected any perception that the Indians had a culture, a civilization,

of their own; they perceived them not merely as savage but, literally, as devils or the spawn

of the Devil; and, since the Devil and sexuality were inextricably linked in the Puritan

consciousness, they perceived them as sexually promiscuous, creatures of unbridled libido.

The connection between this view of the Indian and Puritan repression is obvious: a classic

and extreme case of the projection on to the Other of what is repressed within the Self in order

that it can be discredited, disowned, and if possible annihilated. It is repression, in other

words, that makes impossible the healthy alternative—the full recognition and acceptance

of the Other’s autonomy and right to exist.

Some versions follow of the figure of the Other as it operates within our culture, of its

relation to repression and oppression, and of how it is characteristically dealt with:

1. Quite simply, other people. It is logical and probable that under capitalism all human

relations will be characterized by power, dominance, possessiveness, manipulation: the

extension into relationships of the property principle. Given the subordinate and dependent

position of women, this is especially true of the culture’s central relationship, the male/female,

and explains why marriage as we have it is characteristically a kind of mutual imperialism/

colonization, on exchange of different forms of possession and dependence, both economic

and emotional. In theory, relations between people of the same sex stand more chance of

evading this contamination, but in practice most gay and lesbian relationships tend to rely

on heterosexual models. The otherness and the autonomy of the partner as well as her/his

right to freedom and independence of being are perceived as a threat to the possession/

dependence principle and are denied.

2. Woman. In a male-dominated culture, where power, money, law, and social institutions

are controlled by past, present, and future patriarchs, woman as the Other assumes particular

significance. The dominant images of women in our culture are entirely male created

and male controlled. Woman’s autonomy and independence are denied; on to women men

project their own innate, repressed femininity in order to disown it as inferior (to be called

“unmanly”—i.e., like a woman—is the supreme insult).

3. The proletariat—insofar as it still has any autonomous existence and has escaped its

colonization by bourgeois ideology. It remains, at least, a conveniently available object for

projection: the bourgeois obsession with cleanliness, which psychoanalysis shows to be an

T H E A M E R I C A N N I G H T M A R E : H O R R O R I N T H E 7 0 s 2 7

outward symptom closely associated with sexual repression, and bourgeois sexual repression

itself, find their inverse reflections in the myths of working-class squalor and sexuality.

4. Other cultures. If they are sufficiently remote, no problem arises: they can be simul-

taneously deprived of their true character and exoticized (e.g., Polynesian cultures as

embodied by Dorothy Lamour). If they are inconveniently close, another approach pre-

dominates, of which what happened to the American Indian is a prime example. The

procedure is very precisely represented in Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, with its double vision

of the Indians as “sons of Belial” fit only for extermination and as the Christianized,

domesticated, servile, and (hopefully) comic Blueback.

5. Ethnic groups within the culture. Again, they function as easily available projection objects

(myths of black sexuality, animality, etc.). Or they become acceptable in two ways: either

they keep to their ghettos and don’t trouble us with their otherness, or they behave as we

do and become replicas of the good bourgeois, their Otherness reduced to the one unfor-

tunate difference of color. We are more likely to invite a Pakistani to dinner if he dresses in a

business suit.

6. Alternative ideologies or political systems. The exemplary case is of course Marxism, the

strategy that of parody. Still almost totally repressed within our pre-university education

system (despite the key importance of Marx—whatever way you look at it—in the develop-

ment of twentieth-century thought), Marxism exists generally in our culture only in the form

of bourgeois myth that renders it indistinguishable from Stalinism.

7. Deviations from ideological sexual norms—notably bisexuality and homosexuality. One of the

clearest instances of the operation of the repression/projection mechanism, homophobia

(the irrational hatred and fear of homosexuals) is only explicable as the product of the

unsuccessful repression of bisexual tendencies: what is hated in others is what is rejected (but

nonetheless continues to exist) within the self.

8. Children. When we have worked our way through all the other liberation movements, we

may discover that children are the most oppressed section of the population (unfortunately,

we cannot expect to liberate our children until we have successfully liberated ourselves).

Most clearly of all, the otherness of children (see Freudian theories of infantile sexuality)

is that which is repressed within ourselves, its expression therefore hated in others. What the

previous generation repressed in us, we, in turn, repress in our children, seeking to mold

them into replicas of ourselves, perpetuators of a discredited tradition.

All this may seem to have taken us rather far from our immediate subject. In fact, I have

been laying the foundations, stone by stone, for a theory of the American horror film which

(without being exhaustive) should provide us with a means of approaching the films seriously

and responsibly. One could, I think, approach any of the genres from the same starting point;

it is the horror film that responds in the most clear-cut and direct way, because central to it

is the actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/the Other, in the figure of the

Monster. One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition

of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatized, as in our

nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists)

typically signifying the restoration of repression. I think my analysis of what is repressed,

combined with my account of the Other as it functions within our culture, will be found to

offer a comprehensive survey of horror-film monsters from German Expressionism on. It is

possible to produce “monstrous” embodiments of virtually every item in the above list. Let

me preface this by saying that the general sexual content of the horror film has long been

28 ROBIN WOOD

recognized, and the list of monsters representing a generalized concept of Otherness offered

by the first item on my list cannot be represented by specific films. Female sexuality. Earlier examples are the panther woman of Island of Lost Souls and the

heroine of Cat People (the association of women with cats runs right through and beyond the Hollywood cinema, cutting across periods and genres from Bringing Up Baby to Alien); but the definitive feminist horror film is clearly De Palma’s Sisters (co-scripted by the director and Louisa Rose), among the most complete and rigorous analyses of the oppression of

women under patriarchal culture in the whole of patriarchal cinema. The proletariat. I would claim here Whale’s Frankenstein, partly on the strength of its pervasive

class references but more on the strength of Karloff’s costume: Frankenstein could have dressed his creature in top hat, white tie and tails, but in fact chose laborer’s clothes. Less

disputable, in recent years we have The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with its monstrous family of retired, but still practicing, slaughterhouse workers; the underprivileged devil-worshipers of Race with the Devil; and the revolutionary army of Assault on Precinct 13.

Other cultures. In the ’30s the monster was almost invariably foreign; the rebellious animal- humans of Island of Lost Souls (though created by the white man’s science) on one level clearly signify a savage, unsuccessfully colonized culture. Recently, one horror film, The Manitou, identified the monster with the American Indian (Prophecy plays tantalizingly with this possibility, also linking it to urban blacks, before opting for the altogether safer and less

interesting explanation of industrial pollution). Ethnic groups. The Possession of Joel Delaney links diabolic possession with Puerto Ricans; blacks

(and a leader clad as an Indian) are prominent in Assault on Precinct 13’s monstrous army. Alternative ideologies. The ’50s science-fiction cycle of invasion movies are generally regarded

as being concerned with the Communist threat. Homosexuality and bisexuality. Both Murnau’s Nosferatu and Whale’s Frankenstein can be claimed

as implicitly (on certain levels) identifying their monsters with repressed homosexuality. Recent, less arguable instances are Dr. Frank ’n’ Furter of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (he, not his creation, is clearly the film’s real monster) and, more impressively, the bisexual god of Larry Cohen’s Demon.

Children. Since Rosemary’s Baby children have figured prominently in horror films as the monster or its medium: The Exorcist, The Omen, etc. Cohen’s two It’s Alive films again offer perhaps the most interesting and impressive examples. There is also the Michael of Halloween’s remarkable opening.

This offers us no more than a beginning from which one might proceed to interpret specific horror films in detail as well as to explore further the genre’s social significance and the

insights it offers into our culture. I shall add here simply that these notions of repression and the Other afford us not merely a means of access but a rudimentary categorization of horror films in social/political terms, distinguishing the progressive from the reactionary, the criterion being the way in which the monster is presented and defined.

Return of the Repressed

I want first to offer a series of general propositions about the American horror film and then

to define the particular nature of its evolution in the ’60s and ’70s.

1. Popularity and Disreputability. The horror film has consistently been one of the most

popular and, at the same time, the most disreputable of Hollywood genres. The popularity

T H E A M E R I C A N N I G H T M A R E : H O R R O R I N T H E 7 0 s 2 9

itself has a peculiar characteristic that sets it apart from other genres: it is restricted to

aficionados and complemented by total rejection, people tending to go to horror films either

obsessively or not at all. They are dismissed with contempt by the majority of reviewer-critics,

or simply ignored. (The situation has changed somewhat since Psycho, which conferred on the

horror film something of the dignity that Stagecoach conferred on the Western, but the disdain

still largely continues. I have read no serious or illuminating accounts of, for example, Raw

Meat, It’s Alive or The Hills Have Eyes). The popularity, however, also continues. Most horror films

make money; the ones that don’t are those with overt intellectual pretensions, obviously

“difficult” works like God Told Me To (Demon) and Exorcist II. Another psychologically interesting aspect of this popularity is that many people who go regularly to horror films profess to

ridicule them and go in order to laugh, which is not true, generally speaking, of the Western

or the gangster movie.

2. Dreams and Nightmares. The analogy frequently invoked between films and dreams is

usually concerned with the experience of the audience. The spectator sits in darkness, and

the sort of involvement the entertainment film invites necessitates a certain switching off of

consciousness, a losing of oneself in fantasy experience. But the analogy is also useful from

the point of view of the filmmakers. Dreams—the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions,

fears that our conscious mind rejects—become possible when the censor that guards our

subconscious relaxes in sleep, though even then the desires can only emerge in disguise, as

fantasies that are innocent or apparently meaningless.

One of the functions of the concept of entertainment—by definition, that which we don’t

take seriously, or think about much (“It’s only entertainment”)—is to act as a kind of partial

sleep of consciousness. For the filmmakers as well as for the audience, full awareness stops

at the level of plot, action, and character, in which the most dangerous and subversive

implications can disguise themselves and escape detection. This is why seemingly innocuous

genre movies can be far more radical and fundamentally undermining than works of conscious

social criticism, which must always concern themselves with the possibility of reforming

aspects of a social system whose basic rightness must not be challenged. The old tendency

to dismiss the Hollywood cinema as escapist always defined escape merely negatively as

escape from, but escape logically must also be escape to. Dreams are also escapes, from the

unresolved tensions of our lives into fantasies. Yet the fantasies are not meaningless; they

can represent attempts to resolve those tensions in more radical ways than our consciousness

can countenance.

Popular films, then, respond to interpretation as at once the personal dreams of their

makers and the collective dreams of their audiences, the fusion made possible by the shared

structures of a common ideology. It becomes easy, if this is granted, to offer a simple

definition of horror films: they are our collective nightmares. The conditions under which a

dream becomes a nightmare are that the repressed wish is, from the point of view of

consciousness, so terrible that it must be repudiated as loathsome, and that it is so strong

and powerful as to constitute a serious threat. The disreputability noted above—the general

agreement that horror films are not to be taken seriously—works clearly for the genre viewed

from this position. The censor (in both the common and the Freudian sense) is lulled into

sleep and relaxes vigilance.

3. The Surrealists. It is worth noting here that one group of intellectuals did take American

horror movies very seriously indeed: the writers, painters, and filmmakers of the Surrealist

movement. Luis Bun~uel numbers The Beast with Five Fingers among his favorite films and paid

30 ROBIN WOOD

homage to it in The Exterminating Angel; Georges Franju, an heir of the Surrealists, numbers The

Fly among his. The association is highly significant, given the commitment of the Surrealists

to Freud, the unconscious, dreams, and the overthrow of repression.

4. Basic Formula. At this stage it is necessary to offer a simple and obvious basic formula

for the horror film: normality is threatened by the Monster. I use “normality” here in a strictly

nonevaluative sense to mean simply “conformity to the dominant social norms”: one must

firmly resist the common tendency to treat the word as if it were more or less synonymous

with “health.”

The very simplicity of this formula has a number of advantages:

It covers the entire range of horror films, being applicable whether the Monster is a

vampire, a giant gorilla, an extraterrestrial invader, an amorphous gooey mass, or a child

possessed by the Devil, and this makes it possible to connect the most seemingly hetero-

geneous movies.

It suggests the possibility of extension to other genres: substitute for “Monster” the term

“Indians,” for example, and one has a formula for a large number of classical Westerns;

substitute “transgressive woman” and the formula encompasses numerous melodramas

(Vidor’s Beyond the Forest is an especially fine example, as it links woman and Indian as

“monsters”).

Although so simple, the formula provides three variables: normality, the Monster, and,

crucially, the relationship between the two. The definition of normality in horror films is in

general boringly constant: the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social

institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them. The Monster is, of

course, much more protean, changing from period to period as society’s basic fears clothe

themselves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments—rather as dreams use

material from recent memory to express conflicts or desires that may go back to early

childhood.

It is the third variable, the relationship between normality and the Monster, that

constitutes the essential subject of the horror film. It, too, changes and develops, the

development taking the form of a long process of clarification or revelation. The relationship

has one privileged form: the figure of the doppelgänger, alter ego, or double, a figure that has

recurred constantly in western culture, especially during the past hundred years. The locus

classicus is Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where normality and Monster are two aspects

of the same person. The figure pervades two major sources of the American horror film—

German Expressionist cinema (the two Marias of Metropolis, the presentation of protagonist

and vampire as mirror reflections in Nosferatu, the very title of F. W. Murnau’s lost Jekyll-and-

Hyde film Der Januskopf), and the tales of Poe. Variants can be traced in such oppositions as

Ahab/the white whale in Moby Dick and Ethan/Scar in The Searchers. The Westerns of Anthony

Mann are rich in doubles, often contained within families or family patterns; Man of the West,

a film that relates very suggestively to the horror genre, represents the fullest elaboration.

I shall limit myself for the moment to one example from the horror film, choosing it partly

because it is so central, partly because the motif is there partially disguised, and partly

because it points forward to Larry Cohen and It’s Alive: the relationship of Monster to creator

in the Frankenstein films. Their identity is made explicit in Son of Frankenstein, the most intelligent

of the Universal series, near the start of which the title figure (Basil Rathbone) complains

bitterly that everyone believes “Frankenstein” to be the name of the monster. (We discover

subsequently that the town has also came to be called Frankenstein, the symbiosis of Monster

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and creator spreading over the entire environment.) But we should be alerted to the relation-

ship’s true significance from the moment in the James Whale original where Frankenstein’s

decision to create his monster is juxtaposed very precisely with his decision to become

engaged. The doppelgänger motif reveals the Monster as normality’s shadow.

5. Ambivalence. The principle of ambivalence is most eloquently elaborated in A. P. Rossiter’s

Angel with Horns, among the most brilliant of all books on Shakespeare. Rossiter first expounds

it with reference to Richard III. Richard, the “angel with horns,” both horrifies us with his evil

and delights us with his intellect, his art, his audacity; while our moral sense is appalled

by his outrages, another part of us gleefully identifies with him. The application of this to the

horror film is clear. Few horror films have totally unsympathetic Monsters (The Thing is a

significant exception); in many (notably the Frankenstein films) the Monster is clearly the

emotional center, and much more human than the cardboard representatives of normality.

The Frankenstein monster suffers, weeps, responds to music, longs to relate to people; Henry

and Elizabeth merely declaim histrionically. Even in Son of Frankenstein—the film in which the

restructured monster is explicitly designated as evil and superhuman—the monster’s

emotional commitment to Ygor and grief over his death carries far greater weight than any of

the other relationships in the film.

But the principle goes far beyond the Monster’s being sympathetic. Ambivalence extends

to our attitude to normality. Central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their

fulfillment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral

conditioning teaches us to revere.* The overwhelming commercial success of The Omen cannot

possibly be explained in terms of simple, unequivocal horror at the devil’s progress.

6. Freudian Theses. Finally, I restate the two elementary and closely interconnected Freudian

theses that structure this article: that in a society built on monogamy and family there will

be an enormous surplus of repressed sexual energy, and that what is repressed must always

strive to return.

[. . .]

32 ROBIN WOOD

* A game popular in British fairgrounds actually entitled ‘Breaking up the Happy Home’ is of great interest in this connection: there are no prizes, the participant’s gratification deriving purely from the smashing of china and domestic artifacts with the balls for which they pay.

1 Robin Wood, The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s