The pleasures of horror are found within the act of unleashing something we have hidden away, what Sigmund Freud labelled the ‘uncanny’ (Freud, 1919). Horror works to ‘highlight unconscious fears, desires, urges (…) that are buried deep in our collective subconscious’ (Park, 2016, 3). Taking such ideas into consideration, this essay will argue that the psychoanalytical approach is somewhat useful in understanding the role and attraction of horror in popular culture. This will be carried out with reference to contemporary horror texts - notably Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) - as well as classic Hollywood text Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960).

Freud believed the uncanny was linked to our family origins, a theme prominent within Aster’s films. These texts are unconventional forms of American horror - they avoid jump scares and instead centre heavily on character development. Hereditary (2018), for example, explores cult themes through the Graham family, following the death of Annie Graham’s mother. The film is a personal study of grief, causing Freud’s psychoanalytical model of personality structure to be extremely relevant here. The theory postulates that there are three components to the self: the id, the superego and the ego. The id contains our desires and most primitive impulses; constituting the largest part of the unconscious mind and representing all that has been repressed. The ego ensures that impulses of the id can be expressed in a manner that conforms to societal norms (Pulcu, 2014). Peter’s character conforms to the idea of returning ‘monsters from the id’ (Tarratt, 1970, 38), represented through the demonic force of King Paimon manifesting itself in his body. This causes Peter to experience ‘unusual occurrences’ and ‘eruptions of irrationality’ (Dumas, 2014, 28) in his daily life, illustrated by a scene during which he involuntarily sticks his hand in the air (reminiscent of a puppet) and begins slamming his face into a desk whilst he is at school (Figure 1). The mundane setting of the classroom accentuates the uncanny nature of what is happening to Peter, emphasising the uncontrollable return of repressed trauma in the form of a malevolent spirit; the validity of the psychoanalytical approach here is confirmed when it is revealed that, as a child, his mother tried to set him on fire while sleepwalking. On the other hand, Peter’s younger sister – Charlie – has a signature tongue-click; a manifestation of Charlie’s own repressed demons. This conforms to Freud’s idea on the compulsion to repeat, an incomprehensible behaviour that represents trauma returning in the ‘form of symptoms’ (Dumas, 2014, 28). Through this, Aster works to elicit an empathetic response to their childhood trauma and the tragedies that occur throughout the film, establishing an emotional connection between the viewer and the Graham children. Consequently, psychoanalysis in application to Hereditary (2018) demonstrates a usefulness in understanding the characters and thereby, us and why we act in the way we do.

The psychoanalytic approach cannot be analysed further without discussing classic Hollywood Horror; Psycho was released in 1960 and provided an oedipal stance to the presentation of the monster. In contrast to traditional genre conventions, ‘[the new monster] is invariably a man or a woman who looks as normal as the average person on the street’ (Derry, 2009, 173). For example, in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) protagonist Norman Bates is an attractive young man - played by Anthony Perkins - who is possessed by the superego figure of his mother who drives him to act on her disapproval of young, unattached females staying in the motel. In line with Freud’s psychosexual theory of development, Norman’s relationship with his mother is representative of the Oedipus complex. For instance, his father died when he was young, ‘and so his death allowed Norman to live out the oedipal fantasy of having his mother to himself’ (Gordon, 2008); an attachment that resulted in intense jealousy, and consequently, the murder of his mother and her new lover. The presentation of the monster as a human provides the serial killing protagonist with a level of fascination not dissimilar from the ‘uncanny valley’ phenomenon - the ‘emotional response that happens when we encounter an entity that is almost, but not quite, human’ (Lay, 2015). What makes Norman Bates ‘not quite’ human is his split personality; on a conscious level, he resents and shows anger towards his mother but throughout the film, his actions reveal otherwise. For example, when Marion suggests his mother may be better suited in a care home, he reacts aggressively; Norman’s sexual attraction to the young woman is an unconscious threat that risks his relationship with his mother. Marion, in this sense, thereby represents the threat of castration - ‘one of the central Freudian ideas’ (Dumas, 2014, 26). The iconic shower scene, which depicts Marion being brutally stabbed to death by Norman, is the result of this subconscious threat. This conforms to the idea that horror films are built on a set of recurring themes, including parents and children, sex and blood, loss, trauma and death - a set of clichés typified by the ‘idea that their violence is motivated by sexual aberrations with roots in the past’ (Dumas, 2014, 21). In the case of Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), these ‘sexual aberrations’ are seen in the act of Norman Bates being driven by the internalised voice of his mother to kill the women he is sexually attracted to. Through its depiction of violence rooted in familial trauma, the film works to elicit not only fear and repulsion, but ‘feelings remembered from childhood’ (Dumas, 2014, 22); a twisted nostalgia that takes on a cathartic form due to Norman’s normal, human appearance. The viewer is prompted to question their position in relation to the activities of the killer; aided by the fact that Hitchcock leads first-time viewers to believe Norman’s vengeful mother is the murderer, until it is revealed she died long ago. Therefore, through application to a film such as Psycho, the psychoanalytic approach proves useful in understanding the motivation of serial killers and society’s attraction to such figures; their actions repulse us, but they also fascinate us with repressed feelings from our childhoods. They uncover truths about ourselves and force viewers to vicariously confront their innermost needs and desires.

Barbara Creed argues, ‘the horror film attempts to bring about the confrontation with the abject’ in order to ‘redraw the boundaries between the human and the non-human’ (Creed, 1993). Abjection is the ‘process by which a person can come to identify with blood, excrement and other forms of waste and filth’ (Dumas, 2014, 32). By the end of Hereditary (Aster, 2018), all female bodies end up mutilated and headless; their corpses resemble castrated phalluses. This is interesting, given the idea of the archaic mother and ‘monstrous feminine’ (Creed, 1993); the archetype of the Great Mother is one that ‘occupies a central role in the unconscious life of every individual’ (Makowski, 1985, 73). In Hereditary, Annie Graham (Toni Collette) embodies this archetype; a woman who represses her grief and inner torment by creating miniature figures. In this manner, she becomes the master puppeteer, the person who controls the events by transforming her tragedies into art; in fact, the opposite is true. Foreshadowed early on in the film as Peter studies Greek tragedian Sophocles at school, the Graham family’s helplessness is represented and highlighted through the gore and violence depicted onscreen. In particular, the shocking and sudden decapitation of Charlie, which happens whilst she is suffering anaphylactic shock and Peter is driving to a hospital. Peter attempts to swerve a dead deer, and Charlie is decollated in the process - Annie finds her daughter’s headless corpse in the car the next morning. Charlie’s corpse and rotting head - shown lying by the road in a long take close-up - are examples of abject material, unforgivingly reminding us of our own materiality and foregrounding the irreversible fate of the characters (and ultimately, viewers) as mortal beings, due to a loss in the distinction between subject and object. Consequently, this leads back to the idea of the Great Mother; the ‘primordial images or universal symbols’ (Steven, 1982) of motherhood and womanhood. Kristeva posits that abjection is something that must happen in our psychosexual development to develop ourselves as individual entities and separate to the mother; ultimately arguing that the mother played a much more important role than Freud theorised (Kristeva, 1982). As a result, psychoanalysis is useful in understanding horror as playing an existential role in popular culture through its depiction of the abject. Whilst it should be repulsive, like the oedipal representation of violence and the human monster in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), it elicits repressed feelings from our childhood and takes us back to the past. It is a form of jouissance, a ‘backhanded enjoyment’ (Lacan, 2014) that horror viewers are continually and repetitively drawn to.

Similarly, the dream sequences within Hereditary (Aster, 2018) further demonstrate psychoanalysis as useful in understanding the role and attraction of horror. The Graham family fails to communicate and confront the tragedies they face and, as a result, the ‘oppressed grief and traumas return symbolically and literally in dream sequences’ (Filmosophy, 2018). An example of this is the dream-within-a-dream scene in which Annie envisions Peter’s body crawling with ants, before waking up and blurting out that she ‘tried to have a miscarriage’ by doing everything they ‘told her not to do’ whilst pregnant with Peter (Aster, 2018). It is clear Annie is still dreaming when the pair become drenched in paint stripper and are lit on fire - highlighting not only Annie’s guilt for what she tried to do to Peter as a child, but the neglection of her son following the accident. In this sense, the dream sequences embody repressed grief, which have become too much to process for the consciousness. This supports Freud’s belief that dreams are a coded expression of unconscious impulses and horror can be understood in the same way, confronting viewers with repressed wishes and desires in a nightmarish way. Thereby, as horror texts expose the unspoken emotions and supressed thoughts of characters, they simultaneously reveal unconscious truths about the audience.

However, many scholars not only disagree, but denounce psychoanalysis as a tool for film analysis (Schneider, 2007, 51). And whilst it has been established that psychoanalysis is useful in understanding the attraction of both classic Hollywood Horror and modern horror, the limitations of such theories should be discussed. The impact of Freud’s system of thought on cinema during the previous century cannot be negated, but it can be considered outmoded. Freud’s influence of American popular culture was ‘strongest in the 1940s and 1950s’ during the years of Hiroshima, Auschwitz and McCarthyism (Dumas, 2014, 22). However, the influence of Freudian ideas has since waned, potentially due to the development of second-wave feminism throughout the latter half of the twentieth century which ‘identified women’s cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked’ (Drucker, 2018); especially relevant given the most significant weakness and controversial aspect of Freud’s ideas is ‘the way he thought of women and female sexuality’ (Dumas, 2014, 26). Not only this, but psychoanalysis is often discussed in contrast to affect theory, as it focuses on rooting emotions in symbols and largely omitting the importance of bodily impact; Hereditary (Aster, 2018) is a film ‘pregnant with symbolisms and metaphors’ (Filmosophy, 2018), making psychoanalysis an effective method for understanding the text and its meanings. This is also true for classic Hollywood texts such as Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) which avoids graphic violence during the famous shower scene. As a viewer we don’t see the blade piercing Marion’s skin, we simply see her blood in the bathtub (Figure 2). This conforms to Joanna Russ’s idea that most work on understanding the fascination of horror has ‘been done from an intrapersonal, Freudian point of view, and so concentrates on issue of sexuality and guilt (…) which omits issues like the relation of self to other or the ontological status of the self’ (Russ, 1980, 350); implying that the ‘return of the repressed’ formula does not exhaustively explain all horror movies (Wood, 2001). Ultimately, psychoanalysis as a method for understanding the role and attraction of horror is limited (and not universally applicable), not only by its failure to acknowledge the genre’s affective power, but also by the decreased relevance and regressive nature of Freudian ideas.

Despite such limitations, Robin Wood’s ideas on psychoanalysis are vital to understanding its relationship to horror; whilst Wood acknowledges that ‘horror films necessarily operate on principles described by Freud’ (Dumas, 2014, 30), unlike the latter, the basic principles of Wood’s writings remain valid even forty years after their original publication. Horror films, particularly those released throughout the twentieth century, are ‘easily be read as conservative visions of sexual roles’ with women presented as either victims or monsters (Dumas, 2014, 33) – Marion in Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), for instance. However, Wood theorises that there is a revolutionary component to the horror genre; with the development of radicalism and protest throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the monster developed ‘a widespread tendency to become (…) the emotional centre of many horror films’ (Wood, 2001). Thus, this suggests what happens to characters in horror films is representative of what is happening within (American) society at the time, supporting the sentiment that there is no genre more innately critical of the values of white bourgeois patriarchal society, than the horror film’ (Sharrett, 2014, 56) - distilled by Wood into the statement: ‘Normality is threatened by the monster’ (Wood, 1986, 78). Applying this template to Hitchcock’s 1960 horror, Marion Crane is not simply a reflection of the backlash against second-wave feminism, but a model ‘for the woman’s attempt at liberation and negotiation of increasingly hazardous situations in the horror film’ (Greven, 2019). Dani Ardor, the protagonist of Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), is a modern example of this idea. The film begins with an overture during which Dani’s sister kills herself and her parents by carbon monoxide poisoning - leaving Dani orphaned. After being plunged into grief, Dani joins her emotionally distant boyfriend - Christian - and his friends on a trip to a rural, mid-summer celebration in Helsingia, Sweden. What begins as a peaceful retreat, becomes an increasingly violent affair as her friends are sacrificed by a pagan cult - the Hårga (IMDb, n.d.). When Dani and Christian remain the only outsiders alive, the pair are drugged and take part in the commune’s traditions. Dani wins a maypole dancing competition and is subsequently crowned May Queen, before finding Christian engaging in a sex ritual. This prompts Dani to finally release her howling, intense grief, which she was forced to sublimate to prevent him from leaving her (Wilkinson, 2019). The Hårga then announce that, the May Queen must select a sacrifice and rid herself of her ‘worst affekts’ (Aster, 2019) - Dani chooses Christian. Midsommar ends with an image of Dani smiling sinisterly (Figure 2), as Christian burns to death. Therefore, not only does Dani embody the ‘monstrous feminine’ (Creed, 1993) but the monster that normality is threatened by (Wood, 1986, 78); normality, in this case, is the patriarchal nature of Western society. Dani has liberated herself and her emotions from masculine control by becoming the matriarchal leader of a murderous cult; a direct example of women negotiating ‘increasingly hazardous situations in the horror film’ (Greven, 2019) that prove Wood’s psychoanalytical theories useful in highlighting horror’s progressive role in challenging hegemonic ideals.

In conclusion, the analysis of psychoanalytical methods in regard to Aster’s films and Psycho (1960), indicates that attraction to the genre lies within the elicitation of repressed feelings from childhood in a nightmarish manner, generating fear and repulsion whilst reminding viewers of their glaring impermanence. Horror texts fascinate us because they feel forbidden, playing a role in uncovering truths about ourselves through depiction of abject material and dream sequences, such as those in Hereditary. They also harbour a revolutionary nature in challenging the hegemonic ideologies of society, in line with Robin Wood’s ideas. However, psychoanalysis is limited by its failure to acknowledge the genre’s affective power and the outmoded nature of Freudian ideas in application to modern horror; causing a lack of universality that means psychoanalysis useful in understanding the role and attraction of horror in popular culture to a limited extent only.

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