“When the Woman Looks”

Since the great achievements of the American horror film in the 1960s and 1970s, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), film scholars have consistently found the genre of interest for its potential critique and subversion of dominant ideology. Considerable critical writing has shown that the undermining of bourgeois mores, chiefly through canny usages of a critical perspective grounded in radical political and psychological discourses, has been one of the genre’s most notable characteristics. The notion of the Other, basic to all genres, is addressed in the horror film most directly, through the device of the “monster.” The most outstanding horror films interrogate the ways by which dominant ideology is internalized by individual subjects. They challenge widely held notions of insanity, recognizing, however obliquely, Freudian notions of the pervasive nature of neurosis and psychosis, understanding that the “normal” cannot exist in a civilization based on repression and oppression, particularly with regard to the racial Other and the policing of sexuality.