ABSTRACT
In film scholarship, there is a neat critical expectation that horror films bear a serious social significance by making the monster stand for something terrifying, but repressed, and that “the fear that horror incites has a cathartic effect on our innermost traumas and anxieties.” 1 It has become film studies orthodoxy to read horror films allegorically as responses to cultural anxieties, historical memory, and national traumas, connecting the event to the film symptomatically. 2 Robin Wood argues that the “monster dramatizes all that our civilization re presses or op presses,” 3 articulating the prevailing psychoanalytical approach to horror cinema. Therefore, according to this logic, by applying an exorcizing cinematic discourse, the moral role of the horror film becomes a communal abreaction and the horror genre acts as a repetitive process of “working through” by elaborating and amplifying interpretations. 4 Elsewhere Wood states that in “the basic formulae of the horror film: normality is threatened by the monster where normality is conformity to dominant social norms.” 5
