ABSTRACT
Until recently the horror film tended to be seen as a unified genre, and ‘the privileged and critical tool for discussing the genre’ was, as Noel Carroll notes, psychoanalysis (Carroll 1982: 16-24). The result was a universalizing tendency to read horror only in terms of repressed infantile desires and, as Waller states, a ‘tendency to disregard the complex relationship between a genre and the social, political and cultural values and institutions that make up our world’ (Waller 1986: 12). This led critics such as Carroll and Freeland to reject tout court the relevance of psychoanalysis to film studies, suggesting instead that horror is concerned with the social construction of differences and of evil (Freeland 2000: 2).
