Psychoanalysis, once the dominant theoretical paradigm in cinema studies, has not fared well since the mid-1980s. New theoretical paradigms have arisen, creating a pluralism in the field. More importantly, psychoanalytical film theory has been subjected to a trenchant critique by analytical philosophers as well as film theorists informed by contemporary scientific and philosophical theories of mind. Some have criticized its basic premises and methodology. Noël Carroll (1988), for example, has pointed to numerous flaws in its founding analogies between cinematic phenomena and the irrational phenomena (putatively) explained by psychoanalysis. David Bordwell (1989) has shown how psychoanalytical film theorists of the past failed to adhere to even the most basic empirical and logical protocols of theory-building and instead simply integrated psychoanalytic concepts into traditional humanistic interpretive practices. Others, such as Murray Smith (1995) and Jeff Smith (1996), have pointed to the considerable failings of psychoanalytical theories of specific cinematic phenomena, such as identification and film music. The silence of psychoanalytical film theorists in the face of this critique – the fact that they have not attempted to systematically refute it or to reconstruct their theories in a dialectical response to it – is, I think, ample testimony to its power.

Although devastating for psychoanalytical film theories of the past, nothing about this critique rules out the possibility that there might be more successful psychoanalytical film theories in the future, for this critique is aimed at the failure to date of film theorists to build rigorous, plausible psychoanalytical theories, not the scientific or philosophical legitimacy of psychoanalysis itself.

Because I have expressed reservations about the application of psychoanalysis to film studies in general (Carroll 1988) and to the horror film in particular (Carroll 1990), I have been invited to contribute a comment to this volume on the relevance of psychoanalysis to the horror film. The editor's intention to include dissenting voices in this anthology is as laudable as it is generous and frankly unexpected. But I don't know for whom this opportunity is scarier: me or the psychoanalysts. For I must enter the lair of the Other, while they must suffer the presence of a wolf in philosopher's clothing. I guess it all depends on who you think the monster really is.

Is psychoanalysis relevant to the analysis of the horror film? I think that the simple answer to this question is “Of course.” It is certainly relevant, even apposite, to the analysis of many horror films, because many horror films presuppose, implicitly or explicitly, psychoanalytic concepts and imagery. Forbidden Planet (1956), for example, is frankly Freudian. Its monster is called the Id, a phenomenon explained in explicitly psychoanalytic terms within the world of the fiction. Anyone interpreting Forbidden Planet is thereby licensed to explicate the film psychoanalytically for the same reason that an exegete of Eisenstein's The General Line (1929) would be correct in adverting to Marxist ideology. In both cases, the hermeneutical warrant is historicist.

According to Laurence Rickels, author of The Vampire Lectures, and a master of the catchy academic turn of phrase (yes, such a thing does exist),

Of course, neither film nor psychoanalysis attended to this double feature in isolation from one another. Otto Rank, in a 1914 paper, claimed that “the uniqueness of cinematography in visibly portraying psychological events calls our attention, with exaggerated clarity, to the fact that the interesting and meaningful problems of man's relation to himself – and the fateful disturbance of this relation – finds … imaginative representation” (7). And after reading Rank's piece, Freud himself makes mention of Paul Wegener's German doppelgänger film, The Student of Prague (1913), in his seminal 1919 essay, “The ‘Uncanny’.”

Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1991 film The Double Life of Véronique (La Double Vie de Véronique, hereafter DLV) is a gently tragic tale whose eerie tone merits the label “uncanny.” Premised on the assumption that life itself may be uncanny, DLV tells the tale of two women in France and Poland who are somehow doubles – and who feel this about themselves. (Both are played by Irène Jacob, who won Best Actress at Cannes for her performance.) This premise is made plausible through a rich cinematic style, comparable to the paintings of Vermeer (we often see a woman standing in a room illuminated with side lighting from a window) and Rembrandt (the movie was shot with a filter that provided a golden tone).

Through strikingly composed sequences, DLV insists that unsettling structures of fate are at work in both art and life. For example, the Polish Veronika is singing an ethereal musical phrase on stage when she collapses from a weak heart and dies.

John Carpenter's f/x heavy remake of The Thing (1982) contains a brief interaction between man and monster that graphically foregrounds the chief problematic of the horror film. Under attack from a shape-shifting parasite that readily jumps from species to species and host to host, the members of an Arctic research team attempt to hold their own. In a rare moment of human advantage, the beleaguered company manages to temporarily isolate the chameleon invader. Sequestered in the host head of a decapitated human, the parasite seeks escape by morphing into a hermit-crab-and-skull combination that scuttles to freedom on scaly legs. As the beast of fusion skitters away, a gape-jawed, goggle-eyed technician exclaims, “You gotta be fucking kidding!”

Composed in equal measure of ontological and epistemological bewilderment, this profane cry exactly delimits the boundaries of the genre. Bound between what can and cannot be, the astonished prole must decide between exclusive options. Is the crab head that once crowned a colleague's body a macabre joke, eyes playing tricks, or is the foul crustacean an oracle? Cast between the antipodes of raillery and revelation, the lab tech and his double, the protagonist and the audience must decide if seeing is truly believing. Over and again, The Thing and others of its ilk call for a response. Horror is then an interrogative genre that demands of its subjects, on screen and off, a reply. Is this some kind of joke?

The present volume emerges out of an ongoing, sometimes acrimonious, debate over the viability of psychoanalytic theory to explicate horror and speculative cinema. The doubtfulness of influential critics like Noël Carroll on this score is indicative of a general skepticism about the worthiness of “applied analysis” in cinema and other critical studies, which has escalated over the past decade. One notes that not a few spear-carriers for the current eruption of anti-Freudianism have been former true believers themselves (e.g., Frederick Crews, generalissimo of the famous New York Review of Books “Freud Wars,” who in a previous incarnation authored a workmanlike analytical study of Hawthorne).

The analytic enterprise – notably the idiosyncratic Freudianism of Lacan – dominated film theory for several decades, variably conflated with semiotics, Marxism, feminism, deconstructionism, etc. But even as psychoanalytic practice withers under the lash of managed care, and the Founding Father is everywhere denigrated by clinicians and scholars alike, “Lacanalysis” along with less arcane analytic tactics have lost much of their luster for the Academy. In the quest for genuine relevance or mere tenure, the rubrics of applied analysis have been ditched for archival investigation, or other a la page endeavors.

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

By far the most common accounts of horror's appeal are grounded in concepts drawn from Freudian theory, and I shall approach them by focusing first on simple repression models and then on the more elaborate analyses offered by “structural psychoanalysis.” This psychoanalytic emphasis is not recent – though the Lacanian turn in cultural theory has lent it additional force – and it is tempting to speculate as to why, more than with any other popular genre, those puzzled by horror should so often have turned to psychoanalysis in search of enlightenment. In some part, of course, the genre itself invokes psychoanalytic considerations, at times borrowing its imagery from the symbolic apparatus of dream interpretation as well as allowing fictional characters to advance pseudo-Freudian accounts of their own and other's motivations. Thus, where its typical monsters have been compulsive murderers, as so often in the past thirty years, the genre's common presumption has been of a psychopathology rooted in the psychosexual dynamics of childhood. In this respect, at least, Norman Bates long ago escaped the confines of Psycho to leave his distinctive imprint on modern horror.

However, although the genre's self-conscious borrowing from psychoanalysis is not without significance for the theoretical frameworks invoked in its understanding, such an emphasis does not entail any specific theoretical consequences and so hardly explains psychoanalytic theory's predominance.

In 1979, Richard Lippe and I organized and hosted a retrospective of the (primarily) American horror film at the Toronto International Film Festival, then known as the “Festival of Festivals.” We invited a number of filmmakers to give seminars, and Brian de Palma, George Romero, Wes Craven, and Stephanie Rothman all made public appearances and answered questions, Richard and I interviewing each on stage before turning the questioning over to the audience. As part of this event, we produced a small booklet, to which Andrew Britton and Tony Williams also contributed essays, entitled (like the retrospective) The American Nightmare. My sections were subsequently included in my book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, with an extension dealing with the genre's development – “degeneration” would be a more appropriate term – in the 1980s.

Looking back, it seems to me that our primary motivation was what Howard Hawks always claimed for making his movies – “having fun” – though I would add that, like Hawks, we wanted to make as good a professional job of it as possible and we took our work very seriously. Of course, we would never have done it had we not believed that we had something to say, at the root of which was our sense that this most despised and ridiculed of genres deserved serious attention. I don't think it occurred to us that what we were doing would come to assume the historic importance that seems to be the case.

Castration, sexual abuse, hysteria, perversity, excrement, bestiality, animal phobias – Freud's case histories read like horror movies. They are alive with fears – fear of being bitten by a horse, fear of wolves, fear of having one's bowels gnawed by a rat. His famous Interpretation of Dreams is permeated with anxieties and phobias of a similarly horrific nature – nightmares of falling, suffocation, ghosts, dead children, burning skin, urine and feces, people with bird's heads, snakes, men with hatchets, decapitations. In Freud's view, nightmares were the result of wish fulfillments from the unconscious, deadly dreamscapes of sexual origin in which he included murder and cannibalism (Freud 1975: 723–39). Samuel Goldwyn once offered Freud a lucrative contract to write a script for a movie about great lovers of history. Goldwyn could see how the screenwriter might benefit from an understanding of Freud's theories: “How much more forceful will be their creations if they know how to express genuine emotional motivation and suppressed desires” (Gay: 454). Freud refused outright. Goldwyn might have had more success if he had suggested a horror story.

Much of Freud's writings, in fact, contain the elements one might expect, not from the pen of a respectable, middle class doctor from fin de siècle Vienna, but from the laptop of contemporary masters of horror such as Stephen King or Thomas Harris. Freud's worst nightmare? How to select one dream of untold terror from such a macabre collection?

The past decade has been hard on psychoanalysis. When Time magazine commissions a leading contemporary psychoanalytic scholar, historian Paul Gray, to write a cover story on “The Assault on Freud” (November 29, 1993), it is clear that the bashing has become so predominant and widespread to have entered, in fact, the mainstream. The attacks have come from many fronts, indeed from all angles – new critics joining forces with older, more famous opponents. The few staunch (or shall we say obtuse?) defenders circle the wagons and hope, at most, to be able to sustain the assault a little longer…. Perhaps, though, the gravest danger doesn't come from these critics, who are, after all, still mere thinkers. How can practitioners and scholars of psychoanalysis worry about theoretical challenges when the dire twins of psychopharmacology and HMOs appear so steadfastly intent on starving Freud's creature to death? Forget the academic debates! Today what is truly doing psychoanalysis in is capitalism's good old-fashioned market logic.

In these unusually difficult times for psychoanalysis, it is not surprising that its influence within film theory has been fading as well. The first (and perhaps the last) nail in the coffin was the 1996 publication of David Bordwell and Noël Carroll's massive anthology, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.

THE MYTH OF META-THEORY

Over the past thirty years, a plethora of publications have argued in favor of a specific psychoanalytic approach to some dimension or convention of cinematic horror. Included among these are articles and books by such influential scholars as Robin Wood, Carol Clover, Stephen Neale, Linda Williams, Barbara Creed, even Noël Carroll in an earlier incarnation. These efforts have typically taken the form of either interpretive analysis (of a particular film, subgenre, or the genre as a whole) or depth-psychological explanation (of the symbolic/mythic import of horror film monsters; of the horror affect and how it is generated; of the possibly perverse pleasures viewers obtain from being frightened by visible fictions). And despite the often vitriolic criticisms of psychoanalysis both inside and outside academic film studies, the horror genre has continued to see a steady stream of new psychoanalytic approaches, as well as new variations on existing ones.

As originally conceived, the present volume was to be a collection of “meta-theoretical” essays on psychoanalysis and the horror film – not essays that simply (or not so simply, as the case may be) make use of Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Jonesian, or Lacanian principles, theses, arguments, or purported discoveries in an effort at shedding light on aspects of the horror film. Instead, it was envisaged that contributors would take a step back to address the relative strengths and weaknesses of such approaches.

As a genre, horror has provoked a range of theoretical work from academic audiences, work which seeks to make sense of horror's affective powers. In this essay, I want to resituate the theoretical debates that have circulated around horror. By way of pursuing an “alternative paradigm,” I will discuss theoretical work as performative rather than constative. My interest lies not so much in what theories of horror say (i.e., whether they are true or false, metaphysical or falsifiable), but rather in what such theories do. I borrow this distinction from “speech act” theorist J.L. Austin:

Austin accepts that the “Performative–Constative” antithesis is never absolute, and that the purely “constative” can rarely be disengaged from aspects of performativity (16–17). Even from the constative “side of truth and falsehood,” Austin concludes, “we feel ourselves driven to think again about the Performative–Constative antithesis” (22).

Theoretical work on horror has typically been addressed through a constative lens. This is unsurprising, because it is the habitual orientation of the truth-seeking theorist; a given theory should be, either scientifically or hermeneutically, more adequate than its rivals and should, thus, refer to a state of affairs outside its own model of these affairs.

Once discredited, the auteur theory has come around again. After haunting “the stately castles of film theory and criticism” (Levy 2001: xi) for more than a quarter century, it has been recovered in a number of unlikely contexts – from structuralism to feminism, queer theory, identity politics, and star theory – and is today a major marketing strategy (Saper 2001: 35). With it comes a core of assumptions based in psychoanalysis. But where discussion of film spectatorship has been dominated by Freud and Lacan, discourses surrounding film authorship have shown little interest in psychoanalysis. I will examine the phenomenon of the horror auteur as an exception to this rule. As recognized in recent meta-films – films about the filmmaking process itself – and in popular and academic culture, the horror auteur exposes the theory's psychoanalytic and gothic assumptions, thus interrogating auteurism while lending it levels of mystique.

Reviewer Jan Stuart has stated my first premise, more or less, in a comment about E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (2000) having the same non-news “The Blair Witch Project had up its threadbare sleeve” – that “there is no greater horror than the making of a horror movie: the terror wrought by an insecure actor, a monomaniacal director, a stalking camera.” However, Stuart disparages a cliché I propose to take seriously as an idea and extend to the making of movies in general: that there is something uncanny about whatever drives the “true” auteur.

Film studies is, and has been, deeply involved with cultural categories of explanation. Features of cinema, such as the shot/reverse-shot series, are explicated in terms of ideology and the propagation of a socially determined dominant discourse. The viewer's involvement with cinema has also tended to be framed in terms of culturally construed models of psychology, such as psychoanalysis. I refer to psychoanalysis as culturally construed for two reasons. The first involves the conditions of its origin: Freud as a late Romantic philosopher/scientist whose brilliant work is not separable from the parameters of the bourgeois, patriarchal era in which he lived, and whose project was to substitute a new paradigmatic ideal – the self, the psyche – for those previously holding sway in Western culture. Philip Rieff describes this as the replacement of religion, politics, and economics by “psychological man” (356–57).

Psychoanalysis has also operated within the arena of film studies to advance certain large-scale analyses of cinema's cultural impact, viewed in terms of the mobilization of desire within the medium's mass audiences. Since the 1970s, film studies' appropriation of psychoanalysis has been tied to the efforts of film scholars to explain how cinema connects desire (at the level of individual viewers) to ideology (at the level of social discourse). Allied with the ideological study of cinema found in Marxist or feminist approaches, psychoanalysis has provided film scholars with a method for connecting cinema's operations to the individual spectator as well as to social formations.

An approach to some of the questions posed by the relation between popular culture and psychoanalysis is suggested by Barbara Creed's 1986 essay, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Creed turns to Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien in an attempt to clarify issues of otherness and the monstrous-feminine. By “monstrous-feminine” she refers to woman seen from the point of view of Freud's understanding of castration – as shocking, terrifying, horrific – as the site of abjection. Her theoretical underpinnings derive from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, a book whose project is to establish the abject as a new theoretical entity beyond meaning – beyond the confines of the human (as understood within patriarchal society) – but which nonetheless can be given significance within a psychoanalytic understanding of the formation of the subject. Creed's aim is to show the inescapable relevance of this to an analysis of dominant culture and the subordination of women within that culture.

Kristeva pictures the abject as a place where meaning collapses, where I, the subject, am not. The abject is thus to be identified with what threatens life, and it must, therefore, be radically excluded from the place of the living subject. The abject, in other words, is all that the subject excludes in order to be what it is, to have the identity that it does. The abject is, for Kristeva, what in Judaism is characterized as “abomination”: sexual perversion, murder, the corpse, incest, and the feminine body.