What is trauma if not, as in the Greek, a kind of wound? Here it is something more – a wound that seldom heals, a wounding of body and soul from which, often, the subject does not recover. Hence the critical formula for the outcome of the trauma picture: at the least, significant damage; at the most, violent death. If film horror often sources the supernatural, film trauma focuses on the fears of the human and natural world. What is out there as waking nightmare in a dangerous world is often a mirror of what is hidden in here, in the human heart. The monsters that horror films project onto the screen are often the monsters of our dream worlds. The wounding events of the trauma film are by contrast a fusion of life and dream. In film there is no absolute borderline between these opposites – human trauma/supernatural horror but the question of emphasis, one way or the other, is crucial. The threat of aliens, mutants, werewolves, monsters, robots, slasher killers, vampires et alia: or the threat of evil that is here and now, that is contingent and recurrent in the life-world, yet also seems onscreen to inhabit the world of dream. Horror is thus the popular genre of superhuman evil, trauma its human and dreamlike subset. (Another subset is the serial killer film, which crosses boundaries and, in Hollywood at least, reinvents the superhuman monster in human form – the homicidal freak possessed of rational cunning.)