Freud's Theories

Sigmund Freud is a psychologist who developed the psychodynamic approach to psychology, he played a leading role in creating psychoanalysis therapy, and has some interesting theories about how people can repress painful memories and also inappropriate thoughts into the unconscious. He states that repression is a coping mechanism in which people can block out these thoughts.

He believes that the mind is made up of three major parts, the conscious, the pre-conscious and the unconscious; from an early age any inappropriate thoughts (such as murdering our parents as Freud believes is part of our psychosexual development) are deemed to be socially unacceptable and so are repressed into the unconscious. Freud believes that people cannot access their unconscious and so this material is lost unless a therapist can access it through dream analysis or other psychoanalytical techniques.


However, material that has been repressed can still leak from the unconscious through the forms of dreams, slips of the tongue or parapraxes.

I think that Freud's theories relate to horror films in the sense that the audience watch them to feel scared and to see explicit things that they usually wouldn't be able to see.  Also it could enable the audience to connect with unconscious material through the means of watching films like these, potentially watching horror films where socially unacceptable behaviour occurs it could ignite old repressed material and allow the audience to almost vent their frustrations in an acceptable manner; by watching horror films.

Oedipal Law

Freud believed that the oedipal complex is a person's sexual desire for their mother; that both females and males have a crush on their mother and want to kill their father. There are also several stages to this complex which develop an infants psychosexual development, including the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, genital stage and latent stage. Unless developed normally with successful resolutions, a child can become fixated on one stage meaning that it could potentially lead to neurosis, paedophilia, and homosexuality. 

Oedipal Law is often used as a basis in horror films and defines the genre as one of taboos and psychological insight. Although the horror genre may not directly reflect Oedipal Law, it is an example of the psychoanalytical behaviour often related to viewing something deemed “sick”, however this view of the genre is defended by the theories that can be applied to it in order to explain the possible meaning behind the films. 

Also the idea of the return of the repressed is a common theme used in horror that orginates from the 19th century horror story 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', the narrative consisting of the hidden horror inside all of us that the audience can relate to themselves.