Psychoanalysis & The Horror Movie
A Freudian Reading of Horror Cinema
Over the course of this essay, I intend to argue that horror films show various representations of the failure of repression as a means to control instincts and desires through sublimation. In order to do this, I will be looking at various Freudian concepts relating to ideas of childhood development, the psychosexual stages and trauma, by applying this to the slasher film Halloween (1978) and the New French Extremist film Martyrs (2008). I will also explore the relationship between the audience and the horror film as a way of understanding its role as a doorway into the repressed desires and instincts of both its characters and its audience and will discuss the idea that the horror film as it exists in the real world represents a failure of repression, as it operates as a window into the repressed desires of the film watcher.
Freud argues that during a “period of total or only partial latency” early in childhood psychosexual development, certain “mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct” are built up. Freud argues that these “mental forces” are “fixed by heredity” and that the conflict between these natural instincts and external factors such as “education”, is the cause of repression. In Halloween we see the character of Michael Meyers, the films primary antagonist, as a child, acting out his most violent impulses in murdering his sister. Considering the environmental factors during this opening scene, such as well-dressed parents and a large, well-kept house in a suburban neighborhood, I would argue that Michael’s lack of repression is born out of his more powerful naturally murderous instincts. Where a child might develop the dam of repression thanks to the combination of nature and nurture, Michael lacks the ability to discern right from wrong, good from evil. Based on Freud’s theory of personality, Michael lacks the ego as a means of mediating between his super ego, the moral and societal values, and his id, the pure instinctual rage within his mind. This is the first instance of the failure of repression within a horror film, as Halloween presents a character who is unable to stem the flow of his rage and is also unable to understand the desires he feels to force the values of society upon the youth within the film.
As a result of this, Michael Meyers is the physical embodiment of both the id and the super ego. Early in the film, he is displaying all the instinctual rage of the id in performing the murder of his sister. We see Michael’s perspective as he takes the clown mask and kills his naked sister who just engaged in sexual intercourse. The clown costume holds significance in that the image of a clown represents chaos for the sake of entertainment. There is a duality to the image of the clown as it is at once a comedic image and one that causes fear in many people. This connection between the chaos of comedy and the violence and uncertainty of fear encapsulates the Freudian concept of the id.
In the 2008 film Martyrs, we see a different representation of the failure of repression in the effect that trauma has on the psyche. As a result of the trauma caused by her imprisonment and torture, Lucie, one of the films primary protagonists, has been unable to repress her memories and instincts. As a result of her leaving behind another girl during her escape, her mind manifests her guilt in the form of a mutilated being known as “Creature” in the film’s credits. This being is a manifestation of the guilt she is unable to repress, as a result of the trauma that the scars on her body remind her of. This causes her mind to draw a direct connection between her own body and the violence in her past. The word “Creature” itself connotes the idea of something subhuman or something that is animalistic in nature. In the scenes depicting the Creature, Lucie sees her as a scarred being crawling and convulsing on the floor as in the Bathroom scene. The fact that the film manifests her guilt in the form of an animalistic being, leads Lucie to believe that the answer to beating the Creature lies in her id and thus in revenge. This leads Lucie to the violent massacre that is, her acting upon the whim of her id as she succumbs to the violent impulses and murderous rage that she has been unable to repress as a result of her torture.
As critic Lacan stated in his essay on The Mirror Stage, childhood development is intricately connected to our discovery of ‘self’. Self is here defined as the ability to recognise your own physical body and its relationship with the world around us. Within the various films of the horror genre, the body is often mutilated in violent and grotesque ways such is the case with Martyrs. Early on in the film, we see the protagonist, Lucie, running away from her captivity with a scarred body following years of violent torture. As a result of her stunted development born out of her trauma, Lucie has been denied the ability to view her own body and its relationship to the world. In the film’s opening credits sequence, we see her in an institution, struggling to assimilate with the other children. We are shown various shots of her isolated in the corner while the other children play suggesting that her latent experiencing The Mirror Stage has caused social anxiety. As an extension of this idea, Lucie has only known her body as a scarred and broken entity, her only understanding before her escape of its relationship to the outside world is through pain and mutilation.
During her time in captivity, Lucie is unable to experience the mirror stage due to her being stuck in the anal phase of Freud’s five stages of psychosexual development. Whereas a child who had progressed through the five stages would then come to understand their relationship to the world and understand their own body and how it functions, the film shows us that Lucie is kept in a place where the only bodily functions she understands are bleeding and excreting waste. The chair upon which Lucie experiences her trauma has a hole on its seat in order for her to excrete waste which suggests that her bodily functions are being controlled by her captors. Where Fraud discusses the anal stage as being that where the child learns to control their bodily functions and as a result is able to begin to understand their relationship with the surrounding world, Lucie has no control over her own body, and as such is unable to begin to understand this relationship.
The original poster for the 1978 classic.
Fraud argues that the psychosexual stages lead to an Oedipal Complex, which is itself repressed within the mind of the child as it develops into an adult causing latent trauma. I would argue that the child not being allowed to progress through the psychosexual stages fully in a way that might lead to the mirror stage, as Lacan describes, is equally traumatic. Martyrs relate to Halloween in how the trauma of not progressing through the psychosexual stages relates to the development of the id, ego and super ego. In Halloween, Michael can be seen as the purest embodiment of rage and instinct, or the physical personification of the id. In parallel, Lucie, when enacting her revenge, is also driven by instincts and is also an embodiment of the id. Lucie remains fixated on the idea of inflicting violence upon those who caused her own pain because she is unable to see herself as anything other than scarred and broken as a result of her experiences during the mirror stage. Similarly, Michael remains frozen subconsciously within the genital stage, where he has become fully aware of the sexuality of his sister.
During the opening scene of Halloween, Michael murders his sister while wearing a clown costume. The murder itself is depicted from Michael’s point of view, where he can be seen taking the mask and placing it over his head restricting his vision. The fact that we see the murder from Michael’s perspective reinforces the idea that he is a child performing this act. We see Michael’s perspective as his sister engages in sexual intercourse with her boyfriend and is subsequently killed, naked while brushing her hair. A six-year-old Michael murdering his naked sister has significant Freudian ramifications when considering the murder in relation to Fraud theories of childhood sexuality. If Michael is going through the psychosexual stages, then he is in the midst of the Genital Stage. During the Genital Stage, the child is becoming aware of their own genitalia. During this scene, the knife itself can be seen as an extension of the penis, a phallic object used to perform the sexual act of penetration on a woman. Critic Shoshana Felman, in her essay on Lacan, describes a “process of replacement — of substitution — of symbolic objects (substitutes) of desire.” The symbolic object of desire in Halloween is less a “substitute” and more an extension of his desire becoming a symbol for the id’s violent and destructive nature. Michael’s sister, Judith, is brushing her hair while singing, both of which are innocent acts a young girl might perform creating an air of innocence around the character that, when juxtaposed with her naked body, makes the act of Michael stabbing her more violent and akin to rape.
Sexuality and violence are intrinsically connected within the horror genre. In Halloween and slasher films of the late 70’s and 80’s, the rule dubbed “sex equals death” is clear in many prominent genre films, examples include Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street. and My Bloody Valentine. In many of these films sexuality, in particular, female sexuality, is subject to the whims, violent instincts and objectifying gaze of a male killer. Considering the opening scenes of Halloween we see various shots depicting the masked Michael stalking the babysitters he will kill throughout the film. The “stalking” part of the slasher film is key when considering the way in which horror films approach sexuality.
The sequel to Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween, entitled, Halloween II. opens with an epigraph which reads “WHITE HORSE — linked to instinct, purity and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction.” The image of the White Horse recurs throughout the 2009 film in various dream sequences in connection to Michael’s past. A young Michael, at the age he was when he performed the murders, is seen in these dream sequences with his mother who is dressed all in white as an angelic figure. Michael fetishizes his mother in these scenes within his mind as an overtly beautiful figure of innocence. If we consider the idea of the white horse in relation to Carpenter’s original 1978 film, it can be seen as a representation of the young Michael. The image of a white horse denotes ideas of purity and innocence connected to the colour white, while also suggesting a power and flippant rage connected with the horse. Animals are driven by instincts, or id, and are often used in horror movies as a means of both mirrorings and juxtaposing theirs on screen killers. At the start of the original Halloween Michael is the white horse. A child, a picture of purity and innocence dressed in a costume for Halloween who then succumbs to his animalistic and instinctual rage in murdering his sister. Michael then enters a period of near catatonic behavior, before escaping the mental institution he became incarcerated in at the age of twenty-one.
Freud argued that mankind is inertly evil, that we as a result of our instincts are inherently murderous beings, that through a process called repression learn to function within society. It is through the construction of these “dams” that we are able to restrict the instincts that drive our id, most notably the pleasure principle. This process allows us to become productive parts of human society, as it channels these instinctual desires or impulses into creative energy through a process called sublimation. In applying this idea to Halloween, it is clear that the repression that allows a normal person to function is lacking in Michael thus allowing his primordial murderous instincts to bubble to the surface.
Critic Robin Wood describes “basic repression” as “universal, necessary, and inescapable”. He says that “it is what makes possible our development from uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and convulsions into a human being”. In Martyrs’ opening scene we see the young Lucie screaming and convulsing during her time in the institution following her escape, suggesting a failure in “basic repression” as a result of her captivity.
A common trope within the horror genre is the “final girl”. The term refers to the last woman standing in a horror film after the violence has taken place. The final girl is often the core of the film and often is able to defeat or survive the killer by the end of the film. The final girl in terms of Halloween is Laurie Strode, a young girl, who is portrayed as a virginal honor roll student whose reluctance to partake in the same countercultural, immoral activities as her friends Annie and Lynda are what characterises her as the “final girl” in the slasher tradition. Laurie wears conservative attire, such as high neck jumpers and long skirts that obscure her sexuality while also removing colour from her clothes as a way of taking the emphasis off her physical appearance.
Conversely, characters such as Lynda and Annie are consistently seen in both colourful outfits and varying stages of undress. Michael’s relationship with the women within Halloween isn’t as a voyeur sexually objectifying the women, he is instead a physical personification of society’s values or the super ego. Michael is punishing the promiscuous and transgressive women through strangulation and as a result, is taking away their voices and their ability to not conform to heteronormative societal values. When he attacks Laurie however, Michael attempts to stab her with a kitchen knife penetrating her skin and taking her virginity by force, and as a result becoming the id once more.
Freud had a significant impact on the medical definition of hysteria during his research and described the condition, which primarily affected women, as being the “symptomatic manifestation of repressed desires”. By the end of the slasher film, as a result of the trauma inflicted upon the final girl, they are often depicted as hysterical, as seen when Dr. Loomis appears to Laurie in the house after Michael has attacked her. The distraught Laurie leans on the door frame, unable to hold up her own weight as a result of the exhaustion she feels because of the trauma she has endured. It is at this moment that Michael, the personification of this trauma, rises up in the background of the shot, out of focus as if in the back of Laurie’s mind attempting to escape repression. Slowly, however, Michael works his way to the foreground and into focus as he attacks her, manifesting in her conscious mind causing her to become hysterical and physically represented on the screen a failure of repression through Laurie’s inability to kill Michael. Michael is the physical personification of Laurie’s id coming to the foreground of her conscious mind, unable to be fully repressed due to her hysteria once again representing a failure of repression.
Lucie’s inability to repress her guilt as a result of her trauma isn’t the only failure of repression within Martyrs, the same can be said for the Mademoiselle who leads the group of people creating “martyrs” through acts of torture in order to achieve insight into the afterlife. The Mademoiselle herself is acting upon her own impulses in torturing the women within the film. However, the motive of her violence is the result of the death instinct, the Freudian concept that we all ultimately desire death. The Mademoiselle is driven by the desire to “lead organic life back into the inanimate state” in order to achieve enlightenment.
Horror films act as a way for the audience to live out the instincts of their own id’s vicariously through the medium of film. The barrier of the screen acts as a protective layer between the audience and the violence depicted on screen, while also allowing them to live out their fantasies, and to derive pleasure through entertainment. In Halloween, the audience is repeatedly placed within the perspective of the killer such as the opening scene where they are allowed to walk in the killer’s shoes as he murders his sister allowing a distortion of the barrier between the on screen violence and reality. In this way, the horror movie itself is a representation of the failure of repression in the audience as it acts as a window into the violent instincts that exist within the viewers subconscious. The popularity of horror cinema provides a clear connection between onscreen violence and catharsis within the audience allowing me to conclude that the films themselves are temporary reprieves from the repression placed upon the human mind. Martyrs allow the audience to have a window into extreme violence for the purpose of enlightenment which causes a failure of repression within the audience leading to a pleasure response.
Ultimately, within the horror genre, there is multiple examples of the failure to repress traumatic memories or to repress the primordial instincts that humans are born with. Murder and torture represent the ultimate destructive acts and depict characters acting out the impulses of their id freely and without thought of consequence. Michal in Halloween is the embodiment of the id and his violent murders are a result of a failure to repress his lack of understanding regarding sexuality. Martyrs depict the impact that trauma has on the development of the psyche depicting a character, in Lucie, who is unable to assimilate in the outside world. In conclusion, a Freudian reading of horror cinema reveals that the violence they depict is often caused by this failure in repression.
Bibliography
Primary Texts
Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Ego and the Id’ in On Metapsychology (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987)
Halloween, dir. John Carpenter (Compass International Pictures, 1978)
Martyrs, dir. Pascal Laugier (Wild Bunch, 2008)
Secondary Sources
A Nightmare on Elm Street, dir. Wes Craven (New Line Cinema, 1984)
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997)
Felman, Shoshanna, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1987)
Friday the 13th, dir. Sean S. Cunningham (Paramount Pictures, 1980)
Halloween II, dir. Rob Zombie (Dimension Films, 2009)
Lacan, Jaques, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ in The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, (New York: Norton, 2001)
My Bloody Valentine, dir. George Mihalka (Paramount Pictures, 1981)
Wood, Robin, ‘The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70’s’ in Horror, The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (London: Routledge, 2002)
