Freud - 'return of the repressed'.

Definition - The return of the repressed is the process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness or in behavior, in the shape of secondary and more or less unrecognizable "derivatives of the unconscious." Parapraxes, bungled or symptomatic actions, are examples of such derivatives.
Why it important to horror movies - Freudian theory is vulnerable to attack on many points, but not, on the one that formed the psychoanalytic basis of The American Nightmare: the theory of repression and the "return of the repressed." We can all trace the workings of this, surely, in our own personal histories and in our daily lives; it continues to have great resonance in relation to the horror film, but only in so far as it is melded with a political awareness. Murnau's Nosferatu (1921), made in the very shadow of Freud, strikes me as almost typical Freud, the monster as "return of the repressed" (and its ultimate re-repression) in almost diagrammatic (yet extremely powerful) form. The Freudian analogy holds good for James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), but there, in Karloff's make-up, clothing, gestures and performance, his threats and pleadings, we can also see the working-class, the poor, the homeless, the dispossessed, suggesting a parallel between psychological repression and social oppression. The possibility that the monster (hence "the repressed") might be seen as sympathetic or pitiable (as well as horrifying) was perhaps inherent in the genre from the outset (it is clearly there in Whale's two Frankenstein movies). But it is in the '70s, with the development of radicalism and protest, that the figure of the monster develops a widespread tendency to become (though never unambiguously) the emotional centre of many horror films.
That the "return of the repressed" formula does not exhaustively explain all horror movies was demonstrated already in the '70s/'80s
by what seems now in retrospect the period's greatest achievement,
George Romero's Living Dead trilogy. It has not, I think, been
sufficiently recognized that the meaning and function of the
zombies changes radically from film to film. It is consistent, in fact, in only one way, that the zombies constitute a challenge to the humans, not merely to survive but to change. But the nature of the challenge differs from film to film.

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