Summary: Theories of Horror
Freud
1. Repression. What energy, desire, or passion seems repressed, suppressed, maybe oppressed? How is it manifesting?
2. The Uncanny. Do the domestic, the familiar, and the secure turn strange?
3. Repetition. Do things repeat, keep coming back insisting, like a broken record, like a desiring-machine?
4. Animism/animation. Do dead things, inanimate objects, or other nonhuman things come alive?
5. Ambivalence. Does the monster or the horror suggest mixed feelings, attraction as well as repulsion? (and beyond Freud: potentials for deprogramming standard cultural codes on a track of alternatives, freedoms?)
Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek
6. Abjection and the Real. Any heightening, highlighting of raw life, matter formless or sticky or slimy? Links to the mother and the feminine?
7. Lamella. Any special emphasis on the formless, amoeba-like, slimy and slippery and boundary-crossing?
Mary Douglas, Noel Carroll
8. Category disturbance, disordering. Any mixing, crossover, blurring, distortion of social-cultural classifications? (human and nonhuman, living and dead, whole and fragment, masculine and feminine, and so on). Specifically, via Carroll on horror:
9. Categorically ambiguous—the horror/monster, in two classifications at once?
10. Incompletion—the horror/monster is missing something, not fully formed?
11. Formlessness—the horror/monster is fluid, slimy, lamellar, scrambled, dispersed?
12. Fusion—the horror/monster involves two or more entities combined in one?
13. Fission—the horror/monster is one entity splitting into two, doubling, changing back and forth?
14. Magnification—the horror/monster with one feature or the whole expanding, as if to explode identity/category?
15. Massification—the horror/monster involving swarming, crowding, teeming, as it to overrun category boundaries?
16. Metonymy—innocuous things turning to horror objects via association with monster/horror?
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