Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Prestige Horror

Though the importance of psychoanalysis to horror studies is common knowledge in the field, the extent of its influence is easily underestimated. Critics typically trace the birth of horror film scholarship back to Robin Wood’s essays in The American Nightmare (1979), which were then expanded upon and collected in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan in 1986. Wood’s approach informed other psychoanalytical approaches, most famously Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992) and Barbara Creed’s The MonstrousFeminine (1993), both of which were also expansions of essays published in the 1980s. Psychoanalytical approaches to horror continued to proliferate in the 1990s, including Tony Williams’s Hearths of Darkness (1996) and Harry Benshoff ’s Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997). Barry Keith Grant solidified the influence of these critics and their approaches in his collection Dread of Difference (1996), which contained essays by Creed, Clover, Benshoff, Williams, and Wood in addition to essays with comparable approaches by himself and Christopher Sharrett, with whom he had edited the collection Planks of Reason in 1984. The appearance of a revised edition of Planks of Reason in 2004 signaled the continued significance of psychoanalytically informed criticism into the new millennium. In fact, in Horror Film and Psychoanalysis, published the same year, Stephen Jay Schneider declared that “despite the often vitriolic criticisms of psychoanalysis both inside and outside academic film studies, the horror genre has continued to see a steady stream of new psychoanalytic approaches, as well as new variations on existing ones” (1). His claim is well supported by major studies that followed, such as Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representations and Linnie Blake’s The Wounds of Nations. Recent works continue to tip their hats to psychoanalysis and its most well-known scholars, and companions and introductions to the genre give it prominence . Equally telling is that so many of the seminal works of horror criticism have received second editions, including Williams’s in 2014 and Creed’s, Grant’s, and Clover’s in 2015. In addition, a collection of Wood’s essays on horror earned its own volume in 2018, and Creed’s book was revisited in 2019 in