Freud and his concept of "The Return of the Repressed"

Sigmund Freud was a neurologist who founded the discipline of pshychoanalysis. One of the theories he is most known for is his theory on repression. Something that he looked at was the return of the repressed. He said people repressed certain rages and desires that you had at infancy and they sometimes would slip out. The desires that were theorized to have been repressed were such things like the desire to kill the father as he meant attention was taken away from the child by the mother and given to the dad or when a second child is brought into a family and the first child feels strong resentment towards them. Whilst studying horror movies this theory could be useful for a couple of reasons.

One reason would be that in horror movies, such as slashers, the reason for the killer to be killing is that these rages and desires were not repressed. For example, in the movie Halloween, Mike Myers killed his sister when he was a child. The doctor in film said that this was because he was evil, however if you take Freud's theory of repression into consideration it could have been because the desires and rages from infancy were not repressed.

The main reason the return of the repressed theory by Freud might be useful in the understanding of horror movies is that when people go to see horrors, it could be argued that this is to let these repressed rages and desires out. Although I feel that this is not the case with most people. Many horror movies are also about something returning from the past. This could very easily be linked to Freud's theory about the return of the repressed as they are both about something returning. The repressed could also be something that is said to be from the past. Reasons for people seeing horrors would be to be scared and to see how much gore and scariness they can take, which is something quite strange as usually being scared would be a bad thing. Freud's theory suggests another reason of why people might go to see horrors however the amount of truth in his theory could be argued with as it doesn't fit with most people.