the spectre of freud_nature of the other in screen horror

8/3/2019 The Spectre of Freud_Nature of the Other in Screen Horror

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Raina Haig 162618

MA Critical Media and Cultural Studies

Approaches to the Other in Science Fiction and Horror Films

Course code: 15PANH043

The Spectre of Freud: Nature of the Other in Screen Horror

Word count: 5,094



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The Spectre of Freud: Nature of the Other in screen horror

Psychoanalysis, just one of a range of possible theoretical approaches to the Other

in screen horror, has, to date, dominated this area of film studies. Furthermore, in the

task of analysing the nature, function and effects of screen horror texts, the place of

Sigmund Freud, founder-father of psychoanalysis, has been kept open. In this

exploration of the ontology, or nature of the Other in screen horror, I re-discover why

Freud‟s thinking continues to figure, almost a century later, in relation to this

question. I return to and discuss Freud‟s theory of unheimlich, sketched out in his

1919 essay, The Uncanny. I argue that Freud‟s idea of unheimlich continues to

prove useful in accounting for the nature of the Other in screen horror. Freud

proposes that aesthetic depictions which arouse horror constitute a frightening re-

emergence of repressed, hitherto surmounted, unconscious beliefs, which form an

innate aspect of the human psyche. My conception of the Other in screen horror

places this notion at its core.

I consider whether and in what ways Freud‟s work might need to be supplemented

and which approaches could be helpful, to describe the object of study more fully. I

discuss Jacques Derrida‟s concepts of spectrality and hauntology in connection with

the post-modernist idea of Self and Other as non-essential and subject to change.

Further, following film theorist Steven Schneider, I propose that surface depictions of

the screen horror Other are contingent upon the socio-cultural specificities of their



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production context. I conclude that my discussion so far creates space for the case

study undertaken in the second part of my essay.

I seek to test the emerging description of my object of study through an interpretive

analysis of a screen horror text. To this end, I present an analysis of A Spectre Calls,

a Halloween murder mystery, published in 2011 on YouTube in 4 episodes, with a

duration of twenty minutes in total. I position this text as belonging to a number of

sub-categories of the horror genre. A Spectre Calls is a community rather than a

commercial production which, it may be argued, is not an important screen horror

text. In addition, I have a privileged knowledge of the production context, and it

could be objected that this may present problems of objectivity. I argue, however,

that it is useful to try theory not just on commercial films, to test it more thoroughly.

Moreover, my knowledge and lived experience of the text‟s context of production

enables and qualifies me to contribute an ethnographic perspective, in order to shed

light on textual processes relevant to my argument that the surface nature of the

Other in screen horror is contingent upon the socio-cultural context of its production.

To sum up, my proposition is, firstly, that the nature of the Other in screen horror is a

re-emergence of repressed mental material; secondly, that its surface depiction is

changeable and changing, subject to socio-cultural forces. Thirdly, I seek to prove

this definition through the textual analysis of the specifics of a new screen horror text,

A Spectre Calls. I conclude, my case study further proves that Freud‟s place in

discussions of the screen horror Other is justified but his idea requires

supplementation.



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Freud’s idea of the unheimlich

It is important to revisit Freud because so many psychoanalytic accounts of the

nature and function of horror, and of the horror effect, are founded in Freud‟s theory

of unheimlich as the frightening re-emergence of repressed, hitherto subdued

aspects of the psyche. I suggest Freud‟s idea of unheimlich is useful in providing a

core approach to understanding the nature of the Other in screen horror. In the

following paragraphs, I outline Freud‟s view that a depiction of the unheimlich is

something that 1. arouses feelings of lingering uncertainty and fear in the „reader‟, 2.

emerges from a hidden place, 3. touches residues of repressed, surmounted belief

within us, 4. is at once familiar and unfamiliar.

Freud illustrates the idea of unheimlich as uneasiness with the example of the living

doll, a character who is at once alive and inanimate. The combining of attributes from

two distinct domains, in one character, is common in the horror text, and I discuss

this further in my case study of A Spectre Calls, below. Freud cites Jensch who

describes,

“In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny

effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a

human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not

focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter

and clear it up immediately.” (2003: 5).

This description of the uncanny effect persists in the screen visual effects industry,

where the term uncanny valley refers to a particular point, in combining live action



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and animation elements, when it is uncertain whether a figure is live or animated.

The characters in my case study are not animated, but do present and combine

attributes belonging to two distinct domains e.g. natural/supernatural, alive/dead,

normal/abnormal, real/unreal. Freud suggests the term unheimlich is close to

feelings of dread and horror, a more intense experience than Jentsch‟s idea of

uncertainty. Freud links the term uncanny or unheimlich with the term horror: “It

[unheimlich ] is undoubtedly related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread

and horror” (2003: 1) So, one of the qualities of the unheimlich is that it arouses fear.

Freud, then, homes in on the use of unheimlich to mean something that emerges

from hiding, in a discussion of literary uses of the term. Freud quotes Shelling,

observing, „According to him [Shelling], everything is unheimlich that ought to have

remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” (2003: 4). What is hidden?

Freud argues that every individual evolves, surmounting the narcissism of childhood,

and he equates this narcissism with an ancestral stage of evolution characterised by

animistic beliefs. “[E]verything which now strikes us as 'uncanny'” Freud proposes,

“fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us

and bringing them to expression.” (2003: 8). This, he asserts, makes sense of

Shelling‟s „bringing something hidden to light‟.

Freud‟s key proposition is that the uncanny is an effect of repression: “[T]his uncanny

is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established

in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of

repression.” (2003: 14). This, according to Freud, explains why the uncanny is both

unheimlich and heimlich, at once familiar and unfamiliar for the reader or spectator.



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Returning to film studies, various theorists, such as Carol Clover, Barbara Creed and

Robin Wood, have applied Freud‟s ideas in analyses of the Other in screen horror

texts. Steven Schneider‟s idea of monstrosity constitutes one instance of how

Freud‟s work has been employed, and supplemented. Schneider defends Freud‟s

idea of the Other as the return or re-emergence of surmounted beliefs. He equates

Freud‟s use of the uncanny with the term monster or monstrous . He repositions

cinematic representations of the monster as conceptual metaphors, in the Lakoffian

sense. That is, they are more than rhetorical metaphors. They exist in the spectator

as well as on the screen, arising from deep within us, shaping our perceptions and

determining our responses. We need to re-experience the monstrous, Schneider

argues, to keep in contact with this unconscious, repressed aspect of ourselves, in

the face of socio-cultural changes. (1999: 3). However, Schneider goes further,

explaining how surface depictions of the cinematic monster vary according to the

socio-cultural context of its production. For Schneider, both are true, the universal

nature of the monstrous, and the contingent nature of its particular depictions: “[T]he

metaphorical nature of horror film monsters is psychologically necessary, their

surface heterogeneity is historically and culturally contingent.” (1999: 3).

To conclude, Freud‟s idea of the unheimlich is of a hitherto repressed aspect of

ourselves, that re-emerges, that feels at once familiar and unfamiliar, and that

causes in us feelings or a state of fear and dread. This idea has been widely

influential in the field of screen horror studies, leading film theorists such as

Schneider to propose the screen horror Other is an ontological aspect of being



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human. It is core to my own claim that the Other in screen horror is a form of a

hitherto repressed fear.

Schneider‟s idea that the screen horror Other has a dual nature raises further

questions: First, if Freud‟s notion of the uncanny, or Schneider‟s monstrous is an

essential and universal aspect of human experience, how can it be at once both

essential and non-essential? I shall now turn to post-modern discourse, where

notions of Otherness are inseparable from notions of Self, to begin to account for the

changing and unfinalisable nature of representations of the Other in screen horror,

This is to support my argument that surface depictions of the screen horror Other

are constrained by production context, which I shall seek to prove by analysing a

specific, situated text, in the second part of this essay.

The post-modern Other and Derrida’s spectrality/hauntology concept

Post-modern discourse destabilises essentialist notions of the Other.

For thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, the Other is what lies beyond the limits of

Self and is what in fact defines Self through the constraints it places on Self.

Furthermore, though the categories of Self and Other are fixed in a binary

oppositional relationship, the particular attributes of each part of the binary system

are changing and changeable. In this discussion of the nature of the Other in screen

horror, it seems fitting to invoke Jacques Derrida‟s ideas of spectrality and

hauntology. Derrida helps further this discussion by showing how aesthetic



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representations of the Other are unfinalisable. His approach is non-psychoanalytic,

and will help us make sense of Schneider‟s idea that the screen horror monstrous is

at once psychologically universal and socio-culturally specific. In the following

paragraphs I present Derrida‟s idea of the spectre or ghost or trace as a kind of

ontological reality whereby each part of a binary pairing is „haunted by‟ the other .

This idea helps us to escape the bounds of psychoanalysis, to view the object of

study as something discursive and ontologically textual, something which Derrida

says is never purely itself, and which changes according to context.

In Spectres of Marx ( 1993), Derrida coins the terms hauntology and spectrality,

asserting one part of any binary opposition carries the ghost of, or is haunted by, the

other. Derrida‟s spectre or ghost replaces the idea of an essential presence

/absence with the notion of an ontological undeadness. In terms of time, Self, ( the

present) is haunted by aspects, or ghosts of the past, or future. The real is haunted

by the unreal, what is familiar by the unfamiliar etc.

Derrida points out that the very concept of Being is always haunted, not in the sense

of the past returning as a kind of return of the repressed, but rather in a structural

sense. „The origin of anything, ontology itself, is always spectral, is always

repetition‟s first and last time. Being always carries the ghost within itself, in the

sense of a “structural openness”,‟ as Colin Davis points out. As a conceptual

metaphor, Derrida‟s spectre or trace is useful in considering the nature of any aspect

of a text or its production (Davis,: 2011). It is useful here, because it speaks to

textuality per se, rather than to a text‟s psychological content or effect. We need to

differentiate these two domains, to understand Schneider‟s idea that the screen



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horror Other or monstrous is, simultaneously, psychologically innate and contingent

in its surface depictions.

To sum up, Derrida‟s ideas of trace and haunting help us to recognise the openness

of each part of the Self/Other binary system. Furthermore, his attention to textuality

enables us to think in two ways at once, about textual elements, and about the

screen horror Other in particular: On the one hand, we can agree with Freud and

his followers that it is a universal aspect of the psyche that arouses feelings of

horror. On the other hand, we can think about the Other in terms of textual

„undeadnesses‟, spatial and temporal. We need, next, to situate and test the

combination of ideas I have developed to account for the screen horror Other, to

explore how far my proposition might fit, in the case of a particular screen horror text.

Part Two: Case study: A Spectre Calls

In this part of my essay I present an interpretative analysis of A Spectre Calls . This

study enables me to examine and to provide further evidence supporting my

proposition, that the Other in screen horror is a re-emergence of innate, hitherto

subdued human fears, and that its representation in a particular film is marked by

and contingent upon specific socio-cultural factors connected with the context of

production.



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First, I observe in what ways the text can be classified as belonging to the horror

genre. In addition, I consider the possible functions of horror, and horror sub-genres,

to help position A Spectre Calls as a horror text. Next, I consider how the text

utilises Halloween settings, iconography and characterisations to express fears

about the socio-cultural context of its production. A Spectre Calls was produced by a

group of psychiatric patients and ex-patients in a series of workshops held at North

Camden Recovery Centre (NCRC), an NHS psychiatric day treatment facility. I

initiated and led the series of workshops that culminated in the production. I argue

that the text is hegemonised by its production context, and expresses what Freud, in

The Uncanny, thinks of as a fundamental human fear, that of being buried alive.

Further, according to my interpretation, this fear is marked in the text by a fear that is

specific to the socio-cultural context of the psychiatric hospital. My key proposition is

that the Other in A Spectre Calls is a system of clinical authority and instrumentation

that can, and sometimes does get things wrong for patients. This interpretation is

founded upon, and constrained by assumptions built into the proposition laid out in

the first paragraph of this introduction.

To conclude, my case study findings support my argument, that representations of

the screen horror Other are configurations that mark out the boundaries of the

human and the non-human, or, the socially acceptable and the anti-social or

monstrous. Further, these depictions articulate fears that are marked by the specific

socio-cultural context of their production.



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2.1 A Spectre Calls: text and genre

The first task is to position A Spectre Calls is a gothic horror text. I consider the

series‟ use of the Halloween trope. Next, I position the protagonist as a gothic

construction. I look at the text‟s principal theme, Undeadness. Further, I place the

text within a number of horror sub-genres, and consider how it fulfils the functions of

horror. Finally, I show how the domain of Self is characterised by the perspective of

the patient, whilst the domain of Other belongs to the world of the clinician. In this, I

conclude, the narrative is specific to the socio-cultural context of its production.

In A Spectre Calls, settings, characterisation, props and costumes reproduce the

gothic trope: Set at Halloween, the production uses gothic iconography (spiders,

crow, gravestones, skull), settings (graveyard, witch‟s cavern) and characters

(zombie, witch, corpse, Egyptian mummy). These are familiar elements in the

screen horror canon, designed to arouse uneasiness and fear in the viewer.

The protagonist, Detective Inspector Knacker Of The Yard, is a maverick detective, a

familiar figure in the Victorian gothic horror story. A Spectre Calls Part One opens in

classic gothic storytelling style, narrated by Knacker. The effect of his words is

heightened by suspenseful music and sound effects, establishing a classic Victorian

gothic atmosphere. His narration opens with:

“It was a dark and stormy night. The wind whistled through the skeletal trees where the

bats hung expectantly. It was Halloween. The night of the living dead!.” (A Spectre Calls,

Part One)



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As a gothic text, elements of which may be frightening, A Spectre Calls, can be

considered as belonging to the horror genre, which, Schneider says, owes an

enormous debt to Gothic literature.” (2004).

The principal theme of A Spectre Calls is Undeadness : Halloween is the „night of the

living dead‟, when the veil is said to be thinnest between the living and the dead. In

a graveyard, the detective communicates with supernatural characters from the spirit

world, characters that have their roots in the Victorian gothic, including a doctor and

an Egyptian mummy. The „corpse‟, it is finally revealed, is not really dead after all:

The „dead‟ man shows signs of life and is revived and diagnosed with a complex

sleep disorder. The detective, a Victorian-style polyglot, and polymath is himself an

undead figure in being able to move amongst the Halloween spirits: The Halloween

trope allows Knacker to transgress the normal bounds of Self and Other, to escape

the limitations of time and space that usually govern daily life. This theme is

unheimlich in Freud‟s sense, in arousing feelings of uncertainty, fear and dread.

A Spectre Calls can be described as belonging to further sub-genres of horror. It is a

supernatural, or ghost horror story in that the Other is suspected to be one of a

number of „living dead‟ spirits. This is uncanny or horrific, in Freudian terms, because

Part One opens with shots (from the point of view of the narrator-protagonist) of an

ordinary London street at night. The uncanny effect arises because supernatural

events occur in a poetic world that has been established as natural and every-day.

(2003: 20) In this respect, the text can also be described as a dark fantasy, in that

the laws of nature have been broken to enable human interaction with the spirits of

the dead. A Spectre Calls is a crime story, as it revolves around a murder and the



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solving of the crime by Detective Inspector Knacker Of The Yard. Knacker tells

various ghouls they are suspects in the murder case, who will be interrogated and

punished if found guilty. He takes pleasure bringing the ghouls to book. A Spectre

Calls is a comedy in which the horror effect is off-set by verbal and visual jokes.

Therefore, A Spectre Calls can be positioned as a gothic text, falling into a number

of sub-categories of the horror genre.

Moreover, insofar as A Spectre Calls is a gothic text, we run into the relevance of

Freud, once again: "[N]o discussion of the Gothic can avoid discussing Freud; one

of the most obvious ways of thinking about the genre is to read it in terms of Freud's

system.... We cannot pretend that the striking parallels between Freud's thought and

the Gothic fantasy do not exist" (Day, in Schneider, 2004: 177).

To further position A Spectre Calls as a horror text, I want briefly to consider some of

the functions of horror in relation to aspects of this text. There are three key types of

finding to discuss: 1. Horror as an entertainment, 2. Horror as instruction, 3. Horror

as revenge fantasy (Twitchell, 1985).

First, a function of horror is to provide an entertainment experience like the thrills and

spills of a roller-coaster ride, allowing the spectator to experience the pleasure of

mastery, in the face of a scary Other. This idea is relevant to my argument in that

project participants and patient-spectators engaged, voluntarily, as part of a recovery

process, with a production that sometimes involved them facing and exploring

personal fears and phobias,,



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Second, horror is instructive: enabling us to define, re-define and learn about social

bounds between self/other. Patrick, the text‟s patient-author, disguised as Knacker,

uses this character/role to subvert the doctor-patient power relation, thereby re-

defining the bounds of Self/Other, according to his perspective as a patient. Knacker

struggles to do his job and solve the crime, and does so, but remains an unstable

figure, a kind of partial object. In this, A Spectre Calls subverts the dominant social

narrative of normativity, re-positioning the non-normative as Self, and the Other as

the normative system gone wrong. The character of Knacker represents Self as a

kind of (monster-) mashed-up hybridity. This, I suggest, is an exploration and

expression of Self from the patient perspective, a notion of Self that carries a strong

trace of the Other, that rejects essential normativity, in a new definition of wholeness

that acknowledges and accepts partialness as a given aspect of its ontology.

Normalcy is thereby re-defined as a social space where un-conventional

characteristics are acceptable, but where the decision makers i.e. clinicians must

prevent the incursion of the Other e.g. diagnostic error.

Third, horror allows us to enjoy repressed, socially taboo fantasies (e.g. sexual,

revengeful, murderous, cannibalistic etc.). Screen horror allows us to enjoy Self as

Other. In an example of the revenge theory of the attraction to horror, patient-actor

Patrick, disguised as Knacker, our hero, examines the hapless Dr. Philth and finds

evidence of social abjection. Via this role reversal, Patrick, as Knacker, is able to

give orders to, interrogate, and potentially punish Dr. Philth, who from a patient‟s

perspective, deviates in worrying ways from the normal/ideal doctor i.e. Dr. Philth

shows symptoms of „unusual closeness to a dead body‟, and produces loose pills

from the pocket of his/her grubby white-coat, (A Spectre Calls Part Four).



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In summary, I position A Spectre Call s as a horror text because it fulfils a number of

criteria pertaining to this genre, in terms of iconography, characterisation, theme and

function.

2.2 A Spectre Calls: Production Context

Here, I argue that the production context of A Spectre Calls , a psychiatric treatment

centre, determined the specific characteristics of the Other in this text. This is to add

weight to my argument, that the way the Other is depicted in screen horror is

contingent upon and determined by the specificities of a production‟s socio-cultural

context. The focus of my analysis is the development and depiction of the corpse

character in A Spectre Calls . I show how, during the character development

process, this character changed to fit the values of the NHS clinical setting which

formed the context for the film‟s production. First, I show how the initial scripting

process produced a murder scene and a corpse character that was really dead.

Second, I show how and why the murder scene was removed, and „the body‟ was re-

characterised as unconscious. I argue NCRC is a disciplinary social space in the

Foucauldian sense, producing its hegemonic power.

In the run up to Halloween 2010, during a NCRC film club workshop, one of the

participants put forward the idea of making a Halloween film. This led straight into a

group session that produced ideas for the proposed film. Suggestions for characters



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included the familiar Halloween cast: a witch, zombies and an Egyptian mummy. It

was suggested the story could be a murder mystery, involving a corpse and a

detective. We recorded one of the group, Patrick, improvising an opening to the

film, which began, “It was a dark and stormy night.” The group agreed Patrick

should play the detective. In addition, Patrick agreed to write a script, incorporating

the group‟s ideas. As suggested by the group, Patrick‟s script was a murder

mystery. It featured a gruesome murder performed, in vision, by twelve angry ghouls

and ghosts. In this, the original script the corpse character was murdered and really

dead.

However, the script was subsequently changed, so that in the film as produced, the

body is not really dead. When the group read Patrick‟s script, some participants

expressed concerns about the element of violence. As workshop leader, working in a

clinical setting hegemonised by the idea of recovery, I responded to these concerns

by suggesting we remove the proposed on-screen murder and change the reason for

the corpse‟s demise. One of the patient group, a medic, suggested the body could

be unconscious, due to a medical condition, rather than the victim of a murder. The

idea was agreed and developed. In this way, group members and NCRC‟s

hegemonic emphasis on non-violence, positive thinking and recovery/, constrained

and removed elements of violence from the script.

NCRC, I argue, represents Foucault‟s idea of a disciplinary social space. The

purpose of the disciplinary space, Foucault says, is to produce normal individuals. In

the third technology of power: discipline, Foucault states: „Discipline 'makes'

individuals‟ (1979: 170). Sian Hawthorn explains Foucalt‟s thinking:



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„Discipline is a process of individualisation. It does not exercise power on an

undifferentiated mass of the social body; instead, it separates individuals as discrete

entities and breaks up the body into many distinct parts. But discipline individualises

at the same time that it produces a normalising effect on the individuals it constructs.”

(Hawthorn, 2004)

NCRC practices the „Recovery Model‟, in a treatment regime combining the

conventional use of psychiatric medication, with day to day activities designed to

help individual patients manage their conditions, restructure their daily lives, and „to

return to their usual community roles‟. In this way, NCRC ideology was a socio-

cultural determinant in the film‟s production process.

Foucault and Derrida both argue, however, we can re-distribute privilege, but cannot

remove binary oppositionality. And, if binary oppositionality cannot be removed, the

Other must still be there in the text. So, where or what is the Other in A Spectre

Calls ? In the following reading, I suggest that the script revision, that removed the

social taboo of murder, led directly to a depiction of the Other that was more closely

determined by the film‟s production context, the NCRC clinical setting i.e.

monstrosity shifted away from the Halloween ghosts and was identified, instead, as

an aspect of the clinical system, that constituted the socio-cultural context of the

production.

To discover the nature of the Other in this text, we need to look at the climatic act,

where we discover the body is not dead after all, but rather has succumbed to a

sleep disorder. We have seen that, in this text, the patient‟s perspective is

privileged, as Self, characterised by Knacker, maverick instrument of truth. Here, the

crackpot Detective, observes the body is alive and capable of revival and recovery.



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With his discovery, Knacker exposes the feared, dreaded possibility that the clinical

system is flawed, inhabited by unhealthy medics such as Dr. Philth, who are

incapable of distinguishing a living being from a corpse. . The Other, here,

ultimately, is not one of the Halloween spectre suspects, nor even a hidden aspect of

Knacker. Rather, the taboo act is a belief, a misrecognition, a (delusional?) fantasy

that a crime has been committed, a murder has taken place and that the body is

clinically dead. In fact, no murder has taken place, and the body is revived i.e. the

Other is the spectre of a process of clinical diagnosis that proved unreliable, that

erroneously described a body as dead, when it was alive, reflecting the „buried alive‟

fear discussed by Freud in The Uncanny.

In the film‟s denuement, a new status quo is established, whereby authority (the

power of diagnosis) is exercised by the maverick detective. Knacker observes vital

signs, and revives the body - assisted by Dr. Philth, here restored to his/her proper

role as instrument of recovery. Knacker‟s revised diagnosis is: “A case of catalepsy,

narcolepsy and apopolepsy” (A Spectre Calls, Part 4). The body, revived, gets up to

join the cast in a celebratory Monster Mash dance finale, in an outcome that matches

the stated goal of the service offered by North Camden Recovery Centre, i.e. a

patient‟s recovery of their autonomous capacity to participate as part of the

community:

„North Camden Recovery Centre provides a range of individual and group

interventions to provide support and treatment to people who have experienced a

recent deterioration in their mental health. The purpose of the service is to assist the

recovery of service users and to enable them to return to their usual social and

community roles.‟ Camden and Islington Mental Health Foundation Trust, 2011)



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A Spectre Calls, constructed from the perspective of patient service users, envisions

a social status quo that is a community of the non-normal, one that repositions and

characterises community life as a „monster mash‟.

To conclude, according to my analysis, the Other in A Spectre Calls is the „spectre‟

of unreliable clinical diagnosis, which can be a profound fear for patient-subjects of

the medical system. This case study supports my argument that depictions of the

Other in screen horror are determined by the context of their production. It

exemplifies the argument of Schneider and others that the surface-nature of

Self/Other in screen horror reflects the concerns of a particular socio-cultural group:

Conclusion

Through a combination of approaches, both theoretical and empirical, I have argued

that Freud‟s work and that of other psychoanalytic theorists is still central to an

understanding of the nature of the Other in screen horror. Following Schneider, I

have shown that the surface depictions of the screen horror Other are constructed

and constrained by i.e. contingent upon the socio-cultural context of a text‟s

production.

Through a short discussion of post-modern theory, and my empirical research, I

have shown that Self and Other are categories whose attributes can change and are

socio-culturally determined: In the patient-led production of A Spectre Calls , I



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demonstrated how the category of Self was the domain of patients and ex-patients.

So that Self reflected the patient perspective, and their desire to see a non-normative

individual unmask the Monstrous Other and put matters right, in the face of medical

power-knowledge gone wrong, the ultimate fear in this particular context.

I suggest my privileged knowledge of the production process of A Spectre Calls

qualifies me to draw these conclusions. It may be objected my connection to the

production necessarily leads to limited objectivity. However, whatever the limitations,

this was an opportunity to use my knowledge of a non-mainstream text to shed light

on ideas about the Other in screen horror that have been developed largely in

relation to mainstream films.

My findings add weight to Schneider‟s assertion that surface depictions of the Other

in screen horror are socio-culturally situated and historically specific. I have explored

Freud‟s idea of the unheimlich and found that it is still relevant. The spectre of Freud

will continue to haunt the study of the Other in screen horror for some time.



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List of works cited

Derrida, Jacques (2006): Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of

Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel (1991, 1977), Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison,

Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Freud, Sigmund (2003): The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Books.

Hawthorn, Sian. (2004) Gender, Post-Colonialism and the Study of Religions Course

Handout.

Schneider, Steven Jay (2009): Horror Film and Psychoanalysis. Freud's Worst

Nightmare. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Twitchell, James B. (1985): Dreadful Pleasures. An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New

York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Websites

Davis, Colin. „Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms‟. Oxford Journals Humanities

French Studies Volume59, Issue3 Pp. 373-379. 1-4-2011

Film Studio at Daleham. A Spectre Calls Parts 1-4.

http://www.youtube.com/myvideos/feature=mhum

1-4-2011

Camden and Islington Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.

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the spectre of freud_nature of the other in screen horror

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