Psychoanalysis and Horror

Here is the problem: if fear and disgust are the kinds of feelings that people typically avoid, or, if they feel bad, then why in the world do people go to horror movies? This problem is known as the paradox of horror. It is a species of the paradox of tragedy.

Stuart Hall's (1980) “Encoding and Decoding” model: contemporary cultural studies approaches to film genre emphasize the semiotic and discursive relationship between texts, those who produce and consume them, and the larger spheres of culture and ideology. Cultural texts such as horror films tell us facts about the cultures in which they reside:

Robin Wood (1979) (among others) in the 1970s—on how the genre functions as a sort of collective nightmare, figuring any given culture's repressed and oppressed Others as monstrous—