Since its emergence, the horror genre has been a fertile ground for the unconscious — that dark, pulsating territory Sigmund Freud mapped with words like “repression,” “anxiety,” “return of the repressed,” and “fantasy.” The best horror films are, at their core, filmed nightmares: they dramatize internal conflicts, traumas, unspoken desires, and archetypal anxieties. It’s only natural, then, that many of these films and series speak directly to psychoanalysis — sometimes with precision and intelligence, other times with distortion and reductionism.

For this reason, examining how horror appropriates psychoanalytic concepts to tell complex stories — and what is gained (or lost) in the process — is always relevant and necessary.

The Return of the Repressed: The Psychoanalytic Origin of Horror

In his essay “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche, 1919), Sigmund Freud already outlined the affinity between horror and the unconscious. For him, the “uncanny” is that which should have remained hidden, but returns. This idea — the return of the repressed — became one of the cornerstones of modern horror.

Films like The Babadook (2014), by Jennifer Kent, directly engage with this concept. The monster in the film, emerging from a mysterious children’s book, is nothing more than the personification of the protagonist’s unprocessed grief. The creature grows as she denies her suffering — and becomes less threatening when she accepts her pain and “welcomes” it, as one would welcome a trauma that will never entirely disappear. It’s a film that understands with precision that the unconscious cannot be defeated: it must be negotiated with.

Hereditary (2018), by Ari Aster, also relies on a psychoanalytic foundation: transgenerational trauma, repressed guilt, the desire to break with parental legacy, and the impossibility of doing so. The mother, played by Toni Collette, wavers between denial and revelation, dreams and hallucinations overlap with reality, and the film delves into a space where the boundary between the supernatural and the symbolic is blurred — much like in the unconscious itself.

Symbols, Ghosts, and Desires: Lacanian Horror

If Freud outlined the contours of the unconscious, Jacques Lacan deepened them with concepts like the “divided subject,” “lack,” and “the register of the Real.” Films like Possession (1981), by Andrzej Żuławski, can be read through Lacan: the protagonist’s erratic behavior, the monstrous double, hysteria as the body’s language in the face of the unthinkable — all point to a structure of desire that finds no object. Horror, in this context, becomes a language for the unspeakable.

Likewise, the series Twin Peaks (1990–2017), by David Lynch, is emblematic: dreams, slips of language, alter egos, death and pleasure drives, the double, the symbolic and the real collapsing. Lynch, though not a self-declared psychoanalyst, creates works that seem to emerge from the same cauldron: the unconscious as a text to be deciphered.

Black Swan (2010), by Darren Aronofsky, in turn, exposes the split between the ego ideal and the ideal ego, the repression of sexual desire, the Oedipal conflict with the mother, and the fragmentation of the self. It’s a highly stylized psychosexual horror deeply influenced by Lacan.

Speaking of Black Swan, it’s worth remembering the pioneering and iconic The Red Shoes (1948). Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it can be read through psychoanalysis — especially the classical Freudian school, but also with echoes of Lacan, even though it is not a horror film. That’s because it addresses, intensely and symbolically, themes such as desire, drive, self-splitting, and sublimation — all central to psychoanalytic theory.

From a Freudian perspective, the film can be understood as a representation of the death drive (Todestrieb) and artistic sublimation. The protagonist, Victoria Page, is consumed by the desire to dance — a form of sublimating libido, that is, channeling sexual and emotional desire into artistic creation. Yet art here does not heal: it fragments, divides, and destroys. There is a direct conflict between personal life and artistic life, culminating in a kind of self-destruction.

The ballet story itself, The Red Shoes (in which the dancer is forced to dance until death), can be seen as an allegory of the drive that surpasses the pleasure principle — the desire that does not cease, that pushes the subject beyond the limits of self and body.

From a Lacanian viewpoint, The Red Shoes is a film deeply about the subject split between the registers of the Symbolic (language, social order — here, the theater and its hierarchy), the Imaginary (the ideal image of the perfect ballerina, of romantic love), and the Real (the unbearable, that which erupts as trauma or death).

The ballet functions as objet a — the object-cause of desire — which can never be fully attained. Victoria is captured by this unattainable desire and, in the end, it’s as if she falls into the void of the Real. The leap from the staircase (both literal and symbolic) represents this subjective collapse.

When Trauma Becomes the Villain: Psychological Misrepresentations

But we know not all appropriations of psychoanalytic concepts are successful — and sometimes, certain works use the language of trauma and mental illness as a superficial justification for horror.

Films like Split (2016), by M. Night Shyamalan, have often been criticized for portraying Dissociative Identity Disorder in a sensationalized way. The figure of the “multiple” as a monster had already been explored in Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock, but there it held a layer of sophistication and subtext about repression and desire that transcended caricature. Moreover, it was inspired by a real story. In Split, by contrast, the multiplicity of the self is portrayed as a violent threat, diverging from both psychoanalysis and ethical responsibility.

Likewise, 13 Reasons Why (2017–2020), though not horror, dramatizes issues like suicide, bullying, and trauma with excessive emotional appeal and little clinical depth, drawing criticism from psychologists and educators. Even outside the genre, this series highlights the dangers of romanticizing psychic suffering without critical reflection.

The Monster is the Mother: Family, Desire, and Domestic Dread

The house — a Freudian symbol of the unconscious — is a recurring space in horror. Films like The Others (2001), by Alejandro Amenábar, or Goodnight Mommy (2014), by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, explore fears of maternal loss, the duplicity of the parental figure, and the fragility of childhood identity.

Domestic horror, centered on trauma and family, is one of the most direct expressions of psychoanalytic language in cinema. The Haunting of Hill House (2018), a Netflix series by Mike Flanagan, is exemplary in this regard. Each episode centers on a traumatized child, each manifesting classic symptoms — denial, repetition compulsion, sublimation, unresolved grief. The house, as a metaphor for the psyche, becomes alive: it is the family’s collective unconscious.

Death Drive and the Pleasure of Horror

Why do we watch horror films? Freud would answer with the notion of the death drive (Todestrieb) — the unconscious desire to return to inertia, to repetition, to self-annihilation. But there is also pleasure, as Julia Kristeva pointed out with her theory of the abject: horror attracts us because it embodies what threatens to dissolve us — blood, the open body, the non-self.

Films like Raw (2016), Titane (2021), or even classics like Carrie (1976), by Brian De Palma, use the body as a battlefield between desire and repression. Menstrual blood, sexual desire, appetite, taboo: all return as spectacle — and, paradoxically, as jouissance.

Horror as Healing? Cinema as Symbolic Elaboration

If horror has therapeutic value, it lies in its ability to symbolize what is traumatic. Horror, like dreams, can be a form of working through (in the Freudian sense), that is, giving symbolic form to what would otherwise be unthinkable.

The series Channel Zero (2016–2018) explores fears deeply rooted in childhood archetypes: the doll, the faceless monster, the recurring nightmare. But it does so with a clinical tone, almost like a dramatized psychoanalysis in progress. Likewise, Midsommar (2019), also by Ari Aster, is a film about grief and codependency that uses horror as a metaphor for emotional purging rituals.

Horror is the Symptom That Speaks

The horror genre is, in many ways, the most psychoanalytic that cinema can offer: it speaks without shame about what we try to silence. Freud said the symptom is a “compromise formation” — a coded message from the unconscious. Horror, in this sense, is the symptom-genre par excellence.

Whether dramatizing grief, self-fragmentation, incestuous desire, guilt, or the death drive, horror films and series often speak the language of psychoanalysis — though not always with accuracy.

When they do it well, as in The Babadook, Hereditary, or Twin Peaks, they generate cathartic and intellectually stimulating experiences. When they fall into caricature, like in Split, they can reinforce stigma and misinformation.

The unconscious, after all, is not an entity to be defeated — but a field to be listened to. And horror, when done right…