The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF
of horror narratives; Stephen King, for example, writes ‘Here is the
final truth of horror movies: … They are the barber’s leeches of the
psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety.’ 53 Thus, the interpretation
of horror as catharsis further demonstrates the spread of psychoanalytic
concepts in critical and popular discourses.
An additional effect of the sustained application of psychoanalytic
concepts in both critical and popular contexts has been an increasing
emphasis on sex, gender and sexuality, in keeping with the concerns
developed by Freud. In the case of horror films, this has manifested
as the representation of monstrosity primarily in terms of gender in
fiction and film; as Halberstam notes, ‘the hegemonic installation of
psychoanalytic interpretations’ has meant that ‘monstrosity within
contemporary horror seems to have stabilized into an amalgam of sex
and gender.’ 54 Certainly, the widespread diffusion of Freudian psychoanalytic
concepts has given rise to a situation in which subjectivity and
identity are conceptualized primarily in terms of sex and gender. In
this sense, the representation of selfhood has become centred around
notions of embodiment — which goes some way towards explaining the
popularity of monsters in the cinematic tradition, since they register
an insistently embodied subjectivity.
The ‘body horror’ films that emerged in the 1980s underlined this
trend. These films were related and indebted to earlier narratives
about monsters, particularly the horror films of the 1930s and 1940s,
in which the body had been displayed as a site of leakage, corruption,
permeability, impurity, disease or painful metamorphosis. These films
had evinced an obsessive interest in bodily processes such as growth
and reproduction, organic interiority, the dissolution of the boundaries
between inside and outside, and the fragility of the ‘closed, static,
self-contained, symmetrical, and sleek’ 55 body of the classical tradition.
Such imagery was resurrected and augmented in the 1980s, with
werewolves featuring prominently.
Joe Dante’s The Howling (1980, USA/Canada), an adaptation of
Gary Brandner’s horror novel of the same title, was the first of a
number of high-profile werewolf films released during the 1980s. In
many ways, The Howling was steeped in the traditions of the werewolf
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