Wood's 'Return Of The Repressed'

2. 'Return of the repressed'. Consistent with his earlier observation that genres represent 'different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions', Wood's argument that horror dramatises the process of repression and its rupture in ideological terms, is a seminal argument which has since dominated the general landscape of horror writing. (3) Building on the normality/monster paradigm, Wood situates the potential radicalism or conservativism of horror as stemming from this central concept, depending on how the ensuing tensions are dealt with; whether the monster is defeated or 'normality' is not re-established, ambiguity allowed to remain a problem:

One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses: its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the 'happy ending' (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression. (4) …show more content…
Ambivalence. From these thematic and ideological bases Wood connected address and response by drawing attention to the ambivalence encouraged by horror. Most strikingly, for Wood this is expressed by a sympathetic monster (he suggested that few are totally unsympathetic) and its destruction of 'normality': 'Central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their fulfilment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and to which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere'. (5) Wood's perception that the monster has its source in the very systems of normal society is a conceptually brilliant and highly persuasive hypothesis, the importance of which cannot be