The return of the projected: some thoughts on paranoia and a recent trend in horror films

I have focused on two interrelated changes in horror films of the last twenty-five years: a tendency for the "horror" to become internalized; and the use of what I call "bubbling flesh" to signify the internalized horror. Taking two films--the 1958 Fly and its 1986 remake--and treating them as (paranoid) fantasies, I have explored what I take to be the unconscious meanings of these changes. Although both films present oedipal as well as pre-oedipal conflicts, and although both employ paranoid mechanisms of negation and projection of an unacceptable wish, the earlier film also makes greater use of repression to keep the preoedipal wishes farther from consciousness. The earlier film is also more successful in its projection: In the later film the projective mechanisms fail and the projected returns to its original locus. The particular unacceptable wish that I see as being fundamental to these two films (and perhaps to all horror films) is a radically passive wish for merger with the mother--a merger wish so radical that it can be seen in terms of Gun-trip's "return to the womb" wishes, and so passive that it can be seen as a nearly pure form o Freud's death drive--the drive toward total quiescence and dissolution. I have associated the differences between the two films with changes in society in the past decades, and especially with changes in traditionally conceived gender roles and their associated senses of gender identity. Finally, I have suggested that we view these historical changes not as signs of societal regression but as the beginnings of the failure of one set of defense mechanisms that can possibly allow an opening to try out new strategies.