With the recent passing of the great film critic Robin Wood, I’ve taken to revisiting his articles. While he was a scholar, he produced articles and books with the swiftness of a journalist.
I’ve just reread my favorite piece by Wood: “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” This was the first Wood article I encountered. I have a special place for it because he writes so passionately and insightfully about horror. Horror is so often belittled or entirely overlooked by critics. Wood shows us just how vital horror is and how meaningful it can be.
Here is a link to the full-article. Below is an excerpt that lays out some of his ideas.
I have been laying the foundations, stone by stone, for a theory of the American horror film which (without being exhaustive) should provide us with a means of approaching the films seriously and responsibly. One could, I think, approach any of the genres from the same starting-point; it is the horror film that responds in the most clear-cut and direct way, because central to it is the actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/the Other, in the figure of the Monster. 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 the terror, the “happy ending” (which exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression.
