1. Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (London: Liveright, 1971). [BACK]

2. M. Katan claims that The Turn of the Screw also originated in a nightmare. See "A Causerie on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw " in Psychoanal. Stud. Child 17:473-493, 1962. [BACK]

3. Jones, 78. [BACK]

4. Frank McConnell, Spoken Seen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1975), 76. [BACK]

5. Robin Wood, " Sisters ," in American Nightmare (Toronto: Festival of Festivals Publication, 1979), 60. [BACK]

6. Jones, 79. [BACK]

8. Rage is always an important component in horror films. Nevertheless, in the present horror cycle—given its fascination with telekinesis and omnipotent, Satanic children (and including the "psychoplasmic" imagery of The Brood )—rage has an unparalleled salience. In the America of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the recurring cine-fantasy seems to be of pent-up, channel-less anger, welling-up, exploding, overwhelming everything. [BACK]

9. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979). Both Lasch's and my concepts of narcissism are roughly based on Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronston, 1975). [BACK]

10. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1977), 140-151. [BACK]

11. The use of mythic types of fantasies to justify the parental behavior is discussed in Dorothy Block, " So the Witch Won't Eat Me " (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978). [BACK]

12. The slave creatures in This Island Earth are examples of the fusion of inside/outside and insect/human while the last apparition of the monster in Alien —with its spring-mounted iron maw—is an example of the fusion of flesh and machine, as is the alien's stranded spaceship. [BACK]

13. Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970). [BACK]

14. I Married a Monster from Outer Space belongs to a subgenre of space-possession films including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Conquered the World, They Came from Beyond Space, Creation of the Humanoids, Man from Planet X, Invaders from Mars, Phantom from Space, It Came from Outer Space, Killers from Space , etc. Depending on the specific context of the film, the possessed earthlings in these films can be examples of either spatial or temporal fission. For an interpretation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , see my "You're Next" in The Soho Weekly News , Dec. 21, 1978. [BACK]

15. Daniel Dervin, "The Primal Scene and the Technology of Perception in Theater and Film," in Psychoanal. Rev ., 62, no. 2, 278, 1975. [BACK]

16. In regard to shape-changing figures, like werewolves, it is important to note that metamorphosis in and of itself does not indicate a fission figure. Vampires readily shed human form to become bats and wolves; yet vampires are not fission figures. They are allotropic, varying their physical properties while remaining the same in substance. But with werewolves the change in shape betokens a change in its nature.

Another, though connected, difference between werewolves and vampires hinges on the issue of will. Werewolves—most often futilely—resist their fate while vampires, especially Dracula, prefer theirs. This is a crucial reason for having the two different myths. [BACK]

17. Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety (New York: Norton, 1963), 39. [BACK]

18. The spider, of course, has polyvalent associations. It figures importantly as a phobic object because of its ruthlessness—i.e., its use of a trap, its oral sadism—it sucks its prey, and, for men, because of its sexual practices—some female spiders feast upon their mates. In much of the psychoanalytic literature the spider is correlated with the oral, sadistic mother; its body is associated with the vagina; its legs are sometimes glossed as the fantasized penis that the mother is believed to possess. Some references concerning spider imagery include: Karl Abraham, "The Spider as a Dream Symbol," in Selected Papers , trans. Douglas Bryand and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1927); Ralph Little, "Oral Aggression in Spider Legends," Amer. Imago 23: 169-180, 1966; R. Little, "Umbilical Cord Symbolism of the Spider's Dropline," Psychoanal. Quart .; Richard Sterba, "On Spiders, Hanging and Oral Sadism," Amer. Imago 7: 21-28. There is also an influential reading of "Little Miss Muffet. . . ." in Ella Freeman Sharpe, "Cautionary Tales," Int'nat. J. of Psychoanal . 24: 41-45. In the preceding text I have also connected spiders to masturbation. I have done this not simply because spiders somewhat resemble hands but because that resemblance itself is part of our literary culture. Recall the legend of Arachne, who was punished by Minerva by being reduced to a hand which becomes a spider. Bulfinch writes that Minerva sprinkled Arachne "with the juices ofaconite, and immediately her hair came off and ears likewise. Her form shrank up, and her head grew smaller yet; her fingers cleaved to her side and served for legs. All the rest of her is body, out of which she spins her thread, often hanging suspended from it, in the same attitude as when Minerva touched her and transformed her into a spider." Thomas Bulfinch, Mythology (N.Y.: Dell Publishing Co., 1959), 93. [BACK]

19. Some typical science fiction plots are outlined in the opening of Susan Sontag's "The Imagination of Disaster" in Film Theory and Criticism (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press. 1979). Sontag's first model plot is like the Discovery Plot described in this paper. However, the problem with Sontag's variant is that she does not give enough emphasis to the drama of proving the existence of the monster over skeptical objections. This, I feel, is the crux of most horror/sci-fi films of the Discovery Plot variety. [BACK]

20. The theme of knowing/not knowing is important to horror films along many different dimensions. In terms of cinematic technique, it can influence the director's choice of formal strategies. For example, in recent horror films, there is a great deal of use of what I call unassigned camera movement in the context of stories about demons, ghosts, and other unseen but all-seeing monsters. In The Changeling , the camera begins to move around George C. Scott in his study. It is not supplying new narrative information nor is its movement explicitly correlated within the scene to any specific character. It has no assignment either in terms of narrative or characterological function. But it does call attention to itself. The audience sees it. And the audience cannot help postulating that the camera movement might represent the presence of some unseen, supernatural force that is observing Scott for devilish purposes. The point of the camera movement is to provoke the spectator into a state of uncertainty in which he/she shifts between knowing and not knowing. [BACK]