Freudian's theory of 'The return of the repressed' and how it is relevant in horror movies

Freud's 'The return of the repressed' is about how a persons thoughts or feelings can be rejected by the mind and are stored as unconscious or repressed emotions.

If someone has a 'forbidden idea' then it battles with the mind to get released and the ego has to be on constant alert to prevent the idea from surfacing, but it often would disguise itself and surface as an symtom. Often, something called an 'Reaction formulation' happens where the person does the exact opposite to what the repressed feeling was telling them to do. For example if the repressed idea was telling the person to hit someone, they may hug them instead, but as a result of this the repressed then may begin to reveal its self by maybe making the person want to 'hug them to death', Eventually the person is normally able to deal with these feelings in acceptable ways and move on but if the person cannot overcome these feelings or resolve them then the shame and guilt over feeling these things remains and the repressed emotions remain repressed and are constantly looking for ways to surface.

This idea links to pysco killers in horror movies, as killers are often influenced to become killers by repressed feelings or memories from their childhood. For example at the beginning of the film 'Halloween' we see the child who grows up to be the killer, who witness his sister's sexual relationship and then stabs her in the chest. There are theories about the film that the child may have misunderstood the sexual act and thought that he was producing the same act with a knife. Witnessing this resulted in him spending a large amount of his life being studied by psychiatrists and locked away in mental asylums, but when he was released he killed people who were in sexual relationships and had either just performed the act or were just about too, even though his main target was virginal and it was her that ended up surviving. So overall it was his repressed memories of that night at Halloween that resulted in him becoming the killer that he turned out to be.

This is the beginning sequence of the 1978 film 'Halloween' where the audience is put in the eyes of the killer when he witnesses his sisters sexual act.