Lurking Under the Surface by Brandon R. Grafius

Author:Brandon R. Grafius [Brandon R. Grafius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic theory, used some of his ideas to understand works of literature, not just his patients. In his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud asked what is behind the feelings of eeriness that are evoked by some works of literature. He spent a lot of time discussing E. T. A. Hoffmann’s creepy story “The Sandman” (written in 1816), in which a man remembers a childhood fear about a figure who would sneak into children’s bedrooms and steal their eyes. For Freud, the loss of eyes represents the fear of castration; that’s not a route that many contemporary readers are willing to go down. But what’s more interesting for me is Freud’s next move. He says it’s not that the fear of castration, in itself, is uncanny. What’s uncanny is that this fear represents an earlier stage of development, one we thought we’d gone beyond. But now we find that it still has a hold on us. Robin Wood famously referred to this as “the return of the repressed,” a motif Wood finds throughout the history of horror.

John Carpenter’s film The Fog (1980) plays with these ideas in an interesting way. Instead of repression happening on the level of the individual, it encompasses an entire town. And what has been repressed is the truth of their history.

Unlike his earlier subgenre-defining slasher Halloween, Carpenter dialed back the violence and unspooled this as a slow-paced ghost story set in a Northern California fishing village. The initial cut of the film earned it only a mild PG rating. But in prerelease screenings, test audiences didn’t respond well to it, which Carpenter chalked up to the recent release of gore-filled horror films such as Phantasm (1979). He went back and filmed an additional scene in which a group of seafarers is slaughtered in a visceral manner by the ghosts, which seemed to satisfy audiences. Rebranded as an adult, R-rated horror film, The Fog went on to do brisk business at the box office and secure Carpenter’s status as a moneymaking director.

In The Fog’s opening sequence, a group of children are huddled together and fixated on a golden watch that is ticking loudly. When it snaps shut, the sea captain holding the watch pronounces to the children, “11:55. Almost midnight. Time for one more story.” At midnight, it will be the one hundredth anniversary of a tragic event in the town’s past when a clipper ship was lost in the fog. A light pierced through, promising the sailors safety, but instead of a lighthouse, it turned out to be a campfire, causing the ship to crash on the rocks. Someday, the captain tells the children, the fog will return, and the crew will rise from the sea, “in search of the campfire that led them to their dark, icy death.” Of course, it is not lost on the children that they are huddled around a campfire themselves, making them a perfect target for the ghostly seafarers.

But as the fog returns

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