Unspeakable Horror!

The past few weeks I've been teaching the basics of Freudian and Jungian dream interpretation to my English class, and at the same time teaching Jungian archetypes and the Hero's Quest to my creative writing class.  Reflecting on these subjects, I'm reminded how many connections exist between dreaming and Queer Horror.  This also extends to literary analysis.  Interpreting Queer Horror is a lot like interpreting nightmares.

In some ways this is obvious.  We often think of the horror genre in the same terms as dreams.  We refer to a horror story as "nightmarish," and the genre uses dreams extensively as a literary device that blurs reality.  Think Nightmare on Elm Street! 

I think it goes deeper than this. Freud's concept of repression is fundamental.  In a homophobic society, we teach our children (intentionally or not), to feel ashamed of queer feelings and desires.  Using myself as an example, I didn't want to view myself as a gay boy because that seemed completely unacceptable.  So I repressed my gay desires, and subsequently experienced nightmares with Satan-like figures, boogeymen, and vampires.  I believe these nightmares expressed the repressed desires in the form of nighmare-like shadow figures (I'm oversimplifying a little for the sake of illustration).

I love using a Freudian approach to literature and dream analysis, but I also love to bring a more Jungian approach to the mix.  I recently discovered a three-step approach that someone devised for Jungian dream interpretation.  The first step is to analyze the dream imagery with the individual's personal experiences in mind.  The next step is to analyze the meaning of the dream symbols in a larger cultural context.  Then, analyze the symbols through the lense of Jungian archetypes from the collective unconscious (the theory of the collective unconscious suggests we have a shared set of subconscious dream symbols in the form of archetypes like the shadow figure).  For example, I often dream about Great White Sharks.  On a personal level, I was traumatized by watching Jaws on television at a very young age.  On a cultural level, we are fascinated by the mystery and terror of sharks.  On a collective unconscious level, the water is a symbol for the subconscious mind, so the shark is some kind of harbinger from this world.  Perhaps the shark represents something like a dragon archetype.

It is very interesting to turn this kind of analysis on the stories of the horror genre.  For me personally, I believe that vampires in dreams (a wonderful example of Jung's shadow figure), represent  repression of gay desire and an embodiment of homophobia.  Now that I'm out-of-the-closet and embracing of queerness, I rarely have vampire dreams, but when I do, and I wonder if the meaning of the vampire has shifted in my dream landscape.  More interesting, perhaps, is my constant desire to write about vampires.  I'm always thinking about vampires and vampire stories.  Dreams and creative writing come from the same place after all, the mysterious waters of the subconscious mind.  My desire to write vampire stories and horror stories is a mystery to my family, and in some ways it is a mystery to me too.  Obviously, the "archetype" of the vampire is still resonating on a powerful subconscious frequency for me. 

If you look at the larger culture, it is equally clear that the archetype of the vampire is resonating with people on a profound level.  This has been true for over a century.  What does the archetype of the vampire mean?  I would suggest it means different things in different cultural contexts (vampires are all over the world, after all -- in mythology, that is).  In addition, the meaning of the vampire is different for each horror writer.  I think this also accounts for the vast diversity of the vampire these days, everything from an embodiment of vicious carnal desire to a romanticized embodiment of upper-class eroticism. 

For queer horror, the vampire takes on a special meaning.  I believe the vampire is always a symbolic manifestation of sexuality, and I also believe that a queer aspect of the vampire has been present from the start of the century-old vampire craze (perhaps it goes even deeper in the collective unconscious and the history of human mythology).