State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794 Krin Gabbard Chair Comparative Studies 516 632-7460 07-Nov-1996 10:03pm EST FROM: KGABBARD TO: Remote Addressee ( [log in to unmask] ) Subject: Re: Sexuality in Horror Films I have found James B. Twitchell, _Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror_ (Oxford UP, 1985) to be a successful explanation of horror stories in terms of basic sexual obsessions. Some critics have found the book to be a bit reductive, but my students have always reacted positively to Twitchell's applications of psychoanalysis to Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Jekyll/Hyde/Wolfman cycle. All of these stories are a kind of pornography for children, appealing to the child's most extreme fantasies about birth, sexual intercourse, and sexual maturation. For reasons that Twitchell does in fact interrogate, our culture is more than happy to let children have easy access to all of these stories with their slightly displaced sexual content AND with their highly didactic statements about what must be forbidden. ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]