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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Womb Phantasies in International Horror and Extreme Cinema Haylett Bryan, Alice Rachel Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 Womb Phantasies in International Horror and Extreme Cinema Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at King’s College London by Alice Haylett Bryan Department of Film Studies King’s College London 1 Abstract This thesis explores the relationship between womb phantasies and the proliferation of womb and birth symbolism in international horror and extreme cinema from the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first century. It presents a new cross-national reading of this symbolism as revealing the oppressed and repressed desire to return to the early mother-child dyad, through the use of culturally specific psychoanalytic theory. Chapter 1 outlines the position of the womb phantasy in Freud’s work, providing the critical engagement with this founding theory necessary for the ensuing cross-cultural readings of film and psychoanalytic theory. Subsequent chapters then trace the presence of the womb phantasy in key films from France, America, South Korea and Japan. Chapter 2 establishes the background for the womb phantasy by exploring the representation of the primal phantasies in French cinema, providing a critique of the patriarchal construction of femininity and motherhood using the work of Irigaray, Kristeva and Anzieu. Chapter 3 evaluates the representation of symbiotic mother- child relationships in American horror as symbolic of the womb phantasy, using the work of Mahler, Chodorow and Horney. Chapter 4 questions what happens when this symbiosis is interrupted, with the research of Min, Chung and Cho enabling an analysis of the motifs of abortion, infanticide and death in key films from South Korea. Chapter 5 then shows how the womb is presented as a liminal space between life and death in Japanese cinema with reference to the work of Kitayama, before exploring the correlation between Doi’s theory of amae and the womb phantasy. This thesis thus combines close filmic analysis with psychoanalytic theory to pinpoint the consistencies and variations in the international obsession with the womb in horror and extreme cinema, whilst simultaneously providing the first detailed study of how womb phantasies have become ingrained in psychoanalytic theory across the world. 2 Contents Acknowledgements 5 Illustrations 6 Introduction 8 Psychoanalysis and Horror Cinema 12 Feminism and Horror: The Return of the Repressed Maternal 18 The Womb Phantasy in International Horror and Extreme Cinema 23 Chapter 1. The Womb Phantasy: Freud’s Repressed Maternal Legacy 31 The Womb Phantasy 31 Freud’s Cupboard and the Birth of the Oedipus Complex 36 The Womb and Oedipal Desire 40 The Womb Phantasy and the Search for Origins: Freud and the Wolf-Man 47 The Horror of the Desire for the Maternal Womb 54 The Urge to Restore an Earlier State of Things: The Death Drive, Cinematic Pleasure and the Womb Phantasy 58 Conclusion 68 Chapter 2. Phantasies of Origin: France 70 The Cinema of the Maternal Body 71 The Origin of (Wo)Man: Breillat, Irigaray and the Primal Phantasy of Origin 76 The Two-Faced Mother: Kristeva and the Abject Womb in French Horror Cinema 97 The Touch of the Mother: Didier Anzieu and the Skin Ego 112 Conclusion 131 Chapter 3. Monstrous Mothers and the Mother Hero: America 133 The Great Mistake: Psychoanalysis in America 134 3 “A Boy’s Best Friend is his Mother”: Symbiosis and Maternal Love 141 The Fear of What’s Inside: Haunted House and occult Films, Male Crisis, and the Need to Run from the Womb 166 “It Was Here When We Moved In”: The Retro-Occult Film and Karen Horney’s ‘Dread of Woman’ 180 Conclusion 189 Chapter 4. Mother-Power, Non-Mothers and the Mother Bond: South Korea 191 A New Frontier: The International Language of Horror and the Unconscious 192 Mo-Jeong, Motherhood and Socially Sanctioned Monstrosity 204 A Tale of Two Sisters 225 Conclusion 237 Chapter 5. Sacks, Wells and Water Tanks: Japan 239 The Focus on the Mother in Japanese Horror Cinema and Psychoanalysis 239 Transience and the Womb: Maternal Symbolism in the work of Nakata Hideo and Kitayama Osamu 247 What is Wrong with the ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’?: Miike Takashi And the Japanese Need to Amaeru 274 Conclusion 297 Conclusion 299 Appendix 311 Filmography 320 Bibliography of works by Sigmund Freud 325 Bibliography 327 4 Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Sarah Cooper. Even at the darkest moments of writing this thesis a meeting with her would leave me inspired and renewed. I could not have asked for a better supervisor. I would like to thank my father Maurice Haylett for showing me horror films at a very young age, and my mother Judith Haylett for letting him. Thanks also to Oliver Kenny for his incredibly helpful feedback during the final stages of this research. Finally, this thesis would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of my husband Ross Bryan. I owe you. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of three loving mothers: Sue Bryan, Rachel Ekins and Angela Warner 5 Illustrations Figure 2.1: Alice’s self-reflection in A Real Young Girl 84 Figure 2.2: Marie as the Freudian void in Romance 88 Figure 2.3: ‘The man’ inspects the visual sign of a woman’s activity in the creation of life in Anatomy of Hell 95 Figures 2.4 and 2.5: The mother as abject border in Inside 104 Figure 2.6: Yasmin embraces her inner abjectivity in Frontier(s) 107 Figure 2.7: Skin-on-skin contact between mother and daughter in See the Sea 115 Figure 2.8: Tatiana’s corrupt Skin Ego 124 Figures 2.9 and 2.10: The contrasting faces of motherhood 127 Figures 2.11 and 2.12: Womb symbolism in See the Sea 128 Figure 3.1: Norman’s constant eating fends off the devouring mother 152 Figures 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4: Visual representations of the symbiotic union 158 Figure 3.5: Mrs White, the monstrous mother of the symbiotic union 160 Figures 3.6 and 3.7: Carrie’s womb-space is both a source of horror, and of love 165 Figures 3.8 - 3.12: Wendy helps Danny escape from the possessed Jack (and from the symbiotic union) 172 Figures 3.13, 3.14 and 3.15: Womb, vagina and birth symbolism in Poltergeist 125 Figures 3.16 and 3.17: Houses that bleed 178 Figure 3.18: The haunted cupboard in The Conjuring 183 Figure 3.19: Carolyn’s maternal rapture 189 Figures 4.1 and 4.2: The staircase separates the traditional domain of the mother downstairs, and the temptation of Myong-ja and modernity upstairs 212 Figure 4.3: Comparison of jeong and love 221 Figure 4.4: The haunted cupboard in A Tale of Two Sisters 226 6 Figures 4.5 and 4.6: Uncanny images: womb symbolism and doubling 227 Figures 5.1 and 5.2: Watery tombs in Ring and Dark Water 247 Figures 5.3 - 5.6: The looming exterior and damp interior of Yoshimi and Ikuko’s apartment in Dark Water 258 Figures 5.7 and 5.8: Mitsuko and Sadako’s watery re-births in Dark Water and Ring 264 Figures 5.9 - 5.11 Dark Water (2005) recreating the damp aesthetic 268 of its source material Figure 5.12 Miike references Dark Water in One Missed Call 282 Figures 5.13 and 5.14: An insane Christopher sees an aborted foetus in his water bucket in Imprint 285 Figure 5.15: Asami’s exterior womb in Audition 288 Figure 5.16: Asami performs the role of loving mother in Audition 292 Figures 5.17 and 5.18: Keiko rediscovers her maternity and Takuya’s womb-like cupboard in Visitor Q 295 Figure 5.19: Returning to the womb and the maternal embrace in Visitor Q 296 7 Introduction In his influential essay on horror cinema Robin Wood writes: “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses or oppresses”.1 That which is hidden in the unconscious or denied by society, emerges and is experienced in the safe environment of the cinema, depicted as a thing of horror so that it can be rejected or repressed once more.