Freud's Theory

Freud was a neurologist who looked into psychoanalysis, he found that by talking to his patients rather than hypnotising them he found their problems in their unconscious mind. His theory of repression is that in the unconscious mind, arguing that traumatic and buried memories are hidden because the patient is not conscious of them.
The theory led onto 'Oedipus complex', which he stated was the desire for his mother, and how he had strong feelings of jealousy towards his father due to this. His theory also stated that male infants have a sexual attraction to their mother, whilst the female infant has a sexual desire to her father, this being part of a psychosexual development.
The splitting of the consciousness is only introduced by an intentional act, as a second consciousness, repressed contents are out of the subject's control and are controlled by primary sources, marking the state of repression. Actions are due to a unconscious desire that seeks to return to conscious awareness, which is what is meant by "return of the repressed".
I think this links to horror because Freud is saying that we don't necessarily know what our actions are going to be, we may even unconsciously react in a certain way to something because of a memory that we have blocked out from the past. This is true in certain horrors, a prime example is 'Halloween' when Mike Myers returns to his neighbourhood to react to something that happened when he was a little boy. His mind is controlled by this past image and his feelings and thoughts have been repressed into an action of killing people.
Freud's theory of 'the return of the repressed' is expressed through dreams, fantasies, symptoms, para praxes and unplanned utterances. He found that the mind has a compulsion to repeat with a pleasure principle from this. Horror films often use 'the return of the repressed' with a victim of a past situation or event that has shaped their mind into a state where they are given an 'evil' quality. The repetition of a past event or killer, is a typical horror convention that is easily understood if we study Freud's explanation of how the repressed mind works, in which these killers are suffering from their unconscious minds past.
Another part of Freud's theory of 'Penis Envy', when a female infant has sexual desire of her fathers penis, is something that is heavily criticised by feminists, with him being ignorant of social aspects of psychology, and that the difference between female and male children is down to environment rather than a masculine bias that Freud produced. I think this references to Horror films as Freud's theory which has been assumed masculine bias is something that we can see is a theme in horrors, as typically there is a 'Last girl' whilst all the male and sexual females die before the virginal boyish type females, I think Freud's sexism of psychology is a beginning of the understanding towards this theme.