‘Cinema is an abattoir’: Horror film and explanation

This article is an attempt to move the study of the horror film from the kinds of explanation that typically derive from a certain mode of psychoanalytic interpretation into an area suggested by Wittgenstein’s discussion of seeing aspects. To this end, the article examines various forms of explanation in the literature on horror cinema, and in the case of Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), for example, argues for the position that it is the film itself that is constitutive of the myth that gives rise to it, and not an externally given system or a set of explanatory paradigms. The argument is taken up with reference to the work of J-L Schefer on cinema, and the thought of Maurice Blanchot on literature.