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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

13 Symbols of Horror

Symbols - objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Most films use patterns or specific objects as metaphors for a concept that the film is trying to convey.  In horror movies, many such objects are used to intensify mood, identify character traits, emphasize themes and concepts (e.g. good and evil), and foreshadow events. Objects can be powerful symbols that add depth and meaning to a story.


Horror films try to capture our worst nightmares. As Carl G. Jung observed in his book Man and His Symbols (1979): "Commonplace objects or ideas can assume such powerful psychic significance in a dream that we may awake seriously disturbed, in spite of having dreamed of nothing worse than a locked room or a missed train" and “As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image."

Writers can use objects that appeal to our unconscious in this way for added, subtle dimension to reinforce themes. In a 13-week series of blogs, I’ll take a look at some of the most common symbolic objects found in horror, beginning with:

#1: Religious Icons
Religion is very prevalent in horror, with themes of life and death, spirituality, man playing god, man fighting inner as well as outer demons, good versus evil, and so forth. Religious artifacts may be Christian, occult, satanic, voodoo, or about any other type of belief in something greater than humanity. In The Skeleton Key (2005), hospice worker Caroline Ellis is a skeptic and does not believe in the supernatural, even though hoodoo items and legends surround her in the swampy, primitive homestead where she cares for an elderly man, Ben.
As Ben believes in the hoodoo magic, Caroline pieces together more and more about the lynching of a slave couple who performed hoodoo in the attic, and her belief system begins to shift. She learns about the jujus, spell-books and recorded conjurations she discovers in the attic and begins to perform rituals herself. In the end, her fear makes her a believer and this is her downfall, as it is what the slaves, who have lived on in the bodies of others, needed to take over her body. She let the symbolic objects overpower her reasoning.
Next Blog: Symbols of Death

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