Crimson Peak (2015) Guillermo del Toro 

(similarities to E.A. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher 1839)
-Clay colors water/snow, the house is seemingly ”consumed” by the clay mine under the house: TC 41:23; 44:58; 1:46:3; sublime and abject in nature
-Ghostly appearances as misshapen skeletons, sometimes with indefinable indications for their murder (e.g. woman in the bathtub with an axe in her head TC 1:05:13), the brutality of Thomas's murder - explicit shot on how his sister stabs him in his face; corruption of beauty and family (TC 1:42:43)

-Doppelgänger motif as both abject and uncanny: Fear of the disembodiment of the soul from the body; human duality; where the double appears, boundaries between dream state & reality, and sanity & madness are blurred 

Examples of the Double in Literature and Film:

Enemy (movie 2013) by Denis Villeneuve

Mary Reilly (movie 1996) by Stephen Frears & Christopher Hampton 

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson 

William Wilson (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe 

Pet Sematary (1983) Stephen King 

Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Oscar Wilde

-Frankenstein’s creature is a prototypical abject - a living corpse, an accumulation of body parts of many corpses combined to form a new one (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818) 

-Horror associated with blood is a central theme in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) 

-The abject in Dracula: cannibalism, consumption of human blood, female vampire eating children, animal-like, corruption of the prototypical mother figure, and the female body/male gaze on the female body

-The inability to use a mirror - A mirror represents the 'I' or self, instead Dracula’s mirror image doesn’t exist and does therefore indicate his inhumanity, uncovering him as a creature that seemingly exists in a liminal space between life and death 

-Abjection & art: Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities E 3 (2022) vs. The short story Pickman’s Model by H.P. Lovecraft (1926)

-Dark forms of art as a corrupter between reality and madness; the voyeur isn’t safe anymore

Another similarity is the opposition every theory creates: 

Abjection is correlated to the uncanny, being the natural reaction of the I to what disturbs identity, to what does not respect borders, positions, and rules.

Connection to the uncanny because the phantom represents family secrets (familiarity), but causes horror because these are buried/hidden secrets.

=> All of them being a way to understand reality (the distinction between imagination and reality). Due to them, we form our identities. 

„Gothic novels, like psychoanalysis, explore the ostensibly irrational or distempered.“ => They both examine how people’s imagination (or the uncanny and mysterious) tells us more about one’s repressed guilt and fears. 

=> All three psychoanalytical theories: the uncanny, the abjection and the phantom are great analytic tools for psychoanalytic literary criticism. 

 
„The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of some- thing uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it“.
 
Everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light. 

Psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny - uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression. 

What might be hidden in us, suddenly comes to light and frightens us. (from childhood for example) => The uncanny is related to beliefs in our childish selves, that we’ve repressed or hidden away from us in order to become adults

We cover these beliefs because they are wrong and we don’t want to be wrong. 

Uncanny - fear that our child self was right all along. 

The uncanny requires realism - ask us to believe that these situations happen in the real world; pretend to move in the world of common reality.