The engine of horror cinema is frequently its negotiation of culturally-explosive categories of
identity. From Norman Bates’ violent inhabitation of his mother’s personality in Psycho (1960)
to the protagonist’s struggle with dissociative identity disorder in Split (2016), horror films tend
to invoke fear in their audience by exploring fractures in individual personalities and family
units. This panel will provide a sustained analysis through the lens of gender, class, and
psychology of the variety of ways in which directors have mobilized this process. These papers
call into question horror cinema’s methods of inciting fear and reflecting our culture’s definitions
of self.