Why are we drawn to watching people die on screen? What do horror films reveal about our deepest fears of mortality, and why can fictional death feel strangely cathartic?

Drawing on ideas from Freud, Lacan, and Jung, Mary Wild explores death scenes in horror cinema as expressions of unconscious conflict rather than mere spectacles of violence. Through close readings of iconic films spanning psychological horror, body horror, aliens, vampires, and home invasion, this talk examines how horror stages the death drive, repression, abjection, grief, and the uncanny. Rather than asking why horror obsesses over death, it asks what death in horror allows us to confront that everyday life so often represses.

Based on her acclaimed book Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema, this illustrated talk invites audiences to see horror films not simply as entertainment, but as psychological spaces where our anxieties about loss, identity, mortality, and transformation can be experienced, negotiated and ultimately survived.