The Cold War Horror Film: Taboo and Transgression in The Bad Seed, The Fly, and Psycho

Abstract

An eight-year-old girl commits three cold-blooded murders. Through reckless experimentation a scientist fuses his body with a fly's. A young man keeps his mother's dead body in his house. The horror film is a genre*** that operates within a framework of taboo and transgression. Following its Gothic predecessors, it expresses the most serious of transgressions—murder, necrophilia, incest—highlighting the taboo that prohibits such activities. The Cold War period in American history was an age of taboo and transgression. The transgressive individual became equated with the communist who threatened to destroy America from within and bring about the destruction of the planet through nuclear war. As Gordene Olga MacKenzie argues, the McCarthyist witch hunt for communists encompassed those “suspected of violating mainstream sex or gender roles” (42). Transgression itself, and specifically sexual transgression, became linked with communism in popular perceptions and hence became conjoined with the threat of apocalypse.