Recently, I came across in my possessions a small book entitled "Monsters from the Id" by a man named E. Michael Jones. How, and why, I had come to own this book, I have no idea - I have no recollection of buying it, and indeed, there is no way I would have ever bought it, as this book was amongst the most tendentious and ridiculous texts that I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Apparently attempting to undertake a Christian analysis of horror films, amongst the more curious aspects of the construction of this text was the fact that despite having entitled itself in the language of Freud, the text itself contained no references whatsoever to his work.
A shame that this book was so bad, as the central thesis which it proposed to advance - namely that, when morality is repressed, it returns in the form of a monster, is actually a cogent one, insofar as we are talking about the Kantian morality of the categorical imperative, rather than, as Jones did, morality defined strictly in terms of a monogamous marriage between a man and woman.
Two examples serve to highlight this. First, Charles Laughton's 1955 masterpiece
The Night of the Hunter. A film deemed too dark by audiences on its release, in fact this movie is an disarmingly simple morality tell, and far more genuinely Christian one at that then the ridiculous infantile psycho-religions adhered to by people like Jones.
Taking for its setting depression-era deep south America, the plot is as follows: an itinerant preacher played by Robert Mitchum, with "love" and "hate" tattooed across his knuckles, is arrested after stealing a car. Sentenced to thirty days in jail, he is placed in a cell with bankrobber and murderer Ben Harper, who is awaiting his execution. Harper, we are given to understand, committed his crime so as to feed his children, and it is to them that he has entrusted the money that he stole. Smelling easy money, upon his release Mitchum tracks them and their mother down. Marrying her, he then attempts to force a confession from the kids as to where the cash is hidden. They refuse, he kills her, they escape, and drift down the Missippi river into the arms of Rachel Cooper, a stern but benevolent pious woman, who has made it her duty to take in children and care for them. Mitchum gives chase, eventually finds them, is repelled, and thereupon dragged back downstream to be executed.
In this, several things.
First, the lesson that the sins of the father are visited on the son. Harper committed his crime according to the maxim that the end would justify the means. From this action, his wife is murdered and his children almost murdered. Hence, the story which is presented here would appear to suggest that his thinking was erroneous.
Second, the dialectic of good versus evil. At two points in the film, Mitchum performs the action that is apparently his party-piece: the left-hand, right-hand wrestling match. Since he is obviously the "evil" character in the film, we thus accordingly are given with this set-piece a unique insight into how evil views the world - namely as a infinite struggle between two binary opposing quantities.
The first time that Mitchum does this, he carries it off before a gullible audience: "Never have I seen it better told." However, when he does for Cooper, she visibly balks - as she understands it, morality isn't an epic struggle between abstract principles at all. Rather, it is simply a self-evident matter of duty. "I am a strong tree with many branches that have room for many birds," she says at one point, "And I know it too."
And thus she feels no malice towards Mitchum even though he is so obviously diabolical. Rather instead, she just simply stays up all night with a shotgun in order to protect her adopted children from him, and then, when in the morning he makes his last desperate attempt to grab them, watches as her cat attacks him, and then phones the police while he hides pathetically in her barn.
