How's this for a Grand Unified Theory of horror: All horror monsters (including aliens, vampires, plagues, and slashers) are the personification of the guilty conscience that punishes unrepentant sinners (especially those who've transgressed God's sexual code). The Monster is Remorse, which author E. Michael Jones defines as regret without repentance.

Jones's interpretive theory of horror is easy enough to apply, especially to what's been called the "have sex and die" cycle of films. Consider Halloween: P.J. Soles engages in premarital sex. She knows that she has violated the moral order, but she suppresses her guilty conscience, thus eschewing repentance. But the guilty conscience never relents, and returns in the personification of Myers. Myers is also Nemesis (another of Jones's metaphors), the Greek goddess of "retributive justice" who restores God's/Nature's moral order to balance. Appropriately, Jamie Lee Curtis, a "good girl," escapes Myers.

After positing his theory of horror, Jones attempts to prove its validity by tracing the "trajectory" (a favorite term of his) of "Enlightenment thinking" over the past 250 years, paralleling it to the trajectory of the horror genre.

Jones regards Enlightenment thought as the desanctification of Man. The Enlightenment redefined Man as a soulless animal, a biological machine in a mechanistic universe. Man-the-machine (a clockwork organge, as Anthony Burgess termed it) is not restricted by God's laws, and is thus free to improve himself (e.g., eugenics) and free to live according to his pleasure (e.g., free love).

Enlightenment thinkers believed that Man, once returned to his natural state, would be a Noble Savage bound by his own Reason, but Jones claims that Reason has proven a poor substitute for Religion. The Enlightenment trajectory (which encompasses de Sade, whom Jones often cites) has spread syphilis, AIDS, abortion, prostitution, pornography, divorce, and the genocides of Bolshevism and Naziism.

What has this to do with horror?

Jones believes that horror films are popular not because so many modern people are sinners, but because they refuse to admit it to themselves (i.e., no repentance). Thus, Monsters From the Id is informed by Jones's devout Catholicism: All sex outside of heterosexual marriage is desanctified, in violation of God's law. People subconsciously know that desanctified sex has caused many of their social ills and personal miseries, but because they refuse to repent, they suppress their guilty conscience. Horror is popular because it resonates with people's guilty conscience. Catharsis comes when people face "dark truths" they dare not consciously admit, even to themselves.

The idea of horror and catharsis is old, but not everyone agrees about which "dark truths" are being exposed. Film critic Robin Wood has a different Grand Unified Theory. Wood believes civilization requires some "basic suppression" (e.g., delayed gratification), but that "bourgeois morality" enforces "surplus suppression" (i.e., suppression beyond what's needed, done so that people will conform to roles deemed productive for patriarchal capitalism).

To get an idea of Wood's perspective, here's a sample: "The most significant development in film criticism and in progressive ideas generally ... has clearly been the increasing confluence of Marx and Freud, or more precisely of the traditions of thought arising from them: the recognition that social revolution and sexual revolution are inseparably linked and necessary to each other ... it is here, through the medium of psychoanalytic theory, that Feminism and Gay Liberation join forces with Marxism in their progress toward a common aim, the overthrow of patriarchal capitalist ideology and the structures and institutions that sustain it and are sustained by it."