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The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
In his seminal essay “The ‘Uncanny’,” in a now famous formula, Freud remarks that the uncanny is “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (1919, p. 241). Yet, the repressed phantasmatically (and uncannily) returns, encroaching upon the subject and haunting his or her space of interiority.1 In other words, what generates the feeling of the uncanny is precisely the process of compulsive repetition, this compulsion-to-repeat, which, in my view, is nowhere more forcefully depicted than in Peter Sasdy's Hands of the Ripper (1971) and Tom McLoughlin's thriller The Unsaid (2001), both exemplary cinematic models of the repetition compulsion.
The link between film and psychoanalysis is certainly not new. To take a well-known example, one has only to recall the British director and producer Sir Alfred Hitchcock's fascination with and conscious use of Freudian symbols and psychoanalytic ideas in films such as Psycho, Vertigo, and Spellbound. In Peter Sasdy's Hands of the Ripper, the father-cum-psychoanalyst plays a prominent role throughout and the film actually begins with the brutal murder of the mother. Like the very cyclicity of the seasons, however, the absent or dead mother returns, haunting the final scenes of the film.