Sigmund Freud's concept of "The Return of the Repressed"

Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression. Repression was the name given to the action that is disallowing yourself to access painful memories by burying them deep into your unconscious mind. Throughout Freud's investigation of this notion, he found that his patients all had varied levels of repression. He argued that the act of repression did not happen within a persons consciousness, therefore leading him to believe that a person was not then aware of the traumatic memories and experiences that they have repressed. However, there are signs that repression has taken place with such derivatives as not only symptoms but also fantasies, slips of the tongue, and parapraxes in general, and even certain character traits. This is why a person may be what seems irrationally traumatised, perhaps in a small way, by a certain scent, or image.
                      Reasons as to why the concept of repression may apply and thus be helpful towards the horror genre vary. It's clear that people enjoy horrors hence their popularity, even though the whole idea is that they are basically designed to be hard to watch, to scare the audience. This fact audiences go to the cinema and watch these films to be scared implies within all the people that want to watch a horror, lies a deeprouted fear that they themselves perhaps aren't immediately aware of, a repressed fear revisited. It could be that the fear we feel when watching horror films may not be necessarily all have undergone the same degree of trauma as those in the film, but they are reacting to the horrific representations of such things such as abuse, torture, abandonment, feelings of being trapped etc.
    The idea of 'returning' is useful and conventional of the horror genre as well, as not only does it open windows for the character type of the 'pyschotic killer' that returns on the anniversary of the last havoc he caused, but it also means that there is no end to the trauma, that although it's the end seems to be in sight, it's really not.