Wood argues that horror film monsters are representations of repression and oppression within society. Drawing upon Freudian theory, Wood distinguishes between two forms of repression: basic repression and surplus repression.

According to Aristotle, the structure of a story encompasses six pivotal elements: plot, characters, reasoning, diction, music, and spectacle.

Prince asserts that the Western genre is unique in its preoccupation with historical events, which lends itself to a specific temporal and spatial awareness that explores a post-civil war time frame.

Laura Mulvey’s paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema discusses the adverse quality of the male gaze as it determines gendered interactions within narrative cinema.

André Bazin argues that the compulsion to create art rests in the desire to replicate reality in our ideal form.

Eisenstein pontificates that all forms of art are built upon the foundation of conflict.

Bordwell’s book “Rhetoric in Action: Seven Models of Psycho” explores the rhetorical techniques utilized in seven different analyses of the 1960 film Psycho.