This dissertation will examine a series of recent films that look back at aspects of the American experience in the 1980s. These include Safe, Donnie Darko, American Psycho, Capturing the Friedmans and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Each of these recent "Monstrous '80s films," adopts the conceptual framework and language of psychopathology in contextualizing its monstrous protagonist. The apocalyptic tenor of the films suggests an emerging national metaphor, as if the cultural pathology that was latent in the 1980s is becoming manifest in our retrospective understanding of history.

Monstrous '80s films take up a belated exploration of how we arrived at the current crisis of violence and apathy in American culture. The retrospective analysis of US history through film and the overarching metaphors of psychopathology, trauma and unreliable narration that characterize this cycle of movies will be explored as constituting an adaptive interpretive process in the genre of horror film. Mental illness serves as a metaphor for the larger cultural contradictions that are exposed in films about the Reagan years, and each of these films unfolds around of narrative of trauma, hysteria, contested memory and fragmentation. Because this dissertation explicitly engages the topics of contested historical memory and social conflict, Trauma Studies and Memory Studies constitute a natural analytical framework for this inquiry, which investigates how the specter of the Reagan years has haunted recent cinematic production in the U.S., urging a confrontation with unresolved tensions in the culture at large.