The uncanny is not fear of the unknown. It is fear of something once intimate returning in distorted form.

Dracula survives because the vampire was never merely a monster. It was civilization dreaming anxiously about itself.

Horror is not frightening because monsters exist. Horror is frightening because the symbolic order fails, and we suddenly glimpse what was always underneath reality.

Horror terrifies us because it reveals that the identities we perform as natural were unstable from the very beginning.