"Knives and Teeth": Stanley Cavell on Horror

I'm reading Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: The Viking Press, 1971) at the moment, and I just came across a paragraph on horror films, which follows an appreciation of Hitchcock that takes in To Catch a Thief, Marnie, The Birds, and Notorious. This elegant paragraph, on page 67 and dealing with the power of the projected nightmare, is worthy of quotation:

"In horror movies, sexuality is not suggested but directly coded onto, or synchronised with, the knives and teeth as they penetrate. Here is an obvious reason not to be quick about equating films with dreams. Most dreams are boring narratives (like most tales of neurotic or physical symptoms), their skimpy surface all out of proportion with their riddle interest and their effect on the dreamer. To speak of film adventures or glamours or comedies as dreams is a dream of dreams: it doesn't capture the wish behind the dream, but merely the wish to have interesting dreams. But horror films specifically do infuse boring narratives with the skin-shrinking haunts of dreams."

It's quite something, isn't it?