Why We Crave Horror Movies

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Mr. Sanjay Dasari (Sunny) Professor Fisher RHT with HSF 1302 October 25th, 2011 Feeding the Gators (The Expression of our inner Hyde side, how and why we do it) The Walking Dead is “AMC’s Highest Rated Show Ever.” (Adalian) Paranormal Activity has the highest gross margin in the world’s box office. Horror and action thriller movies have a higher success rate than any other genre in any language in any industry. In music, songs about death and despair have a 20% higher chance of success than those about happiness and how great the world is. This is not a coincidence, and Stephen King, the author of “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” realizes this fact, and offers his own observations in hope of somehow explaining it. I agree with King that some people need to witness violent or socially unacceptable things happen in order to maintain their sanity, but I fear he has failed to recognize the fact that horror movies are but one of the several ways in which people do this. This primal, basic need to express ones true thoughts and opinions is achieved through a variety of ways, including music, painting, storytelling and writing. In his text, King claims that we watch horror movies because it provides some form of entertainment necessary to allow our emotions a free rein; emotions that we often cannot express publicly for fear of societal reprisal. King makes the claim that we have to allow the potential lyncher present in all humans the chance “to scream and roll around in the grass” (Paragraph 9). This expression releases the pent up anger and is a form of cleansing your mind and body of all your negative energy. Anytime you repress the urge to shout, to scream, to hit someone, to break your boss’s nose, you are suppressing your anger and your true emotions. This can be disastrous to your health, and one day, when you ‘snap,’ all that anger will come out tenfold. There

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