Why We Crave Horror Movies

440 Words2 Pages
In his essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” Stephen King tells us that some reasons we like a good horror flick are: to prove that we aren’t afraid of things that go bump in the night, to make us feel “normal,” and to have some good old-fashioned fun. Upon reading these assertions, I began to reflect on my own attitudes about the horror film genre. I have never considered myself to be a horror film fan. I tend to shy away from movies with extreme gore, violence, and gratuitous blood shed. They aren’t fun. They don’t make me feel “normal”, and I am afraid of things that go bump in the night. As a teenager, I never rushed out to see any of the series of “Friday the 13th” movies, for example, because I didn’t want to be reminded that scary, evil, super-natural guys like Jason liked to stalk, terrorize, and then kill teens such as myself. The idea that I could be killed just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time was not appealing to me, and didn’t really seem like an escape from reality. I don’t know, maybe I am (or was) just uptight. However, I did like movies such as, “The Shining” and “Poltergeist”. They scared me because of the super-natural aspects involved. They were good ghost stories and I do like that. No crazed individual was causing all of the chaos. According to Wikipedia on the web, those are horror movies too. So, maybe I do like a good horror flick; it’s just the slasher flick that I have been opposed to all along. Maybe I had been looking at the whole genre of horror films from the wrong point of view. Reading further into Mr. King’s essay, I was intrigued by the notion that a horror movie might actually have a role to play in civilized society. As Mr. King puts it, “like a sick joke, [the mythic horror movie] has a dirty job to do.” It allows us to fantasize, lets our basic instincts free and “appeals to all that is worst
Open Document