Analysis Of Stephen King's Why We Crave Horror Movies

You wake up at three in the morning, shaking in a cold sweat with the fading nightmare of a knife being plunged into some body part and a pool of your blood congealing on the floor. Now, this clearly isn’t the most pleasant way to wake up, regardless of your age. However, there’s a different stigma to horror films depending on how old someone is when they decide to watch them. Parents are concerned that their children will watch horrifying and gruesome films and television programs, slowly becoming more violent and aggressive to the point at which they “snap”. Young adults find the horror genre as an outlet for emotions that society deems unacceptable. It all comes down to when you watch the media in question, not whether or not it should be

In his paper Why We Crave Horror Movies, King writes that, “it urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites” (King). Horrific media allows us to be scared of imaginary things, feel emotions that society deems wrong, and diffuse any pent up aggression through watching others perform violent acts. We exercise the civilized parts of our minds but leave the primal and undeveloped parts unused. Every once in a while, those primal emotional muscles need to be flexed but we need a healthy way to let it out of our systems. Through observing others’ suffering, pain, and discomfort, we can have a cathartic moment where our primal needs have been satisfied. King also says that are varying levels of insanity in all of us, but we need to be reasonable with how much we “feed the gators” (King). If we go off the deep end and hack people up, then it’s not cathartic but rather lunacy. However, if we take in horrific media to sedate those primal urges for a while without harming anyone, then it should be perfectly reasonable to have access to this gruesome genre of art. Another thing King mentions is that we indulge ourselves with horrific media because it’s similar to going on a roller coaster; we feel the need to prove we can face whatever fear is presented to us. He continues on, “[that’s] not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop” (King). There’s a certain thrill in