Jacques D Amboise Analysis

Steven King and Jacques D’Amboise are two very different people, King being a horror writer and D’Amboise being a ballet teacher. The essays they wrote are quite different too, with one showing how horror films help control humanities primal instincts and the other showing people can inspire others and nurture their talents. King talks about how watching horror movies shows that we are still slightly normal, that we all have a little insanity in us so we exercise it when watching scary films to keep it under control, and that bad emotions and urges are punished so we use horror movies to engage these instincts. While D’Amboise shows the kindness of a teacher and how he learned to dance, that because his career was ending he decided he wanted

People have a primal urge to fit in, to be a part of a group to be normal. Humans are also very fragile and thus the slightest difference can make a person believe they are weird. Being weird essentially means being exiled from the rest of humanity, so showing a person something weirder than they are, like a monster, reassures them that they are still normal. Although reassuring their normality doesn’t make them any less insane. As King states, “If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm…if, on the other hand your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re under stress or to pick your nose on the morning bus, then you are left to go about your business…”. Since people all have some sort on insanity horror allows people to express this and keep it under control. The same goes for the primal and aggressive emotions that people get. Everyone gets angry at some point but the emotions are punished by society and must be smothered and repressed. That doesn’t stop people from feeling this way, and so we watch horror movies to allow the instincts to be expressed in a safe