The Chemical That Rules Us Adrenaline. It’s the chemical that courses through a person’s veins whenever their body thinks something is particurally exciting. In acient times, it was deployed when a sweaty caveman was being attacked by a predator. Today, however, it is used when comfortable viewers watche scary images on their televisions in their cushy chairs. In Stephen Kings’s essay “Why We Crave Horror,” Stephen King challenges the sanity of mankind becaude they like to watch scary movies.
In “Fearing Fictionality”, Kendall Walton examines our emotional ties to works of fiction through an example of someone watching a horror movie. He creates the hypothetical example of a man named Charles who is watching a horror movie about a green slime oozing over the whole earth and destroying everything (Walton 258). At one point in the movie, the slime looks towards the camera, picks up speed, and starts oozing towards the viewers (Walton 258). Charles shrieks and grips his chair and says after the movie that he was “terrified” of the slime (Walton 258). The question that Walton explores in this essay is whether or not Charles is actually terrified of the slime.
The build up of emotions may have led to all of the people killing one another. There are various ways to express the variety emotions. Horror films bring out the frightful emotions within everyone. The answer to “how is lynching a lot like horror films today?” is quite simple.
We want to be able to prove to ourselves that we are not scared of anything including death. For example, we go to see blood and guts films to demonstrate that we are not anxious or perhaps we go to see thrillers in light of the fact that we fantasize doing something to that effect in this present reality. He connects this with the roller coaster and that we ride roller coasters to validate that we have the guts to go through the entire ride or just like in horror films sit through the entire movie. Also, by doing this King acknowledges the fact that we put aside our more civilized self’s and become children again to allow our emotions of violence, aggression but most importantly
Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) was voted the “best film ever made” by the 2012 British Film Institute, and for good reason. The plot is elaborate and intriguing and the cinematography is legendary. On top of this, the characters, like good characters should, all have their own needs and wants that are evident in the film. The needs of these characters affect each other and they affect the story and they all follow one common theme: control. Our protagonist, John “Scottie” Ferguson’s wants and needs differ greatly throughout the film, but his only constant is his yearning to get over his acrophobia, or fear of heights.
Stephen King Essay Do you remember that rush of fear we felt when we were younger after watching a scary movie? Every little thing seen in the dark and every nightmare seemed real. In Stephen King’s essay ‘Why We Crave Horror,” he describes that we need to feel those emotions that aren’t welcomed anymore to show that we aren’t afraid and to have fun.
Imagine walking down a street, you pass by two people sitting outside looking terrified at the slightest noise and you ask them what’s wrong. They said they watched a scary movie, but they enjoyed watching it. Stephen King is correct about people watching horror movies to feel normal, but he is also wrong because not everyone feels normal watching them, some might think it’s odd to like movies like that. People watch scary movies to feel normal, but some feel odd for enjoying those type of movies. Many people enjoy watching scary movies, others like to think that they shouldn’t watch them because they think they’ll be outcasts from their friends.
She argues that the act of moviegoing satisfies these voyeuristic desires in people. She writes, “The mass of mainstream film portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy,” (pg. 186). In this essay, I will further discuss her viewpoints on cinema and voyeurism, and how it connects to the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. Rear Window is a film that follows the
By examining the horror genre through the lens of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, audiences will see how exactly
Stephen King also thinks that horror movies provide emotional relief. I'm one of two minds when it comes to King's essay. On the one hand Stephen king is partially right when claiming that people who crave horror movies are mentally ill, he is also right when he claims that horror movies help us go back to our childhood by freeing us from grey and go back to seeing black and white; however, his views regarding that horror movies provides emotional relief can not be accepted because it makes people feel worse than they did before.
In Stephen King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” King is conveying that because we are human, we are insane. We may not be in asylums, but that does not mean we are not insane, it just means we hide our insanity better than others. By watching horror movies we are just asking to have the constant nightmares. However, we watch horror movies to prove to others that we can watch them, and sometimes we watch them so that we feel normal compared to the people in the film. Other times we watch the movies for enjoyment, which is a very weird enjoyment since we are watching people get killed.
The main point of the article “Why We Crave Horror Movies” by Stephen King, is that many people enjoy reading and watching horror stories for many different reasons. One main reason King gives is that people just want to overcome their fears, show that they are brave. Others go just to have fun. But not the happy, playful type of fun rather fun that is dark,full of death and suspense.
Humans are unique creations, each one behaves differently. Humans have the propensity to act inhumanely. "Why We Crave Horror Movies," by Stephen King explores the psychology of the human psyche and tries to explain why people are drawn to the horror subgenre. King begins to connect himself to the reader to establish a relationship of understanding the appeal of horror films. Beyond that, he uses emotional appeals as he utilizes bold, questionable statements to engross the reader.
How it affects us, our emotional muscles. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on the level because it is an invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness extended rarely. “But anticivilization emotions don't go away” (king,Why we crave. 3) this explains why some people think this way. King thought about “ if we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man.
However, film critic, Robin Wood, argues that ‘since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has implicitly recognised horror as both American and familial’ he then goes on to connect this with Psycho by claiming that it is an “innovative and influential film because it supposedly presents its horror not as the produce of forces outside American society, bit a product of the patriarchal family which is the fundamental institution of American society” he goes on to discuss how our civilisation either represses or oppresses (Skal, 1994). Woods claim then suggests that in Psycho, it is the repressions and tensions within the normal American family which produces the monster, not some alien force which was seen and suggested throughout the 1950 horror films. At the beginning of the 60’s, feminisation was regarded as castration not humanization. In “Psycho” (1960) it is claimed that the film presents conservative “moral lessons about gender roles of that the strong male is healthy and normal and the sensitive male is a disturbed figure who suffers from gener confusion” (Skal, 1994). In this section of this chapter I will look closely at how “Psycho” (1960) has layers of non-hetro-conforming and gender-non conforming themes through the use of Norman Bates whose gender identitiy is portrayed as being somewhere between male and female
