Kun Miao

Prof. Madhav Kafle

ESL 015

July 10^th 2013

Mental Patients?

Critique essay of Why We Crave Horror Movies

       When we heard about this title, we supposed that this passage was going to talk about the content of the horror movies and delve into the characteristics of horror movie fans. However, this passage didn’t do any of these things. Based on current society and human psychology, the passage analyzes from general perspective that more and more people go to the cinema to watch the horror movies which might seem meaningless job just for killing the time. The best thing the author has done is that he reflected the common inner illness for people in the passage. He mentioned that we cannot reveal any of our inner sinister emotion in today’s society, so that we need to watch horror movies. I mostly agree with his point of view which is amazing and creative but I hate the local stories. He did quote a big amount of local fairy tales which confused me a lot. I will first give a brief summary of the essay.

In the essay the author, Stephen King, comes up with three reasons that drive people continue to watch horror movies, although horror movies have many terrible and gloomy parts. One reason is that people watch the horror movies is to show their bravery to their friends that they can go through the terrible parts and are not afraid to watch such movies. Another reason people go to the cinema for the horror movies to get a feeling that the people are still far from ugliness. The horror movies would foil people’s kindness. His final reason is that the horror movies are able to fulfill the sinister thinking in people’s inner hearts. In the beginning of the essay, he compared horror movies to roller coasters. People ride roller coasters to prove that they have the courage to sit through it just like horror movies. He also goes on to elaborate that people always watch horror movies to release their negative emotions of fear, violence, and aggression. He concludes the essay by saying that horror movies appeal to the “worst in us.” Everyone should like and will enjoy horror movies based on King’s thinking. Because I mostly agree with his idea, I will first enumerate some strength of this essay.

First I would like to praise that the author developed the essay in a great pattern. Because two of the three reasons which Stephen King came up with were increasingly strange. For normal people, they even won’t continue to read the essay if the author presented his last idea, which is people who watch horror movies enjoy to watch others to be killed or in danger, because this reason sounds very ridiculous. Yet, King made a suitable arrangement for his strange point of view. He didn’t start the essay with the strongest point. First he started with the reason that people want to show their bravery through watching horror movies. After the relatively common reason, he wrote that sometimes people watch horror movies to show their kindness. This opinion is a little strange but acceptable for audience. At last, he presented his strongest point which says that horror movies can help people control the negative emotions that generate from daily life. Initially, I would feel that the last point is completely unreasonable, if I read the bottom of the essay first. However after I read an ordinary and a strange reason, I was only shocked but didn’t feel doubtful about the third idea, because the previous reasons are acceptable and reasonable. I think Stephen King did a good job on organization and arrangement of information.

Besides his great arrangement, I think he provided an extraordinary opinion in his essay. He said that we accumulate anticivilized emotion during daily experience and we cannot release it wherever we want because we need to be kind to others in society so that the negative feeling will be hidden by ourselves. However, we are not saints; the negative emotion will not disappear without reason. If don’t find some method to deal with inner sinister mind, it will become an eruption of bad feeling which always makes us depressed. This is the exact reason I love to watch the horror movies or televisions, like Walking Death. We can absolutely put our inner sinister thinking on the main character in the movies so that we are released. Sometimes we make some mistakes in our lives and we feel guilty. When we watch the horror movies, the characters always manipulate many evil events. It really helps us to recover from the guilty feeling. The author analyzed the reason creatively and logically so that his ideas always point to our inner determination.

Even though, Stephen King’s idea is creative and convincing, I would like to seriously criticize his writing style. The biggest problem he has, from my perspectives, is he didn’t complete enough audience analysis before he started his work. It is widely spread all over the world to watch a horror movie but Stephen King still used plenty of stories in his essay to provide the most exact feeling for the local readers, but I was totally confused because I don’t have shared cultural background or personal experiences. For example, he mentioned the “horrible melting woman in Die, Monster Die!” to show the horrible feeling he got. (Ronnie Hackston) Yet I didn’t feel anything other than “here comes a woman.” So for me I think King need to use some worldwide known allegories to make up his essay.

In conclusion, I am going to say that this is a creative essay which provides us with a new perspective about people’s mental activities during different situations. I really value King’s critical thinking and logical analysis. In addition, he organized his idea smartly. The biggest problem is that he didn’t do the audience research seriously. Stephen King mentioned that in the beginning of the essay that we are mentally ill because we crave the horror movie. However, in my opinion, we are not patients. We just find a special ways to relax to release our inner sinister and gloomy thinking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work Cited

Ronnie Hackston. Die, Monster, Die. 14 Vol. London: British Film Institute, 2004. Print.