In Stephen Kings essay “ Why We Crave Horror Movies” he claims that we are all mentally ill. According to King, people’s quirks are proof of this.
The antidote to our mental illness, king says, is that we watch horror movies to “ re-establish our feelings of essential normality”. King also says that we watch them to satisfy the bad in us. We all do crazy things in our lives.
Once in awhile we all want to thrash out on someone, to prove a point, or just to hurt them for the sake of hurting them. We do not do this instead we watch horror movies, ride roller coasters and let our frustrations out through our imagination, rather than physical action. In King’s “…
horror movies” he explains that “ if we are all insane” then in reality, this is what makes us normal. We can tell that one is what we call abnormal or crazy by the degree of insanity they contain. This being said, ones degree of insanity can vary from a person talking to themselves while in a stressful situation, to having the urge to “ carve up women like Jack The Ripper”, this is the way we can determine if one needs to be institutionalized or not. Or if one is within the realm of normal or so insane that they are harmful. Stephen King claims that “ we are all mentally ill”.
He is right, everyone in the world is mentally ill in one way or another. No one is perfect; as King points out we all do odd things. Some people tend to talk to themselves, have to have everything just right everyday or they go crazy, and just do odd things from day to day without giving it a second thought. We do things that are life threatening just to say that we could do it and do things that make us scared just to say that we were able to. We watch movies that freak us out, do crazy stunts, and do things that could end with us giving our lives just for the thrill of it. No one is perfectly normal or perfect in any sense we all do something crazy at some point of our lives, some do such every day. Everyone does it and everyone is insane to a point that it is considered normal, and is almost expected of people.
We do not call ourselves insane or think of ourselves as insane because everyone has some insanity in their lives so we just think of it as the way of life. Not thinking of how insane we are by doing it. To a point everyone is mentally ill, there is a little insanity in all of us. We all have a little insanity in us no matter how normal we think we are. Our sanity is calculated by how we show are insanity. “ If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree”. So we are all a little insane at least. The question is on what level of insanity we are in, and what we do about it.
Some actually go out and do the killing or act completely crazy and we send them to asylums or prisons. So some people are a little saner then others but that does not make us perfectly sane. Our sanity is based on how we act throughout our lives and how we control our level of insanity. Everyone has some form of frustrations and everyone gets overwhelmed at some point in their lives. Society does not let us act upon them or let our frustrations out by hurting someone our being completely crazy. So we have to have some other form of escape so that we will not be sent to an asylum. For some horror movies are their escape. They are a way for us to let out our anger and frustration by watching someone else get hurt without actually doing it ourselves.
Steven King explains that horror movies are a way for people to feed their gators. Meaning we watch the movies to satisfy the bad feelings that we all have. It gives us the feeling of hurting someone without actually doing it. We can watch the movies or play the games and when we are done turn it off.
Then we can go on with our lives and be the way our society wants us to be. The movies, games, and books we read and watch that are full of horror and killings are our way to vent without actually doing anything. We can let out all of our frustrations we have without getting into any trouble. There is killing or some form of someone getting hurt in everything these days.
There are books, movies, and TV shows packed full of people getting killed or hurt. Even the sweet little Disney movies are full of it. Even in cartoons the characters are always getting flattened by something, or their faces turned around. In Disney movies the witch or bad guy is always getting killed.
We have become desensitized to such graphic visualizations and gore throughout our lives. We have grown up watching and hearing about people getting hurt or injured. We have grown accustomed to it.
So we do not even think about what it does to us and how much we start to crave it. We do find it fun as Stephen King says because it is just the way of our lives so we are used to it. From the days that we were little until now everyone has been taught right from wrong. We have been told what to do and what not to do. A lot of the times we want to do what we are told not to do. But like King said “ if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers in the door, sanctions follow – angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking. ” So we need a form of venting before we end up in an asylum.
Horror movies and the other crazy things we do are ways of letting all that out without actually doing anything our-selves. It is a way for us all to vent. It keeps us from going insane and reacting. King said “ horror movies appeal to the worst in us”. He is correct. We cannot go out and murder someone like killers have.
We would be sent to prisons or even killed like them. Society has taught us that it is wrong. So instead we get our thrill from watching people get killed or hurt in a movie.
It lets us vent and then we go on with our lives. As humans we all seem to crave being scared sometimes. We ride roller coasters and watch movies that tend to freak us out. When we are done with it we want to do it all over again. We crave the thrill and the feeling of not knowing what is going to happen next. That is a little insane because although we are freaked out by it we do it over and over again.
People would think that if something scared us we would stop watching it or doing it. But as humans we do not. We crave it more and more. For some people the more something scares them the more they crave it. We all are a little mentally ill, but everyone is to a point so it makes it normal for us.
It makes us not think about our insanity and just live our lives. We are just humans fighting with the right and the wrong inside of us. We have to let it out somehow. We watch people getting killed and do not even think about it afterwards.
