Stephen King Why We Crave Horror Movies Summary

My grandma once told me, “If you stay up too late at night, the boogeyman will get you”. I never believed her but I knew I wouldn’t want to see the Boogeyman if he actually existed. Most people would actually want to watch these horrible beings. In this case, they would want to view a horror movie such as “Friday the 13” or “Nightmare on Elm Street”. It is part of our Human Condition to be attracted to the films and asking for more. Stephen King’s claims in “Why we crave horror” asserts us that humans crave horror to face our fears, to re-establish our feelings of normalcy, and to experience a peculiar sort of fun.

The question of what it means to be labelled ‘psychologically abnormal’ is examined closely in Rosenhans study of ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’. This study highlights the usefulness and consequences of being diagnostically labelled.

Over 18.2% of the adult American population has been clinically diagnosed as insane. Insanity Is a large concept to understand. It can make anyone diagnosed do things that their full body is not aware of. It can also get people out of certain situations like a court case. In court if one are diagnosed as insane, one would get sent to a mental asylum instead of a prison. This way the person diagnosed can be taken care of. In the recent case of the slenderman stabbing, that has lasted four years, Anissa Weier was sentenced to an asylum instead of being sentenced to prison, for she was diagnosed insane. If Mary Moloney was in court for the murder of her husband, she would be in a mental institution. In lamb to the slaughter, by Roald Dahl, Mary Moloney over reacts and kills her husband using a frozen leg of lamb. Mary had killed Patrick, her husband, because she had received bad news, but the audience does not know what the news is. In Lamb to the Slaughter, by Roald Dahl, Mary Maloney portrays insanity because she overreacted and killed her husband, Talked to herself and laughed at her husband’s death and changed moods in the blink of an eye.

Sanity is subjective. Every individual is insane to another; however it is the people who possess the greatest self-restraint that prosper in acting “normal”. This is achieved by thrusting the title of insanity onto others who may be unlike oneself, although in reality, are simply non-conforming, as opposed to insane. In Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, this fine line between sanity and insanity is explored to great lengths. Through the unveiling of Susanna’s past, the reasoning behind her commitment to McLean Hospital for the mentally ill, and varying definitions of the diagnosis that Susanna received, it is evident that social non-conformity is often confused with insanity.

horror movies, King argues that “we are all mentally ill” (345). He expresses that we all

In fact By comparing ourselves to the author, narrator, and the victims the events that Stephen King points out. We establish ourselves and process what's going on. The reason we crave horror is because it gives us that thrill that urge to feel normal once again and we as people actually enjoy watching a man's head get severed off by some crazy maniac that's trying to kill him. Or for example, Stephen King shows in why we crave horror;shows, Freda Jackson as the horrible melting women in Die, Monster, Die! Confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or Diana Ross, we are still light-years from the true ugliness.

Which is the next thing that Steven King says horror films does for us. As he says, "When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theatre showing a horror movie we are daring the nightmare."(443).As to say that we are challenging are fear, to say yah I beat it I beat the monster. When I watch a horror film I feel unprotected, isolated, and

While reading the story Opening Skinners Box wrote by Lauren Slater there was a chapter that made me look at the world like I do and how sometimes the world relates to a story. The chapter was On Being Sane in Insane Places” while reading this chapter I seen and I was thinking that some of the things being said in the book was true. Sometimes people make wrong choices and they chose paths that lead them to bad consequence. Then we have those people that are born with this, bad consequences. Sometimes we have to face the world and how the world is. Sometimes it is not their fault that they are the way that they are. Some of them are just born that way because of their chromosomes that are way too much or some that don’t fully develop.

Do you enjoy watching murder, the paranormal, and any other morbid scene which makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, your palms sweat, and your adrenaline surge? Why people enjoy watching murder, tragedy, and carnage in their spare time has been a mysterious phenomenon. If these gruesomely horrific scenes would not be enjoyable in real life, why is watching a recreation of it so riveting? Stephen King, a world-renowned horror novelist, wrote “Why We Crave Horror Movies” to give insight as to why horror movies, although gruesome and morbid, captivate audiences. King also aims to persuade readers to continue to watch horror movies, arguing that they are a crucial part of keeping sanity. King delves into this psychological aspect of humans and believes that the desire to watch horror films is a normal tendency of humankind. “Why We Crave Horror Movies” includes appeals to emotion, logic, and author credibility in order to convince readers of the positive, normal desire to watch horror films, why it is important to watch them, and why the reader should believe what the author is saying. King utilizes the rhetorical devices—pathos, logos, and ethos—in an effective way through the use of metaphor, logic, humor, and emotion to persuade readers that watching horror films is normal.

Sanity and insanity are two deeply intertwined concepts. Any observation made upon the nature of either conversely reshapes our understanding of the other. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, there is a power struggle in a psychiatric ward between two conflicting definitions of sanity and insanity and what behaviour can be categorized as such. Miss Ratched’s sanity is achieved through a rigid hierarchal network of rules that enforces uniformity and order while the patients’ revolutionary sanity achieved solely through rebelling from the rules that limit the individual’s freedom and sense of self. In detailing the tension between two opposite views on sanity, Kesey scrutinizes the way society forms its perceptions towards sanity and exposes the flaws in its narrow definition of sanity. The process of defining sanity is formed by rules that act as the model of sanity which is inherently unjust to non-conforming

In Stephen King’s somewhat subjective essay in the 1984 Playboy magazine, Why We Crave Horror Movies, King describes his reasoning behind why so many people are fond of watching movies residing in the horror genre. The content of his essay, though inserted in an unconventional area for

In the essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies” by Stephen King, the author talks about the benefits of the horror movies on human beings. He argues that we all behave like mad people by performing weird things like talking to ourselves, showing disgusting faces and having odd fears. Comparing the horror movies with roller coasters, he states that young people are more fascinated by these adventures to prove the point that they can do this and are not afraid of taking challenges. He argues that we get fun by watching people getting hurt and suffering from menacing pain in the movies. Despite having insane thoughts in their mind which they want to execute in reality people are expected to show emotions that are accepted by the society. Horror movies gives psychic relief to these insane

In the article On Being Sane in Insane Places, the problem is trying to figure out if sane people can be distinguished from the insane and what is or is not normal. This article talks about an experiment that was done to see if sane people were detected from the insane or not and how it was conducted. It states that “normality is distinct enough that it can be recognized wherever it occurs, for it is carried within a person.” This article will prove if this theory is correct or not and how the information for the answer was gathered.

It was a dark, cold, November night. The moon overlooked the lake as it mirrored its reflection. It was peaceful, too peaceful. I was on my way to my aunt’s, who lived a mile or so from my house. I didn’t want to go, but my mother made me. She was working a double shift at the hospital and she didn’t want me to be alone tonight. Tonight was the night my brother died two years ago. It’s a funny story how it happened, but that’s a story to tell another time. According to Stephen King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies” he draws viewers into horror stories like the one above simply because we crave it. King claims in his essay we obsess over the wanting of horror as if we are daring the nightmare. The human condition is finally allows people

“To some extent insanity is a form of conformity; people are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. But it’s really not so simple…I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also” (qtd. in “John Forbes Nash”). To many “normal” people, the terms “insanity” or “madness” portray a negative connotation-- the unfortunate ones “suffer” from mental illness. However, brilliant mathematician and Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash, who has paranoid schizophrenia, cherishes his unique condition as a means of retreat from the brutalities of reality (“John Forbes Nash”). Since ancient times, people have observed the link between madness and creative genius. Indeed, research has proven that the two conditions of