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Stephen King Why We Crave Horror Movies Essay

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Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was mentally ill? If the only way for people to feel normal was to watch a horrific, bloody movie? In Stephen King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies”, King states that “we’re all mentally ill...those outside the asylum only hide it a little better”(King 1). I completely disagree, if we were all mentally ill, murder would be legal, and killing people would be a daily ritual. Also if we are supposedly “mentally ill” that means that even cute, pure babies are mentally ill also, and that they also crave a good horror movie. This suggests that there is not one person on this planet that doesn’t crave watching the blood and gore of horror movies. King’s statements are clearly false because we all know at least one person that is still afraid of the dark, let alone Jack the Ripper who cuts people’s bodies to shreds. So, if people openly reject the nightmare forced horror movies, that means we all don’t “crave” them. To begin with, Stephen King says that people watch horror movies “to re-establish our feelings of essential normality” when really if we …show more content…

One report by Bernie DeGroat says that watching horror movies can cause effects such as “inability to sleep through the night after exposure” to the graphic movie (DeGroat, par 3). After seeing the movie Jaws, one person said that the thing that scared him the most wasn’t the shark “or actual deaths that was frightening, but the blood” (DeGroat, par 9). According to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, people that watch horror movies are more prone to releasing their negative emotions, also called catharsis. Although, studies have shown that Aristotle is completely wrong, horror movies actually make people more aggressive than they were before watching the movie. Therefore, why would everyone crave horror movies when really they make us more

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