Stephen King Why We Crave Horror Movies Summary

Why We Crave Horror Essay Draft 1
Insanity. A staple within the horror genre. Even the thought of drifting without one’s rationality in tact is impossible to even comprehend. Or is it? How long will it take for someone to succumb to the insanity? In Stephen King’s essay, Why We Crave Horror Movies , he deals with these very questions. How everyone requires that desire for horror to feed our human condition. On the one hand, he is right when explaining that, to satisfy our anticivilization emotions, we demand periodic exercise. However, his views regarding the audience of those who watch horror movies to relieve their human condition is contradictory due to different pieces of evidence used to support that claim.
King is surely right about

the role horror movies plays in the human condition because of how it lets people relieve their negative emotions. King himself states,”But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand periodic exercise” (3) , and the horror genre is a great way to do so. The human condition is related to the human experience. The different experiences that happen in day-to-day life can have different effects on the human psyche, and can range from happiness and joy or a scarring instability of emotions. King suggests how we can use the horror genre as the gateway to deal with the negative emotions we experience. The horror genre is important to the wellbeing of anyone due to how we deal with the effects of the human experience.
Although King is right about some using the horror genre to deal with the negative emotions from the human condition, I cannot accept his view that everyone uses horror movies in order to deal with them.

King himself states, “I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better, after all.”, and this shows how he believes everyone has experienced that negative emotion (1). However, he later goes on using an analogy towards roller coasters, and stating, “And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably depleted.” (1). In other words, King introduces the idea that everyone is mentally ill and everyone deals with negative experiences using the horror genre, and then contradicts himself saying only a select few can relieve themselves of the emotions gained from the human condition. The statement of everyone relieving themselves from the horrors of the human experience, and then going on to describe only a select few can, is a blatant contradiction, which highlights the lack of reasoning in Kings

essay.
While King is probably wrong when he claims that everyone uses the horror genre to gain relief from the stresses of the human condition, I fully endorse his final conclusion that in the end, our fears are rationalized into the things we see in horror movies.

King states, “Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster.”, and what he means by this is the reason why that select people watch horror movies is because of how we come to terms with the things we fear. We perceive the things we fear and rationalize them through the content we watch, and King goes on to support this idea later on through the essay. In other words, to steer clear from irrationality, people use the horror genre to face the fears they have gained through the human

condition.
All things considered, although Kings essay has some rationality errors, it still provides a clear message. King provides the evidence and reasoning towards using the horror genre as relief for the human experiences and the human condition. The essay has logical errors concerning those of contradictory errors. However, using the horror genre to relieve experiences gained from the human condition, and rationalizing those fears using the horror genre is certainly logical.