We then read an article by Stephen King and answered some questions.
Before reading,
think about your own attitude toward horror films. Would you say you enjoy or
even “crave” them? Are you repulsed by them? Indifferent?
Why We Crave Horror Movies
By
Stephen King
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. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who
sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one
is watching, people who have some hysterical fear – of snakes, the dark, the tight
place, the long drop . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are
waiting so patiently underground.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat
ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are
daring the nightmare. 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.
Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream
out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists
through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. 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.
If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a
matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the
Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm; if,
on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re
under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone
to go about your business . . . though it is doubtful that you will ever be
invited to the best parties.
The potential lyncher is in almost all of us, and
every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around in the
grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize that it
demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these
emotional muscles are accepted – even exalted – in civilized society; they are,
of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization
itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness -- these are all the emotions that
we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets of Hallmark
cards.
When we exhibit these emotions, society showers
us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of
diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give
her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the
sweetest little thing?” Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham
crackers often follow. But 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.
But anti-civilization emotions don’t go away, and
they demand periodic exercise. We have such “sick” jokes as, “What’s the
difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead
babies?” (You can’t unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork . . .
a joke, by the way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke
may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility that
confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an
insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke
or insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the
best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at
the same time. The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to
do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity
unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized .
. . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark.
For those reasons, good liberals often shy away
from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them – Dawn of the Dead, for
instance – as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket
of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river
beneath.
Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting
out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney
who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that.
As long as you keep the gators fed.
Write down two things people
do that makes King think we are all mentally ill.
1
2
Explain what King means by
“daring the nightmare”
How are a roller coaster and
a horror movie alike?
King says that we need to
exercise our emotional muscles. Can you
think of some ways that we exercise the emotions of love? What are some ways that we exercise the
emotion of friendship?
Love:
Friendship:
King compares horror movies
to fairy tales. Is there any fairy tale
you can think of that has gruesome parts to it?
Which one?
ON THE BACK OF THIS PAPER,
ANSWER THE FOLLOWING IN ABOUT 100 WORDS:
In this essay, King appears
to be suggesting that horror films perform a social function by allowing us to
exercise or possibly exorcise our “anti-civilization emotions.” How do you
react to this idea? What does it imply about the general role of literature,
film, video games and art in society?
