Why We Crave Horror Movies

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at the theater, or at home, are best off with a terrifying horror movie. The jumpy and scariest moments of the movie will have you holding onto your partner tightly. It also takes a lot of skill to actually scare the audience. To scare an audience is to create believable terror that is powerful enough to make an audience forget that they are watching a film. For that reason, it’s a genre which deserves more respect than it often gets. Lastly, they are fun to watch. They don’t just scare us, but they bring joy by making us laugh, like jumping at the cat that pops out of nowhere.

In Stephen King’s “Why We Crave Horror Movies”, his thesis is “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”. King says that horror movies appeal to the worst in us, and that is why we feel the need to watch them. He says that by watching horror movies, we help ourselves to keep our bad emotions to ourselves. “The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is the 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”. I don’t disagree with King, but how can we really say this about people who enjoy horror? Horror fans have all kinds of personalities, so this can’t apply to everyone.

People should seek out horror movies so they could experience the sensation, so you could get a good scare, and because in my opinion, it is the best film genre.