Horror

Horror Movie Fear

In Stephen King's "Why We Crave Horror Movies," he discusses how we are all mentally ill, and how we get pleasure out of scaring ourselves. King explains how we pay for movies to scare us, rides to shock us. How gore can turn in to humor at even a very young age. Horror movies are intended to scare us we watch them knowing this. However, are they unhealthy for us and children, desensitize, and do they create new fears?

While we sit in our living rooms watching a crazed murder run through the woods and slaughter an entire Boy Scout troop, we are shocked but not completely scared. Why? Because we can just pull the blanket up a little farther, and continue watching the horror. These movies create a kind of "safe fear." This lets us push our limits but still be in control of how scary it really is. For example too scary, turn the lights on, invite more friends, not scary enough, turn off all the lights in the house. You can always stay in charge of your environment, but we are not crazy because we do this as King suggests.

These movies also are teaching younger children that violence can be ok. Could this possibly be creating future murders? In the movie "Saw", a man kidnaps people then has them torture them selves, in the end he gets away with it, without getting in trouble. Is this something that children should be able to see? Another example would be "Dawn of The Dead", a group of men going around killing "zombies", and young children not understanding this might think it is ok to kill. Horror movies are corrupting children, teaching them awful things.

These movies are also desensitizing people from real life. Most of us are guilty of slowing down to stair at car accidents. We secretly have a desire to see something we know we should not, to see something that might scare us. These horror movies have us craving for a scare. Like a drug, we need more fear and a bigger fright every time. First, it is just a cat jumping out on the screen scaring us, and then it is a lake monster, every time pushing it farther. As King states, "we are