Why We Crave Horror Movies

In-Class Essay

I personally would like to agree with King in his statement that "we are all

mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it better- and maybe not all that much better, after all." It may be a hard concept to grasp that we are all mentally ill, but I would find it even harder to believe that any of us are perfect. Some people, including myself, love to believe we are normal, but we don't really know what normal is. Tosupport the fact that I agree with King's assertion, I intend to use a couple different examples such as, television, road rage, and of course music.

First of all, let's start off with television. Almost all of us watch television, and we all see how violent and demonic it can be. For anyone who believes TV is not a major example of mental retardation, they are also mentally ill. If you take a baby and expose that child to nothing but TV for the first ten years of his or her life, that child will learn about murder, drugs, suicide, rape, robbery, terrorism, pornography, kidnapping, serial killers, and more. All the things I previously mentioned can be found just from watching the news, never mind everything else. Just recently I read an article in class that had statistics that showed that " prime time programs contain 3-5 violent acts per hour while children's programming contains 20-25 in the same length of time"; that's sickening. I am not saying that TV is a source of mental illness but the things on TV are pretty ill in themselves.

Next, we come to road rage; with road rage I believe that most people will agree that road rage is a mental illness; most people will agree that anyone who chases someone down for cutting them off at a light is pretty insane. But little does everyone know that they probably suffer from the same rage; they just may control it better. How many times have you been cut off and given or have wanted to give someone an obscene gesture? Maybe you made a mistake and someone gave you the finger so you returned with the same belittling gesture, or even simply started to feel angry at someone in front of you who is going too slow for your liking (usually because they are elderly and don't have as quick a reaction time as you want them to have). Almost all of us have road rage, just some of us have it worse than others. You are not better than the next person just because you don't chase people with weapons. Even if you get irritated at losing a parking spot you had first, you have the mental illness of road rage also.

Lastly, let's take a look at music. If you listen to some of the words in music, you should agree that there are some mentally ill people making it. For example, if you look at some rap and rock songs out there, you hear some pretty demonic lines, and at the concerts you see some pretty crazy people on stage. If you