Why We Crave Horror Movies

The essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies” interweaves point of view, structure, and tone to address the foundational themes of fear, emotions, and “insanity” in relation to horror movies. It examines why horror films allow the expression of fearful emotions linked to irrationality. The essay integrates literary techniques and pop culture references to form a cohesive whole, and it highlights several key themes: Good Versus Bad Emotions, The Expression of Fear Through Horror Movies, and “Insanity” and Normality in Society and Horror Film.

King argues that fear and other negative emotions are universal and that horror movies are a key art form for expressing these emotions. The essay gives audiences permission to experience and enjoy these films as a vehicle for fears.

First published in Playboy magazine, the short essay is aimed at general readers and uses a casual tone and has an informal structure and perspective that rely partially on readers’ personal knowledge and experiences to support its arguments. King excludes discussion of his own works or film adaptations, instead assuming that readers know who he is or have seen these adaptations (or other horror films). He could have referenced the screen adaptations of Carrie, Salem’s Lot, or The Shining but instead lets readers draw their own inferences from the essay’s themes. Readers don’t need to know who he is to understand his points because the essay discusses the universal theme and experience of fear.

King uses the first-person point of view, integrating the word “we” throughout the essay to convey not only this informal perspective but also the sense that everyone is the same, including him, when it comes to fear. Everyone has a sense of fear about something, although specific fears differ, and everyone fears death. People need horror movies to experience their fears safely. Even the essay’s title emphasizes this collective point of view through the use of “we.” King sometimes uses “I” to distinguish his personal experiences from the rest of the argument—for example, when he discloses that he personally needs horror movies for his own “sanity.” However, because he has used “we” throughout the essay, readers feel included in this statement.

The text follows the general form of an essay, presented in a casual, conversational manner, rather than presenting a thesis statement and supporting research like an argumentative essay would. It instead relies on people’s universal experiences with fear and readers’ experiences watching horror movies to support the reasons for their desire to see them—not only despite their scary elements, but also because of these elements, which provide a conduit for experiencing and expressing fear safely.

King knows how to create a “hook” that draws readers in from the beginning of a novel, and he uses this skill to begin the essay, opening with the line, “I think that we’re all mentally ill” (Paragraph 1). This assertion invites consideration of whether that statement contains any truth by continuing to read to find out more. The introductory paragraph explains that King thinks everyone is a little “insane” because of irrational fears. Horror movies play on those fears and allow audiences to experience them in a safe way, he argues, and he details the reasons that people are continually drawn to horror movies.

Following his introduction to the concepts of “insanity” and fear, he outlines why people view horror films: to prove that they have no fear, for amusement, and to confirm the sense that they’re “normal.” He mentions only two movies by name (Die, Monster, Die! and Dawn of the Dead), assuming that readers will have seen some or many horror movies and can relate to the essay through their personal experience. Contemporary readers may have seen The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, The Shining, Carrie, Jaws, or Halloween, and later movies but may be unaware of the connection between the fear-for-amusement aspect of their moviegoing and the primal fears that exist in their lives. King points this out, though he doesn’t address the societal fears at the time of publication that serve as themes for some contemporary films of the period.

In addition to an informal structure, the tone of the essay is frequently humorous and casual. For example, King makes a joke about Jack the Ripper and the Cleveland Torso Murderer, noting that “neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh” (Paragraph 8), an example of his own propensity to make jokes like the ones he refers to in Paragraph 11. He also makes a joking aside about the poor quality of actor Leonard Nimoy’s poetry.

The diction of the essay relies on descriptive word choices like “puke of a sister” (Paragraph 10) and “people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces” (Paragraph 1), playful phrases that create a specific picture through imagery. Other word choices are more formal, such as “remonstrance,” “anarchistic,” and “penchant.”

In some places, the essay’s sentence structure becomes more formal through the use of complex and longer sentences. For instance, King writes, “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” (Paragraph 9). King blends these more complex sentences with shorter sentences, and this varied sentence structure contributes to the flow of the essay, keeping it from feeling choppy through too many simple, short sentences or from feeling too formal or academic through too many complex sentences.

To support his argument, King uses literary techniques like metaphors, analogies, overstatements, and vignettes. He compares horror movies to getting on a roller coaster, a similarly scary experience in which people face their fears, and he likens audiences’ primal fears that horror movies sate to voracious alligators living below the forebrain in the mind. In addition, he parallels the effect of watching horror films on “anticivilization” emotions to exercising one’s muscles. He draws analogies between the pleasure people derive from both horror movies and “sick” jokes, and he uses overstatement by juxtaposing horror films with public lynchings of the past, a provocative comparison. He provides a vignette about slamming a sister’s fingers in the door to illustrate the negative emotions a sibling might feel toward their sister. The joke he references in Paragraph 11 about “dead babies” serves double duty: It relates “sick” jokes to the pleasure people get from watching horror movies and also shows those who laugh at it that they are the exact type of person he’s speaking to.

Because King is writing for a general audience, he uses pop culture references to engage the reader and make his points, referring to actors and musicians like Leonard Nimoy, Robert Redford, Diana Ross, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney, such as comparing the attractiveness of Robert Redford and Diana Ross to the “hideousness” of one of the characters in the film Die, Monster, Die!.

Near the end of the essay, King touches on what makes a quality horror movie, arguing that high-quality horror films confirm a sense of “normality” while also opposing the norm and promoting radical change. This is in line with Wilson’s statement that “they serve a wider moral purpose, reinforcing social taboos and demonstrating the macabre fate of those who transgress against our collective rules.” (Wilson, Karina. “Horror Film History”).

King concludes that horror movies are meant to attract people’s “dark side” and yet shows how the genre is necessary to keep the “hungry alligators” at bay and stanch the psyche’s “insanity” from bleeding into the real world, a notion he repeats in Danse Macabre: “I believe that the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears” (King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1981). He ends on a positive note that illustrates how he has moved from his beginning premise of universal fear and “insanity” to showing the necessity of those things for a better world. Society must have “evil” to have “good,” a theme that shows up in many of his works.