Why We Crave Horror Movies

In a few places, King uses parenthetical asides to interject personal thoughts unrelated to the essay’s argument and provide a bit of color and insight into his (mildly “insane”) brain: “If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper and the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away to the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh)” (Paragraph 8). Additionally, he takes a jab at Leonard Nimoy’s poetry—“I don’t dare call it poetry” (Paragraph 9)—a remark illustrating that King, too, has negative (anticivilization) emotions and thoughts. The essay would work without these asides, but they help make King relatable, fostering the sense that he’s part of the “we” in the essay’s point of view and adding to its informal, conversational tone.

The essay occasionally uses the rhetorical strategy of hypophora, in which King asks questions that he immediately answers. For example, in Paragraph 3, he asks why people watch horror movies and then answers the question: “To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster.” King again uses this technique in his list of reasons why people crave the genre. Another example is in Paragraph 13, which asks “Why bother?” in relation to feeding the alligators in the deep recesses of one’s brain, answering that it hinders their escape. It keeps those anticivilization emotions and primal urges from entering the real world. In both instances, King anticipates questions that readers may have and supports the essay’s title. In fact, given the title, the entire essay is an example of hypophora.

The essay uses strong imagery to evoke specific pictures and connect the argument and themes of emotion and “insanity” to concrete examples. The imagery of “puke of a little sister” evokes the emotion of distaste (Paragraph 10), but using the word “puke” also connects to the sense of taste, inviting memories of vomiting. Likewise, the line “pick your nose on the morning bus” (Paragraph 8) creates a clear image, suggesting that picking one’s nose is an example of mild “insanity” (in comparison to the extreme example of serial killers) and evoking disgust. The imagery of “hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath” (Paragraph 12) conjures a picture in the imagination that suggests the negative emotions that live beneath the civilized ones in a person’s brain.

King uses metaphors in the essay to illustrate its points and create more connection with readers. His choice of an alligator as living below the “civilized forebrain” is no accident: “I […] see the most aggressive [horror movies]—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 […] beneath” (Paragraph 12). An alligator is a reptile, so the image alludes to the human brain’s reptilian and primal aspects, those automatic functions that ensure survival and are disconnected from logic and rationality. The raw meat he refers to is the experience of viewing a horror movie to calm those irrational fears and keep the alligators at bay.