Why We Crave Horror Movies

Emotions serve as an overarching theme in the essay, particularly the more specific emotion of fear. King addresses the difference between “good” and “bad” emotions and how horror movies allow people to experience negative emotions in an imaginary world instead of letting them run rampant in the real world, thus letting inherent “insanity” briefly run free in a controlled setting.

He describes the emotions that polite society allows, such as love and kindness, and how these good emotions are what society and people are supposed to strive for: “When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement” (Paragraph 10). On the other hand, “anticivilization,” or “bad,” emotions will always exist and, King posits, require frequent exercise to keep the “dark side” of humanity sated. Otherwise, the danger is that these dark emotions might escape into the real world. He doesn’t name these anticivilization emotions but instead uses a vignette to illustrate them:

When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers in the door, sanctions follow—angry remonstrance from parents, aunts, and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking (Paragraph 10).

People shouldn’t be punished for having these negative emotions, but they shouldn’t act on them either, he emphasizes. Instead, one safe way to experience them is through horror movies. Society frowns on the primal desire to hurt another human or the pleasure derived from laughing at an inappropriate joke, but everyone experiences dark emotions like hatred, anger, or malevolence. Horror movies allow people to take pleasure in someone else’s pain without being responsible for it. Viewers can watch a character get killed (a person they know isn’t real and who is distant from their own lives) by a murderer whose perception is detached from reality.

Good and bad emotions must coexist; one can’t exist without the other. King argues that in order to have love and kindness, we must in some way address the more dangerous emotions—those that could make some people “insane,” such as most representations of serial killers or horror movie villains. Additionally, he hints at the separation between good and bad emotions—and echoes that binary when he argues that horror movies emphasize absolutes rather than the “gray” middle area.

He concludes, “It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed” (Paragraphs 13- 14). Good versus bad is a theme that appears in many of his other works, and many other films and novels, horror or not, in the form of the fight between good and evil. Although the essay doesn’t explicitly mention this, good versus bad emotions tie in with the good-versus-evil trope. One can think of good characters as exemplifying good emotions and evil characters as feeding their bad emotions.