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It is the end of a long week at school. The toppling pile of homework on your bedroom desk is not getting any shorter, while your stress is going through the roof. Everybody at school seems to be testing your patience and you feel like a meltdown is right around the corner. What’s the best way to relieve all this stress? Well, according to the king of horror himself, Stephen King, the best reliever is horror. In King’s essay,”Why We Crave Horror.” he states that the human condition requires this release of energy, and this release is best performed through horror. Although King may be correct in his idea of catharsis, his downfall comes when he claims that horror is the best release for everyone. In spite of his shortcomings, King made many valid points about catharsis. King states,”The potential lyncher is in …show more content…
He states things like,”If we are all insane, thyen sanity becomes a matter of degree”(2). While statements like this could just be attention grabbing devices, he continues to restate and expand upon ideas like this, and he is highly incorrect in these ideas. King is mistaking the human condition with mental illness. We are all different and have different coping mechanisms. I don’t think picking your nose or having a twitch is an indication of mental illness so it is unfair to identify it as such. Throughout King’s essay, he speaks about how “fun” and “cathartic” horror is. King says,”And we go to have fun”(1). A common theme throughout this essay is King’s constant display of bias and opinion which vastly outshines his use of facts and real evidence. This essay would have a much greater quality if he used facts and evidence from a study or real people other than himself. You cannot base a essay entirely off of opinion. While, yes he does have extensive experience in the field of horror, he is just one person. King does use a quote but it does not have any evidence of his claim, just more
There are two types of movies that provide psychic relief. One of those types of movies could be a horror film that makes everyone scream. The other type is a movie like Marley and Me that provides catharsis by making everyone cry. In Stephen King’s essay ¨Why We Crave Horror¨, he explains that the reason why we watch horror movies is because ¨… horror movies provide psychic relief¨. This is because he believes it is rare for people to have that opportunity to express such negative emotions when watching horror films. King’s argument has elements that agreeable and disagreeable. On the one hand, he is right when claiming that our emotions and fears need to be controlled by an exercise; however, his belief that horror movies provide psychic
King, who has explored almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires, rabid dogs, deranged killers, pyromaniac ghosts, to telekinesis, biological warfare and even a malevolent automobile was known for his horror stories, and strange deaths.
...see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky;” He uses historical and biblical evidence to support his arguments. He organizes his arguments perfectly in order to persuade in the most effective way possible. King knew rhetoric. At the end of his letter, he finished up by showing his true reason for fighting his fight. He said, “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less that brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”
One of America’s famous actress film director and producer Katie Aselton once said,” I don’t love horror movies with something surreal happening. That doesn’t work for me. What’s terrifying is something that could actually happen to me and what I would do. I don’t know how to throw a punch, and I’ve never had to do it.” This quote shows connection to King’s article. I’m starting to consider that everyone has a crazy side. Why We Crave Horror Movies explains the reason people want to go see horror movies. The average person enjoys the horror movies because they are in a safe environment knowing they can not be harmed. By discussing the argumentative strategies such as ethos, logos,
Eight Alabama clergymen made a public statement directed towards Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. containing many criticisms against the civil rights movement. The criticisms were as follows: (1) The issue of race relations should be handled by local leaders instead of “outsiders” like himself. (2) Pressing the court and negotiation among local leaders is a better path. (3) The Negro community should be more patient, for the workings of the legal system take time. (4) The demonstrations are “unwise and untimely.” (5) The methods used by demonstrators are extreme and (6) If it weren’t for the police, your demonstrations would have turned violent. As a result, King, while imprisoned in the Birmingham City Jail, wrote them a lengthy letter that refuted all of the aforementioned criticisms and then proceeded to express his disappointment in them for saying such things. Through his skillful use of diction, anaphoras, rhetorical appeals, and syntax, King successfully achieves his purposes: to refute claims made by the eight clergymen while justifying his reasons for the demonstrations he lead and to encourage the clergymen to join his cause.
He used rhetorical techniques such as allusion, irony and metaphors. These were all ways of connecting to his reasoning’s by using an element of life or something that we are well aware of. He also used different types of appeals, which were pathos, logos and ethos. Each of these appeals had drawn us into his reading in different ways to connect to our emotions and the most affective was the common logic he brought and his credibility of being a well-experienced person in horror. Common logic is the best way to catch your readers attention because if they understand what you are proclaiming then they can grasp onto your argument. For Why We Crave Horror Movies, King gave both visible common logic and hidden. The hidden had to do with the psychological reasons to why we desire horror movies and how it can release our hidden, evil emotions that we normally keep inside of us. Also, it relieves us of stress to not be in the real world even if it is just for an hour or more. These hidden logic is more of a realization for the readers and come into sense these are the reasons why we truly do crave horror
horror movies, King argues that “we are all mentally ill” (345). He expresses that we all
Overall, in Stephen King’s essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies”, his suggestion that we view horror movies to “reestablish our feelings of essential normality” (562) and there is a “potential lyncher in almost all of us” (562) has brought forth many aspects that I have never really thought about. Why do we have so much excitement when it comes to horror films? Everyone has their own opinion, which will never end with one definite answer. Stephen King thinks there’s and evil in all of us, but I don’t think so. The evil only comes out if you make it, we do not need horror films for psychic
The clergymen claim colored people have become very violent towards civilians to the point that authoritative figures have been necessary in order to stop the commotion and protect the civilians in Birmingham city. King did a great job in ...
He uses this and a logical tone to coerce the audience’s trust. It is a cheap tactic for “establishing ethos.” All we know about King is that he writes in the horror/thriller genre what we don’t see is King explaining where his information comes from. He doesn’t share where his research came from, or whether there were any studies done on this particular topic. King’s only example of how this applies to real life include Jack the Ripper, The Cleveland Torso Murderer, and a ten-year-old child. His examples are slim and we have no actual proof that they snapped because they couldn’t release their violent, murderous tendencies through socially accepted outlets. We have no way to test his credibility and so his essay becomes ineffective and less like a serious academic argumentative essay than a joke. The anecdote about the ten-year-old is equally questionable as the child in question is an unknown subject. King introduces the joke without any reference as to who the child was or in what context the joke came out. For all the audience is aware the child could have been open to very vulgar materials which would naturally corrupt it’s mind, or that the child was put up to tell Stephen King the joke as a result of King’s reputation. Another aspect that brings me to the conclusion that King’s essay is ineffective is that he never sourced the critic. The one quote King shares
evidence of Stephen King being very interest in horror showed in his work in his early
King owes his success to his ability to take what he says are “real fears” (The Stephen King Story, 47) and turn them into a horror story. When he says “real fears” they are things we have all thought of such as a monster under the bed or even a child kidnapping and he is making them a reality in his story. King looks at “horror fiction...as a metaphor” (46) for everything that goes wrong in our lives. His mind and writing seems to dwell in the depths of the American people’s fears and nightmares and this is what causes his writing to reach so many people and cause the terror he writes about to be instilled in his reader.
For instance the claim that is not to be agreed with in King’s essay is the one where he declares “The fun comes from seeing others menaced - sometimes killed” (2). King has the mindset that the reason we find horror movies entertaining is because of the torture the characters go through. This opinion of his is completely unacceptable because even though we all have our bad side, the satisfaction isn’t from seeing the people playing the roles die; but from the movie as a whole that is filled with feelings of suspense, curiosity, fear, excitement and so many more
This essay is very influential from the start to the very end. He uses terms that make oppression seem to terrible, to make them feel bad about what they let happen. King seems very successful in capturing the audience that he intended to capture through stating scripture to draw in the Christians, words that are used to describe things that would be so much worse; like using evil to describe oppression or unjust, to writing it down in an obvious form that everyone could understand. He left them with very powerful messages that will linger in their minds until they cannot take it anymore, until they see that it is actually wrong and do something to fix the justice system to which they are governed under. By leaving with that thought of mind, he was very successful in getting his point through to all he intended it for.
I don’t disagree with King in his opinion at all, but I feel that maybe this was a bit of a simple answer to a very loaded question. I mean can we really say this about all horror fans? Horror fans have all kinds of different occupations, personalities, and backgrounds so obviously this theory can’t apply to everyone, so in this case, I can only really say why I watch horror movies, and ask you to do some kind of self reflection on your own.