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Why We Crave Horror Movies—By Stephen King
I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all
that much better, after all. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their
faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching, people who have some hysterical fear – of
snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting
so patiently underground.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a
horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride
this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at
some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a
lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of
the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be
considerably depleted.
We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even
reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no matter
how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from
true ugliness.
And we go to have fun.
