Stephen King
Stephen King, in his essay Why We Crave Horror Movies, takes a humoristic yet insightful take on the human tendency to revel in freak, absurd and morbid expressions through the medium of horror movies. In his essay, King states that everybody is insane and the sanity is only the degree to which a human is insane. He states that people watch horror movies to feed their inner demons and to lock up their insanity to be acceptable to the society. The essay portrays rather disturbingly the truth behind people’s need to watch horror movies.
Use of Literary Devices
In this essay, the author has extensively used literary devices such as metaphor, rhetorical question and irony to make it easier for the reader to understand the full-meaning of his thesis.
1. Metaphor:
Another metaphor that the author uses is the similarities between the horror movies and roller coaster rides “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”. Here, the author states that horror movies are similar to roller coaster rides since they have the same appeal of twists and turns for the youngsters.
2. Irony:
According to the author, the people who crave for or watch horror movies get delighted by witnessing the agony and pain of the victims or characters in the movie and of course with buttered popcorns. The lines “The potential lyncher is in all of us (excluding saints, past and present; but then, most saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass” clearly bring out the irony of emotions.
Another instance where irony shows up is when the author comes up with the dead baby joke which he apparently has heard from a 10-year old kid. “‘What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls anda truckload of dead babies’ (You can’t unload the truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork.)” This morbid joke seems to fulfil two purposes for the author: one it establishes his theory about the human’s desire to be delighted in other’s pains and second it reiterates the same point because the reader actually gets entertained.
3. Examples:
4. Humour:
5. Rhetoric Question:
The title of the essay is itself a rhetoric question that forces the reader to think and analyse the nature of human behind. The answer to this question is very craftily given by the author by saying that it is an excuse to satisfy the inner alligators of the human mind that needs to be fed from time to time.
6. Slang:
