A Response to Stephen King’s
“Why We Crave Horror Movies”

If I’ve seen one horror movie, I’ve seen them all.  They come at a dime a dozen these days.  Stephen King’s essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies” looks at the importance of keeping a mind sane by watching violent horror movies.  He argues that a person needs to “keep the gators fed” because if we don’t get this horror “fix”, we could have anti-social emotions pouring out of everyone instead of being contained deep inside.  King is right to a certain degree, but he should have used a different genre in his essay.  Science fiction (sci-fi) makes people think.  Sci-fi stimulates the brain with intelligent stories, characters, and ideas.  The moral public should crave sci-fi movies rather than horror flicks to stay sane in this world.

Science fiction movies, more often than not, have more substantial plot lines than horro.  Many movies deal with discovering new life forms or diplomacy between two different species.  The whole basis for the Star Trek franchise is to find alien civilizations in deep space.  The plots deal with the consequences of initial and prolonged contact.  Rebels, dissenters, and malevolent beings make for interesting stories of betrayal, sabotage, and war.  Most people, however, have to overcome the view that aliens don’t exist to enjoy the scenarios in sci-fi.

Horror movies, on the other hand, have no clever plot lines.  How many times does a viewer come away after watching a horror film and ponder some kind of moral “what if” question or wonder how the director did that cool special effect?  Everybody knows the plot of a horror movie before they even sit down in the seats.  Some psycho/maniac/murderer gets released from mental hospital/prison/Hell and returns to kill all teenagers/camp counselors/party goers.  Is a chainsaw-wielding maniac really going to come after you?  Chances are, probably not.

Horror movies have no reasonable character development, either.  Film makers don’t distinguish one hero/heroine from the next because there is no point.  Nobody becomes attached or sympathetic to the characters because the majority of them die.  Don’t become emotionally attached.  What’s the point of setting yourself up for the great, big death scenes of the supporting characters?  The hero/heroine usually continues battling the psychopath in the next sequel, making new, expendable friends as they fight on.

In contrast, the characters in sci-fi are well developed.  Where would Star Wars be without Luke Skywalker and the gang?  There couldn’t be another Alien movie without the tough and endearing Ripley.  These characters have depth and emotions.  People wait patiently for their new adventures.  Viewers root them on against the bad aliens, hope for a romance with their sweetie, or just pray they lived on from the cliffhanger of the last movie.  These characters become our alter personas.  Watchers assume lives through them because we don’t live in the 24^th century or have advanced types of space technology yet.

Also, sci-fi has more original ideas than horror does.  There are countless kinds of aliens, planets, space craft that can be dreamed up.  Interactions between humans and aliens can have different twists.  Disasters in space, landing on planets in our own solar system, and events like black holes and the unknown have yet to make an impression in the movie markets.  These premises are waiting to be explored in greater detail.

Horror films, meanwhile, have been done to death.  All the horror movies now use elements from movies that were made twenty years ago.  Classics like The Exorcist and Halloween have been rehashed and incorporated into the trash of the late 80’s and 90’s.  The premises, the gore, and cheesiness of new films like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer have added to the tired qualities of the horror genre.

Milk does the body good, whereas science fiction does the mind good.  Sci-fi questions people’s beliefs about God and whether or not He made an advanced life on a different world somewhere out there.  Generally, we don’t know if aliens, good or bad, are going to make contact with us.  People may crave science fiction more because they want to see what might happen if or when aliens come to visit Earth.  That would be even more scary than horror because it could actually happen.  Watching a film like Close Encounters of the Third Kind may enlighten people to say “it could happen.”  Science fiction may help our minds figure out whether “the truth is out there” or not.

Horror movies have terrified me for a lifetime.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Stephen King’s IT have given me nightmares since the age of ten.  Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th movies are just as bad.  These kind of movies have no truth or morals to come out of them except violent warnings such as “don’t go partying with a leather-faced lunatic in the middle of a cornfield in Texas.”  Horror movies are for people looking for a ordinary thrill with no emotions, characters, or plot.

Science fiction appeals to almost anyone today, whether they are fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, The X-Files or all the rest.  These forms of entertainment provide us with a hope of a better future.  A mission to Mars, finding a life form different than ours, or traveling to other galaxies make people interested in what could be out there.  We want to crave and see that maybe even more than horror.  As King wrote, horror movies have a sense of emotional release on our part and that horror plays into our very primal brain reactions.  As a society, we must move beyond this basic, primal understanding and look to science fiction to expand our minds and open our eyes.

(10 paragraphs, 960 words, 3 pages, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point font)