Essays

Personal opinions about the work Why We Crave Horror Movies
We human beings all are more or less abnormal, in some way, but we never admit that we are, we just live in disguise pretending that everything is normal and try to control ourselves to not to generate embarrassment in front of other people. However, it’s really hard from us to wear the mask all the time and never show the real temperaments, we need to find a way to release ourselves without being known by others, otherwise we probably would lose control one day. Therefore, we go to the theatre to watch horror movies in the dark, to feed the desirable alligators hidden under the trap door of our minds. And by the time we walk out of the theatre, we can still keep pretending normal and lead our lives. In this way, we can not only satisfy our evil desire to watch people being killed, but live on in disguise in a relaxing condition.
The author points out several aspects showing that those who watch horror movies tend to have mental illnesses. First, the way they relax themselves is peculiar and they have fun with doing it, it’s like in Roman Times people take picnics to go to the pit to enjoy wrestle between gladiators. Second, we try to hide the authentic purpose why we watch horror movies—to have that such peculiar fun, instead we find a stately excuse that we watch them to show that we are not afraid, or we are daring the true ugliness, but we did feel shocked and frightened and want to scream out at some points, and the truth is that the so-called ugliness is actually not the true ugliness in reality, they just are being naïve enough to think they can really become so courageous.
While reading the text for the first and the second time, I mistook the real meaning of the alligators, I thought they refer to us human beings directly. Because we are mentally ill, yet we pretend that we are normal, living in the normal peace, doing normal jobs, locking the evil power down the bottom of our hearts, only letting it out for a breath when watching horror movies in the dark theatre where nobody would notice our evil part because of long-term repression. When watching horror movies, we are allowed to take our back to the ration, the morality, to shout, to scream like those greasy children, to unchain the morbidity, to let our most base instincts be free, to realize our nastiest fantasies. However, later Miss F’s speech in class made me realize that I was wrong. She said that our brain can be divided into two parts according to some quote-unquote theories, the forebrain represents the civilized part which help us make the rational decisions and stay normal, while the afterbrain represents that herd of alligators which I originally thought stand for humans. There exists a contradiction in human beings’ brains, the justice against the greasy naivety, therefore human beings are always struggling with themselves about how they should behave, feeling hesitated about whether to play silly or cool or normal, and their behaviors are always capricious. Fortunately our forebrains defeat our afterbrain in most cases(the alligators never succeed in getting out of the ground once), which is shown in our daily life; yet we still need to relax, to let free the other side of our brain, so we need to watch horror movies from time to time to prolong our durations for daily trifles, to feed the alligators in a regular time.
Another thing I want to talk about is the reason we act normal despite our mental illnesses. The first reason has been mentioned before—to release with horror movies. Another reason is that the society and the family help us reestablish the common sense by correcting the mistakes we made while we grow up, they insert the trap door—the criteria of rightness and wrongness into our mind to help us make the right decision, and all the things left to do is do not forget to feed the alligators under the trap door is case they are so hungry that they break through the door and control our mind and make us do something as crazy as the things happened in horror movies.
And I think it’s really innovative and a little bit unfair for the author to write the sentence” It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love”, I don’t know whether it is because I am a foreign speaker or not, I would feel confused if I haven’t known it is a piece of song sung by the Beetles. Fortunately I knew it, so it settled my annoyance anyway.
My last thought about this complicated writing is that it really takes a person’s patience and energy to partly understand the main idea and some of the sentences, and it gives me a direction for my study later that I should read more materials to expand my scope so that I would be able to figure out immediately what references the author cites, which can be categorized as mythos—cultural beliefs.

Added details: what does it mean by the sentence “If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man”?
A: For example, we used to say “When we created the wheels”, here we mean the whole mankind including me, but actually the creator only refers to in individual. I, as an individual, am taking credit of everything that is good, but people rarely say” When we kill the saints”, or when we commit suicide. We take responsibility for the good things, but we do not take responsibility for the horror. What is funny is that we associate ourselves to the whole human beings when it refers to something glorious, yet we avoid being mentioned when something bad happened. I see in myself to the potential for genius, and I only recognize it on such condition, which is a lovely lie. The idea of just having good guys and just having bad guys is comfortable enough, but it is not real. Here author holds that if you choose a good thing, then you must choose a bad thing, which is if we are all human beings, then we must be all insane.
Q: What is the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies? You cannot unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork.
A: There are four different genres : fiction, drama and poetry non-fiction, and there are also different genres of jokes, and this is a bad and poor joke, people say this, it is in bad taste, it is not good joke. People laugh about this joke because they need to tickle themselves, to scratch and ditch, and if you ignore it, it won’t go away. You cannot scratch too hard, just to release.

For me, I used to speak to myself even when there are other people around me, which I think it is way enough to leave me to be a wallflower in a party. However, I feel a need to talk to myself, it’s like a process of reflection after a day’s labor.