Kedlyne Demosthene
Professor Wood
February 8, 2016
Formal Paper #1
No Crazy Inside
According to Stephen King, everyone in society has some mental disability and
we all crave to kill and torture. In Stephen King’s published essay “Why We Crave Horror
Movies”, King claims the only reason why we don’t kill is because we feed these inner thoughts
with horror movies. King states that we don’t only watch movies for entertainment and joy, but
we watch it as a psychological need. King believes that we need to subject ourselves to
irrationality periodically to exercise our dark side and release the evil that’s inside all of us. A
concerned parent once argued that “King’s argument about horror movies being healthy for us is
loaded with bias and specious logic”. The concerned parent is absolutely correct, King based his
essay on his view of society without showing any evidence to back up his arguments with
research and studies, which makes his essay bias and specious; without any real factual evidence
to back up his arguments Stephen King’s essay is solely based on his thoughts and ideas.
King’s essay generalizes society solely off of his assumptions. King opens his essay with
“I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better”
(King 1), this sets the tone of seriousness, which alarms the readers immediately. Then without
backing this statement up with some research to ease the readers, King proceeds to make wild
