Being insane is good for you, everyone should try it sometimes. This may be an unpopular idea although Stephen King, well established horror fiction writer alludes to it in his article “Why we crave horror movies.” The article written in 1981 is King’s take on why people crave horror movies as well as pointing out that we are all mentally insane it just varies in degrees of insanity. Edgar Allen Poe’s writing, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is a fiction story in which a man unaccepting of his insanity, kills an elderly man for the simple reason that the elderly mans eye bothered him. A clear notion can be draw from the two texts that Poe’s story is the perfect stuffing to hold down our inner insanity by feeding it and allowing it to be tamed. The
…show more content…
Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” does a great job of feeding our inner gator by exposing the reader to violence. We know humans love violence and this is illustrated when King says “One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching.” (3) This outlines and compares the modern horror movie to public lynching in ancient time. It is well documented that when public lynching took place huge crowds would gather round to watch them take place, the question then is why? Well it was a good way for the people pf the time to quench all their dark fantasies where it be watch someone in extreme pain or watching until they died. Being exposed to this violence allowed people to continue on with their normal lives having satisfied the ugliest of thoughts they hold within them. In the text the reader is exposed to violence multiple times, one of those times is when the narrator explains to the reader in great detail how he killed the old man, “In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done.” (13) This imagery is used to arouse our twisted dark fantasies as we picture the narrator jumping onto the old mans bed and strangling him, not allowing the old man to draw a single breath and to end it with a smile …show more content…
People have dark thoughts, people dream of doing really bad things but what is learned through reading and analyzing these texts is that watching or reading horror satisfies these thoughts and dreams and allows them to be fulfilled through this genre of fiction allowing us to live our lives a little more at
Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” does a great job of feeding our inner gator by exposing the reader to violence. We know humans love violence and this is illustrated when King says “One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching.” (3) This outlines and compares the modern horror movie to public lynching in ancient time. It is well documented that when public lynching took place huge crowds would gather round to watch them take place, the question then is why? Well it was a good way for the people pf the time to quench all their dark fantasies where it be watch someone in extreme pain or watching until they died. Being exposed to this violence allowed people to continue on with their normal lives having satisfied the ugliest of thoughts they hold within them. In the text the reader is exposed to violence multiple times, one of those times is when the narrator explains to the reader in great detail how he killed the old man, “In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done.” (13) This imagery is used to arouse our twisted dark fantasies as we picture the narrator jumping onto the old mans bed and strangling him, not allowing the old man to draw a single breath and to end it with a smile …show more content…
People have dark thoughts, people dream of doing really bad things but what is learned through reading and analyzing these texts is that watching or reading horror satisfies these thoughts and dreams and allows them to be fulfilled through this genre of fiction allowing us to live our lives a little more at