Why We Crave Horror Movies--By Stephen King This essay, originally published in Playboy magazine, attempts to explain why horror movies satisfy our basic instincts. As you prepare to read this article, consider your thoughts on the emotional condition of people in the U.S.: How emotionally healthy are Americans? Were they more emotionally healthy 20 years ago? A century ago? What makes a society emotionally healthy? Emotionally unhealthy? How can society maintain good health? What is the relationship between emotional health and a civilized society? I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better, after all. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching, people who have some hysterical fear – of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground. When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare. Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. 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. We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness. And we go to have fun. Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced – sometimes killed. 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. It is true that the mythic “fairy-tale” horror film intends to take away the shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all. If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business . . . though it is doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties. The potential lyncher is in almost 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. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional muscles are accepted – even exalted – in civilized society; they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness -- these are all the emotions that we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets of Hallmark cards and in the verses (I don’t dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy. When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the sweetest little thing?” Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers in the door, sanctions follow – angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking. But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have such “sick” jokes as, “What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?” (You can’t unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility that confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time. The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them – Dawn of the Dead, for instance – as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed. Can Video Games Make You Smart (Or At Least More Flexible)? Playing strategy games improves cognitive flexibility. Posted Aug 09, 2013 The potential ills of video game play have been broadcast all over the media. Playing violent video games can prime aggressive behavior. Kids who get video game systems perform worse in school after they get the system than they did before. Not all effects of video games are bad, though. There is evidence that playing video games can make people faster at processing visual information like searching for an object among a set of other distracters. One hallmark of smart thinking is flexibility. People who are able to see the same object in different ways and can keep lots of possibilities in mind at the same time are often able to develop novel and creative solutions to problems. A paper by Brian Glass, Todd Maddox, and Brad Love in the August 2013 issue of PLoS One suggests that some kinds of video games can help to teach this skill. They compared the effects of playing real-time strategy games to playing games that require no particular strategic thinking. The participants in this study were all women, because the experimenters had trouble finding enough men who do not play video games regularly. The women were assigned to one of three groups. One group played a simple version of the game StarCraft. In this game, participants have to create, organize, and deploy armies to attack an enemy. In the simple version of the game, the player had one base and the enemy had one base. In the more complex version of the game, the player had two bases and the enemy had two bases. The overall difficulty of the game was then set up so that the simple and complex versions of the game were about equally hard to win. This way, the games differed primarily in how much information players needed to keep in mind while playing. The control condition had people play a life simulation (the SIMS), which does not require much strategy or memory. Participants played their assigned game for 40 hours. As a test, participants were given a pre-test and post-test of a series of tasks that tap cognitive abilities. Some of the tests require cognitive flexibility. For example, in the classic Stroop task, people name the color of a font for words that name colors. The typical finding is that people are slow to name the color when the word names a different color than the font. In task switching procedures, people flip back and forth between the responses they make. For example, in one task, people are shown a letter and a number (say e4). On some trials, they are prompted to identify whether the letter is a vowel or consonant, while on other trials, they are prompted to identify whether the number is odd or even. People generally slow down when asked to switch from one task (say identifying letters) on one trial to the other task (identifying numbers) on the next. The faster you are able to switch between tasks, though, the more flexibly you are thinking. Other tasks did not require flexibility. For example, a visual search task requires finding a particular object among a set of distracters. That task requires perceptual speed, but not flexibility. The results of the study were striking. Participants who played StarCraft showed significant improvement on the cognitive flexibility tasks, but not the other tasks compared to those who played the SIMS. The improvement was largest for those who played the complex version of the game, and smaller for those who played the simple version. Additional analyses found that the people who played the complex version of the game had to keep more information in mind while playing than those who played the simple version. Practice using all of this information may have been the root of the improvement on the flexibility tasks. These results are intriguing. It is hard to get people to work on difficult tasks for long in school settings, but much easier to get them to work for long hours while playing video games. If games can be structured to promote skills that improve flexible thinking, then they can be a valuable tool in helping people to get smarter. That said, flexible thinking is only a part of being smarter. In order to really do smart things, you also need to know a lot of information in order to be able to use that knowledge to solve problems. As much fun as video games may be, they will not substitute for the hours you need to put in to become an expert in at least one domain. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201308/can-video-games-make-yousmart-or-least-more-flexible 
Purchase answer to see full attachment