Carroll, N. (2002) Why Horror?. IN Neill, A. & Riley, A. (eds.) Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates (2nd ed., Chap. 17). New York, NY: Routledge.
In this article Kansas State Professor gives his opinion on why we watch scary movies. He talks about how we are civilized people, that is we want things to become efficient, safe and secure in our society. As we become more civilized we repress our uncivilized nature, through watching horror movies and all sort of related things. The article states that there is a certain age in which people go and watch horror films, and the age tends to max out at 25 years. Teenagers are the ones who tend to see more scary/horror films. But why do they do so. The reason is becomes the movies are forbidden territory, made only for adults, and this makes them seem more attractive. Also as people grow up they want to explore their limits of extreme or threatening situations.
According to Carroll in Why Horror?, "the horror story is driven explicitly by curiosity. It engages its audience by being involved in processes of disclosure, discovery, proof, explanation, hypothesis and confirmation." In other words the curiosity of the narrative of horror films. The viewers are curious as how the movies will introduce the monster/evil into ordinary life situation, a situation a person can relate to, which establishes this fear of possibility.
However, in the article written by Rappoport the reasons we watch movies is because we want to know our tolerance of fearful situations. That is people want to learn more about themselves, and figure out the range of their uncivilized behavior compared to the civilized nature. They want to see how far away they can go away from civilized behavior and still fee comfortable with themselves. Rappoport states that "as people grow up, they have to explore or test their limits to discover what sorts of things make sense to them---what they enjoy and can tolerate, compared with things that are too extreme and threatening."
In Why we like to watch scary movies, the reason why we go to see them is our curiosity as to what our tolerance is for extreme or threatening situations. Whereas according to Carroll the reason why we watch horror films is also because of curiosity. But this curiosity is different in the fact that this curiosity pertains to how the evil can fit into our daily lives.
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