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Fear In The Shining

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As children, we all feared something. It may have been an irrational fear, like the boogeyman hiding in the closet or monsters under the bed, or something more rational like getting separated from our parents in a store or getting stuck someplace, but there were things in this world that terrified us. However, fewer and fewer of these types of things make us afraid as we grow older, but there is a part of our mind that retains those fears and thoughts society deems to be negative and unacceptable. Instead, we take in various types of violent and horrific media that feature unrealistic and unnatural fears to scare us, but why? Well, let’s take the iconic psychological horror film The Shining by Stanley Kubrick as an example of the horror genre. The movie weaves a story of a man named Jack, his wife, and their child spending the winter looking after a remotely located resort. Everything goes well for a while*, but eventually Jack goes crazy with cabin fever and goes on a rampage, trying to kill both his wife and son. After a nail-biting chase through the snow covered hedge maze both the wife and son get away safely while Jack, fully …show more content…
By watching and experiencing gory, violent, and terrifying media, we open “a trapdoor in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath” (King). We allow our primal urges to feast on the dark, the ugly, and the supposedly negative actions that are performed within the content we observe, finding satisfaction in looking on and eliminating the need for committing violent acts. Jack in The Shining goes mad and eventually kills a man, brutally hacking into his chest with a fireman’s axe. By merely observing the action and not actually killing someone, the urge for violence is subdued and remains satisfied until the next so-called “feeding

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