How and why I first got hooked on King remains a mystery to me, but I guess I was exposed to the endless stream of his film adaptations. book which were produced throughout the 1980s. Back then, the film versions of The shine, Stand by meand Mess have been displayed forever television.

King himself was such an impressively memorable character, an oversized man with a mischievous smile and devilish eyes accentuated by glasses, that seeing his picture gave me a mental picture of the kind of person I thought I wanted to be. son, as I was certain that I myself would one day be a writer. I remember wanting to move to Maine. I actually convinced my parents to buy me a typewriter. You know, like the one Jack Torrance uses.

I once waited an entire afternoon to get my hands on a freshly unboxed copy of King’s 1992 novel. Necessary thingswhich was added to my stack of King tomes at home—a stack, I hasten to add, I read with anticipation, but not much excitement. Truth be told, I found his books not only beyond my reading comprehension level, but obviously blatantly age inappropriate. Yes, kids can tell when they’re reading something they shouldn’t, and being a “good kid” I could never do this without a little guilt.

Above all, what bothered me when I read King’s work was the genre to which it belonged. Finding it increasingly inappropriate to be so associated with a gore practitioner, I announced to my father, “I’m not a horror freak, you know!” Even at the age of 9, I had no desire to be seen as one the horror group.

Over the years, I had definitely fed my appetite for fear by watching Alfred Hitchcock presentsthe Nickelodeon series Are you afraid of the dark?and inevitably Unsolved mysteries. However, as far as I was concerned, these benign performances were of an entirely different character from the King’s canon. To merely be frightened by a horror book, movie, or show is to dance on the edge of the terrifying, remaining, by definition, suspicious of it. To actually come to enjoy the genre, indeed, to stop being afraid, but to enjoy the horror, is to cross that line.

Works of art aimed at inducing chills are old, but many of the best examples – for example, Henry James Turning the screwthe collected works of Shirley Jackson or the Universal monster movies—were constrained by past standards of good taste. More importantly, the earlier books and films were conceived before the development of a horror fan base that would inevitably demand deeper shocks and gore. There wasn’t a “horrorcon” when Washington Irving wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and 40 years didn’t dress up for Halloween when Val Lewton produced his stylish slate of horror films at RKO Pictures in the 1940.

By the 1970s, proudly unashamedly terrifying horror films such as The Texas Massacre and Last house on the left cultivated the same audience that would later absorb the horror wave of the 1980s and early 1990s: these were the years of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Psycho III, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Masterand Children’s play 3.

These films are neither defensible as art (because they’re so inept) nor as the cinematic equivalent of scary stories told around the campfire (because they’re so badly told). They don’t even have shock value as a theoretical attribute. In a horror sequel, the bad guy/killer/demon is generally the most familiar character and the victim-protagonist the latest in a line of bland rubes, so the audience doesn’t wonder. What it will happen but When: When will Michael Myers escape from the asylum? When will Norman Bates go mad? When will the Chucky doll start terrorizing people? Audiences expect these things to happen, and far from being scared or even scared, they hoot and holler when they do – at least in the horror-crazed crowds I’ve sometimes found myself in.

To talk about the damage caused by a steady diet of this detail is to invite accusations of censorious puritanism. But to deny that films of this kind work to stifle, strengthen, or at least soften a person’s sensibilities would be dishonest. It would be hard to imagine any serious moral or religious system in the world that would consider it salutary to consume horrific images simply for kicks. In fact, even America’s leading film critics found the horror craze of the ’80s hard to stomach: on their TV show, critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel routinely criticized this fare.

What they said was both funny and true. Siskel argued that Hellraiser II it should have been renamed Skinned alive and that something called The hitcher it was really “nothing more than a dozen ways to cut a person.” Ebert discussed the last part of the Friday the 13th as an exercise in pure and undisguised nihilism: “Just think about the message this movie delivers to a teenage audience: the world is a totally bad place, this movie tells you. It will kill you.” And here’s Ebert Children’s play 2: “What good can it do to have such ugly, ugly images planted in your mind?” And in the twisted movie Randy Quaid Parents: “It serves no other purpose, as far as I can tell, but to disgust.”

This was strong stuff, but so were the films considered. Ebert was right to adopt a tone of righteous indignation: these films do not present a darkly complex worldview, but a completely simplistic nightmare in which chases, stabbings and demonic possessions are so mundane, so devoid of their savagery that be fun

Today, however, the moralists lost and the horror freaks won. They won so decisively that the genre has largely shed its once despised image. In 1992, Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture at the Oscars, and in 1999, The Blair Witch Project it was considered a cultural milestone. Most fans would probably recognize that Camp Sleepaway II or Poltergeist III they were fairly mundane affairs, but these days, horror is full of tone and haute.

Well-respected indie production companies like A24 and Blumhouse produce films as stylish as any foreign import, from Parent! TO M3GANFROM The sigh remake to relaunch Halloween series. The spitting and polishing of these productions reveals the integration of what had once been cult enthusiasm. The genre has become like a great oak tree with many branches, including “Christmas horror”, “techno horror” and “body horror” – the last of which is obviously the category of the recent Demi Moore film. Substance. Each of these subgenres has its followers, as does, apparently, even the most grotesquely unspeakable of all film franchises: at count’s end, there were three films in The human centipede series and 10 in Saw series.

Cultivating audiences for every imaginable variety of sick and sick movies – from those that wring cheap thrills out of the rite of exorcism, including this year’s. The exorcism with Russell Crowe, to those in which the madmen simply smile portably, such as Smile and recent Smile 2 — communicates a disturbing message to audiences: No matter what weird stuff you think you like to see, there’s a movie, indeed an entire subgenre, just for you.

Watching such films is not like listening to a scary ghost story, but like watching a car wreck – an exercise not in empathy or curiosity, but a morbid fascination with blood and guts. With all due respect to my 9 year old self, Stephen King looks strange by comparison.

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Peter Tonuette is a contributing writer to Washington Examiner magazine.