To the person hungry for excitement the greatest possible sensation is death - in art as well as in reality. The dullard newspaper-reader sitting at his breakfast table is avid for stories of misfortune and death. But mass misfortunes and deaths en masse cannot satisfy him; apparently the anonymous mass seems too abstract. And so your newspaper-reader may feel the need to go to a movie and see a gangster film. His pattern is like that of every addict: his hunger for sensation requires a nervous jolt to satisfy it; the jolt to the nerves engenders a more intense hunger, and so the dose must be constantly stepped up. What such a person really gets out of these vicarious deaths if the contrast effect: it seems as though other people are always the ones who must die. For this type of person is fleeing what most horrifies him: the certainty of his own death - which his existential emptiness makes unbearable to him. The certainty of death terrifies only the person who has a guilty conscience toward his life.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.