Books vs. Movies

No, this isn't a post declaring how God-awful the movie version of Eclipse was, or how smexcellent the Harry Potter movies are. (Both are facts, by the way. Not opinions. Facts.)

I was thinking about this last night because, you see, I watched a horror movie about a month ago. I will not reveal the name of this horror movie because it's rather embarrassing in its, er, non-scariness. But if you know me in real life, you know that I don't do horror movies so well.

Case in point: That horror movie I saw a month ago? I still make my dog come with me anywhere around the house when it's dark outside.

The interesting thing is, I can handle books way better than movies. For example, I read The Shining all at once in my basement (it was really hot and the air conditioning was broken) at night by myself, in seventh grade. When I was done, I was a little creeped out, but I was pretty much fine. (No, Firefox, I was not "crept out".)

Or another example. In sixth grade, I read every single Dean Koontz book the library had to offer. This included violent scenes involving the rearrangement of limbs, rapes, weird... things, and so on. Apart from making me a stranger person, I was more or less unaffected.

And I've written fairly violent things, too. I don't go into very gory detail because I write YA, but I've had to read articles that were extremely gory (with pictures of blood so fake I had to laugh) for research, and the details I leave out, I still have to imagine.

But show me a movie where there's a drop of blood and I'll have to look away. In the first Twilight movie, that scene where Bella was bleeding or something? (She "fell down the stairs".) I looked away.

Why is it that movies are more powerful than books? Is it because we can see it and hear it more directly? But if this is the case, then why do many people prefer reading to watching movies?