Analyse af 'Scary Movies' af Stephen Amidon

Scary Movies is a short story from 1995, written by Stephen Amidon. The story is about two boys who lives in a nice suburb to New York City. The boys are born into a wealthy family who lives in the right neighborhood, but the other part of the people from the story, which are the black people, who seems to be very poor, since they are house cleaners for the white people. "On screen, the final battle began, but I didn't care. Suddenly, I felt too old for this. You had to be crazy to find this scary, what with all that was happening out in the real world" [1]. The text is about the inequality between the black and white people, and how the white people were raised without knowledge of the other race, since they think that every black man beats up white people for no reason. Without being aware of it, they seem to be very racistic towards the black people, but they has no reason to be racistic. When they go inside the cinema, and sits down on their seats, they actually realize that they are the only white people in the cinema, and gets very scared, and starts to think of a flight plan out of the cinema, but as the movie starts, they start to discover something they have never experienced before. Whenever there is a scary part in the movie, the black people start to get very wild and scared. The boys starts to love the mood in the cinema, and starts to visit it more often, but when the riots break out due to the assassination of Martin Luther King, things starts to change. The boys does not really find out what was going on, but the fact is that the black people are making riots due to the death of their 'savier' Martin Luther. The narrator seems not to be frightened at all by the apocalypse, that is going down in town. One of the most important themes in the story is ignorance of the black race, and was raised to leave them alone, because he would get no advantage of knowing them it seems. “We knew nothing about our black neighbors, other than the cruel jokes our parents sometimes told, and the occasional spasm of anger we’d see on the local news”[2] This proves that they does not really know their black neighbors, but has a lot of preconceived ideas of the black men, such as they has bad jobs, and often acts violent while the white, rich people are watching them on the local TV. Therefore the white people seems to be scared of them, and they are acting like the black people are an animal with an infectious virus.