Ngozi Nwokeukwu

Dr. Muniz-Villalon

English 15 Section 104

February 27, 2020

A Good Scare Never Hurt Anybody (Cover Letter)

To me, horror is a fine art. However, I know it is not for everybody. For some people,

horror bring intense uncomfortable terror and you cannot convince someone to put themselves

through that. Nonetheless, while there are people who cannot for their own safety interact with

horror, there is a whole group of people dedicated to feeling the thrill that horror gives. And for

major fans of the genre, they have watched all and every type of horror: small budget, cliché,

major motion, gory, psychological, classic, new age. This is the audience I am working with.

My audience is very picky when it comes to a good horror movie, so I wanted to focus all

my effort on building my ethos and logos while using methods of compare and contrast,

definition, and testimony as well. Not a lot of major horror movie fans are women, so it was

important for me, in developing my ethos, to show all the common knowledge I had on horror

movies. This was demonstrated in all the horror movies I had seen and the common terms I knew

and defined, for example, the importance of a scream queen in the genre. My criteria was one of

my biggest examples of my ethos and logos. The criteria were built from things I know make a

good horror movie, for example good actresses and gore, and using what other, more informed

horror movie experts know to back up those claims. In the case of the gore, I used sources from

psychologists on the matter, as well as famous directors and their use of gore to build up my

criteria. Another good example of my ethos and logos was in my comparison of one of the most
highly renowned horror movies of all time and my horror movie, and how they were very

similar. I prove this using a mix of things I knew and evidence from to support that. The big idea

behind that section was cultural significance and how that spotlights the uniqueness of the

storyline. I talked about what I knew in terms of my movie and its cultural connection to the

current political climate and some evidence of how the very famous horror movie had such a

cultural impact that it had theories to this day connecting to its major cultural themes. The

importance of having my prior knowledge and having other professional examples to back it up

is a common thing throughout my paper.