What’s Behind the Hunger for “The Hunger Games?”
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Lionsgate(SALISBURY, Md.) — No doubt about it, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and Twilight are three of the most popular book and movie series of our age.
However, Lance Garmon, a psychologist at Salisbury University in Maryland, says that the fascination many young adults have with these pop culture phenomena go beyond their sheer entertainment value.
To put it bluntly, Garmon says people who are really into The Hunger Games and the rest may have a fixation with death.
He had college students take surveys that dealt with The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and Twilight as well as their own anxiety or obsession with dying. In some cases, the participants read The Hunger Games and Harry Potter books and watched the movies as many as six times.
Garmon and his research team surmised that these young adults were death-obsessed while those who saw the movies multiple times without having read the books had anxieties about death.
As for Twilight, these fans, particularly women, were drawn more by the romance in the series than any death aspect.
The bottom line: the attraction of these series is to satisfy a deep-seated fascination with death or romance, mainly to give fans some inner satisfaction.
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