It's dark. Your friend took her beanie off after the light's went out, and you keep leaning over to her to tease her as she hides behind the folds of thin fabric.
"C'mon, dude, this movie isn't even scary. "
She puts her fingers to her lips and looks at you angrily.
"People will hear you. Just because it isn't scary to you doesn't mean it's not scary."
Another badly edited zombie crashes into the camera on the screen above you. You scoff, lean back in your chair and put your feet up on the seat.
About two weeks later, the theatre is nearly empty, and you look excitedly to your friend. With nearly all the seats avaliable, you jump from row to row just because you can. You stop jumping when the lights go out. A long, slow groan begins with the screen still black. It flashes to an empty room with a rocking chair in one corner, creaking slowly with quiet, ominous fading slowly in the background. It's too quiet. All of a sudden a bloody face appears in the center of the screen, twitching unnaturaly and you curl up inside the folding chair, screaming and silently glad that it's just you and your friend in the theatre.
You look over to her and she's grinning from ear to ear.
"I thought you said this was a comedy! Is this some sort of joke?"
"Well, you said scary movies aren't scary, so I thought it'd be funny to you."
"I said zombies don't scare me! Haunted houses do!"
While scary movies aren't the only thing that tailoring tactics relates to in life, it's a very good example. Scary movies get a bad wrap from big critics who claim that they aren't scary, when they could be terrifying to other people. The level of scare depends on what the audience is afraid of, and how much of that particular subject it takes to get them into blood-curdling fear. The same idea is apparent in arguements. A person who cares nothing for the environment will likely be indifferent towards a persuasive method that talks about how something negatively affects wildlife. When presenting why you feel a certain way and trying to cause someone to feel the same, the arguement is usually more of an impact with several different angles.
First off, I love your mini story! I never thought of scary movies as a tailoring your tactics example until you explained it in this way. Something else, I wonder if directors tailor their scary films not only to legitimately scare their viewers, but to give them a thrill. It's like how some scary movies are aimed to give you nightmares while others have the goal of keeping you at the edge of your seat and your heart racing. It all depends on the viewer.
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