The really scary thing about thrillers.

When dastardly villians are terminated in an inferno of special effects, what are you left with? just a lot of good action and bad advice, says Patrick McCormick. In real life, the evil and nefarious doings of human beings can't be stripped so easily of their mystery and complexity. Next time you go to the show, just keep in mind, "It's only a movie."

Sitting in a darkened room, I watch in horror as the assassin's rifle slides between the balcony drapes and lines up on the tuxedoed diplomat in the first loge. As the symphony accelerates into its final movement, all other eyes are fixed on the conductor while I am riveted to the marksman and his unsuspecting prey, my jangled nerves a perfect contrast to the killer's languid movements.

My chest muscles squeeze viselike as I watch him focus, nestling the diplomat's face in the scope's cross hairs. The kettle drums pound like rolling thunder, the cymbal player stands, his outstretched arms ready for the final crash. A throttled scream rises in my throat as a macabre smile touches that face, and the trigger finger begins to squeeze. I cannot take this. My heart has stopped. I cannot remember my last breath. My mind exploding, that old familiar chant starts to kick in: "It's just a movie. It's just a movie . . ." If only that worked with roller coasters, too.

I confess: I get a rush out of thrillers. Just seeing the previews for last year's blockbusters, "The Fugitive," "In the Line of Fire," "Rising Sun," "The Firm," and "The Pelican Brief," sets that old black magic coursing through my veins. Like a guest at Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, I felt that delicious excitement that comes with sneaking up on a cage full of raptors.

And I am not alone. Last year, thrillers (both the books and screenplays) by Crichton and John Grisham alone grossed more than half-a-billion dollars. And Tom Clancy, Ken Follett, and Robin Cook win not be unemployed any time soon. Page turners and spine tinglers have been keeping us up at night and on the edge of our movie seats since before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula or Alfred Hitchcock made "The Thirty-Nine Steps," "Rear Window," or "North by Northwest." Why? Because, at least at a safe distance, we love a scary ride with a juicy villain.

And rides don't come much scarier than a good thriller, a riveting chase made up of equal parts careening roller coaster, exasperating maze, and spook-house gauntlet. In this two-hour, or 300-page, train wreck we are scooped up like mobile homes in a hurricane's path as our hero stalks and is stalked by a saber-toothed Cheshire cat that appears and evaporates with increasingly maddening menace.

Inside the thriller we are swept along by the storm front of the ride, frightened by sudden twists, loud explosions, and scary faces popping out at us that make us feel as if we are on a bobsled into a volcano. Such rides can be awfully exhilarating, momentarily shattering the monotony of our daily routines with a mini-vacation that has us hanging from Mount Rushmore with Cary Grant or diving off the Hoover Dam with Harrison Ford. Without needing to drive to Orlando or Busch Gardens, we can have a jolting, white-knuckle adventure and still be safely ensconced in our armchairs or movie seats when the lights come up. Pretty hard not to like that kind of fun.

Of course the real kick of these rides comes from brushing up against those exquisitely dangerous and malevolent villains. Under a wafer-thin veneer of polished, old-world charm, these Jekyll and Hyde creatures are quivering land mines, brilliant as Lucifer, savage as Jack the Ripper.

And it is this deliciously volatile mixture of intelligence and insanity, done to such chilling perfection by Anthony Hopkins in "Silence of the Lambs" and John Malkovich in "In the Line of Fire," that makes these fiends so frightening and these stories so exciting. We love to vicariously rub up against such danger, and so for a few hours we imagine ourselves rattling the cages of these trained Dobermans, thrilled at the sport of provoking their murderous wrath and delighted to escape with our arms intact.

But we also love these villains because they are so refreshingly and unabashedly evil. Indeed, these archfiends are the vampires of malice, roaming the streets and sucking every drop of evil into their demonic personalities.

Like Sherlock Holmes' Professor Moriarity, thriller villains are the masterminds behind every nefarious deed, their tentacles at the root of all human evil. And how wonderful it is for a few hours to strip evil and suffering of all its mystery and complexity and reduce it to one perfectly malevolent fiend suitable for removal.

Establishing world peace or freeing our neighborhoods of crime requires only the elimination of this one foe. And because these fiends are so irredeemably evil and dangerous, we don't need to bother negotiating with them or exercising any sort of restraint. Inside this deadly hunt we can give chase and enter into combat at full throttle, competing with the fiend in a no-holds-barred, cosmic pillow fight. With guns blazing, we can rush in and solve this problem. What a tremendous release. No wonder these guys are so popular.

Yet, even as a die-hard thriller fan, I've recently begun to wonder if these roller-coaster rides really are so safe - for me or society. Although I've always thought of thrillers as having a sort of medicinal effect, providing a welcome rush of adrenaline to counter the humdrum of daily life, I find myself asking if these spine tinglers don't also have some serious and lingering side effects - particularly when taken in such large, and sometimes gruesome, amounts.

When the book closes or the lights come back up, are we really so safely ensconced in our armchairs or movies seats? Or are we suffering from a sort of thriller hangover? An occasional friend has complained that a particularly disturbing thriller left him or her sleepless or haunted by nightmares, and I admit to having read or seen a few stories that left me longing for nothing so much as a good bath. And even after a thorough scrubbing, I've found myself wondering how many times we can invite such violent guests into our imaginations without being affected - maybe even a little sickened - by them.

The problem starts with the fact that thrillers invite us into a world where evil is presented too simplistically. Within the world of the thriller, all the evil and suffering dispersed through our lives has been refined and concentrated into one highly toxic villain. All of life's complexities have been removed, and we have projected the sum of all our woes onto one vicious fiend who can be blamed, hated, and punished with impunity.

In thrillers such as "Mississippi Burning" and "Sleeping with the Enemy" serious social evils - racism and spousal abuse - are deduced to a couple of psychopaths while "The Firm" and "The Fugitive" seem to imply that the problem of legal and medical systems run amok can be blamed on a couple of renegade corporations.

Not surprisingly, simplistic problems call for simplistic and violent solutions, and in these thrillers, racial strife and wife beating are solved by torturing bigoted deputies and murdering psychotic husbands. An overly litigious society is addressed, as Richard III suggested, by "rounding up all the lawyers," and health-care reform and the trade balance are secured by arresting a shill for some pharmaceutical conglomerate (though not for price gouging).

Thriller heroes aren't known for their tendencies to dialogue, negotiate, contemplate, collaborate, or pray. They are not interested in patience, compassion, compromise, repentance, reconciliation, or forgiveness. These are the stuff of "relationship" films, and characters who try such tactics in a thriller are usually executed for their trouble. Thriller heroes prefer the efficiency of Alexander the Great - slicing, stabbing, or shooting their way through life's Gordian knots.

And just how realistic is this? So little of the evil we face each day is concentrated in an archfiend such as Hitler or solved by using force. In fact, too many people already turn to violence to address personal and political problems - and hitting, stabbing, or shooting other people nearly always makes things a lot worse. It certainly didn't help the Bobbitts, the Buttafucos, or the city of Los Angeles.

And remember, while thrillers are fond of glamorizing the successes of military force in WWII and the Cold War, such violent and simplistic solutions didn't serve us too well in Vietnam, Iran, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Somalia. Nor have unemployment, crime, and drugs been so well taken care of by a multiplication of weapons or prisons. The flaw with thrillers is that when all you've got is a weapon, every problem looks like a target.

When you come right down to it, thrillers offer us a world where lone heroes must face homicidal maniacs with the only weapon at hand: violence. That sounds a lot like the world of a paranoid schizophrenic or terrorist. Indeed, in many ways being in a thriller is like being inside the head of Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinkley, or David Koresh. So while an occasional draft of this bracing beverage is exciting and heady, none of us should try to operate the heavy machinery of real life under its influence.

But in fact the distorted worldview and very limited problem-solving techniques of thrillers are currently being applied to real-life situations with disastrous results.

To start with, there is way too much of this sort of thrill in our entertainment diet, and maybe way too much kick in our modern thrillers. TV viewers and moviegoers in America are saturated annually with thousands of acts of violence, and now new video games are letting us participate in these slugfests. Our contemporary novels and movies are no longer peppered with murder, they are littered with it.

Stories that used to excite us with heroes clinging to rooftops now jolt us with tales of serial killers mutilating corpses. Instead of being thrilled, we often find ourselves feeling a bit queasy or contaminated, like we had been caught rubbernecking at a grisly car wreck. Shows such as "Perry Mason" and "Murder She Wrote" seem like children's fare because there is usually only one killing on the menu.

We need to cut back on our consumption of this very red meat. But instead, violent entertainment is spreading beyond film and fiction. Looking more and more like pro-wrestling without the cute tights, TV talk shows host men and women who beat and amputate their spouses, jail-house visits with Son of Sam and Amy Fisher (enough already!), unrepentant rapists, and an occasional brawl with skin-head neo-Nazis.

The national news programs are bracketed with tabloid shows specializing in random acts of violence, and the local late-night news is increasingly focused on reports of murder and assault, even though recent studies show a decline in violent crime.

As a result of so much jolt in our menu, Americans who watch a good deal of television see the world as decidedly more dangerous and hostile than those who don't and tend to support more forceful and violent responses to crime and other social problems. I can't help wondering where so many Americans got the idea that a brutal caning was the appropriate medicine for adolescent graffiti. It would seem that they accept both the thriller mind-set and its approach to problem solving.

These tendencies are even more dangerous in the hands of politicians. Many of us still remember that President Richard M. Nixon decided to bomb Cambodia the day after his private viewing of "Patton" and wonder how George C. Scott's opening speech affected history. The simplistic framework of thrillers makes them an attractive way for politicians and voters alike to reduce complex social questions into sound bites. Reagan reduced the civil war in Nicaragua to a matter of Soviet aggression; Bush reduced the quagmire of U.S. relations with Panama to Noriega's drug deals; and Clinton is reducing the issue of urban crime to a need for more cops and prisons.

We all love the clarity of a deadly enemy, but it is a dangerous deception to try to impose the worldview of thrillers on personal, professional, or social problems. In real life our experiences of evil are much more complex, nuanced, and difficult than those diabolical villains in the thrillers we love.

And the responses to evil include patience, suffering, sustained struggle, nonviolent resistance, legislative change, cooperation, forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation. These responses may not be as stimulating, focused, or intense as hunting down the enemy and killing him or her, but they are immensely more sane and realistic. In the real world we have to learn to get along with our spouses, bosses, and enemies. Indeed, even Yassar Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Anthony de Klerk, and Nelson Mandela have recognized the need to negotiate and compromise with their deadliest foes.

So while thrillers, in small doses, offer an exciting kick, we need to remember that too-regular consumption of this product could prove quite harmful, particularly when it steps outside the bounds of entertainment and starts being used as the framework for the evening news or political solutions to social and economic problems. After all, "it's only a movie."