The Gore Score

I discovered horror movies as a little guy, having seen my first one at six and then falling in love with the genre on the for real-real until I had seen THE THING years later. When I fell for scary movies, as they will always sorta be to me, I fell hard and the older I got the more insatiable I became. It was a new love and when you fall baby, you fall hard.

My tastes changed. Slashers to monsters to classics to foreign to gore. Oh yeah, that gore phase. It hit me heavy and hit me hard. I was a fan of special effects and dreamt of following that career path myself one day – spoiler alert, I for sure didn’t – and that was what really got me into the gore – the work behind the scenes. There was an artistry to all of it, a craft. I fell in love with the personalities behind the gore, the process of it, and the risque nature that it all catered too as much of the ‘good stuff’ was cut out. Gore, even the most realistic, was just another part of movie making. Another aspect of storytelling. It was a visceral part of it that conveyed the terror and cost of facing the darkness.

I have to admit though that I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to having been drawn but the sheer audacity of the gore itself. Yeah, I liked how it was made but I really loved the nastiness of it all. There was something dangerous about all of it. You’d see mainstream movies that would slip in an exploding head, or a gutted person that would rival what you’d see in the indie and foreign fare. Gore was, to my youthful self, the creme in the cookie of horror. Sure, sure, it was fantastic to find a movie with a goof story and great characters but darn it, what good was all of that if there wasn’t a head getting bisected or someone’s chest erupting into a crimson mist?

Right?

Gore is not for the faint of heart, and I get it. Even reading extreme violence can churn the stomach. What’s funny is that, as much as a kick as I got out of a bit of the old ulta-violence I didn’t really write a lot of it. I wrote some, but I never went all in for gore. I will say though, now that I have made a couple movies, I did go for a gross out in the second film, though a little bit of that ended up on the cutting room floor. There’s just something satisfying about creating an illusion of destruction knowing that it’s all done with some store bought meat, some fake blood, and quick editing.

What’s interesting is that as I have gotten older my gorehound status has sorta waned. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy a good gut munching but with the advent of ultra-gore movies coming out of the sub-basement of the underground horror movement, I find that without any reason or context, it’sjust a mass of fake blood and fake body parts. You can force ‘care’ for a character, in that, you never want to see anyone get tortured or abused (OK, I don’t want to see that) so you can take a complete stranger, a blank character, and drop them into that sort of an environment and you’ll elicit an emotional response but it’s not earned. It’s the equivilent of a jump scare. It’s cheap. With a smart filmmaker and good way to mask what they are shooting to give it authenticity you can for sure make some low rent horror look utterly believable and horrifying. Great. There is a skill to that. But it’s when you care about the character and understand the situation that it all begins to mean something. You can be affected by anything but the things that stay with you are the ones that put you in that place mentally and emotionally. So while I still get a kick out of gore, especially the fact that basic cable television gets away with things that ‘R’ rated movies didn’t just a few years ago, the grotesque thrill from watching gore with no reason or story just doesn’t have any interest for me. That’s why I never watched the FACES OF DEATH movies because, even though most of that footage was faked, I had no interest in watching just scenes of death and murder. Fake or not. And there are people drawn to the real stuff, and man alive is it ever out there to find, but again, there’s a difference. I can go in my basement and put together something to pretend that a horrible act happened but no one is harmed. People that want to watch real people being harmed, beyond an initial curiosity, are a whole other cat.

It’s weird that we’re in an era where you can make things more realistic than ever and thus nastier than ever but I still look back with fondness to the days of my youth when we’d find a movie we hadn’t seen and would be shocked at how gruesome it got. Or the thrill at seeing a gore scene pop up in a Hollywood film as if to wink that hey, we like that stuff too.

While I have aged, and my tastes had definitely changed from what they once were, I still am a gorehound at heart, just of a different kind. I don’t get a kick out of seeing gore for the sake of gore anymore, though it’s interesting to reason out how it was done and how they made it look so real. It’s an art, all of it, and I still appreciate that aspect of it. Maybe that too will change and I’ll begin to like romantic comedies and safe sit-coms about families but for now, I’ll still revel in my gore, and giggle every time a head explodes.

…c…