Gore

niallon

By no means a new argument but one that I cannot seem to find on this board.

Gore. Hinderance or helpful to horror films? Obviously, for certain films it's the main draw i.e Hostel, Zombie flicks etc. However, especially with the recent stream of dime a dozen cheap horror flicks I cannot help but notice that it's nowadays all about who can get the best exploding head shot and such. Whatever happened to genuine thrills and shocks? In my opinion when you cover the screen with blood you have a desensitized audience after about 15 minutes and you've lost them. If you don't keep the blood flowing, they'll lose interest, but, if you do keep the blood flowing, then you just have a gorefest with no substance and no genuine chills.

So what do ye all think? Is it possible to have a gore filled flick that also carries a bit of weight behind it in scares and such or is the recent gore extravaganza killing decent horror films?

Creature

I think it really depends on the type of film. Some films, Devil's Backbone and Psycho for example, can be better served by having the gore is kept to a minimum and left to the viewers imagination. Others, such as Romero's Dead films and The Thing wouldn't have been half as good without the gratuitous gore and violence. I am by no means a gorehound. I enjoy many a horror that don't feature bloody sprays every 4 minutes.

I think the recent surge in dime a dozen cheap horror flicks are aimed the teen horror market and only really exist to generate money and sell tickets rather than do something substantial. Think of them as the manufactured pop bands of the horror film world. I hope they're just trend that will probably die down in a couple of years when the next cinema fad comes along.


I think it is very much possible to have a gore filled flick that also carries a bit of weight behind it. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead is a great example of this. It totally differentiated itself from horrors around that time and actually made for a all-around good film by not being made to the same formula of the teen-horror crap.

Karl Hungus

It's a very multifaceted arguement, and not one that has any clear answer one way or another, it depends on the person who's viewing, and it also depends on the film maker. But I'll try my very best to give my perspective on it...

I guess for me, I'm predisposed to gore. I feel in a way that if gore is hidden, or played-down, I'm being cheated. Now, that doesn't sound very good, but let me qualify what I mean before you make any judgements. In my early teens I was a big fan of action movies, absolutely loved them, but seeing as I only got to see them on TV, I saw them in heavily edited format, which I didn't realise until years later. For example, one of my favourite films was Robocop, but the entire scene where Emil was bathed in toxic waste and then hit by the car and exploded into pieces; I didn't see for years! Likewise I watched Predator about 20 times before seeing Carl Weathers' arm being shot off. I guess I discovered what was going on when I saw Terminator 2 on BBC1, which I had previously rented about 3 or 4 times, so I knew exactly what was to be expected, and I was shocked when the whole fight scene in the bar at the beggining was trimmed down considerably; the stabbing was edited out, the guy being throw onto the stove and burning his hands. I felt so annoyed that they'd do this, I felt completely and utterly cheated, I just stopped watching.

So I went through a period of rediscovering a lot of favourites that pretty much astonished me with the amount of gore they had. What's more is that a lot of the films felt better with the gore, it's like this was what the film makers had originally intended, and it was a greater experience. Robocop had so much more 'Ooomph' when I saw the unedited version.

Today, I'm very suspicious of action films that are low on gore; there seems something wrong about bloodless violence, and often times it reeks of studio interference, cutting down a film for the sake of hitting a younger market. I actually find this somewhat disturbing, as it show violence without consequence, and I think if you're going to have violence onscreen, it should actually be genuinely violent, like in Taxi Driver or No Country For Old Men.

More onto horror films now, I find that the above is equally true, and it's even more disturbing when you've got Slasher films that are being marketed to younger audiences now, such as Prom Night (Remake) that was rated PG-13 in the States, which means that anyone under the age of 13 can watch the film with a parent or guardian. Of course, that can depend on the kind of film, as The Others had the PG-13 rating, but wasn't a violent film. I'd say in general though, horror films are fairly adult entertainment, and I think they should be R-Rated, full-blooded and visceral when there's a violent subject matter.

Of course, there is a flip-side to that which Captivity proves, as that was a film that was re-edited to include more gore than what was originally intended, in order to cash in on the likes of Saw and Hostel. That was possibly one of the worst films I've seen in a long time, so while I did enjoy Saw and Hostel, no amount of gore made up for what was a utterly retarded film that not even Uwe Boll could feel proud of.

Anyway, with the issue of desensitization, I don't really agree with that, because if there's one thing that makes me wince beyond anything else, it's seeing someone' achilles tendon being sliced. I first saw it happening in Pet Semetary, it still puts a shiver through me, and no matter how many times I've seen it happen in other films, it always has the same effect on me. The scene in Hostel where it happened was the scene that effected me the most out of either film, and they didn't even show it happening, it was only a reaction shot of the character's face, but it still got to me. Freaks me out every time.

With reguards to films that are gore-filled and have substance, there are plenty of examples over the years, from The Thing, The Fly, any number of Dario Argento movies, The Evil Dead, Hellraiser... In fact, most horror films had quite a lot of gore up until Scream and it's various clones, and it is nice to see some gorier horror films back on the big screen.

Is the recent gore extravaganza killing decent horror films? Frankly, no. Rose tinted glasses may apply here, as there's always been a tremendous amount of **** horror films, and right now it's been crap like Captivity, Vacancy, the seemingly endless Saw franchise, because that's the latest bandwagon that's being jumped on. Hostel made an incredible amount of money with a very small budget, so Hollywood sees dollar signs! It's no different to what happened in the last decade when Scream raked in the money with a relatively small budget, we had dung like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cherry Falls, Valentine, Urban Legend and so many more just coming out of the damned walls!

And it's no different to what has gone before either, because A Nightmare On Elm Street made huge money compared to it's meager budget, and there was a string of sequels pumped out by the studio without the involvement of Wes Craven, just like they've done today with Saw without the involvement of James Wan; rehash rehash rehash.

If there's a spate of bad gore movies, it's because of bad film-making, and a desire to cash in on a successful formulae, the gore content is not the problem.

niallon

It's interesting to see The Thing and The Evil Dead name checked above. Personally I regard them amongst the greatest films ever made, not just of the genre.

Thing is, they both had directors behind them who were genuinely into the film, not just looking for a quick buck. So I guess gore really isn't the problem nowadays, it's knowing how to use it.

So it seems we're touching on another argument here about the incompetency of modern directors and that is a long, painful, horrendous road!

+1 on the tendon slicing by the way Karl, horrific stuff!

Karl Hungus

niallon wrote: »

So it seems we're touching on another argument here about the incompetency of modern directors and that is a long, painful, horrendous road!

I wouldn't say for a second that modern directors are incompetant, at least not moreso than before. There's always been hacks who'll hop on board a bandwagon, or churn out a by the numbers sequel for the studio. Do I need to remind anyone of how completely awful A Nightmare On Elm Street Part II was? Because it was one terrible excuse for a sequel, I'll say that much.

niallon

Just back in from seeing The Happening and I see it as a perfect example of proper use of gore:

The film is entirely gore lite, cutting away just as all the the gruesome events are about to occour until suddenly, mid way, two children are shot dead in full gore filled fashion. Shockingly good.

I think it's full on proof of the effectiveness of gore when used tastefully. As I said in my initial argument, when it's a principal component in the film, gore is great. It's when used unnecessarily that it becomes a problem.

TerrorFirmer

What I just don't get is the inconsistency regarding editing - look at something like Final Destination 3, brutal, disturbing, graphic and still 15A. In contrast, I got 'Halloween: the unrated Directors Cut' recently and felt fairly cheated that in every scene, the actual bloodletting is hidden by a lightning fast edit - it's actually bizarre, I can truthfully say that with the removal of the scenes involving nudity, it could almost have made 12A. To say I was disappointed was an understatement - a film doesn't necessarily have to rely on gore but in this instance, the entire atmosphere of the film oozed violence and relied on a build up to the inevitability; only to have it edited out of the film itself! Imagine Starship Troopers, but in every scene where a soldier is about to be ravaged, the camera suddenly cuts to a different scene - and you have an idea of how disjointed the movie felt.

Sorry to take the topic off track a little, but has anyone else seen this alleged 'Directors Unrated Cut' of Halloween? Biggest joke ever.

Gore is gore, but it's presented in so many different ways, that even in aesthetically being the same, it's impact is so different....it's not even down to quantity, it's the way in which its presented and crafted into the movie. That scene in Irreversible will never leave me; you're literally silently begging for it to stop and be over....in another film in a similar situation you could be grinning from ear to ear. It's a bit over saturated at the moment alright, but it's banality is more attributable to the rise of cash in movie releases - Saw and Hostel opened it up to a new sort of violence to the masses - super depravity, totally distinctive from OTT 'action' (robocop?) and typical horror violence. It worked for a while, and still has the potential to continue to do so, as soon as they stop trying to cash in on each others efforts. Captivity was truly an abomination of a movie, a cess pit of stolen ideas - they simply don't seem to realize that for such extreme violence to work, to be perceived and reacted to in the manner they they want, the fundamentals of the film have to be equally gritty and convincing. You have to be appropriate. Compare saving Private Ryan to Starship Troopers and while several thousand gallons more of the red stuff was split in the latter, it's still and always be a fondly remembered blockbuster ride into a fantasy world in contrast to the former which would almost bring you to tears over the incomprehensible reality of war. This is how the cash-in's fall flat regardless of how much they attempt to emulate the genre innovators; all filler no killer!

It's also generally filtered to a lesser extent into the way other movies are being currently made, across every genre...you just don't see movies anymore where the action hero gets beaten up left, right and center and emerges without even so much as a nosebleed. Everything is focused more so on slightly increased levels of realism in terms of human endurance/make up etc.

Personally, I prefer the good old fashioned Starship Troopers style hyper-violence wrapped up in a reassuring make believe shell - it's the violence that's always worked for me as entertainment. Roll on July for SST3

nyarlothothep

Yar, Paul Verhoeven is one of my favourite directors and has used gore so effectively in his films, in a kind of cheesy comical videogame way but which totally adds to the violence.

I like gore when its used to supplement a good plot, gore on its own is just pointless although it can have humourous results. The OTT cheesy gore fest of re animator comes to mind,they wantonly took the idea of gore to its logical conclusion when the bad guys intestines explode from his stomach and try to strangle the protagonist, its just ridiculous, its like "I am GoreZon, fear my exploding intestines and blood".

Anyway my position on it is that gore is good as long as it contributes to the film. Though sometimes it can be a bit trying, but that ultimately depends on the plot. I mean The Mangler Reborn was just depressing, not only because it was such a crap film, but also because it was an extended piece on human suffering and nothing else. Torture films are a bit one dimensional and just a downer in general.