Disclaimer: This article talks about some disturbing subject matter, if you believe that you may be upset by such content, I’d strongly recommend not reading.
With my birthday coming up soon, a friend of mine got me something that I’d been curious about for a long while, the two Terrifier films. As I’m sure you may’ve heard of, these films feature an enormous amount of severed limbs, impalements and blood in general and I’ve even heard of people vomiting and fainting while watching the second film! I’m not sure what it says about me then that I took the whole film in my stride, enjoying my time with it and feeling unfazed by the violence onscreen, something I thought about more when I realised that a particularly gory and infamous section of the film is three minutes long. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about gory horror movies and what the appeal I find in them is.
Let’s start by covering some basics. First off, I’ve spoken before about how, while I enjoy gore, I seek deeper meaning to hold my attention span which ranges from good storytelling, intriguing themes and concepts or even just importance in film history. I also want to mention, because I’m sure someone would fail to make the distinction, that gore in movies appeal to me, gore in real-life doesn’t. Just to give a brief example of this, I remember eating my dinner while watching Hellbound: Hellraiser II, a film I love BTW, and someone asked me how I could be eating while the movie was playing. I mentioned how I was unaffected by the gore but, next day, I went out to my cats to find that one of them had given birth and was in the process of eating her kittens. As you can imagine, this disturbed me greatly to the point where I desperately scrambled to save the remaining one all while holding back the urge to vomit. It’s a grim story but I think it perfectly illustrates how I distinguish between real and fictional gore.
Having said all that, it’s time that we get to the matter at hand, why these gory horror movies appeal to me. For that, I think there’s several reasons. The first that I wish to discuss is the escapism that it provides. My mind is constantly on the go every day from reading the news to figuring out life and even writing blog posts like this one! Being able to sit down and watch something that feels like an attack on the senses actually feels like a rejuvenating experience to me which I’m sure will sound odd to some people but which a great body of work has covered and proven.
Of course, there’s also the craftmanship behind many of these wonderful effects which I adore. I wrote about the legendary special makeup effects artist Tom Savini and part of the reason I did that was because of a series of appearances he had on David Letterman which showed all of the incredible equipment and devices that he used and the tricks that made them appear even more realistic on camera. Amongst several highlights was seeing Jason Voorhees’ head from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (the fourth of twelve films!) and seeing how they had his head slide down the machete that was embedded into his skull when he fell forward onto it in the movie. Additionally, even many modern horror movies, due to their low budgets, make heavy use of prosthetic effects, something which I find much more appealing than the use of CGI which I often find distracting and breaks my immersion.
There’s also something about the brazenness of gory horror movies that also appeal to me. Having grown up being used to seeing films cut away just as the violence happens (two examples that spring to mind are Scar’s death in The Lion King where he’s devoured by hyenas and Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazi gets chopped up by the propeller of a plane), I found the concept of seeing the violence so directly appealing. Now there can be times where I watch a gory scene and I’m thinking to myself “This is taking too long” which I would consider to be either a failure of the special effects to interest me or a failure to incorporate story elements, thereby ruining the flow of the film.
Of course, I’m sure plenty of people will disagree with me but I’m always eager to find films that will manage to hook me with the story or themes while serving a big helping of excellent gory special effects. Let me know your thoughts on the appeal of gory horror movies, what some of the best gory special effects you’ve seen have been, whether you like or dislike gore in media and why and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs!