Gore for Thought

To many horror movie directors, torture is imperative. 

The end of October is nearing, and accordingly, many will be on the hunt for a new horror movie. Horror is a seemingly reliable genre. No matter the character arcs, the setting, even the plot — most viewers walk away with a satisfyingly scary experience.

Though, the plots of some horror movies seem to serve as just a conveyor of gore to the audience. Even when the plot is bad, the movie still garners viewership because the disturbing effects attract the curiosity of many.

It seems to be, even when a horror movie is formally bad, it’s still monetarily “good.”

Human fascination with the macabre predates cinema. The origins of fascisation with the macabre was seen in many ancient civilizations. When the publishing industry began to expand in the 1800s, it was writers like Edgar Allen Poe who made names for themselves in the horror genre of writing. 

There were the macabre works of Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde, who used horror as means of social commentary — “Tell Tale Heart” covering guilt and paranoia, and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” vanity and recklessness. 

Then came the invention of film. Horror could be told through a new, multifaceted mode of storytelling. But has the steady progression of visual effects numbed audiences to human suffering? Stories such as “Tell Tale Heart” seem to fall flat with audiences today in comparison to modern horror films. 

Stephen King, author of the highest grossing horror novels ever published, identified three types of horror in media — the gross-out, the horror or the unnatural and the terror.

King points out the gross-out factor as a severed limb or a bodily fluid. Fairly easy to pull off.

The unnatural is as it sounds — spiders the size of buses or women with buttons for eyes. 

The last, and in King’s opinion the worst form of horror, is terror. Terror is the anticipation of a dreadful event, or the atmospheric sense of dread.This form is the most difficult to curate in writing and film because of the amount of intentionality and attention to detail it requires. 

Terror requires time to curate. It can’t be done with a jumpscare or a quick beheading. Terror has to fill someone with true dread, not gross them out.

Movie directors should focus on this type of horror, which if done right, could add much more to the plot than two hours of mindless gross-outs. 

In a world where the infliction of pain can look so incredibly realistic, horror movie directors should be cognizant of the way they use gore as a means of plot direction. Nowadays, audiences will sit down to watch two hours of senseless, plotless gore containing most diabolical gross-outs of human suffering directors can dream up. 

This type of horror is lazy. Although audience members may feel sick by the end, they’re simply grossed out, not truly terrified. 

“The Terrifier” series for example, has very little plot. Art the Clown, the antagonist, has no backstory, no origin place, nothing resembling a story until the second movie, and even then, the story of The Terrifier is still largely unknown.

These movies are the perfect example of directors using film as a medium to expose audiences to hours of torture. It’s a good movie for those who are fans of gore, but it does nothing in terms of telling a good story — which is the purpose of movies. There’s a clear difference between scaring people and making them nauseous. 

“The Substance,” a body horror film about a woman willing to do anything to look younger, is full of disgusting bodily fluids. However, because the gore is used as a medium to highlight themes such as insecurity, vanity and desperation, it actually adds more to the storyline, rather than subtracting from it. The violence in this instance is a necessity to convey the themes of how consuming and destructive the desire to look younger can be. 

A good movie requires a good story. Horror movies should utilize terror just as much as gross-out if the director truly wants to scare the audience. The gore used should have purpose, and it should carry the plot and support its themes. Plotless horror is just lazy.