Gore Fest ’09
Let’s talk about gore for a second. Gore is that thing that happens when you are watching a movie and all of a sudden someone’s internal organs are yanked out through his eye sockets. Disgusting, yes, but entertaining too. Gore is a touchy subject in the world of action movies. Too much gore can dissuade the squeamish from going to see your film, while two little gore can get your movie spurned as “childish.” And then there are those instances in which gore goes straight off the charts, past the realism mark, until a scene ends up being far more violent and bloody than it would in real life. Below are a few examples of effective cinematic use of gore, and no, these scenes are not all from horror movies.
Takashi Miike
If you are a fan of psychological horror films like Saw, you need to see the films done by Takashi Miike, sometimes called the king of Japanese horror. In this scene, this unfortunate man held fake auditions to find a new girlfriend after his wife died. This girl just so happened to win that audition, and unfortunately turned out to be a psychotic dominatrix who chops off her lover’s limbs, stuffs them in bags, and then keeps them too far away to answer an ever-ringing phone. This final scene in the movie uses gore to great effect, to show just how deeply, deeply screwed up the girl actually is. Needles in the chest and eyes, cutting off a foot, now that is true love! The gore in this scene is made all the more effective because it is not overdone; it’s deadpan gore, if you will. There are no blood splatters or leaking entrails or muscles. Everything is silent and methodical, like the antagonist.
Summer School
Now, this scene from Summer School turns up the gore volume quite a bit, and for one particular reason: It had to offset the intrinsic campiness of its premise. The plot of Summer School centers on someone who has watched way too many B-grade horror films. B-grade horror films were known for their campiness, and people would more often than not laugh at the scenes that were geared toward true horror. To offset this potential problem, Summer School‘s special effects wizards decided to up the gore content until people started vomiting in their seats out of sheer revulsion. I mean, come on, would two guys going, “Woah, dude, we are psychopaths” really scare you if it weren’t for the mutilated bodies littering the ground?
Silent Hill
Silent Hill was one of the better video game to movie conversions over the years, and it used gore to great effect, as you can see from this scene involving Pyramid Head skinning a girl alive. Now, here is the interesting thing: In the original Japanese Silent Hill games, the gore was very subdued. You would see walls bleeding, horrible monstrosities attacking you, and other such crazy things, but the actual murders were never very bloody. This actually says something about the difference between Japanese and American horror. Japanese gore is more of a mental gore, the notion of “God, that would suck if it ever happened to me.” American gore, on the other hand, is deployed in a more outright vomit-inducing manner. The Silent Hill movie is as close as I expect we will get to a midpoint between the two, containing a lot of the passive-aggressive hate that Japanese horror films give you, as well as people getting skinned for good measure.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
Post a Comment to Gore Fest ’09