One Bloody Mess: Gore in Horror

I axed you if you wanted a bit of gore!

If there is anything that makes horror stand out from other genres of similar styles like thrillers or crime dramas, it is how intensively a horror story will use gore. When horror wishes, it will use gore in heavy amounts to the point of nausea. It is a tool like any other to shock, surprise, and horrify. While other genres tiptoe into the blood and guts, horror jumps into the river of blood and guts with no care who it splashes from its cannonball. So how shall we use this lovely tool in the toolbox of frights? Shall we paint the town red or keep it subtle? Surprise the reader or make it obvious where things are going? Show all or let the brain fill in the gaps between the phrases? These are the questions that every writer has had to think through, so let us go through them, and along the way, we shall discuss every option along the way along with the different types of gore you will see that are very unique to horror.

So first things first, we should understand what gore is and what ways it is used in horror. The definition of gore I will use is that it is a phrase that describes body horror or injury used to scare or gross out. Body horror is any manipulation of human or animal bodies that is not natural by any means and rarely could happen in the real world. This is where we find transformation horror and monsters. Think of something akin to the horror found in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki when people start taking horrible transformations into twisted bodies, snail people, or another horrors the spiral turns them into. It is also where you find werewolves, zombies, and that thing in The Fly. These sorts of monsters are the ones we know of, but are not afraid of turning into ourselves. I mean, snail people don’t exist, right?

Injury on the other hand, is when the human or animal body is hurt in some way that could happen in real life. Injury is the kills you see in a horror movie that make your jaw drop. They are the grossest ways you can find to use a wood chipper improperly such as in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. They are Reagan stabbing herself in the vagina during the Exorcist. The purpose of injury is mainly empathy, but not in the normal emotional connection with the character sense, but the sense that you imagine in your mind for a split second how that feels and either cringe, stop watching, or maybe even puke. The other purpose is the shock value, yet I find that secondary because shock is temporary while empathy lingers long after the initial jump.

The blend of body horror and injury in my opinion is deformities. In this sense I mean the monster that comes out of the shadows and has a hook for a hand or an eye missing. These are things that make you cringe yet feel mild sympathy such as the deformities that Jason was born with or the burns on Freddy Krueger. Both of them went through a lot of pain that turned them into what they look and act like within the movies. I find them also to be the things that if you saw a person just living out their day and they looked like that, you’d not only do a double take, but feel absolutely guilty for doing so. Think something like conjoined twins, they look unnatural but were born looking like that and often suffer serious painful complications to the point surgery is often the recommended tactic to help them. It is sad but disturbing and the human mind falls into the uncanny just by looking at them.

This is by no means a definitive list but they are the types of gore that interest me greatly. I tend to prefer the transformation or injury types out of personal issues I have with using deformities. When you are born with birth defects, it’s hard to get exactly freaked out by seeing someone else experiencing an abnormality but for others it might be very effective. So what kind of gore affects you emotionally? It can be a type I listed here or another grouping all together, this was just what I’ve noted as groups within gore. Let me know in the comments and I will see you all on Food Thursday.