Viscera and flesh in all its glory- An essay/discussion on Censorship and Extremism in media
WARNING: This essay will discuss some triggering and disgusting content, like gore and references to assault. I am more than happy to not read this out if it makes anyone uncomfortable.
Note: it has been a LONG time since I wrote an essay, so please forgive me if the formula is not perfect and correct.
Imagine this; it is 1960, and on your way to the cinema to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s new film ‘Psycho’. The title alone sends a spidery, cold sensation down your spine. Soon enough you are in the cinema reclined in the cozy red seats, with popcorn in one hand and a soda in the other. The movie starts, and nothing could prepare you for the horrors you would witness on the big screen. A man spying on a woman through a hole in the wall, a woman murdered in the confides of the hotel shower, a toilet flushing- how crude! – and the big reveal of Norman Bate’s mother. You leave the cinema horrified. Never could you imagine seeing such things in the safety of the cinema. You cannot help but ask yourself- what is the point of such brutal violence and taboo displays in media?
Over sixty years ago, certain topics were forbidden from being shown in media. A woman could not be seen in her bra, a character could not curse- not even to say ‘damn and violence was a subject best not breached. And yet, you would see a character suggesting a nice cigarette to help sleep to relieve stress. Naturally, some creative minds started to rebel against these ideals. In his film, Hitchcock flushed a toilet and had a woman showering before she is brutally butchered. Later, other directors started to challenge censorship by showing more explicit sex and gore in their media.
Dario Argento’s most infamous film, Opera, shows a character have tape lined with sharp needles placed beneath her eyes; threatening to pierce her eyelids or eyes if she dared blink. Sam Rami’s famous movie franchise, The Evil Dead, featured the protagonist Ash Williams being forced to kill his friends and girlfriend in an over the top gorefest after they are possessed by the wicked deadites released by the skin bound Necronomicon. Recently, audiences were disgusted by a fresh film franchise named ‘Terrifier’ which had no plot other than a depraved and cruel clown named Art who went around and butchered people for the fun of it.
Again, you are left to wonder, why? Why the violence? Why the sexual content? Why do these stories must be so disturbing and intense?
The answer is simple- it is a protest of censorship. It is a trial of how strong someone’s stomach and will is in the face of guts, sex and other sins known to man. Humans just love the macabre. Its why some of us tune into the latest true crime podcast to hear the story of a serial killer or pick up a copy of George RR Martian’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” when HBO’s adaptation feels too lacking in its brutality. It is why we watch shows like Dexter, and all the grizzly ways he dispatches of his victims or play video games like Mortal Kombat and rejoice when a character finishes the fight with a spectacle of gore. Whether we like it, or are repulsed by it, we tend to seek it out. And it is how I, unfortunately, discovered the depths of book genre’s most divisive and gut churning genre- Splatter-punk.
Splatter punk is a genre solely dedicated to pushing the envelope on what was allowed and banned from books. It first began in the early 1980s, and given its name in the mid-1980s by fellow splatter punk author David J. Schow at the twelfth world fantasy convention held in Rhode Island at that time. It was designed to challenge ‘suggestive’ horror novels released around that time and set out to unmask the truly horrific acts often left out of horror stories.
These stories often featured brutal depictions of over-the-top violence, intense and descriptive sex scenes, foul descriptions of gross subjects like bodily fluids, rape, animal abuse and anything else which would make a reader repulsed and uncomfortable. If the movies ‘Opera’ or ‘The Evil Dead’ mentioned above were written as books, they would undoubtably be considered splatter-punk.
If you were to ask Google ‘who is the most famous splatter-punk author?,’ you would be given more than one author. However, of these names, one sticks out- Clive Barker. He is the disturbed mind behind the popular horror novella ‘the Hell-bound heart,’ a third addition to his night visions anthology, which was later adapted to the ‘Hellraiser’ movies.
In the Hellbound Heart, we are introduced to Frank Cotton, a hedonistic criminal who is seeking pleasure in all its painful glory. He finds it in the cenobites residing in a mysterious puzzle box, whose ‘pleasure’ leads to his demise and his soul being taken into the cenobite’s realm. Later, his brother Rory and wife Julia move into the house and after Rory cuts his hand in the attic his brother vanished it, the blood mixing into what remained of the hedonistic criminal, Frank returns from the dead and seeks out Julia, who he had slept with a week before she married his brother. Still in love with him, even though he is now a fleshy, red form, she agrees to lure unsuspecting men into the attic for Frank to consume so that he may be whole again. And that’s only the first quarter of the story!
As you can imagine, the story was not made for someone with a weak stomach to read. But the book still sold thousands of copies, and people read it for its explicit subject matter and the thrill of consuming such brutal media. But Clive Barker is not the only author who is willing to push the envelope with stories of spilled guts and disgustingly painful imagery.
Nowadays, someone else wears the crown of famous splatter punk authors. And his name is Aron Beauregard. If you were to type his name into an amazon search bar, you would see just from the covers of his books alone how far he is willing to go to make his reader feel sick.
For example, his cover for ‘Through the eyes of desperation’ is a simple one at a first glance. It takes place in a casino, and we see a man playing roulette and a dealer tossing a ball into a roulette wheel. But when you look closer, you find the scene is not at all innocent. The man playing is holding his face in pain, and the ball the dealer is tossing into the roulette wheel is the man’s eye! Another example is the cover for his most controversial work, ‘The Playground.’ It shows a young girl standing on top of a slide, looking down at the death trap waiting for her below. Buzz saws coated in gore and blood spin onwards, waiting for its next victim. The thought of someone so young being in such a situation is enough to make anyone feel a growing pit in their gut.
His covers are stomach churning, and disturbing to look at. It makes you wonder if the author is messed up or trying his hardest to make his readers squirm and feel uncomfortable. But that is the point. You are supposed to be disgusted. You are supposed to be scared for the helpless victims in the story, who may not even be alive by the time you turn that final page. It is by design. And we humans, as much as we do not want to, seek it out anyway. We have grown used to it all. The deaths in the world, the vicious acts committed on the vulnerable, the abuse suffered behind closed doors. It is sadly the human experience. And no matter how exaggerated the stories of splatterpunk may be- the experience is still there. And the truth is, many of us are desensitised to it. Warts and all.
It is why many of us try so hard to censor it all. Naked bodies incite thoughts of sex and intimacy, blood and gore incite thoughts of violence and brutality and natural bodily occurrences like menstruation or insemination is disgusting and should remain restricted to the sole gender experiencing it. But by doing this, we do harm to those most impressionable, our youth. By not telling our preteens about the changes in their bodies, we subject them to confusion and isolation. By not warning our children about a world of people who may do them harm, they may fall victim to those very monsters. By not informing them about being safe when consuming substances or starting relationships, we leave them open to illness and life altering consequences.
Censorship is fine, it can provide a safe place to consume media without thinking about the perils of the world, but we cannot mask everything. At the same time, making a spectacle of the horrors of the world we numb ourselves to can also hurt us. We dilute these horrors until the impact of reality simply no longer exists. As informative as some true crime podcasts or certain crime shows can be, we rarely ever consider the weight the crimes had on victims and their families.
In conclusion, we need to balance the censored with the uncensored. We live in a world that is far from nice and safe, but we should not have to be afraid of it. Horror reminds us that we humans evolved in unforgiving times, and we got here through the instincts of survival and community. What makes a story impactful is not a huge dragon or a dystopia’s downfall- it is how it reflects reality and grounds us in both fiction and truth. Sometimes the final girl does not defeat the camp slasher, sometimes the criminal is not caught by the police officers and sometimes we are just fleshy meat suits for a vulnerable brain which oozes blood, gore, and filth. We are viscera and flesh, in all its glory.