Splatter film  

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This page Splatter film is part of the disgust series. Illustration: The Bitter Potion  (c. 1635) by Adriaen Brouwer
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This page Splatter film is part of the disgust series.
Illustration: The Bitter Potion (c. 1635) by Adriaen Brouwer
The Dragon Slaying the Companions of Cadmus (1588) by Hendrik Goltzius, after a painting by Cornelis van Haarlem
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The Dragon Slaying the Companions of Cadmus (1588) by Hendrik Goltzius, after a painting by Cornelis van Haarlem

"In 2000s cinema, there has been a resurgence of films influenced by the splatter genre that depict nudity, torture, mutilation and sadism, sometimes disparagingly labeled "torture porn" by critics. The Eli Roth film, Hostel (2005), was the first to be called "torture porn" by critic David Edelstein in January 2006, but the classification has been applied to Saw (2004) and its sequels, The Devil's Rejects (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), and the earlier films Baise-moi (2000), and Ichi the Killer (2001). Edelstein also included Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) in with the genre, due to its explicit scenes. A difference between this group of films and earlier splatter films is that they are often mainstream Hollywood films that receive a wide release and have comparatively high production values. The 2002 horror film FeardotCom has also been listed as an example of torture porn."--Sholem Stein

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A splatter film is a subgenre of horror film that deliberately focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and graphic violence. These films, usually through the use of special effects, display a fascination with the vulnerability of the human body and the theatricality of its mutilation. The term "splatter cinema" was coined by George A. Romero to describe his film Dawn of the Dead, though Dawn of the Dead is generally considered by critics to have higher aspirations, such as social commentary, than to be simply exploitative for its own sake.

The term was popularized by John McCarty's 1981 book Splatter Movies, exhaustively subtitled: Breaking The Last Taboo: A Critical Survey Of The Wildly Demented Sub Genre Of The Horror Film That Is Changing The Face Of Film Realism Forever. The first significant publication to attempt to define and analyse the 'Splatter Film', McCarty suggests that Splatter is indicative of broader trends in film production. Though Splatter is associated with fairly extreme Horror Films, and such works form the main focus of the book, a relatively diverse range of titles dating mainly from the 1960s to late 1970s are also included, for example John Waters' Female Trouble, Magnum Force, the 1973 sequel to Dirty Harry, Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky, and Walter Hill's Western The Long Riders. This filmography implies that the influence of film-makers such as Sam Peckinpah or Andy Warhol, to name two, is as significant to the development of the form as Grand Guignol, Hammer Films or Herschell Gordon Lewis.

During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the use of graphic violence in cinema has been labeled "torture porn" or "gorno" (a portmanteau of "gore" and "porno"). By contrast, films such as Braindead, Evil Dead II and to some extent Dawn of the Dead, all of which feature over-the-top gore, can be construed as comedic, and fall into the category of splatstick.

Origins

The splatter film has its aesthetic roots in French Grand Guignol theatre, which endeavored to stage realistic scenes of blood and carnage for its patrons. In 1908, Grand Guignol made its first appearance in England, although the gore was downplayed in favor of a more Gothic tone, owing to the greater censorship of the arts in Britain.

The first appearance of gore—the realistic mutilation of the human body—in cinema can be traced to D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), which features numerous Guignol-esque touches, including two onscreen decapitations, and a scene in which a spear is slowly driven through a soldier's naked abdomen as blood wells from the wound. Several of Griffith's subsequent films, and those of his contemporary Cecil B. DeMille, featured similarly realistic carnage.

Modern era

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the public was reintroduced to splatter themes and motifs by groundbreaking films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and the output of Hammer Film Productions (an artistic outgrowth of the English Grand Guignol style) such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958). Perhaps the most explicitly violent film of this era was Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960), which included numerous scenes of flaying and dismemberment in its depiction of the Buddhist underworld Naraka.

Splatter came into its own as a distinct subgenre of horror in the early 1960s with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the United States. Eager to maintain a profitable niche, Lewis turned to something that mainstream cinema still rarely featured: scenes of visceral, explicit gore. In 1963, he directed Blood Feast, widely considered the first splatter film. In the 15 years following its release, Blood Feast took in an estimated $7 million. It was made for an estimated $24,500. Blood Feast was followed by two more gore films by Herschell Gordon Lewis, Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965).

The popularity of the splatter film in the 1970s was met with strong reactions in the US and the U.K. Roger Ebert in the U.S., and Member of Parliament Graham Bright in the U.K., led the charge to censor splatter films on home video with the film critic going after I Spit on Your Grave while the politician sponsored the Video Recordings Act, a system of censorship and certification for home video in the U.K. This resulted in the outright banning of many splatter films, which were deemed "video nasties" in the British press.

Some splatter directors have gone on to produce mainstream hits. Peter Jackson started his career in New Zealand by directing the splatter movies Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992). These films featured such over-the-top gore that it became a comedic device. These comedic gore films have been dubbed "splatstick", defined as physical comedy that involves dismemberment. Splatstick seems to be more common in Japan, with the examples of Robogeisha, Tokyo Gore Police, and Machine Girl.

Splatter films have pioneered techniques used in other genres. For example, the popular 1999 film The Blair Witch Project is similar to the 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust. The story in Cannibal Holocaust is told through footage from a group of people making a documentary about a portion of the Amazon which is said to be populated by cannibals. Although the Blair Witch directors had not seen Cannibal Holocaust at the time of filming, this "mockumentary" format was later used in their film.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Splatter film" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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