After extensive True Blooding and experiencing ambivalence towards the sexual content I keep returning to a couple of scenes. Really beautiful scenes. Really visceral scenes. And having missed the tactile quality of special effects ardently for many years I wanted to wax nostalgic over guts of glory and how they go all over the place. Below is a list of the holy entrails... and in no particular order, just appearing as they fall out.
TRUE BLOOD
Impressive return to the sticky substances in HBO uber popular vampire romp. Unlike the conventions that the televisual medium has developed of vamps evaporating into dust, True Blood gets in your face, your hair and even your cleavage.
The first vampire slaying takes place on top of Sookie Stackhouse. She has just been attacked by Longshadow and Bill stakes him from behind. He erupts. Spewing blood and coating Sookie before imploding. His sticky remains splashing to the ground. The gelatinous mess insultingly splatters Sookie, who is completely bathed in blood. There hasn't been quite such a proudly scarlet woman since Carrie went to the prom.
True Blood is a truly joyous change in vampire slayage.
HELLRAISER
The resurrection scene has never been equalled. The reverse animation is a clunky, gooey delight. The timing is perfect. It's horrifically, unjustly long. Slowly liquescence seeps through the floor boards in the attic. It pools and gathers gradually gaining form. The anticipation mounts as the liquids turns to substance, the substance solidifies and the solid mass begins to build a body. The physical form is ambiguous for a while, just dripping body junk. The figure is rising. Your spine tingles and your tendons twinge. Your body physically trying to comprehend the reconstituting body before your eyes. Until finally we have glorious skinless meat. This scene raises hell and the hairs on your arms.
WIZARD OF GORE
Hershell Gordon Lewis pioneered the effects of splatter cinema. Low low low budget and low low low brow, his ketchup and sausage approach to guts is the happy antecedent of many contemporary mess makers like Tom Savini. When the wizard drills through the centre of his glamourous assistant her collapsing torso spills an impossibly thick substance. He then proceeds to fondle the spaghetti stand-in for intestinal strands whilst the offal of some unfortunate beast literally sits on her obviously unscathed stomach. Wizard of Gore is crude by todays shiny standards of simulation effects but that is its appeal. The absurdity stands out, but there is also the sense of discovery in watching HGL films as you realise that this was the moment when body based horror cinema realised its own disgusting potential.
PLANET TERROR
Robert Rodriguez's homage to 'grindhouse' cinema is perfectly putrid. It's an insane and exceptional addition to the saturated zombie genre. It is incredibly self-aware and relentless in its violence. Memorable scene's include Tommy's death. The doctor Block's son shoots himself in the face with the gun his mother has given him, after the stern warning 'you could blow your head off!'. Cue the release of his brain matter across the screen and dash. It's not often you get to see kids die and it's timed so perfectly that its that awkward combination of pleasure that horror plays with. You knew it was going to happen, it had all been set up, but you know its morally dubious. The scenario gratifies your anticipation and then makes you deal with it.
The stand out and recurring theme however is slime. Everything oozes in Planet Terror. Everyone is just a huge pustule waiting to pop. The badass Dr Block takes a hit to the face, slime from his patient smears his glasses, drips dangerously towards his mouth and refuses to move. It's the kind of tacky gore that won't quit. It strings and sticks everywhere, evoking these beautiful disgusting words from Sartre:
'the slimy appears as already the outline of a fusion of the world with myself... Only at the very moment when I believe that I possess it, behold by a curious reversal, it possesses me... I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me... That sucking of the slimy that I feel on my hands outlines a kind of continuity of the slimy substance in myself. These long, soft strings of substance which fall from me to the slime body (when, for example, I plunge my hand into it and then pull and then pull it put again) symbolize a rolling off of myself in the slime'. Sartre
Planet Terror is a mess that you can't get off of your skin our out of your head. Simply remarkable interiors.
EVENT HORIZON
Aside from being genuinely compelling science fiction, Event Horizon provides some wicked gorey motifs. Whilst I want to rant regarding time paradoxes, sexual space bending and FUCKING HELL!!!! I'll just stick to the subject. The are two outstanding visceral images for me. Firstly the ghost ships beautiful bodily decoration that would make Ed Gein weep. The deck is hung with skeletal remains and draped with organs. The effects is hauntingly beautiful.
Secondly, Enucleation has never really been in vogue but is horrifically stunning in Event Horizon. The crew are haunted by ghosts with no eyes. It's so subtle but effective. They open their empty sockets and you can glean into their bloody heads and beyond to the absence of their souls.
DRAG ME TO HELL
Sam Raimi's much awaited return to horror comedy is hard to swallow. It is incredibly cinesthetic working on the disgust provoked by the ingestion of perceptibly foul things. Main protagonist Christine suffers a strew of oral abuse. She is macked by a slobbering old witch, swallows a fly, is vomited on with insects, pukes blood, just to name a few. The idea being that we physically respond to the presentation of gross ingestion and projection with our own senses. We are able to imagine these substances entering or exiting ourselves and it's massively effective in its massive quantities.
xoxo Final Girl
... this topic will continue as I revisit my favourite body horrors.
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