Returning from this depressing interlude to the idea that when used properly gore can be a crucial aspect of the fear itself, the first place to which its more explicit use goes is the body horror genre. Here we encounter the can’t-not-look-at-it wonder of films such as The Fly, The Thing, Alien, and Society. The role of the gore here could not be more obvious. Like the home-invasion concept, body horror plays on the fundamental fear of personal violation; the difference is that whereas home invasion is often effective when things can’t be seen, body horror depends precisely on a full dose of exposure to the trauma. In body horror, dread can pretty much be dispensed with – the terror comes straight out of our inescapable sympathy for any fellow human being whose body is no longer safe from itself. It is a natural human instinct to want to be the owner of our bodies; these movies eat that instinct alive.
But as effective as it is, the body horror subgenre provides the next move along the scale to the point at which many of that type of film – Slither and Teeth for example – tread a fine line between the disgusting and the ridiculous. That fine line becomes specifically intentional once we move into the realm of the true comedy-gore subgenre – where we find offerings such as Peter Jackson’s 1993 genre classic Braindead (or Dead Alive, as it is known in North America) and the ‘classically bad’ Basket Case – and also towards those films for which gore is simply the main event, such as Videodrome (off to wash my eyeballs again). Films such as these have been popular for decades, and yet their existence is often overlooked by those that criticize modern horror films for excessive carnage. Hatchet makes Hostel look like Mary Poppins.
Of course, it is perfectly understandable to describe these films as disturbing. But the sense of the ludicrous can be found in many a modern horror. The brilliantly surprising anti-stereotypical The Cabin in the Woods literally pulls out all the stops in terms of what frightens us (although I personally don’t want to meet the person whose nightmares involved those sorts of unicorns – nor do I want to know what version of The Little Mermaid they’ve been watching), but there are one or two moments in its finale that are undoubtedly intentionally comical.
