Splatter horror is not just a film genre: certain authors of extreme horror novels have adopted the term "splatterpunk" to describe works that include gory depictions of violence. However, it is very common for splatterpunk novels to throw several other taboo subjects and situations into the mix to try and bump up the shock value as high as possible.
Subgenre of Horror and Sister Trope to Slasher Film and Exploitation Film.
Tropes associated with Splatter Horror:
- Bloody Hilarious: In splatstick, the blood and guts are played for laughs.
- Bloody Horror: Where blood and gore by themselves make things scary.
- Body Horror: Some examples of body horror have a focus on the violence and bloodshed inherent to twisting the body.
- Crosses the Line Twice: It's so gory and excessive that it becomes comical.
- Gorn: One of the main elements of this genre, though while gorn is used to excite the viewer, splatter horror uses similar themes to upset or horrify the viewer.
- Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death: Many of the early splatter horror titles were gratuitously over-the-top, offering would-be viewers a good idea of what they were in for.
- Horror Comedy: Splatstick films tend to wind up here, but where they land in the spectrum varies widely.
- Kensington Gore: An initial component of splatter horror, due to censorship limitations and special effects limitations. As movie effects have improved, so has the realism of the gore (for better or worse).
- Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Many films in this subgenre use fake blood measured in gallons.
- Slasher Film: The genre most associated with splatter back in the 80s, which featured graphic violence in a Ten Little Murder Victims setup.
- Torture Porn: In the 2000s, splatter was revived as this.
Examples:
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Directors
- Herschell Gordon Lewis is considered the father of splatter films, using so much stage blood in his movies that they were labeled "two gallon" or "three gallon" pictures based on how much he ordered from his distributor.
- Lucio Fulci shares Lewis' title as the "Godfather of Gore", as his giallo and horror films seldom pass up the opportunity for over-the-top gore, to either horrifying or unintentionally hilarious effect.
- Peter Jackson is best known for his sweeping epic fantasies today, but when his career was first getting started he was responsible for splatstick films like Braindead (described in more detail below).
- Eli Roth has stated that he wants to get back to the roots of horror from the 1970s and 1980s, especially the gore. As such, he was one of the forerunners of splatter horror's resurgence in the 2000s. See Hostel and Cabin Fever below.
Anime and Manga
- Works in the ero guro genre typically combine themes of eroticism, sexual corruption, decadence, and malformation to either shock the reader or satirize contemporary issues of censorship or cultural problems. Many of these themes were suppressed by the Japanese government during World War II, but re-emerged later in both manga and music.
- Waita Uziga is an infamous guro manga artist whose works tend to be not safe for work, sanity, or life, featuring plotlines surrounding rape, mutilation, and murder (not necessarily ...In That Order) to the point of absurdity. He tends to write two basic characters: Complete Monsters and their victims.
- Franken Fran is a guro manga centering around a Cute Monster Girl Frankenstein's Monster mad surgeon who fervently believes in preserving life by any means possible. To judge by her usual results, most of her patients would disagree if they could.
- DEAD Tube: Take the exhibitionism typical of websites like YouTube, then rip away all the content filters and in fact require the users to upload violence, rape, and murder for the sake of views, add a healthy (er... you know what we mean) dose of spectacular sadism and bloodshed. This is the result.
Comic Books
- EC Comics was a pre-Comics Code horror publisher that used the visual medium to its fullest in gory, often horrifying ways to punctuate its stories, which included themes like cannibalism, live burial, body horror, and gruesome deaths (or gruesome survivals). Ultimately this led to a backlash from the Moral Guardians in the 1950s, which sought to tone down a lot of the gore and ultimately led to the closure of the publisher.
- Crossed is a series that deconstructs the idea of a zombie apocalypse in the most horrifying way, by turning the infected into grinning, sadists that seem to take most of their ideas from the Reavers as far as rape, murder, cannibalism, and how flexible one may be in the order one approaches these. Unlike in Firefly, which keeps the gore off-screen and lets the viewer's imagination fill in the blanks, Crossed puts everything on display in full color—mostly red. The deaths and mutilations are brutally gory, which is only made worse by the giggling, gibbering infected that, save for a cross-shaped rash on their faces, are completely human. However, the gore is so repetitive that it simply loses its intended effect in later installments.
Fan Works
- Because fanfiction offers authors the freedom to explore themes that the source material can't or won't touch, Grimdark works frequently feature gory set pieces, played for horror or parody.
- The most infamous of the MLP gore fics is Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), featuring Pinkie Pie vivisecting Rainbow Dash alive to collect a "special ingredient" for her cupcakes (namely, pony flesh). Recursive Fanfiction continues exploring Pinkie Pie's apparent derangement in various directions; for example, the Muffins Saga adds additional accomplices for Pinkie Pie's harvesting and baking process, while exploring novel methods for torture and dismemberment.
- Pages Of Harmony combines splatter with psychological torture as Twilight Sparkle attempts to harvest the various Elements of Harmony from the rest of the Mane Six without killing them too quickly. In particular, the segments covering Rainbow Dash (which ends with Auto Cannibalism) and Fluttershy (which takes four solid chapters and an entire alphabet's worth of torture methods) are especially bloody.
Films — Live-Action
- Cannibal Films, both classic and contemporary, tend to liberally dole out blood and guts to emphasize the savagery of the cannibalistic antagonists and the vulnerability of the protagonists (who are frequently not action hero types), as well as to draw uncomfortable parallels between human flesh and animal meat. The gritty grindhouse aesthetic of older films in this subgenre was ultimately replaced with nauseatingly realistic special effects in newer media.
- Cannibal Holocaust is one of the more infamous examples of this trope in cannibal films, featuring on-screen violence and deaths so realistic at the time that the director was accused of making a snuff film. In addition, the film has drawn fire for featuring six genuine animal deaths on-screen, and even though the snuff accusations were disproven, the film has been heavily censored or banned outright in several countries.
- The Green Inferno, coming from the unholy union of Eli Roth and the cannibal film, starts off relatively tame, but takes a hard left when the protagonists are captured by the cannibal tribe they were trying to save from deforestation, starting with the gruesome dismemberment of a still-living Jonah (starting with the village elder extracting and eating his eyes and tongue) and continuing from there with increasing physical and psychological brutality. Some of it is played for Black Comedy (as with the death of Lars, when he is swarmed by a tribe of stoned cannibals with the munchies), but most of it is just gleeful gore and violence, as befitting Roth's love letter to the subgenre.
- Ravenous, being a borderline Black Comedy historical thriller about cannibalism, was not only so bloody that the production ran out of fake blood during the climactic battle, but also presents meat dishes with the same loving attention most films would give an eviscerated murder victim. In fact, one of the main themes is comparing human meat to animal meat, and considering the lead actor, the writer, and the director are all vegetarians, the honest disgust shown towards meat in general enhances horror of the cannibalism scenes nicely.
- Zombie movies combine the anatomical horror of the slasher and cannibal genres with the grotesque decomposition of the undead to emphasize the sheer inevitability of death, even as the zombies seem to represent other contemporary social issues (deliberately or otherwise).
- The first splatter film to popularize the genre was Night of the Living Dead (1968), as George A. Romero attempted to replicate the gore and atmosphere of EC Comics on the big screen. Romero would later coin the term "splatter cinema" to describe his later film, Dawn of the Dead (1978).
- Zombi 2 features some of the most viscerally disgusting zombies within the subgenre, showing off Fulci's love of gore through rotting, worm-eaten effects makeup that can make the unprepared viewer's stomach churn even before they get to the impaled eyeball scene.
- Evil Dead:
- The Evil Dead (1981) starts the series with a splash, with its shoestring budget and grocery-store gore effects combining into a bloody mess that earned it the title of most violent film in 1979 and a comfortable spot on the Video Nasties list. From a simple pencil jabbed into the ankle, to the dismemberment of the demonically-possessed Deadites, to a finale featuring claymation demons melting like really gory candle wax, it's no wonder the crew struggled with the MPAA to not get an X rating, even with the multicolored Deadite blood.
- Evil Dead 2, in line with the increasingly comedic tone of the series, featured gallons of stage blood of various colors and visual gags involving zombie parts as it essentially parodied its own (more straightfaced) prequel.
- Evil Dead (2013), which is bloodier by far than the original series and features graphic dismemberments and mutilations (some self-inflicted), including a more brutal version of the original's tree-rape scene.
- Braindead is one of the more infamous "splatstick" films, with grotesque special effects mainly surrounding the slow decomposition of Lionel's mother Vera and her victims, culminating in a climax that involves a chest-mounted lawnmower, a basement full of zombies, and the most stage blood that had ever been used in any film at that time.note
- Re-Animator and its sequels are billed as some of the goriest films of all time, packing their run-times with so much blood, guts, transgressive sexuality, and pitch-black humor that Stuart Gordon elected to start his own studio rather than subject his vision to censors and risk it getting edited into oblivion. When an opening scene featuring exploding eyeballs is considered one of the tamer gags, you know you're in for a wild ride, as proven when the climax redefines "giving head".
- The Dead Snow films feature Norwegian hikers versus Nazi zombies, both of which seem to be Made of Plasticine. Naturally this results in members of both groups getting torn apart in showers of blood and limbs. In the second film, the undead Nazis even use a length of intestine from one of their victims to siphon fuel from a crippled vehicle to a more viable one.
- Planet Terror, a love-letter to exploitation zombie films, centers around a gas that turns people into zombies. But not the shambling, relatively-human kind—instead, the infected seem to melt into vaguely humanoid collections of pustules and oozing mystery fluids that can turn even the strongest stomach.
- Blood Feast, directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, is considered the first splatter film, notable for its depictions of onscreen gore. As such, it is the oldest film to be included on the Video Nasty list.
- The Hellraiser movies revolve around physical and mental torments in the course of exploring the limits of sensation and beyond. The Cenobites are practitioners of self-mutilation who have pushed the boundaries of both pleasure and pain to such an extent that the line between the two is virtually nonexistent. They are clad in / sewn into elaborate BDSM-esque clothing who wield spiked chains to tear apart those who summon them... as a prelude to giving them a crash course in what a Sense Freak truly is. Obviously, the movies tend to be extremely bloody and generally rather visceral, featuring artistic sculptures of flesh and agony created from various hapless victims, even though the aforementioned beings work on Blue-and-Orange Morality at worst.
- The Toxic Avenger, known as the film that built the house of Troma, is a superhero black comedy splatter film that marked the point when Troma transitioned from sex comedies to exclusively horror films. It takes elements from the teen and superhero genres and turns them up to their most gruesome extreme, including high school bullies that deliberately run over a kid on a bicycle so that his head is smashed like a watermelon, toxic waste that just happens to be sitting around turning a 98-pound weakling into a deformed superhero who eventually gets a blind girlfriend, said superhero fighting crime through graphic dismemberment and bloodshed, and generally all of the schlockiest special effects one could possibly stomach. This film went on to spawn a franchise that spanned four movies, a short-lived animated series (!), a musical (!!), and a beat-em-up video game.
- Hostel was the first film in the Torture Porn resurgence of splatter horror in the 2000s, featuring a pair of college students who fall afoul of an organization of sadists while backpacking across Europe.
- Saw and its sequels emphasize the psychological aspect of splatter horror, as Jigsaw forces his victims to survive gruesome deathtraps or mutilate themselves or others in order to escape, though as the series progressed, the focus became less on psychological horror and more on the gory setpieces.
- The Cabin Fever movies feature a fast-moving flesh-eating virus working its way through the leads, leading to plenty of bloodshed and Body Horror as they literally disintegrate over the course of the movie.
- The Final Destination franchise centers around the laws of physics apparently Balancing Death's Books through deadly freak accidents. The first two movies were (relatively) realistic in the death scenes, while the third and fourth started to get rather cartoonish and over-the-top. The fifth movie dialed back the gore quite a bit after negative reactions to 4.
- The Belko Experiment starts with the concept of a white-collar take on Battle Royale and runs with it to its bloody end, featuring exploding heads, bloody, over-the-top murders (including one character getting his face obliterated with a fire ax on-screen), and gruesome injuries even among those that aren't instantly killed. The film dances all over the Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror, ultimately averaging out somewhere in the realm of a blood-splattered Black Comedy.
- The Cube series of movies center around cubical mazes where some of the rooms contain brutal deathtraps that can take out the unwary in a number of creative ways, ranging from razor wire to flesh-eating bacteria to abstract four-dimensional rearrangements of spacetime. Figuring out the pattern behind the placement of the traps and how best to avoid them and not go splat provides much of the tension.
- The Italian supernatural revenge film Adam Chaplin centers around the title character's quest for revenge against the mob boss who had his wife murdered via immolation. He enlists the assistance of a demon who sits just behind his shoulder, and who gives him super-speed and super-strength, allowing him to rip off limbs, impale victims, and beat people to a literal pulp with his bare hands, resulting in frequent deluges of blood. Bear in mind, Adam is the protagonist.
- The Hatchet films are modern throwbacks to the gleefully gory, cheesy slasher films of the 1980s, featuring the monstrously strong and deformed antagonist Victor Crowley (played by slasher veteran Kane Hodder) ripping apart the Made of Plasticine main cast with his hands as much as with hunting tools both powered and unpowered. While a few kills get Gory Discretion Shots, plenty of brutality is shown onscreen, such as a woman getting her skull pulled open like a Pez dispenser, several people getting their heads pounded into chunky salsa with various blunt objects, and a fisherman getting a hole punched into his stomach and his guts pulled out.
- While the first half of The Fly (1986) is fairly tame, the second half takes a messy hard left as Seth Brundle's fusion with the housefly causes a grotesque transformation into a human/fly hybrid: his teeth and hair fall out, he accidentally pulls out a fingernail and then squirts pus out of the denuded fingertip, his skin becomes lumpy and almost tumorous, and he becomes unable to digest solid food, forcing him to essentially vomit up stomach acid on a potential meal and slurp up the resultant slurry. In the end his human shape falls apart to reveal the hybrid form underneath, showcasing the squishiest of 80's special effects. Why yes, it was a David Cronenberg film, why do you ask?
- Japanese splatter films tend to be especially crazy even within this subgenre, with their anime-inspired plot elements and special effects that range from schlocky and visceral to horrifyingly realistic (sometimes within the same movie). Some samples:
- Ichi the Killer is an insane fever-dream of a yakuza film whose title character is capable of sexually-charged berserker rages that tend to leave his enemies as little more than a fresh coat of paint on the walls. Add to this a sadomasochistic dandy with a pierced Glasgow Grin named Kakihara who is willing to hang people up by hooks as a prelude to torturing them, and who is equally eager to cut off the tip of his own tongue in penance (shown in gory technicolor), and it's hard to know who to root for amid the bloodbath... but at least fans of Japanese splatter will have a blast.
- Splatter Naked Blood starts with an experimental painkiller that turns pain into pleasure, given to three women during a trial of a new birth control. This leads two of the women to mutilate themselves in a blissful bloodbath: one of them cutting off bits of herself (especially erogenous zones) and eating them, and the other piercing her flesh with anything pointy she can get her hands on until she looks like a Cenobite from a jewelry boutique.
- The Guinea Pig films are a series of six Japanese horror films from the 1980s and 1990s that gained global notoriety mainly for the first two films (The Devils Experiment and Flower Of Flesh And Blood), which led to the producer needing to prove that nobody was actually hurt or killed during the graphic torture and dismemberment sequences, as well as for the sixth film (Devil Woman Doctor) being found in the possession of Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki. In particular, Flower of Flesh and Blood scared Charlie Sheen so badly that he called the FBI to report a snuff film.
- Tokyo Gore Police centers around a world where people called Engineers are able to produce weapons out of any injury. The Engineer Hunters fighting this menace are assisted by Ruka, who has become very good at killing them during her hunt for the assassin that killed her father. However, the plot can easily get lost in the Body Horror, cannibalism, self-harm, High-Pressure Blood that allows people to fly, and state-sanctioned sadism on display. Fortunately, a curious viewer gets an early warning in case he has a weak stomach: the first exploding head occurs a bit over a minute in.
- The Sadness is a Taiwanese splatter film about a disease that turns people into grinning, sadistic murderers with a particular love for rape and dismemberment, leading some to label it the Spiritual Successor of Crossed (see above). Notable incidents include an old woman dousing a kid with boiling oil and peeling off the half-cooked flesh from his face, a young man going on a stabbing rampage in a crowded subway car, and a young woman losing her ocular virginity in a hospital. Worth noting is that the "sadness" of the title refers to the Berserker Tears of the afflicted, which one character believes is due to the fact that said afflicted are aware of everything they are doing, but they can't stop themselves.
- Street Trash is a splatstick exploitation film centered around a liquor store owner who starts selling bottles of Tenafly Viper from the 1920s to the homeless for a dollar a pop... with the minor drawback that anyone who drinks the booze soon melts into a puddle of steaming day-glo ooze while screaming in horror. Of course, since the creators state that they wanted to offend as many people as possible, this only provides a loose framework for other gags like implied necrophilia,a cop deliberately vomiting on a mafia boss he just fought, and a game of keep-away involving a character's torn-off manhood.
- The Cabin in the Woods offers a moderate amount of bloodshed in the first half, as befits a Standard Slasher Film, but when Dana hits the "Purge" button and unleashes every single monster archetype into the complex... well, the sequence isn't called "The Carnage" for nothing.
- Downrange packs a lot of gore into a simple concept: a nameless, faceless sniper pins down a carload of college-aged friends on a remote stretch of road, occasionally taking potshots at them to cripple them and their car, and to keep them from escaping. The result is a tense but overall bloody thriller, as the film doesn't hold back with the gore effects. The first kill is an extremely messy head shot, and the other wounds handily follow suit.
- Deathgasm, a dark comedy-horror about a group of teenage metalheads who accidentally kickstart a local apocalypse, features some of the squishiest in Kiwi gore since Braindead, starting with demonic zombies leaking and vomiting blood from every orifice, and continuing on with truly absurd combat scenes involving comically-huge sex toys, power tools, and in one case what can only be described as a chainsaw enema.
- Eat (2014) features a woman named Novella whose financial stresses and perpetual unemployment lead her to compulsively eat chunks of her own flesh, leading to not only uncomfortably dreamlike sequences of Autocannibalism but also the blood-splattered aftermath as she returns to her senses.
Literature
- Apeshit, as a love letter to the slasher genre, features over-the-top descriptions of gore and dismemberment—made even more shocking and stomach-churning by the fact that the characters survive the brutality. Its sequel, Clusterfuck, cheerfully continues this trend.
- James Herbert's The Rats was notorious at the time for bringing new levels of graphic descriptions of painful death and physical injury to horror novels. Herbert's many followers in 1980s Britain included Shaun Hutson, Guy N Smith, and Graham Masterton.
- Even the Doctor Who Expanded Universe got into this with the Past Doctor Adventures novel Rags by Mick Lewis, in which a demonically-possessed undead punk rock group create a Hate Plague near every gig they play, with spectacularly gruesome results. It's one of the darkest works under the Doctor Who banner in any medium.
- From sci-fi author Asi Hart:
- They way in which the soul eating demon in The Man In The Corner Room removes the soul from its victims and turns their bodies into raw materials is described in anatomical detail.
- Most kills in In The Realm Of Carnal Horror are very bloody.
- Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen. The title character is a Blood Magician who gained power by eating the heart of a demon and torturing every human in her demesne to death.
- "Eric The Pie" by Graham Masterton is a short story about a boy who eats animals alive, reveling in the cruelty he inflicts on them, eventually graduating to his fellow humans. He also engages in bestiality at one point. The story, published in the inaugural issue of Frighteners magazine, was so controversial that newsstands pulled the issue, forcing Frighteners to go under after just two more issues.
Live-Action Television
- Monty Python's Flying Circus parodied this in their sketch "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days", wherein a delightfully bland garden party descends into bloody mayhem within minutes, without a sharp implement to be found.
Music
- Very popular in Death Metal, with bands often being lyrically-influenced by splatter films and often taking cues from it for album covers as well. Cannibal Corpse (admitted horror fans) are probably the most (in)famous, with 90% of their songs consisting of extremely gory lyrics described by lead vocalist George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher as short stories that could be turned into horror films.
Tabletop Games
Theater
- Grand Guignol theater is the Ur-Example of splatter horror, offering gory special effects in the portrayal of bleak storylines like Titus Andronicus. It eventually closed in the The '60s from not only competition from the movies and TV, but also with the discovery of Nazi Germany's perpetration of The Holocaust; after a horror like that happening for real, the theatre's shows felt terminally upstaged.
Video Games
- Until Dawn is a homage to classic splatter horror, featuring all of the classic tropes and cliches and a variety of very bloody and sometimes quite creative ways in which its main characters can meet their end. Interestingly, most deaths can be averted (only one death is hard-coded after the prologue), though doing so is very unlikely in the first playthrough.
- Splatterhouse, as the name suggests, was essentially this aesthetic as a sidescrolling Beat 'em Up, with enemies being dismembered in showers of gore and Body Horror aplenty. While the original games are quite tame by modern standards, the original arcade game was still gory enough to draw the ire of Moral Guardians at the time.
- The Mortal Kombat series first made its mark on video game history by adding blood and gore to the versus fighting genre, to the point where Moral Guardians immediately decried its potential harm to any children that might stumble across it. From showers of blood knocked off combatants with every punch or kick to over-the-top fatalities frequently send blood, limbs, organs and several skeletons' worth of bones in all directions. It really says something when guest fighters like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger look restrained by comparison.
- Dead Space drops hapless engineer Isaac Clarke in the middle of the intersection between Event Horizon and Resident Evil, forcing him to face down the dead-ish crew of the Ishimura in the form of Necromorphs that can only be defeated by dismembering them with power tools or stomping on them—a process which is exactly as messy as it sounds. The first game's remake amplifies the effects with modern graphics and the new "Peeling" system to make it all the more gruesome as you blast and cut off layers of flesh until the Necromorphs are reduced to just gore-soaked skeletons.
- CarnEvil is a light gun rail shooter that has the player menaced by freakish carnival... creations that embody Malevolent Mutilation and Body Horror even before you shoot them into bloody pieces. One can almost smell the gore in certain levels, even through the cartoony graphics.
- The 1986 arcade shooter Chiller is legendary for being banned virtually everywhere, and distills splatter horror down to its 8-bit core, offering up bound torture victims that the player can shoot at to open bloody wounds or set off traps and torture devices to mutilate them.
- The God of War games offer this in spades as the Villain Protagonist Kratos plows his way through humans and mythical monsters alike with all the brutality of a wheat thresher with anger management issues. Many of his finishers involve ripping off a Gorgon's head or force-feeding a minotaur one of his chain-blades, and even the gods and godlike beings he faces down are torn to pieces, with the only concession to their higher power level being how long he has to beat on them with how many power-ups. The death of Poseidon in particular is pretty brutal even for the series, as Kratos beats his face in with his bare hands, shown from Poseidon's ever-messier point of view.
Web Animation
- Happy Tree Friends is a series of animated shorts centering around a gang of fuzzy woodland creatures that seem to be unaware that they are in a Sadist Show set in a Crapsaccharine World. Rare is the character that does not suffer graphic injuries or death in any given episode, though whether the result is horrifying or hilarious is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Western Animation
- Mr. Pickles offers us the Black Comedy adventures of an adorable border collie who just loves his owner Tommy Goodman... when he isn't using innocent bystanders as fodder for his demonic sadism. People get mutilated and flayed alive in punishment for often relatively minor offenses, but mainly anyone who would threaten or insult Tommy.
