For the Love of Gore

Hey there faithful Normalinauts. Kilian here and, for the second week in a row, we at Normality Restored are pleased to welcome a guest contributor. He has requested that we call him “D. Composition” and I fully honor that request. As a slight, personally advantageous, aside I will say that I am enjoying the guest contributors as it means I do less writing (though more editing) and so we get a wider array of voices here on the ol’ NR.

So without further ado, I present to you…

If I were to walk up to an average movie fan and ask him if he remembered such films as “Deep Blue Sea” or “Resident Evil”, I imagine his response to the latter would be “Not really, but I do remember that guy getting diced by those lasers! That was awesome!” and to the former “Not really, but I do remember the shark jumping up and eating Sam Jackson! That was awesome!”

Sorry for the spoiler, but if you haven’t already seen Deep Blue Sea, chances are high that you either don’t want to see it or you already know about it because of Dave Chapelle.

Dave Chapelle: Samuel L. Jackson’s

I find this to be a commonality with a lot of movies, even when the movie is pretty good (I personally enjoyed Deep Blue Sea very much). We all know the reason for its everpresence. It’s the same reason people love rollercoasters. It’s a shocking thrill rolled in fun. Better the fictional movie characters deal with it than us, of course. It’s a fun way to have all the characters we hate get offed in a film. It works the opposite way with our heroes though (There were too many good times with Chef from South Park before his grisly demise. Gore is like taking a wound, or a death, in a story and turning it up full blast, much to the chagrin or delight of the prospective viewer. The gore can be a little much for some people, but that can be enjoyable too. I always find myself smiling at gore moments if I notice that someone else is cringing while watching. I think anything in a movie that can get a reaction like that is doing something right. I suppose I’ve personally been desensitized to the majority of the gore out there, though. I got started at an early age with a certain stripe-sweatered melty boogeyman with knives for fingers. Who could get these images out of a 7 year old’s mind (or a 27 year old’s mind for that matter)?

Few films, however, can match the feeling one gets when watching Dead Alive (Braindead). Back in the late 80’s-early 90’s Peter Jackson (you know the one…he directed the Lord of the Rings movies, for all you non-existent non-nerds reading this) made a couple of really funny and really gory little movies. Dead Alive is the best of these (according to myself and some friends). A few stragglers aside, it seems to be the undisputed “goriest fright film of all time.” If you’re not familiar with Dead Alive, you’ll either be really happy or really pissed off you’ve missed out for so long.

The movie is about a young man who lives with his old abusive mother. The films opens with the mother getting bitten by a rat-monkey at the zoo and, of course, contracting a zombie-like disease. The ball starts tumbling from there. The protagonist does his best to take care of his zombie-mom despite the infection of more and more, who also end up getting kept in his house. There is zombie sex, a zombie baby, a kung fu priest, a lawnmower scene, and a bunch of gross out stuff that even had me squirming.

If you do decide you want to see this movie, make sure to get the unrated version, because the “safe” version has so much cut out it really isn’t the same movie.

Needless to say, gore is and has been a great joy of mine for all kinds of reasons. It’s always fun to see where the filmmaker is going to take the viewer to get to some new level of shock or creativity.  This is why people always talk about the “curb scene” in American History X or the “pen trick scene” in Dark Knight or the “eye splinter scene” from Zombi or the “tooth-pulling scene” from Oldboy. These are the standout moments in film for many because they are so shocking and so memorable.