Why do I want to watch what I don't want to watch

Gore and Wet Death

The description didn’t make any sense. A man gets into an elevator. He’s going down but the cable far above snaps and the elevator begins to plummet down the shaft. The man is panicked, thinks he is going to die. But just before the elevator crashes to the ground, it screeches to a halt. He’s relieved, flattened against the floor by the sudden reassertion of gravity. But above the cable is still travelling, falling. It cuts through the ceiling of the elevator and cuts the man in half.

Flipping heck, I thought. How would they do that? What would that look like? I couldn’t imagine it. It horrified me. Disgusted me. I desperately wanted to see it.

And so it was and so it used to be. We heard about these scenes before we ever saw them. We imagined them; tried to visualize them; maybe even drew them in blue biro in our homework diaries: all long before we actually sat and watched the scenes themselves. I heard about an alien bursting out of a man’s chest; the many mutations of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly; a man being lowered slowly into a wood-chipper.

When I finally saw the scenes themselves, they frequently were altogether different to what I had imagined. The man in the elevator was bisected horizontally across his torso, whereas I’d imagined it being from head to groin - more horrifying by far - like an anatomy model - half a brain slopping out, an eye rolling, half a tongue spasming. The man in the wood-chipper was shown via shadow play which struck me as an obvious con. Goldblum didn’t disappoint though. Brundlefly was sick in all possible ways.

What was it that made me wanting to see such unpleasant, revolting stuff? Even today, if someone mentions a Lucio Fulci movie or something like The Terrifier 3, I can’t wait to see it. And this isn’t just horror films. If there’s a heinous scene in a French art house movie or something from Lars von Trier, that goes on the Letterboxd watchlist pronto. I remember standing in front of a book of the film of Monty Python and the Meaning of Life opened at two pages depicting the end of Mr Creosote in glorious technicolor and I fought back the nausea as I wondered how I could get my hands on a video cassette so I could luxuriate in its awfulness in full.

Something was obviously and deeply wrong with me. You see, I didn’t want to see a man explode, or a head, or someone’s eye get cut with a razor blade, or fingers being squeezed like ripe zits or melting faces, shattered bones, spilled guts and viscera. I didn’t want to see it at all. I had to see it. It was a compulsion that felt like some sort of immoral duty. Thank the Lord Jesus Christ and all his little mates that the internet hadn’t been invented yet. I would never have left the house.

I read someone referring to “wet death” as a description of gore. (I’m not being coy with my references: I honestly can’t remember who it was and any google search gives you results you don’t want to know about.) I interpreted it as an intimation of our corporeal reality; our existence as biological, mortal, sliceable, stabbable, spillable beings. That’s a nice philosophical way of looking at it, I suppose. There’s also the idea that gory films are an adolescent rite of passage. We watch them together - in my day groups of teenaged boys - daring each other to look away, but after a while most find being disgusted boring, or just plain disgusting and decide, quite reasonably, not to bother any longer.

I stuck to it though. I like horror. I like its ability to scare me. I’ve never become one of those jaded horror fans, able to scoff at the jump scare or muse about a nice kill or two. I just get scared. The Terrifier terrifies me. The gore turns my stomach. If I’m watching these films on my own, I’m sorely tempted to fast forward the creeping around moments. Who am I kidding? I do fast forward the creeping around bits. The first Terrifier took me 35 minutes to watch. Watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - which has just passed its half century - I have to turn the lights on and walk around the house singing cheerful songs to exorcise my dread as the film continues in the living room. It’s a film incidentally which is not gory in the least, but in my head it’s the goriest film ever made.

And there is a new horror available on our screens as well. This began with the internet. Those Faces of Death videos you’d be able to catch on YouTube. Saddam Hussein’s improvised execution was one such video that was instantly available and took us back to a medieval time of spectacular public violence, botched. These last years we have the livestreaming of school shootings, the posting of terrorist attacks, Telegram channels from the Russia-Ukraine front line and Israeli soldiers recording their genocidal war crimes as cutesy Instagram stories with the apparent consent of the IDF. The videos of the victims of the massacres are harrowing in the extreme and show wet deaths of unimagined brutality. I’m not even going to detail the images I’ve seen.

Perhaps, they’re not really wet deaths at all. They’re dusty with debris from pulverised buildings. They’re not a spectacle. They’re not foregrounded. And no one - including me - really wants to look at them. Give us torture porn. Give us an eviscerating clown. But this grinding reality… no. There’s a controversy in the latest Terrifier film because it shows Art the Clown killing children, which some think should be off limits. White children, I suppose I should add. Walter Chow’s amazing review of the film is a screed against what has happened this year in the Middle East and uneasily, despairingly finds some release in watching Art’s latest Grand Guignol exploits, but the idea of catharsis has always struck me as too neatly utilitarian: too mechanical. Like we all have this valve. It is a handy way of voyeuristically slavering over the carnage and then claiming it to be moral when it is amoral at best; at worst I don’t know, a perversion? A sickness?

In recent years, horror fans have become increasingly vocal about the disrespect the genre suffers: the way it’s shut out of the Oscars; the way it gets covered/dismissed by critics. I’ve always thought these pleas wrongheaded. The value of horror is that it’s marginal and dirty, smells of fungus and punctured spleen. Asking for Oscars is like wanting to go to a dinner party hosted by a wanker.

Gore is the least reputable of the disreputable genre. It’s the porn to the erotica. Sadistic, shameful and wrong. And I want to conclude these thoughts with a neat intellectual turn which will actually have me argue that… yes, in some way I am deeply moral and intellectually justified in watching this stuff, but it just won’t work.

I don’t want to watch it. I watch it. I wish I hadn’t. I guess that’s almost everything these days.