Gore (film genre)
As Gore ( Engl. Clotted blood and pierce, impale ) is similar to the splatter film , a visual and emotionally oriented strategy of cinematic designated body representation. While the act of hurting is the focus of splatter, the result of violence is more likely to be presented in colored, clinically detailed close-ups, close-ups and close-ups with gore . Dismemberments, guttings, organs swelling out and rooting in the bowels of the film victims find their place here. A precise differentiation between splatter and gore is difficult in most cases, however, the terms are often used synonymously . Gore is used relatively often in horror and yakuza films , but other genres also play with this stylistic device.
history
Since there is hardly any precise differentiation between splatter and gore, the history of gore coincides with that of splatter .
Blood Feast
The Gorefilm was invented by Herschell Gordon Lewis . The idea came to him when he was watching a gangster film in which a man was thrown to the ground by a machine gun volley, which was staged in a rather unspectacular manner, as the man only touched his chest and fell dead shortly afterwards. Instead, Lewis set himself the goal of staging such scenes more realistically - and thus more bloodthirsty. Together with producer David F. Friedman, Lewis developed the idea for Blood Feast earlier during the filming of Bell, Bare and Beautyful (1963) , which would go down a little later as the first gore film in film history. It is about the serial killer Fuad Ramses, who ambushes young girls and cuts off their body parts to pay homage to the Babylonian goddess Ištar .
Blood Feast (1963) is not a staging masterpiece: the actors act woodenly, and the gore effects seem cheap rather than shocking, at least from today's perspective. Even so, Blood Feast became a hit, grossing more than $ 6.5 million in recent years at a cost of $ 24,000 in production. The film was so successful that Friedman and Lewis followed up with the gore films Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1964), which together with Blood Feast make up the now legendary Blood trilogy. Other films followed, such as Moonshine Mountain (1964, but contained very little gore), A Taste of Blood (1967), The Gruesome Twosome (1967), She-Devils on Wheels (1968), Just for the Hell of It (1968) ), The Wizard of Gore (1970), This Stuff 'll Kill Ya (1971), The Gore-Gore Girls (1972) and many more, until Lewis retired for a long time and only established himself as the producer of Blood Feast 2 in 2002 : All U Can Eat and 2001 Maniacs successfully reported back.
Cannibal movie
The 1970s and early 1980s, however, were shaped by the infamous Mondo and cannibal films . Umberto Lenzi gave the go-ahead with his film Mondo Cannibale (1972), which was followed in 1977 by Ruggero Deodatos Mondo Cannibale, Part 2 - The Bird Man . As in countless other cannibal films of the time ( The White Goddess of the Cannibals , R .: Sergio Martino, 1978; Lebendig gefressen , R .: Lenzi, 1980; The Revenge of the Cannibals ( Cannibal Ferox ), also by Lenzi, 1981) also let Here the directors slaughter animals in front of the camera in order to depict a kind of "hyperrealism" and the wildness of nature.
In 1979, Cannibal Holocaust ( Naked and Mangled ) by Ruggero Deodato followed , which is considered the “high point” of the cannibal genre: a working group of documentary filmmakers examines the South American jungle in order to prove the existence of cannibals . However, they go too far in their investigations and ultimately become victims of the voracious natives themselves. An anthropologist finds the bodies of the television filmmakers and their records. When looking at the footage, they turn out to be sadists who cruelly abused the natives.
Cannibal Holocaust was a controversial film, not least because of the many real animal killings that took place. For example, Deodato B. behead a turtle and eviscerate what was captured on film and can be seen for minutes. The recordings of the animal killings then led to a lawsuit against him in Italy for illegal appropriation of film material ( animal cruelty ), during which the suspicion arose that Deodato had not only killed animals for the Cannibal Holocaust , but also people. At the premiere of his film, he was accused of slaughtering Indians. In fact, no one was killed except for the animals in the Cannibal Holocaust , but the director received a two-month prison sentence and a $ 10,000 fine, although he took in $ 250,000 with the footage.
The cannibal genre only lasted from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s and eventually died out almost entirely. Newer cannibal films, for example, are the Wrong Turn films .
Zombie movie
Another cornerstone of the Gore is the zombie film . Starting with The Night of the Living Dead (Original title: Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, USA, 1968), Dawn of the Dead ( George A. Romero , Italy / USA, 1978) and Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA, 1985) triggered a veritable wave of zombies. Italy was now producing Gore films on an assembly line, the best-known here are A Zombie Hung on a Bell Rope ( Lucio Fulci , Italy, 1980), Woodoo - Zombies' Dread Island (Fulci, Italy, 1979), Zombie Attack (Umberto Lenzi, Italy / Spain , 1980) or In the violence of the zombies ( Joe D'Amato , Italy, 1981). As a homage to the great times of the Italian horror film, one can finally see DellaMorte DellAmore ( Michele Soavi , France / Italy, 1993).
Japanese Horrormovie
If the Italian gore film was already considered extremely brutal, the Far East was in no way inferior: In Guinea Pig - Devil's Experiment ( Hideshi Hino , Japan, 1985), one of the most controversial films of all time (45 minutes is the torture of a defenseless person Woman seen through three male youths), the climax of the gore can be seen as an eye is pierced with a needle. The first part was overshadowed by its even more brutal successor, Guinea Pig 2 - Flowers of Flesh and Blood (Hideshi Hino, Japan, 1985), in which a psychopath disguised as a samurai slowly dismembered a drugged tied woman.
The American actor Charlie Sheen saw Guinea Pig 2 - Flowers of Flesh and Blood at a party and then switched on - since he thought the film was snuff - the MPAA , which in turn contacted the FBI , which then also investigated and found out that it was the material shown was not a real killing. The makers of the film later released a making-of to prove that the film is no snuff. Both Guinea Pig - Devil's Experiment and its successor state in the opening credits that they are based on authentic film documents that have merely been shot. But whether there really were these snuff films - as claimed in the opening credits - that were supposedly sent to the director Hideshi Hino and the police, or whether it was a sophisticated marketing strategy, is unclear.
In addition to the Guinea Pig series, the historical gore oxen split torturing (Yuji Makiguchi, Japan, 1976) should be mentioned, which indulges in extremely brutal gore scenes (a woman is torn apart by oxen).
present
More recently, Gore representations can mainly be found in horror films of the zombie subgenre, for example in Georges Romero's Land of the Dead (2005) or in the remake of Dawn of the Dead from 2004, as well as in torture porn films such as Saw , Hostel and numerous other representatives of the horror genre.
literature
- Julia Köhne, Ralph Kuschke, Arno Meteling (eds.): Splatter Movies. Essays on modern horror films. (Deep Focus 4). 2nd reviewed edition. Bertz + Fischer Verlag , Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-86505-157-X .