The Pornography of Violence...

It’s probably because I’ve just finished reading Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, but I have some things which I think I need to put out there. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have little time for material which prides itself upon being categorised as splatterpunk. This category of horror, which explicitly describes visceral incidents of death and dismemberment, is very hard to achieve as a writing style, but is incredibly easy to do badly. To date, I have read perhaps five splatterpunk stories which have been worthwhile; the rest is dross.

Splatterpunk – or what regularly passes itself off as splatterpunk nowadays - has its roots deep in Freudian psychology and smacks of arrested development. It’s small children pushing shit out of their back ends and thinking that they’re clever in some way for having created such an interesting, malleable substance. Well, we adults grow out of that phase. Shit is recognised for what it is: it’s not clever; it’s just what it is - a function, with expected after effects. You eat; you digest; you excrete. Everyone does it; it’s nothing special. If you’ve left high school and you still think this is interesting, then you’re in trouble. Or, a splatterpunk author.

Splatterpunk is all about the body and what happens to it under duress. It’s not body horror - which is something different - it’s about what happens when you take a chainsaw to a human body: we all get it; it’s nothing special. Death, dismemberment, destruction. The products of splatterpunk are easily anticipated. Predictable. No matter how you carve this sandwich, you still find the sand.

There’s little to differentiate splatterpunk from sexual pornography. It’s simply the exposure of a clandestine activity to reveal its full extent. Porn is the revelation of sexual physicality; splatterpunk is the revelation of corporeal destruction. Like all forms of pornography, splatterpunk entices because it promises the revelation of illicit activity. And, like all forms of pornography, it suffers from a generalist streamlining into various “tastes”. You know who you are...

Think of practically any moment of violence you’ve seen in a movie. Most of them - the most visceral ones you can remember - will most likely have been about the anticipation of the violence and not the violence itself. Think of the scene in the latest version of “Casino Royale” where Mads Mikkelsen’s le Chiffre is confronted by the African rebel (Isaach De Bankolé) wanting his money back; he threatens to take a machete to le Chiffre’s girlfriend (Ivana Milicevic) in order to get his way. The machete is drawn and the girl’s arm is presented for chopping... It doesn’t happen, but then it doesn’t need to: the scene is about the lengths that those involved are prepared to go to in order to have their way. The various characters’ reactions to the incident are, if anything, more chilling than the implied violence, and it’s exactly what the entire scene is designed to do – reveal the characters’ motivations. If the machete had been used, this would have been an entirely different film altogether; a B-grade one; straight to DVD.

The splatterpunk option is always an obvious train ride to an inevitable conclusion; it only goes to the one place. You can rinse and repeat only so many times before the colours just run into a bloody blur.

(On a side note, I often wonder if splatterpunk’s main difficulty is that it begs the question – how does the author know this experience enough to be able to write about it? For most splatterpunk stories I just decide that the writer is extrapolating from various visits to their local butcher, or from playing around with a Kentucky Fried chicken. I fully agree that it is the writer’s imagination and the way that they convey these imaginings that allows them to cover the distance between fantasy and fact. Most splatterpunk offerings fail to impress because the skills are wanting; however, remember that I said I’d read about five such stories that I thought were effective? The skills were definitely there and the stories were genuinely disturbing; but they also left me wondering about the authors themselves and what they got up to in their spare time...)

My main objection to splatterpunk is that it has wandered into Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothery and now seems likely to take it over. This is wrong. This is not what HPL intended. It certainly is nothing like his writings. So why – I ask, without expecting a reply – do people think that splatterpunk is what HPL was going for? Okay, I’ll almost concede “Howard West: Re-animator” – it’s gruesome and gory – it’s still not splatterpunk. Think about HPL’s “The Picture in the House”: the narrator walks into a house owned by a cannibalistic psychopath and, only due to sheer luck (and a lightning strike), does he manage to get out of the place alive. And are we treated to flensing knives, masks made of human skin, or heads in the refrigerator? No: all we get is an old book and a weird stain on the ceiling of a living room. It’s one of Lovecraft’s most powerful non-Mythos stories and all it takes is a bike, a potential victim, a house, a psycho, a book and a funky stain. The rest is window-dressing and a fantastic story. What Tobe Hooper would make of this, I shudder to think; although, on reflection, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a fairly safe approximation...

What I think is happening is that people are making an assumption about Lovecraft and his material that isn’t exactly valid. Lovecraft needs to be read in context; you need to look at what was going on around him when he was writing. The universe was expanding rapidly, thanks to Einstein, and things were moving from a static, known state, into something different. Clyde Tombaugh had just discovered another planet(oid) and the old order was being shaken up. Lovecraft’s response was to write about how our expectations and assumptions were all null and void because the goal posts were suddenly being moved. Where does the blood and gore come from? It’s incidental. Modern Lovecraftian writers respond to what they’re experiencing, and since they’re writing HPL pastiche, they fuse their own misgivings onto Lovecraft’s format. Whatever this stuff is, it’s not Lovecraftian. It’s Ligottian; It’s Pulverian; it’s a Pugmire. But it’s not Lovecraftian. It’s something new, grafted on the texts of HPL, but focussing on 21^st Century anxieties the which –thank the gods – Lovecraft was never privy to.

So write Lovecraftian horror; write Cthulhoid fiction. Go for it: write your arses off, but be clear about what it is that you’re doing. Don’t write splatterpunk – the general run of splatterpunk anyway - and think that you’re doing anything special. An axe to the head of some fictional body is as endlessly dull as it is repetitive. Regardless of the horror element in HPL’s stories, he still made a point; if you don’t have a point to make, if your writing doesn’t have a message to impart, then perhaps it’s best not to write at all.