The Disquieting Guest — Some Notes on Gore
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a brief Twitter conversation with Teresa Frohock and Fred Kiesche that touched on the virtues of the suggested versus the explicit in the creation of terror. If memory serves (and my apologies if it does not), Robert Wise’s The Haunting (the 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House) was invoked. That film is, without a doubt, a powerful argument for the virtues of subtlety. So is the CGI-laden 1999 version, which proves just how good Wise’s approach (faithful to Jackson) was by doing the precise opposite and failing in spectacular (if entertaining) fashion. That being said, I would like to mount a bit of a defence of explicitness here. More particularly, I would like to say a few words about the value of gore. Back around the end of the 80s, and the start of the 90s, there was a sometimes-heated debate on this subject. We had “quiet” versus “loud” horror, and this was when the term “splatterpunk” had its greatest currency. While the debates were interesting, the
