It is not all good that is gore

Today, I figured I should write about a key component for any good horror flick. We're talking the red stuff, the redrum, the kroovy. Blood and gore is the focus today. Now, when I say horror and gore makes a good combination, a lot of movies seem intent on proving that the two really doesn't belong together. It's not as much malice as criminal misuse of the adrenaline pump quickstarter that's the problem.

We've seen it before, horror gorefests, where any attempt at a story is discarded in favor of showing another few bucketworths of the red stuff, where the human body apparantly does contain 43 gallons of blood under pretty high pressure. Especially sequels seem to suffer from this.

Don't get me wrong, I love gore, if done properly. Few things are as satisfying as a good silver-screen machete fatality, complete with apropriate splatting and gushing, and when there's a pool of it anywhere, you can bet your ass there'll be more, probably also lots of it. Good usage of blood keeps the viewers at least slightly unnerved. After all, humans are more or less preprogrammed to react when the red stuff is on the outside.

Same goes for torture, except that very rarely makes for awesome watching, even when done properly. The first Saw movie was pretty damn sweet in my opinion, but that's more or less the honest exception. The sequels, and seemingly neverending slew of imitators, however, did not fare quite as well. Let's face it guys, your fevered sadistic nightmares have fed you a couple new ways to kill people slowly, fair enough, but the real problem does arise when you come to the realization you really don't have a good story. Actually, more often than not, no story at all is present. So, how does one remedy such an ailing? By sitting down and actually trying to craft a good, coherent story?

Hehe, I wish. My experience with scriptwriters/directors in this situation is that they go with the everpopular "make a vauge story and with so much graphic gore people hopefully forget about this pesky story thing"-solution. Worst thing? People get away with it. All the time.

Oh well. Halloween countdown: 24 days.