the splat pack

Music: B-Tribe: Sensual Sensual (1998)

Afeared that Delta Airlines is going under, I cashed in some frequent flyer miles this summer for a subscription to Variety. Both judgments were mistakes: Delta looks like they will survive, and Variety is not as interesting as I thought it might be. I reasoned that because I study popular culture and reference film and television all the time in my teaching, Variety may be a good read and useful. The problem with Variety is that it is too promotional and careful to really dish any shit about Hollywood, and it has all this bizarre insider jargon (for example, Rupert Murdoch is routinely referred to as "Rupe," all network television stations are called "Nets," and everything is abbreviated: "H'w'd conducts dud diagnosis"; "B'way makes music" . . . . ). Every issue is a giant promotional splash with very little "insider" scoopage. Bleh.

This said, the the most interesting story that Variety ran was this weeks lead, "Blood Brothers: The Splat Pack Support Group Bonds Horror Helmers." The story is about young filmmakers and screenwriters in their late 20s and early 30s who are turning out low-budget splatter blockbusters: Eli Roth (Hostel), Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), Barren Lyn Bousman (Saw II), James Wan (Saw), Leigh Whannel (Saw III), and Neil Marshall (The Descent) are featured. Most of the story focuses on Roth, and a sidebar titled "For the Jung at Heart," features Roth's father, a Harvard psychoanalyst. Says daddy:

The Splat Pack films, and Eli's in particular, . . . give people a chance to process unbearable and unacceptable feelings, but feelings that they nonetheless have. When this gets projected onto the screen, it gives people a way to see their dreams actualized. It provides a safe way of handling these feelings.

I wonder what King Oedipus would say if lil' Eli made bondage porno?

I've always been a fan of horror films---I was (and am) that kid who was into masks and renting bad b-films and I even had a subscription to Fangoria until I was 31 years old (I’m 33, by the way). I stopped subscribing to Fangoria because the horror film was slowly being overtaken by gore: the monsters and creatures and ghosts are now replaced almost entirely by the sociopath with knives. The zombie has (thankfully) held on---perhaps the monster of our times---but it seems like the supernatural has been eclipsed by the ecstasy of sadism. Where is the imagination in seeing someone's fingers being chopped off? The first (and one of the best) "splatter" film, Black Christmas, was still somewhat of a monster movie when it debuted in 1974: the "moaner" or "super-tongue" was not quite human, or at least the viewer is led to believe so, and while the murders were gross, they didn't turn on Bloodfeast style gore. They turned on suspense. Jason of Friday the 13th is a supernatural mutant, as wasthe monster of my youth, Freddie Kruger. Even films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre buffered the gore with kitsch or bizarre b-movie oddity (e.g., the bizarre-family dinner scenes).

With films like Saw and Hostel, horror is just horrible. It's all about nail-biting (and chopping) gore with little to no inventive story in the service of captial, NOT fantasy (notably, the little cartoon used to illustrate the story features a Suit weilding a chansaw). What happened to films like Phantasm with flying silver balls-o-death and dwarfs from Mars? Although Roth's pop is right about film as a projective enjoyment, from the standpoint of the collective unconscious, do we not see a transformation in horror over the past thirty years that says something a little disturbing? Have we become too comfortable with filmic violence?

I think and feel that we have, and although I will never jump on the PMRC political wagon, it just bothers me that Variety is celebrating the Splat Pack because they are profitable. I know, I know: "Like Duh, Josh, you subscribed on this premise." And the subtext of the story is money: Wan's Saw was shot with a budget of 1.2 million, but made over 100 at the box office, and so on. The story is pretty much this kind of song and dance for 3,000 words. Although it's true that older I get the more squeamish I have become, my objection isn't so much about gore as such, its that the gore is so mindless (oh, the jouissssssssssssance!), that the gore is a commodity, that the fetish is not so much the possibility of the supernatural but rather of simply losing one's mind. Mindlessness is as much the logic of mass violence as it is capitalism---or rather, mindfulness in its most instrumental is commercially addictive.

"When you watch people scream and almost vomit, it makes it all worth it" says Roth. Roth is making himself and The Man money off of your impulse to throw up. Unless you are a forensic nurse or coroner, I think it is important to preserve our impulses to throw up.