Splatter Film - The Modern Era

The Modern Era

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the public was reintroduced to splatter themes and motifs by groundbreaking films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and the output of Hammer Film Productions (an artistic outgrowth of the English Grand Guignol style) such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror of Dracula (1958). Perhaps the most explicitly violent film of this era was Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960), which included numerous scenes of flaying and dismemberment in its depiction of the Buddhist underworld. Other noticeable and influential films from the period include the French Eyes Without a Face (1959) and the Italian Black Sunday (1960).

Splatter came into its own as a distinct subgenre of horror in the early 1960s with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the United States. Lewis had been producing low-budget nudie films for several years but the market for such fare was losing ground to Hollywood, which was beginning to occasionally show nudity in its films. Eager to maintain a profitable niche, Lewis turned to something that mainstream cinema still rarely featured: scenes of visceral, explicit gore. In 1963, he directed Blood Feast, widely considered the first splatter film. In the 15 years following its release, Blood Feast took in an estimated $7 million. It was made for an estimated $24,500. Blood Feast was followed by two more gore films by Herschell Gordon Lewis, Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965).

As influential and profitable as it was, for many years Blood Feast remained little seen outside drive-in theaters in the Southern United States. Graphically violent imagery was starting to experience some mainstream acceptance in films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969) and Soldier Blue (1970), but largely remained taboo in Hollywood.

The first splatter film to popularize the subgenre was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), the director's attempt to replicate the atmosphere and gore of EC's horror comics on film. Initially derided by the American press as "appalling", it quickly became a national sensation, playing not just in drive-ins but at midnight showings in indoor theaters across the country. Foreign critics were more kind to the film; venerable British film magazine Sight & Sound put it on its "Ten Best Films of 1968" list.

Its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, became one of the most successful splatter films, both critically and commercially. It was released in United States theaters unrated rather than with the X rating it would have received for its explicit carnage. Critic Roger Ebert called it "one of the best horror films ever made". Romero's film was also important in that it upped the ante in terms of technique, special effects and the quality of writing, characterization and so on.

Roger Ebert in America and Member of Parliament Graham Bright in the U. K. led the charge to censor splatter films on home video with the film critic going after I Spit on Your Grave while the politician sponsored the Video Recordings Act, a system of censorship and certification for home video. This resulted in the outright banning of many splatter films in the UK, and were deemed "video nasties".

Some splatter directors have gone on to produce mainstream hits. Peter Jackson started his career in New Zealand by directing the splatter movies Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992). These films featured such over-the-top gore that it became a comedic device. These comedic gore films have been dubbed "splatstick", defined as physical comedy that involves evisceration.

Splatter films have influenced cinema in certain ways. For example, the popular 1999 film The Blair Witch Project is similar to the 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust. The story in Cannibal Holocaust is told through footage from a group of people making a documentary about a portion of the Amazon which is said to be populated by cannibals. This "mockumentary" format was later used in Blair Witch.