Dave Gebroe's Spilling Guts # 1 - "Genre’s Wasted On The Gutless"
Written
on 9/10/07
Horror. This blood-splattered universe we love like mother’s milk, this world of intestinal worship and fanboy minutiae, of conventions and bloghounds, of bated breath when it’s goin’ strong and mopey finger-pointing when it’s down, out, and straight-up gutter-balling…this genre’s being run into the ground by some of the very figures given credit for its success.
Sure, yeah, it’s too simplistic to generalize quite like that. But just like youth is wasted on the young, genre’s wasted on the gutless, treated with outright condescension like a steaming trash heap by those looking to make a quick buck and get their foot in the door. These poseurs invariably “progress” to more serious-minded fare, and then we’re left to deal with the aftermath.
Hey, it’s just one douche-bag’s opinion. But we wonder why there’s a ten-to-fifteen year horror cycle, why the ups and downs are so pronounced…this is a tradition that stretches all the way back, just look at Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dementia 13.”
And this time around, the torture porn’s gonna be the final nail in the coffin.
Just because today’s self-appointed social commentators have condemned us to thrash around in our own post-9/11 filth doesn’t mean our noses need to be thrust full-on in our mess. If anything, this point in history’s screaming out for a more empathetic twist on the brand of horror that served us so well coming up. It begs for it. It’s what’s going to keep people tuned in once the gorehounds have ceased trying to figure out how cleverly the effects were executed.
Lest we forget, what keeps us embroiled in a film—a show, a book, etc, etc—is human relationships. They’re the cornerstone of the dramatic experience. Whether we consciously realize it or not, the relationships that govern the greatest of horror films are what keep us tuned in, not the novelty of a cool-ass monster. Not the creativity of a kill we’ve never seen before. Not an unending stream of gushing blood. All that stuff’s all well and good, but…
…let’s face it, the horror genre is a godsend of untapped potential. When you get right down to it, horror is a more hydrenalized form of straight drama. It’s drama, but with cutting-edge life-and-death stakes. That being said, we should wind up giving a shit, throwing ourselves into the experience with more heart-rending empathy than your run-of-the-mill Fried Green Tomatoes, or Beaches, or whatever other heartstring-tugger you care to mention. Right? Well, yeah…in theory. But over and over again, all we’re getting is surface-skimming effects-laden dogshit. Why aren’t today’s filmmakers helping to buoy this big old beast to a more prestigious level of consideration, to get us to a place where the Academy might actually consider nominating these films on the regular?
I actually do like the Halloweens and Friday The 13ths and all the rest. I grew up on that shit. It’s just that as I got older I realized just what had been under my nose the whole time. In making Zombie Honeymoon, I intentionally played on the probability that my film would to all appearances come off like a Troma film so I could land some serious emotional sucker-punches. One of the original inspirations was Roman Polanski’s utilization of the genre to make some sense of his wife Sharon Tate’s death at the hands of the Manson Family. He wound up staging the goriest ever retelling of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, trudging waist-deep through buckets of guts and severed heads in order to attempt to give some context to what must have seemed at the time to be nothing but a morass of random brutality. He used the genre to an end, for a purpose. Or, to paraphrase the closing line of Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, “To know life, you must first fuck death in the gall bladder.” And thus, high art meets low art…and deep, multi-textural subtexts CAN (should?) be built into and tucked snugly inside the cool shit we all grew up digging.
Is this a mission statement? Maybe. All I know is that I woke up one morning about five years ago and realized that there was an empty space on the shelf of movie history for a more emotional kind of horror film, for gore flicks that dare to engage us on all the possible levels a movie can and is able to.
Now just you watch as I fill that space.
_ Dave Gebroe
Sure, yeah, it’s too simplistic to generalize quite like that. But just like youth is wasted on the young, genre’s wasted on the gutless, treated with outright condescension like a steaming trash heap by those looking to make a quick buck and get their foot in the door. These poseurs invariably “progress” to more serious-minded fare, and then we’re left to deal with the aftermath.
Hey, it’s just one douche-bag’s opinion. But we wonder why there’s a ten-to-fifteen year horror cycle, why the ups and downs are so pronounced…this is a tradition that stretches all the way back, just look at Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dementia 13.”
And this time around, the torture porn’s gonna be the final nail in the coffin.
Just because today’s self-appointed social commentators have condemned us to thrash around in our own post-9/11 filth doesn’t mean our noses need to be thrust full-on in our mess. If anything, this point in history’s screaming out for a more empathetic twist on the brand of horror that served us so well coming up. It begs for it. It’s what’s going to keep people tuned in once the gorehounds have ceased trying to figure out how cleverly the effects were executed.
Lest we forget, what keeps us embroiled in a film—a show, a book, etc, etc—is human relationships. They’re the cornerstone of the dramatic experience. Whether we consciously realize it or not, the relationships that govern the greatest of horror films are what keep us tuned in, not the novelty of a cool-ass monster. Not the creativity of a kill we’ve never seen before. Not an unending stream of gushing blood. All that stuff’s all well and good, but…
…let’s face it, the horror genre is a godsend of untapped potential. When you get right down to it, horror is a more hydrenalized form of straight drama. It’s drama, but with cutting-edge life-and-death stakes. That being said, we should wind up giving a shit, throwing ourselves into the experience with more heart-rending empathy than your run-of-the-mill Fried Green Tomatoes, or Beaches, or whatever other heartstring-tugger you care to mention. Right? Well, yeah…in theory. But over and over again, all we’re getting is surface-skimming effects-laden dogshit. Why aren’t today’s filmmakers helping to buoy this big old beast to a more prestigious level of consideration, to get us to a place where the Academy might actually consider nominating these films on the regular?
I actually do like the Halloweens and Friday The 13ths and all the rest. I grew up on that shit. It’s just that as I got older I realized just what had been under my nose the whole time. In making Zombie Honeymoon, I intentionally played on the probability that my film would to all appearances come off like a Troma film so I could land some serious emotional sucker-punches. One of the original inspirations was Roman Polanski’s utilization of the genre to make some sense of his wife Sharon Tate’s death at the hands of the Manson Family. He wound up staging the goriest ever retelling of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, trudging waist-deep through buckets of guts and severed heads in order to attempt to give some context to what must have seemed at the time to be nothing but a morass of random brutality. He used the genre to an end, for a purpose. Or, to paraphrase the closing line of Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, “To know life, you must first fuck death in the gall bladder.” And thus, high art meets low art…and deep, multi-textural subtexts CAN (should?) be built into and tucked snugly inside the cool shit we all grew up digging.
Is this a mission statement? Maybe. All I know is that I woke up one morning about five years ago and realized that there was an empty space on the shelf of movie history for a more emotional kind of horror film, for gore flicks that dare to engage us on all the possible levels a movie can and is able to.
Now just you watch as I fill that space.
_ Dave Gebroe
