Andrew Bullock on the phenomenon of gratuitously gory TV
Bloody good telly…
Last week, I touched on certain shows that tend to be, for want of a better word, “bloody”. Not “bloody” in the “oh, that’s a bloody good show” context, but more in the literal sense of “there’s a lot of actual blood in that programme”. For example, Game Of Thrones sees a massacre take place at a wedding, Dexter is about a blood splatter analyst serial killer, and if I had a penny for every death Walter White caused in Breaking Bad I would have £1.86 (according to Wikipedia).
I’ve always had a bit of an addiction to this type of entertainment. Does this make me sick? I don’t know why, but there is a thrill that comes with watching intense, nerve-shredding scenes in which one of our fellow human beings is under threat. It’s not that I’m wishing it upon anyone in reality, it’s just fun to sit in front of the screen and get lost in a good chase scene or watch a murder mystery unravel.
My DVD collection consists of films such as Scream and Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On the shelf below that, you’ll find psychological blood baths such as Black Swan and The Skin I Live In. And below that is She’s All That. I think things admittedly got a tad silly when movies such as Saw and Hostel hit the cinemas. I won’t pretend that I am not morbidly entertained by them, but they are pretty horrid. And this is what makes a certain category of people go “tut”.
“There is a thrill that comes with watching intense, nerve-shredding scenes”
TV has entered a new era though, where it has taken society’s desire for blood-curdling screams and translated it into weekly televised viewing in a beautiful way. Classic horrors such as Silence Of The Lambs and Dawn Of The Dead are now weekly series, in the form of Hannibal and The Walking Dead – and these shows are fantastic. The former is utterly grotesque with its human-eating lead character, but the way the cooking scenes are shot makes me less offended by the idea of preparing a human spleen with poached eggs, fennel and hollandaise sauce. The latter is all about the relationships between the characters. Sometimes a zombie doesn’t even appear in an episode, because we are too busy learning about someone’s back-story – pre-apocalyptic deadly outbreak.
Nonetheless, the snobs out there will still be “tutting”. But, snobs, you don’t fool me! I know that after Gardener’s World you’ll flip the channel over to Silent Witness to encounter a less gratuitous artistic expression of murder, death and trauma. It’s the same content, there are just more people milling around pristine refrigerated laboratories with white doctors’ coats on, and an Oxford degree pinned up in the background.
And then there’s the sneaky little lot who bust out the dark chocolate on a winter’s night and get their cheeky fill of Midsomer Murders. The older generation who tut at Hollywood’s slashers and torture porn would do well to check themselves next time they sit down to watch a show about one supposedly quaint district in rural England that has witnessed roughly 250 killings over a 16 year period. One of which happened with a wheel of cheese.
Andrew’s blog can be read at drewjbullock.wordpress.com
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