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"Ewwww!"

How many times have you been watching a movie and something perfectly suspenseful or meaningful been interrupted by someone getting decapitated, dismembered, or otherwise brutalized in a disgusting fashion? Over the past thirty years, the movies have become plagued with unnecessary amounts of gore and it's only making movies that much harder to watch.

Back in the "golden age" of horror, the genre only needed a little bit of makeup and special effects to scare the average movie-goer. Usually scenes of death would be implied and if you were lucky the scenes would have very little blood in them. The original "Shower Scene" from "Psycho" was filmed over a series of a few days with the blade never even touching Janet Leigh. There was no need to show here getting slashed because you KNEW that it was happening.

The original "House On Haunted Hill" had no gore in it whatsoever. It relied on clever camera angles, excellent uses of lighting effects, and the genius of the King of Horror, Vincent Price to keep people on the edges of their seats. The re-make was filed with needless amounts of sex, violence, and of course a supernatural plot that had nothing to do with the original. To most reviewers it was considered one of the worst movies released that year.

Classic movies like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" had their share of blood and violence, but nowhere near as much as the re-make (or its own sequels/prequels). Leatherface was able to make quite the impression with a minimal amounts of gore (well, okay toward the end there was quite a bit, but by that point in the film everyone was more-or-less numb from the rest).

Of course, the horror genre isn't the only one that's been affected by this mentality. The suspense genre has had its share of damage done by movies like "Basic Instinct" (again, with a little nudity and graphic sex to spice things up. The science fiction era has its share as well with films like "Total Recall" and "Starship Troopers" - come to think of it, all three of those films were made by the same director. Go figure.

While a little occasional gore might be useful to help get a point across in a film, by no means should movies revolve around them. After a while it will only leaving the audience desensitized to the violence completely ignorant of the fact that the films they're watching lack any real plot.

Learn more about this author, David Furritus.
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