Blood and Guts: Fans celebrate excess of gore

An intrepid hero runs down a dirt lane, past the dilapidated country house and finally reaches the old mill. Suddenly an oozing, flesh bare hand shoots out of the rotten wood and grabs the hero by the neck. Struggling to remain conscious, he pulls an overly large handgun from his holster and fires repeatedly into the mill, with any luck filling the arm's owner with life threatening holes. As the hero empties his pistol, the zombie lurches out and begins gnawing on the man's neck. The hero then unsheaths a machete and chops off the zombie's arm, causing blood and melted flesh to spew forth. Raising his hellacious blade, the hero chops said zombie's head down the middle. Brains spit from the cranium, eyes pop from their sockets and a horrible vomit-esque material erupts and covers the hero's entire body.\nThis generic example of your prototypical blood and guts intensive movie can be taken from many sources. Lloyd Kaufman and his company, Troma, have been making these types of movies for over thirty years. John Carpenter has dealt with his fair share of fake blood. Even "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson spent several years up to his elbows in rotting corpses and decaying intestines with movies such as "Bad Taste" and "Dead Alive" before going on to create films geared towards a more mainstream audience.\nThe people who love these movies are, more often than not, die-hard fans. Usually the Johnny-come-lately fans tend to steer clear of such portrayals of violence.\n"Troma stuff is, to me, some of the best movies … it's all low budget, but it's done really, really well. It's all low budget, but you can tell they have so much fun doing what they do," says a man going only by the name Spliff, an aficionado of such movies and an employee of Skinquake -- a Bloomington-based tattoo parlor. \nFun is certainly a drawing point. Where some moviegoers might find themselves crouching behind movie theater chairs in lieu of excessive dismembered body parts onscreen, true fans see humor in the horrendous.\n"It is very common for people to find it humorous for people to be in bad circumstances," says Michael Parkinson, employee of The Cinemat. "To have bad things happen to them as long as it doesn't seem too realistic or too close to home …" \nWhile viewing these movies from an anthropological distance keeps the fans safe from an excess of bodily fluids, many find that the sensory overload is what draws them to the genre in the first place. \n"A lot of times the gore movies are funny because of the excess of that gore," says Chris Bingham, an IU senior studying Communications and Culture. Many of the movies he enjoys overload in several areas besides violence. "'Evil Dead 2' is one of my three favorite movies of all time … there is a lot of excess in it; the blood, the sometimes dramatic camera angles -- there's excess in pretty much every aspect of it."\nNo matter what sub-genre these fans are interested in -- Italian, Chinese, Japanese, comedic or dramatic -- all agree on one thing; it is the ability to experiment outside the Hollywood system that brings followers to these hematic flicks. Fans of independent movies, and excessive gross-out movies in particular, feel that films benefit from the director having complete creative control over his or her art form.\n"There's more originality to the movies; they just seem to let loose with their imagination more. Whenever you put something out in the Hollywood conglomerate, it's all very carefully looked at and picked apart," Spliff says, who thinks that horror movies made within Hollywood, such as the "Scream" trilogy, don't compare to the works of independent filmmakers.\n"It's not commercialized -- well, it is commercialized, because it is a business and they're trying to sell something -- but generally with these movies there's a pretty good chance that you get something that someone made because he wants to, not because he's being paid a lot of money," Bingham says.\nAlthough many of the aforementioned flicks may be hard to come by in the age of clean-cut chain movie rental franchises, there is one store that offer those oft-coveted pieces of celluloid for the devoted few. Plan 9, located at the corner of Kirkwood Avenue and Walnut Street, is a place for those with tastes that vary from the norm. It offers a wide selection of horror and ketchup-concentrated movies. \nAs with many other counterculture mediums that find an audience, horror movies are being rediscovered by Hollywood. "The Ring" did extremely well at the box office last year, and currently out in theaters is the semi-popular zombie import, "28 Days Later." Next month will feature the eagerly anticipated and long in development fusion of two slasher staples with the release of "Freddy vs. Jason." The trend gives no signs of stopping. The flesh-eating virus flick, "Cabin Fever" is due out in theaters this September, and a remake of the classic horror movie "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is being released in theaters this October starring "7th Heaven" wunderkind Jessica Biel.\nStill, true fans will always return to the independent releases for their love of original work and the absurdity of gallons upon gallons of fake blood.\n"The humor in it is so out there, so atrocious … that it just makes it, to me, interesting because I have a pretty sick sense of humor as it is," Spliff says.