Gore Porn

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Gore Porn
A scene from cult underground movie Faces Of Death
Moralist and censorship campaigner Mary Whitehouse (Getty)
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Featuring dogs fighting to the death, the aftermath of horrific accidents and monkey brains, the underground 'mondo' horror developed an aura of mystery during the 1970s and '80s
Moralist and censorship campaigner Mary Whitehouse (Getty)
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Featuring dogs fighting to the death, the aftermath of horrific accidents and monkey brains, the underground 'mondo' horror developed an aura of mystery during the 1970s and '80s
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Mary Whitehouse has a lot to answer for.
Whitehouse, who attempted to police the nation’s morals in the 1980s under the guise of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (Nvala), the body she ran, has become a figure of hatred among many for her attempts to spoil fun. Sex, drugs, swearing and violence were all forbidden in Whitehouse’s world, and the 1978 horror film Faces of Death was absolute anathema to her.
Faces of Death was one of the famed “ video nasties ” – questionable content that had spread like a virus throughout the new video rental stores that had popped up on high streets across the world as a result of the shiny VCRs that sat under many household televisions. For the first time ever, movie watching wasn’t limited to a big screen cinema.
Faces of Death had this legend about it. It was this forbidden thing. People were talking about it and how it was all real; you got to see people actually killed on screen
In the comfort of their own homes, people could watch whatever they chose – and people’s personal tastes were quite often depraved.
Horror films – particularly a semi-realistic documentary subgenre called mondo – had been popular in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, but, says Mark Goodall, the head of film and media at the University of Bradford, “the audience had to seek these things out. Most of the mondo films were shown in less salubrious cinemas up and down the country.”
Suddenly, the home video revolution meant that people could indulge their violent side at home.
“I’ve always had an interest in horror films,” explains Michael Felsher, the owner-operator of Red Shirt Pictures, a Detroit, Michigan-based production company which helped produce a 2008 documentary for a special Blu-ray and DVD re-release of Faces of Death on its 30th anniversary.
Buoyed by the new world of video rental stores, Felsher’s VCR would gobble up every tape he could get his hand on it. At the junior high school where he studied, there was one tape that people couldn’t stop talking about.
“ Faces of Death had this legend about it,” he says. “It was this forbidden thing. People were talking about it and how it was all real; you got to see people actually killed on screen.”
It was a conversation happening in school yards and workplaces across the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s – a prototypical viral video, gaining popularity by word of mouth and an illicit tinge. “It had an underground currency,” says Goodall. “It was sought out by horror fans.”
In the UK in particular, the underground movement that gained pace behind Faces of Death tied in with the burgeoning punk subculture. “People who were looking for extreme films, art house films, naturally gravitate towards Faces of Death . It has this subcultural crossover,” explains Goodall.
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From the box art – depicting a huge skull, and with warnings about the graphic content contained within – to the odd mix of violent, hyper-realistic scenes, the 104-minute video quickly gained a name for itself. “It developed this reputation of almost a dare,” says Felsher. “‘Can you watch this?’ That’s what really propelled it.”
The film’s distributor, Gorgon Video, which was created solely to distribute the movie, played up to the forbidden, dark, underground nature of its content. “It was the legend of Faces of Death ,” says Felsher. “It inherently had this aura of mystery. It’s the forbidden fruit. The more you’re told you don’t want to watch this… you do.”
Looking back, the film is hokey and of its time. A doctor, “Dr Francis B Gröss”, hosts the production, which shows a number of ways to die, interspersed with other violent scenes, including dogs fighting to the death and the aftermath of horrific accidents. But in the late 1970s, it was revolutionary.
“ Faces of Death came at a crossroads when what had been a fairly shocking but colourful and quite nicely put together style of documentary film flipped into being more nasty and unpleasant,” explains Goodall, who interviewed English novelist JG Ballard for his book on mondo films, Sweet and Savage , after finding out Ballard was a fan of the genre.
“He told me what he thought was interesting about them was that they blurred fact and fiction,” says Goodall. “Audiences weren’t really sure – they suspected some of it was fake but went with it and knew they were being co-opted into this slightly manipulative form of film making.”
That sense of a blurred line between fact and fiction has its parallels today, in a time when we’re bombarded with news – both fake and real – with little way of unpicking what’s what. “I think you can trace that back to these films,” says Goodall.
Ballard even coined a phrase for the type of scenes that Faces of Death presented: “the horrors of the real.”
Rather than the traditional tropes of horror films that had typified the genre – of werewolves howling at the moon, vampires camping it up behind their cape and cowering from the sunshine and rictus-jointed monsters lumbering around shaky sets – this new era of film, starting with Faces of Death , presented situations that were all too real to us in a mockumentary style. In one scene you see a man jumping out a window; another involves monkey brains and a restaurant.
“The response they encourage in the viewer is the same as horror: recoiling from something, or a fear that this could happen to you,” says Goodall.
In some cases, it had happened to someone. Faces of Death gained its reputation at the time because people told their friends about this horrific film they’d seen that was a compilation of real life gore porn. (One scene, in which a cult member is sacrificed, ended up being passed around tape trading circles, the quality degraded so much that it ended up in the hands of the FBI, who had to investigate it as it had lost its original tie to Faces of Death .)
In fact, the producers never professed that the film’s violence was real, but people simply believed it. And actually, some of the scenes do show moments of extreme, real violence.
Estimates vary depending on who you ask, but somewhere around a third of the footage contained within the film is real.
One memorable scene shows a man’s body lying dead on a beach. “That’s all real, but it happened by accident,” recalls Felsher, who interviewed several people involved in the production for his documentary.
“They were down there filming something else but they got a report of a body on the beach and happened to be there to film it,” he says. “It was some guy who got high on LSD and had fallen into the water and drowned.”
Other scenes included “found” footage. The American film makers called up local news stations, asking if they had any unused footage of accidents or murder scenes that they’d filmed but weren’t suitable for broadcast on television. Some stations obliged.
But how did Faces of Death come about? How did the American film makers set about shooting odd scenes that combined with real life footage of horrific accidents?
A Japanese company commissioned a group of American film makers to produce an assignment. “The people behind it were more into nature footage, National Geographic- style programming,” explains Felsher. “The Japanese company wanted a hardcore death thing, and hired the nature documentary people because they felt that the subject wasn’t so far off, they could take footage and manipulate it in a way they wanted.”
The director, who Felsher interviewed and still refuses to release his real name (he uses the pseudonym Conan LeCilaire), came from a well-known family in the world of nature documentaries. Though Felsher believes LeCilaire “wasn’t embarrassed by or ashamed of it, he didn’t want to become known as the Faces of Death guy”, and so didn’t put his real name to the film.
It also, on the face of it, wasn't a risk. A low-budget movie (the entire production cost an estimated $450,000) that was quickly decried as tasteless, if it didn’t capture the imagination, it wouldn’t be much of a loss.
The Japanese company believed they could find an audience for this gore porn.
“It was huge in Japan,” says Goodall, and followed in the footsteps of other mondo movies such as 1975’s Last Cry of the Savannah , an Italian-made movie which was more popular at the Japanese box office that year than a newly released film by a young director called Steven Spielberg: Jaws . It also inspired other gross-out films that appeared at least to be anchored in reality, including the controversial Japanese series of Guinea Pig films.
The company just didn’t realise that they’d find such a big audience – and in all four corners of the world. “It was the first movie that really hit the big time in America in terms of capturing that particular generation’s attention,” says Felsher. “It tapped into an American experience. It wasn’t taking place in Africa or some other foreign land.”
The film ended up earning more than $35 million at the box office and spawned many sequels, but has had a longer-lasting legacy than the riches it made. Faces of Death has now become bigger than the film itself: it has become shorthand for a particular type of film, a cinematic approach to death, showing graphic, hardcore footage.
But then again, there’s still an audience seeking out the unbridled, real-life violence that Faces of Death purported to provide. “That hasn’t gone away,” says Goodall. People who watch Isis videos now, it’s the same thing. It’s like a horror. They’re even choreographed to be like a horror film, the way they’re shot, edited, and music added. That’s where they do connect with anxieties and play to society.”
Social media and the prevalence of sites such as LiveLeak, which hosts footage many other sites find too distasteful, is perhaps what dates Faces of Death the most.
Both my selections on this list mark the two instances in which I've actively cried in a cinema out of fear, if you can believe that's possible. Though J.A. Bayona's ghostly tale is a beautiful throwback to Gothic conventions, which lace its hauntings with powerful emotions and warnings, that kid with the sack on its head traumatised me for life. Worse, I came back home and remembered the flat I'd newly moved in to had a cupboard with no key, and no clue as to what may be contained inside; considering what's eventually found to be hiding in the basement of The Orphanage - yeah, I didn't sleep that night - Clarisse Loughrey
Another film that doesn't rely upon (or need) special effects to make you a bit scared to turn the telly off when you've finished watching it. So disturbing in fact that the studio insisted the ending was changed to make it less dark before it was released. The 1978 remake is very good too - Jon Di Paolo
I'm a huge fan of Roger Corman's House of Usher (1960), the first in a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations the schlock producer made with the gloriously hammy Vincent Price. The latter stars as Roderick Usher, a sickly aristocrat living in queasy isolation with his sister in the crumbling mansion of the title. Corman's Poe films became increasingly formulaic and campy but this one really delivers - Joe Sommerlad
There have been countless movies about demonic possession but none of them have managed to be quite as memorable as William Friedkin's The Exorcist. This film has received as much critical acclaim as it has attention from terrified audiences decade after decade. Every sequence will offset your internal rhythm while scenes of a disfigured little girl (Linda Blair's Regan) crawling on the ceiling will haunt you for many nights to come - Zlata Rodionova
I am living proof that Tobe Hooper's seminal horror should not be watched at the age of 11; between the horrifying dinner table scene - where the cries of Marilyn Burns' Sally are laughed at by her cannibalistic captors - and that final shot of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) flailing his chainsaw about aimlessly in the air, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the horror film I would least like to watch again - Jacob Stolworthy
This Stanley Kubrick classic doesn't necessarily fit into the horror box but for audiences chasing a real sense of unease, The Shining fits the bill. Based on Stephen King's novel of the same name, the film tells the story of the Torrance family who hole up in an isolated hotel for the closed winter season. Things take a macabre turn as an evil presence begins to influence father Jack (Jack Nicholson) to undertake a murderous rampage. In typical Kubrick style, nothing is as it seems - Megan Townsend
I really enjoy watching horror films even though they never scare me; that's not including The Watcher in the Woods, of course. Yes - Disney film The Watcher in the Woods. There's just something inherently unsettling about the film's frequent use of mirrors that freaked me out and the way writing and apparitions suddenly appear in them. Who knew a Disney film could give you nightmares for weeks? - Richard Williams
Every Halloween I consider wearing one of the hideous baby face masks from Brazil and every year I chicken out for fear of my reflection. A sinister Michael Palin is also extremely disorientating. But nothing beats the sinking dread of a tyrannical, behemoth bureaucracy swallowing you whole and turning your dreams into nightmares. Having said that, Brazil is also my favourite film - Joe Vesey-Byrne
I was waaay too young when I first saw Bernard Rose’s Candyman and it still scares me to this day. It’s the story of a PhD student (Virginia Madsen) who visits an impoverished Chicago tenement building to investigate an urban myth whispered among the residents about a hook-handed ghost stalking the corridors. Naturally, she soon realises the phantom is all too real…. Philip Glass’s delicate music box score is eerie indeed and Tony Todd utterly mesmerising in the lead. Candyman manages to be both sincerely frightening and an important statement about the legacy of slavery and the injustices still endured by Black America, as relevant now as it was in 1992. Say his names three times before the mirror, I dare you - Joe Sommerlad
Screamers is based on a Philip K Dick story, and his trademark other-worldliness and fascination with the dark side of AI/human nature give it some genuinely chilling twists. Plus there's robots with sharp blades that tear out of the ground and chop you to bits - Jon Di Paolo
Okay, hear me out. Scream might not be a high-quality film or achieve anywhere near the art of modern indie horrors being made on a fraction of the budget, but its antagonist still haunts me and I'll tell you why: zombies don't scare me, demons don't scare me, ghosts don't scare me, but humans do. None of horror's clichéd evil beings are as terrifying as a human on a murderous rampage with no apparent motive. Ghostface is gangly, awkward, fallible and all the scarier for it. The way he runs around like a toddler, blindingly slashing at the air, is chilling and an unwelcome reminder that, if you did die at the hands of a psychopath, it wouldn't involve a cinematic, well-placed spike but a floundering struggle - Christopher Hooton
Whilst not the first film that comes to mind when considering the horror genre, this film for me is as scary as it gets. At first, the violence seems irrational and nihilistic, but the most terrifying thing about Michael Haneke’s Austrian psychological thriller about two men who randomly torture a middle-class family in their idyllic vacation home is the fact that we become the driving force behind the horror. Breaking down the fourth wall (spoilers ahead), one of the oh-so-polite psychopaths rewinds a scene that doesn’t go his way, and gives us a much more gruesome ending to the film, otherwise, as he says straight to camera: “we’d all be deprived of our pleasure - Kirsty Major
Make no mistake: if the Hollywood version of Ring is a decent remake, the Japanese original is far more petrifying. There is just something inexplicable about Asian horror films rooted in Japanese folklore and ghost stories that makes them far creepier. Watching it for the very first time is like living a nightmare; as Sadako crawls out of the well, you’ll find yourself automatically pushing against the back of the sofa in the hope she will not eventually end up in your living room. The movie put me off watching TV and picking up the phone for a couple of weeks, at least - Zlata Rodionova
For me the scariest moment in any movie ever has to be from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. The scene happens around 10 minutes into the film but is sold bold and confident in it's ability to scare you it actually tells you exactly how it is going to do so. By using dream logic, distorted sound and strange camera movements, the scene transports you into a nightmare, turned reality for one of the characters in the scene. These five minutes are exhausting to behold but it is a masterclass in how to effectively use the jump scare. This segment perfectly encapsulates the rest of this beautiful, confusing and surreal movie as you never know what lies around the corner on Mulholland Drive - Greg Evans
This chiller doesn't rely on CGI or special effects to be scary - it's all about building tension through old-fashioned dramatic tricks and it does it brilliantly. Nicole Kidman delivers an absolute tour de force and it is riveting and affecting as well as liable to make you jump out of your seat - Jon Di Paolo
One of the horror films that still scares the heck out of me. It’s by Hideo Nakata, who made the equally as scary The Ring. Hollywood did a remake with Jennifer Connelly in 2005, but there is definitely something about the original Japanese version that leaves you with a hauntin
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