In Edison, N.J., a man named Rick Sullivan has been producing a newsletter called the Gore Gazette for more than a decade. The Gazette is a typed and Xeroxed eight-page sheet devoted exclusively to ultraviolent movies — the more repulsively, distressingly, sickeningly violent the better, in Sullivan’s view. “Gore” is a bizarre, 30-year-old subspecies of the horror film, comprising those movies that dare an audience to sit through them without getting sigopfutuck. (Sullivan’s highest praise is to call a movie a ” chunkblower.”)
Before the words “politically incorrect” entered the American vocabulary, Sullivan was their personification. Gleefully homophobic, racist, and anti- leftist, equally disgusted by Edwin Meese and the religious right, the Gore Gazette has long been on the periphery of the periphery, a truly underground rag.
When Sullivan and other gorehounds — like Michael Weldon, publisher of something called Psychotronic, and Joe Kane, the self-dubbed Phantom of the Movies — made a fetish out of “gore,” they were paying tribute to a form of moviemaking no rational person could enjoy. That was the attraction. Gore movies were typically made for very little money and intended for venues like Southern drive-ins and inner-city grindhouses — those one-time theatrical palaces on New York’s 42nd Street or in Chicago’s Loop. These movies bore titles like Blood Feast and The Gore-Gore Girls and The Wizard of Gore, and featured disgusting, though unconvincing, depictions of evisceration — an actress would sit, very still, while an actor trying to look evil pulled animal intestines out of a clearly fake second stomach. But with the end of the drive-ins and grindhouses, gore is now (like pornography) exclusively the province of the video market, which ought to have made it more than ever an underground, subcultural pleasure.
Ah, but these are hard days for subcultures. Subcultures are, after all, populated by alienated souls who are doing everything they can to outrage and mock conventional values. But what can the most alienated soul do when the world of convention is now dedicated to seeking out the latest, the newest, the hippest in alienation and turning it into a fashion appropriate for a Paris runway and a Soho boutique?
What, in other words, is a Rick Sullivan to do when Hollywood starts spending $ 30, $ 40, $ 50 million on movies that are really only suitable for discussion in the Gore Gazette?
In the past six weeks, three Grade-A Hollywood movies dealing with serial killers have taken mainstream cinematic violence to a new level. Just as $ IShowgirls was a $ 40 million work of X-rated soft-core pornography, so $ ISeven, Strange Days, and Copycat bring the world of the gore movie to the family multiplex.
The difference: At least the Motion Picture Association of America had the good taste to warn people that Showgirls was deeply offensive by giving it an NC-17 rating. Strange Days, Seven, and Copycat are all rated R. You could take your kids to see them. For God’s sake, don’t.
In Strange Days, a homicidal rapist with a virtual-reality gizmo forces his victims to watch their own rape and murder as though they were looking through his eyes and feeling his emotions and sensations. In Seven, a serial killer who fancies himself the instrument of God imprisons a one-time child molester for an entire year in a bed where he is alternately drugged and tortured but cannot cry out because he bit off his own tongue during one of the torture sessions. (And this is only one of the seven deaths the movie’s title promises.) In Copycat, two different serial killers on two separate occasions hang Sigourney Weaver above a toilet in a ladies’ room with steel cable and threaten to kill her slowly with a variety of medical devices while she struggles to keep her outstretched feet on the porcelain below.
What explains this confluence — three different serial-killer movies all coming out in the same month, all stuffed with the most gruesome and grotesque images of violence, torture, mutilation, and carnage? Partly, it’s the way Hollywood works: Three years ago, The Silence of the Lambs won the Academy Award over Beauty and the Beast, made $ 200 million at the American box office, and turned Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning depiction of a cannibalistic serial killer into a 90s cultural icon second only to Forrest Gump. The success of Silence of the Lambs is only now being Copycatted.
But the truth is that, like The Silence of the Lambs, the new spate of se rial-killer movies is just the big-budget apotheosis of the zero-budget gorefes ts that set Rick Sullivan’s New Jersey heart afire. Wonderfully well-acted, bri lliantly p hotographed, these movies have been made with the latest Hollywood techniques, all the special effects bells and whistles that a huge budget affords. But these are not deployed in the service of cutesy tricks like Forrest Gump shaking hands with President Kennedy, or even gross-out moments like the alien in Alien bursting through a guy’s stomach. No, the special effects here are used to create realistic images of torture and degradation. In one key scene in Seven, two cops discuss the serial killer’s M.O. while the naked corpse of an obese man lies beside them on a coroner’s table. The bloated corpse is a remarkable accomplishment in puppetry, to be sure, so believable as to be nearly unbearable to look at. Such a scene might have been attempted in a cheapo gore movie, but it would have been impossible to suspend your disbelief as the corpse took a quick breath every now and then. By contrast, $ ISeven is only slightly less disgusting than an actual trip to a city morgue.
Seven is the fall’s biggest hit, and understandably so: At a time when so few movies are memorable, Seven sticks with you for days. But this story of a moralistic murderer who slaughters one transgressor for each of the seven deadly sins is profoundly troubling. It took a lot of imagination to come up with the various murders we see on display here. And these were never actually committed; they exist in the minds of writer Andrew Kevin Walker and director David Finchef. So when these two creative types met to discuss them, and after great labor came up with the bit where the guy gets tied to the bed for a year, or the lady gets her head cut off and delivered to her husband by a courier service, did they congratulate each other on a hard day’s work well done? Did they give each other a high five? Or were they already solemnly telling each other that the violence needed to be specific and graphic because they were so concerned about the problem of evil in the modern world?
In this alternate universe populated by serial killers who seem less psychopathic than playful, the killers win and the cops lose. The intellectual, physical, and technical brilliance of the killers in these movies is a matter of wonder: “He’s very smart,” says policewoman Holly Hunter in Copycat, ” he’s way ahead of us, and he’s leading us around by the nose.” (This line of dialogue appears, in one form or another, in every one of these movies.) The killers escape detection and, if captured, can escape police or prison custody seemingly at will. They are masters at the arts of breaking and entering, computer programming, medicine, and wire-tapping.
They are so able, in fact, that they lead the cops to question the very power of good. The protagonist of Seven, played by Brad Pitt, turns out to be merely a pawn in the serial killer’s game; when he puts a bullet through the killer’s head, he is merely falling for the killer’s gambit by committing the sin of “wrath.”
The pretense to seriousness may be the most obscene and objectionable thing about these movies. Seven cloaks its fascination with torture in a character study of a pessimistic cop (Morgan Freeman) whose dark view of human nature is confirmed by his experience with the serial killer. Strange Days cloaks its literally pornographic premise — a machine that allows its wearer to experience the emotions of another — in a radical-chic plot about a race riot and an evil Los Angeles cop.
Rick Sullivan isn’t the only person whose culture is being pulled out from under him by the Hollywoodization of the gore movie. After seeing only one or perhaps all three of these serial-killer movies, you might experience a sentiment similar to my companion’s as we exited Seven: “I never want to see another movie ever again.” This sort of fare is what seems to be shrinking the ranks of American moviegoers. People go to the trouble of hiring a sitter, driving to the multiplex, and laying out $ 14 a couple because they’re looking to have a little fun. After watching Sigourney Weaver hanging over a toilet bowl, many of them might just decide to stay home the next week, or linger a little longer at the restaurant, or take a walk.
Seven may be a hit, but then the Greek general Pyrrhus also had a hit once, a battle of which he famously said, “Another victory like that and we’re done for.”
By John Podhoretz
