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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Fake Gore



No, not Al Gore, but gore as in blood and guts. It's the Halloween season so we are inundated with scenes of gore. Lawns are decorated by plastic skeletons and decapitated heads. TV is flooded with horror movies. It's strange what passes for entertainment.

Generally, I'm not much entertained by fake blood and guts. As a former firefighter I saw more than my share of the real stuff. Splattered bodies were just another bad day at work. The one thing about obviously dead people is that there's nothing you can do for them. About all you can do is maybe screen the death scene from the curious public. The dead deserve a bit of dignity, if for no other reason that it makes the surviving family feel a bit better.

A buddy of mine once called me to complain about his bad day at work. One of his superiors in the office took credit for his work. The day he called me, I'd had a fire with a triple fatal. I was with the crew that discovered two of the bodies. A third body was so burned that I did not recognize it as a body. The house was on fire, filled with smoke and heat. I crawled right through the charred remains. My gear smelled like death for week, in spite of multiple washings with industrial soap. My friend decided his bad day at work wasn't that bad after all.

So yeah, gore isn't particularly entertaining for me. I don't have a PTSD with these events or anything like that. It's just sad. Why people are fascinated by this stuff is beyond me. Maybe it's because so few of us actually have dealt with real death?

There is one horror film genre that I'll watch for old times sake. When I was a little kid my grandmother would sometimes babysit me. She let me stay up late at night and we'd watch zombie movies together -the old shambling corpses with parts falling off and everything movies. My grandmother and I would both laugh and laugh. I have warm memories of those late nights with my eccentric grandmother. Good fun.

-Sixbears

8 comments:

  1. Sixbears, I'm afraid most folks aren't aware of the REAL occult connection with a lot of horror films, but then again, some ARE.

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    1. I am concerned that fake horror numbs us to the real horrors around us.

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  2. One of my boss's cousins is a retired Central Power & Light line crew chief. He told me that when a car accident occurs in which a power pole is hit, a power from power company is required to come out and turn off the power at source before anyone else can start to clear the scene. He had to do this many times over the 30 years plus at that job. So seeing corpses became an every day possibility.

    He wasn't so affected by the adults, it was the children that really hit him hard. He does have some PTSD issues and takes medications to help him with that.

    I've never really understood the motivation of the movies which glorified gore either, I guess I'm weird.

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    1. Yes, kids are tough to handle. Also, friends and relatives. Usually we just do the job, as getting emotional doesn't help anyone. Talking it out back at the station later helped.

      No, you are not weird. Nothing weird about not being entertained by others pain and death.

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  3. The way we treat death I think is the reason we have so many "gory" movies. We treat death as "don't look it might scar poor Johnnie"! Not seeing death in its natural form and making it a "taboo" subject is in my mind a leading cause of the fascination of the zombie crap.
    The days of having dear ol' grandpa lying in state in the front parlor is long gone. Nowadays the old bird is off in a nursing home and away from family interaction when he croaks. The next time the family sees him is when he is all made up in the casket. Sanitizing it and making it discrete has turned it into an unknown territory that soulless Hollywood can mess with.

    Steve

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    1. I think you are right about that Steve. We isolate ourselves from our own mortality.

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  4. Real gore sure ain't entertaining.

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  5. you can buy now "zombie flamigos" for you "holloween lawn"

    have you escaped yet?

    Wildflower

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