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