Theme: Splatter Films

Splatter Films are works that place an emphasis on splatter, gore and blood-letting. These are works of horror, although many place their tongues in cheek and go over-the-top to become Horror Comedies. Works that are more concerned with creatures, transformations and mutations are listed under Makeup Effects Vehicles.

The first splatter film was Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963). From there, Lewis built a career out of serving up painfully bad films whose sole virtue was depicting extreme bloodletting. Others soon followed suit.

The splatter film gained a major boost with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), which showed numerous ways that zombies can be despatched. This was followed by the Slasher Film, in particular with Friday the 13th (1980) and sequels, that showed teens being despatched in a series of novelty deaths. Horror magazines of the day made superstars out of the various effects artists.

The splatter film’s heyday was in the 1980s-90s. Apart from occasional revivals, the genre has largely died away in the 2000s where the earlier reliance on makeup effects has become supplanted by digital gore, although there are many exceptions to this that prefer old school methods. In recent years, Japan has produced a robust output of ridiculously over-the-top splatter films.