In Defense of Pulp and Splatter

So I was getting into makeup in the green room when a member of the crew came down, absolutely livid. She'd just been to the movies, and seen a trailer that offended her: a horror movie set near Chernobyl. And I was very good and kept my mouth shut (no mean trick, for someone as in love with the sound of his own voice as I am), but by the end of the rant my interest in the movie had leapt from exactly zero percent to well over fifty.

The thrust of her argument seemed to be that setting a horror story in the wake of a real-world tragedy reeked of exploitation. But that's founded on the assumption that horror isn't a valid or versatile enough tool to examine that stuff, and I really couldn't be further from that camp. Horror's about fear, after all, and not solely about the basic physical fears of violence and death and decay: it can can also be about the various paranoias and unease that we live with nightly, and dragging them shrieking and bleeding out of the shadows. George Romero's zombies are about more than shambling monsters. I won't say that universally the *best*, but certainly the most *memorable* horror I've seen, and the stuff that's had the greatest influence on my own writing, has nearly all had an explicitly political dimension.

Having written both, I find a lot of similarity between writing comedy and writing horror, in that they both revolve around generating a very specific physical/emotional response: laughter in one case, nausea, disgust, and unease in the other.

Actually, I think it goes *deeper* than that(TM), because the more I look over what I've just written the more I suspect that there's some element of bullshit rationalization in there. The fact is, I would be actively disappointed to go to this movie and find that they've erred on the side of good taste: I *want* an element of crass exploitation.

And here's the other parallel between comedy and horror: the school of satire I admire in both completely dismisses social niceties and audience delicacy. It wades in waist-deep into the blood and guts and swings wildly at anything in reach, and that, I believe, is the most efficient way to arrive at something meaningful.

What I'm saying is that I'm not really interested in scalpel-like precision: give me a hacksaw. Let's open up the top of someone's skull and really get our hands dirty, wrist-deep in gray matter, squeezing and poking at that big, squishy frontal lobe.

After all: there's more than one way to get cerebral.