American “Grand Guignol”: Splatterpunk Gore, Sadean Morality and Socially Redemptive Violence

Each one of us has in his innermost being a secret longing for violent emotions.... Fear has always existed, and each century has stamped upon its literature the mark of the fears that torment it.... Andre de Lorde Fear in Literature (1922) La cruaute n'est pas sourajoutee a ma pensee; elle y a toujours vecu: mais il me fallait en prendre conscience. J'emploie le mot de cruaute dans le sens d'appetit de vie, de rigueur cosmique et de nicessite implacable, dans le sens gnostique de tourbillon de vie qui devore les tenebres, dans le sens de cette doleur hors de la necessite ineluctable de laquelle la vie ne saurait c'exercer; le bien est volu, il est le resultat d'un acte, le mal est permanent. Le dieu cache quand il cree obeit a la necessite cruelle de la creation qui lui est imposte a lui-meme, et il ne peut pas ne pas creer, donc ne pas admettre au centre du torbillon[s] voluntaire[s] du bien un noyau de mal de plus en plus reduit, de plus en plus mange [mache]. Antonin Artaud "Lettres sur la Cruaute" (II, 14 November 1932) Splatterpunk, or the "new horror," as it has recently come to be called, is an aggressively confrontational literature of contemporary alienation. As a sub-genre of horror literature and a spin-off of splatter film, it is frequently dismissed as a sensationalist, disgustingly graphic "literature of illiteracy" (Sammon, "Outlaws" 278). It is pulp fiction on the periphery of the pop-culture scene, what one culture critic called "today's outlaw pop art," a "secret popular literature" (Gehr 57). The pulse and heartbeat of its prose pounding with the manic, visceral, electronically-amplified rhythms of punk rock and heavy metal, splatterpunk, like splatter film, is most typically seen as an expression of adolescent angst, of the despair of urban youth, and of the rebellion against paternal authority. More elitist critics, who think in terms of genre paradigms, contend that splatterpunk is "an aggressively grubby underground movement [that] now seeks to compete with more conventional horror writers.... Most of this new horror fiction trades in the scariness of the seen, the notion that a reader will be frightened-and entertained?-by the explicit depiction of horrible acts, including murder and every sort of mutilation of the human body (Tucker 13). What is striking about this critique of splatterpunk is its assumption that it is essentially a literature of terminal nihilism, fundamentally without cultural antecedents and, as a type of hard-core pornography of violence, virtually devoid of socially or ethically redeeming value. Lacking in subtlety and wallowing in physical experience at the expense of the psychological or the spiritual, its critics condemn the "new horror" as crude exploitation of sadism and explicit violence. Splatterpunk is essentially defined by what it is not-classic horror literature. Like the debate over p.c., post-structuralist criticism, and the post-modernist aesthetic, the issues here are the definition of the canon, the precedence of the traditional over the experimental, and the relationship between values and aesthetics. In the traditional pantheon of horror, no author looms larger than Edgar Allan Poe. His meticulously crafted tales of the macabre rooted the dark blossoms that unfolded in the human soul in psychological states of acute neurasthenic anxiety, hypersensitivity to imagined supernatural threats, and a painfully magnified sense of moral revulsion and self-loathing derived from a pervasively Calvinist conviction of personal guilt. But terror, for Poe, while an emotion that often led on to madness ("The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat"), is an interior state, an affliction, perhaps a disease of the mind. The experience that has triggered terror can always be explained rationally by the narrator, however apparently supernatural it may be from the perspective of the mental world of the horrified protagonist-the seemingly schizophrenic Roderick in "Fall of the House of Usher," for example. …