If you think you've got the stomach for some proper gore, then this is the perfect music video to test yourself. Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy have always been abrasive both sonically and visually - sampling tons of horror audio and video clips in the process - but it is during the Rabies period that they really came in to their own. OK, their sound might be a bit dated by 2010 standards, which shows pretty clearly on one of their best tracks, "Warlock", but combine it with a classic video that borrows all the best splatter scenes from the 1970s and 1980s, and you have a time capsule like none other. Enjoy!
Hold your meals, ladies and gentlemen, for now we’re coming up with something fairly revolting…
Body horror, or venereal horror as David Cronenberg calls it now and then, is any form of horror based primarily on transfiguration and mutilation, be it explicit the way all gore movies are, or implicit like Rosemary’s Baby. Body horror involves everything from alien chestbursters to weresheep transformation sequences to vagina dentata, and that’s before we get to an entirely new level with Cronenberg's Videodrome.
The 1980s are a particularly rich decade for this type of horror as cyberpunk and industrial aesthetics dug deep into the language of popular culture, riding the media-fueled fears of what the 21st century was supposed to hold for the human body. Think not only of the obvious examples like Akira and Robocop but also of "cleaner" projects like Dune and Blade Runner (remember the eye plant?). That gore became such an important thing for the slasher genre after Friday the 13th wasn't going to help things, either.
Of course, body horror has always been present in storytelling as it really represents the visual component of aging and death – it reminds us that as much as we’d like to think of ourselves as spirits, we’re 100% organic and we tend to decay over time. Myths and legends make full use of chopped-off body parts and strangely mutated human beings to drive the point home; so are the tales of the Brothers Grimm and pretty much all European folklore. Last season we covered the Thing-Without-a-Name and the Werewolf - an important thing that needs mentioning is that body horror plays a huge part in why they are so effective. On one hand, it is way easier to detest an abomination than a perfect being; on the other hand, if you leave out this visual externalization of what is essentially internal struggle within the main characters, you might as well scratch the genre and watch a psychological drama (to significantly lesser impact). Just think of Tod Browning's Freaks.
As I’ve suggested on several occasions, if there is one true master of body horror, it would have to be David Cronenberg. The guy is a true auteur, making movies so dry they could snap at any given moment, much like the main characters they make room for; yet this unsettling vibe is always used as a force to push the overall themes forward and not just to provide visual spectacle. As others have noted, over the arc of his career, Cronenberg's films have followed a definite progression, moving from the breakdown of social order in his early films (e.g. Shivers, Rabid) to personal chaos (e.g. Scanners, Videodrome) to self-changing experiments (e.g. The Fly, to certain extent Dead Ringers). For this reason, it made perfect sense to pit him against William S. Burroughs for the production of the “unfilmable” Naked Lunch. At the end of the day, Cronenberg clearly has a thing or two for the human condition, or rather for its fragility - disease and disaster, according to him, are less problems to be overcome than agents of personal transformation (and if you want to read more about it, go here and here for interesting articles on the subject; also, you might want to check out the following clip).
Musically speaking, this episode ties 100% with the body horror theme, covering as much ground as possible between Tapeworm’s version of Skinny Puppy’s “Warlock” and Clinic’s “Distortions”, including a couple of turns by the ever-present Fantômas. Enjoy!
There's an army of zombies coming right at you, on your left you see a pack of werewolves, on your right a bunch of politicians, and you only have three bullets in the revolver. What do you do, man, what do you do?
The options:
You fight and die like a hero!
You run!
You take out your Republican party membership card and nobody dares to touch you!
On June 3rd, we had a show about scary video games with particular emphasis on the survival horror subgenre, which has made quite a splash since the appearance of the Alone in the Dark series. Most of the video games discussed (modern classics such as Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Dead Space, but also oldies like Doom and Redneck Rampage) are nightmare-inducing in ways that only the best horror films are, and one might even dare say that the games are actually better at throwing people in fits of terror because their monsters never attack famous actors - they attack YOU! Oh, the sweetness of running amok through the endless tunnels of hell, with a terrible monster right behind your back...
Well, this self-defense reflex that permeats horror games is also what is consistently lacking from the respective film adaptations. Some films make it through despite this obvious impediment - the Resident Evil film series is heaps of fun and the Silent Hill adaptation is extremely effective when it takes scenes straight from the games. Most video game adaptations, however, are outright disasters and most of the blame falls at the feet of one Uwe Boll, the man that seems to love being hated. Oh well, what can you do, life was never meant to be perfect.
The music for this episode hits hard with industrial landscapes and beats from artists such as Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, Throbbing Gristle and Rob Zombie. The ridicilous sounds of that internet meme from a few years back also pop up to remind you that All your base are belong to us! and that horror sometimes is linked purely to stupidity :)
Danse Macabre is a kick ass radio show dedicated to the meisters of the horror genre. The shows blasts the airwaves with a special theme every Friday from 00:00 - 02:00 CET. On April 10, 2009, episode 1: "Invitation to Dance" ran all the way to Valhalla.
