Everyone has different tolerances for horror, blood and gore in their entertainment, be it movies, TV, books, manga, or games. I’d like to get a sense of where I fall in the spectrum.
This poll won’t satisfy everyone, but try to find one of the first 5 options that approximates how you feel. I’m lumping in all forms of entertainment here, although I recognize that it might be easier (or harder) for some people to make it through a horrifying book than a similarly-horrifying movie.
Interestingly, my tolerance for movie horror and gore used to be very low, although I read a lot of Stephen King and similar stuff. As I’ve gotten older, I am somewhat more blasé about movie violence, but don’t really seek out gory books. I still don’t go to see movies where the gore is the main point, though.
I went with “keep it out of my face”
This is going to sound really weird but…
It’s not gore that bothers me in scary movies, it’s the suffering. I’ve helped butcher animals and watched medical procedures online and it doesn’t really bother me.
What gets me about these movies is the thought of the victims in horrific pain while they scream and thrash around. That part really bothers me.
When you say “entertainment”, do you mean fictional entertainment? Because my tolerance for gore and violence is extremely high when it’s purely fictional. When it’s real, not so much, in most circumstances*. When it believably depicts violence and gore and it’s ostensibly based on something that has/does happen, my tolerance is low too in most circumstances.
In other words, I find it difficult to watch a movie like We were warriors but have no problem blowing up enemies with a rocket launcher in video games, no matter how realistic the graphics.
*A typical exception being, say, the hanging of Amon Goeth, which I had no problem watching.
I don’t mind gore if it’s part of a story. I dislike gore for it’s own sake. I really hate torture flicks because I sympathize too much with the victim. I’ve never seen any of the Saw or Hostel movies and have no desire to.
I agree about the suffering. That’s the main reason I avoid horror movies and why I eventually got turned off of horror literature. I just started being uncomfortable with the idea of “enjoying” elaborately set up pain and suffering. Violence in the service of telling a story is different, somehow.
I’ve become a Dad cliché. I used to tolerate more violence in entertainment before I became a parent. Now, when I see violence or horror, I mostly just want to hug my kids.
My tolerance for violence is proportional to how “fair” it is. Two tough guys, about evenly matched, pummeling each other? OK, I can watch a bit of that. When Jason Bourne fights that guy in his Paris apartment, or plays cat-and-mouse with Clive Owen in the open field, I’m OK with that. Or, if a war movie has decently-armed soldiers facing off against their enemy in a more-or-less fair fight, that’s OK in small doses, too.
But if it’s one person just brutalizing someone in a one-sided beat down, I just can’t deal with it. Any depiction of torture or violence against a weaker victim is right out for me, even if it’s not particularly bloody. Or in war movies, if it’s just wholesale slaughter like the trench-charging scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front, where the guys in the pillboxes just mow down their opponents by the hundreds, I just feel like crying.
This is my response as well. It also helps if it’s comedic or cartoonish, such as in Evil Dead 2 or From Dusk Till Dawn. I like my horror to be fun, not grim.
I can tolerate all the violence and gore there is. Much of it isn’t entertaining though. There are far more horror films that are just plain boring and stupid to me than the ones that do entertain.
I inherited my inability to watch gory things from my father. I know I’ve said it on this board before, but my father was made so anxious by gory/gross/violent images that he couldn’t watch the Errol Flynn “Robin Hood.”
This, but without the “sympathize” part so much. Torture flicks say more about the makers and consumers than I think they realize, and that is not something I care to be associated with as a human being. Otherwise, blood and gore in the service of story doesn’t bother me.
I have a fairly high tolerance for violence and gore in books, as long as it makes sense within the context of the narrative. And in movies…OK if something like The Deer Hunter or Saving Private Ryan, or a true-crime documentary.
But gratuitous violence and gore, no. I think I managed to watch a part of one Freddy movie, and about half of the first Kill Bill, before leaving.
Back in the 1980s I was at a party where someone put a Faces of Death movie into the VCR. I think that is gross and morally wrong to consume real-life violence as entertainment, and I protested loudly before leaving.
I also have not and will not watch any of the recent stoning or beheading videos or anything like that. I accept that they happen, but I see no benefit to actually viewing such things.
However, the entire movie/horror industry really needs to understand that the second bucket of blood does not make up for an overall crappy movie. Doubling the body count does not double the quality For the most part, movies can be very effective without showing excessive violence and gore. We do not need a gruesome 15-minute torture scene to understand that serial killers are bad people. There has to be a real point to everything that gets put on the screen.
So, as much as I’ll say “whatever you got” I’ve also learned that I should probably pass on NetFlix reviews where all everyone can talk about was how cool the death scenes were. Blood, violence and pointless frantic action do not prevent a move from being flat out boring and tedious. And some of the best movies I’ve seen are ones that know what to keep off screen.
Gore doesn’t bother me, but I have no reason to seek it out. I won’t go see a movie where the amount of gore is a selling point because there’s nothing to interest me. But I’ll watch a gory scenes in a good movie – I love Tarantino, for instance.
As for horror, I read it from time to time, but don’t bother with most horror movies. Horror films are usually so blatantly manipulative that the “scary” scenes just annoy me and what is called “scary” is merely startling the audience.
My favorite actual horror movie is Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, which subverts the cliches of horror (especially Rosemary’s Baby) to an ending that is horrific not because of blood and gore, but because it puts the protagonist into a state where death is inevitable and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Similarly, for me the best horrific scene in films is the final scene of Obama. It’s totally horrifying if you’ve seen all the movie, and the best thing about it if you watch the scene without the rest of the movie, you’ll never realize just how horrifying it is. It looks pretty mundane, actually, but the horror is in what it represents.
Jaws is the obvious example that everyone’s familiar with.
More recently, two that come to mind: Appropriate Adult, in which much of the drama is developed through police interrogation. (It’s a true story and perhaps respect for the victims was a factor?) Absentia which is perhaps flawed by showing so little that a lot of people are left with more questions than answers… but you will be on the edge of your seat.
