“Gore” is the word used for depictions of bodily injury in horror films, games, manga, and other media: blood, open wounds, severed body parts, exposed internal organs. In Japanese it is sometimes used almost interchangeably with guro, but strictly speaking the two are not the same. Gore also overlaps with ryona, which centers on characters being made to suffer; with “splatter,” which turns bodily destruction into a set piece; and with “body horror,” which deals with the deformation and invasion of the body. Each of these terms, however, focuses on something different. Put roughly, gore is a word about how blood and bodily injury are depicted. Guro is broader and is also used for things that strike people as bizarre, visceral, or repulsive. Ryona developed as a word tied to a taste for scenes in which characters are hurt or defeated, and so differs somewhat in character from both gore and guro. Gore, guro, and ryona are not steps on a scale from “mild” to “extreme.” A single scene can be gore, guro, and ryona all at once; in other cases something may be ryona but not gore, or guro but not gore. Ryona is explained in detail in “What Is Ryona?”
What Is Gore?
The basic meaning of “gore”
The English word “gore” means blood, especially clotted blood. Merriam-Webster’s entry for “gore” lists, alongside the sense of blood, a usage referring to graphically depicted bloodshed and violence. When films or games are called “gory” or said to contain “gore,” the words usually refer to explicit depictions of large amounts of blood, deep wounds, dismemberment, internal organs, or the destruction of body parts. The ESRB, the American ratings board for games and other media, uses “Blood and Gore” as a content descriptor. The ESRB distinguishes plain “Blood” from “Blood and Gore,” describing the latter as depictions that include the mutilation of body parts in addition to blood. For the purposes of this article, it is easiest to think of gore as depictions that show blood and bodily injury in concrete detail. There is no strict threshold for what counts as gore that holds across film, games, and fan cultures alike.
What does gore include?
Typical gore includes heavy bleeding, wounds, severed limbs, decapitation, stabbing, the exposure or removal of internal organs, missing body parts, and decomposing corpses. Film scholarship sometimes breaks these down into categories such as mutilation, dismemberment, decapitation, and evisceration. What matters is not simply the fact that someone is injured or killed, but how concretely the injury is shown. If a character is shot and simply falls out of frame, the scene may be violent, but its gore is weak. If, on the other hand, the camera moves in close on the wound, or shows the body being destroyed and the state it is left in afterward, the scene becomes much more strongly a matter of gore.
Gore vs. Guro vs. Ryona
Gore, guro, and ryona are easily confused. The way to tell them apart is to ask what each word is actually for.
| Term | Main focus | Relation to sexual meaning | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gore | Depiction of bodily injury: blood, wounds, dismemberment, internal organs | Not required | Wounds, severed limbs, exposed organs, heavy bleeding |
| Guro | Content, or a judgment about content, involving the bizarre, the visceral, or the repulsive | Not required | Corpses, insects, rotting matter, vomit, deformity, wounds |
| Ryona | A taste for characters’ injury, suffering, and defeat, and the depictions associated with it | Developed in connection with sexual preference, but now also used as a tag or a name for a kind of depiction | Blows, KOs, restraint, screams, defeat, mutilation |
Gore: how the body is injured and destroyed
At the center of gore is physical damage to the body. It shows, in concrete terms, changes such as skin tearing open, blood flowing, part of the body being lost, or internal tissue being exposed. Gore is also a word that makes it relatively easy to describe “what is visible on screen.” It can be applied to a whole work, as in “a gore film,” or to particular scenes, as in “this scene contains strong gore.”
Guro: a broader word covering the bizarre, the visceral, and the repulsive
The Japanese word guro is short for gurotesuku, “grotesque.” This relationship can be confirmed in the dictionary entries for guro collected on Kotobank. Today guro is applied to a wider range of things than gore. Not only blood, corpses, and wounds but also swarms of insects, mold, rotting food, vomit, abnormal skin, and strangely shaped objects get called guroi (“gross,” “grotesque”).
In other words, guro does not require bodily injury. In phrases such as guro chūi (“guro warning”), the word serves not as a viewer’s reaction but as a warning that disturbing content lies ahead. Nor does everyone dislike what gets called guroi. People who enjoy guro use the same word, so it is hard to define it simply as “whatever provokes disgust.”
Ryona: a word about suffering, injury, and defeat that developed in connection with sexual preference
Ryona differs somewhat in character from gore and guro. It developed as internet slang for a taste for scenes in which fictional characters are attacked, cornered, defeated, restrained, or made to scream, and for depictions of such scenes. A widely known account of its etymology holds that it was shortened from ryōki onanii (“bizarre-and-gruesome masturbation”) via ryonanii to ryona. It is said to have originated around 2003 in game-related threads on 2channel, and later sources quote posts that linked masturbation to scenes in which characters die crying out. However, the original logs from that time have not been fully verified against independently preserved records, so it cannot be asserted that “the word ryona was born on this particular day in 2003.” As this origin suggests, ryona has historically been a word closely tied to sexual preference. Gore and guro require no such sexual element.
The meaning of ryona has since broadened. It is also used as a tag to classify works and scenes, as in ryona-e (ryona illustrations), “ryona scenes,” or “ryona elements.” Someone who uses the word does not necessarily find the scene sexually arousing. Another feature is that the word can be applied even without bloodshed or dismemberment. In game communities of the 2000s, games with no blood were discussed from a ryona perspective in terms of damage voices, the way characters fall, KOs, and so on. There is also usage that applies ryona to depictions involving death or severe bodily injury. A blanket division such as “ryona stops short of death” or “once someone dies, it’s guro” cannot be made.
Whereas gore focuses on the depiction of bodily injury, ryona has a different axis: situations in which a character is harmed, and the taste or interest directed toward them.
Gore, guro, and ryona can all overlap
Consider a scene in which a character is wounded, bleeds heavily, and has their body progressively destroyed. Because it shows bodily injury in concrete detail, it is gore. As a visceral, bizarre depiction, it could also be called guro. In contexts where viewers appreciate and classify it with a focus on the character’s suffering and reactions, it may also be treated as ryona. Conversely, a bloodless fighting game in which a character is attacked again and again, with attention paid to the voice and animation on defeat, can be ryona but is hard to call gore. A photo of a swarm of insects or rotting food may be called guro, but it is neither gore nor ryona. The three words do not line up degrees of extremity on a single scale; they are words that classify depictions from different angles.
Do “Guro” and “Grotesque” Mean the Same Thing?
Guro is short for “grotesque”
Guro may look like a relatively new word born on the internet, but the abbreviation itself predates the internet. Dictionary materials derived from the Seisenban Nihon kokugo daijiten (the abridged edition of the Great Dictionary of the Japanese Language) record a usage of guro in the 1930 Dictionary of Modern Terms (Modan yōgo jiten) (Kotobank, “guro”). For the adjectival form guroi, a citation card from the Nikkoku Tomo no Kai records the phrase “like gross old SF” (mukashi no guroi SF mitai) in Karasawa Yoshiko’s Hooray for Naoki and Yoshiko, the PC Couple (Naoki・Yoshiko no pasokon fūfu banzai, 1995) (Nikkoku Tomo no Kai, citation for guroi). This 1995 example is attested through a user-submitted citation card and does not represent the first use of the adjective guroi. It can be confirmed that the abbreviation guro existed before the internet, but it has not been proven that the word passed in a straight, unchanged line from its prewar usage to today’s guro gazō (“guro images”) and guro chūi.
The grotesque does not mean only blood and guts
The English “grotesque” comes, via the Italian grottesca / grottesco, from grotta (“cave”). This etymology can be confirmed in Merriam-Webster’s entry for “grotesque”. Behind it lies the decoration of ancient Roman buildings that were explored during the Renaissance as cave-like underground spaces. A collection page at the Metropolitan Museum of Art explains how the underground rooms of Nero’s Golden House came to be called “grotte,” and the decorations found there “grottesche.” In such decoration, humans, animals, plants, and fantastic beings are combined in unnatural ways. In later literature and aesthetics, too, the grotesque has served as a term for discussing deformity, hybridity, exaggeration, incongruity, monstrosity, and the mixture of the comic and the terrifying.
The grotesque does not mean “bloody, guts, corpses.”
The “grotesque body” discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin is not simply an injured body either. It centers on the mouth, the belly, the genitals, eating, excretion, pregnancy, and birth—the parts and processes through which the body connects with the outside world, a body that is never complete as a closed individual. When someone in present-day Japanese speaks of a guroi gazō (“gross image”), and when art historians or literary scholars speak of “the grotesque body,” the words share an origin but differ considerably in scope.
The guro in “ero guro nansensu”
In Japan around 1930, the phrase ero guro nansensu (“erotic grotesque nonsense”) was used in discussions of urban culture, publishing, and entertainment. This guro also derives from “grotesque,” but it does not fit neatly into the present-day usage of “it’s guro because there’s blood and corpses.” It had a broader cultural background in which the bizarre, an interest in the abnormal, spectacle, sex, and the uncanny intersected. In 1928, the magazine Grotesque (Gurotesuku), associated with Umehara Hokumei and others, was also launched. However, the use of “grotesque” in a magazine title and the general currency of the three-word combination ero guro nansensu at that same point need to be considered separately. There is a connection between the historical guro and today’s guro gazō, but treating them as words with the same meaning is too simple.
Gore vs. Splatter
Gore and splatter are also easily confused.
A useful way to think of it: gore is about “what is depicted,” while splatter is about “how bodily destruction is turned into a set piece.”
Gore is the depiction of bodily injury
Gore is a broad term for explicit depictions of blood, wounds, dismemberment, internal organs, and the like. Even if a work as a whole is not a gore film, one can say that a particular scene “contains gore.” Localized gore appears in war films, crime films, action films, art films, and elsewhere.
Splatter makes bodily destruction the main attraction
In splatter, blood and bodily injury are shown repeatedly or at length through special effects, and become the film’s main attraction in their own right. The time it takes for a blade to approach the body is drawn out, and the film shows not just the moment of impact but the wound and the cut surface itself. Viewers watch not only for a character’s death but also for “how did they make this special makeup?” and “how far will they go?” Splatter films contain a great deal of gore, but not every work with gore is splatter. The term “splatter film” is widely said to have been coined by George A. Romero. It can be confirmed that Romero was using the term around 1978, but the moment of coinage cannot be established from primary sources. John McCarty’s 1981 book Splatter Movies is an important source that popularized the term as a film category. Splatter films are explained in detail in “What Is a Splatter Film?”.
Gore vs. Body Horror
Because body horror also deals with the body, it readily overlaps with gore.
Gore centers on showing, in concrete detail, damage done to the body: wounds, dismemberment, exposed organs. In body horror, the fear comes from changes such as the body deforming, becoming infected, being parasitized, fusing with something else, or slipping out of one’s own control. A foreign object enters the body. The body turns into another creature. Skin and organs change shape of their own accord. It is one’s own body, yet one cannot stop it by force of will. These are the kinds of depictions involved. In the BFI’s body horror list and the Criterion essay on body horror, mutation is treated as a central element. Some body horror involves heavy bleeding and dismemberment, but body horror does not depend on large amounts of gore. Conversely, a scene in which a character’s arm is simply cut off with a blade may be strong gore, but that alone does not make it body horror.
How Did Gore Develop?
The history of gore is not the history of films using more and more blood.
It is also a history of changes in from what distance, for how long, and with what techniques the inside of the body and its injuries are shown.
The 1960s: blood and bodily injury become a selling point
One frequently cited turning point in the history of gore cinema is Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963). Since works depicting dismemberment, eye injuries, and the like existed before Blood Feast, it is not accurate to call it “the first film in history to show injury to the human body.” What distinguishes it is that it put color blood, organs, and bodily destruction front and center as the main selling point of a feature film. Including its overly vivid blood and crude effects, the film’s appeal lay not only in realism but in the spectacle of “showing this much.”
The 1970s: horror that shows the body spreads
In the 1970s, explicit depictions of bodily injury spread across many kinds of horror film. George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) repeatedly features Tom Savini’s special makeup for gunshot wounds, dismemberment, bites, and entrails. In Lucio Fulci’s films, eye injuries and decomposing bodies linger on screen, while Dario Argento emphasized the shock to the body through color, composition, and sound. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), by contrast, is known as an extreme film, yet the amount of blood and bodily destruction actually shown on screen is smaller than its reputation suggests. Its intense sensations are built from production design evoking meat, heat, noise, screaming, and drawn-out chases. A frightening film and a gore film are not the same thing.
The 1980s: special makeup shows the body transforming
In the 1980s, special makeup techniques advanced, making it possible to show at length not only wounds and dismemberment but the very process of a body breaking down and changing into another shape. Using latex, prosthetic skin, dummies, blood tubes, animatronics, and more, films such as An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Thing (1982), and Day of the Dead (1985) made the splitting, deformation, and collapse of bodies into major set pieces. The horror magazine Fangoria, founded in 1979, also played a major role, because it featured not only the monsters and wounds on screen but also special makeup artists such as Tom Savini, behind-the-scenes photos, and how the effects were made. Audiences came to watch not only for “is it scary?” but also for “how did they make it?”
The 1990s: gore meets comedy
When massive bloodshed and dismemberment are exaggerated to extremes, they can produce laughter as well as fear. The term “splatstick,” combining “splatter” and “slapstick,” is used to describe works that turn bodily destruction into comedy through pratfalls, repetition, timing, and impossible quantities of blood. Peter Jackson’s Braindead / Dead Alive (1992) is a representative example. The destruction of bodies is exaggerated further and further from reality, and the violence comes close to cartoon gags. Gore is not necessarily a means of frightening alone.
The 2000s onward: showing not only bodily destruction but the duration of suffering
In the 2000s, criticism of films such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) turned not only to wounds and bodily destruction but also to restraint, forewarning, forced choices, inescapable situations, and the drawn-out time of suffering. The critical label “torture porn” also spread in this period. “Torture porn” is better understood not as a stable, neutral genre name but as a term that critically classified certain 2000s works for showing suffering and bodily destruction at length. In current filmmaking, practical effects and CGI are not a simple either-or either. Methods are used in which prosthetic skin and fake blood are created on set and the footage is then digitally processed to erase seams or adjust the amount of blood.
Is Gore Only Found in Film?
Gore is a word strongly associated with film, but today it is also used for games, manga, anime, and other media.
Gore in film
In film, special makeup, cinematography, editing, and sound shape the impression of bodily injury. Is the moment the blade enters the skin shown, or does it happen off screen with only the result shown? How many seconds is the cut surface held on screen? What sound is attached to the wound? Even for the same event—“losing an arm”—the intensity of the gore varies greatly depending on how it is staged.
Gore in games
In games, bodily injury can occur as a result of the player’s own actions. Attacking an enemy may produce blood or depictions of lost body parts, and depictions of bleeding and dismemberment are sometimes changed depending on the region or retail version. It is best to keep the general notion of “gore” separate from the official classifications used by each country’s ratings board. The ESRB has an official descriptor, “Blood and Gore,” while Japan’s CERO has its own review criteria.
Gore in manga and anime
In manga and anime as well, explicit depictions of bleeding, dismemberment, organs, corpses, and the like may be called gore. A major difference from film is that there is no need to build special makeup resembling real human bodies. Manga can show a single injury in a large panel, and anime can freely exaggerate bodily destruction that would be impossible in reality. There is no unified standard for how far a depiction must go to be called gore.
Is Gore Essential to Horror?
Gore is common in horror, but it is not essential to it. Horror can work with ghosts, psychological fear, unknown entities, darkness, sound, pursuit, and unstable spaces alone. Some works, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, leave an extremely strong impression of cruelty while showing relatively little actual gore on screen. Conversely, gore exists outside horror too. It is used when war films realistically depict wounded bodies, when crime films show gunshot wounds, and when bodies are violently damaged in action films. The label “gore film” does exist for a group of works, but the word gore does not designate a film genre alone. It is a word that can describe both the overall tendency of a work and individual depictions of the body.
Why Do People Watch Gore?
A common question is: “Seeing blood and wounds is unpleasant, so why do some people go out of their way to watch gore films?” The answer cannot be reduced to “because they like cruelty.”
The pleasure of watching special effects and makeup
In a gore film, a human body appears to be destroyed on screen. At the same time, viewers often know that the image has been made with latex, dummies, fake blood, editing, sound, and so on. This gives rise to a craft-oriented way of watching: “How did they make it look like the arm was cut off?” “Where did they switch from the actor to a dummy?” “What is this wound made of?” As a culture of special makeup artists and behind-the-scenes coverage spread in the 1980s, gore became not only a way of staging fear but also a source of enjoyment in watching filmmaking technique.
Disgust and curiosity can coexist
The attraction to disturbing information—about death, injury, violence, danger—is studied under the name morbid curiosity. Coltan Scrivner’s research treats morbid curiosity not as something found only in a few abnormal people but as a psychological tendency found in people generally. In Japanese the term is sometimes rendered literally as byōteki kōkishin (“pathological curiosity”), but it is less misleading to think of it as curiosity that makes us want to know about death, danger, and disturbing things. When watching horror, the feelings “I don’t like this” or “this is scary” can arise at the same time as “I want to see more.” Research by Andrade and Cohen likewise argues that positive and negative feelings can be experienced simultaneously within safe entertainment. Revulsion and curiosity are not necessarily opposites.
Gore can produce laughter as well as fear
When gore is exaggerated to extremes, fear can turn into laughter. Too much blood, impossible bodily destruction, absurdly long dismemberment scenes, and the like lose their sense of reality and move closer to black humor or slapstick. Splatstick is the typical case. The experience of watching gore can involve disgust, fear, surprise, curiosity, admiration for special effects, and laughter all at once.
What Does the “Gore” in Goregrind Mean?
The “gore” in goregrind, a subject this site also covers, is likewise connected to the bodily depictions discussed above. In the late 1980s, Carcass brought pathology, anatomy, decay, corpses, and medical terminology into their song titles and lyrics, and used collages of corpse photographs taken from forensic materials as album artwork. Their early works also combined low, processed vocals and murky recordings, and had a major influence on later goregrind. However, it cannot be confirmed that Carcass called themselves “goregrind” from the start of their career, or that they invented the word “goregrind.” In a 1992 interview with Bill Steer, he recalled that, at least around the time of Symphonies of Sickness, they did not think of themselves as a grind band. It is more accurate to say that Carcass’s early works later became a major reference point for goregrind. In goregrind, gore does not simply mean cruel lyrics. Combining the vocabulary of pathology and decay, images of corpses and dissection, low, disintegrating vocals, and a murky sound, it can be seen as a form of expression that brought a gore-like sense of the body into music.
For more, see “What Is Goregrind?”.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Are gore and guro the same?
A. They are not exact synonyms. Gore usually refers to depictions that show bodily injury—blood, wounds, dismemberment, organs—in concrete detail. Guro includes this but is also used for things that involve no bodily injury, such as insects, rotting matter, vomit, and deformity.
Q. Are gore and splatter the same?
A. No. Gore is a broad term for explicit depictions of blood and bodily injury. Splatter refers to a mode of depiction, and a group of works, that repeats and prolongs such things through special effects and puts them front and center as the film’s main attraction.
Q. What is the difference between gore and ryona?
A. Gore is a word concerned with the depiction of bodily injury. Ryona is a word that developed in connection with a taste for scenes in which characters are attacked, restrained, defeated, or made to scream. While it has sexual origins, it is now sometimes used as a tag for works or as a name for a kind of depiction. Some uses of ryona involve no bloodshed, while others include death or severe bodily injury. Gore and ryona can overlap, but they are not the same word.
Q. Is anything with blood gore?
A. The presence of blood alone does not necessarily make a whole work a “gore work.” There is a range, from works with a small amount of bleeding to works that dwell on dismemberment and exposed organs. How strongly something reads as gore depends on how concretely it shows blood, wounds, and bodily injury.
Q. Is gore only found in horror?
A. No. Gore also appears in war films, crime films, action films, and elsewhere. At the same time, many horror works create fear with little or no gore.
Summary
Gore is the word for depictions in film, games, manga, and other media that show bodily injury—blood, open wounds, severed body parts, internal organs—in concrete detail. In Japanese it is sometimes used in a sense close to guro, but the two are not exact synonyms. Guro is short for “grotesque” and is used not only for bodily injury but also for insects, rotting matter, vomit, deformity, and the like. The “grotesque” of art and literature is broader still, with a long history that includes hybridity, incongruity, exaggeration, monstrosity, and the mixture of laughter and fear. Ryona has a different character. It developed as a word tied to a sexual taste for scenes in which characters suffer or are defeated, and is now also used as a tag and as a term for classifying depictions. Bloodshed and dismemberment are not required.
Sorting out the three:
Gore = how blood and bodily injury are depicted
Guro = what is felt and classified as bizarre or visceral
Ryona = what kind of interest is directed toward a character’s injury, suffering, and defeat
That is how the differences come into view.
Splatter is a mode that pushes gore forward as a film’s main attraction, while body horror centers on the deformation, infection, parasitism, fusion, and loss of control of the body. These are not fully separate boxes. A single scene can be gore, guro, and at the same time be viewed as ryona. What characterizes gore cannot be explained by the quantity of cruelty alone. How does it show wounds and the inside of the body, which are normally hidden? How is that depiction created through special makeup, sound, editing, drawing, or animation? Gore is a form of expression that has produced not only fear and disgust but also curiosity, surprise, admiration for craft, and sometimes even laughter.
About the Research for This Article
For this article, we cross-checked dictionaries on the English words “gore” and “grotesque,” art-historical sources, scholarship on gore and splatter film, the lexical history and actual usage of the Japanese word guro, community usage of and research on ryona, and first-hand testimony from within goregrind. Claims such as “gore = guro,” “guro means only bloodshed,” “ryona means no one dies,” “ryona always means violence against women,” “Romero definitely invented the word ‘splatter,’” and “Carcass invented the word ‘goregrind’” cannot be asserted on the basis of currently available sources, and so have not been adopted. Words such as guro, ryona, and body horror are used differently depending on the period, medium, and community. The comparisons in this article do not establish a single official definition; they lay out what each word has mainly been used to describe.
References and Main Sources
Some sources below are in Japanese; their original titles are given with English translations in brackets.
Gore, Splatter, and Film History
- Merriam-Webster — “gore”
- ESRB — Ratings Guide
- Philip Brophy — “Horrality”
- James Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema, Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.
- Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing, State University of New York Press, 1997.
- Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror, Continuum, 2005.
- Xavier Aldana Reyes, Horror Film and Affect, Routledge, 2016.
- John McCarty, Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen, 1981.
Guro and the Grotesque
- コトバンク — 「グロ」 [Kotobank — “guro”]
- 日国友の会 — 「グロい」用例 [Nikkoku Tomo no Kai — citation for “guroi”]
- Merriam-Webster — “grotesque”
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — collection page
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.
- Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature.
- Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque.
Body Horror
- BFI — 10 great body horror films
- Criterion — “Mutation as Metaphor: Body Horror’s Visceral Transformations”
Ryona
- リョナゲー（仮）Wiki — 『鬼武者無頼伝』 [Ryona Games (Provisional) Wiki — Onimusha Buraiden]
- Meghan Blythe Adams, Exquisite Corpses: Markedness, Gender, and Death in Video Games, The University of Western Ontario, 2020.
- 松浦優「『暴力的』な性的空想の倫理に関する予備的考察」— CiNii [Matsuura Yū, “A Preliminary Study on the Ethics of ‘Violent’ Sexual Fantasies” — CiNii]
Audience Psychology
- Coltan Scrivner — “The Psychology of Morbid Curiosity”
- Eduardo B. Andrade & Joel B. Cohen — “On the Consumption of Negative Feelings”
Goregrind
Translated from the Japanese original, “ゴアとは？｜グロ・リョナとの違いと意味を解説”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.