“Splatter film” is a term for films that put blood, dismemberment, viscera, and the destruction of the body strongly in the foreground as special-effects set pieces, and for the body of works characterized by that kind of staging.
It is sometimes used in a sense close to “gore,” but the two are not perfect synonyms. Gore is a broad word for what kind of bodily damage is visible on screen: blood, wounds, viscera, mutilation, and so on. What characterizes splatter is the way such damage is staged: shown at length, repeated, and emphasized as a special-effects showpiece.
In film history scholarship, changes in splatter/gore cinema are studied not only in terms of the quantity of graphic violence, but also as changes in technology, distribution, and audience culture: what the body is made of, from what distance and for how long it is shown, and how audiences came to watch those images.
What Is a Splatter Film?
The English word “splatter” means for a liquid or similar substance to spray or spatter about. When people speak of a “splatter film,” they usually mean a horror film, or a mode of staging, that uses special effects to show blood and bodily destruction explicitly and makes those scenes a major attraction of the work. In 1981, John McCarty published Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo with FantaCo Enterprises. The book treats splatter movies as a sub-genre of horror film, which confirms that by the early 1980s films foregrounding bodily destruction had been organized into a recognizable category. At the same time, there is no official set of criteria for what counts as a splatter film. The scope of the term varies across criticism, fan culture, distribution, and marketing.
Splatter vs. Gore: What’s the Difference?
Splatter and gore overlap substantially, but their ranges of use are not the same.
| Term | What it mainly refers to |
|---|---|
| Gore | Explicit bodily damage such as blood, wounds, dismemberment, and viscera, and its intensity |
| Splatter | Films or staging that foreground blood and bodily destruction as sustained, repeated special-effects set pieces |
| Extreme horror | A broad label with shifting boundaries, covering violence, sex, taboo, discomfort, the limits of what can be distributed, and more |
| Torture porn | A term that critically grouped certain films, mainly from the 2000s, by the way they show torture and prolonged suffering |
Gore can describe a single scene as well as a whole film. If a war film or crime film contains a scene that explicitly shows wounds or missing body parts, that part can be called gore. In splatter, the set piece is often built around not only the moment the injury occurs but also what comes before and after it: stretching out the time as a blade approaches, showing the cut surface, repeating further bodily destruction.
The difference between gore and guro (the Japanese term for the grotesque) is discussed in detail in “What Is Gore? Its Meaning and How It Differs from Guro and Ryona”.
Who Coined the Term “Splatter”?
Did George A. Romero coin it?
A widely circulated account holds that George A. Romero, known for Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, coined the term “splatter film.” From the primary sources that can currently be checked, it is not possible to establish an occasion on which Romero first created the term. In a March 1978 interview with Romero in Rolling Stone, Romero himself uses the expression “splatter films” when describing his reputation.
This is not a statement declaring a coinage; the context is Romero explaining the reputation that was attached to him at the time. What can be confirmed is that in 1978 Romero himself was using “splatter films” as an ordinary expression. In 1981 McCarty’s Splatter Movies was published, organizing a body of works into a single category. It can be confirmed that Romero and Dawn of the Dead became strongly associated with the establishment of the term “splatter,” and that McCarty systematized these works as a group in 1981, but who first used the term “splatter film” in print has not been established.
Bodily Destruction on Screen Before the Splatter Film
Dismemberment and bloodshed were depicted in film and on stage long before the splatter film took shape. Before cinema, the Grand Guignol in France staged bloodshed, eye injuries, amputations, and the like on stage through trickery. In film, The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) depicted a beheading by substituting a dummy for the actor, and Un Chien Andalou (1929) features a montage of an eye being sliced open. The Japanese film Hell (Jigoku, 1960) also contains scenes of bodies being destroyed in hell. The shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) does not linger on wounds; instead it creates violence through short shots, screams, sound, and editing. The history of bodily destruction on film includes not only methods of showing injury directly, but also methods that make the audience imagine injury: substitution with dummies, offscreen violence, sound, and editing.
The 1960s: Blood Feast and Blood in Color
The film most often treated as a turning point in the history of splatter/gore cinema is Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963). Blood Feast cannot be called “the first film in history to show injury to the human body”; earlier works had already dealt with dismemberment, eye injuries, and the like. What this film did was put blood, organs, and mutilation in color at the forefront as a major selling point of a feature film. The American Film Institute’s entry on Blood Feast records that Lewis prepared the special effects in Chicago and produced his own stage blood. It also records a promotional practice of handing out plastic containers to audiences for vomiting at screenings. Lewis went on to make Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Color Me Blood Red (1965), and other films.
In Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968, Kevin Heffernan studies the horror films of this period not only through their content but through changes in production, distribution, exhibition, and publicity.
Gore in the 1960s was tied not only to special-effects technique but also to exhibition: how to publicize shocking images and draw audiences into theaters.
The 1970s: The Spread of Horror That Shows the Body Explicitly
In the 1970s, films that explicitly showed bodily injury were made in many different regions.
Dawn of the Dead
George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) repeatedly features Tom Savini’s special makeup for gunshot wounds, bites, dismemberment, viscera, and more. In the scenes where zombies eat humans, the injury does not end as a momentary shock; the artificially made flesh and organs remain on screen. Together with the fact that Romero himself used the term “splatter films” in 1978, this made Dawn of the Dead a work strongly associated with later images of the splatter film.
Lucio Fulci
Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) shows eye injury, decaying bodies, viscera, and the like at length. In the eye-injury scene, the film first signals the approaching danger, stretches out the time before contact, and then shows the resulting damage. This structure of anticipation, delay, impact, and revelation of the wound is one of the techniques used again and again in splatter films.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Doesn’t Show Much Gore
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is known as an extremely brutal film, but the amount of blood and bodily destruction actually shown on screen is not as great as its reputation suggests. Its intense impression comes from production design suggestive of meat, screaming, noise, heat, pursuit, and restraint. The film is also an example of how a film’s extremity and the amount of on-screen gore do not necessarily match.
The 1980s: Special Makeup Effects and Fangoria
In the 1980s, special makeup and mechanical effects advanced, and more films showed the body breaking down at greater length and in more complex ways. The techniques used included artificial skin made from foam latex and similar materials, articulated dummies, blood tubes, pneumatically operated devices, animatronics, and precise life casting. In An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Thing (1982), Day of the Dead (1985), and other films, the set piece became not only dismemberment but the process of a body transforming, splitting open, and collapsing over time.
Special Makeup Artists Become Known
The horror magazine Fangoria, launched in 1979, introduced readers not only to finished monsters and wounds but also to in-progress photos of special makeup, materials, processes, and the people who made them. In Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema, James Kendrick discusses, alongside 1980s screen violence, Fangoria, the growing name recognition of special makeup artists, and the place of Tom Savini and others in fan culture. As it became known who made the special makeup and what mechanisms were used, audiences could evaluate not only a film’s story but also how its effects were made.
Tom Savini and Special Effects as a “Magic Trick”
Tom Savini has compared special makeup effects to a magic trick that gets the audience to believe an illusion. In a 2020 interview with Savini in The Independent, he speaks of effects work as a “magic trick” and explains materials, experience, and how things look when filmed. Recalling the blood in Dawn of the Dead, he notes that a color that looked right in the container came out looking pink once filmed. Special makeup is not simply a matter of reproducing real bodies and blood as they are; it has to create something that reads as a wound or as blood through the lighting and the recording medium.
How Did VHS Change the Way Splatter Films Were Watched?
From the 1980s onward, VHS changed how horror films were distributed and watched. A scene that passes by once in a movie theater can be paused, rewound, and replayed on home video. Films that never received a theatrical release, as well as imported films, reached audiences through video rental and video sales. In The Pleasures of Horror, Matt Hills discusses the pleasures of horror without limiting them to the films themselves, including fan culture such as fanzines, magazines, events, collecting, and the exercise of taste.
Joan Hawkins’s Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde examines how art films, avant-garde films, and horror regarded as lowbrow intersected within the same audience culture through video distribution. Kate Egan, who has studied the British “video nasties,” also traces in Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties how videos that were targeted by regulation later acquired value as objects of fan collecting. Through VHS, the splatter film became not only something seen once in a theater but also something to watch repeatedly, to examine for its special effects, and to collect by title and by version.
Splatter and Laughter: What Is Splatstick?
Blood and bodily destruction are not used only for fear. The term splatstick, combining “splatter” and “slapstick,” is used to describe works that link excessive bodily destruction with comedy through timing, repetition, malfunctioning tools, artificiality, and the like. In his 1994 essay “Who’s Laughing Now? The Postmodern Splatter Film”, Michael Arnzen discusses the postmodern splatter film, laughter, and the self-consciousness of special effects.
In Re-Animator (1985), Evil Dead II (1987), and Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead / Dead Alive (1992), large quantities of blood, bodies coming apart, and physically impossible movements are tied to comedy. In Braindead, bodily destruction is exaggerated beyond the range of realistic violence, and blood and bits of flesh become part of slapstick motion.
In splatter films, fear and laughter are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Did the Splatter Film Decline in the 1990s?
In 1990s theatrical horror, psychological thrillers and self-referential slasher films became prominent. This period cannot, however, be treated as a blank in the history of the splatter film. Works such as Braindead were made, and extreme horror films continued to circulate through direct-to-video releases, imported videos, fanzines, and stores and screenings dealing in cult films.
In Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom, David Church studies how former grindhouse exhibition was remembered and reconstructed through home video and later fan culture. Kate Egan’s work on the video nasties likewise addresses how works that disappeared through bans and regulation came to take on different value through video culture and collecting.
Looking only at mainstream theatrical releases, one cannot conclude that splatter culture disappeared in the 1990s.
The 2000s: Saw, Hostel, and “Torture Porn”
In the 2000s, films such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) sparked major critical debate about how bodily destruction and suffering are shown. The term that became widely known in this period was torture porn. In 2006 David Edelstein published “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn”, discussing Hostel and several other films in connection with prolonged suffering and the audience’s complicity.
Torture porn is not a stable genre name meaning the same thing as splatter. Later scholarship has examined it as a press label and discursive category that critically grouped certain 2000s films. Nor can the Saw series be treated as having the same amount of gore throughout: in the first film, much of the violence is placed offscreen or after the fact, and as the series went on, scenes explicitly showing traps and bodily destruction increased.
In 2000s criticism, the issue was not only the moment the body breaks, but also restraint, anticipation, choice, and the duration over which suffering continues.
Splatter Films Today and Digital Technology
Today’s gore/splatter effects are not a binary choice between practical effects and CGI. Artificial skin, dummies, fake blood, and the like may be filmed, and then wires and rigs are removed digitally, or blood and injuries are added. Combining practical effects with digital processing makes it possible to erase the boundary between actor and prosthetic and to add movements that would be impossible on set. Film scholarship, too, does not automatically regard practical effects as superior to CGI, but analyzes what kind of body each produces on screen.
How Are Splatter Film Special Effects Made?
Several techniques are used for bodily destruction in splatter films.
| Technique | Main use |
|---|---|
| Fake blood | Bleeding, spatter, pools of blood |
| Prosthetics in latex, silicone, etc. | Wounds, skin, swelling, splitting open |
| Dummies and artificial bodies | Dismemberment, crushing, head destruction |
| Blood tubes | Blood spurting from wounds |
| Animatronics | Movement of transformed bodies or organs |
| Camera angles and editing | Hiding the switch between actor and model |
| Digital processing | Removing wires and seams; supplementing blood and injuries |
In special makeup, making something identical to the real thing does not guarantee that it will look real on screen. The color of the blood, the depth of the wound, and the shapes of organs and cut surfaces are adjusted to the lighting, the characteristics of film or digital cameras, the distance from the camera, and so on. A body made with special makeup is also an artificial body designed for the camera.
How Do Splatter Films Stage Bodily Destruction?
Several staging techniques recur in splatter/gore film scenes.
Anticipation
A blade, a trap, a restrained body, or the like is shown first, letting the audience predict what will happen.
Delay
Time is stretched out just before the danger touches the body. Cutting between shots or bringing an instrument slowly closer makes the audience wait for the moment of injury.
Impact
The moment a blade goes in, a body bursts, or a bone breaks is emphasized through image and sound.
Revelation of the Wound
The wound, cut surface, viscera, and so on are shown after the injury. The scene does not end with the moment of impact; the result is left on screen.
Aftermath
The results of violence are prolonged: blood keeps flowing, a body convulses, a corpse remains on screen. In his 1983 essay “Horrality,” Philip Brophy discusses horror from the late 1970s onward in terms of not only telling a story but “showing” the destruction of the body and the family, as well as special effects and humor. In splatter films, bodily injury is sometimes constructed both as a narrative event and as a special-effects scene that the audience can look at for a certain length of time.
Why Do People Watch Splatter Films?
The audience for splatter films cannot be explained by a single psychology. In the case of gore made with special makeup, viewers watch the in-story event of “a character being hurt,” while in some cases also knowing that it is an image made with latex, models, fake blood, editing, and sound. For this reason, viewing practices beyond fear and disgust have been documented: looking at special-effects craft, checking how the tricks work, laughing at excessive bodily destruction, and collecting titles and versions. Fangoria, VHS, fanzines, making-of footage, conventions, and the like made this kind of production knowledge part of fan culture. This explanation applies to bodily injury simulated with special effects. Footage of real death or injury, or of actual harm to animals, cannot be treated within the same framework of special-effects appreciation.
Are Splatter Films Only Horror?
The term “splatter film” is strongly associated with horror, and McCarty’s Splatter Movies also treats it as a subgenre of horror film. Staging of excessive bodily destruction close to splatter also appears in black comedy, action, and other forms. “Splatter” is sometimes used as a name for a group of works and sometimes described as a mode of staging that strongly displays bodily destruction. Gore has an even broader range and can be applied to individual instances of bodily injury in war films, crime films, art films, and so on. Here too, the ranges of gore and splatter do not coincide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What is a splatter film?
A. It is a term for films that foreground bodily destruction such as blood, dismemberment, and viscera as major special-effects set pieces, and for the group of works characterized by that kind of staging.
Q. Are splatter and gore the same thing?
A. They are not perfect synonyms. Gore is a broad word for the explicit content of blood and bodily injury. Splatter usually refers to films or staging that emphasize such content as sustained, repeated special-effects set pieces.
Q. Who created the splatter film?
A. No single person can be said to have invented the splatter film. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963) is regarded as a turning point in film history for making color blood and organs a major selling point of a film. In the 1970s the display of bodily destruction expanded in works by George A. Romero and others, and in 1981 John McCarty published Splatter Movies.
Q. Did George A. Romero coin the word “splatter”?
A. The claim that Romero coined it is widely circulated, but no primary source showing the occasion of the coinage can be confirmed. In 1978 Romero himself used “splatter films” as a phrase to describe his own reputation.
Q. Is Blood Feast the world’s first splatter film?
A. Not in the sense of “the first film in the world to show bodily destruction.” Earlier images dealing with dismemberment, eye injury, and the like exist. Blood Feast is positioned as a work that foregrounded color blood, organs, and mutilation as a major selling point of a feature film.
Q. Are splatter films scary?
A. Not all of them aim only at fear. Some works, such as Evil Dead II and Braindead, tie large amounts of blood and bodily destruction to comedy, and the term “splatstick” is used for this kind of expression.
Q. Is Saw a splatter film?
A. The Saw series includes entries with intense depictions of bodily injury, but the series as a whole cannot be treated as having the same amount of gore. In the first film, much of the violence is placed offscreen or after the fact. Later entries increasingly show traps and bodily destruction explicitly. Saw and Hostel also became the focus of debate in the 2000s around a different critical term, “torture porn.”
Summary
“Splatter film” is a term for films and staging that strongly foreground bodily destruction such as blood, wounds, dismemberment, and viscera as special-effects set pieces.
It overlaps substantially with gore, but the two are not perfect synonyms. Gore is a broad word for the explicit content of bodily injury, whereas a major feature of splatter is staging that shows injury at length, repeats it, and emphasizes it as a special-effects showpiece.
Techniques for depicting bodily injury on film have existed since the earliest days of cinema. Blood Feast (1963) foregrounded color blood and organs as the film’s selling point, and in the 1970s the display of bodily destruction expanded in films such as Dawn of the Dead.
In the 1980s, special makeup technology and Fangoria made effects artists and production processes widely known, and VHS expanded a fan culture of watching films repeatedly and collecting versions. In the 1980s and ’90s, splatstick tied bodily destruction to laughter, and in the 2000s, debates around Saw and Hostel made not only injury but also restraint and prolonged suffering objects of criticism.
The history of the splatter film includes not only choices about how much of the body to show, but also changes in special-effects technology, film distribution, home video, magazines, and fan culture.
About the Research for This Article
This article draws on contemporaneous sources and film scholarship concerning the history of terms such as splatter film, gore, extreme horror, and torture porn; the history of horror film from the 1960s onward; special makeup techniques; and changes in audience culture brought about by VHS and specialist magazines.
Regarding George A. Romero, his use of the term “splatter films” can be confirmed in a 1978 interview with him, while no evidence has been found that he was the first to invent the term. Nor does this article treat Blood Feast as the first film in history to show bodily injury, since examples of footage depicting dismemberment, eye injury, and the like exist from before 1963. The article also does not treat the 1990s as a period in which the splatter film disappeared, and includes the circulation of home video and cult films. Gore and splatter are likewise not treated as perfect synonyms.
The AFI’s commentary on Blood Feast refers to Variety of October 16, 1963, but the AFI page alone does not make it possible to determine whether the word “splatter” appears in the original 1963 Variety text or is part of AFI’s later description. This article does not treat 1963 as the first attested use of the word “splatter.”
Key References
- John McCarty, Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo, FantaCo Enterprises, 1981.
- George A. Romero interview, Rolling Stone, 1978
- American Film Institute — Blood Feast
- Philip Brophy, “Horrality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film”, 1983.
- Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968, Duke University Press, 2004.
- James Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema, Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.
- Tom Savini interview, The Independent, 2020
- Michael Arnzen, “Who’s Laughing Now? The Postmodern Splatter Film”, 1994.
- Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror, 2005.
- Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, 2000.
- David Church, Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom, 2015.
- Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties, 2007.
- David Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn”, 2006.
Translated from the Japanese original, “スプラッター映画とは？｜ゴアとの違い・意味・歴史を解説”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.