Is Anyone Else Hungry?

I think meaningless or excessive gore in horror movies is fun, just for the type of unease it can give you - you are meat, and not much else. Not necessarily the fear of being preyed upon, not becoming meat in the mouth of something else, but simply being meat. Whether you die or live or anything in between, at any moment you could be reduced from a walking, talking human being to inanimate flesh. There's a really neat sort of inevitability in the idea of that, how you'll never be anything more than what you already are, and once you die nothing else about you will matter but the physical piece you left behind. You're mortal! You can be resilient, and brave, and smart, but you're still human!

And for all the people who do believe gore and body horror are shock value and no true horror, there's too many more who won't watch the Saw series with me because they feel uncomfortable about watching people go through the damn meat grinder. Psychological horror? Fine. Paranormal? Great. That 'pound of flesh' trap? One thousand years of sympathetic wincing from my audience. It's true that something like 'Nope' is a more intellectual (and frankly, a much better) movie than one like those, and I could go on for way too long about it, but there's still a special sort of charm in the revulsion gore inspires.

Now, in a better world, this post is also about bodily autonomy and the violation of it, literal and figurative. Some whimsical little rambling about sanctity, destruction of purity/innocence/whatever tasteful and anodyne word you'd like to use in place of virginity, and how it couples with destruction of the pure/untouched/unharmed body. Just some ideas I could bat at playfully like a kitten. But this is the world we live in, and I've only got three paragraphs <\3.