mark mclaughlin
FOUR-LETTER WORD BEGINNING WITH `F'
Mark McLaughlin's fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared/are forthcoming in more than 650 magazines, anthologies, newspapers, and websites, including Horror Garage, The Black Gate, Galaxy, Black October, Gothic.Net, Space & Time, Writer's Digest, FilmFax, The Best of Palace Corbie, all three Bending the Landscape volumes, The Book of All Flesh and its two companion volumes, and two volumes each of The Best of the Rest, The Best of HorrorFind, and The Year's Best Horror Stories. Forthcoming appearances include Cemetery Dance, Dark Arts, Midnight Premieres, and In Laymon's Terms. Collections of his fiction include Slime After Slime, Hell Is Where The Heart Is, Motivational Shrieker, and At the Foothills of Frenzy (with co-authors Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Knight). Also, he is the co-author, with Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, of the poetry collection The Gossamer Eye, which won a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. Many of his works can be purchased at www.shocklines.com Visit Mark on the web at www.geocities.com/mcmonstrous
GET THAT THING AWAY FROM ME!
I'M ALLERGIC TO MACHETES
(THEY MAKE ME FALL APART AND DIE)
Ah, so you have returned. Welcome, once again, to my online House of Horrors, my Mansion of Madness, my Palace of Peril, my Domicile of Doom, my Chateau of Shivers, my--you get the idea.
Today's four-letter word beginning with “F”-- the FEAR du jour--is actually a four-letter word beginning with “G.”
GORE.
Dead human meat, usually rendered dead via the chopping or stabbing actions of some cinematic loony who had a traumatic childhood incident. Did you hear that, moms and dads of the world? You'd better be nice to your kids, or else they'll grow up with the slaughterhouse version of an itchy trigger-finger. I suppose that would be a meat-cleaver-fist, or a machete-wrist.
But be careful: if you treat your kids toooo nicely, they'll grow up to be victims instead. Yes, they'll grow up sorority-girl-pretty (or fratboy-handsome) and always want to have sex late at night in lakeside cabins or abandoned insane asylums. Then, when they hear a noise down the hall or outside in the bushes, they'll light a candle to see what's going on, and then blithely venture forth to meet their bloody doom.
So parents, try to find some kind of middle-ground: don't torture your young ones, but don't mollycoddle them, either.
Speaking of youth: I remember the first time I saw a scary gore movie. Way back when I was in college, three friends and I decided to go to the drive-in to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. None of us were familiar with the movie, but from the title, we'd figured it had to be some kind of comedy. Boy, were we wrong! As the movie progressed, two of my friends started crying and one threw up.
Me? I scrutinized the movie with great interest. I remember saying things like, "The camera work is weird, like a home-movie. I think that's supposed to make it seem more real!" and "Would a weird hillbilly-type family of psycho-killers be able to own property? Isn't there paperwork involved? How do they pay their bills?" and "Do you think the big fat guy wears the human-skin mask when he's asleep?"
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre wasn't the first super-gross movie, though. Not by a long shot. Movie gore was invented, as far as I can tell (and I've seen LOTS of movies), in 1963 by Herschell Gordon Lewis and the good folks behind Blood Feast. This movie was about a crazy caterer whose motto could have been, "You are what you eat." Or, to put a finer point on it, "You're made of the same stuff as my catered meals, okay? In fact, you might just BECOME my next catered meal." The movie features brains getting scooped out of a head, a tongue being pulled out by the roots--it's no Disney flick. And for 1963, that must've been pretty darned shocking. Heck, it's still pretty shocking by today's standards.
