“Oh No, It’s Alive!”: Inhuman Gore And Why It Sticks With Us
This article contains descriptions and pictures of both artistic and realistic gore. It also contains spoilers for Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion, Perfect Vermin, and Ultrakill.
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Like many other people in my age group, the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion is seared into my brain. The show’s technicolor gore is representative of, in my opinion, one of the most effective and impactful tropes a horror story can utilize: finding life in unexpected places. In our everyday environment, we interact with hundreds of types of objects and we do not question whether or not they are alive. When I make breakfast, I don’t worry about hurting my toaster by slapping the lever down too roughly. The characters in these stories are forced to confront their assumptions about life and their environment and we, the audience, find ourselves empathizing with and caring about objects that look nothing like us. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how an anime, two video games, and an art exhibition masterfully use gore to burn themselves into our memory and make us empathize with unexpected objects.
Have you ever been walking outside and flipped a rock over only to find a heaping pile of wriggling worms underneath? Ever opened a kitchen cabinet only to have a roach rocket out of the darkness? It’s easy to forget that places we see as still and lifeless can not only harbor living things but allow them to thrive. We see and interact with inanimate objects every day and never once do we question whether or not they are alive. Our brains are hardwired to recognize patterns and then apply those patterns to the noise and chaos of our everyday life. When something unexpectedly breaks that pattern, it’s a shock that can cause lingering uneasiness.
In the show Neon Genesis Evangelion, we are introduced to a world under attack from colossal, ultra-powerful monsters called angels. Humanity has built mecha, gigantic robots controlled by human pilots, to destroy the angels as they arrive. The mecha, called EVAs, are stored in hangars like the high-tech military machinery they appear to be. We learn that all is not as it seems when an EVA is badly damaged in battle with an angel, exposing shockingly white teeth and a bulging green eye in a fleshy socket. These mecha that had been introduced as inanimate war machines are revealed to be alive and capable of pain. We are also introduced to the concept of EVAs going “berserk” and exhibiting what looks like intense anger or panic. In the follow-up movie The End of Evangelion, we see an EVA violently disemboweled to reveal bleeding flesh, intestines, and a skeletal structure made of bone.
A machine built for war that can feel pain is upsetting on its own but even more unsettling is the revelation that comes later in the series. We learn that not only are the EVAs alive, they were intentionally trapped within metal shells to contain and control them. We have to wonder; are the EVAs sentient? Can they think and feel just like us? As we watch the show, we can’t help but relate to the characters as they also come to the same sickening realization. Their actions become something we are invested in because we can empathize with their horror.
Even objects with less potential for sentience can be horrifying when we discover that they are filled with gore. The video game Perfect Vermin uses this to great effect when the player is immediately dropped into a seemingly deserted office building and handed a sledgehammer with no context or instructions. The fun “rage room” type introduction comes to a screeching halt when a sledgehammer blow causes a chair to groan in pain and explode into a gory splatter. In what turns out to be a heartbreaking allegory for the slash-and-burn nature of chemotherapy in cancer treatment, the player needs to hunt down and smash a set number of ordinary-looking objects that are filled with blood and guts in order to progress. Time limits and increasingly confusing office layouts make the task feel more and more futile and the disturbing nature of the “kills” does not lessen.
As I played through the game, I found that smashing these living pieces of furniture actually got more upsetting even though I knew exactly which pieces contained the gore. Knowing that a specific fridge had guts made me connect with it on some level. I didn’t want to cause it pain even though I didn’t know for sure if it was capable of thought or feeling. Even after it was revealed that these items were the cancer cells of the allegory, I didn’t feel good about smashing them. Perfect Vermin is a masterpiece of a game and a flawless example of how to use gore as a way to force the player to empathize in unexpected ways.
Once you’ve recovered from the shock of finding life in an unconventional place, an ugly question rears its head. Where did that flesh come from?
In the video game Ultrakill, you play as a sentient, blood-fueled war machine in a world where humanity is extinct. To find blood to fuel yourself and stay alive, you descend into a Dante’s Inferno-inspired Hell and reap the bodies of the damned to collect their blood. As the game progresses, you begin to find context clues and pieces of information about the universe you are rampaging through. There are several types of man-made machines in Ultrakill’s Hell and every single one of them is full of blood and guts. While it’s easy to chalk this gore up to fun game design and dismiss it, let’s take a closer look at these bloody machines and the role they play in the Ultrakill universe.
You play as V1, a prototype war machine designed and built to fight in humanity’s Final War. The Final War was a bloody conflict that stretched over two centuries, eradicating most of humanity and rendering huge swathes of Earth uninhabitable. During the war, humanity developed the technology to use blood to fuel machines but there was a catch. The blood needed to be fresh. The first solution to this came about with the Guttermen; machines with a casket-style box containing a real, live human welded inside. Minimal life support was provided to keep the human alive enough to produce fresh blood as fuel for the Gutterman. As the war escalated and technology marched on, humanity discovered new ways to keep that blood fresh longer; namely, adding flesh and organs to filter and circulate blood throughout the machines.
While we’re not told where these blood-filtering guts came from, we can use what we know about the Guttermen and humanity’s “victory at any cost” mindset in the Final War to come to an unsettling conclusion. The flesh inside of V1 and every other manmade robot we encounter almost certainly came from a human. Ultrakill’s lore mentions that the Guttermen’s human fuel sources were almost all deserters, prisoners of war, or exhausted soldiers that could no longer fight. If this brutal version of humanity viewed itself as a finite resource, it’s easy to imagine it “recycling” those humans who were perceived as useless.
In my opinion, this realization in context of the game’s lore cements humanity itself as the antagonist of the game’s universe and renders Ultrakill’s story remarkably unique. If humanity is dead, blood is fuel, and Hell is a finite space with a finite amount of beings that contain blood, V1’s story will either end in death by combat or with slow, painful starvation. In a way, this frees the player’s conscience and allows them to revel in the violence and bloodshed. Ultrakill takes what could be a horrifying story of “recycled” human viscera inside war machines and turns it into a joyous, defiant explosion of blood and gore.
Revealing that seemingly inanimate objects have guts inside is shocking but nothing is as viscerally uncomfortable as guts that are out in the open, devoid of the context of a body.
The mixed media sculpture of Chinese artist Cao Hui harnesses this visceral discomfort in his collection entitled “I Want to Play God.” Technically speaking, his sculpture is stunning; the colors, textures, and patterns of the pieces in this exhibition are close enough to the source material he mimics to be downright alarming. Emotionally speaking, the art in this collection is like a blow to the chest. A nondescript wing chair becomes an abomination made of mottled skin with intestines and fat spilling from tears in the upholstery. A flesh suitcase peels open to reveal organs and connective tissue glistening inside. Striped couches may be common but Cao Hui’s striped couch sculpture in “I Want to Play God” is made of alternating stripes of torn skin and intestines that seem ready to start squirming at any moment.
In Hui’s artist statement, we learn that the inspiration behind this collection is an artist’s drive to understand, replicate, and perfectly represent complicated systems in ways that can bridge disciplines like medicine and engineering. “People differentiate between artist and non-artist based on degree of mastery in imitating nature, and further differentiate Realism from Hyperrealism based on skill in rendering details,” begins Hui. “I think artists really want to play god more than anything else, and will stop at nothing to construct a truth that validates the self… I really wonder to what extent these self deceptions and constructed truths can strike a nerve in the knowing onlooker.”
Hui’s sculpture does indeed strike a nerve; the hyperrealistic viscera portrayed in each sculpture is almost too disturbing to study for long enough to admire the technical skill that went into creating it. Every piece in this collection is an elegant, brutally efficient way to force the viewer to confront their own mortality and acknowledge that they, too, are made of flesh.
Guts are intimate. They’re shocking. We don’t often see guts and when we do, we know that something has gone very, very wrong. This instinctual reaction makes our minds snap to attention and try to puzzle out what happened, why it happened, and if it could happen to us. Used in excess, gore loses its shock value and becomes almost mundane but used sparingly, it can sear into our memory. Gore creates a bloody bridge between us and the unfortunate character who has been torn apart and forces us to empathize regardless of who or what that character actually was. Suddenly, we relate to a robot built for war, a refrigerator, and, in Cao Hui’s case, an unseen subject that has been so thoroughly picked apart and reassembled that we can’t tell what they were in the first place. We are confronted with the reality that the bodies we live in are fragile, breakable, and full of guts.
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Mentioned Media
Neon Genesis Evangelion: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112159/
The End Of Evangelion: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169858/
Perfect Vermin: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1416130/Perfect_Vermin/
Ultrakill: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229490/ULTRAKILL/
Cao Hui: https://www.linlingallery.com/album_d.php?lang=en&tb=2&cid=-1&id=5564
