How to Make Gore Tasteful

Serve it fresh and hot with some steamed greens and a side of fried potatoes. Oh wait, you said tasteful.

How would gore scare me?

If it was someone’s innards creeping out of their body and coming after me, but not too fast or too slow – that just takes the fun out of it. I should be able to have a chance to get away, but of course, it can find me.

If it was something red and nasty coming out of the toilet after flushing. You know the thing that won’t go down, but will come up after you. There is something gross about stuff coming out of the toilet – even worse if you just got up. As a kid, I was afraid of the toilet at night because I thought something lived in there and would get me.

Creeping limbs of any sort, especially zombie limbs.

Eyes that appear in strange places and look at you when you notice them. I do mean real eyes too, like on the coffee table. Gross and creepy. Or someone walking around with bloody sockets instead of eyes, that always got me too.

Coming across a bucket (or any container) of bloody bits – and they are moving.

Yeah, I guess I have a thing about bloody moving dead stuff, but not zombie related. Zombies do not invoke fear in me, rather they amuse me.

~Purrverse: a poem about a wicked kitty.

Would taking a shower and the little areas that the water comes out turn into eyes be gory and creepy?

yes it would. but the one thing you have to understand is gore, like any violence is never tasteful. shocking and creepy yes, but never tasteful.

Yeah, tasteful gore is kind of missing the point and anti-climatic:

He slit up his victims belly and pulled out the intestines to drape them over his body arranged in the likes of Lagerfelds autumn collection, sans the usual haute couture horribleness...
nah, just doesn't work. :-(

It could work with maybe:

[i]To him their skins was something like the latest and fashionable dress those dear girls wore. He wanted a pretty dress like them.
A dress full of scars, and disgust. A dress full of humanity. He would have to cut the perfect size for him. And there lay his victim, so beautiful. Her flesh made him jealous and it made his knife cry for him. He began to cut into her skin as blood oozed out.
He was going to have himself a fashion show soon and soon he would just look as pretty.[/i]

Was that tasteful in any manner whatsoever?

On that note, "The Moving Finger" by Stephen King scared the absolute hell out of me. Not while I was reading the story so much, but for weeks and weeks afterward when I imagined a grotesquely multi-jointed finger reaching out from the bathroom sink every time I walked past it at night.

It works. Just not as horror. =)

Where's the fun in tasteful gore? ;) I believe it was Stephen King who said something along the lines of "if you can't scare your audience, go for the gross-out."

I think the only way to have gore be tasteful is to have it not be there. And actually in some cases this is not a bad thing. Horror is all in what you don't tell. If you look at classic horror like Lovecraft or Hitchcock, you can see how they were masters of this. Modern horror is all about the gore and some would argue that its not as scary for it. Why do you need to describe in brutal detail how your killer killed someone? Would it be creepier to just "pull back the camera" at the last instant and imply that something horrible happened. The unknown is most people's biggest fear and nowadays we are so desensitzed to violence that it's almost ho-hum. But we'll always be scared of that thing hiding in the shadows that promises to kill us in unimaginably horrible ways.