Snuff Out the Light

THE ORIGINS OF SPLATTERPUNK

Initially dubbed by David J Schow at the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, the splatterpunk movement officially burst onto the scene in the mid-1980s. While the term splatter had been an existent horror term (credited to film and media analyst John McCarty) since the days of bloody gore films from the likes of Hershell Gordon Lewis, the effort to capture this extreme sensationalism on the written page had never before formed such a concentrated artistic movement. The merit of such a movement was under hot debate, but the proponents of it determinedly plowed on until a first splatterpunk story compendium was published in 1990: Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror edited by Paul M. Sammon. 

Many established horror authors would criticize the movement as cheap and sensationalist. Several authors such as William F. Nolan and Charles L. Grant would censure the movement, and Robert Bloch (Psycho, Jaws) would state “there is a distinction to be made between that which inspires terror and that which inspires nausea”. Despite this, splatterpunk found its supporters. Critic Phillip Nutman would describe splatterpunk as “survivalist literature” which “reflects the moral chaos of our times”.

Sammon would follow this up the collection  with a sequel five years later, yet it seemed as if the movement was losing steam. While it helped popularize the works of notable horror authors now lauded in the modern horror canon—Clive Barker, Jack Ketchum, and Poppy Z. Brite, for example—it seems that the term extreme horror is now preferred for the movement with splatterpunk only referring to the awards for extreme horror or the works which came out of the movement itself. This doesn’t mean that extreme horror and splatterpunk still aren’t making history, however.