How Gross Is Too Gross?

I tried to get into The Walking Dead. I really did. After being called out at World Horror Convention 2012 for being an author of zombie novels and not having seen it, I decided that it was something I had to do. I rented the first season from Netflix, talked my wife into watching it with me, and spun up the DVD player.

The characters were interesting, the premise was reasonably thought out (I still don’t buy into the “simultaneous appearance of zombies in all parts of the world” school of zombie storytelling, but this isn’t a post about zombie lore, so I digress), and the effects were cool.

But it was just too gross.

And more to the point, being gross seemed to be the point. In the third episode (or so), the heroes had to make their way through a city block of zombies to get to some vehicles to rescue themselves with. In order to get past the zombies, the heroes had to—I am not making this up—chop up a zombie and turn it into goo so they could smear the putrid stinking mess over themselves. The idea was that if they smelled like zombies, they could walk among the zombies without triggering an attack. I’ll let you watch the episode to see how it played out.

Here’s my point. As I was writing that synopsis, I could feel my gorge rise. I wasn’t exactly nauseous, but I was getting there. The whole concept of painting yourself in rotten human fluids is just… gross. And just because it is horror doesn’t mean that it has to be gross (well, not that gross).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I used to be an avid watcher of CSI (at least while William Petersen was still onboard), and I’d watch it during dinner. Now, there was a disturbing show. Their effects shop did an excellent job of depicting all manner of damage one human could inflict on another. And yes, there were some episodes that were a bit too much for me. But there was a reason for the disgusting images. They were trying to accomplish something. It was brief, and if I didn’t want to watch, I could always cover my eyes for two seconds, and it would be gone. But with The Walking Dead, if I were to take the same approach, I would be better off just blindfolding myself and listening to the audio of the show. I just couldn’t get away with looking away for a moment, because the next moment, something even more disturbing would appear.

I think about some classic horror that I’ve seen and read, and I don’t remember it being so overtly gross. In Stephen King’s Christine (both the book and the movie), there’s a scene where Christine crushes some bad-asses to death as revenge for the trashing they gave the car. Scary, sure, disturbing, perhaps, but it was just enough to get the point across and then move on. In The Shining (again, book and movie), there was the river of blood—though I kind of wish they had kept the topiary animals instead of going with the hedge maze in the movie, but again I digress—and in Misery there was the ankle smashing scene. In 30 Days of Night (I only saw the movie), the little girl vampire running through the store, dripping blood from the mouth, was pretty upsetting. But each of these scenes was brief, to the point, and actually helped move the story along.

But what is the dividing line between gross for effect and gross for gross’s sake? At the extreme end, there are authors like Edward Lee (who is a really nice guy, but who writes some really upsetting gore-porn). Violent rapes, graphic dismemberments, torture both physical and psychological. In my opinion, there’s enough bad stuff in the world that I don’t need to fill my head with those images. I can just watch the news.

Actually, I think that’s the point. I’ve said before that I write about “the end of the infrastructure” because I want to learn how to react to something that terrifies me. By confronting it head on, I can become a stronger person and more prepared to face the world. Perhaps others use downright disgusting horror as a way of facing their fears. The world is filled with bad stuff. Some of it is happening out there right now as we speak. Many people have survived situations that would crush the rest of us—many of those survivors are or were children at the time of the event. I think the people who inflict various levels of troubling, or sometimes outrageously upsetting, images on their psyches are doing it because, ultimately, horror fiction is safer than the horrors of reality.

I’m willing to bet that I’m not the first person to postulate this hypothesis. I’d be surprised if every horror writer didn’t come to this conclusion at some point during their career. But I think it needs to be said. Fiction is about “what if?” Horror fiction is about “what if something bad happens?” From my point of view, however, it is up to the individual to decide what images and ideas they will take in to their minds, and what to do with them.

Dead, rotting bodies, upright or otherwise, gross me out. But the breakdown of society fascinates and terrifies me. Should I give The Walking Dead another shot at helping me deal with my fear? If you ask my writing partner, Harry Shannon, he’d say, “absolutely!” He LOVES that show. Will I actually watch it, though? Probably not.

Instead, I think I’ll go read A Canticle For Leibowitz.