gory details

let's meditate on death, real and fictional.

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CONTENT WARNING: Literally everything. Like, all of the things. Anything that could theoretically trigger you to the point that you would no longer be able to comfortably go about your day, assume it's discussed here at length.

THIS IS NOT AN ACADEMIC STUDY NOR A WORK OF JOURNALISM WARNING: This is not an academic study nor a work of journalism. I cite some sources where relevant, but much of this is speculation. Really, this is more of a personal essay than anything else, much like the majority of my work. Take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

AN EPITAPH (A SELF-INDULGENT INTRODUCTION)

To some degree, all humans are obsessed with death. Now, I might have spent more time meditating on the concept than a lot of people my age, but considering that there's only one way for this whole thing to end, it's understandable that people would be fixated on the hows and whys of it happening, even if they aren't conscious of the exact impulses behind that fascination. Any and all human interest in pain, in sickness, in murder, in anything that makes you go all creepy-crawly is rooted in this very simple death drive. But the great thing is, to name-check ...And Justice for All's posthumous tribute to Cliff Burton, "To live is to die." It might deal you some real psychic damage to think about sometimes, but ultimately the embrace of death is central to the ability to live well and without regret.

It's taken me a very long to come to this conclusion after much agony over the ways in which one's body can fail and the myriad possibilities (and lack thereof) about what an afterlife may entail, armchair philosophizing about the very nature of the passing of time (that one still causes me to froth myself up into a fine frenzy at times), and many episodes of feeling completely unreal, detached from and unable to understand this plane of reality as we know it. I'm not completely better, and I may never be, but I've reached some degree of peace and acceptance, and all I can do is keep working towards a greater understanding of myself rather than waste time trying to figure out the ultimate secrets of the universe, to learn things that humans were never actually meant to know in this lifetime on this plane of existence.

This piece isn't so much about music, although I do touch on it a bit. It's more accurately about gore, true crime, the Disturbing Movie Iceberg, and extremity and exploitation in art. That being said, you can sort of take this piece as the denouement of my series on The Cure and existential OCD. It's not necessary to read my previous four essays to understand this one, but it does help put this one into context, and I've often wondered if it is my mental health journey that's resulted in the very tangible and observable shift in my musical preferences.

I'll always love emo and hardcore. I have ADHD and anger issues and I am also a politically aware person existing in the world, and because of these things, I will always have use for emo and hardcore as well. I'll always have space in my life for Blacklisted and American Nightmare and Blood Brothers and Orchid and The Promise Ring and Converge and Jawbreaker and The Wonder Years and Massa Nera and, yes, My Chemical Romance.

But I do think that the negative existentialism, occult attempts to peer through the veil of reality, and bleak sense of cosmic despair espoused by black metal are cathartic for me. I think that death metal's rigid obsession with decay and the breakdown of the human body and mind and spirit speaks to my paranoia, while also functioning as a pressure release valve. I think that the alien soundscapes of IDM, ambient, and other forms of electronic music reflect my feelings of alienation, derealization, and depersonalization and help me feel understood. My love for hip-hop, through all of this, remains mostly unchanged. I suspect that the cognitive process of following and untangling more dense lyricism forces me to remain grounded and present, and a lot of rap already focuses on pretty morbid subject matter.

(This is a bit tangential, but the confines of my workplace have forced me to branch pretty far outside of my comfort zone to find acceptable music to play at work, and that's resulted in some really cool discoveries. I already knew that I loved jazz and shoegaze and synthpop and miserablist alt/outlaw country, but who would have guessed I was at all into classical music until I threw on one of John Zorn's orchestral compositions on a whim?)

Where am I going with this? Right. The reason I know that these issues have been plaguing me under the surface of my subconscious my entire life, rather than being only recent afflictions, is because of my lifelong love of horror. In my early college years, I took a break from it for a while while I was busy adjusting to Life In the Real World, not having much time for fictional terror amidst all the drama of my personal life. But horror has taken on a radically increasing resonance and prominence in my life since 2020. Horror, out of all genres of all forms of media, is the one most dedicated to helping humans gaze into the abyss and confront that gnawing inevitability of death. It does not shock me in the least that so many people, like myself, became devotees of the genre in their childhood, a time that for so many of us is marked by trauma or at the very least the slow erosion of innocence and the pushing of preconceived boundaries.

DEADSTREAM (AN EXAMINATION OF VIOLENCE BOTH REAL AND IMAGINED; AN EXAMINATION OF A LIFE LIVED BEHIND AND IN FRONT OF A SCREEN)

Horror comes in many forms, and though many of those are "cozy" horror or "gateway" horror (all of which are perfectly valid), I've always been of the opinion that what lies at the root of horror fandom is a desire to recapture the childhood feeling of seeing something you shouldn't. Maybe when you can induce that feeling in a controlled environment, it helps you gain mastery of it; or maybe there's something validating in that moment of The Sublime (in the gothic sense) as the unknown becomes known.

I think there's also a sense that American childhoods are particularly screwed up right now. That seems pretty self-evident to me. I was born on September 11th, 1996; the two most formative large-scale events of my childhood were the Columbine massacre and 9/11, both of which--along with the corresponding media responses--informed the entirety of my school years and adolescence. I might no longer necessarily be The Youth, but I feel like I exist exactly at the intersection between them and The Olds. The current wave of teenagers is the first to live entirely in the historical shadow of these events, taking mass shootings and forever wars as givens, as inevitable as taxes.

This is magnified by the way that social media has developed over the last 20 years; we're all overstimulated by the constant live-tweeting, live-streaming, and real-time memeing of devastating events, but the teens are the ones for whom that level of overstimulation and that level of intense intimacy with stranger's lives--and often the last moments of their lives--are expected and, to some degree, Normal. The social maladjustment and long-lasting socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and other current events aside, childhood and adolescence in the 2020s is a perpetual minefield where any day you go to school could be your last, and millions of people might end up seeing how it all ends. This is a level of access to Things You Shouldn't See that is completely unprecedented.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, the popularity of the Disturbing Movie Iceberg, an image macro that was uploaded to Reddit two and a half years ago and, after Wendigoon made a movie-length YouTube video unpacking it, has since then grown into something of legendary status as a gut-churning Hardcore Horror Fan Obstacle Course.

If you're unfamiliar with the construction of the iceberg, its first few levels function like a normal iceberg meme would-- starting out with more widely-known and comparatively accessible fare (Saw, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eraserhead, Midsommar, The Human Centipede) before swerving into the realm of notorious underground and foreign films (Martyrs, Suicide Club, Gummo, Salo or 120 Days of Sodom, Antichrist, Tetsuo the Iron Man-- hey, these movies are actually pretty good). It then takes another dive into films with really low budgets but outlandishly offensive ambitions, like the Lucifer Valentine films and Nekromantik, then pivots to movies whose entire purpose is to essentially function as fake snuff. The most well-known examples of the latter would be the August Underground and Guinea Pig series, both of which are mostly special effects reels.

The iceberg sort of takes a turn after that. I'd recommend watching Wendigoon's video if you really want a more in-depth explanation, but the next level down is arguably exploitative "mondo"-style documentaries like Orozco the Embalmer and Mondo Cane, and that's about the last level of the iceberg that can be considered to be composed of "real" movies. The next level is basically fucked-up porn made for people with really odd and potentially dangerous paraphilias (I think interactions between dead fish and various orifices is involved in at least one of them), and then the final level is made up of "mixtapes" or compilations of, basically, real footage of shocking and gruesome occurrences and deaths. Supposedly some of the stuff on the bottom level of the iceberg contains footage that is illegal, such as bestiality and child abuse, but independent investigators have confirmed this to be completely untrue; it’s just a rumor that adds to the “urban legend” factor.

Now, as a longtime horror fan who was also reared in the crucible that was early 2010s Tumblr, I am not someone who is easily rattled. Well, I guess I am, actually, but the things that rattle me usually have to do with existential bullshit rather than extreme violence or disgusting imagery. But I'm also by no stretch of the imagination a healthy bar for comparison. (As I've written about before, early 2010s Tumblr fucked people up.) Not all of the movies in the first six or so levels of the Iceberg are good; in fact, most of them are terrible, and anyone who has been into horror for the last fifteen or so years will have probably already seen many of the best or most notorious ones.

Low-budget extreme horror, for whatever reason, is so rarely made with intent and vision. The majority of extreme horror films that I would say are actually worth watching are, for whatever reason, usually from places like France or Japan. Granted, taste is subjective, but when I think back to my revelatory memory of first watching something like Audition--which I heard about spoken of in whispers and in Bloody Disgusting and AV Club comment sections before finally watching it in middle school and getting my mind blown--extreme horror is at its best when it's exploring uncomfortable ideas and poking at taboos that conventional horror can't.

The problem with so many of the movies on the Disturbing Movie Iceberg is that they're boring, and they're not trying to say anything. Even the Guinea Pig series, which is one of the purest examples of gore for gore's sake, has some extremely interesting entries--early on, from the perspective of visual aesthetics, and later thematically, as the legendary horror mangaka Hideshi Hino established authorial control over the series. So it's possible to make something fucked-up, gratuitous, and completely lacking in taste without being completely substanceless.

But even at their most lurid and ramshackle, the worst movies on the early levels are still recognizable as, at the least, attempts to create a narrative, establish a mood, or ruminate on a theme. The last two levels of the Disturbing Movie Iceberg don't even really count as "movies," let alone horror, and the idea of kids looking up Liveleak gore compilations and obscure, questionably consensual fetish porn as part of an Internet endurance test unsettles a part of my soul in a way I'm not quite sure how to articulate.

I don't know that they are aware that there's a difference between seeing an artistic reenactment of death and torture and witnessing the actual events of death and torture themselves. While you're not necessarily guaranteed to experience trauma from the latter, there is a decent chance you could really end up hurting yourself by seeking out those images and videos. Do not listen to anyone who tells you that casually watching beheading videos as passive entertainment is no big deal. They are actively engaging in unhealthy behavior.

I sometimes think back to a Kotaku article I read once about how the developers who work on ultra-violent games like Mortal Kombat 11 and Outlast experienced negative effects from prolonged exposure to violent imagery. What's interesting is that it was largely not the animated violence that bothered them; the abstraction that distances the player from the violence does the same for the developers, largely. (This would be the same level of abstraction that protects one from Tokyo Gore Police, Dead Alive, Hostel, or Cannibal Corpse and Brotha Lynch Hung lyrics.) It was the real-life reference materials. Responses ranged from, unsurprisingly, becoming desensitized, to diagnoses of PTSD, unwanted intrusive thoughts and images, and graphic dreams so vivid that the developer in question began to deprive themself of sleep to avoid them. You can read the article here if you'd like.

There is not very much academic study on the effects of watching videos of real-life gore on your mind. At least, I couldn't find anything that didn't conflate "real gore" with "screen violence," and the latter has been shown time and time again to have little bearing on real-life behavior, propensity for violence, and empathy--in fact, the linked study shows that horror fans, even and maybe especially the fans of hyper-violent fare, may actually skew more empathetic than average, which doesn't surprise me in the least. It shouldn't surprise you either, unless you thought that the popularity of Doom and Dr. Dre in 1993 was also indicative of lower empathy levels and more aggressive tendencies. (It wasn't.)

Now, some of you fine readers might see where I'm going with this and are starting to get concerned, and you'd be right because as much as it might seem like an obvious conclusion to jump to, it's extremely irrational to paint all gore-viewers as future violent offenders. There are a variety of motivating factors that may drive one to seek out videos of gore. Maybe you want to be a medical examiner or a crime journalist, and you're trying to desensitize yourself to the images so that you can pursue your chosen career. Maybe you suffered a trauma involving grotesque injury in the past and you're engaging in exposure therapy so that you can face your fears in a controlled environment. The most obvious is one that I myself have fallen prey to at least a few times, and that's good old ghoulish, morbid curiosity. If you think about death all the time, and the entire world is telling you over and over again that death is taboo, of course, you're going to seek out some recorded evidence of what it actually looks like.

If you're anything like me, the knowledge that you're looking at something real--the life of someone with hopes, dreams, and loved ones getting snuffed out violently--is probably going to make you feel guilty and at least a little nauseous, and you're probably going to want to avoid that sort of thing as much as possible. But everyone is different, and everyone's response to outside stimuli is different. If you didn't feel guilty or nauseous that does not make you a bad person. Or if you are, it's not for me to judge. And your response might completely change over time, as well. All of those things are valid. I promise I'm not doing the thing! The moral panic thing!

But also, you should not be casually watching this stuff on a regular basis. If you do, hey, listen to me, look at me, hello: I'm talking to you. Now, if you google "why do people watch gore videos" you basically get a lot of pseudo-intellectual bullshitters on Quora or whatever, and outside of that, most people don't really seem to want to go into the matter beyond citing morbid curiosity. But there was one theory that I thought was pretty interesting: watching gore as a form of psychological self-harm.

Now, we're relying a lot on self-reporting, but the theory goes that much of the reasoning provided by people who habitually watch gore videos lines up well with the reasoning provided by people who chronically self-harm: there's a jolt of adrenaline; it reminds them that they are alive; it grounds them; and so on. This theory posits that the majority of--for lack of a better phrase--gore enthusiasts have some form of ADHD and/or depression, and as a result suffer from a deficiency in dopamine and/or serotonin. Watching a gore video puts the viewer in a state of heightened psychological arousal due to the intensity of its content and thus provides the viewer with a small hit of dopamine. When you live in a perpetually dopamine-deprived state, if you can make the Dopamine Machine Go Brrrr, then it's not surprising that you will sit there and milk it for all it's worth, even if it's ultimately detrimental to you. It's the same reward/repetition mechanic as cutting, habitual drug use, or watching porn all day.

Granted, this is a bunch of armchair psychology, and it might be completely immaterial, but having once dated a person who fit the above profile perfectly, it makes a lot of sense in the context of my lived experience. At the time I thought of it as a case of Tumblr-poisoning--this person also reblogged gifsets of Cassie from Skins as thinspo, physically self-harmed, smoked a pack and a half a day, and followed heroin bloggers while struggling with opiate dependency themself. They were not exactly a portrait of mental health even outside of the ritual gore-watching. But then again... probably neither is anyone who watches videos of real people dying horribly on a regular basis, and I myself was (and arguably remain) far from a paragon of mental health in any capacity.

So maybe it's not so good for your emotional and mental health to avidly seek out real gore to consume. Maybe it can desensitize you to real-life violence and its consequences. Maybe it can exacerbate your already-existing issues with anxiety, depression, and compulsive behavior. At the very least it can have long-lasting effects on your psyche that aren't readily apparent. It's well-documented that Facebook content moderators, whose entire job is to sift through all sorts of content (ranging from not just gore but also, potentially, child abuse) frequently need to leave their posts and enter counseling due to the toll it takes on them psychologically.

Ultimately, much of this is obviously heavy speculation, and there isn't enough actual research on this subject for me to draw from. If I took my investigative journalism bona fides more seriously, I would join some gore subreddits and Facebook groups and try to conduct more concrete research and interviews, but as of this writing I don't really have the stomach for such a task; from what I've experienced in the past, those communities are also often extremely callous, disrespectful, and display a frankly concerning lack of empathy. Regardless, I think it's worth asserting that watching real gore is absolutely risking some degree of trauma.

Though this is far from established fact, I and others suspect that even if you're not traumatized, the reaction your brain gets from watching material like this can provide a dopamine incentive to do it again and establish a pattern of behavior that puts you at further risk. What is established fact is that if you stumble upon a video of shotgun suicide surreptitiously uploaded to TikTok and watch the whole thing, the algorithm very shrewdly assesses your interest in that sort of material and funnel-feeds you more and more content related to it.

I don't know; perhaps I'm coming off judgmental, or like a moralizing buffoon. In an online world where attention is currency and violent acts garner attention, gore will pretty much always be a part of the landscape, and it has been since at least the founding of rotten.com in the 90s. And I can't in good conscience claim that documentation of such events should not exist or be accessible; we gain nothing and lose much by pretending these things don't happen, and they can be useful as practical tools for reasons I've gestured towards.  I just feel like I need to push back against the inclusion of unsimulated violent content under the "horror" umbrella. Horror's purpose as a form of entertainment is, before anything else, to entertain, and something seems irresponsible to me about the use of someone's actual dying moments, without the consent of them or their family, as entertainment.

Some could argue that horror is art, and art's purpose isn't always to entertain, which is true; art whose sole function is to challenge, disgust, and upset is still, nonetheless, art. There are also multiple examples of gore being utilized within the larger context of other art forms, such as the long tradition of extreme metal bands using photos from medical textbooks and crime scenes in their cover art. Carcass's photo collages, which are barely distinguishable as anything unless you're looking closely, don't really bother me. Pissgrave's use of extremely graphic photos is meant to serve as a complement to their extremely ugly, hostile music, and they might be the only band I've ever heard that's sonically depraved enough to earn that. So maybe my issue is more with gore on its own, divorced from any sort of larger narrative or thesis, used for its own sake as shock value; maybe that's what feels seedy.

But now I feel like my stance is not internally consistent. I drew a hard line, then retroactively discovered that I previously accepted things that crossed that line, and it didn't even occur to me before writing this essay. Am I being hypocritical? Am I simply drawing arbitrary lines in the sand based entirely on what I, personally, do and don't find acceptable, which may or may not change at any given moment? I'd like to interrogate this about myself and stress-test my own arguments against how I actually behave.

Because if the line is, "Gore isn't necessarily an unhealthy interest as long as it's incorporated into another form of art and utilized as part of a larger thematic point or narrative," then we've got a big problem, and that problem is a band called Fluids.

Fluids, if you're unfamiliar, are a moderately popular deathgrind band, insofar as one can accept "moderately popular deathgrind band" as a not-inherently-oxymoronic phrase. Their primary mode of songwriting seems to be to sound as similar to the New York death metal legends Mortician as possible, with tracks centered around thickly distorted bass grooves but not so much centered around developing a "song." They have some compelling moments here and there, but they lack Mortician's efficiency and consistency, which is not something I ever thought I'd be complimenting about Mortician.

The thing that sets Fluids apart is that Mortician would often use excessively long (sometimes twice the length of the actual music) samples of horror movies in their songs, as a sort of Easter egg for horror aficionados in the audience, while Fluids use samples of, well, gore videos. And if they aren't explicitly gory, they're at the very least recordings of very real, very disturbing events. If you don't know what you're getting into when you press play, it almost feels a bit like a sick prank. The one that got me was a song of theirs that sampled the video footage of the death of Daniel Shaver, and it left me feeling very repulsed and upset.

What complicates and problematizes what I'd like to be a straightforward condemnation is this: that's very obviously their point. What happened to Daniel Shaver was sick and repulsive, and it should leave you feeling ill if you have empathy. But is this a point they could have made without using the audio from that recording? (Considering their lyrics are unintelligible, probably not.) Is this an example of something genuinely provocative, that can trouble even a hardened veteran of death and black metal edgelord bullshit, or is this just another example of shock value masquerading as something more thoughtful and nuanced? (I like to call this the "I'm the only one willing to tell the truth about this ugly, sick world, maaan" paradox.)

Is it art or is it exploitation?

Is it both?

Is now a good time to start talking about true crime?

I've been thinking a lot lately about Ben Kissel's expulsion from Last Podcast On the Left and its surrounding network. But before I can talk about that, I have to talk about this.

Much digital ink has been spilled hand-wringing about true crime. Is it inherently exploitative of the victims? Does it influence its audience, predominantly middle-class white women who are statistically less likely to be victims of violent crime than young men of color, sex workers, trans women, or the homeless, to be more paranoid, and thus more likely to trust their own biases as "gut instinct" and call the police on members of the aforementioned vulnerable populations? Is it actually feminist to enjoy true crime? Does it help you defend yourself? Does it glorify law enforcement? Is it educational? Is it vapid? Is it the realm of low-class trashy Oxygen-core programming like Snapped? Is it the realm of prestige work like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song, and award-winning podcasts like Serial? Has the idea of an intrepid, tenacious podcaster solving a cold case produced an epidemic of amateur sleuths interfering with investigations and tormenting victims' families, or has it brought closure to just as many?

It probably won't shock you to learn that I don't know the answer to any of the above questions. Any story--and that's what true crime ultimately is, is stories--are Rorschach tests that we can all take from as we will, based on our own backgrounds. Someone like me can look into a grisly crime and its fallout--let's say for example the West Memphis Three--and come away feeling like it's an extremely effective study and critical analysis of the myriad failures of the American justice system. Someone else can research the same case and come away feeling like the police are all that stand between innocent children and sacrificial rites conducted by devil worshipers. You and I may think that the latter person is crazy, but the fact remains that the details of the case fascinated both of us, because of the universal human death drive I talked about in the introduction. Macabre material has retained its appeal (which might not necessarily be the right word) since the days of public executions, no matter how much people like to pretend this shit is new. The only thing that's new is the sheer glut of content and the unprecedented access to it.

With that being said, I think everyone agrees that there are "right" and "wrong" ways to approach true crime as subject matter, although no one seems to agree on what those standards should be. Nearly everyone has a bad taste in their mouth from the host of Sword & The Scale and his habit of interspersing his podcast episodes with lengthy, unedited 911 calls, many of which involve the caller being injured or dying on the line. People are less sure of what to make of My Favorite Murder: some have accused the podcast of trivializing the crimes being discussed, due to the hosts' lack of research, habit of spending much of the episodes talking about unrelated topics, and use of cutesy, infantilizing catch phrases; others have found a therapeutic quality in the podcast and its surrounding community, and the hosts' gentle jokes provide much-needed levity, where other podcasts linger on the grisly bits.

So it's surprising that a show as unrepentantly weird as Last Podcast On the Left is near-universally praised in true crime circles. Granted, I didn't really "get it" at first glance--I didn't find Henry Zebrowski's near-constant stream of manic energy and character work very amusing, and it felt like his interruptions were disrupting what seemed like well-researched narratives. But as time went on and I got used to the show's particular flow, as well as listened to episodes on other topics like UFOs, paranormal phenomena, and creepy history, it really gelled with me and I started having difficulty enjoying other true crime podcasts.

What makes it work is that Marcus Parks is one of the best researchers and storytellers in the field. Henry also brings a lot of research and knowledge--particularly to episodes about high strangeness and occult phenomena--but it's Marcus who drives the narrative flow of each episode and grounds the proceedings. He is painstakingly respectful to the victims in every case. Henry's jokes went from being a constant annoyance to a minor inconvenience to indispensable from the fabric of the show as his cocktail of improvisational, deeply warped humor grew on me like a fungus. Though the show went through growing pains in its early years (the hosts generally advise everyone to skip the first 100-150 episodes of their catalog), they're a well-polished machine with an intangible element of chemistry that makes each episode a joy to listen to.

Well, at least it did. Since the beginning of the pandemic, cracks were building in the show's facade, and it all came to a head this fall as Ben Kissel--the podcast's resident everyman, whose drinking, declining self-care, and lack of preparation were a running joke for years at this point--was exposed as having a history of domestic abuse. Things that didn't seem to have much of an explanation, like an underlying sense of simmering tension between Kissel and the other two hosts, suddenly made a lot more sense. As Kissel was one-third owner of their company, there's still a lot of legal wrangling behind the scenes, but he has been ousted.

Typical of true crime fans, there's been a lot of internet sleuthing going on regarding "how much Marcus and Henry knew," and a lot of gossip and debate regarding one of the other shows on the network, Some Place Under Neith, which is hosted by Henry's wife Natalie. I don't really have the time nor the inclination to get into it here. If you really care, there are plenty of threads on Reddit about it. If you want my opinion, Marcus and Henry did the best they could with what knowledge they did have, people have shockingly little perspective on how difficult it is to push an addict to get help when they don't want it, and I think they've been handling this PR shit storm about as well as anyone could. Aided by the inclusion of Ed Larson and Holden McNeely into the central fold, Last Podcast itself has been trucking along in finer form than ever without the noticeable tension and Ben's palpable disengagement.

But it has gotten me thinking. A known abuser has forfeited the right to publicly speak on and profit from victims' stories. I'm not sure if anything's ever been more clear-cut. But my brain likes to spider-web its way out from something simple and make it into a much more complex issue.

Does anyone really have the right to create true crime media? Once an event has been turned into a narrative, does that not by necessity remove ownership of the narrative from the victim who experienced said traumatic event (or, in the case of their death, their families)? You could make the ridiculous demand that all producers of true crime content be subject to rigorous background testing to ensure they meet a moral standard, but inevitably people will quibble on what exactly that entails. (And also that's a horrific thing to advocate for!)

It all sort of leads me back to thinking that maybe true crime is an inherently exploitative genre. Of course, the term "exploitation" has a long history in the film world, and endless examples abound of a film that is artful and exploitative at the same time. Here's some: The Untold Story, Faster Pussycat...Kill! Kill!, Combat Shock, Requiem for a Dream, and The Girl Next Door (the one based on the Jack Ketchum book, not the teen comedy). Granted, these movies vary in budget, quality, and tastefulness, but all take very real issues and use them both to construct compelling narratives as well as to question why we're so fascinated by their subject matter, or to make a poignant statement about the effects that drug addiction, PTSD, and other taboo subjects have on their protagonists without shying away from the uncomfortable details. (And, in fact, acknowledging that those uncomfortable details are probably why much of the audience is tuning in to begin with.)

But true crime doesn't have the luxury of fictionalizing its subject matter in the way that films do. It's right there in the name; ostensibly, these are real things that happened to real people, which brings up a lot of the icky ethical issues that plague the discussion of real gore. What makes it slightly thornier is that true crime's narrativized nature does abstract it enough that people who would otherwise balk at graphic violence--or even fictional depictions of graphic violence--are able to digest true crime. It's one of the most popular genres in the world for a reason. (Is true crime a "genre"? That in and of itself is probably worthy of discussion.)

That same narrativized quality also has another interesting effect: it helps turn true crime media into, well, art. Why not? Journalism is an art form unto itself; read In Cold Blood and tell me that isn't art. And it's this exact classification that, once again, complicates things. What responsibility do art and artists have, particularly when they are using real stories, that happened to real people, and have real impact, in the context of their art? Do they have the responsibility to the victim to get all the facts right, or do they have a responsibility to their audience to make sure they're crafting a compelling story? By the same token, if true crime is art, then the question "Does anyone really have the right to make true crime media?" becomes instantly ridiculous, because every living person on the planet has the right to make art.

Answers, if there are any to be found, are predictably going to be subjective. Ask 100 people what responsibilities they think artists have to the public and you'll get 200 conflicting answers. But these are things that are worth thinking about. It seems like the line between reality and fiction gets a little blurrier every day, and simultaneously people are more and more willing to lay their personal code of ethics down as a blanket rule. That's a dangerous combination. Half of Gen Z apparently thinks sex scenes are never necessary to the plot of a movie or TV show. (Whereas I generally think that even if they're not necessary, they're nice to see.) I haven't yet seen anyone apply this logic to violence, though one assumes that it would make a similar sort of sense. I've seen Gen Z kids argue that sex scenes are unnecessary because porn exists; it's a bit harder to imagine someone arguing that it's not necessary to show a graphic murder on screen when Liveleak exists.

It's interesting, though, isn't it? The disconnect between extreme violence that's fictionalized and stylized, as in the case of splatter movies or video games, and extreme violence that's all too real? How often the case is that people are easily able to stomach one but not the other? I can't count the number of true crime obsessives I've known who are too squeamish to sit through any given Eli Roth movie. Meanwhile, I sometimes have to take extended breaks from true crime because it starts to make me feel not paranoid, but extremely sad; despite this, I love extremely violent movies and video games. There's something cathartic about that fictionalized, stylized violence; of course with movies, there's the aspect of really respecting the complex practical effects work, but in the case of a game like Doom Eternal, I'm fascinated by the dazzling spectacle of it. In either case, the violence has become art in and of itself!

At the end of this all internal arguing, I've realized that I've come to very few actual conclusions, if any. I started with a strong stance and have spent the rest of this essay slowly deconstructing it until I'm not sure what I believed in the first place. Or was that my plan all along, and I was trying to challenge the preconceptions you came into this piece with? (It's the former.) That being said, I think that if this comes down to any lesson, it's that we should be kind to each other. The world is scary, and violent, and traumatic, but our relationships with people don't have to be. Death is terrifying, and oblivion incomprehensible; we all have our own ways of coping with the fact that we must inevitably confront this. Some say that all humans are born alone and die alone; I don't think this has to be the case. It's important that we forge connections and foster love between ourselves when we can, because, in my opinion, that's about as close to the meaning of life as we're going to get.

If you're obsessed with horror--the more hardcore the better--make sure you've got a balanced media diet. The last thing you want to be is one of those weirdos who doesn't want to watch or play anything unless it's somehow scary. (Remember though: if you work hard enough, you can make an argument that just about anything is horror. My favorite horror games are The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Super Metroid.) And I know that what drives me towards the horror genre is a desire to confront things inside me that I'm uncomfortable with: past trauma; the inevitability of death; the inevitable loss of my loved ones; the fear of abandonment; the fear of my body failing me. Horror is an amazing pressure release valve, but consider talking about some of that stuff with somebody. Maybe even just journal about it. You'd be surprised how much it helps.

If you're watching gore because you're lonely, depressed, and just want to feel something, reach out and do something nice for someone you know. Could be anyone. It's cliche advice but go outside. Pet a cat, pet a dog. Talk to somebody about your feelings. It might seem impossible, but I know you can do it. I've never watched gore with any regularity--haven't watched any on purpose in years--and I still talk to my therapist about things I saw on the Internet in 2010. It leaves its mark on you, and it's important to address trauma before it festers.

And if you do watch gore, or are obsessed with true crime, it's worth taking a moment to think about what you're consuming. I don't necessarily think you need to feel guilt--some might say that's a useless emotion altogether, and I'd be a hypocrite anyway because I also still consume true crime content regularly. But think about the human beings involved, and think of the corresponding human cost. There's a debt of empathy there, the Amigara fault outlines left behind by the soul, if you believe in a soul; if you don't, then it's left behind by a metaphorical soul. I hope you feel the responsibility to pay it forward.

-xoxo, Ellie

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