THE ‘NEW BLOOD’: A NAME CATCHES ON

Excitement about the Splat Pack seems to have been ignited with the April 2006 issue of the British film magazine Total Film. The issue featured an article by Alan Jones, entitled ‘The New Blood’. Its title was accentuated by a ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Content’ label to let readers know they were about to enter forbidden, dangerous territory. Evidently, the local cineplex had been transformed into dangerous territory because ‘a host of bold new horror flicks’, such as Eli Roth's Hostel and Alexandre Aja's 2006 remake of Wes Craven's 1977 shocker The Hills Have Eyes, had assaulted audiences with levels of brutality missing in ‘all those toothless remakes of Asian hits starring Jennifer Connelly, Naomi Watts and Sarah Michelle Gellar’ (Jones, 2006: 101, 102).

Jones devotes his article to showcasing the young directors who were ‘taking back’ horror from purveyors of ‘watered-down’ genre movies (2006: 102). One of the auteurs in the movement featured in Jones's article is Eli Roth who positions himself as one of the power players of this movement. Jones's article features a photo of Roth brandishing a chainsaw, a devilish smirk on his face, surrounded by photos of bloody carnage from Roth's Hostel, including an image of a man being castrated with a pair of bolt cutters. These grisly visuals imply that Roth can deliver the gory goods. In the article, Roth – a graduate of New York University's film school whose father and mother are, respectively, a Harvard professor and fine artist – comes across as forcefully as these images would suggest. Roth declares: ‘Guts and gore are in right now because audiences are fed up with loud bangs substituting for scares and quick cutaways from the money shots’ (quoted in Jones, 2006: 102).

Roth's effusive language, which conflates horror and pornography, continues as he claims that he was the one who got this movement started with his 2003 directorial debut, Cabin Fever: ‘I don't want to sound egotistical, but Cabin Fever was one of the first of the new distressing rash that didn't hold back [but instead] put full-frontal gore back on the agenda’ (quoted in Jones, 2006: 104). If one considers the numbers, it is not difficult to see why Roth felt that he was at the forefront of a successful cinematic new wave.