A beginner's guide to splatstick

What is a splatter movie?

Films like Hostel: Part II slot into the category known variously as shock exploitation, splatter, gorno (that's gore + porno), torture porn or, at the comedy end, splatstick. They're catagorised by lots of flesh (usually female), lots of innards (generally animal), a gleeful approach from their directors (almost always male) and an unnatural fixation with domestic power tools (drills, blowtorches etc).

Who are the splat pack?

Mostly American thirtysomething males who came of cinematic age in the 1980s. They include Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever), Rob Zombie (House of a Thousand Corpses, The Devil's Rejects), the duo James Wan and Leigh Whannell (Saw) and token Brit Neil Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers). They worship at the shrine of foreign masters such as Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi The Killer) and are presided over by patron saints of schlock Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) and Quentin Tarantino (remember the brains all over the back of the car in Pulp Fiction?).

Article: do these new 'gorno' movies go one step too far?

How did they react?

Alfred Hitchcock - who started it all with Psycho - once said, "Ingrid, it's only a movie." But he hadn't seen Saw - which American critic Roger Ebert found "cheerfully gruesome". "What horror films have been waiting for," is what Quentin Tarantino said about Hostel. The Catholic News Service saw things differently: "A nauseatingly vile horror flick - a steady stream of soft-core sex and hard-core gore, as gratuitously pornographic as it is mindless. The stomach-churning is extreme by even the barrel-bottom standards of Quentin Tarantino, its producer." The New York Times described it as "one of the most misogynistic films ever made".

Where will it all end?

An embrace by the art and mainstream crowds means only one thing - the genre is running out of steam. It's also hard to top a scene in which someone's face is blowtorched, the scorched eyeball is yanked from its socket and the dangly bits cut (the first Hostel film). But diehards will doubtless turn out for Wan and Whannell's Dead Silence, about a possessed ventriloquist's dummy; Cell, Eli Roth's stab at a Stephen King story; and new boy Todd Lincoln's Hack/Slash, which doesn't really need a plot summary, does it? All come Certficate 18 guaranteed.