In 1986, war was declared. War on metal!

“The cassette or CD player in too many teens’ rooms is an altar to evil, dispensing the devil’s devices to the accompaniment of a catchy beat,” warned televangelist Bob Larson. In the 1983 book Backward Masking Unmasked, author Jacob Aranza warned that Queen’s song “We Are the Champions” was “the unofficial national anthem for gays in America.” Larson listed all the satanic bands out to seduce our children, balancing the usual suspects—Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath—with Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles, and the Eagles, as well as the Beach Boys (transcendental meditators), Bee Gees (believers in reincarnation), and John Denver (once tried aikido). Fueled by Michelle Remembers, James Egbert III’s disappearance (see here), and other sinister claims, by the mid-’80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing, possibly because the threat of secret satanists was a welcome distraction from the real dangers threatening to kill us all, like a foreign policy based on mutual assured destruction.

Credit 155

Pop culture was the battlefield in this new holy war, and heavy metal music was on the front lines. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) issued their “Filthy 15” blacklist of objectionable bands, whose only real effect was to guide curious kids to the smuttiest music on the market. Made up of the wives of power brokers and politicians in Washington, D.C., the PMRC publicly demanded that record labels reassess the contracts of musicians who performed violent or sexualized stage shows. They managed to hold Senate hearings on explicit lyrics and “porn rock,” which accomplished little except to show Americans that Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider was more levelheaded and informed than Tipper Gore. The group’s only lasting impact was the explicit lyrics sticker on CDs and cassettes, immediately making those recordings one hundred times more desirable to kids.

Clive Barker (far left) made a name for himself with his debut multivolume short-story collection, inspiring the splatterpunk movement of gory horror fiction. David Schow coined the term, and John Skipp and Craig Spector were among its founding fathers (right). Credit 156

Horror responded in the most metal way possible. When televangelists denounced horror movies, books, and games as causing cannibalism, murder, suicide, depression, and domestic violence, horror writers and metal bands doubled down, firehosing ever-more-offensive content into the faces of conservatives. In Providence, Rhode Island, at the 12th World Fantasy Convention in 1986, this weaponized brattitude took horror fiction one step closer to extinction when Fangoria columnist David Schow coined the term splatterpunk, named for a new school of fiction oozing out of the crypt. At the vanguard was Clive Barker, whose debut six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, published in the U.K. in 1984, was released in the U.S in 1986 in the form of six terrible-looking paperbacks.

There had always been American writers, like Jack Ketchum, who refused to blink when describing gore, but the complete conviction, serious craft, and forensic eye for grotesque detail that Barker brought to his stories, about zombie actresses giving blowjobs and an army of disembodied hands declaring war on the human race, unleashed the beast. All at once, a pack of young dudes— Ray Garton, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, John Skipp, Craig Spector, and Schow—were delivering bloody books featuring all the ways a human body could be folded, spindled, curb stomped, flayed, eaten alive, castrated, blow torched, pierced, meat hooked, and mutilated. Powered by a rejection of literary style and an embrace of short, sharp, stripped-down sentences, these edgelords rejected God, America, Reagan, romance, and even the splatterpunk label, which they took great pains to denounce at every opportunity (even within the pages of anthologies with the word splatterpunk on the cover). Almost exclusively a boys’ club (the most prominent female purveyor of splatterpunk, Poppy Z. Brite, is a trans man), and deeply white-bread (the PMRC targeted gangsta rap as hard as heavy metal, but no writers took up that torch), splatterpunk started as a trickle of short stories before erupting into a mudslide of novels, zines, and anthologies.

Credit 157

The only thing as stupid and outrageous as splatterpunk was rock. Heavy metal was being hit with hard cultural radiation in the ’80s, and although hair metal and arena rock dominated, in underground chambers, music was mutating into death metal, thrash, and grindcore as bands like Cannibal Corpse, Rigor Mortis, and Megadeth clawed their way toward daylight. Splatterpunk and metal were a match made in hell, both genres delivering attention-seeking spurts of juvenile nihilism alongside gleeful gushers of gore.

Much like the multiplying subgenres of metal, splatterpunk was not just a marketing label but a movement. Its advocates felt they were the future of horror, a resistance pushing back against the Moral Majority, confronting humankind with our bleakest impulses and offering a community for the freaks and geeks left behind by Reagan’s America. But more than a movement, they wanted to be a band. The splatterpunk authors could picture nothing cooler than being in a punk band (and a few of them were, notably John Shirley, as well as John Skipp and Craig Spector). They made sure they were photographed together as often as possible, worked together on anthologies, and cited one another’s work in articles.

Загрузка...