99 Buckets of Blood on the Screen

Traditionally, entries in the horror movie genre have included such classics as The Wolf Man, Dracula, The Mummy, and Frankenstein. These films play on our fear of the unknown and with things that confront our senses of tradition and morality. The trailer for the original 1931 Dracula:

These films have no need to utilize graphic violence or realistic gore to illicit chills from viewers. These monster movies were also clearly fictional and far removed from the reality of moviegoers.

Contrast these films with those like the Saw franchise, Hostel, Turistas, and Rob Zombie's films House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. They rely almost exclusively on the use of extreme violence, shown unflinchingly on screen, to the delight/terror of viewers. Consider the trailer for Eli Roth's Hostel, below:

This movie is based on a single premise: watching people being tortured. Which begs the question: is this type of violence acceptable to show in films, and do audiences have a immoral obsession with violent content? It seems that every movie released in theatres today has to out-do the last in terms of the amount of fake blood they manage to spill in ninety minutes.

But what about when the violence conveys a message? Consider another Eli Roth film, Cabin Fever:

The "disease" in the film can be seen as a metaphor for HIV or another sexually transmitted infection, spread as a consequence of the promiscuous sexual behavior displayed among the young people in the film. In the end, movie violence is more easily justified when it has a point.