Splatterpunk 101

From a piece I posted and shared on the Monster Librarian website, waaaay back in 2010…

Let me try to do this as succinctly as possible.

The word “splatterpunk” was a throw-away joke that David J. Schow came up with at a party during the World Fantasy Convention in 1986.

The reason he came up with that goofy word was this:

Over the previous couple of years, a handful of writers had sprung up — from pretty much out of nowhere — with pretty radical takes on the tidy structures of “regular” horror fiction. None of us knew each other before then (or even knew OF each other, by and large). But we were all attacking the problem of “normal” horror, from some pretty wild angles.

There was Clive Barker, straight out of London, with his ground-breaking Books of Blood. There was Dave Schow, writing these mind-blasting short stories from the gutters and gambles of Hollywood. There was Joe Lansdale, blowin’ out of Texas, his wild vision really starting to take off. And there was the Skipp & Spector thing, stomping through the pitch-black New York City jungle night.

We were all very different, stylistically. But we had a couple of things in common, which lumped us together in peoples’ minds:

1) unflinching violence, often described more elaborately than was previously the custom;

2) frank, usually weird, often hilarious, frequently disturbing sex;

3) a general CULTURAL SUBVERSIVENESS, that playfully but deliberately fucked with everything that was safe and conventional and — to our minds — kind of chickenshit about regular, normative, conservative horror.

And it’s THAT quality — more than the sex, the violence, the rock ‘n’ roll rhythms, the cinematic imagery, etcetera, etcetera — that distinguished that impromptu group of writers, to me. Less the “splat”, in that sense, than the “punk”. Which means punk as social politics, not just as a wardrobe choice. Punk as in fun-lovin’ trouble-makin’ outsider-intensive dance-and-fuck- all-night critique of buttoned-down, tight-assed, only-do-it-with-the-lights-off horror.

And people in the horror scene were trying to figure out what to call this phenomenon. (Cuz that’s all it was. A spontaneous eruption in the arts. Like God said, “MAKE IT WEIRDER!” and a handful of us jumped.)

And because William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and such had just got the jaunty name “cyberpunk”, Schow said, “Yeah, I guess they’ll have to call us ‘splatterpunks’ now.” And everybody laughed.

And fifteen minutes later, it was all over the convention.

And within a few months, there were articles about it everywhere from Twilight Zone Magazine to The Village Voice to Penthouse.

Such is the power of a single stupid word, when its time has come.
This, of course, is simplistic as hell. But I’m doin’ it off the top of my head, so forgive me.

If you really wanna know what the word means, read the stuff that the people were talking about then. Read, for example: