Has TV reached peak gore? The Walking Dead and Ash vs Evil Dead push limit

The death of director Herschell Gordon Lewis last month had many revisit the Godfather of Gore’s seminal 1963 exploitation masterpiece Blood Feast. Widely accepted to be the first gore movie, where disgustingly blood-soaked murders are the raison d’être, Lewis’s low-rent cinematic milestone has, over the years, become almost charming in its blunt explicitness. The standout scene, where a woman’s tongue is pulled out, is far from today’s forensic realism, as it’s clearly an oversized lamb’s tongue dripping in cranberry sauce, and the actress chosen because she was the only person who could fit all that into her mouth.

It’s striking just how these thrills, once confined to drive-ins and grindhouses, are now being pumped directly into our living rooms. You can draw a straight line from Lewis’s groundbreaking goremongering to the now par-for-the-course bloodletting on shows like Game of Thrones, with its now legendary Red Wedding killing spree, The Walking Dead and Ash vs The Evil Dead. But will today’s gruesome TV be looked back on as equally quaint and kitsch? And as things are pushed to the limit of what audiences can stomach, where can things go from what is already a saturation point?

When Ash vs Evil Dead returned for its second season a few weeks back, after working out its kinks in a patchy but enjoyable first, it wasted no time in ladling out the gore. Even before the titles had rolled in the comeback episode everyone was doused in gallons of blood as two deadites were messily dispatched in Ash’s bar. The show has struck such an insanely over the top tone that this sort of thing is completely expected, welcome even – indeed, the screen has been painted as red in episodes of Penny Dreadful, with their bloodied ballroom hallucinations, Dexter’s pivotal childhood trauma of witnessing his mother’s killing in a blood-drenched shipping container and any number of Hannibal’s grisly corpse tableaux.

Any questions as to where on earth this show could go next were answered in the second episode, The Morgue, where television history, of a sort, was made. After recovering the troublesome Book of the Dead from an autopsied cadaver, the body, infected by evil, reanimates and attacks our put-upon hero. First the intestines grow lamprey-style teeth, burst out of the body and have at Ash, deliving some of the wonderfully grotesque slapstick that’s the signature of The Evil Dead series.

Then came the capper, so to speak, as the guts, having snared Ash, pull him headfirst into the corpse via the rectum. Cue even more slapstick as Ash struggles to loosen himself from this bizarre predicament. It’s bloodless, but far from dry as Ash is covered with a different bodily fluid, one that stinks him up for the rest of the episode. It’s hard to count just how many taboos were broken in this sequence, but it’s clear that nothing like this has happened on television before. Will it, indeed can it, ever again?

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Then, this week, we get The Walking Dead finding its new limit – for show and viewer alike it would seem – as fan favourite Glenn was brutally offed by Negan and his barbed-wire covered bat, Lucille. From a technical standpoint, Glenn’s demise was no different than anything on Ash vs Evil Dead; the gooey innards of one dummy head are not much different from that of another. Glenn’s pulping looked pretty similar to the damage meted by Ash’s possessed 1973 Oldsmobile as it spun its wheels on the heads of those it ran over, grinding their features into a bloody mess.

There it’s a side gag: here it was, for many, a step too far. Even after their annoying “fool me once” routine with Glenn’s fake-out death last season, this was still tough to take in what was, overall, a particularly brutal and bleak hour of television. Online chatter is full of viewers claiming this is the final of many last straws, others annoyed that there’s suddenly a lot of horror in this zombie TV show.

Things have been heading this way for a while. TV’s longform storytelling makes us more familiar with and emotionally attached to characters, something horror films have always struggled with. Folks in The Walking Dead have been beheaded, dismembered, eviscerated and eaten – and the zombies get even worse treatment. Glenn’s death, and to a lesser extent that of the more disposable Abraham, even in that context, is still upsetting and unforgettable. Would it have been as significant without the straight-from-the-comic shot of Glenn with dented forehead and popped-out eye?

TV viewers are not yet completely desensitized to such splattery gruesomeness, but how long will that last as shows use it as an easy go-to for kneejerk reactions?

Despite the small screen being awash with blood and guts, the most nightmarish thing I’ve seen on TV lately has been that weird tooth child thing on Syfy’s Channel Zero. Perhaps we have reached a saturation point with TV gore. Lewis’s legacy was never expected to land in our homes and, time will tell, there’s a strong chance TV has overestimated just how much of the red stuff audiences can tolerate. Maybe it’s time for shows to get creepy and surreal again – before gore becomes a bore.