The Value Of Shock
When the horror genre is choosing to not be subtle, it is sometimes accused of including certain types of content for 'shock value.' I'd like to draw a clear line between gratuitous shock value, and shocking content that is useful and meaningful.
Since it is typically the number one offender, we might as well begin with the depictions of, or flippant references to rape. In my last essay I promoted the intensive study of touchy subjects before writing about them, and this subject is the prime example of that. There's a lot to unpack here so strap in, 'cause this is going to take a strong minute.
Despite it’s name, the horror genre is not limited to eliciting feelings of fear. At this point the genre is associated with every upset emotion, be it anger, deprecation, disgust, or even moral outrage. The genre may elicit any of these emotions singularly or in tandem. The elicitation of these feelings are what defines the term we are discussing here.
Needless to say, depicting rape can make the audience feel all four of those things at once, fear notwithstanding. This is why amateur horror writers resort to depicting rape as a cheap source of shock value, not unlike cooks who pour balsamic reduction on everything.
A popular example of this is in the French film Irreversible, directed by Gaspar Noé. Irreversible is a psychological thriller, and it’s scenes are predictably arranged in reverse order. About midway through the film, the female protagonist is assaulted, then anally raped in front of a fixed camera for several minutes. Apparently the film was supposed to be about nihilism, but many audience members agreed the brutality of this scene overshadowed the overall film's alleged themes.
Surprisingly, I can offer two examples of narratives that handled this subject well, and oddly, both of them were written by men. They are the manga Berserk by Kentaro Miura, and the novel The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman. I’ll start with Berserk.
Much of the time, the dark fantasy genre merely amounts to a fantasy where people say fuck and cunt a lot. Sometimes there’s sex, and sometimes the violence is more explicit than in standard fantasy. Berserk, on the other hand, features a great deal of nudity, violence, and sex. Most instances of that last item are not consensual.
The story follows Guts—yes, that’s really his name—a preposterously capable fighter who is also a victim of sexual and psychological abuse. Even before the story reveals these facts about Guts, his behavior is consistent with someone who has suffered in this way. Sometimes the sexual assault is committed by monsters, but apart from that every other instance of it resemble real life rape scenarios; victimization as a prostitute, victimization from a trusted friend, victimization from a family member.
On the surface, Berserk can be easily mistaken for shock schlock, but anyone who has the intestinal and cardiac fortitude to actually read it will find it’s an in depth tale about abuse. It may indulge it’s audience with cartoonish levels of violence and fantastical demonic madness, but the intensity of all that is consistent with the narrative's refusal to pull it’s punches in a thematic sense. It’s a shame Kentaro Miura died before he could finish Berserk. It’s a good thing though, that the story will still be finished by a group of people capable of doing it justice. I sincerely hope they pull it off.
The Magician’s Land only depicts sexual assault once, and the crime is committed by a supernatural force, but it depicts the problem in a meaningful way from an angle that Berserk doesn't. In the first book of the trilogy, The Magicians, the protagonist Quentin Coldwater begins the story at once sullen, and irritatingly egocentric. At the beginning of the second book he’s been through a lot, but he still hasn’t really grown up yet. The novel alternates between his story and the story of his friend Julia, who, in the present tense timeline, behaves totally differently from the way she does in her flashbacks. Eventually, it is revealed this sexual assault was the cause of her massive personality change—among other things. It isn’t until she has a transcendent experience that they sit down and she tells him what happened to her. In the end, Quentin chooses to sacrifice his own happiness so that Julia can have hers, and this serves as an expression of him finally growing up.
I think it’s important to mention that writing about this subject with purpose, as the stories I’m defending do, does not make the depictions therein less shocking. It only means the writers were aiming to elicit more feelings from their audience than just the upsetting ones.
Violence is another avenue one can take for shocking the audience, and this sort of horror, executed cheaply, may be more prolific than pointless rape scenes are. One popular example of cheap shock violence is the film Hostel, which features the mutilation of fingers and the severing of a man’s Achilles tendons. It is also considered offensive for political reasons given its representation of Slovakia where the story is set. It is widely labeled as torture porn just like the Saw franchise.
If you want an example of violence that's easier to watch than Hostel, and you want to compare and contrast depth of meaning between depictions of violence, then I recommend you read the superhero satire Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, then compare it to the film adaptation of the same name by Zack Snyder. Many people have argued that Snyder's version misses the point of the story, and I agree with them.
In the source material—the graphic novel—the violence is depicted as brutal and frequently unfair. One might choose to call it uncool. The film, by sharp contrast, is super stylized in order to look as cool as possible. Even though the story is told in practically an identical way to the comic, the execution of it evokes contradicting ideas, and thus it fails to send the same anti-superhero message.
Because filmmaking is a significantly more complex craft than prose writing, you are far less likely to make this mistake if you are writing books or short stories. But even in prose there is the overt text and the sub-text, so it is still possible for you to execute them in contradiction with each other. If you are telling a very violent story with an anti-violence message, then you should frame the violence as awful rather than in a glorified fashion. It also helps to linger on the negative consequences of the violence, especially if you integrate it into the plot or character development. If you need a solid example of this sort of work then you should read the First Law books by Joe Abercrombie. He’s a master of writing about violence honestly. He's also a master of subverting expectations. I’m going to gush about him more in the future.
Anytime audiences are presented with shock-media it is always followed by the same argument; that subtlety is always more impactful. They'll mention how you don't see the shark in Jaws until nearly the end, and how this adds more tension than seeing the shark earlier possibly could. They will likely say all sex scenes should be implied and never explicitly shown. For many stories there is a case to be made for more subtle narrative executions, I'll grant them that. But sometimes the subtle touch is too gentle to achieve what the author wants.
Think of this: if you need to cut through a sidewalk, do you use a steak knife or a concrete saw?
Exactly.
I consider the term 'shock value' to be a misleading term. When we say it we mean to say that a particular story—or specific parts of specific stories—is merely shocking. But shock itself does have value. When shock artists aren’t shocking recreationally, they are doing so because the public needs to be jerked out of a collective reverie. While it isn't typically categorized as shock media, I think a classic example of this is Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens.
Nicholas Nickleby was written to be a social-problem-novel, which, to my thinking, is an old-fashioned term for shock-novel. Dickens’ awareness of abuse in boarding schools motivated him to depict that abuse in his third novel. Said novel features the following content that is fairly categorized as shocking: the starving and beating of children, many of whom are disabled and/or deformed, the blatant exploitation of said children, and suicide. This served as an accurate depiction of the problems in real life boarding schools. For this reason, the novel was instrumental in the destruction of the Yorkshire school industry at the time of the novel’s publication.
It isn't often art creates real change at all, let alone change for the better. This is why Nicholas Nickleby is a special book; it changed something for the better, and it did so by shocking it’s audience.
Shock value is defined as content that elicits negative feelings; anger, disgust, fear, etc. But the best negative feeling it can potentially elicit is guilt, because very often the most shocking thing of all is the truth.
If you want to use shock value in your art, if you want to shock people for a good reason, that’s the best reason there is.
-Aleister Hanek, July 2022