What is Victorian Literature?

What is Modernity?

Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

Utopia vs. Dystopia - What’s the Difference?

What is Weird Fiction?

What is Monster Theory?

Surrealism in Literature & Film: An Introduction

What is Avant-Garde?

What is Speculative Fiction?

What is Cubism?

What is Bakhtin's Carnivalesque?

What is Modernist Literature?

What is New Criticism?

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What is Free Verse?

The Fin de Siècle | Definition, Examples & Analysis

Fin de siècle (literally meaning “end of the century” in French) refers to the latter part of the nineteenth century, a period characterized by a mood of uneasiness, overstimulation, boredom, and concern for the future. More specifically, this phrase is used to describe the artistic and cultural climate in this period and the various works which emerged from this general feeling of fashionable world-weariness. This artistic and intellectual milieu began in France and eventually moved to England and other countries in Europe. As Walter Laqueur explains, 

Fin de Siecle and Other Essays on America and Europe

It was mainly (though not exclusively) a French phenomenon and it has been explained with reference to the lost war against Prussia, economic and demographic decline, the consumption of alcohol, the spread of atheism and of crime, the general decline of family ties, the deteriorations of morals. (Fin de Siècle and Other Essays on America and Europe, 2018)

Laqueur adds that the fin de siècle mood dissipated in France in 1905–6 and even earlier in Britain with the arrest of writer Oscar Wilde in 1896.

The fin de siècle is a crucial period in European cultural history with its emerging artistic and literary movements such as Aestheticism, Decadence, and Symbolism. It is worth noting that there is much overlap between each of these movements. For example, as we will go on to see, Oscar Wilde could be characterized at different points as an Aesthete and a Decadent. 

The end of the century ushered in a new way of viewing the purpose of art. There was a rallying against the conventional Victorian belief that art should have an ethical purpose and be used didactically to help people to navigate their moral lives. The Aesthetes, by contrast, believed that art should exist to be visually appealing and that morality (or even historical accuracy) had nothing to do with the merit of a work of art. Aestheticism is often identified with the famous slogan of “art for art’s sake.” Painter James McNeill Whistler stated in “The Red Rag” (1878), 

Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond

Art should be independent of all clap-trap — should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confusing this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. (Cited in Peter Dayon, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond, 2016) 

The freeing of art from morality led to works which shocked Victorian middle-class sensibilities by focusing on subjects like pleasure and sexuality, designed to evoke an emotive response rather than to provide an ethical message. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866, [2006]) caused outrage with its focus on masochism, flagellation, and paganism. However, as Romana Byrne argues in Aesthetic Sexuality (2013),

Aesthetic Sexuality

the beauty of Swinburne’s form, his “metric eloquence” and “versiﬁed rhetoric,” redeems him from the obscenity of his subject matter, transforming matter of “moral repulsiveness” into beautiful art. The Aesthetes believed that work such as Swinburne’s did not have an obligation to demonstrate morality to the public and should be viewed in terms of its form and lyricism. 

In The Decay of Lying (1891, [2018]), Oscar Wilde presents the tenets of Aestheticism through a Socratic dialogue. 

1. “Art never expresses anything but itself.”

Art is independent of the narrative, morality, or ideologies the public attaches to it. Art, according to the Aesthetes, should not fulfill any real function except to be sensually appealing. In the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) Théophile Gautier, one of the most notable figures within Aestheticism, wrote that, 

Arthur O'Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum

Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his weak infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory. (Théophile Gautier, cited in Jordan Kistler, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum, 2016)

Wilde believed that artists should rely upon their imaginations rather than copying the real world. The critic, therefore, should take into account the form (or beauty) of the piece rather than the content. For example, if a painting would be more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing with the use of bold and vivid colors, the artist should use such colors, rather than adhering to realistic, neutral tones. 

We strive to be like the art we see, and we are influenced by the art we consume. 

4. “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”

Artists should not be restricted by facts or an obligation to tell the truth, as art is, by its nature, deceptive. 

Emerging from, and often overlapping with, Aestheticism’s valuation of art for art’s sake was the Decadent movement. The Decadents similarly believed that art should be appreciated on its own merits and be unconnected to politics, religion, and morality. The Decadents further valued excess and manmade art over the natural world. The Decadents also argued that creative outputs were a way of overcoming the natural predisposition humans had toward boredom and dissatisfaction. 

This notion was inspired in part by the cynical philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer who believed that human misery came from unsatisfied needs and desires which could only be relieved through art and the rejection of the self. In Decadent Poetics, Jason David Hall and Alex Murray write,

Decadent Poetics

Decadence, then, as a literary practice, amounts to a critique of the nineteenth-century idea of ‘decadence’ [...], a challenge to the materialism of modernity, a counterpointing to its deadening conformity and complacency. (2013)

The Fin-de-Siècle World

decadence can be mapped on to this sense of the modern lived as excess, seen as ‘dissipation’ in all its several senses, as pleasure, ennui, exhaustion, and transgression. The decadent is always the enjoyment of corruption and impurity, the wallowing in life as exile, as dissolution, embracing life as old, grotesque, sick. Decadence testifies to the lateness in the modern, the modern as over-ripe, rotten, the culmination that draws on nature experienced as the ‘other’ side of life, pointing towards death, the exploration of sickness and death as themes in culture that effect a spiritualization of the latter. (Jervis, “The Modernity of the Fin De Siècle”, in The Fin-de-Siècle World, 2014)

The Decadents were inspired by the work of French poet Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s writing was highly influenced by the works of American Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe. His volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), translated as The Flowers of Evil, epitomizes the Decadent style with its Gothic and erotic imagery. The French government found the collection so provocative that they demanded that six of the poems be removed from the collection. 

In his introduction to The Flowers of Evil, F. P. Sturm writes,

The Flowers of Evil

Baudelaire is decadence; his art is not a mere literary affectation, a mask of sorrow to be thrown aside when the curtain falls, but the voice of an imagination plunged into the contemplation of all the perverse and fallen loveliness of the world. (Sturm, 2012)

Baudelaire’s melancholia is captured by the artistic works of the Decadents who followed him, artists and writers whom Sturm goes on to describe as, 

[...] by turns morbid, hysterical, foolishly blasphemous, or weakly disgusting, but never anything for long, their one desire being to produce a thrill at any cost. If the hospital failed they went to the brothel, and when even obscenity failed to stimulate the jaded palates of their generation there was still the graveyard left. (2012)

Other Decadent writers include Arthur Machen and Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, [2010]), for example, features the eponymous Dorian who is listless and bored, living a hedonistic lifestyle that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the age. Wilde himself was central to the Decadent movement due to his high visibility in London society; a famed dandy, he dressed lavishly, started trends, and lived as a prominent figure in the public eye. 

Symbolism began in France and Belgium in the 1880s with the publication of Jean Moréas’ The Symbolist’s Manifesto (1886). Symbolists believed that art should come from emotions and that the artist should not aim to represent the world as it actually is. Many symbolists painted images from their dreams. One of the most well-known paintings of this artistic movement is Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), part of a series of paintings entitled The Frieze of Life, which quickly became a cultural symbol for the fin de siècle. In this painting, Munch uses bold, expressive colors to show a world dissolving into chaos. The most prominent figure in the painting clamps his hands over his ears as a way to block out the scream, while the figures in the background remain oblivious. 

Gardner's Art through the Ages

exempliﬁes [Munch’s] style and remains to this day one of the most potent symbols of the unbearable pressures of modern life on individual people. The image — a man standing on a bridge — belongs to the real world. In fact, the inspiration for the painting came after Munch had experienced a ﬁt of anxiety after walking, intoxicated, across an Oslo bridge on a summer evening. (Gardner's Art through the Ages, 2015)

While Munch addresses the impacts of everyday life, he uses his imagination (and influences from impressionist and post-impressionist painters) to depict a nightmarish rendering of the modern world. 

The Decadence movement sparked concern over declining moralities towards the end of the nineteenth century. Some thinkers believed that the attitudes and behaviors present in fin de siècle decadence would cause degeneration within society. Degeneration theory argued that individuals could devolve. Writers such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso proposed that some people were already degenerate, born with a biological make-up that rendered them ‘other’ and a potential threat to the rest of the population. Lombroso in Criminal Man (1876, [2006]) argues that even the skulls of criminals are different from those of non-criminals. Lombroso identified several supposed biological traits of the “born criminal” including asymmetrical facial features and a sloping forehead. 

As Christopher Nissen and Marja Härmänmaa explain, 

Decadence, Degeneration, and the End

Decadence and degeneration began to be regarded as sociological phenomena, and indeed they attained a pseudoscientific status in the medical studies of psychiatrists and doctors. (Decadence, Degeneration, and the End, 2014). 

In Degeneration (1895, [2016]), Nordau denounces fin-de-siècle decadence as a passing fad and argues that the temperament of the period may result in degeneration and criminality. He writes, 

Degeneration

But the physician, especially if he have devoted himself to the special study of nervous and mental maladies, recognises at a glance, in the fin de siècle disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic and ‘decadent’ works, and the attitude taken by their admirers in the tastes and æsthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is quite familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria, of which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia. (1895, [2016])

In other words, those who admire or produce artistic works that contribute to the Decadent movement are, according to Nordau, likely to be afflicted with physical and mental maladies such as hysteria and degeneracy. 

For Nordau, Decadence equals depravity: the unhealthy Decadent unreasonably projects his own misery onto that of the flourishing world around him, and thus yearns to drag it down to his level, to make the rest of the society behave as antisocially as he does. (2014)

Decadence, therefore, becomes epidemic, capable of dragging down society with loose morals and making society regress back to an atavistic state. 

As S. Karschay points out, the categorization of anything different as “degenerative” created a new marginalized group consisting of anyone who did not meet the physical specification of “normality” as described by the likes of Lombroso and Nordau. As Stephan Karschay writes,  

Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle

In the process of this excessive taxonomical activity, supposedly degenerate individuals were stigmatised as social Others. Branded as diseased, deformed, deviant and dangerous, they were excluded from society’s normative field and relegated to a sprawling realm of transgression. (Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle, 2015)

It is important, however, to recognize that not everyone fully accepted degeneration as a valid theory. As Karschay goes on to explain, 

Individual commentators did not universally agree on degeneration’s empirical reality as an urban phenomenon, and the affective responses of those who acknowledged its existence ranged all the way from apocalyptic pessimism through solicitous concern to optimistic insouciance. Yet, as almost any critic of the Victorian period [...] would underline, notions of degeneration dominate intellectual and popular debate at the end of the nineteenth century, and degeneration theory informs much of fin-de-siècle fiction, particularly the Gothic. (2015)

As we will go on to see, Gothic literature in this period either propagated the ideas of degeneration theorists or sought to challenge the assumptions about the physical manifestations of criminality. 

The Victorian public’s obsession with degeneracy, criminality, and moral decay proved fruitful for many Gothic writers (see our study guide on Gothic literature and film for more on the Gothic tradition and its key elements, as well as our related guide on weird fiction). Fin de siècle Gothic authors tended to set their tales in the heart of London and, in keeping with the Urban Gothic tradition, depicted it as a labyrinthine space designed to conceal criminal deeds. The malevolent cityscape was the perfect home for iconic criminals and monsters. We see in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886, [2015]) how the eponymous characters are able to hide in and navigate their way through the city, its sprawl accommodating their nefarious deeds. Thanks to urbanization and industrialization, the city was becoming an unknowable place. This fear of urban living was exacerbated when the streets of Whitechapel became terrorized by the serial killer Jack the Ripper between 1888 and 1891.  

Writers also created monsters whose grotesque physiognomies were inspired by writings on degeneracy as well as Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871, [2020]). Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula (1897, [2012]) presents the titular vampire as imbued with all of the physical characteristics of the atavistic criminal. Dracula is described as having an “aquiline face,” “thin nose,” “domed forehead,” and “pointed ears,” similar to the descriptions of the degenerate or the criminal as envisioned by Lombroso and Nordau (Stoker, 1897, [2012]) . 

Fears of the atavistic criminal inform Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The novella features Edward Hyde (the monstrous alter ego of the reputable Henry Jekyll), who is described in terms of his hideous appearance. He is referred to as a “juggernaut” and “dwarfish,” giving “an impression of deformity” (Stevenson, 1886, [2015]). However, rather than simply constructing monsters from anxieties around criminality in his novella, Stevenson challenges the notion that criminality and evil can be detected in a person based entirely on their physical appearance. As Simon A. Cole writes, 

Suspect Identities

In the Jekyll-Hyde character, Stevenson drew attention to a problem that was much on the minds of contemporary jurists and criminal anthropologists alike. In modern, anonymous, socially mobile societies, distinctive dress, appearance, and accent were losing their power to convey social status at a glance. These emerging societies were brimming with people who were strangers, both to one another and to the state. The most heinous criminal could appear in the most innocent guise. (Suspect Identities, 2009) 

While Hyde is described with the stereotypical image of the degenerate, he is able to rescind into the form of the gentlemanly Jekyll, showing that depravity can be hidden behind a veneer of respectability. A similar argument can be seen in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray:  the beautiful, perpetually young Dorian commits heinous acts as a supernatural portrait retains all of his sins.

The transforming or mutating body was also used as an avenue to explore other issues such as the emergence of the New Woman. The New Woman was a term used to describe women in the nineteenth century who resisted traditional roles as wives and mothers and sought independence, threatening preconceived notions of femininity. The New Woman faced much resistance; she was often presented as aggressive, promiscuous, masculine, and child-hating. In Degeneracy, for example, Nordau criticizes the New Woman’s style of dress and behavior. 

In Gothic fiction, we can see examples of the New Woman represented as monstrous and unnatural. In Arthur Machen’s short story “The Great God Pan” (1894, [2018]), the character Helen Vaughan, the result of a scientific experiment, is presented as a sexually liberated woman who causes the ruin of the men she comes into contact with. When Helen is forced to kill herself at the end of the narrative, she undergoes a strange mutation, shifting from “sex to sex” before disintegrating into an unidentifiable substance. Tabitha Sparks explains, 

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

By attributing Helen’s deviance to her inextricable sexuality, Machen assigns Helen’s androgyny to the realm of gothic fantasy, and invokes the logic that naturalizes “good” (passive) femininity as a physiological standard. (The Doctor in the Victorian Novel, 2016)

In depicting Helen as an evil abomination, Machen reaffirms traditional sexual roles, suggesting deviations from this are unnatural and dangerous. 

The fin de siècle marked a shift away from traditional Victorian values and the onset of modernity. Numerous culturally and intellectually important works of art and literature sprung from this period ranging from artwork such as Munch’s The Scream to Stoker’s Dracula. The uneasiness and world-weariness which defined the period, rather than resulting in existential despair, culminated in a myriad of important literary and artistic works which came to define the period. 

Dowling, L. C. (2014) Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton University Press. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/737321/language-and-decadence-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siècle-pdf 

Navarette, S. J. (2021) The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. University Press of Kentucky. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/2394264/the-shape-of-fear-horror-and-the-fin-de-sicle-culture-of-decadence-pdf 

Ferguson, C. (2017) Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue. Routledge. Available at: 

https://www.perlego.com/book/1486651/language-science-and-popular-fiction-in-the-victorian-findesicle-the-brutal-tongue-pdf 

Baudelaire, C. (1857, [2012]) The Flowers of Evil. Translated by F. P. Sturm, W. J. Robertson, and J. T. Shipley. Barnes and Noble. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3716158/the-flowers-of-evil-barnes-noble-digital-library-and-other-writings-pdf 

Byrne, R. (2013) Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/818297/aesthetic-sexuality-a-literary-history-of-sadomasochism-pdf 

Cole, S. A. (2009) Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Harvard University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1147076/suspect-identities-pdf 

Darwin, C. (1871, [2020]) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Read Books Ltd. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1416753/the-descent-of-man-and-selection-in-relation-to-sex-pdf 

Dayan, P. (2016) Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1633881/art-as-music-music-as-poetry-poetry-as-art-from-whistler-to-stravinsky-and-beyond-pdf

Editorial Staff of the National Museum (no date) Edvard Munch and "The Scream" in the National Museum. Available at: https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/stories/explore-the-collection/edvard-munch-and-the-scream-in-the-national-museum/ 

Hall, J. and Murray, A. (eds.) (2013) Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de siècle. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3486575/decadent-poetics-literature-and-form-at-the-british-fin-de-sicle-pdf 

Kistler, J. (2016) Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1633943/arthur-oshaughnessy-a-preraphaelite-poet-in-the-british-museum-pdf 

Kleiner, F. S. (2015) Gardner's Art through the Ages: A Global History. Vol 2. Cengage Learning EMEA. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/801707/gardners-art-through-the-ages-a-global-history-volume-ii-pdf 

Laqueur, W. (2018) Fin de Siècle and Other Essays on America and Europe. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1381650/fin-de-siecle-and-other-essays-on-america-and-europe-pdf 

Lombroso, C. (1876, [2006]) Criminal Man. Translated by M. Gibson and N. H. Rafter. Duke University Press Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1465805/criminal-man-pdf 

Machen, A. (1894, [2018]) The Great God Pan. Endymion Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1886365/the-great-god-pan-pdf 

Moréas, J. (1886, [2019]) The Symbolist’s Manifesto. A. Cline (trans). Available at: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MoreasManifesto.php 

Nissen, C. and Härmänmaa, M. (2014) Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3487806/decadence-degeneration-and-the-end-studies-in-the-european-fin-de-sicle-pdf 

Nordau, M. S. (1892, [2016]) Degeneration. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1821690/degeneration-pdf 

Saler, M. (2014) The Fin-de-Siècle World. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1558782/the-findesicle-world-pdf 

Sparks, T. (2016) The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1633314/the-doctor-in-the-victorian-novel-family-practices-pdf 

Stevenson, R. L. (1886, [2015]) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 3rd edn. Broadview Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2030514/strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-third-edition-pdf

Stoker, B. (1897, [2012]) Dracula. HarperCollins. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/670643/dracula-pdf

Sturm, F. P., Robertson, W. J., and Shipley, J. Shipley (2012) “Introduction” in C. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil. Barnes and Noble. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3716158/the-flowers-of-evil-barnes-noble-digital-library-and-other-writings-pdf 

Swinburne, A. C. (2006) Poems and Ballads (Third Series). Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1728483/poems-and-ballads-third-series-taken-from-the-collected-poetical-works-of-algernon-charles-swinburnevol-iii-pdf 

Wilde, O. (1891, [2018]) The Decay of Lying. Alma Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1309998/decay-of-lying-pdf 

Wilde, O. (1890, [2010]) The Picture of Dorian Gray. HarperCollins. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/669650/the-picture-of-dorian-gray-pdf

What was the Fin de Siècle?

What is Southern Gothic?

What is Cosmic Horror?

What is 'The Abject' & Abjection Theory?

What is Splatterpunk? | Definition, Examples & Analysis

Splatterpunk is a horror movement and subgenre that emerged in the 1980s. It is characterized by graphic depictions of violence. The term was coined by horror writer David J. Schow at the World Fantasy Convention (1986):

I made up the term to describe hyperintensive horror - the Clive Barker 'there are no limits' variety - [back] when it mattered. If Stephen King is comparable to McDonald's, then splatterpunk - in its day - was akin to certain varieties of gnarly mushroom, the kind that could open new doors of perception, or, in noncompatible metabolisms, just make you puke. (quoted in Robert McCammon, "The Splatterpunk Files," 2020)

The term is often used interchangeably with “extreme horror” and is typified in the kind of horror fiction which aims to unsettle its reader through the use of grotesque descriptions, excessive violence, and often sexually transgressive or otherwise taboo content. 

In Body Gothic, Xavier Aldana Reyes provides us with a clear definition of splatterpunk and its place within the Gothic: 

Body Gothic

Contrary to more modern gothic, splatterpunk, as a particularly virulent horror subgenre, often relishes the histrionics of corporeality and makes the most of the excesses that have come to define it. (2014)

Splatterpunk’s engagement with body horror is reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva defines the abject as that which does not "respect borders, positions, rules" and "disturbs identity, system, order" (in Classic Readings on Monster Theory, 2018). The abject arises when we experience or see something which threatens these borders, such as illness, disease, or death, as this reminds us of the vulnerability of our bodies and our mortality. 

Whereas “quiet horror” (or psychological horror) allows the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks and relies upon the terror of the unknown, splatterpunk does not dare look away. Instead, key pioneers of the subgenre, John Skipp and Craig Spector, highlight that pushing boundaries is at the core of splatterpunk:

Despite the public outcry that it’s time to stop, we’ve gone far enough, thank you—or perhaps, ironically, because of it—another handful of intrepid souls will feel the itch to probe a little deeper.


(“On Going Too Far or Flesh Eating Fiction,” Book of the Dead, 1989)

This guide will trace the splatterpunk movement from its inception, identifying key writers who tested the limits of their readers. In addition, we will explore how this divisive genre has been used as a tool with which to dissect social and political issues in contemporary society. 

splatterpunk did not develop in a vacuum, and should be envisioned as a culmination of the corporeal turn that the horror genre experienced as a result of the influence of cinematic trends and their explicit images. (2014)

The influence of 1980s horror cinema is clear in splatterpunk fiction. Skipp and Spector’s Book of the Dead, for example, contains a foreword written by George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead (1968). 

We can also find antecedents to splatterpunk in works of literature. James Herbert’s The Rats (1975), Aldana Reyes highlights, is a key example of Gothic becoming “sparingly” more graphic and acts as “a splatterpunk novel avant la lettre” (2014). Herbert’s work signals the visceral descriptions that became characteristic of splatterpunk: 

Rats! His mind screamed the words. Rats eating me alive! God, God help me. Flesh was ripped away from the back of his neck. 

Shivers ran along his spine, to his shocked brain. The dim shadows seemed to float before him, then a redness ran across his vision. It was the redness of unbelievable pain. He couldn’t see any more—the rats had already eaten his eyes. (Herbert, 1975)

Stephen King, in his introduction to James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (Steven Jones, 1992), compares Herbert’s work to the 1970s punk rock movement. As Simon Brown summarizes, 

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic

Instead of being cerebral and polished, punk was visceral and confrontational, spitting and shouting obscenities into the front row, much the same way that, King argues, in The Rats and The Fog Herbert grabs the reader and screams in their face, forcing them to pay attention as vermin devour a baby in a crib. (“James Herbert’s Working-Class Horror”, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, 2020)

Herbert’s in-your-face style became one of the key features of the splatterpunk movement. 

Splatterpunk has often been criticized by its detractors for its focus on gratuitous descriptions in lieu of real artistic expression or literary merit. One such critic is horror novelist Robert Bloch, famous for writing Psycho (1959). As Paul Bail explains, 

A Critical Companion: Paul Bail

Robert Bloch [...] considers the horror story to be a type of morality play, in which good should generally triumph. He is very critical of what he sees as the mindless violence of more recent horror films and their prose imitators, the splatterpunk writers. (John Saul: A Critical Companion, 1996) 

Bloch, a master of creating terror and suspense, argued that “[t]here is a distinction to be made between that which inspires terror and that which inspires nausea" (quoted in Jean W. Ross, Contemporary Authors, 1989).

Splatterpunk has also been condemned for its representation of women. In her review of Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge (1995) edited by Paul Sammon, an anthology seemingly dedicated to female splatterpunk authors, Ellen Datlow had this to say: 

[...] why are only half the stories by women? Oh, they're about women this time. . . . You mean unlike the first volume where the female characters are mostly victims? But at least eleven of the stories in Splat ll feature women as victims of torture, degradation, and/or murder. [...] whether the stories are by women or men, what is being called "splatterpunk" is for the most part violent, brutal, ugly fiction treating women as victims. (The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 1996)

We will go on to explore the problematic treatment of women in the subgenre, as evident in the work of Jack Ketchum. 

Despite these proclamations that splatterpunk lacks any literary merit, many critics, as we will go on to reveal, have argued that the transgressive and taboo subgenre articulates the horror of the world we live in: 

The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature

[...] by unsettling distinctions and exposing hypocrisies, [splatterpunk] brings the stark horror of contemporary reality to the surface and refuses to let us stir it back into the depths. (Aalya Ahmad, “Transgressive Horror and Politics,” The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, 2018) 

[Splatterpunk] roughly blossomed from 1985 to 1990 through the work of the self-professed Splat Pack, which included John Skipp and Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, Ray Garton, Robert R. McCammon and Schow himself amongst others, and the aggressively violent and extremely visceral novels of cult horror writers Edward Lee or Jack Ketchum [...] (2014)

However, some writers like Lansdale have shunned the splatterpunk label. In a 1992 interview, Lansdale explains he finds the moniker too narrow (“Chewin’ the Fat with Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy,” Conversations with Joe. R. Lansdale, 2022). Despite these misgivings, the aforementioned writers were seen as pioneers of the subgenre. Since then, many have joined their ranks. 

The following section will focus on the work of Skipp, Spector, Schow, Clive Barker, Jack Ketchum, and Billy Martin (formerly Poppy Z. Brite). 

Skipp and Spector co-authored several splatterpunk texts and were instrumental in the development of the subgenre. Their debut The Light at the End (1986) is seen as the first novel to start the splatterpunk movement. The text combines the urban horror of New York slums with a punk aesthetic. The antagonist Rudy Pasco, a punk rocker turned vampire, represents inner-city decay, according to David Simmons, and “his actions go largely undetected by the city authorities, and, instead, the task of vanquishing him falls to a ragtag bunch of individuals familiar with the inner city environment” (American Horror Fiction and Class, 2017).

In addition to their contributions to the oeuvre of splatterpunk fiction, Skipp and Spector have provided insight into the theoretical side of the movement, identifying the key ingredients that inspire fear and revulsion in their readers. In their introduction to the Book of the Dead, Skipp and Spector explain there are three levels to horror. At the first level,

It’s fear as a matter of simple biology: the flesh, surrendering to the laws of physics. By itself, it’s most certainly horrifying, and it plays from the understanding that you can flinch if you want to… the camera simply won’t do your flinching for you. (Skipp and Spector, 1989)

The second level “takes place on the stripped-naked faces of the people to whom the horror is occurring” (Skipp and Spector, 1989). The third and final level is “the level of gestalt, of fusion and reintegration”:

At this point, you can no longer detach; the unknown has become tangible and all too real, beyond cheapening on the one hand or denial on the other. You can see the wet hole and the charred stump, yes; but beyond that—and in vital, visceral conjunction— you can know how it feels to be a part of it. (Skipp and Spector, 1989)

It is at this third level where splatterpunk thrives. 

David J. Schow, who coined the term “splatterpunk,” has written numerous texts in the subgenre from short stories to novels and screenplays. One of Schow’s most prominent works is the story “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy” (in Book of the Dead, 1989). This post-apocalyptic, zombie tale features Wormboy, a cannibal, as he battles a preacher, Reverend Jerry and his group of followers, pacifist zombies who refuse to consume human flesh. Aalya Ahmad describes Schow’s work as “replete with cartoonish ultra-violence and messily exploding, putrescent zombies, giving the reader little time to recover from one gross-out scene to the next” (2018). 

Splatterpunk’s co-ascendancy with the rise of Ronald Reagan and the religious right in the United States during the 1980s underscores the subversive intent of much of its excesses, often directly aimed, as in “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” at authoritarians and religious hypocrites. (2018)

Schow’s other works include The Kill Riff (1988) and Seeing Red (1990).

Perhaps the most well-known splatterpunk author in the mainstream is Clive Barker, whose fiction includes novels like The Damnation Game (1985), and the splatterpunk anthology series Books of Blood (1984-5). Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart (1986) was soon after adapted into the film Hellraiser (Barker, 1987), directed, written, and produced by Barker. 

While Barker “actively rejected the ‘splatterpunk’ or ‘gore’ labels” (Aldana Reyes, 2014), the features of his work epitomize the subgenre. Barker describes his work as follows: 

Writing Horror and the Body

The kind of horror fiction I write is primarily interested in tearing away the veil. Confrontation with the image, seen clearly. I'm trying to see what the wound means. And the only way ... is to look at the wound. (Quoted in Linda Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, 1996)

Barker’s fiction tends to focus on the horror of corporeality. In “The Midnight Meat Train,” (1984) for example, a man (the “Butcher) murders people on the subway train in order to feed human meat to deities that live underneath the city of New York (Barker, Books of Blood). Despite the gratuitous content, as Sorcha Ní Fhlainn explains, “Barker’s treatment of the body is not purely exploitative”: 

Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer

[Barker’s] corporeal experiments, often destructive and bloody, tend to lead to a species of transcendence from a bounded conception of reality. Horror allows Barker to explore the limits of the body, and hence, of the human. This is not the case because he sees corporeality as a bad thing – quite the contrary. [...] Even though Christianity has been a huge influence in his imagery and thematic concerns, corporeality, for Barker, offers a sense of ontological belonging that is truly universal, a commonality premised on our very existence as sentient beings who live and interact with each other through our respective bodies. (“‘To darken the day and brighten the night,’”Clive Barker: Dark imaginer, 2017) 

"Who's the scariest guy in America? Probably Jack Ketchum”

 (Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly, Nov. 19, 2004)

Splatterpunk writer Jack Ketchum is no stranger to controversy. His first novel Off Season (1980), the text which prompted King’s comment to Entertainment Weekly, was decried for its violent content. Since then, Ketchum has published numerous texts including The Girl Next Door (1989) and The Woman (2010), many of which have been adapted into film. 

Ketchum’s fiction uses violence often as a way of articulating the contradictions present within modern society, making the reader question what it means to be civilized. Let’s take Ketchum’s Off Season as a key example. This horror novel centers on a group of New Yorkers holidaying in a cabin when they encounter a cannibal clan. The text is based loosely on the legend of the infamous cannibal Sawney Bean. As Jennifer Brown states, “The interesting question the novel poses is what level of savagery lies beneath civilization” (Cannibalism in Literature and Film, 2012).

Brown goes on to explain that Ketchum uses such visceral descriptions as a way of drawing comparison between the protagonists and the cannibals: 

Cannibalism in Literature and Film

Ketchum gleefully describes cannibalism in an almost recipe-like way with long passages about the technique and care required to make sausages and stews of human meat. The gruesome details of preparing human meat as food certainly add to the horror and give Ketchum a place to include buckets of blood and minced brains, but they also echo the revered family meal, the domestic hearth, and subtly suggest that much as the New Yorkers treat them as animals, these cannibals are all too human. (2012)

However, the violence in Ketchum’s work has been subject to scrutiny, particularly the violence routinely enacted against women in his novels. In “Gender Dynamics in Jack Ketchum’s Splatter-exploitation Horror,” Dorota Wiśniewska writes of The Girl Next Door, 

Jack Ketchum’s novel and its film version contain one of the most graphic images of blatant misogyny in American postmodern horror, which manifest themselves as torture, gang rape and the death of the female. (in Diversity and Homogeneity, 2016)

Billy Martin, best known for Lost Souls (1992) and Exquisite Corpse (1996), uses the key tropes of splatterpunk to make social commentary:

The Gothic Vision

Poppy Z. Brite presents violent desecrations of the body not in order to justify sexual violence but to expose the hypocrisy of whole cultures committed to hiding the pervasiveness of both literal and metaphorical drives to rend, mutilate and dissect through exploitative power relations. (Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision, 2002)

While Exquisite Corpse has been criticized for its subject matter, the retelling of the murders committed by Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen, it has also been praised for its nuanced exploration of capitalism, sexuality, and identity. 

Despite the often difficult-to-stomach violence, Martin’s work is far from empty violence. Of Exquisite Corpse, Simmons argues, 

American Horror Fiction and Class

the recurrent depiction of the serial killer as devouring other human beings as food, and the emphasis placed on the figure’s frequently grotesque acts can be read as a critique of late-stage capitalism. (2017)

The text makes the reader examine their role in the proliferation of capitalism through excessive consumption and commodity fetishism.  

In Exquisite Corpse, Martin further engages with questions of liminality and identity, both in terms of culture and gender, as seen in the character Tran-Tran Vinh, a Vietnamese-American runaway who is targeted by serial killer Andrew Compton (based on Nilsen) and cannibal Jay Byrne (based on Dahmer). As Gina Wisker highlights,

Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction

[Tran] is in a liminal space between genders, identities, cultures and places; he loses himself in the graveyards and underworlds of New Orleans, and is caught up in the decadence and destruction of a Gothic vampire existence followed by death. This novel is a tour de force of glittering, decaying excess and death, a nihilistic vampire overload. (Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction, 2016)

Splatterpunk as a socio-political critique 

Throughout this guide, we have briefly discussed how splatterpunk writers used horror and gore to contribute to contemporaneous cultural, social, and political discourse. Indeed, this boundary-pushing genre has been utilized to make commentary on elitism and the policing of popular taste, bourgeois institutions, and the horrors perpetuated against marginalized groups. Horror writers have long used monsters to signal difference, otherness, and to articulate cultural anxieties. (For more on this, see our study guide “What is Monster Theory?”)

Transgressive horror, in its very excesses, may expose the cultural distinctions governing taste itself; what is acceptable to show and not show; what constitutes abnormality and Otherness and can powerfully expose and unsettle the normativity of dominant institutions and systems, thereby functioning as a form of oppositional politics. (2018)

David Simmons echoes this sentiment, claiming that splatterpunk writers “wanted to push the boundaries as far as possible”:

Interestingly, this fiction often dealt with those who were marginalised by mainstream society, either because of race, gender, sexuality or class. In the process, and much like punk itself, splatterpunk often contained a radical rejection of bourgeois ideology in favour of valorising the proletariat. (American Horror Fiction and Class, 2017)

Despite the aforementioned misogyny present in some of these texts, numerous splatter texts, especially those by women writers, engage with meaningful discussions of gender and its place within horror: 

A “splatter-feminism,” which deserves a much fuller discussion, can be discerned in the nineties-era work of writers, such as Kathe Koja, Christa Faust, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Billy Martin (formerly Poppy Z. Brite), to name a few. Splatterpunk feminism foregrounds gender transgressions, subcultural styles, deviant sexualities, and strong, sometimes terrifying, women/genderqueer characters. (Ahmad, 2018)

The exploration of gender and sexuality can also be seen in the work of Barker who uses the allure of sensation to draw attention to discussions such as “the politics of gender, feminism, male violence against women, homosexuality, AIDS, urban blight, Marxism, violence in the media, pornography, and censorship” (Badley, 1996). 

We can also see “overt satires of consumer capitalism” in the wide range of splatterpunk zombie fiction in the subgenre (Ahmad, 2018). This is evident in in Josué Montijo’s El Killer (2007) in which the zombies are drug addicts (referred to as “tecatos,” a term used to describe homeless drug addicts in Puerto Rico), wandering around the city searching for heroin. As Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz explain, 

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic book cover

these creatures not only contaminate the landscape (their filthy bodies are covered in oozing ulcers) but they also represent the useless excess produced by a capitalist society.  [...] There is no salvation for the tecato, only death either at the hands of “el killer” or from drugs. This violent form of life (and death) that the novel presents exemplifies some of Puerto Rico’s most pressing issues in the recent past: drug trafficking and addiction, violence, and social inequality. (“Latin American Horror,” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, 2020)

Discussions of social inequality and the lack of government support for the destitute are further examined in Martin’s Lost Souls: 

The vampires in Lost Souls adopt the rejected child Nothing, who is a representative of the waste of a culture more focused on conquering Vietnam and on sidelining its veterans than on moving towards positive change, or social care. (Wisker, 2016)

While splatterpunk has offered some damning indictments of the modern world, it is important to note that not every text in the subgenre is socially or politically engaged. As Aldana Reyes states, 

Whilst I would not want to suggest that all splatterpunk is progressive – in fact, as with a lot of horror films, the opposite might sometimes be true, since the expulsion of evil tends to lead to a reactionary re-establishment of the status quo – it is important to note that splatterpunk is a deliberately ambiguous creature. It both foregrounds its countercultural inclinations and capitalises on its popular appeal. (2014)

Though splatterpunk is primarily associated with work in the 1980s and early 90s, it still continues in another form today. Aldana Reyes explains that 

it could be argued that the reason why ‘splatterpunk’ is no longer used as an adjective to define a specific type of fiction is because the extremity it once came to define has been more widely assimilated by the horror genre. (2014) 