Splatter Capital: A guide for surviving the horror movie we collectively inhabit

by Mark Steven

Splatter Capital shows how a popular sub-genre of cinematic horror has developed a uniquely sensitive perspective on the cycles of capitalism. It argues that the emphatically messy brand of horror mobilised in gore or "splatter" films is extremely responsive to the internal contradictions that threaten the future sustainability of capitalist accumulation. And, while responding to the prospect of that end, splatter promotes an extant capitalist accumulation is and always has been a nightmare of systematised bloodshed. This book provides an account of that nightmare as told through a combination of economic history and filmic analysis. The story it tells will serve as a source of both theoretical and practical knowledge for surviving the horror movie we collectively inhabit.

Genres: Horror, Politics, Film, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Audiobook

170 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Harry Goodwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wickedly fun read!
Steven argues that waves of on-screen gore mirror phases of global capitalism - from Eisenstein illustrating the murder of the working class with a close up insert of pig slaughter, to how Roth's Hostel films present the interply of class and privilege in the economic landscape. It's convincing! And written with flair, always situated in the author's personal relationship to the genre.
Really want to buy a physical copy now to underline in a more physical way than dragging a finger across a screen. Buy it!

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

describes the human centipede as "the most depressing conga line you've ever seen in your life," 13/10 worth all your coins

massive thanks to the discourse collective for the giveaway copy 💖

[Brandon Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I’ll be returning to frequently. I’ll likely end up talking about it so much that it puts off anyone I know from actually reading it. I just hope to do it some justice.

[Gabriel Avocado · Rating 3 out of 5]

I put this in fiction: horror because it deals with the horror genre but it's nonfiction.

Anyway, i liked this one. It's pretty fucking pretentious. My boyfriend tried reading it and he cited the author really going out of his way to make you feel stupid as one of the reasons he dropped it. Like...yeah. i think i have a pretty good vocabulary and this book really tested my limits.

That being said, Steven had some good explanations of Marxist theory that i found useful. I'm not really a film critic and i don't understand film language like i understand literature. But for me, i got a lot out of his conclusions, particularly when he was talking about finance capital.

Steven tends to gloss a bit over how distasteful some of these movies are but i think that's kind of the point. He meets them in their terms, and depending on how you interpret media, you might really dislike that. Frankly, in a contextual reading of gore films of their time by mostly white first world directors, yeah they're problematic. Horror is a problematic genre. Am i expected to disavow the point he makes about splatter in the 70s because i don't like Cannibal Holocaust nor its production? I mean....i need to learn what to take and what to leave behind. There is something to be learned. What you believe is useful varies.

I've addressed this because i frankly don't know how good the film criticism is. I haven't seen a lot of these movies because i don't like this kind of horror. I'm not a fan of gore and i grew up during the torture porn hysteria, which scared me off because i was a boring teenager. But what i have read has indeed intrigued me enough to want to read more IN SPITE OF the books genuinely fucking pretentious, know it all tone.

I really wish Steven had written more about the inescapable nature of capitalism because that felt like it was going to be very important with a very big set up and it had no pay off at all. He also touches on Green Inferno and it'd be interesting to hear his take on Eli Roth's version of Cannibal Holocaust but like.....he didn't lol he just references the film. Was it too hard or something? Was he on a time crunch? Or worse, was he unable or unwilling to write an analysis of one of the most controversial splatter films of the modern day? Especially given how it revolves só heavily around exploiting indigenous, uncontacted people....could you just not do that? This is really fucking troubling to me.

It's an intriguing book. I think once you get past the 10 dollar words and the feeling that this guy posts on Reddit all the time you'll get something out of it but like.... honestly it's just okay.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bonkers theorisation - much more fun than the dry Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11. A bold statement in identifying splatter as a left cultural product (?). Yes, of course, the actual systemic violence perpetuates by capitalism is an open secret, but to imagine capitalism as a big set of the endless splatter film, or what Steven characterises as Gallerte by citing Marx, is a fresh idea. Curious why there is no mention at all of Peter Jackson's earlier films (Braindead is the epitome of splatter cinema).

[Rhi Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The theory is good, and I recommend if you're a lefty fan of horror. The writing isn't fun enough for the subject matter, and is very dry to start off but picks up as it goes. A fun concept, but maybe would have been more suited to a video essay.

[Jacob Bush · Rating 4 out of 5]

First things first: this is a scholarly text, and should be read as such. The author manages to flirt with being a popular writer, particularly in his descriptions of the films examined throughout, but his role as a professor is apparent. Buyer beware, I suppose.
As a professor of modern studies and Marxist, Steven can come off as a bit masturbatory at times, though I think it would be a bit harsh to actually brand him as such. His florid prose is only slightly less complex than the intricacies he tries to dissect, which is no small feat in my opinion. The book is trying to pull together a tableau of stars into something resembling a constellation, and I’m sure it took quite the effort to pull it off.
One concern I have is that the premise presupposes that the reader has already accepted that exegetic viewing is always valuable or insightful, which I am only mostly convinced by. It is true that the Marxist dialectic states that cultural production lies atop socioeconomic relations, making film a pretty obvious bud pushing its way out of the productive soil. However, people don’t think in straight lines, and Steven’s use of the term “economic intelligence” gets dangerously close to outright stating that there is a conscious effort not to necessarily “make a statement” with a film, but that it was crafted by a consciousness armed with epistemological tools for deciphering the nature of capital.
However, I am pretty compelled by the notion of ideology’s total capture of the psyche, making the author, art, and reader all not only receptive to the stimulation of filmic representation of hegemony, but divided crystallizations of hegemonic ideology themselves. As such, the tide of history moves all. Basically, we all know the vibe, and if I can be really reductive, Mark Steven is trying to track down the vibes that films are attuned to. To a critical thinker such as himself, to understand the superstructure is to understand the structure and vice versa.
Being a critic, or at least a good one, is to be a detective. You’re not just giving a list of what’s good or bad, you’re trying to help an audience come to a better understanding of what’s happening in the art being critiqued, but what can be credited (or blamed) for producing that work of art. That takes a trained suite of senses and a lexicon that not everyone else has access to. Steven is clearly practiced at teaching, as he comes very close to being able to communicate the knowledge being created through his research to a popular audience. I’m not sure if it’s totally possible to do that, given the subject matter, but he made a damn fine effort. Sometimes being a detective can direct one toward phantom clues, and though Steven makes a compelling argument for each link in the constellation, you do get the sense that he is reaching for something that may not quite be there, even if the point being made is salient all the same.
To wrap up, I highly suggest this book as both a fan of horror films and a leftist who could always use a chance to brush up on historiographic theory. There are surprisingly concise and cogent criticisms of capitalism here as well as a collection of critical reviews that make me wish Mark Steven had a Letterboxd account. Don’t expect it to be the easiest read, but don’t be intimidated, either. It rewards your effort fully.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ultimately, it more or less convinced me. This Marxist reading of splatter films builds not just on the famous writings of Franco Moretti, who I think of when I think of Marxist readings of horror, but on Marx himself, who constantly resorted to supernatural metaphors when discussing capitalism well beyond the specter haunting Europe. As Steven's quotations show, Marx referred quite a bit to the daily violence of capitalism's workings in ways that often uncannily reflect the doling-out of violence in, say, Blood Feast or Cannibal Holocaust or Hostel. (Not to mention lines from Rousseau that also fit.) I have to admit that I've seen only the Hostel movies and literally a minute of Blood Feast, which was frankly enough. Also, I read this as I was sitting down to lunch at Dragon Beaux, which was not the smartest decision. His general point is that, at least in class terms, these movies tend to be politically progressive (and sometimes socialist, though I'm not clear to what extent any clear program is being advocated beyond cutting up the rich) though regressive in gender terms (what with "wealth" often being figured as female), as opposed to slashers, which in their classic form are socially conservative (restoration of order at the end, more or less, and sex will kill you) but progressive in gender terms (the classic Carol Clover reading). I guess the tie of Texas Chainsaw Massacre to early postindustrial decline is now commonplace, so the newer arguments to me involve connecting movies like Hostel and Saw to full-on globalized postindustrialism, along with the notion that they incarnate, so to speak, the neoliberal imaginary of unstructured independent operators, with Jigsaw being a kind of avatar of "the de-territorialized world of an outwardly post-industrial economy, a void beneath the credit market into which the old relations of production [e.g. all of those traps, which essentially recreate the dangers of the old industrial workplace] reassemble themselves, horrifically." Later: "torture is a franchise. Jigsaw is its brand name." I suppose my issue with this is my usual issue with Marxist analysis, which is that it's totalizing (I'm still persuaded by the theorized Abu Ghraib connections to torture porn, for instance); but the analysis here of the various stages of splatter (its invention in the 60s and 70s, found-footage cannibal movies, 80s body horror, and some truly disgusting-sounding post-2000 movies along the lines of Human Centipede) is quite persuasive.
Still, I'm not going to rewatch any of those movies--saw Day of the Dead when it came out, back in college, and honestly am still getting over it.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This starts off great: Steven is a dynamic and lively writer, and the ways in which he sets up a provocative symbolic correlation between the horrors of capitalism and the specific features of the splatter subgenre are smart and compelling. But sadly, quite a bit of that early excitement slowly evaporates as he subsequently moves through four (arbitrary-seeming) selections of splatter horror from different eras, which he cherry-picks in a reading that is too single-mindedly focused on making his readings suit his argument about these four periods of late capitalism. In order to try and make the point that these movies have some kind of fundamental anti-capitalist kernel to them, Steven willfully ignores key aspects of the genre and even these films, resulting in interpretive readings of famously slippery and politically ambivalent films that are reductive and therefore ultimately somewhat tedious. So even though the writing is sharp and the book has its strong points, it’s one of those monographs that should have been a blog post.

[Goldendigital · Rating 5 out of 5]

Based theory and kino-pilled. My favorite part was when talking about the Saw franchise:

"Here the frequently middle-class victims are forced into the position of industrial workers and are destroyed by heavy machinery in such ways as to simulate occupational injuries. Small wonder those victims are pushed toward regularly fatal self-harm by way of omnipresent clocks and times, capitalism's chief measurement device for the extraction of value."

It really do be like that.

[Kai Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accessibly-rigorous and rigorously-accessible political economic readings of gore flicks like Hellraiser and The Human Centipede; intermittent autotheory that adds so much personal historization to the highly abstract and metaphorical dialectics it bookends; assemblage-ing the high-/low-brow until it becomes irreducibly gallerte slop (babe wake up it's time for our corporately-mandated 15min lunch). And he's even catty.

So fucking cool. The kind of shit I wanna do.

[Caio Maximino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um ensaio sobre filmes gore/splatter e sua relação com as contradições internas do capitalismo em diferentes fases do século XX - especialmente nos pontos de expansão do gênero, o final dos anos 1970 (e a ascensão do neoliberalismo) e os anos 2010 a 2020 (e a mundialização do neoliberalismo e crise que marca o fim do império americano). Um conjunto bastante acurado de análises sobre corpo, violência, e capital, sob a ótica desses filmes.

[M · Rating 1 out of 5]

How does the author so utterly miss the liberalism coursing through the veins of the Saw franchise? The series ignores the material conditions and resource inequalities shaping human desperation. Addiction is framed as a moral failure. Any critique of the capitalist system is made through individuals rather than the systems themselves. The punishments are punitive, vindictive, and cruel.

[Francis Fanning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun, sometimes challenging exploration of the grizzliest horror films. Though I wasn’t completely convinced by some to the theories put forward, it was great dissecting some of the horrors that, when lined up altogether like that, prove pretty stomach churning.

[Cameron Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steven's reading of Marx as a literary precursor to the splatter genre is impressive. Read this if you want to understand The Human Centipede without ever having to watch it.