Embarrassing confession time: I’ve always been a bit of a mess around blood and guts. When I was a teenager, I’d regularly feel light-headed at the sight, or even the description of it. Biology class dissections, history lessons about gruesome forms of capital punishment in the middle ages, a pig-butchering scene in Michael Winterbottom’s otherwise dreary adaptation of Jude the Obscure that we had to watch for an English lit lecture: all would turn me white as a sheet of A4.
In recent years I’ve largely managed to get over my squeamishness around a bit of spilled claret. I’ve had to, frankly, because it’s hard to escape the stuff in popular culture these days. Where full-on, gnarly violence might have once been largely reserved for horror films and extreme cinema, now even our prestige TV can’t resist a bit of it. The biggest show of the last decade, Game of Thrones, was a real gorefest at times, and its follow-up House of the Dragon seems to be on a permanent mission to outdo it. Another series of the moment, the critically acclaimed superhero satire The Boys, has enough exploding heads and severed limbs to eclipse Peter Jackson at his Braindead peak. And the most-watched show of the past few months has been Netflix’s “unwatchably queasy” Jeffrey Dahmer drama.
