splatterpunk n. 2

The splatter punks are doing some excellent stuff. Ray Garton’s Live Girls is one of the best horror novels I've read in a long time.

But most of all, the new style gave the nascent splatterpunks an unprecedented freedom to do whatever they wanted to. In short, a new generation of horror writers found (like the tag line for Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’) that ‘there are no limits’.

They're young. They're gifted. And they're ready to rock and roll. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Splatterpunks.

The New Horror’s most visible practicioners [sic] are a rude, unruly lot. Hip to the tendency of culture to instantly stencil labels on nascent movements, they've styled themselves ‘Splatterpunks’, in a deliberate, preemptive strike.

There were only three deaths, and nothing there you wouldn’t see on prime-time TV. The treatment…was the work of our very own John Skip and Craig Spector, the original Splatterpunks, who actually didn’t splatter very much.

I worshipped the Splatterpunks. Read every magazine article on them that I could find. Bought their books. Clamored for more. As a kid in the ’70s, I decorated my room with posters of KISS and Farrah Fawcett. Years later, it was the Splatterpunks. I wanted to be these guys. They had it all—women, booze, best-selling horror novels, and the adulation of the fans. Although they might kill me for saying so, they were sort of like the genre’s first boy band.