Gory details is a monthly article dedicated to helping writers improve their writing by looking at some of the "real" places and things that often find their way into horror stories. This month's details are about internal organs. Yummy!
As important part of the genera as it is, horror seems to be deeply divided about what happens to bodies once you start to hack, mangle, fry, or chainsaw them. On the one hand you have the "Dead‑Alive" approach. In this Steve Jackson (a la Lord of the Rings) horror classic, the main character arrives at a zombie filled dinner party with a lawn mower slung across his chest, blade forward. He fires that bad boy up and we have about ten glorious minutes of the special effects guys feeding zombie parts to a running lawn mower. It's heavenly. When it's over, the hero is covered in red goo. The stairway is covered in red goo. The curtains are covered in red goo, the floor's about six inches deep in red goo, but the goo doesn't really have any details, you can't make out arms or lungs or anything. The opposite, more detailed approach is typified by Steven King's "The Running Man." (The book not the distantly related movie.) Near the end, the badly injured main character is trying to get to the cockpit of the plane he's in when a loop of his own intestine, which has fallen out, hangs up on something trapping him. Now that would hurt. So just what all can come spilling out of a human and what would it do if it did? We'll start at the top.
Brains: Brains get splattered all over in horror movies, on walls, all over girlfriends, and this is pretty much the way a brain behaves under pressure. The brain is soft and pliable. If you stuck your finger into it, it would slide right in about like pushing into jello. It can be difficult to get out of the head however as it is laced with large arteries and tied to the brain stem. If you were to cut off the top of your victim's skull, reach around the edge of the brain and try to lift the thing out, the blood vessels would pull through leaving you with a hand full of mush. In a note for all you mad scientists, only about one in ten brain cells actually carries neural impulses. The rest are mostly astrocytes and glial cells that provide support, nourishment and a bunch of things science hasn't figured out yet. Have fun.
Eyeballs: Yes they do pop out. No they don't hang down to someone's chin. The optic nerve will hold an eye at cheek level, no further. And while you can just pop it back in it won't just start working again. The muscles that control eye movement would have to be sewn back together.
Lungs: Healthy (non smoking) lungs are yellow to gray and are filled with tough bronchial tubes and blood vessels. The Celts had a punishment called "The Death Butterfly" where they'd tie a guys hands around a tree, hack open his back and watch his lungs flutter like a butterfly. I've always wondered if that would feel cold.
Heart: If you rip open a guys chest, you don't immediately see a red beating heart, the heart is protected by a thick sheet of yellow, sickly looking fat. And yes, it will keep beating for several minutes after removal. Although people don't think about this. The brain of the heart removee will continue to work until it gets oxygen starved and collapses from lack of blood pressure several minutes later. Ever watch someone feed your own still beating heart to the bog monster? Whooo!
Liver: The largest single organ in the body next to the skin. The liver is a large purple/red organ lying across your body just below your ribs. Anyone who's been cat fishing with liver knows that it is tough enough to be difficult to cut but not tough enough to stay on a hook. Weird. The liver functions to clear the blood stream of pollutants. As such, any nasty thing that has gotten into the body is likely to be found here. It's a good place for the autopsy to turn up unusual goodies.
Digestive tract: The stomach is a bag of muscles that squeezes itself to mix food with the hydrocloric acid it produces. To protect itself from its own acids, the stomach also produces a thick mucus. If you've ever hurled so hard you ran out of food and were producing thick, clear strings of goo, you've seen this yourself. The large and small intestine are several yards of coiled tubes arranged under your stomach and liver, the large forming a sort of upside down U over the small. They are gray to yellow and are held in place by a series of thin membranes. They can and do come out when the muscle wall is torn out of the stomach. Because of the delicate nature of the membrane holding them and the complexity of their organization, intestines are almost never put back in. You can't just push them back. Even modern doctors usually cut off the damaged portion and sew the ends back together inside. Remember, the digestive tract is full of whatever has been eaten in the last day or so. In a very effective scene from "Catch‑22" by Joseph Heller, the protagonist goes to help a wounded comrade. He finds, in addition to a gaping hole in his friend's stomach, bits of stewed tomato from lunch leaking out of the wound. Great scene.
Bones: Horror seems to treat them pretty well, broken ends sticking out of wounds, cracking noises. An interesting note is that a wildebeest, killed by lions and stripped bare, will still have 2000 calories in rich, fatty marrow hidden away. I don't know how much a human would have but it might make a nice touch for a cannibalism story.
Other details: Any deep wound is likely to reveal a thick, yellow layer of fat just under the skin. Breast are almost entirely fat. (I still love 'em.) All body cavities have a thin, tough membrane along their inside wall, the pleura in the chest, the three layer meninges around the brain and spine. A fully cut artery is less dangerous than a partly cut one. A fully cut artery pulls back into the tissue around it where pressure from the muscles helps slow the bleeding. It will still kill you, just not as fast.
Well, there's some gory details your 8th grade human health teacher probably missed. Now get out there and write.
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The Gory Details (Gross)
HorrorBetween 2004 and 2008 I wrote a series of "Tips for Writers" for Nocturnal Ooze magazine vaguely about what would happen in real life if you did the things they do in movies but mostly about the gross out. I've always loved them and so have taken...
