Gross out
Gross out describes a celebrated movement in art (often comic), which subversively aims to shock the audience with controversial material including toilet humour, nudity, and darkly twisted League of Gentlemen-style plot lines, usually serving the purpose of popular entertainment, though sometimes a vehicle of satirical social comment.
Movies
National Lampoon's Animal House was the genre pioneer, a raucus movie about frat boys, i.e., student fraternity boys. Porky's, starring Kim Cattrall followed, (the first movie featuring a female orgasm), as the demand for gross-out movies blossomed. As the terminology "Gross Out" entered common usage, in a tongue in cheek manner, one movie was even entitled "Gross Out" (1991), directed by Bill Osco, featuring plenty of farting and toilet humour, featuring Bob Blaine and Joe Vazquez.
Horror movies are a popular medium for gross out expressionism, including killing/torture/maiming, infestations/infections, eating parts of or entire humans and/or other animals, and spewing forth disgusting fluids.
Linda Blair's projectile vomiting scene in the original Exorcist film is a pioneering "scary movie gorefest moment", the graphic filming and pre-computerised editing techniques setting the pace for many other leading film-makers within the steadily expanding Hollywood horror genre.
Otherworldly monsters found Predator and Alien, the films which feature zombies and werewolves kill for nourishment (or in the case of Predator, for kicks), but don't always eat the whole body (zombies eat brains, but werewolves are less fussy). Supernatural entities , such as demons, vampires, poltergeists, mummies, Freddy, and Jason are not always concerned with killing humans for food, but are rather more concerned with possession of souls, world domination, revenge, etc, and may not exhibit a gross out factor, through their actions.
More grotesque are the serial killers and torturers such as in the Scream movies, Se7en, and Michael Myers, beings who saw the human body as a focus for performance art.
Adolescent sex and wind-breaking jokes, are common in non-horror genres, American Pie the ultimate example of a latterday Hollywood gross-out popcorn movie, jam-packed with sexual references and imagery, a no-holds-barred, suggestive/explicit style of cinema pioneered by "shockflick" director Lars Von Trier of avante-garde film collective Dogme, who challenged the norm, with far-out depictions of life, using portable cameras and innovative production techniques, designed to make audiences simultaneously laugh and cringe [1].
Not all gross out movies are merely fictional. Supersize Me was a gross-out documentary movie with a serious social and political message, the subject of the movie, American journalist Morgan Spurlock suffering severe debilitating health problems after living off Big Mac burgers for a short period of time, including physical and psychological difficulties requiring medical advice.
Television
Jackass and its UK cousin, Dirty Sanchez were the pioneers of "gross out television". Featuring dangerous stunts, nudity, profanity, and furious action never seen before on the small screen, both series started on MTV, and progressed to iconic feature length movies.
Theatre
Gross-out theatre is increasingly practised on stage, particular at the Edinburgh Festival, but also in the larger, more adventurous, British theatres.
The prime examples of which, is the stage version of the contemporary drama Trainspotting by best selling playwright, author, Irvine Welsh; the controversial New York musical Urinetown by Kotis and Hollmann, the outrageous anarchistic schlockomedy (shock horror comedy) musical about a Manchester jobcentre Restart by Komedy Kollective; and performances by another United Kingdom-based act, Forced Entertainment who devised the iconic theatrical gorefest Bloody Mess [2]. Their recent show, The World In Pictures, featured cavemen and women, dodgy haircuts, semi-nudity, and plenty of improvisation, accompanied by an offbeat soundtrack [3].
Art
Controversial American cartoonist and vaudeville performer Basil Wolverton invented his trademark "spaghetti and meatballs" style of artwork. Various mainly-British artists helped create a flourishing gross-out art scene, which began mainly in the 1990s, the most famous of which, were Damien Hurst, known for encasing mutilated rotting cattle in formaldehyde, and making art of endangered marine species such as sharks in formaldehyde tanks, and Tracy Emin, whose exhibit of an unmade bed, featured used tampons, condoms and blood-stained underwear. Once he had established his popstar status in the artsworld, Hurst, also made a short comedy movie featuring Eddie Izzard.
Music
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Gross out themes are common in popular music genres, especially rap and heavy rock, where shock value helps create marketable notoriety. Bands include Blink182 famous for including breast and fart jokes in their songs, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, and many others, whose material shocks the music world.
Sometimes the line between truth and urban myth is blurred by the sensationalist sections of the media. For example, Frank Zappa denies eating steaming excrement, live on-stage, and Ozzy Osbourne claims never to have bitten off a live bat's head.
Similar themes are also sometimes conveyed in music videos, the aptly-named Gross Out, a single from popular indie band, The Vines' whose second single from their third album, "Vision Valley", had a video shot in 16mm, filmed by director Josh Logue.