A Terse History of Gore in Horror Cinema

Pre-Cinema (thanks to Chris, Scarecrow, and tbirkhead):
0.1 Although not given public spectacle, early Greek tragedy sometimes included elaborated descriptions of off-stage gore. This is especially true of Euripides' The Bacchae, which includes descriptions of animals and people torn limb from limb by ecstatic women. Found in the Roman drama of Seneca are the horrible acts of the House of Atreus, including Atreus' butchering his brother's children and secretly feeding them to him in a banquet.

0.2 The first instances of gore as a spectacle come with Jacobean revenge tragedy, which was heavily influenced by Seneca. For instance, the nihilistic conclusions of The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, and Shakespeare's almost comedic violence in Titus Andronicus, including lopped-off limbs, cut-out tongues, rapes and murders.

0.3 Also notable, particularly in England, were the public executions, which attracted large mobs.
The Grand Guignol theater, opening in 1897, not long after photographs of the grisly murders of Jack the Ripper made the papers, moved the display of gore to the fore, making gore the raison d'etre of the plays being presented. This lasted until 1962--just one year before Blood Feast--when cinematic gore had already rendered the Grand Guignol theater redundant. The Grand Guignol tradition, by then, had been absorbed by the cinematic medium.

Cinema:
1.1 Cinematic gore has its roots in some experiments in historical re-enactments by Edison Laboratories, particularly in their beheading videos. The beheading of Mary Queen of Scots is one such instance, occurring a full two years before the Grand Guignol even opened in Paris, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ES7ujycXo. It is also rumoured that some Grand Guignol performances were filmed. (thanks morebrains)

1.2 The first instance of gore in a feature film is probably Griffith's Intolerance (1916), which features two on-screen decapitations and a spear bloodily transfixing a soldier's body. A few years later, Dali and Bunuel infamously sliced an eyeball on screen and had ants crawl from a wound in a hand in their surrealist short, "Un chien andalou" (1929) (thanks Chris).

2.1 Where gore began to be used in horror films I can't say for sure. But Carl Dreyer's fascinating Vampyr (1932) was notoriously censored for its graphic depiction of the staking of a vampire woman at its climax. All other horror films at this time rarely featured even blood.

2.2 Two years after Vampyr, an American poverty row exploitation film, Maniac (1934) included a horrific scene of a cat's head being squeezed until it's eyeball popped out, which was then eaten by the titular maniac. (thanks Chris)

2.3.1 The most traditional starting place for gore, however, is given as capitalist extraordinaire Herschell Gordon Lewis. Yet five years before Lewis made gore an official part of the horror film--a profitable part of the horror film--with Blood Feast (1963), Fiend Without a Face (1958) had a splattering climax of exploding brains.

2.3.2 While I don't know fore sure if Fiend Without a Face is the first real gore film, it's a pretty good contender. Similar proto-gore films include Eyes Without a Face (1955), with its explicit face-transplant scene, Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959), The Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959), and of course the infamous shower sequence in Psycho (1960), with its blood running down the shower drain. (thanks Franklfw, t-birkhead, and annamae)

2.3.3 At the same time, Hammer Studios in the UK were bringing colour to gore, particularly with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror of Dracula (1958), influenced as they were by the Grand Guignol tradition. (thanks leroy gomm)

3.1 Come 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, Romero gave gore an eerie reality, with his living dead chewing on what appears to be real flesh. Since then, the pairing of George Romero and Tom Savini took gore to a new level with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the gut-pulling finale of Day of the Dead (1985).

3.2 Carrying on the tradition in Europe was Lucio Fulci's Romero-influenced gore films, in which latex resembling skin is melted, eaten by spiders, torn, pierced, and all that good stuff. Mentionable, too, is Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox (1981) for pushing the gore to a level rarely seen save in Mondo films.

3.3 At the same time, the gialli were giving gore-spattered death-scenes a stylish elegance that gave it a legitimacy not easily swallowed, but eventually influential. This is especially true of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (1971), a subversive extension of the giallo genre that he himself more-or-less invented, that puts the destruction of that awful human race at the forefront.

3.4 The experimental horror of David Cronenberg, during the '70s and '80s, revealed human flesh, in the world of cinematic horror, to be a malleable stuff, subject to graphic, horrific mutations and modifications, memorable depicted in Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986). (thanks scarecrow)

3.5 Somewhere along the line, the realism Romero brought to gore was lost. This is especially apparent in the comic gore in Evil Dead II (1987) and reaching its apex in Peter Jackson's wild, record-setting gore flood in Dead Alive (1992).

3.6 At present, a return to realism--obsessive, clinical realism--prevails with films like Philosophy of a Knife (2008) and the August Underground series, which brings an unprecedented reality to the cinematic destruction of the human body. More cinema-friendly applications of this same principle have resulted in the genre some call 'Torture Porn.'

3.7 Meanwhile, the German splatter movement, exemplified by Andreas Schnaas Violent Shit films, bridges both movements, having both the clinical realism and the involvement of human sexuality as a component of the core that is a part of the clinical gore tradition, as well as the ridiculous excess of '90s splatter comedy.

0.0 Competing with such films is the reality, in the form of viral videos on the internet, depicting brutal murders, offensive acts of masochism and sadism, violent deaths in accidents, as well as executions, attracting, just as the public executions of old, large crowds.