Splatter vs. Spatter {Rated G for GORE}

Something that intrigues us here at bc/hf is crime scene photography. Well, pretty much anything death related is interesting to us...

Back to business. Today, I was enjoying a "Stuff You Should Know" podcast (Check this shit out! It's rad!) about Jack the Ripper. I have heard lots of facts and lore about Mr. Ripper, but I learned an interesting new tidbit today. His last victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was immortalized in what is often touted as the first crime scene photo! Grainy? Yes. Ghastly? Indeed!

I remember being a young lass and watching the film Road to Perdition. What really struck me about the violence in this film was the spattering of blood. I guess I had assumed that blood just dribbled out. As a tot, my biological father watched an inappropriate amount of horror movies (I blame this for my morbid nature). When it came time for my shots, I envisioned the nurse pulling the finished syringe from my arm and Tarantino-style blood spraying from the minuscule hole in my arm.



 Needless to say, that didn't happen. Then, years later, I watched Road to Perdition and saw bullets force blood across the room and onto walls and (gasp) vintage lamps.

Stuff You Should Know also taught me that once the blood has hit a surface and is being examined by the ladies and gents of law enforcement, it is "spatter." That equates to "blood spatter analysis," as apposed to "blood splatter analysis." If I watched, Dexter, I might reference that now, but I don't so I won't.

Although, I will say that this character only makes this one face. Artistic choice or lack of facial malleability?

My fiance told me that all his lady-interests have all had one thing in common: curiosity for all things morbid. My head dropped in embarrassment. Morbid is an understatement.

"One girl sat with me and looked at this awful, bloody crime-scene filled photo book. She looked at it for hours..."

I immediately had a flashback to the days of yore (high school), when I dated a guy who worked in Barnes and Noble. He showed me the books that they kept behind the counter. It wasn't just Playboy Mags. He pulled out an old book, filled to the brim with black and white crime scene photos. I looked at it for as long as I could stomach, which wasn't as long as I would've expected. At risk of grossing out my fiance, I try to curb my morbid behavior, or at least wait  until he goes to work...

This photo is so dynamic.

Here is a more modern photo. Damn.

This one is a John Wayne Gacy special ;)

This one is purely for comic relief.

You might remember Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia."

Sometimes, when I look at her, I see this:

or this:

Oh Heath, I never cared until I found out you were dead....

Interesting, yes? Well, sometimes...

Like I said earlier, I couldn't look at the book for long. My curiosity began to frighten me. Each person in the picture is a real person. Yikes. Everybody is somebody's baby.

Here at BellaCozy/holdfast, we are obviously huge fans of Sweet Movie. One minute it is like this:

And then, "The whole world is full of corpses..."

And you've got the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1943:

That's about 22,000 civilians. That's somebody's baby. They all are.

I used to spend so much time fervently researching the Holocaust. It was the only part of history that intrigued me for countless years.

 I began to frequently dream about living in a ghetto and walking around at dusk with the Gestapo monitoring corners under foggy light from a streetlamp. The dreams met frightening crescendo. I dreamt about Jewish children being tied to a chair by an SS officer and then thrown down  several flights of stairs. I believed that I must have been a reincarnated victim of the Holocaust.

Several years after the dreams ceased, I discussed it with my Psychology professor about my reincarnation theory. She told me that it was most likely Vicarious Traumatization. I had consumed so much information on  the subject and experienced so much empathy, that it was beginning to affect my thoughts. My professor had experienced the same scenario after 9/11 when she was inundated with news footage and photographs.

I feel comfortable speaking for us both when I say that, although we are often morbid, weird-ass girls, we do have respect. We might be strangely entranced by photos of the dead, but I think part of it truly is because of the human element. It is because we can feel for them. It is because everyone you know, someday, will die.