CGI Gore Is a Plague on Horror. There May Be a Cure.

A new class of horror filmmakers is mapping a path back to effects that carry weight onscreen.

Bloody Fun
A brief celebration of onscreen carnage.  

There’s something not right here, I thought as I watched the sink overflow with blood.

Not my sink, to be clear — this was a plumbing fixture in 2025’s franchise fourquel The Conjuring: Last Rites. In one of her many portents of doom, Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) sees blood bubble up from her sink and flow out onto the kitchen counters before cascading down to the floor. The blood didn’t look like blood, though. There was nothing remotely organic in the way it moved, no density or viscosity to it. This was far from the first time a lackluster computer-generated effect took me out of a movie. But it felt especially egregious here: Fake blood is not hard to come by. Yet I was being asked to suspend disbelief for an ugly, weightless CGI facsimile of the real thing.

I wish it were just The Conjuring. Alas, that movie’s bad blood is symptomatic of a much larger digital-effects problem that has long plagued horror fans like me. Across both lower-budget indies and major studio releases, knives meet flesh, limbs get severed, heads get smushed, and much of it has the undeniable look of animation instead of anything grounded in reality. It’s hard to pinpoint when bad CGI gore became a norm, but you can think of 1993’s Jurassic Park as a dividing line. The ensuing explosion in digital effects had an especially pronounced impact on horror, a historically effects-heavy genre. While the late ’90s were a time for testing out these techniques, the aughts and 2010s were riddled with less-than-impressive examples of practical gore being swapped out for computer-generated substitutes. Contrast the blood geyser of 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street with the fuzzy razor-glove stabbing of the 2010 remake. Note how the kills in the Final Destination movies — the unquestionable selling point of that series — seemed to lose their impact from film to film, reaching a nadir with 2009’s visually appalling The Final Destination, which features a painfully unconvincing explosion of guts.

But with advancements in technology, digital effects in 2026 should, in theory, be vastly improved from the amateur efforts of the aughts. Why, then, does cheap-looking CGI gore remain depressingly common?

For the most part, CGI gore is cheap and fast to deal with, compared to all the logistical challenges the real (fake) stuff presents. Once an actor is covered in blood and other viscera, shooting another take requires getting them cleaned up: new hair, new makeup, new wardrobe, all of which has to look exactly the same for continuity between shots. That also inhibits the actor’s ability to film anything else. Getting blood all over a set, meanwhile, can slow down a filming day even more, requiring extensive clean-up between takes. 

“It really became a scheduling issue,” says Tony Gardner, a makeup-effects designer and puppeteer. Gardner’s work includes Zombieland, Old, multiple Chucky movies, and the Chucky TV series. “There has to be someone who’s really gung ho, like [showrunner] Don Mancini was on Chucky, to pivot during that reset and film other stuff so the day is still efficient.”

There are others working today who still prioritize practical gore. In the year’s biggest horror hit, Obsession — a box-office behemoth that made over $500 million on a $750,000 budget — a memorably brutal head smash was accomplished via the old-school technique of using a dummy as a stand-in for the victim. And though a more modest success, the January release Primate also earned acclaim for limiting CGI in its depiction of gruesome chimp-induced violence, including a facial degloving (don’t Google it) and a man getting his jaw torn off. “It was a studio movie, it had a budget, and they just let us go full fucking on,” Primate director Johannes Roberts recalls.

But there are always limitations. Even a filmmaker as ascendant as Zach Cregger — who rode the enormous success of 2025’s Weapons to this year’s smash Resident Evil — has to compromise, balancing his preference for practical effects with the logistical hurdles that Gardner describes.

Sometimes digital blood is a necessity, for example, and when done with care, it can effectively mimic the real thing. In one of Resident Evil’s climactic scenes — apologies for the spoilers — a scientist played by Griffin Newman loses his arm and gets dragged away, leaving behind a trail of blood that was done with CGI. The moment in which his arm gets torn off used practical blood, however, since it had to interact with the environment in ways that are harder to digitally re-create. Films like Resident Evil are inevitably a combination of practical and CGI. Cregger also describes an earlier scene in which an infected woman’s head is blown off with a shotgun. In that case, his team built a head-size “blood bomb” they could film exploding and then digitally composited that footage with footage of the actor.

“All that spray and the hair falling on the ground, falling off the wall, dripping down — all of it was real,” Cregger explains. “The effect is you can feel it. I feel like people can tell when they’re seeing something that’s real.” 

Many of the best examples of modern gore — like this year’s Evil Dead installment, Evil Dead Burn, which offered a dishwasher-door-induced head smash to rival Obsession’s — employ the kind of practical-CGI mix that Cregger describes. When these effects are done well, there’s a seamlessness that doesn’t make you feel like you’re watching a video-game cut scene. Even the Terrifier series, which has grown popular in large part for its relentless practical gore effects, doesn’t do everything on set. As filmmaker Damien Leone told IndieWire back in 2022, “You have to embrace the technology. There are so many amazing things you can do with digital effects.”

Trey Lindsay has done visual-effects work for lower-budget indies, including the movies made by the Adams family. (That would be John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser, the family of filmmakers behind 2022’s Hellbender and this year’s Mother of Flies.) Lindsay details a technique he used on 2023’s Where the Devil Roams, in which he had to show the aftermath of a man taking an axe to the head. He created an appliance for the actor and used fake blood, but he also digitally erased a portion of the man’s head to create a gnarly hole. “There’s no way to do that with an actor,” he notes, “because, you know, we can’t scoop out his brains.”

Lindsay calls this the “magic trick” of visual effects, and suggests that using practical and CGI in tandem can fool audiences better than one or the other alone. “I think there’s a beauty to combining both, and I don’t know if that’s a hot take or not,” he says. “The things I like to do lean on practical for the visceral impact of it and then I use digital to do things that we couldn’t have done in the ’80s.” 

All of this sounds good — in theory. In practice, I’m sitting in the movie theater wondering why the blood in The Conjuring: Last Rites moves like the titular creation of 1997’s Flubber. “There’s artistry that comes with making [CGI] successful, the same way there’s artistry that comes with making the practical stuff look good,” Gardner acknowledges. Lindsay has another theory as to why so much of the digital gore I’m complaining about looks as crappy as it does. He believes that many of these effects are done in postproduction not simply as a cost-saving measure but so filmmakers and producers don’t have to make creative decisions on set. The effects themselves are then rushed and end up looking, well, like that. “It’s a paranoia and resistance to committing to a creative decision early enough that they can execute it well,” he says.

Whatever the reasons for the sloppy CGI, the result is infinitely more ruinous to a movie than a botched practical effect. You can recognize there’s a cheap dummy being used in Obsession and still buy into the moment more than you would if it were a computer re-creation of a head being pummeled into bits. In part, this is the uncanny-valley effect, where CGI looks close to the real thing while still being slightly off.

There’s also the fact that horror fans in particular can appreciate the work that goes into practical effects, whether or not they look real in a literal sense. “You don’t watch the original Evil Dead thinking, Well, that’s a very realistic portrayal of demonic possession,” Lindsay notes. “No, you’re enjoying it because it’s Karo syrup and latex, and you can see the seams. And you can kind of tell how it’s done, but that adds to the handcrafted beauty of the whole thing.”

Cregger shares a similar sentiment. “Even if I’m going to see the seams, I will be way more forgiving if it’s artificial practical than artificial digital,” he says. “And I think most people operate the same way, because if it’s practical and it looks fake, at least you can tell you’re looking at a real thing, and there’s something in our lizard brain that is more gentle to that. Whereas if it’s just shitty CGI, I think we all just kind of go, ‘Fuck this movie.’ At least I do.” 

Studios may be coming around to the “practical is better” perspective, too, if only for financial reasons. The astounding success of the Terrifier series is impossible for anyone to ignore — those movies became word-of-mouth hits because of gore that had to be seen to be believed. More recently, Obsession and Backrooms surpassed expectations in ways that few could have predicted, and while neither of those movies are as gore-forward as what Art the Clown gets up to, both have a throwback effects approach that delighted audiences.

Is it preemptive, then, to hope the era of CGI-gore dominance is coming to an end? Perhaps. But there are other reasons to feel optimistic about the future of practical effects — and, perversely, we might have AI to thank. Many of the industry insiders I spoke to about modern horror’s overreliance on computer-generated gore described a pendulum swing in the opposite direction. At a time when any prompt can deliver a photorealistic explosion, younger audiences are craving effects that feel more grounded and tangible. 

“AI has sort of killed this desire for spectacle in kids,” Roberts tells me. “An audience now is not impressed by visual effects the same way. You see it on YouTube all the time. There’s giant things killing giant things, and it’s kind of cool, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a button. And you wanna sit and watch a movie and go, Wow, okay, that was a feat. That was something, what they’ve done there. That was real.”

Barring a risky One Wish Willow request, it would be naïve of me to imagine a future in which practical gore reins supreme once again. But those of us who prefer the old-school thrills can at least take comfort in the number of like-minded people currently making movies, from industry icons with decades of experience to a new class of horror filmmakers disrupting the genre. Just as there will always be new technological advancements — cheaper and easier, if not better-looking — there will also always be those keeping the old ways alive. “There’s a ton of invisible CGI, so as a technique, there’s huge value to it,” Lindsay says. “But it’s much more fun to just take rubber masks and throw fake blood on them. That’s much more my speed.”