Lewis’s legacy was never expected to land in our homes and, time will tell, there’s a strong chance TV has overestimated just how much of the red stuff audiences can tolerate. Perhaps we have reached a saturation point with TV gore. TV viewers are not yet completely desensitized to such splattery gruesomeness, but how long will that last as shows use it as an easy go-to for kneejerk reactions?ĭespite the small screen being awash with blood and guts, the most nightmarish thing I’ve seen on TV lately has been that weird tooth child thing on Syfy’s Channel Zero. Would it have been as significant without the straight-from-the-comic shot of Glenn with dented forehead and popped-out eye? Glenn’s death, and to a lesser extent that of the more disposable Abraham, even in that context, is still upsetting and unforgettable. Folks in The Walking Dead have been beheaded, dismembered, eviscerated and eaten – and the zombies get even worse treatment. TV’s longform storytelling makes us more familiar with and emotionally attached to characters, something horror films have always struggled with. Things have been heading this way for a while. Online chatter is full of viewers claiming this is the final of many last straws, others annoyed that there’s suddenly a lot of horror in this zombie TV show. Even after their annoying “fool me once” routine with Glenn’s fake-out death last season, this was still tough to take in what was, overall, a particularly brutal and bleak hour of television.

There it’s a side gag: here it was, for many, a step too far. The show has struck such an insanely over the top tone that this sort of thing is completely expected, welcome even – indeed, the screen has been painted as red in episodes of Penny Dreadful, with their bloodied ballroom hallucinations, Dexter’s pivotal childhood trauma of witnessing his mother’s killing in a blood-drenched shipping container and any number of Hannibal’s grisly corpse tableaux. Even before the titles had rolled in the comeback episode everyone was doused in gallons of blood as two deadites were messily dispatched in Ash’s bar. When Ash vs Evil Dead returned for its second season a few weeks back, after working out its kinks in a patchy but enjoyable first, it wasted no time in ladling out the gore. But will today’s gruesome TV be looked back on as equally quaint and kitsch? And as things are pushed to the limit of what audiences can stomach, where can things go from what is already a saturation point? You can draw a straight line from Lewis’s groundbreaking goremongering to the now par-for-the-course bloodletting on shows like Game of Thrones, with its now legendary Red Wedding killing spree, The Walking Dead and Ash vs The Evil Dead.

It’s striking just how these thrills, once confined to drive-ins and grindhouses, are now being pumped directly into our living rooms.

Ash vs the evil dead