Before the internet allowed us to watch footage of people being murdered for free, any aspiring video-age Percival had to search high and low for quality snuff. There was no relic so highly prized as the Grail of gross, Faces of Death. Often shelved in the back rooms of those pre-Blockbuster video stores located in strip malls, grocery stores and along lonely roadsides, this mondo masterpiece was spoken of by those who had seen it in a hushed, foreboding tone reminiscent of Large Marge’s admonition to the hitchhiking Pee-Wee. A dark fate surely awaited anyone brave enough to press play. However, aside from the rather pedestrian suicides, autopsies, and slightly more elevated baby seal clubbing, the most fondly remembered scenes – everything from the eye -bleeding electrocution to that cute grizzly nibbling on a little foie gras d’ humain – were, alas, fake. In hindsight, that the film was narrated by one “Dr. Francis B. Gross” should have been a red flag regarding its legitimacy. But my teenage self really wanted to believe that someone had actually shot footage of young women (surprisingly buxom, considering the supposed Third World trappings) sacrificing a willing man, eating his flesh and engaging in an orgy where the corpse’s blood proved a far better lubricant than K-Y Jelly ever could. I’d be lying if I said that along with being repulsed, I also wasn’t kind of turned on. In his fascinating, but ultimately frustrating new book, Wake Forest professor Eric G. Wilson dives into this fecund topic of morbid curiosity. It’s the sort of high concept that will intrigue readers before they even read the flap. After all, the title says it all:  Everyone Loves a Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away. Wilson gets right to the heart...

Soda is delicious. But to the ancient Callatians, so was the flesh of dead relatives and nowadays no one outside of gourmand serial killers would salivate over a dish of foie gras d’ humain.  That soda and junk food have followed in the footsteps of flesh and cigarettes to become the consumptive Voldemorts of the 21st century presents a great challenge for corporate confectionerians: How to produce products with addictive deliciousness without fattening the populace into lumbering Elephant Men. PepsiCo’s quest of attaining this snacktopia was chronicled recently in a fascinating New Yorker article written by John Seabrook. In the article, Pepsi’s strategies for creating healthier food — developing a brand new type of salt with the atomic-age name “15 Micron Salt” and building a “taste testing” robot hardwired with cultured cells featuring the genetic sequences of the four known taste receptors — seemed more like excerpts from a science-fiction novel than the evolutionary next step for Cool Ranch Doritos. Instead of spending hundreds of millions dollars on cutting-edge scientific research, all the folks at Pepsi really needed to do was look west toward Los Angeles. During the past fifteen years the marketing, distribution, and accounting departments inside Hollywood studios– the real imaginative forces of the dream machine—have discovered a can’t-miss business algorithm: making movies that no one likes but everyone goes to see. Or, to be more precise, the Orphan Blockbuster. Like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Hollywood hive mind has now confused audiences to the point where they can’t tell good from bad.  Let’s look at two recent releases, both on their way to making more money than the GDP of Guinea-Bissau: Fast Five and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Both films may be built with...