Flood of blood

Greetings from the slaughterhouse that is pop culture.

Our most popular forms of entertainment – TV, films and books – have followed video games into a ferocious new realm of ultraviolence marked by increasingly graphic depictions of brutality.

Consider:

•In last year’s sadistic film “Saw,” a man cuts off his own foot with a dull hacksaw. (The even more gory sequel, “Saw II,” opens in theaters today.)

•In “Domino,” now in theaters, bounty hunters shoot off a man’s arm and then carry the severed limb around with them.

•In an episode of the Fox network’s “Killer Instinct,” a home-surgery victim wakes up on his patio to find his liver cooking on the gas grill.

•In Stephen J. Cannell’s new novel, “Cold Hit,” someone shoots homeless men in the head, cuts off their fingers and carves runic symbols in their chests.

You may believe that you’ve already gotten a bellyful of Hollywood violence, from “Psycho” to “Pulp Fiction.” But many pop culture experts agree that the lavish intensity of today’s carnage makes previous eras look dainty.

“In the last few years, there’s been a steady increase in the amplitude,” says Stephen Prince, a professor of communication studies at Virginia Tech and the president of the international Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

“Characters were beheaded in D.W. Griffith’s ‘Intolerance’ in 1916, but it was shown quickly and in long shot,” Prince says. “Today you might see it in slow motion, with close-ups from multiple camera setups.

“It’ll have an aggressive sound component to make it texturized and sensual. You’ll hear the arterial blood splatter. The whole treatment is much more detailed and loving.”

Novels are going down the same visceral path.

“I have noticed an increase in gratuitous violence, a desensitizing of violence,” says Oline Cogdill, the longtime mysteries columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Some writers feel because films and television have gone so far, that they need to do that to attract an audience.”

The ratcheting up of violence is most evident in this season’s network TV series.

“With competition from cable, I think networks have had to go further in graphic representations of violence,” says Cynthia Felando, a film-studies lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I’ve had squeamish reactions watching ‘CSI.’ “

Television’s top-rated show has certainly had its stomach-turning moments, such as last season’s buried-alive finale directed by Quentin Tarantino, or the recent episode in which human remains were found grossly decomposed in a steamy car trunk.

But it has plenty of company.

In the debut of the CBS’ new drama “Criminal Minds,” for instance, a woman – bound, gagged and caged – frantically struggles as her rapist/serial-killer captor jabs at her bloody fingertips with pincers.

Why are TV producers suddenly so enamored of hard-core gore? They may be sublimating their frustrated sex drive, suggests Melissa Caldwell, director of research for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group.

“In the post-Janet Jackson media environment, the networks and TV producers and writers are wary of pushing the content envelope as aggressively as they have with regard to sexual content,” Caldwell says.

However, she adds: “As the law stands now, the (Federal Communications Commission) has no authority over violent content.”

Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has introduced a bill that would give the FCC jurisdiction over egregiously violent displays.

“There’s no question that violence in television programming continues to dramatically increase,” the senator says. “More and more, broadcasters are looking for ways to increase ratings and, unfortunately, increasing violent content seems to be their answer.”

People in the TV industry maintain that this season is merely business is usual.

“When I was a kid, there was violence on TV and there’s violence now,” says Nick Santora, a writer-producer for Fox’s “Prison Break.” “In fact it’s less gratuitous now.

“Physical confrontations are story-driven. They’re not there just for shock value.”

As for the scene on his show where the hero’s toes are chopped off by a convict with a pair of garden shears, he says: “We’re the least violent prison show you could imagine. Ninety percent of our show is cerebral, exciting and caperesque. And every once in a while we have to hurt somebody.”

Even Santora admits that when it comes to violence, TV producers are operating without clear limits.

“The standards are so ambiguous as to not give you much of a guideline, so often you go by instinct,” he says.

The TV and film industries are self-governed through content-ratings systems. And those classifications tend to be vague and inconsistent.

“It’s important for people to realize that ratings have ‘crept’ over time,” says Kimberly Thompson, director of the KidsRisk Project at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

“Looking at films over an 11-year period, we showed that ratings crept so much they moved almost a full category,” she says. “Today’s PG-13 movie is like an R-rated film from 10 years ago.”

And while lurid films such as “Saw” and “Domino” may not be huge box-office hits, they enjoy healthy afterlives.

“We are in a cycle … during which horror films, particularly violent movies like ‘Saw,’ are selling unusually well on home video,” says Scott Hettrick, editor of the trade magazine DVD Exclusive.

“Saw” has earned more than $90 million so far on video, nearly 65 percent more than it took in at the U.S. box office.

More and more Hollywood projects are based on hard-core source materials. The films “Sin City” and “A History of Violence,” both critically lauded, were adapted from gritty graphic novels.

The “Resident Evil” films and the current “Doom” are re-creations of violent video games. Other movies, such as “Dawn of the Dead,” with its incessant skull-splattering kill shots, just look like first-person-shooter games.

How far will this trend toward ultraviolence go? The only logical answer is “further.”

Once artistic boundaries of taste or restraint have been crossed, they are rarely reinstated. The demons will not go back in the bottle.

We may have to resign ourselves to the words of Mandy Patinkin’s character in a recent episode of “Criminal Minds”: “Finding new ways to hurt each other is what we’re good at.”