Going to ramble about movies vs books as it pertains to what's shown and not and how this affects the publishing industry...a little.
Jurassic Park, the first one, is absolutely horrifying and tense and stressful. It does a fantastic job of relaying the horror of these prehistoric creatures and how poorly we would manage against them.
How foolish it is to mess with nature.
It's a delightfully unsettling monster movie that holds up better than anything its age. "Spared no expense" indeed.
However, there's no real blood or gore.
There should be. It should be dripping for how the dinosaurs rip people apart. Everyone should be coated head to toe in offal from how the T-Trex eats because it thrashes like a shark.
But there's nothing but a splattered window and some aftermath.
You might think, "well it is not a horror film, it is science fiction and adventure like the book."
Plenty of sci-fi is drenched in blood.
As is the book. It is horrendously bloody, and the author said it is to immerse the reader in the danger of these dinosaurs. He also said film doesn't need that. On film when you get bloody it is distracting.
It's fun to think about that.
There's a lot of writers who think in movies, who view their words as a lense and a camera seeing their world and following cues. Lot of readers do too.
So it's also important to think about.
To know when enough is enough and when to push it more. To know it takes more words to immerse someone in a scene than it does pictures.
You want to show someone how dangerous a beast is in a book you can write them eviscerating someone. The slow and agonizing details of flesh tearing, blood spurting, with a revolting stench of split bowels and everything leaking to soak the earth beneath.
In a movie you can talk about the evisceration but only show your beast violently consuming a cow with careful shots that never actually put the beast in perspective but clearly display its ravenous hunger.
It works. You know that thing is very dangerous and you do not want it near the characters.
More words, the right words, help create vivid images to get sucked into.
The need for less on screen, and so many conflating book and film, has me wondering if that's why submission guidelines have become ridiculously limited. Why more agents are looking for bloodless tales or being overly specific about the horror they'll take.
They're thinking in movies and can't see a need for the violence or gore so often prevalent in written fiction. Even in the genre of horror, where these things nest and breed.
It's too much to imagine and they'd rather watch the sanitized, bloodless film.