No, I’m not talking about some sort of sick pornography where everyone takes BDSM two steps too far. If you want that, might I recommend a few Japanese websites?
What I’m talking about is a sub-genre of horror movies that somehow earned one of the most disturbingly appropriate titles in cinematic classification. ‘Torture porn’ refers to any horror movie that gets most of its scares via violent imagery. Such a film will also display scantily clad men and women throughout the film. Hence the ‘porn’ part of the title. Now, if the only qualifiers are nudity and gore, why would such a sub-genre ever be more than a footnote in cinematic history? Why is it worth saving?
First, where the hell did such a title come from? Originally, there were splatter films. Movies with lots of gore and over-the-top violence, sometimes tongue-in-cheek like Dead Alive, but always ridiculously bloody. Then in 2005, Hostel happened and the splatter film title just wasn’t enough. It was at this point that someone classified horror films that contained a combination of tits and blood as ‘torture porn.’
Retroactively, there are a lot of movies that fell under this new label. Cannibal Holocaust being a prime example. Unfortunately, just like every other classification, journalists have gotten incredibly lazy. Movies that contain none of the former and little of the latter are now categorized as ‘torture porn’ simply because they make the viewer uncomfortable. This is where I start to get pissed off.
Date Movie makes me uncomfortable because it’s an unfunny piece of shit. It’s genuinely torturous to me. Does that make it ‘torture porn’? No, no it does not.
I can see some people claiming that it’s called torture porn because the movie seems to get off on the torture part. That the filmmaker is glorifying and possibly sexualizing acts of physical violence. Okay, I won’t argue with that. However, we already have a classification for that. It’s called splatter films. Or gore movies. You know, the ones that weren’t good enough for Hostel and its ilk.
It’s this laziness in classification that I believe is diluting the genre, and will ultimately make it a footnote in ‘failed movie subcategory’ history. Adding films like Wolf Creek and Grindhouse wrong, but understandable. They’re both admittedly violent, but Grindhouse is a self-stated homage to the old grindhouse flicks, which do not in any way match the definition of a torture porn flick.
The big problem is that we’re now classifying any film that is just the least bit disturbing as ‘torture porn’. Antichrist is a creepy flick, I’ll admit. But it doesn’t belong in the genre. It’s a drama with a few horrific elements thrown in. It’s not a horror movie.
“Okay, angry writer guy,” you say to your computer screen. “It’s obvious that you don’t like lackadaisical classification, but just when were you going to get around to the defending part of your article?”
Great question, reader, and I really like your use of the word lackadaisical. If I’m willing to go to all this trouble to complain about poor cinematic classification then I must actually care about the genre, right? Yes, yes indeed I do.
You see, torture porn as a genre is simply the latest brand of horror films that are meant to test and challenge the audience. They don’t exist to be your favorite movies of all time. In fact, if Hostel II or Martyrs is your honest-to-goodness favorite film ever made, then you should probably commit yourself. You have problems.
What a movie like The Devil’s Rejects should do is challenge you, both cinematically as well as visually. I’m never going to watch A Serbian Film again, but it highlights the best and worst of the genre. It’s a movie that combines a compelling plot with horrific images of violence, interspersed with themes of love and, yes, pornography, and then blurs and twists those lines. That’s what the genre is supposed to be about. Hostel coined the phrase because it used the idea of sex and sexuality to lure both the victims and the audience into its horrific innards. A movie that only offers violence, or offers no actual horror (yes, I draw a very thick line between horror movies and movies with horrific scenes) should not be classified as torture porn.
If we were pickier about our categorizations and only let in true ‘torture porn’ flicks, we would still see a lot of genuinely crappy movies in the genre. But we would also start to see a pattern of challenging films that blur the line between sexy, sleazy, violent and horrific. Diluting the genre by adding in dramas and thrillers that have a scene or two of violence simply dilutes the entire group of films. Ultimately it over saturates the market and we will eventually miss out on challenging, (hopefully) entertaining movies.
On a final note, I can’t wait to see what sort of Google search terms people use to stumble across this column.
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