Is “torture porn” the product of some wacky fringe fetish group that just so happens to have tapped into a major, underground western market, or is there something else, something darker and more embarrassing to acknowledge here about the culture in question? Is there, perhaps, an ever-increasing drive for greater stimulation, for the ultimate in shocking imagery and media? I remember 10 years ago when it still seemed scandalous to find graphic porn on the internet. Now not only can you find graphic porn with a freakin’ Google search, you can easily find all manner of images and videos of the worst kinds of torture, rape, mutilation, you name it. By the time that the Daniel Pearl abduction and subsequent execution/beheading happened, I not only knew that it would hit the internet, I knew two or three sites that were most likely to have the video posted, within hours. With that sort of real-life horror to compete against, could it be that filmmakers have felt pressure to up the ante to keep pace? What does a horror filmmaker do to compete with an actual beheading caught on camera? Or a video of someone being set on fire (for real)? More disturbing than that, why is it that an effort to emulate such acts in cinema will almost assuredly find an eager audience? Why do I want to be shocked, offended, repulsed? I don’t think this line of questioning is unique to the “torture porn” subgenre; people were asking similar questions when Universal’s Frankenstein came out. With each generation, the body count, the amount of flesh shown, the level of violence depicted has increased. What do you do when you’re at the limit of the depiction of physical violence in a movie? You have to up the level of psychological torture to get through to audiences. When Frankenstein came out, there was a massive backlash. How could anyone make such a movie, some asked. By the time Halloween came out, people generally saw Frankenstein as a classic, but not really all that scary. By the time Saw came out, Halloween was seen as a classic but not really all that scary. Nowadays, we have Hostel and Miike films like Audition and Ichi the Killer; it used to be that horror films were competing to show the most fake blood. Now they’re trying to depict the most mental and emotional anguish along with the physical pain.
My prediction is that more of the shocking stuff will find its way into the mainstream, and so the pioneers, the trailblazing horror filmmakers will have to find a way to get people’s attention, and they will continue to push the envelope to do so. In Scrapbook, the action and dialogue is mostly ad-libbed, and the lead male (who has abducted the lead female) rapes a woman and steps away for a moment, only to return and urinate on the woman. Unscripted. Real urine. With the willing consent of both actors, in the interest of making the film as realistic as possible. This sort of thing (available as a Watch Instantly selection on Netflix!) would of course never fly in the theaters…but then again, fifteen years ago, do you think people would have said the same thing about Hostel? Fifteen, ten, five years from now, is it possible that we’ll have movies like Scrapbook in theaters? Is it possible that the legendary snuff film will emerge as the final frontier for underground horror films?
The preceding random neural firings were brought to you by Peppermint Schnaaps and the letter D.
So it seems to be an obvious enough synthesis that it precipitated out of the culture, as it were, in more than one place. I’m just one of the hundred monkeys. So it’s a relatively new term–it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, after all–but I thinks it’s become pretty well understood.