Of course, now that I’m thinking about it, illegal violence is not necessarily the way to measure a propensity for violence. That WWII Generation are probably the most violent, way more so than mine. How do you like that, Tom Brokaw?
That wasn’t sex, though. Just topless Jamie Lee.
You could think of the later Freddy and Jason movies as a transition between classic slasher films and modern torture porn. I think spoke- has the difference pegged. In classic horror, the heroes are the people who are trying to survive the scary situation, and the monster is… well… the monster. In torture porn, the hero is the monster, and the victims are basically just a plate of cookies that you’re waiting for the monster to eat in new and interesting ways.
Actually, violent crime is currently on the uptick. However, the casue appears to be demographic:
So all those “boomlet” kids who fueled the success of Toys’R’Us a few years back are now entering their crime years. Isn’t that just darling?
No debate on “torture porn” is complete without linking to Vern.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was given an X, not for one any one scene, but for the overall tone of the movie. In Britain, some violent movies were rejected for “nihilism.”
There’s no need to go declaring these things illegal, but the MPAA could definitely pull its head out of its ass and start cracking down so you can only find this crap in your video store. Fuck, have you SEEN Hostel II? Anyone can take their 5-year-old to see that shit and that’s ok with them. The MPAA has definitely gotten way way WAY more lenient on gore in recent years. Back in 1986, I can remember reading my Fangoria magazine about Friday the 13th Part VI, and how much stuff they had to cut. One scene had to be deleted because it showed “too much blood on a wall.” Compare that movie to the sickening The Hills Have Eyes remake to see just how far the R-rating pedulum has swung.
Eli Roth is a talentless one-trick pony and it amazes me that he’s become one of those rare celebrity directors who makes the talk show circuit. He’s stated that he watched the Daniel Pearl execution video over and over for inspiration and talks about what actress he’d like to put in his movies to be tortured and killed. What a swine. Arrested development much?
I think most of the recent movies have a different, un-rated version for the home video market,[really deep voice] ‘with scenes too intense for theatres’.[/rdv]
Wether these bits would have passed the MPAA or even if they were ever submitted is another question.
And ensuring that the rest of us never quite…stacked up.
It seems like another difference is that the older slashers had a predator theme, with the monster chasing down the victims, or pouncing on them from cover. Either way, the monster was looking for a kill.
This is flatly untrue. The founding fathers wrote the First Amedment to protect newspapers against censorship for political reasons; they never even considered pornography. If they’d had any idea what kind of junk the First would be used to justify these days, they’d probably have written a much more specific amendment.
Now as to the OP, the last horror movie I saw was I Know What You Did Last Summer. I detested that one, and every one released since then looks even worse. Bluntly, love is the right means of relations between human beings and there’s something wrong with an audience relentlessly cheering a torturer. With that said, I’m far more concerned about the people who celebrate the real torture of innocent people in Iraq than those who celebrate fake torture in movie theaters.
Sez you. Seems to me that if the Founders had been of a mind to permit censorship for any kind of speech, they could easily have made the First Amendment longer and less elegant than it is. I think they meant just what they said.
You know, if the CIA is gonna be using extreme interrogation methods, I see a potential source of government revenue here . . .
Cheap porn and horror have a lot in common, especially when it comes to fluids. But so do tear-inducing melodramas.
Saw the documentary S&man a few months ago. It follows three torture-pornographers- one campy and business-minded(Bill Zebub), one quasi-goth responsible for the infamous August Underground series, and one who’s made a series of verité stalk-and-kill flicks called the S&man series. These all make Hostel look like Scream (which is relatively tame, more comedy than horror). Though oddly, it was the third filmmaker, the one who used the least violence (the movies were set up with him stalking a girl p.o.v. style, abducting her then killing her, usually through strangulation or hanging. Less blood than an action movie) wast he creepiest and may have actually been stalking women in real life.
One of the scream queens seemed to think her movies were helping sickos exorcise their demons.
Footage from some of the very first faux snuff films was included- re-enactments of famous executions, made in the late 1800s.
I’m still forming my opinions about all this. I love horror movies, but can’t always define what makes me entertained (e.g. Hostel) vs. disgusted (e.g. The Hills Have Eyes Remake). And although I’m all for freedom of expression and all that, I hate the idea of people (okay, guys) getting off on torture porn.
At the same time, it’s wrong to think these flicks are fodder for sadists. As Carol J. Clover pointed out in the doc, viewers are just as likely to identify with the victims. In fact, in the case of the August Underground guy, every single person who wrote to him to ask to be in his movies wanted to play a victim.
Well, of course they didn’t: pornography wasn’t invented until the middle of the twentieth century, when Hugh Hefner amazed people with the idea of depicting nudity in visual images. It had never occurred to anyone in the 1700s that words or images could be used for prurient images.
And Trading Places may not have shown sex, but there were at least two topless-women-in-bed scenes that strongly implied it.
Daniel
They also didn’t intend it to apply to movies, telephone conversations, the Internet or anything else that’s been invented since the 1700’s. Should those be subjected to censorship by your logic ?
On the other hand…boobs are real. Jason Voorhees’ victims are latex and food coloring. We’re not watching people getting chopped up; we’re watching people pretending to be chopped up.
Personally, though, I like 'em both…all the grisly, depraved murders, all the wildly explicit, gooey, sex. Then I turn off the TV, go to work, buy groceries, shop for a birthday present for my sister on eBay. Just like a normal person.
Hey, I like hot sauce and ice cream, but I don’t want the one anywhere near the other.
I am against censorship, period. But I would never date a guy who watched and enjoyed these kind of movies. And I would really think seriously about even being friends with someone who watched this kind of garbage. I think these movies are just wildly and frighteningly misogynistic, and the people who make them, along with the people who get into them and enjoy them, have something off going on. I do not mind horror, per se, but these movies are about enjoying women being brutally tortured and treated as objects. It’s disgusting, and I think the words “torture porn” are very apt.
Porn is a lot older than the 1950s.
A lot.
And Ben Franklin probably owned a huge stash of it.
Well, no, they didn’t. They had no concept of those things. I’m fairly sure at some point in the future, newspapers will be beamed directly into our minds. Everyone would think you were nuts if you tried to write that in a ‘constitution’ today.
I would like to add that I’m glad the founding fathers were not more specific (probably for this very reason), because I love porn, horror, and Saw was a great movie.
Now I’m confused as to whether this is a staged “fantasy whooshing”…