No you don’t. But it would finish Great Debates, if you (all) never did.
Most unseemly? Have you never seen a nectarine - unpeeled?
You see, this is the bit I find difficult to understand.
I still don’t think “Saw” counts as torture porn. It’s an intelligent, well plotted movie.
I’m not into it myself, but I would liken it to a roller-coaster ride. People would not like to be in a real out-of-control vehicle or accident, but they like being scared as if they were - knowing all the while that they are perfectly safe.
Similarly, some people like gruesome slasher movies, because they are scary/horrifying - yet they are just watching a movie.
Why? As others mentioned…rollercoasters, haunted houses, suspense thrillers…all of them exercise your extreme emotions. I also happen to appreciate the imagination that goes into a quality kill that has never been depicted on film before. I like witnessing the extremes to which normal people can stretch their imagination in areas where they probably (hopefully!) have no personal experience.
This is not a pat answer, as the subject is sophisticated and subject to much debate. We humans have urges, be they sexual or violent, that transgress the rules we set for ourselves in a civil society. By looking upon them, we can be purged or cleansed of these taboos and can live more comfortably amid the rules. This summary is extremely pat, so I would definitely urge you to read the linked article.
I’m not the one to answer, really. I hate torture porn and I avoid horror in general as much as possible, with a few exceptions for really good movies.
Regarding child porn, it’s not really comparable to normal video. Granted, I don’t know much about it, but it’s not something you can really fictionalize with special effects; either the kid is getting diddled or they aren’t. It’s something real that actually happens. A better comparison than torture porn is snuff films. I guarantee you if you told an audience watching Hostel or Saw that what happened on screen really happened, you’d get an audience full of revolted people running out of the theater and maybe calling the police.
Conversely, look at Japan, and anime, with so many animated series and movies featuring sexualized teens and pre-teens. There’s clearly nobody being harmed in the making of a cartoon, so perversities get explored more often. Lolicon (lolita complex) is a much bigger thing in Japan than it is here, although I’m quite willing to wager it’s not exactly outwardly socially acceptable.
Mind, I’m not arguing that this is acceptable and not perverse, only that torture porn isn’t as reviled as child porn at least in part because it’s purely fiction and the audience knows at all times that it’s not real.
I find the Saw movies annoying, actually, because I dislike the “superintelligent sociopath” trope. And Hostel bugged me because the whole “ultrasecret society with hundreds of members and employees” cliché is irritating. The Hills Have Eyes also put me off because any reasonably well-trained and equipped platoon should be able to wipe them out easily, but they always send in easily-panicked idiots.
I watch these movies when they appear on cable but I don’t enjoy them!
Such masochism is unacceptable. You must stop before Jesus kills another kitten.
Sickness like this is rampant. Just the other day, I saw a roomful of kids laughing hysterically and clapping their hands with glee when a poor little pussycat (with a speech impediment!) was crushed beneath a steam roller! Squashed flat, while their sadistic little eyes gleamed with merriment.
All I can say is, that fuckin’ canary better have a heavy equipment union card, or I am going to be really outraged!
I’m the same way. I like my horror films to be believable. When the concept is really far-fetched, I can’t buy into the terror.
Oh, what the hell, I’ll bite.
I enjoy “torture porn”. I like watching movies such as *Hostel *and Saw. However, I much prefer the earlier 80s and 90s examples of the oeuvre, such as the Friday the 13th series, or the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
It’s not because I enjoy watching people get hacked apart into itty-bitty pieces, however. This genre is called “horror” for a reason- because it’s horrific. I enjoy the experience of seeing such a horrific situation resolved and over with at the end of the movie, even if it didn’t exactly have a “happy” ending.
Plus, I must admit, I love putting myself into the protagonist/victim’s position, and asking myself, “Now, how would I get out of THAT situation?”
I don’t really respect the term “torture porn”. Porn is a good thing, torture is a BAD thing. The phrase makes no sense.
Sure it does, just…a bit of a convoluted sort of sense. With regular porn, the plot of the movie only exists as a framework for the sex. You watch the movie for the sex, not the plot. With torture porn, the plot of the movie only exists as a framework for the torture scenes. You watch the movie for the torture, not the plot.
I’ll admit it’s probably not the best descriptor of Saw, since I understand that to have an engaging plot, but there’s plenty of movies that fall in this category. House of 1000 Corpses, for example.
Count me as another one that doesn’t enjoy these kinds of films and therefore doesn’t watch them. The closest I could come to seeing a film like that is something like Se7en where the torture and nastiness isn’t actually depicted, but alluded to, and isn’t there simply for effect but as an exploration or religously themed criminal insanity. It’s not just movies either. I was reading one of the Maquis de Sade’s books and got to the point where he was talking about sawing the limbs off of a conscious prositute with a rusty blade and thought to myself “why am I reading this?”, and promptly stopped.
The reason I can’t enjoy torture porn is the knowledge that all these films which are considered far fetched and fantasy feature acts that probably have actually happened in some form or another to real people at some time or another, and whilst I’m not empathising with the actors because what’s happening to them isn’t real, all I can think of are the people that HAVE had such things done to them and it was real, and I don’t want to voluntarily invite those sorts of thoughts into my head.
Woo - big generalisation. *All *porn is good? Snuff and kiddie to name but two?
I’ve never heard this idea before, so I don’t know how much acceptance it has from anybody.
Well, who develops the technology? Isn’t technology going to reflect the mores of the people who develop it, rather than advancing them on its own? Life and people have evolved over billions of years, any morality we’ve come up with - and I’d argue that a lot of our morality is self-serving more than plain old ‘good,’ - is more recent and more complicated. I think it only makes sense that technology we develop might evolve faster than we do.
Are we now retroclassifying those as “torture porn?” I know that’s where the genre has its roots, but even from my limited horror movie experience I’d say those kinds of movies are supposed to be something different.
Yeah, that’s exactly what Lightnin’ meant. Don’t forget porn featuring animals, that shit rocks too.
:rolleyes:
If done right, yeah.
**Illuminatiprimus **and Bryan Ekers: oh dear - have I been wooshed? I’ve always wanted to be.