Torture-Porn Doesn’t Captivate Audiences

It’s a bit sad that the ‘Torture-Porn’ genre ever got any traction in the first place, but such is the evolution of things. With ‘Captivity’ doing so poorly in its debut this weekend (and the last installment of 'Hostel' doing so badly) it looks like audiences have had their fill of movies about gruesome and slow ways to kill someone that you (or an antagonist who represents you in a movie) have kidnapped -- that is, until the next iteration of this plot that’s just different enough we have to see it.

The names being invented to describe this new sub-genre are far more engaging than the movies themselves. I like the combo of: gore + porn = ‘Gorn’. It’s not as pretty looking as torture-porn but it’s more fun -- short, sweet, and doesn't require that you type the word 'torture' so much -- nice.

'Captivity' may not have done well, but this Pandora’s box has been opened and there’s no turning back. Each year from now on we can look forward to the next installment(s) of mindless, pointless, and almost plot-less excursions into the juvenile fantasy (posing as motion picture entertainment) of kidnapping and torture. And every year the blogosphere will object, but less and less vehemently as time passes, until, years from now, no one bothers to mention that the latest gorn is nothing more than an exploration of drugging, kidnapping, torture, and rape.

We find ourselves undergoing the inevitable decline that awaits all societies (in the past or future, on this planet or another) whose members possess that double-edged attribute known as Human Nature. I don't suppose anyone is to blame for that. Whatta you gonna do?

Grim Future

According to Mikita Brottman, a horror movie scholar (educated at Oxford no less), the current splatter fests are no different from the ones from yesteryear except they aren't played campy anymore.

Brottman cites a notorious 1980 exploitation flick called Cannibal Holocaust, along with Sola, by the art-house director Pier Paolo Pasolini. And starting back in the 1960s, Brottman says, Herschell Gordon Lewis was cranking out makeshift B pictures like Blood Feast.

"Exactly the same things happen," Brottman says. "People have their legs cut off and tongues pulled out and eyeballs exploding -- but they seem really ridiculous and laughable, whereas the movies now seem really visceral and shocking. But the same things are being done to the body."

I have to agree. In general, movies today have plot elements that are similar to cutting edge horror movies from decades past, but today's movies have become so serious and their depictions so heartless, the fun has been replaced with what seems like nothing more than an implied warning -- 'We live in a world where this could happen to you'...

I'm a big fan of the 'Abominable Dr. Phibes' series which starred a brilliantly wicked Vincent Price as a man seeking revenge for the death of his wife. The Phibes movies featured some of the goriest possible killings but they were carried out with a wink and a nod by a passionate organ-playing Dr. Phibes who wore thick make-up and a flowing cape -- not the kind of movie character you could take too seriously. Price's portrayal was intelligent, hammed-up and a lot of fun for the kids -- it was always clear he was 'play acting'. Phibes may have been abominable, but his movies were not an abomination.

In the sequence from 'Hostel II' (clip available on the same page as the NPR story) a girl (played by Heather Matarazzo) is suspended upside down and naked, with her hands bound behind her back. She has been prepped for torture by two attendants who, after making sure all is just so, leave her to await the arrival of the torturer (a person who has paid a lot of money for the privilege). Before they leave they turn the lights off, which induces screams of terror from the victim. The sequence does not have a dramatic presentation, plays real, is typical for this kind of movie, and makes me wonder what the future holds for the genre.

It's easy to trash the directors who craft such scenes (and a lot bloggers are enthusiastically voicing their disgust with the Splat Pack), but the fact is these movies make huge profits and producers can't be blamed for meeting the demands of the market. It's probably better to question the psychology of the audiences which make these movies so popular. Whatever the societal cause may be, the effect seems clear -- we need increasingly violent and gory movies to immunize ourselves from the very real threats we see in the daily news. These movies mitigate the audience's dread of the real world.

Will anything stop the escalation? Of course, we all know, nothing will. It doesn't seem like entertainment anymore, and there's a good reason for that.

Boiling Point

The possible effect the Virginia Tech shooting may have on the future of the movie industry is currently a hot topic in the blogosphere. Reactions cover the gamut, from the measured consideration of Michael Cieply at NYT to the overblown, righteous foot-stomping of Nikki Finke.

Cieply suggests (in an admirably neutral way) that the events at VT may cause emotionally battered audiences to avoid gore/torture fests like the upcoming 'Hostel II'. I don't think any such thing will happen -- I think the box office for 'Hostel II' will be very good, and (if it is) I fully expect an onslaught of blog editorials questioning the sensitivity of a society which would flock, nay, stampede to the nearest theater to see people being tortured so soon after a national tragedy involving the shooting of innocent people. (However, one wonders when is a good time to see a movie featuring innocent people being tortured. If not a few weeks after a shooting...when? Eight weeks, three months)?

Cieply cites Dr. Kaplan, a former film exec and thinker on movies, as saying "Famously, 9/11 was supposed to be the end of irony," he said. "If anything, irony has blossomed."

The above still is from director Uwe Boll's upcoming 'Postal' (clip via Bollbashers.com). In the sequence a commercial jet crashes into a skyscraper. This, coming less than six years after 9/11, is perhaps more than ironic, and whatever it is, it's in full blossom.

People have short memories. Our minds and spirits have become dulled by the violence of war, the almost daily deaths caused by suicide bombers, and yes, the random school shootings. People want to be entertained, to get away from the news of the day and see a movie. If that movie contains acts of violence of the same type found in the headlines we're trying to escape, I guess you can chalk yet another one up for irony.

If 'Hostel II' is a hit, who will be more insensitive -- the producers for making such a movie or the audience for seeing it? Art cannot help but imitate, while being a diversion from, life. I think this is the nature of things. People want to get away, and who could blame them.