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New horror shows trend
The Advocate
Horror movies weren’t always gore filled hack-fests. No, the original horror movies relied heavily on psychological terror and dramatic tension to scare the audience.
However, like anything, the audience became bored by these tactics, and demanded something more intense. By the seventies, movies such as George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” were being called exploitative and gruesome by many critics, while still demonstrating an intelligent social commentary.
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For the most part, movies didn’t progress past this by much. The “Evil Dead” series expanded on this, and there were some more obscure foreign films that appeared, such as the infamous Italian film “Cannibal Holocaust”, which were simply titled as “cannibal exploitation.”
Flash forward to present day, and there are a laundry list of movies that feature mutilation, torture, and breaking the bounds of all social decency as the selling point. Movies such as the Hostel series, the Saw series, “Wolf Creek,” etc, fit into this category.
These movies are so outrageous and over-the-top, that critics have given them their own genre: torture porn.
The title of the genre is a bit misleading, as these films do not feature explicit sex. Rather, they feature explicit violence, which parallels the gratuitous quality of pornographic films that exploit explicit sex acts.
Many filmmakers have, naturally, taken great offense to the label of torture porn. Stephen King said, of “Hostel: Part II”, one of the many movies being labeled as torture porn, that “sure it makes you uncomfortable, but good art should make you uncomfortable.”
Why come up with a shocking new label for these movies? They are simply exploitation films, which is nothing new to the world of cinema. They are not unique.
In fact, labeling these movies as torture porn seems to serve no other purpose then to sensationalize what should be a trend that needs to be looked at critically and seriously. By labeling it with such a weighted name, critics have already polarized public opinion and ended the discussion before it even started. It seems irresponsible to give these films such a broad and undeserving title, when there was never a necessity to do so.
So is torture porn a big deal? Well of course. It is arguably desensitizing viewers to things that should be blatantly horrific, and it always begs the question of where movies can go now to shock people. On the other hand, the same can be asked of almost any element of film today, such as swearing, sex, etc.
So did violence really need it’s own category? Or were reviewers and critics just trying to sensationalize a topic that they knew the general public would easily get behind?
I’m inclined to say the latter.
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