Enjoying horror films - why do we (or don't we)?

Started because of a back and forth I had w/HI DERE on a different thread, quoted here:

semi-facetious question: how do you reconcile being a fan of horror movies with disliking things that are unpleasant to watch?

― smoking cigarette shades? it doesn't even make any sense. (HI DERE), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:15 PM (36 minutes ago)

this was the wrong kind of unpleasant to watch - sloppy code word for unenjoyable or in most cases boring and dull.

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:19 PM (32 minutes ago)

that does raise an interesting question that i have often wondered about re: why some people are wired to enjoy those moments of cringing "aaaaggggghhhh om my god aggghghhghh" horror moments and others just aren't. ie: i totally understand why hostel II (which i will argue is a really well done film) is just plain unwatchable to a huge group of people, and i am curious about why i react differently, while still NOT enjoying the torture scenes per se (which is why the "torture porn" genre grouping makes me really really angry).

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:24 PM (27 minutes ago)

sorry that was totally unfocused, what i am wondering is what makes me react positively to scenes that viscerally bother and disgust me - its like some second level emotion that i dont understand, where the pleasure comes from enduring the unpleasantness somehow.

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:28 PM (23 minutes ago)

none of which alters the fact that "Big Fan" is a big steaming pile of poo

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:28 PM (23 minutes ago)

start another thread so I don't dilute your scorn of "Big Fan" with ongoing allegations that you totally love torture porn, just admit it

― smoking cigarette shades? it doesn't even make any sense. (HI DERE), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:31 PM (21 minutes ago)

so i started this thread. wondering if anyone else has wrestled w/this question, esp since it seems like one of the bigger genres that non-fans expect justification for

discussion of the vagaries of "torture porn" can go on this parallel thread Torture Porn (a film thread) and if the two threads get too samey i'll just kill this one

too late, I locked the other one already

btw i searched for a thread on this but the only thing that was kind of similar was a thread started by squirrel_police and i just couldn't bring myself to bump that

xpost oh srsly?

well ok then, i guess part of this kind of strikes to the heart of the whole torture porn genre term (which is a term i think is badly used 95% of the time). the connotation of torture porn seems to misunderstand the feeling that i am talking about above - it is a dismissive statement about how people engage with what is going on onscreen via oversimplification.

I can point to the first time i remember having this feeling as well - 9 years old, watching "The Wrath Of Khan" during the scene with the eel bug going into the dudes ear. obv not a horror film, and certainly not torture porn, but i remember how for the first time there was a palpable physical feeling of horror and revulsion, but somehow it was exhilarating to survive it. to this day its prob the only scene from that movie i remember.

I, for one, enjoy horror movies for the same reason I enjoy other fantasy - it allows me an opportunity to experience feelings I wouldn't otherwise - here, in particular, of dread, fear, shock, awe, and disgust - in an entirely safe setting. These feelings are good for a rush.

So, xpost.

Oversimplification how? I most often see it used when talking about movies that go to relatively extensive and sadistic lengths to frame ongoing violence against a person or people, whether it's slow lingering shots of a madman freezing a woman's hand and then methodically clipping off her frostbitten fingers one by one (the ever-charming "I Know Who Killed Me", which I turned off precisely when it got to this scene) or extended cannon-fodder sequences where waves of henchmen are dispatched in increasingly brutal fashion (the ever-awesome "Bad Boys II", which I didn't think would top the car chase where the bad guys were throwing cadavers at the good guys until they got to the gun/bomb battle at the mansion). There is a certain element of salacious glamorization of the act which fits in very well with the label, including the negative connotations around both the words "torture" and "porn". When people film these things, they're at least partially banking on the viewers getting off on transgressive feelings while watching them, so it seems like a very fair label to me.

torture porn: I know it when I see it.

I enjoy a lot of horror material in general - much as with other genres (sci-fi, westerns, noir, etc.) I enjoy the way genre conventions can be used to grapple with larger socio-political issues and ideas; the way they transpose real world ideas and emotions onto these completely unreal/fantastic templates. and then there's a pure slapstick/comic element to a lot of ridiculous gore films, which are just fun. supernatural dream killer who spouts one liners while cartoonishly murdering naked teenagers? sounds hilarious! lovingly filmed scenes of the goings-on in some loony's overly gruesome torture chamber? eh, not so interesting.

xp

the torture stuff (saws, hostels, martys, ils, wolf creek, devils rejects, etc.) does hit a weirder note than straight horror though, many of these films aren't scary in the traditional sense. i mean the creeping dread has some shared similarity, but many of these spend little or no time on the jump-scares that are sort of coin for the genre.

xposts

i dont think the impulse ppl have to test themselves against their fears in a safe controlled way is partic strange or bothersome - idk its kinda the same pleasure as riding rollercosters or bungee jumping or w/e.

The first Saw had plenty of jump-scares!

Well, it had like 2, that was plenty for me.

I think the "torture porn" label is partly a response to the elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque sequences that became popular post-Saw (? probably), because these kinds of films seem to have a different rhythm & rationale to yr Slasher movies, which are suspense-driven more than disgust-driven.

Sorry I realise I just repeated what john said while I was typing. Modern torture porn flicks feel different to old school gore movies as well I think, tho I'd be harder pressed to say why.

i think the issue i have with the term is mostly to do with the use of "porn", which operates on a much more ahem functional level where the pleasure is more direct. in other words, using porn to describe this stuff implies that the enjoyment is contained in the visual, which is not true for me.

and i think that it carries an explicit message of shame and wrongness within it as well.

Actually, I think the first "Saw" works so well precisely because so much of it is based off of suspense; the scenes from that movie that I really appreciated, like the reverse bear trap sequence and the mindfuck reveal near the end after Carey Elwes "escapes", were great because of the escalating sense of dread they inspired, and that was driven almost entirely from pacing and being terrified of the horrific thing that was about to happen ANY SECOND NOW rather than extended grossoutness.

another movie that seems to complicate matters is "Cabin Fever", which removes the personal antagonist completely in lieu of infection as the torturer, but is still full of horrifying visual moments.

Although I don't see myself as a horror fan at all, I realize I have seen a shitload of horror films. I love Raimi because he injects humour in it. I love Paranormal Activity and BW Project because it is fear of the unseen/known.
Not that big of a fan when it comes to torture porn. Then again I saw Saw and Hostel -are those torture porn anyway -and enjoyed it.

My neighbour is VERY into horror.

the ever-charming "I Know Who Killed Me"

this is an interesting film to cite (given that I have actually seen it, unlike, say Hostel II lolz). the scenes Dan mentions were just terribly done - lurid, humorless, gratuitous and unnecessary. they didn't have any reason to be there, and they way they were filmed would indicate that they were there to titillate the viewer, to revel in their "transgressive" nature (ie "ooh! can't believe they did that!"). which is kinda a stupid reason for anything to be in a film. I mean, I don't see any point in really pushing against censors when it comes to this kind of thing - really there aren't any effective censors to even be pushing against. America loves violence! It just seems kinda pointless.

xp

I know people who can't watch (non-satirical) horror movies because of some kind of innate squeamishness.

Then I know people who can't watch them because they have been through some seriously fucked up shit in their lives and it actually evokes a kind of PTSD response.

Then I know people who SHOULD have that PTSD thing going on but love horror movies anyway.

Myself-- it seems to come down to one main thing which is that in books, music and films i LIKE TO BE MENACED. This tends to be an atmosphere thing as much as anything else, and specific shock images don't really do much for me. I would probably hate to watch the above-referenced frozen hand scene. But I can't get enough of things like that goddamn raincoated dwarf in Don't Look Now. Something like Suspiria, the appeal for me is not in the bit where the girl falls into a giant thicket of razorwire or the sight of the guide dog ripping out its owner's throat but more in the palpable MENACE that the movie exudes, the feeling that the film itself wants to hurt me...

Lol. I guess I like porn and horror bec both are about climax/release.

i think the saw movies are kinda interesting in terms of "torture porn" bcuz theyre so much more ambivalent abt who the audience is supposed to be sympathizing with. w. hostel or martrys the pleasure is almost masochistic - the liberation of victomhood &c - its a big part of what makes them hard 2 watch.

haha reminds me one of my best friends cant/wont watch gross-out comedies bcuz he gets too painfully embarrassed on behalf of those films protagonists.

using porn to describe this stuff implies that the enjoyment is contained in the visual, which is not true for me.

it also sort of implies that tons of mainstream cinema isn't primarily a visceral, unreflective pleasure, and I don't think that stands up for a second. It's a handy shorthand label in a discussion like this tho.

My neighbour keeps saying I have to watch the rest of the Saw sequels.

Why do so many ppl react to horror like metal? Like you have to be 15 to watch/listen to it.

uff, I have 0 desire to see the Saw sequels even though I was shocked by how much I liked the first one

NV in re to porn: I sort of disagree w that statement.

the saw franchise is def one that has wandered far off the mark at this point, but i think the first 2 maybe are pretty tight little films (despite the terrible acting in the first one). and i mostly mention them because the first saw is sort of the general touchstone for where this stuff came from (although i would say there has been a much longer weird evolution towards this stuff over the years).

Also why do so many adult men I know react to romcoms like they're 15?

How do you mean nath? I was saying I think porn is more a method of watching and you can apply to most movies in the right circumstances.

i approach horror as any cinematic art, and generally prefer ones that appeal to the emotions and the intellect as well as the gut, mostly because i'm yet to see a film that's scared me

anyone who thinks there's a film that might scare me, please let me know

Particularly gruesome horror movies I feel are like restaurants/food carts that are maniacal about making one menu item, and doing it as well as they possibly can, because that's what they're good at, which is much more honorable than trying to accomodate a larger customer base.

Some people don't appreciate a cart that only sells tamales, and would rather go to Baja Fresh. Fine, but if you want some bitchin tamales, get it from the cart.

Probably this sense of naughtiness maybe. Both genres were/are outside the mainstream. So there is that

re: truly scary movies, a lot of people have nominated Jesus Camp and I can't think of a one to top it.

the 1st saw is a rad movie in a lot of ways but its hardly even a 'horror' movie its like sadist noir or a murderous mystery. again i think its interesting bcuz it starts w/ a p clear object for the audience - were stuck in a room w/ these dudes - but it quickly becomes ambivalent abt them and their relationship to the audience. the pleasures and the pov of the movie shift around in a way that horror movies really dont

something like men behind the sun (which i thought was p loathsome) seems like a better progenitor

porn and torture porn both feature intense close-ups of biological functions that serve no discernible narrative purpose. I think that's where the short-hand term comes in handy for so many people (including me) - they see something that aesthetically resembles porn in the way it is shot and presented, and it has no context beyond its own empty, mechanical nature.

really about the closest I come to appreciating "torture porn" is watching Moral Orel, which starts out as a cartoony ha-ha Claymation series lampooning the hypocrisy in modern-day conservative Christianity and slowly morphs into a wholly harrowing, at times terrifying nihilistic rant on the bleakness of modern existence

you may think I'm exaggerating but watch the second season closer "Nature" followed by the third season, particularly the first 5 episodes ("Numb" in particular is kind of terrifying and easily the most uncomfortable thing I've watched on television)

lj: dont really know how to recommend anything because i think it depends on how you define "scary" - there are def things that evoke the usual jump scares, but for me the scary stuff is the stuff that is sort of emotionally devastating, and since i know you have seen irreversible if that doesnt fit your definition im not sure where to send you

re: porn, That's backwards! In porn it is actually the narrative that serves no discernible narrative purpose!

re: morel oral -- did you watch it through? it's pretty anti-nihilistic by the end.

(granted I don't think the emotional impact of Moral Orel works as well if you don't watch the previous seasons, as it pretty much escalates from haha grossout satire into oh shit this is fucking horrifying and I might cry satire over its run; it's probably the best-plotted show ever broadcast on Adult Swim)

xp: haven't gotten all the way to the end, but I know what happens and yeah, I agree with your assessment but HOLY SHIT the road it takes to get there is just YIKES

the closest i've come to appreciating 'torture porn' is Peter Jackson's Braindead (aka Dead Alive) which is as y'all know fucking hilarious

looking at the IMDB of Jesus Camp i gotta say that does look damn scary although documentaries are a different matter - Africa Addio has a similar 'oh FUCK am I really seeing this' horror to it but it isn't a 'scary movie'; it's just fucked-up real life

irreversible didn't scare me, but it did remove my breath at times - it was pretty emotionally devastating but not in a way that made me want to cower behind a sofa

how does Moral Orel compare to Frisky Dingo?

porn and torture porn both feature intense close-ups of biological functions that serve no discernible narrative purpose. I think that's where the short-hand term comes in handy for so many people (including me) - they see something that aesthetically resembles porn in the way it is shot and presented, and it has no context beyond its own empty, mechanical nature.

― Get the Flaps Out (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 5:43 PM (1 minute ago)

see though this is exactly what i am getting at, there is a further context and (non-direct) narrative purpose in the stuff i appreciate - martyrs or wolf creek are both incredibly brutal and very intimately shot (for lack of a better term), but are def working on a higher level than what you are ascribing to it

Frisky Dingo is more consistently funny; Moral Orel is a better show in terms of storytelling and emotional impact.

actually lj wolf creek might be my best suggestion for you.

the long static shot of orel staring at the birds outside of his window @ the end of nature part 2 is one of the most affecting and disorienting things ive ever seen. and then the dedication to john cassavetes! yah the depths of cruel loneliness that show managed to depict is kinda horrifying esp in an episode like "sundays". i guess mb interesting to separate terrifying and horrifying

re: porn, That's backwards! In porn it is actually the narrative that serves no discernible narrative purpose!

I dunno what porn you're watching but as far as I can tell porn industry pretty much jettisoned any pretensions to narrative from at least the mid-90s onward.

also lolz about torture porn thread devolving into a discussion of Adult Swim

cool, aussie nastiness here we come

also cheers dan, FD is an all-time fave of mine so i'm pretty stoked for Moral Orel if that is all so - sounds like a much, much better version of Monkey Dust

Africa Addio (eng version: Africa Blood And Guts) is by far the most horrifying thing I have ever seen, fwiw

if you watch Africa Addio you have my blessing and my prayers

Braindead/Dead Alive isnt even really related to this stuff imo, most of what i am talking about works on a very bleak humor-free level. i think thats part of the difference with standard goregrind fare and the newer stuff (combined w/the advancements in realism in gore, i have no doubt that if blood feast had been made with todays tech and budget it would have been a very different and difficult film).

yeah I know Braindead isn't remotely the same, I was just advertising my general reluctance to watch 'torture porn' movies unless they're amusing and done with gallons of corn syrup

"I can tell porn industry pretty much jettisoned any pretensions to narrative from at least the mid-90s onward."

Is that what they mean by Brechtian filmmaking?

ha see, I know that "Dead/Alive" is all haha jokey and I still refuse to see it because I really really don't need to

rad horror movies that lj might like (not incl wolf creek which is great):

session 9. old fashioned atmospheric horror movie. really well shot/structured/paced. horror of the unknown terror of the dark stuff.

martyrs. its violent & french & (pseudo?) intellectual. also great art direction.

jeepers creepers. way better old skool horror throwback than even drag me to hell. great build-up & surprisingly solid characters but the last third is kinda bad.

hostel II. p thoughtful & visceral at once

there are a bunch others but really i guess we already have a thread for this

"the depths of cruel loneliness that show managed to depict is kinda horrifying"
Don't you find the backstory more horrifying? Scott Adsit at some point basically had to choose between severing relations with his religious sister or working on the show.

i cannot stress how impt it is for a horror movie to end well, btw - probably the #1 reason drag me to hell was so good

but ty lamp! :)

yeah but lj, if you made it through irreversible (def not trying to derail into a discussion of that film) i cant see why this stuff would make you hold back. also, there are def scenes in oldboy that edge into this territory

xpost also Lamps list very OTM, and obv we share similar tastes wrt this stuff

xxpost eh drag me to hell was ok

never thought I would want to watch morel orel

Saw 2 is my fav of the series (well the first 3, never made it past that) because it's like a horror-adventure and reminds me of Goonies.

LJ, also check out Cure and Pulse by Kyoshi Kurosawa. Really good psychological horror films and he's got really brilliant atmosphere and blocking. Cure and Martyrs are the only movies that have fucked with my head enough to ruin multiple nights of sleep.

btw can I also reiterate that I am never, ever, ever, EVER seeing the movie "Martyrs", like ever

In general, these movies are just not for me; I don't enjoy the way they deliver their scares and, on a deep lizard level, I cannot rationalize away the terror they inspire when I watch them.

oh, it's not a reluctance based on revulsion or the possibility of puking or w/e. i CAN watch it - but i generally regard most such films as tacky, gratuitous and not rly worth seeing - i.e. artless - it is an aesthetic, not a visceral choice

drag me to hell was vvv enjoyable and that is all i asked from it

oldboy does its brutal shit so, so well and with such genuine humanism <3 as does sympathy for lady vengeance

aha more recommendations! thank you, psych horror is probably the stuff most likely to really fuck me up - when a movie does so, i will let this thread know

I mean ffs, in HIGH SCHOOL I had nightmares from a wholly comical remake of "Night of the Living Dead" that I laughed at while I was watching it, I can't imagine what would happen if I watched some shit like "Martyrs" or even "Audition".

Is that what they mean by Brechtian filmmaking?

nothing's more Dogme 95 than no-budget porn amirite

need to goddamn watch audition

Dancer in the Dark was kind of emo-porn.

(for a while I thought that my issue with horror movies was that they weren't done Japanese-style, a la "The Ring" and "The Grudge" (and yes I am explicitly referencing the American remakes) but even those fucked me up after I really THOUGHT about them)

(btw both are still really bad-ass and if the originals are scarier there is no fucking way I'll be able to sit through them)

oh, it's not a reluctance based on revulsion or the possibility of puking or w/e. i CAN watch it - but i generally regard most such films as tacky, gratuitous and not rly worth seeing - i.e. artless - it is an aesthetic, not a visceral choice

ok see this is the sort of stuff that pisses me off. i have no problem with people like dan where it is not enjoyable, i totally understand and respect that, but just deciding in a vacuum that it is mostly artless? where does that supposition come from?

dude i'm talking about the stuff that every review claims is really schlocky and plotless, like saw - i wouldn't enjoy it BECAUSE it's not very good!

if the reviews are wrong please disabuse me; i am usually WELL up for watching challenging and viscerally extreme artistic statements

i mean i was talking exclusively about 'torture porn' which is quite a narrow and specialised band

Yeah, but most people would call Martyrs "torture porn" and artless is one thing that it is definitely not.

well for starters a bunch of people on this thread have already said pretty positive things about saw (my feelings are mixed). also faith in reviews can be pretty misguided, i would venture to say that (much like metal) horror films are generally approached at arms length with bias by a lot of professional reviewers, and that that prejudice is going to color the review.

xxpost

martyrs was the 1st movie since man bites dog to give me legit nightmares. probably sd this before but i find non-supernatural horror movies to be the most scary simply bcuz they strike at my irl fears so much more

again i think w/ a lot of "torture porn" theres a testing masochism @ work. dan i dont think its strange that some1 wouldnt be into that but shakey mo tbh is being kinda retarded in claiming that every shot needs to serve strict narrative purpose. also i think its dumb to act like movies are artless for trying to make u feel things

I think the explicit HORROR tag, particularly when combined with slasher tropes, is what gets to me; I sort of tolerated the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies because, while they were slasher flicks, they also had a really fucking cool narrative hook (if you sleep, you will die). I fucking LOVE the Resident Evil movies despite never playing the games and having zero interest in playing them. I also loved "Silent Hill" and "Zombieland" and "Sean of the Dead" ans "American Psycho". Basically, if you can downplay the slasher aspect of the movie and if your visuals are horrifying without lingering/dwelling on grossness (this is why "Feast" was unbearable btw, in addition to the acting), I can fuck with your movie. If you are basically doing homages to "Black Christmas" with 90-second shots on severed limbs and flying eyeballs etc, well then no, I am not fucking with your movie. If your concepts are deeper than that but still feature the lovingly-zoomed-in-on-a-severed-optic-nerve shots, I am not watching you ever, sorry.

xp: I would describe "Saw" in many ways and "plotless" is nowhere near that list of words; in fact, I gather the big problem with Saw as a franchise is that it's way too enamored of its unnecessarily convoluted and ponderous plots.

There was a straight-up quasi-snuff (fake) movie that has its own kind of artistry (the 'actor' is a horror-manga artist, and despite being shot on video, it has very striking imagery) but really the greatest thing about it was Charlie Sheen saw it, then reported it to the FBI.

hahahaha

yeah there is a direct to dvd company that specializes in what i would gladly call torture porn, and i guarantee that if you ever see one of their movies you will feel much more charitable towards this stuff.

that every shot needs to serve strict narrative purpose.

I didn't say this fwiw. But I realize framing another's position as an absolute is par for the course when attempting to undermine it.

lol sorry. every "close-up". i mean yah im exaggerating but its still a p dumb point - clearly the lovingly crafted shots of physical torture/pain/evisceration arent furthering the story (always) but its p clear they serve a strong aesthetic/thematic purpose. i mean its totally fair to dislike that aesthetic but the parallel you were trying to draw with actual porn is bogus imo

fwiw, the wholly objectionable scene in "I Know Who Killed Me" did serve a narrative purpose, namely it established that Good Lindsey had been captured by a psycho who was torturing the shit out of her and also establishes the physical link between Good Lindsey and Bad Lindsey when parts of Bad Lindsey start falling off at random later in the movie (allegedly, as I said I stopped watching so I never made it to that part); my objection was that it was really fucking gross and not something I particularly needed or wanted to see

dammit guys i kinda put my foot in it there and badmouthed stuff i really haven't seen enough of to have judged

i mean coming from a guy who reps for gaspar noe this has gotta sound pretty hypocritical

will be on martyrs + other such movies, and will not describe 'saw' as plotless - but in theory i'd rather avoid movies that are *just* about unpleasant things happening to people - there have gotta be artistic statements beyond 'gore' imo

and will not use 'artless' again, bad word - i at least need to investigate this aesthetic more fully

er, establishes the basis for the physical link blah blah blah, ie it wouldn't make sense for Bad Lindsey's fingers to fall off if we hadn't seen Good Lindsey's pruned in a previous scene

"i guarantee that if you ever see one of their movies you will feel much more charitable towards this stuff."

I dunno -- the third movie in this series is kind of charming slapstick mostly.
Any given season of 24 is usually far more offensive w/r/t torture porn than anything mentioned in this thread. It's disgusting precisely because they attempt to justify it in some way -- it tries to make you feel good about it.

The restaurant equivalent would be "we use no trans-fatty fats" on their 1k calorie lardburger or something.

er, establishes the basis for the physical link blah blah blah, ie it wouldn't make sense for Bad Lindsey's fingers to fall off if we hadn't seen Good Lindsey's pruned in a previous scene

lol yeah yr right. perhaps I should've specified that it served a narrative purpose but that narrative was totally nonsensical and retarded and was clearly just a flimsy pretext to showcase Lindsay Lohan being tortured.

also granted that most reviews will be predisposed against ultraviolent movies for reasons of moral taste - reasons i do not share - it's a goddamn movie, they can do what they want

Really good thread. My feelings on this stuff are so convoluted and tightly packed* that I'll have to ponder for a few hours.

* like a wadded up ball of aluminum foil that I want to flatten out without tearing -- nearly impossible

oh to clarify philip, i wasn't talking about the movie you cited, there is a pure ugly psycho movie company that i cant remember the name of right now that is full on purposeless brutality

lemme guess you tuned into some random frequency and there it was

enjoy the gun in yr stomach

- I don't like jump scares
- I don't like torture porn
- I liked Audition

not sure if there's a contradiction in there or not

enjoy the gun in yr stomach

lol

oh yes, toetag pictures, primarily for their release of the August Underground series. NOT A RECOMMENDATION

xposts

okay reading the descriptions of Hostel and Hostel II on Wikipedia is more than enough to reinforce that I should never, ever, EVER watch these movies (I did watch the train sequence in the original "Hostel" though, that was good)

btw is the beginning of Hostel II ever, like, explained, or is it just as random and disjointed as the Wikipedia synopsis

(btw I will never understand I why I can READ all of this shit but can never WATCH it; apparently my eyes are hardwired to my perception of reality and I can't divorce the two the way I can with my imagination, even when my imagination is grosser than imagery I'm seeing)

Oh I guess Hostel creeps into 24 territory. Far more disgusting for its ideology than any screen gore.

24 is something I refuse to watch for all sorts of reasons, principally 'life is too short'

It's kind of awesome, though, or at least it used to be.

hmm

definitely going to see Moral Orel, but 24 needs more selling

I keep hoping the number of sketch comedians on it will hit critical mass and it will turn into Mr. Show: Torture City Laff Riot.

ok that i am definitely cowering behind the couch from

I think it was season 3 that opened with Jack executing a prisoner at the end of the first scene and cutting off his head so he could put it in a duffel bag and present it to a drug lord whose cartel he was trying to infiltrate? I don't know about you but for me that is high-quality wholly absurd entertainment and my enjoyment of that type of thing is the closest I get to understanding how someone can be a fan of horror movies.

I read somewhere Dick Cheney is a fan, and somehow this series has validated his foreign policy.

see to me that really cements that Dick Cheney is demented

It's also inspired some respectable journalism

dick cheney will shoot u in the face if u disagree (suitfiud)

anyway back to the thread

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_centipede

someone explain to me why everyone involved in this movie shouldn't be locked up forever

its only "(first sequence)" u cant really judge a dude until all six (?) segments are out

On 19 October 2009 it was announced a sequel, titled The Human Centipede (Full Sequence) has been planned for cinemas in 2010. 'Full Sequence' will supposedly include a centipede composed of twelve individuals.[31] Six has said how it had always been his intention to make two Centipede films, with the first film existing to get his audience "used to the sick idea" in order that the second could be much more "nasty, with way more medical experiments" in a way that would have been "impossible" in the original, and would have "destroyed" any chance of the film being made.[8]

I mean, no

Hey man, tamale food truck. Not for everyone.

Or, in fact, anyone.

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

john justen and hi dere WILL watch it

I'll admit to wanting to see this after reading this:
"Throughout the production process Tom Six stated his intention to create a film that was "100% medically accurate",[13] consulting a real-life surgeon during the creation and filming process.[14] Six has claimed that whilst initially reluctant to take part in the film because of professional reputation, after reading the script the surgeon consulted took a very strong interest in the procedure, devising a method that he believed would work in real life."

That's commitment!

i am guessing that statement is probably only a half truth xpost

UGGGH!!!! That looks all kinds of wrong!! Why can't I seem to find the torrent for it?!?

i am guessing that statement is probably only a half truth xpost

you would be guessing correctly unless there is a sum of money running into the millions that would then be subsequently wired into my bank account

Fetchboy, 'torrent' taking on all sorts of meanings there

oh god

To sum up as succinctly as possible:

horror : death :: "torture porn" : dying

Which is facile and a bit of an oversimplification, but pretty much the gist of why I don't do the torture stuff. To me, the instance of death isn't nearly as disturbing as the act of dying. A cinematic depiction of a dude being killed instantly with a pitchfork doesn't unnerve me half as much as a depiction of someone slowly and violently losing their life. There needs to be some level of cognitive dissonance and awareness of artifice for me to be able to deal with things in entertainment that, in real life, I find horrifying and abhorrent.

(although i would say there has been a much longer weird evolution towards this stuff over the years)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/68/Seven_%28movie%29_poster.jpg/200px-Seven_%28movie%29_poster.jpg

lol, I love that movie

basically I'm a massive ball of contradictions when it comes to this stuff

"There needs to be some level of cognitive dissonance and awareness of artifice for me to be able to deal with things in entertainment that, in real life, I find horrifying and abhorrent."

I don't know if muppet torture porn would necessarily be easier to take. Scraps of felt flying around.

obv you have not seen Meet The Feebles

Meet the Feebles is so awesome

all i remember from that movie is a hippo jogging. (and same sort of plot/character as Dead Alive)

You don't remember "Soooodommmyyyy... Youuu might think it odd o' me..."

Oh yeah they reprised that instrumentally as love theme to dead alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCcaMIcwz30

I don't recall any plot/character similarities between it and Dead/Alive though, not sure what you're thinking of.

haha i am sitting here boggling at the jogging hippo being the one image that would have stuck with you out of that movie

It's a striking image! Up there with Eisenstein's baby carriage falling down steps.

lolol

re: being the same movie -- The protagonist is kind of a nerd -- has an interracial relationship that is sabotaged by authority figures (some of them comically lecherous), muppets die as a result.

I think you mean inter-species relationship...

altho wait now that you mention it it never registered with me that the romance in Dead/Alive is interracial...? aren't they both caucasian?

If y'all want a starting point for the "weird evolution" of this stuff you need to go a lot farther back than "Se7en." Herschell Gordon Lewis was doing this stuff before Fincher, or Eli Roth for that matter, even knew what movies were. Heck, probably before Roth was born.

eh Wizard of Gore is pretty silly

Yeah, but from a formal standpoint, the narrative is still just a device to shuffle us from one lovingly crafted gore sequence to the next.

no argument there

Is the eyeball slice in Un Chien Andalou the ur-text for all this?

yeah re: herschell, thats why i mentioned blood feast upthread

i don't think anyone's suggesting se7en as the ur-text for this, but don't underestimate it either. SAW is basically se7en from Spacey's POV

Torture Porn ain't nothing new

http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu92/damien_stone/grand_guignol_jardin_des_supplices.jpg

The Grand Guigol sounds hardcore.

from wiki:
Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, by André de Lorde: When a doctor finds his wife's lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor's brain.

Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, by André de Lorde: Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a young, pretty fellow inmate out of jealousy

re: dead-alive's interracial couple -- The nerd's uncle calls her a hot latin number or something but like in feebles, the tension is more class-oriented than being from a different species.

I just realized the synopsis also sort of works for LOTR, with Sam's lifemate as Rudy, and all the muppets replaced with CG.

still trying to get to the heart of this. it doesn't have to be all about the whole torture porn thing either, would be curious to hear what fans of more trad horror stuff think about it as well.

for example, i watched "sleepaway camp" for the first time a few months ago, and for the most part it is a sort of goofy camp slasher movie, and then THAT SCENE happens (if you've seen it, you know which one) and it just hit me in some primal fear center, the whole ice cold feeling of dread thing. and again, i loved it. what im still trying to work out is why some of this stuff has that effect, and what makes that feeling so enjoyable that i make considerable efforts (and spend a lot of watching time) to keep seeking it out (i mean tbf even a really good horror film can rarely sustain this feeling through the whole thing).

The recent "Wolfman" movie seems like a perfect example of a movie that is nominally Horror, but clearly a completely different genre from most of the movies discussed here. I absolutely loved it, but it fails in terms of what most people expect from the horror genre now, because it succeeds in term of what people expected from horror circa 1935-45.

Visceral disgust versus Gothic trauma: your choice, neither is wrong.

JJusten, I had the same reaction to Sleepaway Camp - it's weird because when you talk about the plot twist disembodied from watching the movie, it sounds absolutely silly, but it sure isn't in context.

I really think the mood of that scene is what does it too. It's a shame Return to Sleepaway Camp was such a horrid pile of shit

so lj, seen anything that scared the shit out of you yet or?

getting the fuck off of The Human Centipede thread

What would you say the Hostel movies are about?

― low-rent black gangster nicknamed Bootsy (DJP), Wednesday, June 8, 2011 7:20 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fear of the "foreign"

there's also the level on which we might "get" things out films that aren't their meanings. i.e., we might enjoy the comic dialogue and characterizations, or the suspense-driven mystery-thriller plotting.

― And the piano, it sounds like a carnivore (contenderizer), Wednesday, June 8, 2011 7:25 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

also hostel 1 has a really interesting subtext about the false notions of heroes and villains that movies thrive on (horror in particular) - also a clearly thought out effort to invert the final girl trope. and bringing it down to a basic xenophobia yawn is really missing the point, especially considering that the ugliest of americans survives.

― just malorted a little bit in my mouth (jjjusten), Wednesday, June 8, 2011 7:37 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I don't find either of these concepts that interesting in the framework of a movie about people trapped in a torture resort. Is anybody REALLY going to walk away from "Hostel" thinking "wow, I'd better be careful when I travel abroad"? Are the horror movie trope inversions going to be interesting to anyone who isn't already deeply invested in the structure of horror movies? Furthermore, at least one trope inversion is immediately subverted in the beginning of the sequel; does that impact the enjoyment/analysis of the original movie at all?

It just seems that the appreciation isn't along the lines of "wow, look at the story in this movie"; it's "wow, look at how this film was constructed", which I think is what the "all I get out of this is that Eli Roth like filming gross violence" backlash is thriving upon.

You could take a film like "Inception" and point to it being both a heist film about people invading their marks' dreams and tragedy about a man who holds himself responsible for his wife's death and his refusal to forgive himself tied in with some questions about the nature of reality and how you determine what is real and what isn't. I'm not saying there is anything inherently interesting or fascinating about these specific plot strands; I am saying that there are concurrent storylines that inform each other and, for many fans, make the movie richer. If "Hostel" is not really about the torture scenes, much like "Inception" isn't really about the dream infiltrations, what is it about?

I mean, even within the horror genre, you've got classic movies like "The Birds" (or even "Psycho") which seem to be extended "what if? exercises
(I see "The Birds" as "what if you took a romantic drama and dropped an en masse bird attack in the middle of it?") or even movies like "The Ring" which starts out as a weird death curse movie but opens up into a more interesting story about an evil girl killed by her parents who is reaching out from beyond the grave to kill the people who watch her story but don't pass it on. You can even look at "Friday the 13th" in terms of being a revenge flick and an indictment of teenage irresponsibility if you really wanted to; does "Hostel" do anything similar?

It's not that Hostel is profound, but that, if you can handle the violence, it's FUNNY. It's a dark comedy about a bunch of frat boy types who discover europe isn't just for them to fuck and drink in. You can say "well that doesn't sound so great/like it justifies the violence" or whatever, and that's fine. don't see it!

"what if you took a harold & kumar movie and put them in a torture resort?"

privileged guys who think the world is theirs to exploit turn out to be actual gristle for a mill. You can be disinterested in the theme, but it's a theme!

horror films are meant to horrify, and the particular horror that torture films engage in are the fear of the loss of agency and free will, of being used by another for their sick desires. hostel also throws in the xenophobic aspect of being lost in another country. there are no lessons to be learned here, it's just kicks.

horror films in general are designed to provoke an emotional response, so talking about plot and mechanics is (while not entirely besides the point) not so critical an issue. some of the most effective and scariest horror movies have some serious filmmaking competency problems - see the love for carnival of souls on the pre-70s horror thread.

and hostel isn't the greatest example to pick because, although it is competently made when compared to your average horror flick, it's just not very good overall. most of its faults are failures of imagination, not pushing the thematic stuff far enough, and being, in its own way, kind of conservative. I did appreciate the miike cameo tho.

You can even look at "Friday the 13th" in terms of being a revenge flick and an indictment of teenage irresponsibility if you really wanted to

ok this is 1000x more lolzy than any defense of hostel's relative worth.

hostel has two, maybe three, gore setpieces that are disturbing. the other 80 minutes deal with the suspense of ppl getting into a tight spot and then trying to get out.

"what if you took a harold & kumar movie and put them in a torture resort?"

Thank you! This is more interesting to me as a description than "it inverts horror movie tropes and leans on xenophobia".

Also, this may explain why a lot of horror is not my thing:

horror films in general are designed to provoke an emotional response, so talking about plot and mechanics is (while not entirely besides the point) not so critical an issue. some of the most effective and scariest horror movies have some serious filmmaking competency problems - see the love for carnival of souls on the pre-70s horror thread.

also I need to learn how to place parans within sentences ty

I will note you could say the same thing about comedies, thrillers, actioners, romance. Most dramas revolve around the emotional payoff rather than competent filmmaking. The Notebook plot is ridiculous but it makes people cry.

Sorry, I meant "most genres"

well... if I am already not a huge fan of gore and the suspense leading up to it, placing it inside of a movie that isn't going out of its way to give me a story is not going to be my thing!

yeah that's fair! i'm just saying in most cases the plot/filmmaking are just craft meant to help that simple emotional response.

that's why hostel is a well-known horror flick - it sells about 15 minutes of extreme torture with 80 minutes of suspense that is relatively well-crafted, they also did a bang up marketing job of convincing ppl it was 15 minutes of plot and 80 minutes of torture.

i was seriously freaked before seeing it!

I will note you could say the same thing about comedies, thrillers, actioners, romance. Most dramas revolve around the emotional payoff rather than competent filmmaking. The Notebook plot is ridiculous but it makes people cry.

yeah but horror is an extreme example. I've seen horror films where boom mics are visible, sound is out of sync, effects are laughable, acting is atrocious, they make the notebook look like the godfather from a technical standpoint, but they are still effective horror films - it's due to horror being rooted in the surreal and nightmarish. carnival of souls is one of the alltime great horror films but it was made for $33K and it shows.

haha i think carnival of souls sucks myself

where does "The Room" fit into that thesis

carnival of souls was my favorite film until I saw andrei rublev

but hey there are comedies that look like shit (ever seen a Stella short?) but crack me up anyway.

excellent xpost! one could argue it's a very successful comedy!

carnival of souls was my favorite film until I saw andrei rublev

yeah no offense but i will never let you near my remote

haha i am going to see The Room for the first time next week; stoked

diff between the room and a badly made horror film is that the latter is trying to scare/disturb you, and if it succeeds it has fulfilled its aesthetic goal

the room feeds on the humorous gap between its intent and its actuality

tho there are a lot horror films that fit that mold - plan 9 from outer space for example

the shittier the production, the scarier the movie is TBH

yeah no offense but i will never let you near my remote

this is prolly for the best

issues of "intent" = "we put you in the cult section"

lol the room
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-FSddF8p_U

i have to take a moment to drink this in, but that never stopped me from firing off an ill-advised knee-jerk response before, so why now?

UH SPOILERS OBV

to start, i am a much more staunch defender of Hostel 2, which i think is a pretty thoughtful and inventive film, so i cant go completely to the mat for part 1. still, on one hand H1 (and lots of the extreme horror that has come out in the last decade or so) has this laserbeam-focused reinvention of the genre where ideas of reward and punishment and moral/immoral are inverted. its fair to look at the general trend of horror before as bent towards the doling out of excessive punishment for minor misbehavior (primarily teen sexuality/drugging/drinking or interestingly enough bullying), and the rewarding of purity/honesty/literal virginity (this is the final girl thing im talking about). friday the 13th is definitional here obv. and this is not any idea im taking credit for btw, its fairly established at this point. so to me one of the things that hostel does, knowingly and willfully, is play with those expectations. great efforts are made to establish the nice guy, athletic, strong, handsome, thoughtful and kind - the survivor, and to establish the sleazy victim friends that you are primed to watch get their expected punishment. it is key to realize that the first scene of utter cruelty and brutality is directed at the final girl character (who again is a ultra-american catalog model male), and its ridiculous to think that this is in any way an accident.

so lets talk about the survivor - he is selfish and unlikeable. he escapes death not through agency but slapstick comedy (not to get too film studies 101 here, but in fact the only way his fate comes into his own hands is by having them partially severed functioning as a banana peel also isnt lucky coincidence), and most of his further triumphs are accomplished by being passive or mistaken for the kind of person that signs up to murder people for sport - the indication here is that the only thing that separates him from the torturers is bad timing. when he tries to be heroic and save someone, he is incapable of accomplishing even that. finally, in the requisite postscript revenge payoff (another trope - jasons head sliding down the machete etc) he isnt able to achieve this through cunning or strength or stealth or quick thinking - random luck presents his villain to him, and he kills an old man with his pants down on a toilet. the end.

so when i talk about the idea of tweaking the villain hero stuff, its not just the bleakness of "everyone dies" that im talking about (although hey, seriously, everybody dies if possible in this movie), its a lot more than that.

typed that up an hour ago but some douche wanted to tell me all about the compressor he just bought for his car before buying 2 guitar picks so whatever

Is anybody REALLY going to walk away from "Hostel" thinking "wow, I'd better be careful when I travel abroad"?

lolin' here because that was almost precisely what an ex-co-worker said to me after seeing hostel.

lololololol

jjj, I appreciate that response but that strikes me as the type of thing that only a person invested in analyzing the structure of horror movies is going to care about

like, it is very cool to read about here on a text forum but I am reasonably certain that my reaction while watching the movie would be "omg that is disgusting" and the nuance of execution would basically not be on my radar at all, even after reading what you just wrote and reading plot synopses laying out similar things

all which goes back to my original hypothesis re: "this is horror for people deeply invested in the horror genre"

"this is horror for people deeply invested in the horror genre"

I think that's fair.

and really, plenty of horror fans can't hang with the torture stuff and prefer more classic fare. I probably fall into that category even if I really dug martyrs, for example.

and I've still never seen i spit on your grave because it sounds so awful. and watching cannibal holocaust was easily one of the worst movie experiences of my life.

^ it's just a horrid movie

I thought I'd turned a corner in my horrorphobia when I saw and massively enjoyed the remakes of both "The Ring" and "The Grudge" but now I think it's more that those movies are more the speed of what I can deal with gorewise in a horror movie.

Is anybody REALLY going to walk away from "Hostel" thinking "wow, I'd better be careful when I travel abroad"?

i think it's important to view hostel in its immediate, post 9/11 context, and to consider it alongside other similarly-themed armerican films of the era: turistas, and aja's the hills have eyes remake. i don't think it's fair to label hostel "merely xenophobic" (or w/e, not quoting anyone specifically), but it does exploit anxiety about america and americans' place in the world. all really effective, horrific horror exploits anxiety of some sort or another, whether stoking it, exposing it, sublimating it, providing a relief valve, etc.

and on a more visceral level - altho I wouldn't call martyrs pleasant (not even close), it was definitely a rush. I was in a constant state of apprehension the whole time I was watching and a big reason for that was knowing the rulebook had been thrown out the window. this movie could be going anywhere and my imagination (and dread!!) was running wild the whole time. plus, the film does a lot to disorient the viewer as well. there's almost a... psychedelic?... quality to watching some of this stuff.

lol I thought I'd read something about "Hostel" being written way before 9/11 but that was actually "Cabin Fever"

expanding on that last:

"...it does exploit anxiety about america and americans' place in the world. a world that seemed suddenly and violently anti-american."

alan n otm re martyrs

watching inland empire really, really late while tree branches scraped against a window right by me provoked a very similar response, actually.

I guess if I'm going to watch a movie that goes there like that, I would rather watch something in the vein of "Requiem For A Dream" than "Martyrs"

although I likely am never watching RFAD again; when I first saw it I called it "my favorite movie I never want to see again" and that opinion has pretty much held up in the intervening years

i see what youre saying about it being only for the deeply invested in horror crowd, but idk, definitions of hero/villain status is one of the most interesting things to look at in art in general imo. so in some ways this new wave of horror is similar to the point where gangsters didnt always have to die at the end of the movie - its a real shift in the boundries of moral judgement in cinema.

another movie that gets sometimes torture porn labelled that really goes all in on what im talking about is Hard Candy actually.

J saw "Hard Candy"! Her main comment was "man what a fucked up movie"; I couldn't even get her to say if it was good or bad, lol

my imagination (and dread!!) was running wild the whole time. plus, the film does a lot to disorient the viewer as well. there's almost a... psychedelic?... quality to watching some of this stuff.

― (⊙_⊙?) (Alan N), Thursday, June 9, 2011 11:19 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

OTM. this, i think, is a big part of the appeal of self-consciously "extreme" horror. the anticipation of transgression, a dreadful, apprehensive sort of fascination. that coupled with the psychedelic sense of sensory, emotional and chemical (adrenalin) overload you get when the shit really hits the fan.

I would rather watch something in the vein of "Requiem For A Dream" than "Martyrs"

requiem for a dream is perhaps my single least favorite movie. hate it so much right now.

Also I am not saying that definition of hero/villain is de facto uninteresting (hi dere I read comic books that feature Wolverine and Deadpool); I'm saying that the extreme graphic nature of the violence seems to act as a blocker to some of the people watching the movie so the convention inversions aren't as readily acknowledged.

yeah but thats the case anywhere, some peeps think fantasy is kids stuff, or rom coms are for girls - it doesnt detract from whats being done within those confines

definitions of hero/villain status is one of the most interesting things to look at in art in general imo. so in some ways this new wave of horror is similar to the point where gangsters didnt always have to die at the end of the movie - its a real shift in the boundries of moral judgement in cinema.

― just malorted a little bit in my mouth (jjjusten), Thursday, June 9, 2011 11:24 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is probably true, but i prefer other sorts of subversions of the hero/villain dynamic. for instance, stuart gordon's dagon, where what seems an evil presence is finally revealed as love, and the "hero" transcends the film's horror context by finally succumbing to it, transforming it from a tale of virtue defeated to one of romantic victory.

that coupled with the psychedelic sense of sensory, emotional and chemical (adrenalin) overload you get when the shit really hits the fan.

^^^ I think the problem with a lot of modern "torture porn" is that it's missing a large portion of this surreal quality. When the psychedelic sensations are removed it's just people being awful to each other and I sort of don't care.

yeah but thats the case anywhere, some peeps think fantasy is kids stuff, or rom coms are for girls - it doesnt detract from whats being done within those confines

I think you are allowing your tolerance for watching violence cloud your argument.

I acknowledge that anything identified as "genre" is going to have barriers to entry that may block someone from appreciating an example of it; that doesn't automatically mean that all of those barriers are equivalent or as easy to overcome. The question I'm posing here is "Would 'Hostel' be as reviled/notorious (delete where applicable) if the violence wasn't as graphic?" along with "Would 'Hostel' retain the power of its convention inversions if its violence was less graphic?" You kind of have to be cool with or at the very least accept seeing some pretty fucked up shit if you're going to watch a movie like "Hostel" or "Martyrs" or "Inside"; would these movies be lessened if the violence was less explicit?

To better illustrate what I'm saying, think about the scene in "Reservoir Dogs" where Michael Madsen is torturing the police officer with the straight razor, then when he sits on his lap and cuts out dude's eye, the camera suddenly veers away. In a commentary about the movie, Tarantino talked about how he also filmed that scene where the whole eye removal scene was shown, but when in the editing booth playing back the two takes the one where the camera cut away was by far more powerful and unsettling. Is it possible to make a credible argument that cutting away from some of the gore could preserve the points being made and the emotional responses being evoked while lowering the barrier to entry for those people who have issues dealing with the extreme violence?

this is a weird argument to have with someone who hasn't seen the movie, and therefore doesn't have a clue how graphic it is

though as for your question, yes, and that's why there's TV edits

that's a weird argument to make

it's like saying could you make reservoir dogs without profanity, well yeah, you could, why would you tho?

martyrs, for instance, is a film about torture. it could be made and still be a really interesting movie without the excessive violence, but that's not the movie that got made is it?

lol xp

If "Hostel" is not really about the torture scenes, much like "Inception" isn't really about the dream infiltrations, what is it about?

― low-rent black gangster nicknamed Bootsy (DJP), Thursday, June 9, 2011 8:50 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i think this was well-addressed in the other thread, tbh, and jjj has done a great job of following up here. it appeals on a number of superficial levels: it's funny, suspenseful, well-constructed, horrifying and quietly subversive. it both exploits and questions american anxieties in the post-9/11 era. it plays with the body-count genre's conventions regarding main and secondary characters, "good" and "bad" behavior (i.e., who gets to live and who will die), though i don't think it's as subversive in this regard as jjj insists.

one way in which these movies are at least somewhat groundbreaking is the way in which they manipulate identification, frequently inviting the audience to identify with characters who will essentially be destroyed. in these situations, we hang on to our sense of identification with increasing desperation, and that manipulation of audience desperation is an interesting device. in conventional horror movies, protagonist characters often die in the end, but they're rarely maimed or driven insane along the way. we essentially know that we're okay - and that they are us - because they haven't been dismembered. "torture porn" films violate this rule. they ask us not just to witness acts of tortuous violence, but to endure them personally, to emotionally identify with the suffering of others. and we're often tricked into identifying with characters who we take to be "main characters" (alternate selves), but who in fact die long before the film is over, so that our point of identification is defocused, must shift, with increasing despair and anxiety, onto someone else. not that it's torture porn, but quentin tarantino's death proof is a great example of how audience emotions and expectations can be manipulated in this manner.

To better illustrate what I'm saying, think about the scene in "Reservoir Dogs" where Michael Madsen is torturing the police officer with the straight razor, then when he sits on his lap and cuts out dude's eye, the camera suddenly veers away. In a commentary about the movie, Tarantino talked about how he also filmed that scene where the whole eye removal scene was shown, but when in the editing booth playing back the two takes the one where the camera cut away was by far more powerful and unsettling. Is it possible to make a credible argument that cutting away from some of the gore could preserve the points being made and the emotional responses being evoked while lowering the barrier to entry for those people who have issues dealing with the extreme violence?

― low-rent black gangster nicknamed Bootsy (DJP), Thursday, June 9, 2011 11:46 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

um, he cut's the dude's ear off, right? and that scene's a very complex cinematic joke. he shoots this agonizingly tense and violent sequence - having already established that he will transgress, will show blood - but entirely spares us the image of trauma. "look," he seems to crow, "i can fuck you up as bad as anyone ever has without even showing you the gore!"

...then he takes a break, as madsen walks out to his car (the first real outdoor, full-light scene in the film since the beginning, iirc) and lazily retrieves some gasoline from the trunk.

...then he comes back into the warehouse and shoots the entire remainder of the scene with the guy's severed ear-hole in tight, bloody close-up! just to rub your nose in the fact that, sure, he can show you the gore, too, if he feels like it...

it's an explicit game that tarantino is playing with the audience, and our delight in this meta-textual game is one the film's great pleasures.

cut's = cuts, duh

If the reaction of a sizable number of people to a movie is that it was so graphically violent that they missed or discounted the overarching themes and the various genre subversions being talked about in this thread, how is it weird to ask "The graphic violence turned some people off; is it possible to tone down the violence and still retain the essence of what you got from the movie?"

The cursing analogy is valid; I don't think it's a de facto stupid or weird question to ask at all.

xp: right it was an ear, not an eye, sorry; I think it's arguably less traumatic to see a dude without an ear than it is to see a dude get his ear sawn off but obviously that is my opinion (also it is my opinion that the handling of gore/violence in that scene is fantastic, largely because I didn't have to watch dude's ear get cut off)

point being that, as tarantino slyly asserts, you can achieve "extreme" emotional effects without explicit gore and trauma, but those things work pretty well, too.

Ultimately my main point is that if these movies are purposely pushing the envelope wrt to how they use violence, why are you guys so upset when some people say "ugh that's too much" and refuse to engage with the movies?

i actually dont think that the movies we are talking about would have the same effectiveness with a lessening of the way the violence is presented. and to follow up wrt what contenderizer is saying, part of the deal with hostel is that you are kinda roped into identifying with a main character that you dont initially respect or like - in the old days, theres no way that would be the last person standing, but the rules have changed, and that makes it interesting. theres a bit of commentary on the fact that as human beings, sympathy and the recognition of self in a character dont go hand in hand, and probably shouldnt - unlikable people dont deserve to be maimed any more than likeable people do, and the fact that these movies put that in front of you is a worthwhile statement.

If the reaction of a sizable number of people to a movie is that it was so graphically violent that they missed or discounted the overarching themes and the various genre subversions being talked about in this thread, how is it weird to ask "The graphic violence turned some people off; is it possible to tone down the violence and still retain the essence of what you got from the movie?"

― low-rent black gangster nicknamed Bootsy (DJP), Thursday, June 9, 2011 12:03 PM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark

that's a very hard question to answer, and a fair one. basically restates the "gratuitous" objection to nudity and sexual content we often see in response to other types of films. i guess i'd say that a great artist could theoretically achieve any effect with or without any given device. but certain devices do nonetheless work well.

i'd agree that certain sorts of content do limit the audience, but i'm not sure this is a bad thing. not everyone wants explicit violence and/or sexuality in their films. but i don't think that ken russell's the devils would be half the film it is if it were shorn of both. whether or not we want to endure the spectacle to achieve whatever reward it might offer is always gonna be a personal call...

The graphic violence turned some people off; is it possible to tone down the violence and still retain the essence of what you got from the movie?

I think the answer to this questions is "yes", obv the 15 minutes of torture could've been toned down in hostel and it would be essentially the same film (actually it would be turistas lol)

now what

where is anybody upset about somebody saying "ugh that's too much" and refusing to engage with the movies? I posted this in the human centipede thread:

anyway I'm 1000% cool with ppl saying "that's something I never want to see" - there's some shit you can't unsee and I'm generally anti-ludovico technique

but when ppl start saying "there is no way there could be value in this for anyone" - that's the point I take issue with and the same one jjjjjjusten was iirc as well

it's the diff tween "I don't understand why ppl like tcm/thc, can u explain" to "this is some sick crap ergo only a sick fuck would want to watch it"

― no serenade no fire brigade just a trypophobia (Edward III), Thursday, June 9, 2011 10:12 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

also i think that the visceral (figurative and literal here) aspects of these films cant be soft-pedaled - watching the camera pan towards the unlucky likeable dude as his tormentor walks up to him and then panning away to the sounds of screams would really weaken the impact.

dammit jjj stop making me want to see Hostel

I will send all my therapy bills to you, plus my wife will kick yr ass

you know those christian companies that reedit hollywood movies to take out the objectionable content? maybe they have a hostel edition lol

Ultimately my main point is that if these movies are purposely pushing the envelope wrt to how they use violence, why are you guys so upset when some people say "ugh that's too much" and refuse to engage with the movies?

― low-rent black gangster nicknamed Bootsy (DJP), Thursday, June 9, 2011 12:05 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm cool with that. i think conflicts in threads like this arise primarily from misunderstandings, poor communication, knee-jerk response. it's perfectly cool to express disinterest or even disgust.

spoilers, but in the first hostel, the hero isn't made particularly unlikeable, or at least not more unlikeable
than the heroes in Dude Where's My Car (I mean the hero is basically a smarter, more-educated Stiffler),
and he makes it through the end, and at the moment where it could have
offered an ethically uncomfortable disconnect between the hero and the audience, it chickens out, and
finally at the end, it regresses into standard revenge fantasy, which is especially gross because it is
at the expense of a character from another movie that actually was effective in
avoiding the standard hero/villain identification thing.

^ early john ashbery draft

The question I'm posing here is "Would 'Hostel' be as reviled/notorious (delete where applicable) if the violence wasn't as graphic?" along with "Would 'Hostel' retain the power of its convention inversions if its violence was less graphic?" You kind of have to be cool with or at the very least accept seeing some pretty fucked up shit if you're going to watch a movie like "Hostel" or "Martyrs" or "Inside"; would these movies be lessened if the violence was less explicit?

― low-rent black gangster nicknamed Bootsy (DJP), Thursday, June 9, 2011 11:46 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

responding to the other part of what seems to be yr key post here...

i'm sure that hostel would be less notorious if it were less explicitly violent. while it might work in any number of ways (speculative, who knows?), it simply wouldn't be the film it is. same might be said of hitchcock's psycho, romero's night of the living dead and many "new hollywood" classics like bonnie and clyde, taxi driver and even the godfather films. these films might arguably be "just as good" if they were less graphically brutal, but that's hard to say, and they would certainly be different.

haha dan i am def not trying to talk you into seeing hostel

I think dan really really wants to see hostel, but is scared to, so he's mad at us, and is now torturing us with all these posts

that's sick man

also i should mention, since its what kickstarted this thread - human centipede is by far the least gory of the movies we are talking about, so i dont think its really the onscreen violence that gets to the heart of this

You are definnitely making it interesting beyond "zomg dude cuts off his hand, and then a girl has her eyeball out"

tbf what REALLY kickstarted this was the banning of HC2, which was described as much gorier and was alleged to contain graphic depictions of some pretty horrifying, almost "A Serbian Film"-level shit

well, we were talking about "torture porn", so it's the combination of explicit violence with an unflinching (sadistic?) depiction of protracted human suffering. the 'pede leans heavily on the latter, and yr right, very little on the former.

human pitchfork

HC is def more conceptually unpleasant, but the actual violent scenes are pretty tame - the sadism is the prob here, the revulsion comes from feces and fears of infection, not blood. and the truly horrifying bits are relatively bloodless.

xpost yeah but outside of the british film board and the director, nobody has seen that movie so its hard to really discuss it

people (including dan, i think) often object at least as much to sadism/torture as they do to explicit violence/gore/splatter.

part of the genius of the human centipede is how the guy has terrorized the world with what is basically 3 naked ppl swaddled in gauze

no karo syrup required, that does wonders for your budget

i will admit to lolling at South Park's take on HC

the actual violent scenes are pretty tame - the sadism is the prob here, the revulsion comes from feces and fears of infection, not blood. and the truly horrifying bits are relatively bloodless.

― just malorted a little bit in my mouth (jjjusten), Thursday, June 9, 2011 12:28 PM (24 seconds ago) Bookmark

the sadism is definitely there, and it's massive. the crazy concept w its boundary-pushing squick factor is definitely the reason for the film's notoriety, but the execution focuses closely on the terrible suffering of the characters trapped in the situation. they're hardly three-dimensional, and their situation is occasionally played for laughs, but we're encouraged to identify with them, and they are fucked. this get's back to what i think is somewhat novel about the "torture porn" (TP?) genre: the assault on the audience's expectations of safety in identification. to identify with someone in the film is to BE in the film, and we expect to be granted a certain dignity in the films we inhabit.

in the human centipede we are trapped in an inescapable hell exactly as (and exactly because) heiter's subjects are. even if we manage somehow to escape, our mouths and asses will be forever ruined and we will never be able to walk again. that's our situation in the film to the extent that we're capable of identification, not just that of "the chacters". the film's pitiless insistence on this predicament, and its cruel refusal to soften the blow in any way, makes it monstrously sadistic, imo.

might seem less so if you don't identify with the victims.

I'm kind of astounded how it's not a completely obscure cult flick, like the last time I was in best buy it was on an endcap, not hidden away in the horror section

xp

in the human centipede we are trapped in an inescapable hell exactly as (and exactly because) heiter's subjects are. even if we manage somehow to escape, our mouths and asses will be forever ruined and we will never be able to walk again.

when I saw jjj it seemed like he was walking fine; his mouth and ass were ruined years ago tho

even if we manage somehow to escape, our mouths and asses will be forever ruined

so sad this is too long for a dn

to be of use

"zomg dude cuts off his hand, and then a girl has her eyeball out"

the eyeball gouging isn't so offensive as the idea that her looking slightly less hot than before is good enough
motivation for her to kill herself. they didn't even bother to establish that she was in europe on a modeling contract
for two-eyed people only or something.

omnia vanitas

tbf, most modeling contracts do include an eyeball clause

how do you indemnify against incidental centipeding?

the eyeball gouging isn't so offensive as the idea that her looking slightly less hot than before is good enough
motivation for her to kill herself.

uh did you miss the part where half of her face has been horribly burned with a blowtorch

it was the same half as the eye wasn't it? just needs creative hair-parting.

they had a girl like that on top model. she did okay, except for the smeyes.

smde

ok im bumping this thread to avoid derailing the human centipede with this sorta discussion.

so for people that are supportive of the "torture porn" term, why is it objectionable that people like me and some others in this thread have such a dislike for it? it seems to me that the only reason to cling to the torture porn terminology is because there is a vested interest in the connotations of the term itself. just as importantly, why is there a need for a subcategory for these films beyond horror? in other words, what value other than dismissiveness is there for this classification?

it's a done deal dude, yer not gonna get the toothpaste back in that tube

i know that sounds semi-accusatory but i am actually interested in the positive arguments for this phrase i guess

xpost right but theres such an inflexibility abt abandoning the term, im just wondering if there is a reason beyond negativity there. i mean its not like genre terms havent been abandoned before, i mean we dont have hillbilly or (not trying to godwins law here honestly) race music because the terms became useless.

race music term is a bad analogy imho

In regards to the term "torture porn," its easy to throw around in this day and age but I feel as though it does have a real meaning beyond "horror movie I didn't like"; I have kind of reserved the term for movies that follow the sort of basic plot-line of "people get tortured for X amount of time by the dastardly Y until Z happens," but has excessive (for my tastes) amounts of elements like rape fantasy and sexualized violence.

So its always subjectively used by me, but it has to fit certain criteria beyond "being shitty."

xpost well again i am not trying to bring race into this, and the reason i mentioned the godwin thing is that i was afraid that it was a loaded example and thats not what im trying to do here

xxpost right exactly, but even in your description there you are talking about excessive (to your tastes) levels of stuff, so its obv not a neutral term, its a judging term - thus not really a legit genre

maybe a different example - no one is going to be using the term "crabcore" in a few years (actually is anyone seriously using it now), because its a genre classification designed for ridicule of a subset of bands. theres no utility there other than a coded "thing i dont like that is similar to other things i dont like". to me thats how torture porn functions as well

I have kind of reserved the term for movies that follow the sort of basic plot-line of "people get tortured for X amount of time by the dastardly Y until Z happens," but has excessive (for my tastes) amounts of elements like rape fantasy and sexualized violence.

barring the use of the term "excessive" I don't see what's wrong with this as a subgenre definition

But most all horror films have some element of eroticization so really it comes down to degrees and means, I think jj is wondering if there any objective criteria for "torture porn," or if its something more nebulous like "obscenity"

I don't see what's wrong with a possibly transient term with negative connotations for a subset of a film genre.

Presumably it's dismissive connotation arises from some of these movies failing to rise above the gratuitous torture aspect of the storytelling, by which I mean the movie revels in just showing people doing gross shit to other people. The focus is shifted from terrorizing the characters with the threat of death to inflicting pain on the characters in escalating ways.

No one's going to call a slasher flick "torture porn" unless the slasher is tying people down and snipping off their fingers one at a time, then drilling out the victim's eyes, then slowly flaying the skin off the victim's body, then slicing long shallow cuts through the victim's musculature, all while the victim is still alive and begging for the tormentor to stop.

But most all horror films have some element of eroticization so really it comes down to degrees and means

nah, the first half of the formula - people get tortured for X amount of time by the dastardly Y until Z happens - is very specific and covers a lot of ground perfectly well, the second part is more like an addenda, an elaboration of the tone and direction you can expect from a movie tagged with the genre signifier.

I know that I only use the term, torture porn, in the deragatory sense. Porn is a loaded term. It implies that folks are getting primary sensual pleasure from watching simulated torture. Clearly not neutral.

As a fan of hardcore action movies, I'd probably roll my eyes at someone who called it murder porn or w/e

explodaporn

Intelligent Suspenseful Murder Porn from the 1970s always comes up on my netflix recommended list, but maybe its just me...

rain man = autism porn

When people use the term porn in a lightly self-mocking or positive sense, i.e. food porn, they're not being neutral. They're talking about the sensual pleasure they derive from images of the object and praising the quality of the object or the image.

I don't think folks who are fans of films like the Human Centipede or Hostel are licking their lips and making yum noises when they watch these movies.

Presumably it's dismissive connotation arises from some of these movies failing to rise above the gratuitous torture aspect of the storytelling, by which I mean the movie revels in just showing people doing gross shit to other people. The focus is shifted from terrorizing the characters with the threat of death to inflicting pain on the characters in escalating ways.

this is sorta cart before the horse tho, its dismissive connotation is carried in the term itself.

But most all horror films have some element of eroticization so really it comes down to degrees and means, I think jj is wondering if there any objective criteria for "torture porn," or if its something more nebulous like "obscenity"

i think that there's been a big shift in the way horror films operate in the last 10-15 years, and "torture porn" is an attempt, however imperfect, to describe this. i see the texas chainsaw massacre as torture-porn's ur-text, and that gives the genre/sensibility a 40 year lifespan at this point. i'd argue, however, that after its initial flourishing in the grindhouse era, torture porn didn't re-emerge into pop cinema until the late 1990s, spurred by internet fandom and the sudden widespread availability of films that had for years been seen and whispered over only by a select few diehards (salo, the men behind the sun, the guinea pig series, the new york ripper, thriller: a cruel picture, and so on).

i noticed in the late 90s that online horror fandom was increasingly driven by a desire to experience the worst of the worst. the definition of "horror" in a lot of people's minds seemed to be shifting from "stuff that will scare the audience" and/or "entertaining gore" to a single-minded focus on "the onscreen depiction of atrocities". of course, this had long been a part of horror's DNA, going back to herschell gordon lewis' blood feast in 1963, and earlier in tamer forms. but in the internet era, the dedicated pursuit of "the most disturbing" became a major part of popular horror fandom. films didn't have to be gory or even particularly scary to count, they only had to be punishing, extreme and emotionally scarring.

horror filmmakers naturally noticed this, and the genre began to crank out endless torture & rape exploitation pictures. many of these are "horror movies" only in that they graphically present unspeakably awful things happening to people onscreen, and therefore are indeed horrifying. they have little other connection to the genre, and taken as a widespread trend, they seem different in kind from most of the popular horror films of the 80s and 90s. they often have more in common with brutal 70s thrillers like straw dogs and the house at the edge of the park, along with later outliers like henry: portrait of a serial killer and the original funny games, than with late 20th century conceptions of what the pop horror movie should look and feel like.

and again, i think some of yall are trying to have your cake and eat it too wrt trying to establish that there is a specificity to "torture porn" as a term that is outside of pure judgement basis, but then returning to judgemental summaries of what "torture porn" films are like.

Okay I know that was not worded particularly well

what I meant, and what I thought was obvious, was that the dismissive term was created because of how people felt about the movies, not that the term took on a dismissive connotation later

all I have to say on this topic: I don't enjoy being scared.

I agree that the term is loaded, but Contenderizer is describing a kind of movie that seems to be defined as a sort of endurance test of really awful things. What term would you use to describe these kinds of movies?

contenderizer otm in many regards, I think. Great post, and these are many of the reasons I stopped watching after watching a ton of this stuff in the 70s/80s.

i dont think you need a term really? i dont think that its really a valid distinction that can be made - human centipede 2 fits that category, but so do martyrs, funny games, and inland empire. is there any value on classifying these 4 movies together, and if so, doesnt extreme cinema or some other meaningless jumble do a better job as a descriptor?

the thing that unites the films that people sometimes call "torture porn" is a tight focus on the spectacle of helpless dehumanization and annihilation. in such films, victim-people are trapped, brutalized, stripped bare, rubbed in blood and offal, tortured, maimed, raped and (usually) eventually killed. these sacrificial victims are reduced to a feral & desperate, almost animal, state in which they can only communicate through grunting, screaming and pleading. a great deal of screen time is devoted to their writhing, howling and rolling in filth. their helplessness is prolonged onscreen, sometimes for most of a film's running time, both as a suspense generating device and as an end in itself, the graphic depiction of such brutal dehumanization being a reliably effective "disturber" of disturbance-hungry audiences.

that people who are repelled or at least troubled by this trend in popular cinema should pejoratively liked such films to pornography hardly seems surprising or objectionable to me, and i'm pretty much "the audience".

human centipede 2 fits that category, but so do martyrs, funny games, and inland empire. is there any value on classifying these 4 movies together, and if so, doesnt extreme cinema or some other meaningless jumble do a better job as a descriptor?

hah, it's interesting to consider inland empire as a "torture porn" style endurance test. in certain respects it does seem to be of the genre. in other important respects, not. the super-prolonged hollywood boulevard sequence is where it comes closest, of course, but that's a relatively small part of the whole film.

i do think that the whole idea of obscenity is closely tied to all of this, in that certain examples are dealt with differently by some subgroups depending on intent (thinking passion of the christ and irreversible and 127 hours here).

what i keep coming back to is whether anyone is really willing to say there is any judgement-neutral application of the term (cf crabcore analogy upthread). i find it unlikely that anyone is going to start any discussion at the bar with "hey i really enjoyed this great new torture porn movie last night". and if thats the case, it has no utility as a genre distinction in my mind.

i find it unlikely that anyone is going to start any discussion at the bar with "hey i really enjoyed this great new torture porn movie last night".

this is only because you refuse to use the phrase "torture porn"

(also fucking Passion, I am never seeing that fucking movie and I absolutely consider it from conception on up to be torture porn; in fact, I find the entire thing so offensive that I have pretty much actively avoid any and all Mel Gibson and Jim Caviezel projects released since... except obv for Apocalypto)

it isnt because i refuse to use the term. no normal person that doesnt want to come off as a creep is going to use that term in a positive manner in general society.

inland empire

mmmm no

the super-prolonged hollywood boulevard sequence is where it comes closest

nobody is tortured in this sequence. also: it is funny.

the definition i was working with was "a kind of movie that seems to be defined as a sort of endurance test of really awful things." the reason you dont want to apply that to inland empire, or certainly that part of it is, surprise surprise, because you like inland empire.

my work filters the word "porn" out of search results, but the google search "I like torture movies" leads to a hilarious number of "I like torture movies, BUT..." links

xp: that is the vaguest definition of "torture porn" I've ever seen and I don't think anyone would agree with it

I mean, under that definition you could call "Freddy Got Fingered" a torture porn movie

ok but its a definition that austerity ponies used to summarize contenderizers longer version, it isnt something i came up with.

does "a tight focus on the spectacle of helpless dehumanization and annihilation" work better for you?

the reason you dont want to apply that to inland empire,

no it's because I don't agree with that definition, it's too vague. I agreed with the previous, more specific definition originally posted.

this one:

"people get tortured for X amount of time by the dastardly Y until Z happens," and includes but hasexcessive (for my tastes)amounts of elements like rape fantasy and sexualized violence.

The definition has to include direct mention of long, gory, protracted physical torture of the characters in the story. The entire source of the discomfort and revulsion/attraction comes from the dwelling upon the details of the torture; if you remove that, you are basically talking about every movie where something unpleasant happens.

ok so dancer in the dark and requiem for a dream are torture porn then right? xpost

yes

altho I can't honestly remember if there's any torture in Dance in the Dark, I turned it off like 1/3rd of the way through because it was so stupid

Requiem For a Dream tho = sure

altho... hmm I can't remember who the "dastardly Y" would be in Requiem for a Dream exactly...?

like they're mostly torturing themselves iirc

the definition i was working with was "a kind of movie that seems to be defined as a sort of endurance test of really awful things." the reason you dont want to apply that to inland empire, or certainly that part of it is, surprise surprise, because you like inland empire.

― Thu'um gang (jjjusten), Thursday, March 22, 2012 2:31 PM (2 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would say that "a kind of movie that seems to be defined as a sort of endurance test of really awful things" applies to Straw Dogs and I thought that was a great movie. I'll probaboly never watch it again because why would I want to do that to myself.

i would say that lots of movies that we don't ordinarily class as "torture porn" are in fact good examples of the genre, at least at its less formally constricted outer edges. including dancer in the dark, straw dogs and a good many lars von trier films.

^ this is why "torture porn" is a misleading descriptor. not because of the pejorative implications of the word "porn", but because the "torture" isn't always direct, isn't always what we think of as torture. lars von trier, as a director, tortures his female protagonists horribly, and tortures his audience in the process. straw dogs operates in the same way. pointedly, both lars and straw dogs lean heavily on rape as spectacle.

for something to be torture porn, the principal compelling element needs to be the torture scene(s), and that has to be the chief selling point to its audience. Like if in each season of 24, Jack Bauer didn't torture someone, the audience would be disappointed. it has more to do with this tacit contract than any level or quality of cruelty depicted. Like they could have put an extended eyeball-popping torture scene in Julie and Julia, and it probably wouldn't have qualified.

The only things I remember about "Dancer in the Dark" are:

- how terrible "I've Seen It All" is
- how fantastic the scene with "Scatterheart" in it was
- how sad "107 Steps" was

I honestly do not remember over-the-top, salacious violence done solely for the purpose of showing an attractive person begging for mercy as horrible things are done to their body for an extended period of time. I do remember thinking the movie was grimly unpleasant and thinking Bjork was a decent actress, which may have been heavily informed by my raging Bjork fandom.

would've improved Julia and Julia imho

xp

i hesitate to do this because of the inherent unpleasantness, but i think it might help to illustrate my point - as contenderizer said (and the definition shakey is working off of) some of these films have elements of rape or sexual sadism in them. for the people that keep trying to establish torture porn as a non-loaded specifier, imagine that the term was instead "rape porn". can you really maintain that this is a term that people would use to willingly describe their personal tastes? no fucking way.

I don't get your point.

also people enjoy all sorts of things - particularly porn lol - which they would not willingly describe

Have I at any point tried to make the argument that the term "torture porn" is not pejorative? If so, I apologize; I believe pretty firmly that it's a totally pejorative term that entirely encapsulates why I have zero interesting in seeing the films that I label it with.

I feel like you are arguing not only with a strawman, but an entire field of detassled corn

my point is

what i keep coming back to is whether anyone is really willing to say there is any judgement-neutral application of the term (cf crabcore analogy upthread). i find it unlikely that anyone is going to start any discussion at the bar with "hey i really enjoyed this great new torture porn movie last night". and if thats the case, it has no utility as a genre distinction in my mind.

― Thu'um gang (jjjusten), Thursday, March 22, 2012 7:22 PM (36 minutes ago)

xpost

right but you also keep acting as if my refusal to use the term is some sort of counterfactual arguing point, and keep challenging why i and others would just refuse to accept it as a term.

Are you talking about this:

this is only because you refuse to use the phrase "torture porn"

which was actually a joke?

also i dont see the strawmanning in the basic argument i am making, which is that this is a useless non-functional term. it tells you nothing about the intent or motive or meaning of the film. drive and days of thunder and the fast and the furious are all movies about people driving fast on some level. who gives a shit about that tho?

xpost no thats just one example, and sorry, i didnt mean to single you out - it just seems odd to me that people not only want to use the term, but also want me to agree that the term is viable.

and to be clear i am not like offended about it in any way, it just seems weird that people are so forcefully interested in going beyond the "this is a term i use to describe things i dont like that seem to be about this" to the point of "this is a specific filmic term that should and can be used by others".

i feel like fast and furious tapped into that car-modding-fetishism more than days of thunder though. i think a good test of whether a movie qualifies is if you could conceive of the franchise being compatible with ":tokyo drift"

like days of thunder: tokyo drift doesn't really work as well as vanishing point: tokyo drift

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_bSk6yN_RU3Q/S0AxWM5PxkI/AAAAAAAAE5U/WKWU4ZFn7To/s400/frontiers_243x331.jpg

from frontiere(s) (2007, d. xavier gens)

i can't find the exact image i'm looking for, but for me, the idea of "torture porn" as a distinct genre crystallized after watching frontiere(s), martyrs and eden lake in fairly quick succession a couple years back. the iconic image that defines the genre in my mind is of a woman dressed head to toe in blood and filth, her hair matted and face painted with it, her supernaturally white eyes staring out from within a seemingly inhuman mask. and it's always a woman. the woman is the sacrificial object in these films, the thing caught, caged, beaten, raped and killed. because of this, we could call them "rape movies" instead of "torture porn". the rape isn't always literal, but it's nevertheless the basic text: a woman taken against her will, degraded horribly and very likely destroyed.

many of the slasher and giallo films of the late 70s and 80s were "rape movies", too. in those films a woman was repeatedly pursued and "taken" with a knife or other cutting implement. in modern "torture porn" type films, just as in their slasher/giallo predecessors, the basic rapeyness of the text is often obscured by the presence of male victims and complex framing stories. the big difference is that the slasher film concentrated on the suspense leading up to the act, and made fairly brief (though graphically memorable) business of the fatally penetrative moment. torture porn films, otoh, are all about prolonging the violation. the point isn't the titillating suspense of a point-of-view shot of the unwary victim-to-be, seen half-clad through her bedroom window. instead, it's her shrieking terror as she is made to suffer unspeakably.

martyrs and the human centipede 2 are interesting examples of the genre in that they both seem to address and critique it. martyrs concerns the "sacrifice" of an "innocent" woman for the benefit of an audience. the human centipede 2, meanwhile, is the explicitly sexual fantasy of a deranged fan of the first film.

and it's always a woman

saw, hostel both say this is wrong tho

the image of a blood-drenched protagonist seems incidental to any torture-porniness, though? it's more in line with revenge porn, which admittedly has a lot of overlap.

several of the victims in hostel are women. and i meant "always" in a broad, general sense. it's generally true of the genre, even though there are exceptions.

i mean, yeah, i probably should have said "almost always" but got a bit rhetorically carried away.

yeah but in hostel and saw the main characters/victims are all men, and i would venture to say theres much more screen time devoted to what happens to them then the incidental side characters.

i think what might be a little more interesting is to look at how many modern films use the setup of "couple in trouble" instead of woman in trouble, and what that might mean

the image of a blood-drenched protagonist seems incidental to any torture-porniness, though? it's more in line with revenge porn, which admittedly has a lot of overlap.

yeah, that's why i'm bothered by the phrase "torture porn", as i said earlier. i think it's more interesting to look for an emerging trend in a broad variety of films than to immediately restrict ourselves to one obvious feature (literal onscreen torture).

i think what might be a little more interesting is to look at how many modern films use the setup of "couple in trouble" instead of woman in trouble, and what that might mean

yeah, that's a fair point. the "couple in trouble" (or family under siege) genre has been very popular lately, and often overlaps with so-called "torture porn".

also i dont see the strawmanning in the basic argument i am making, which is that this is a useless non-functional term. it tells you nothing about the intent or motive or meaning of the film. drive and days of thunder and the fast and the furious are all movies about people driving fast on some level. who gives a shit about that tho?

the day when society at-large finds watching extended scenes of other people driving really fast to be as gross and shocking as extended scenes of people being mutilated is the day that this argument makes a lick of sense

saying "but it's just a device to tell the real story!" misses the entire point that the device is what is turning people off and causing them to coin terms like "torture porn"

i mean without getting too pomo failure of the modern family etc about it, on a purely functional level its a quick step towards establishing sympathy towards the characters i guess, they are part of something we value/aspire to and so the threat of that being destroyed adds something on top of str8 up human empathy i guess

maybe people should call it "softcore torture porn" or "torturerotica" because no one's actually being tortured, whereas in porn people are actually having sex.

lol

but why exactly should i care about people being turned off by this supposed device? esp considering that the people critiquing and criticizing these films via that term are very unlikely to actually ever see them.

there will always be biddies catching the vapors, i'm cool as long as they don't control the government or my TV

You shouldn't! But apparently you do, otherwise we wouldn't actually having this argument!

i guess what i am saying in a more blunt and slightly rude way is that if the people who want to use "torture porn" will never engage in such films outside of finger-wagging and titch titching them from the outside why do i care what they think or engage in the discussion on their genre terms at all

I don't know, why do you?

you passed "slightly rude" with "race music" btw

thats ridiculous

race music was a widely used term, and it was used as an example of a term that outlived its utility.

when i talk about the "rape movie" and the image of the woman-as-helpless-animal, i'm talking about what i see as the core of the genre, it's raw, unrestricted id. this is all but buried in many of the genre's most popular manifestations (hostel, for example), but given very clear expression in what robin bougie called the "cinema sewer", the fringe world of extreme, underground and cult films consumed mostly by genre fans.

though there are exceptions, i think that if you take all the recent films that are or might be labeled "torture porn" and look at them as a whole, the tendency to focus on the female as victim becomes very clear. particularly so when other recent cinema-of-disturbance films are included (lars von trier films like breaking the waves, dancer in the dark and dogville; gaspar noe's i stand alone and irreversible; requiem for a dream; etc.)

it's = its, as usual

Race music was not an inherently pejorative term in its conception; it morphed into one as attitudes towards race changed in our society. Torture porn was pejorative from the get-go. Casting them as analogous turns "race music" as a term into something it initially wasn't and makes for a really, really poor analogy.

If the subtext behind this is "why do you keep asking me about these movies when we both know that, in general, you hate them?" the answer is "because even though I find these things repellent, I am curious about the reactions of people who watch them and also I like talking to my friends"

lol @ "utility" btw

i guess what i am saying in a more blunt and slightly rude way is that if the people who want to use "torture porn" will never engage in such films outside of finger-wagging and titch titching them from the outside why do i care what they think or engage in the discussion on their genre terms at all

i use the phrase "torture porn" and though i might seem like something of a finger-wagger, i'm not really condemning anything or anybody. i'm just trying to describe the function and appeal of a class of films as dispassionately as possible.

i mean, i've been a gorehound all my life. i watch and even like a lot of films for the gore effects alone. people in the 80s used to describe the horror films i liked as "the pornography of violence", and as much as i wanted to object, i couldn't, really. the way gore scenes function in a film like maniac is almost exactly the same as the way sex scenes function in old-fashioned, narrative porn. they're the focus and sometimes the entire point. they in a sense "justify" the rest of the film. tons of 80s movies have no real reason to exist outside their gory special effects. and i'm okay with that.

fyi i am sam, forest gump, riding the bus with my sister, and bill are all special needs porn. slingblade too imho

it's true that the metaphorical use of the word "pornography" (or porn) implies the obscene, the transgressive, the foul. but even that's okay as far as i'm concerned, because i acknowledge that my interest in gore is not dispassionate. i like the transgression, the "nasty" and "sleazy" aspects of it. that's not all i like, but my interest in the forbidden and disreputable can't be separated from my interest in gore-horror.

in that sense, the link to porn isn't such a big metaphorical leap. i mean, comedy might be described as "the pornography of jokes" and romance "the pornography of love", but there's nothing inherently transgressive in either jokes or love, so the metaphor doesn't make sense. gore and rapey torture shit are transgressive, so QED.

i disagree that the lack of actual torture defines soft-core torture porn. The socially acceptable torture-otica is torture directed at tough guys like james bond or 24's ethnic villain of the week. female/child torture is still a little transgressive for dick cheney to put on his netflix.

Race music was not an inherently pejorative term in its conception; it morphed into one as attitudes towards race changed in our society. Torture porn was pejorative from the get-go. Casting them as analogous turns "race music" as a term into something it initially wasn't and makes for a really, really poor analogy.

right but when i brought it up, it seemed like people were maintaining that torture porn wasnt pejorative. thats exactly why i used it, because for the sake of argument, if i could establish that it had become pejorative over time, there would have been a decent parallel there.

If the subtext behind this is "why do you keep asking me about these movies when we both know that, in general, you hate them?" the answer is "because even though I find these things repellent, I am curious about the reactions of people who watch them and also I like talking to my friends"

nah man i am not talking about you at all actually, i am literally not talking abt anyone on this thread, i am talking abt in the culture at large, where people arent engaging in this discussion like we are on this thread but are just straight up uninterested in digging any deeper into the possible problematic aspects of the term, why should i bother

i can see where that could have been misread but srsly i had no intention of dismissing the peeps on here - im talking about the muddleheaded types that have slotted the torture porn epidemic in place of the slacker stereotype or the devil worshipping rock and rollers in the general culture war/whats wrong with america these days discussion

i disagree that the lack of actual torture defines soft-core torture porn. The socially acceptable torture-otica is torture directed at tough guys like james bond or 24's ethnic villain of the week. female/child torture is still a little transgressive for dick cheney to put on his netflix.

yes but softcore porn is less socially acceptable than 24 or james bond - it's shown after 11pm on cinemax and hbo zone, and few other places. You can't say martyrs or whatever is hardcore because it's still not actually footage of torture. to carry out the analogy, james bond is equitable with a movie that's just "sexy" rather than "erotica."

the obscene, the transgressive, the foul.

You are describing John Waters movies.

that too! love JW to death.

but i'm also describing herschell gordon lewis, horror as a grindhouse/exploitation genre, the early peter jackson flicks, etc.

i will admit that one thing i am not looking forward to but see as an eventual consequence of this is the moment that some asshole school shooter has a copy of hostel 2 and the inevitable media braying begins. unless thats already happened and i missed it. which also is why human centipede 2, had it not been hamfisted in every way, could have had some interesting stuff to say, since its a film about the possibility of these films creating real life horrors.

and it's always a woman

saw, hostel both say this is wrong tho

― Thu'um gang (jjjusten), Thursday, March 22, 2012 4:22 PM (Yesterday)

not to mention another seminal (maybe *the* seminal) film - audition

I kinda wish this type of movie had been given a diff name (like idk extreme horror or something) but it's like railing against "teen pop" or "chick flick" at this point, it's just part of the vernacular. I hated the term pigfuck to describe the noisy rock I was listening to in the 80s, it was invented by somebody who really didn't think too much of the genre (christgau iirc) and it was subsequently used either pejoratively by those who didn't like the music or with great irony by those who did.

torture porn is a similarly misleading and reductive moniker, and trying to define it highlights the problems with genre definition themselves, as soon as you start demarcating the boundaries there are violations and exceptions everywhere, especially among the best or "classic" examples (audition, inside, in my skin, funny games, baise-moi, martyrs, saw, hostel). in fact, when I finally saw hostel I was surprised to find it was about 80% plot and suspense with a couple of intense set pieces - it would've made for a very disappointing porn movie. plus I don't think the "porn" assignation is due to the transgressive nature of the material alone. porn in this sense just implies a utilitarian approach to aesthetics (cf food porn, also terminator 2 being called "action porn" when it came out). although clearly the woman-as-object aspect of some of these movies does resonant, reinforces the porniness of it.

and von trier's stuff or requiem for a dream are poor examples - it's like watching a movie where the protagonists impale themselves on sharp objects and calling it a slasher film

wd watch that

think I have, actually

re: terminator: it was 'fx porn' wasn't it? not that i disagree either way

Requiem is more editing porn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP6Ro-Rwvl8

xps

re: T2, can't remember offhand, I linked to original article once so I know it's out there but I'm not gonna google "terminator porn" at work

torture porn is a similarly misleading and reductive moniker, and trying to define it highlights the problems with genre definition themselves, as soon as you start demarcating the boundaries there are violations and exceptions everywhere, especially among the best or "classic" examples (audition, inside, in my skin, funny games, baise-moi, martyrs, saw, hostel). in fact, when I finally saw hostel I was surprised to find it was about 80% plot and suspense with a couple of intense set pieces - it would've made for a very disappointing porn movie. plus I don't think the "porn" assignation is due to the transgressive nature of the material alone. porn in this sense just implies a utilitarian approach to aesthetics (cf food porn, also terminator 2 being called "action porn" when it came out). although clearly the woman-as-object aspect of some of these movies does resonant, reinforces the porniness of it.

^this

I think that while the term, pornography, has been historically applied to trangressive media, it has been done so as a means of dismissing it by lumping it together with material that is intended as pornography.

PS I'd like to thank contenderizer & edward III for contributing thoughtful texts around ideas that I neglected to treat thoughtfully and failed to develop.

I took my cheerleader gf to go see blue velvet when it came out, I guess we were about 16? she told her mom I took her to a porno movie.

</stealthbrag>

lol

needless to say things did not work out for us

Yeah cuz she was into some freaky shit obv

not to mention another seminal (maybe *the* seminal) film - audition

fair point, but compare w the number of miike films that use the torture/annihilation of women as mise-en-scene

plus audition's female villain gets tortured and raped in flashbacks

i do acknowlege, though, that the genre isn't so completely dependent on the dehumanization/torture/destruction of women as i suggested upthread. guys get their time on the rack, too.

the flashback stuff is hinted at and not really dwelt on, not even directly depicted iirc?

ichi the killer obv has some horrific violence directed at women, but at men too - it's an equal opportunity offender! and for some reason calling that film torture porn seems... wrong?

xp before you clarified ha

hey guys I figured it out - if there's a dungeon it's torture porn

i really don't mind ___-porn being used as a term of dismissal, particularly if it cuts to the heart of why audiences want to see such a movie and why the producers decided to make it. maybe torture porn isn't a good descriptor of miike movies but audiences would be pretty upset if nobody got tortured in audition, and turned into nora eph-porn instead.

but the first half *is* nora eph-porn!

which I guess makes the back half torture meet-cute

saw bloody valentine (1981) the other day at the prince charles cinema in london and, even allowing for the fact that its not a masterpiece, and the pcc does attract an 'irreverent' audience, and that horror is prone to getting dated more than other genres, i find it weird that people just like to watch a lot of horror now to laugh at it. esp when this film wasnt even THAT bad! its pretty well done in a routine-slasher-movie kind of way. maybe its really hard to be scary now post-irony or post-SAW etc.

? there is plenty of stuff that's genuinely disturbing and there always will be

I don't think they're more or less prone to appearing dated than, say, musicals. But they are just as apt to be fetishized for their adherence to their eras' flavors as any other genre.

slasher movies obv have a lot in oommon w/ post-animal house comedy movies - it's no coincidence that bob clark directed black christmas and porky's.

yup. gratuitous boob shot = kill shot

I don't like horror movies, and I don't like gore. I think a lot of it has to do w being real sick as a kid and spending lots of traumatic time in hospitals. I think people that enjoy horror movies are sickos that got the lucky end of the stick and haven't had to really deal with life or death stuff.

lol

I wouldn't have lolled but I would've ^^ronged.

I'm fine with people not liking entire genres/mediums/forms for their own personal reasons but casting aspersions on entire audiences is nagl

^^agreed

i was ashamed of myself (and everyone else) in attendance of the new robocop movie and am totally judgmental of that one guy who clapped at the end. no gore in nu-bocop though.

That's a horror film?

well, i was horrified by it.

Fair enough

Cool of y'all to step in and be judgmental about how you shouldn't be judgmental.

Btw original Robocop is high art and gets a pass.

i find it weird that people just like to watch a lot of horror now to laugh at it.

this was always the case

i've had an ongoing argument with my friend about this ever since we saw hausu because he wants horror movies to actually be scary, and i just wanna see a bunch of funny fucked-up gross crap

also in crowds ppl tend to laugh at themselves being scared? like if they were home on the couch they might be all OMGGGGGGGG O_O but in the movie theater they're all like LOL HAHA MAN THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN SCARY BUT NOPE LAUGHING HAHAHA

I get a huge adrenalin rush out of being terrified by movies, I love it so much when a movie does it well

It's what drives me nuts about DeRogatis' stupid music analogy that he keeps throwing out (in ref to Odd Future, smh) about whether you'd wanna see Psycho or Saw III, when it's like, duh, those movies are attempting to do different things.

I'm the same way with haunted houses. I don't like things jumping out and scaring me, but I like all the fucked up gross crap

i think that's kinda true, what VG said about crowds vs. home -- even a dumb horror movie can turn into a disturbing mindfuck if i'm watching it at 1 a.m. alone, but something about the experience of being in a movie theater makes it easier to handle.

last night i watched the Evil Dead remake and kept wanting to standup and applaud at the most over-the-top gorey moments, was kind of disturbing myself. i'm not super partial to one type of horror movie over others, though -- i like the gratuitous nasty stuff, i like the jumpy thriller stuff, i like the spooky mysterious stuff, i like that some of the best movies kind of combine those categories.

weird weird bruce campbell cameo at the end of that one.

Cool of y'all to step in and be judgmental about how you shouldn't be judgmental.

lol dude you're the guy who swung in with a bullshit opinion. I love gore movies precisely because they help me deal with childhood trauma, if that's not valid for you in your own life then cool? but if I'm a "sicko" for how I process my shit through art then fuck you, pretty much?

I think people that enjoy horror movies are sickos that got the lucky end of the stick and haven't had to really deal with life or death stuff.

Yeah, this type of horror fan exists. But I know three separate people who have had life or death stuff, and who are into horror films (related to their experiences or not as it may be, I don't know). Okay, that's three anecdotal ppl cardamon knows, not a great argument I know.

Some horror films though, it feels somehow as though the director knows what fear is and they're on the level with you. Hithcock w/Psycho and Birds, Argento w/Suspiria, and I got this vibe from Texas Chainsaw Massacre too, like the director had got a sense of some dark horrible shit that is 'in' Texas and was putting this across?

Would not put I Spit On Your Grave on this list.

My phrasing is shit here. Does any of this make sense.

Well we all stop loving horror movies when we die, so he may be onto something there.

Real talk

do zombies like horror movies

They help them cope.

sickos

they want to see what it's like to run fast and quicken in seconds.

I guess I should be glad that this thread went as long as it did before someone showed up and literally called horror fans sickos, one of the very things I was bitching about in the earliest parts of this thread.

getting butthurt that someone called you a sicko because you like the genre that brought us "tree rape" is the definition of a first world problem

whiney, ilx weatherman

ilx weather underground

That's the nicest compliment I've ever handed someone I don't believe I like.

Lol at getting that from a dude that spends a lot of time getting aggro over differing music crit opinions and getting picked on for eating at subway

any given whiney post is a first world problem

No doubt

cool it guys. i don't like where this is going.

who are you, the fonz

i think we wld be in denial if we didn't acknowledge that part of the pleasure in watching horror films is interrogating our own sadism via the comforting prism of genre tropes, but for me the most interesting horror movies are invariably those where our identification constantly moves between monster and victim - where we recognise the thrill of transgression and the terror of victimisation.

Settle down guys so Adam Bruneau can next explain to us the hypocrisy behind liberals not being tolerant of other peoples' intolerance.

Thou shalt not zing ... except!

i think we wld be in denial if we didn't acknowledge that part of the pleasure in watching horror films is interrogating our own sadism via the comforting prism of genre tropes, but for me the most interesting horror movies are invariably those where our identification constantly moves between monster and victim - where we recognise the thrill of transgression and the terror of victimisation.

yeah this is true & good imo

u sick fuck

me irl tbh

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6512/558/1600/File0479.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/image_zps0e8ea81f.jpg

why the hell did you all let Adam troll you

because we're sickos jeez have you not been paying attention

I don't like horror movies, and I don't like gore. I think a lot of it has to do w being real sick as a kid and spending lots of traumatic time in hospitals. I think people that enjoy horror movies are sickos that got the lucky end of the stick and haven't had to really deal with life or death stuff.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, 20 February 2014 00:08

I'm fine with people not liking entire genres/mediums/forms for their own personal reasons but casting aspersions on entire audiences is nagl

― How dare you tarnish the reputation of Turturro's yodel (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 20 February 2014 00:21

Cool of y'all to step in and be judgmental about how you shouldn't be judgmental.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, 20 February 2014 00:55

lol dude you're the guy who swung in with a bullshit opinion. I love gore movies precisely because they help me deal with childhood trauma, if that's not valid for you in your own life then cool? but if I'm a "sicko" for how I process my shit through art then fuck you, pretty much?

― joe perry has been dead for years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, 20 February 2014 01:43

Yeah, this type of horror fan exists. But I know three separate people who have had life or death stuff, and who are into horror films (related to their experiences or not as it may be, I don't know). Okay, that's three anecdotal ppl cardamon knows, not a great argument I know.

Some horror films though, it feels somehow as though the director knows what fear is and they're on the level with you. Hithcock w/Psycho and Birds, Argento w/Suspiria, and I got this vibe from Texas Chainsaw Massacre too, like the director had got a sense of some dark horrible shit that is 'in' Texas and was putting this across?

Would not put I Spit On Your Grave on this list.

― cardamon, Thursday, 20 February 2014 03:50 (1 year ago)

What Adam said is very far from the truth. It's amazing how so many horror fans and creators have suffered serious trauma or some other deeply unpleasant things. I remember one particularly harrowing account from a horror reader whose younger years were in the most horrible circumstances I've heard anyone talk about on a forum.

Quite a lot of these people find horror therapeutic. Joanna Russ said one of the reasons she likes horror is because it made her feel less alone in thinking the universe was so horrible, even when put in an fantasy fashion.

Yeah that's a load of bs i said there.

A lot of horror writers jokingly say that they are the most well adjusted writers of any genre because they get all the bad shit out their system. I don't know how much truth might be in that.

I'm not sure why but in the past year I've been very disturbed by things that I wouldn't have flinched at before. I've never been particularly into realistic and mundane horror but I think now I'm even avoiding it a little now.
I might give Jack Ketchum a try because he is so highly acclaimed, as well as the main bestsellers who have nasty stuff peppering their work (Masterton, Laymon), not sure about the extremist speciality guys.
original European decadents and conte cruels writers might be easier to swallow for their emphasis on beauty.

I'm just popping in here briefly because with the advent of Trayvon Martin's killing on through the most recent shooting of Charles Kinsey, I realized that part of my baseline ongoing experience as a black American is constant lurking sublimated dread that an authority figure will turn on me for no reason and kill me, which mirrors very closely the anxiety and fear I experience when I watch horror movies, and my subconscious cannot detach one reaction from the other. Which is another way of saying that the scares I get from most horror movies mirror exactly literal ongoing concerns about my actual safety and my emotional reactions cannot distinguish between the two situations (although now that I've made this connection, maybe I can convince my subconscious that reactions to horror movies aren't real).

Is it the same for ghosts and monsters stuff?

Depends on the monster, really, and the tone/nature of the film.