NEWS: Chris GoreÂ’s Footage Fetishes: Is this the New Breed of Horror or Torture Porn?

CULTURE: Chris Gore’s Footage Fetishes: Is This the New Breed of Horror or Torture Porn?

When a type of horror film becomes widely popular, it is often a reflection of the secret fears the masses. And no movie genre has experienced more of a resurgence in the wake of 9/11 than horror. Fictional monsters and tales of terror are much safer (and more entertaining) to experience at the movies. In a way, it can be cathartic to walk out of a film having “survived,” so to speak. I’m just not sure the current crop of horror flicks will stand the test of time as classics worth revisiting. I also wonder as to what these films say about multiplexers’ views on what constitutes entertainment.


Torture is as popular at the movies as it is with the Bush administration. Funny, eh?

The original Saw touched a nerve and wrought a franchise netting hundreds of millions of dollars at the box-office and on DVD. While the film does feature torture through clever devices intended to teach a lesson about an appreciation for one’s life, these are brutal movies. In spite of being sick and disgusting, the Saw trilogy is oddly funny as well. In the wake of Saw we saw a slew of chilling new films each seeming to up the ante on the torture factor. There was Wolf Creek with little plot but plenty of agonizing scenes of helpless women tied up and used for carving practice. And even the remake of The Hills Have Eyes honed in on torture as its main thrill. Eli Roth’s Hostel seems to be the only one among them that has some sense of redemption at the end of the gruesome story. Well, more of a revenge that satisfies, but it ends on a hopeful note, unlike the rest. However, even with some of these films having merit, it’s still all about getting to the gore scenes—show us some blood. It’s as if the whole audience is just waiting to get past the “talking” and the “story” with their horror dicks in their hands waiting to jerk off to torture porn.


Eli Roth's Hostel features both a gruesome story with some satisfying redemption, er, revenge in the end.

The core of the plot for all of these torture porn movies is to get the cast of characters into a situation in which they will experience pain. There seems to be little story to speak of during these torture scenes. For the most part, the scenes follow similar beats: various devices are introduced, these scary-looking devices are used to provoke the victims to tears at their very sight, and then these lethal devices are used on the victims resulting in blood, guts, gore and often, painful appendage removal. The victim, if being viewed by a friend, is often dispensed in a horrible way. And then said voyeur is next. As a show of how gutsy the filmmakers are, these torture scenes seem to go on much longer than necessary. For myself, I get a little sick to my stomach watching it. And itÂ’s not even a fun kind of sick, like the one I experienced watching Borat getting tea-bagged.


Wolf Creek features plenty of young girls tortured over and over and over...

For me, a quality horror film provides scares. Scares are just plain fun. There really is no correlation between a gory movie and a scary one. Oftentimes truly scary movies provide thrills by not showing the gruesome stuff. ItÂ’s very rare that gore and scares come together as one. Perhaps one of the best examples, in fact, a film that changed the genre and movie history was the original 1978 George A. Romero Dawn of the Dead. In one of the filmÂ’s opening sequences, we see a human head explode. ItÂ’s horrific. Until that time, nothing like that had ever been put on film. And horror films were never the same as each one must somehow top the other.


Sure, they're having fun now, but things get bad quick for the characters in Turistas.

And now we have Turistas, which has opened to critical disdain, pretty much across the board. But for the horror genre more than any other, the critics are irrelevant. ItÂ’s all about the fans. So, to horror fans, I have to ask, is this torture porn fun to watch?

For myself, the answer is no. I love horror and IÂ’ve seen all these movies and I really donÂ’t like them. And while I want to support the genre since I would almost prefer any of these films to the milquetoast crap we normally see, I just want to know why audiences are showing up in droves.

Clearly, avoiding facing the terrors in the real world has something to do with their popularity. The television coverage of the conflict in the Middle East inching us ever closer to World War III is the waking nightmare we face. Those real horrors seen daily on the news are just too depressing to think about. Maybe I’m wrong and these movies are providing a useful service to moviegoers. I guess numbing oneself with torture porn is a way to cope—the news won’t seem scary at all.

Gore gone.

Chris_Gore is an author, a filmmaker, the creator of Film Threat, and despite this piece, loves gory movies.

I dunno about your "torture pron is a way to escape the reality of horrible news", I think that it's more a reaction to the slew of action movies where a character can fall off a building while fighting the bad guy, then get shot, then get hit by a car, and walk away with barely a limp.

Wolf Creek was fucking horrible, so it gets points for being a film that was hard to watch. Other horror films have the gore and torture, but wolf creek managed to get me thinking 'oh dear god no' before it actually showed any gore.

I over-anticipated Saw, so I didn't think much of it. Hostel wasn't brutal enough for me; I hated the characters and wanted them to die a slower more horrible death. Air-hoses up the jacksie next time please, movie-makers.

I agree with the horror porn concept but I think Hollywood is largely to blame. When the plot line leaves you wanting, the gore scenes are all that is left. Everything on tv and in the movies has gotten more violent, racier, more out there. Each successive generation is becoming desensitized at a younger age. As a result, film producers are forced to become more "inventive" or else have their finished product be considered lame and boring. The on going cycle feeds on itself so to speak.

The Saw trilogy is the "Star Wars Episodes 1-3" of horror.

The following contains Wolf Creek spoilers. So if you actually want to see this steaming cinematic pile of dingo feces, don't click.

I've yet to see any of the Saw movies. I figure they'll make their way onto my Netflix queue eventually.

like wolf creek is the first movie to ever have someone walk into danger after they are relatively free

I prefer some story with my gore. A movie with little plot that introduces as many characters as possible just to kill them as gruesomely as possible, does not appeal to me.

I enjoyed the first Saw. I thought it made you think which is rare in today's horror. I also enjoyed the lesson or "message". Two however was tres lame and I have yet to see three.

No, certainly not. But for as serious as the movie and all involved took themselves, it was preposterous. If you're going to do an Australian-tinged riff on the stupid American teen-to-mid-20's popcorn horror movie genre, don't be so pretentious about it.

I'm not too into Saw, the morality is a little but muddled and I don't really buy it as a plot device.


Didn't see Wolf Creek.

Hostel, was just gonzo cinema throughout. Just didn't do the trick for me. The first half of the movie was nothing but stupid characters acting like jagoffs and tits. I didn't give a shit about any of the characters, so I didn't really care if they got ripped apart. I don't know if that was intentional.

The Hills Have Eyes? I loved it. Didn't let me down a bit. It was everything I wanted it to be.

I prefer my gore totally over the top. Like, say, strapping a lawnmower onto your chest and running into a room full of the undead.

But for serious movies, I don't know... I guess it all boils down to balance. Gore is good. Plot is good.

Sometimes I just need to see a bunch of people get hurt. Call me fucked up, but it's true. Sometimes I just have enough plot in my recent media/life that I just want a flashy gore-fest. It's a balance between gore/plot, flash/substance. Both serve completely different purposes, and satisfy different needs.

But a nice balance between the two is my preference.

i didnt think it was pretentious

see here

Greg McLean SuicideGirls interview

Greg McLean ReallyScary.com interview

Hostel was way over blow by the media and people who haven't really watched it. Its really not that bad or sadistic. The idea itself is sadistic but I think Roth really underplays what he could have done in the movie. Some other movies such as the remake of The Hills Have Eyes where some mutant redneck is raping and nursing off a a woman while holding a gun to her baby's head is way way worse and should be flagged a torture porn for obviously going way over the top when there was no need and it had nothing to due with the plot.

I agree, the first Saw was cool, the second was terrible. Saw III gets things back on track and while not as good as the first one, it comes close.

Yeah, Hostel was a big disappointment. All the hype had you thinking this would be some trauma-inducing shit but when I saw it I felt totally conned. Luckily, it was a netflix rental so there was no need for me to go and hang myself.

Heh heh . . . horror dicks . . .

Saw is barely even cringe-worthy. It talks big, but it flinches away from even showing the part that gave it its name. There were a few somewhat interesting ideas, but...nah. Didn't do it for me.

Honestly, I'm not that interested in the genre, but if done properly it can be both entertaining *and* squirm-inducingly nasty. I think the best example of this is "The Devil's Rejects". The main characters are murderers, rapists, and sadists, but they have a certain amount of uncomfortable charm and so when things go wrong for them, well... you may well feel sympathy for them. Which is not a comfortable place to be. And it's smart and even funny in places.

Or Audition. God. That didn't really show that much either, but it was a lot more suggestive and creepy about it, and since it starts off as a romantic comedy sort of thing..

I'd still rather actually be scared by horror, and serial killers and torturers don't scare me. They startle me, gross me out, whatever (or bore me/make me laugh, if the movie's bad enough on both a plot level and a visual level), but scare, no. For that I need unstoppable supernatural creatures, particularly with no discernable motive. Enter Ju-On...

I think Chris makes a mistake lumping Saw in with Turistas and Hostel, and to an extent, even The Hills Have Eyes.

The key fear that Hostel, and now Turistas, taps into is the fear that we increasingly live in a world where there is no safety outside of our cozy American lives. In the last five yearss, we have helped to create a world that largely hates us (remember that even immediately post-9/11 there was very little but sympathy for us worldwide). And that world is no longer shy about expressing its disdain.

Enter movies where privileged groups of hedonistic American consumers go happily amok in foreign countries (or backwater America) only to find themselves sold into torture, sadistically revenged and chopped into bits.

It all makes perfect sense to me. ; P

Gore and scare can go well together. Look at films like Dario Argento's Suspiria, 28 days later, the original Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, Return of the Living Dead, and of course Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Yes, some of those wouldn't scare your average 10 year old today; but they were scary then (some still are), and all of them were pretty gory. The only real difference between these films and shitburgers like wolf creek is the directors styles, imagination, and motivation for making the movies.
With many modern horror films, especially with movies like hostel, I watch them and I can almost see and hear the director, sitting slumped and dazed off to the side, telling us "Hey, we couldn't find real actors; and stories from Ramsey Campbell, H.P. Lovecraft, and F. Paul Wilson take too much time and skill, so this is the best I could do."

Anyway, disagreements about the gore and scare scales aside, I have to agree about this recent trent of "torture porn" becomeing so popular. Hollywood may bear some burden of blame, but it's the millions of people who keep spending money going to these releases that keeps more of them coming out.

Actually, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original) is one of the least gory horror movies I've seen. Almost everything unpleasant that happens happens off camera. And I'd argue that Nightmare on Elm Street was scary despite the gore, not because of it. The gore is kind of silly and overdone, but the idea that when you go to sleep, you're in *his* hands...well, that's scary. That's the sort of thing that keeps one up at night. Pity that the rest of the series doesn't really seem to have captured that sense of sleep deprived paranoia.

I think the recent trend toward horror porn is not a new one. Cinema runs in cycles not unlike an other popular culture (with a turnaround about every 20 years or so). We have these movies now (Touristas, Hostel, etc..) that echo older films, and I use that term loosely, such as The Fabulous Torture Show and Pieces. It seems reasonable that we push the boundaries of what we know works in horror films until they become tired and unprofitable. After a few years of this drudge, someone will undoubtedly take the genre in another direction. Look at Scream for example. When it came out, it was praised for being fresh and new. Two years later we had a second scream and a bunch of rip-off films that were made with essentially the same plot and cinematic style. Think, I Still Know What You Thought I Didn't Know but Now Do...Last Summer type movies. After the idea pool had stagnated long enough (read: the film studios didn't think they could beat the dead horse any longer) horror moved on. We are already seeing the same trend in the Japanese horror remake vein of the genre. Once studios find that they've bled that avenue dry, they'll go looking for the next money maker. Horror porn, as you call it will be no different. In order to change which movies get made, you really have to vote with your dollars.

Unfortunately, so far the main horror films I like are made in Japan, and not shown theatrically in the US, so my dollars don't count for all that much. (They observe that the Japanese movies have an audience, and then they make shitty watered-down remakes because they feel the American film-going audience can't handle foreign films. Or so I can only assume. But I don't like the shitty watered-down remakes, so I'm hardly going to encourage their production...)

I can't stand to watch torture porn. It makes me squirm in my seat.

i must be the only person in the world who liked Wolf Creek...i wouldn't watch it again but i LIKED it....scenes stuck in my head for days and that rarely happens to me with horror movies. the beginning was slow and the end was lame but the middle was really tense and legitimately horrifying.

Hostel was crap. i hated it. the only part i liked was when the guy with the chainsaw slipped on the fingers. i fell over laughing. but the entire movie was retarded. i can't believe they're making a second one. well, i can, because it's horror.

i never saw any of the Saw movies...they look too dumb. i just don't care for horror in general, except for some of the older stuff and a few random newer movies (28 Days Later, House of 1000 Corpses/Devil's Rejects, May, etc.).

the first time i heard of Turistas was when i saw huge posters for it plastered up all over New York. i laughed and said "nice Hostel rip-off."