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

Great to see a lot of passionate responses. It's interesting to note that "Turistas" came in 8th at the boxoffice its opening weekend taking in $3.5 million playing on 1,500 screens. I guess this one can be declared a bomb.

Perhaps the holidays may not be the best time to release a horror film with loads of torture.

Thank god someone else is saying this. I can't stand this genre of movies. Bring back horror movies where the horror comes from the suspense of where the killer or creature is coming from or what its going to do next, not from the normal person deciding what organ to remove next.

And the sad thing is, I can't really see any end in sight.

We have Hostel 2 coming out in a few months. Same movie, chicks instead of dudes.
We have Rob Zombies remake of Halloween. I have hope for this, but at the same time I worry he's going to possibly take it away from its slasher roots. We'll see.

But there are bright points. One in particular for me. And that is Guillermo Del Toro's Pans Labyrinth. I am ridiculously pumped for this movie.

Just my two cents.

Ooo another movie I'm pumped for is Perfume: Story of a Murderer. Watch the trailer and tell me it doesn't look terrifying.

+1

Personally, if a horror movie wanted to make everyone (male) in the audience cringe, all they'd have to do was have a torture scene like the one in Casino Royale. I appreciate my man-parts a lot better after that.

Also, its funny because apparently thats taken directly from the novel. My mom, being a huge bond fan, said thats the only part she remembered from reading the novel many years ago.

Are you kidding? That's the best possible time. And the studios are clearly aware of this, as evidenced by The Santa Clause 3.

The best possible thing that Rob Zombie could do with the Halloween remake is take it away from its slasher roots. Slasher movies have been beaten into a thin, viscous goo. I would be very surprised if he could extract anything whatsoever from the genre that was entertaining, much less genuinely scary or innovative. (Especially in a remake.)

But then, I'd really much rather see him make a new movie of his own. I honestly don't think I enjoyed a single moment of Halloween (the original). I realize it's one of the movies that started the cliches, but nonetheless it is essentially a giant brick of cliche in this day and age. And unlike Nightmare on Elm Street or Chucky or a handful of other slasher film progenitors, it doesn't really have any interesting twists. It's just some psycho killing people. Yay, and, uh, stuff.

And yeah, "Pan's Labyrinth" looks fucking awesome.

Perhaps the studios are just worried about the traditional horror options. With a supernatural foe you run the risk of the audience just not buying into it. There are the cheesy horror flicks where people don't mind that it's clearly a guy in a rubber suit, but that's not a huge market. The result seems to be that cultures which are a bit more in tune with ghost stories, such as Asia, are the one making those films (bar remakes of things which have proven themselves).

An example of how horror lost its way in modern cinema might be the remake of The Haunting. The new version rightfully flopped but who would say that something just like the original, which was a classic, would generate any boxoffice?

Well, I think studios need to realize that DVD, unlike VHS, is actually a viable way to distribute a first run movie. It's the perfect format for small-audience movies (and I think serials also ("TV series" without the TV). Well, I guess to be fair they're not completely unaware of it ("Mirrormask" was originally slated to be released directly to DVD, but got such an surge of interest that it saw limited theatrical release.), but they aren't doing as much with it as they could be. And by the same token, viewers need to realize that direct-to-DVD doesn't need to mean "crap" the way direct-to-video nearly always did.

I also have nothing positive to say about this genre of horror . Now I just got done watching Feast , which I enjoyed greatly . I'm not offended by gore ( I tend to watch the fx to try to figure out how they did them & enjoy them as a work of art when done right ) , but anyone can fake torture . I don't need "real" in my horror . I'm trying to escape reality a little here , give me a break . I'd enjoy a new Evil Dead movie , if a sequel of anything really needs to be made .

Obviously, the intention of these directors is not to foster this type of inquiry; namely, why are people so fascinated with violence? (See Eric Fromm's "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness") However, as this thread shows, this type of inquiry is a consequence, though an indirect one, of these films. So, in this sense, perhaps these films do have a positive consequence as they open up the space for debate about violence and its normalization and banalization within the contemporary collective consciousness.

In contrast, there are films that could be similarly categorized which do specifically address these types of questions. Here, I'm referring to the films of Chan-wook Park (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance). He utilizes violence for the specific goal of bringing out both philosophically and practically interesting questions about justice, retribution, and ethics in general.

In my humble opinion (and this is coming from someone who really gets nothing out of these types of films) the best horror movies are the ones done by people who don't set out to make a "horror movie", if that makes any sense. Some of my favourite scary movies are ones that don't prescribe to the confines of the genre. Movies like The Shining and the Exorcist strike me as great examples of movies that set out to be good movies before they set out to be horror movies, and were scary as a byproduct. They were scary because they were done well, not because they were trying to be scary. If it's following a formula it's going to suck no matter what. Good horror movies are always the ones that do something new (see Scream or Saw). Thats just my 2 cents.

I understand that statement completely. That is a fantastic observation. Thanks!
CG