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 it’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. It’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 film’s opening sequences, we see a human head explode. It’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. It’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 I’ve seen all these movies and I really don’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.