Some VERY enhanced interrogation techniques gave us all a hard-on.
Ideas for a fun evening: Dinner out at the new Italian place around the block. Karaoke with friends. A glass of wine and a good novel near the fireplace. Getting shit-faced watching the game with your buds. Viewing attractive young people get slowly mutilated, flayed, whipped and killed in elaborate torture scenarios that would make the Grand Inquisitor turn his head. No? Don't like that last option? Well, you obviously were immune to the many charms of this decades most pronounced horror genre: Torture Porn.
The modest bloodbaths of past slasher films proved too tame for the insatiable bloodlust of 21st Century audiences; we now had an appetite for scenes of distended violence, maximum bloodletting on the side please. The visceral thrills of viscera proved too tantalizing to refrain from indulging. Do, Do, Do...the Strappado!
Torture porn is a game of chicken between director and audience. "You liked that? You like to watch a girl hung upside down above a tile spa and bled like a calf at slaughter while a naked French Woman writhes below in ecstasy? Yeah?" "Pu-shaw, that was nothing. I'm fucking tough." "OK, try this on for size? Here is a girl detaching her tormentor's cock with a pair of scissors and serving it to the Doberman like it was Kibbles and Bits." "Give it to me, I'm ready!" This game has no happy ending.
Popular offenders include: Eli Roth's Hostel and Hostel II, Wolf Creek (it's torture mate!), remakes of the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its new prequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Captivity and Touristas (a film in which the violence had become so explicit and banal that it felt more like viewing surgery footage than a fictional horror film). Other filmmakers would not want their work to be classified alongside these cheap exploitative pics but Lars Von Trier's recent provocation Anti-Christ and, especially, Mel Gibson's two hour gladiatorial exercise in sadism masquerading as religious devotional, The Passion Of The Christ, are as much part of the genre as is any of Eli Roth's less highbrow entries.
The film series that defined what torture porn was all about was, of course, the Saw films. Each Saw flick is little more than a exercise for its writers to dream up new and more elaborate Rube-Goldbergian torture devices for their hapless victims to attempt escape from, because thumb screws are so over! The ruse is that the Saw films portend to be little morality plays, the killer not simply a sadistic madman but a radical do-gooder, getting apathetic people to finally recognize just how precious their lives really are...on pain of death! The first edition in the franchise had some structural novelty and whopper of an ending; as the quality of the films have fallen the strained elaborateness of the torments has become itself a torture to behold.
Sadly, as the images from Abu Grahib reminded us, real torture is anything but entertaining. Torture is the ultimate debasement of a person, reducing them and their consciousness to only the most animalistic of impulses. Perhaps torture porn is proof that mass media does respond quickly and effectively to our collective social anxieties. Whether these films adequately and morally confront the real psychological impact that Abu Grahib had on America, I'll leave to the experts. I just hope that torture, whether in our movies or in our politics, does not continue its stranglehold on the American psyche.
You AUGHT to remember....
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