“Torture porn” Part 1: Who started it?
Many people blame Eli Roth’s Hostel or the Saw series for sparking the “torture porn” genre. But the damage was done by another …
I don’t want to oversimplify, but something sinister happened in, and to, horror in the last decade or so. It began in 1996 with Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Scream.
The original Scream was a great film. Here was a true mainstream horror crossover: smart and funny, with enough fidelity to the slasher genre to keep horror fans happy. It converted a lot of fans to the horror genre, people that until then had thought the genre inaccessible.
Williamson’s writing was typical of the smart-teen trend of the late 90s that spawned the likes of Buffy, Dawson’s creek and I Know What You Did Last Summer (etc – NB the latter two were also Williamson’s work). The philosophical smart-ass college-kid wave eventually broke – smashed forever in fact, by the events of early September 2001.
There’s little to add to a critique of the first couple of Scream films. They have very healthy Wikipedia pages. But in opening up and dissecting a lot of the “rules” of horror that had gone before, it destroyed those rules. Unwittingly, Scream, with it’s sexy and groundbreaking approach to horror, opened a door and let in “torture porn” / “gorenography”. It terraformed the strange landscape of horror we have in this foul year of our lord, 2011.
The terms ”torture porn” and ESPECIALLY “gorenography” are banned (inasmuch as anything can be “banned”) from this site, unless they’re being used self-reflexively. Apart from the unhealthy and uncomfortable connotation of finding graphic scenes of torture and killing sexually arousing, The terms themselves are problematic.
The dictionary definition of “pornography” is “obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic merit.” Film of any genre should have artistic merit, even if it’s just to be entertaining; film is an artform. Yet I’d take issue with those who say porn can’t be an artform. And obscenity certainly has its place in art.
Should art shy away from inflaming the propensities, whatever they may be? Never. But it shouldn’t make you uncomfortable for the hollow sake of being uncomfortable. Art should always have a soul, if not a message.
In a sense, the original definition of pornography is dead, or at least outdated. Today “pornography” refers to the stuff people trawl the internet for, in order to get their rocks off. So tightly are the terms bound to the concepts of sexual arousal, it’s impossible for them to sit comfortably in a splatter/gore horror context. The thrills you get from good horror aren’t explicitly sexually arousing (although this doesn’t mean horror can’t be sexy).
The terms do great damage and disservice to the horror genre. ”Torture porn” was a term attributed to David Edelstein, chief film critic for New York Magazine. It makes for a great headline, but it was never intended to be a genre by serious film-makers. In creating that catchy label, many exploitative film-makers and films came along with it to cash in. Empty, cynical, and in some cases, morally bankrupt.
Those rules that the Scream series ended up destroying gave horror a moral framework. It meant that the Final Girl ended up killing the killer (even though he’d inevitably be resurrected for another instalment). It meant that college kids who drank, fornicated or otherwise “sinned” would get their comeuppance. Going anywhere was folly, and claiming that you’d return soon was a genre motif equivalent to a hard-bitten cop in an action movie being one step away from retirement. It meant you could subject child-characters to incredible peril, but children (those sacred cows) often escaped death, if not trauma.
It was fun to bend those rules, even break them if there was sufficient need – it would usually be a shocking incident integral to the plot. But still they remained. Then the Screams came along and chopped them to pieces. Hollywood horror realised the jig was up – raising the stakes would not be enough (this had gradually happened in terms of levels of violence, as the idea of what was shocking diminished). The game would need to change altogether.
I am a meat popsicle
Ghost Face Killer sucks, he was a clumsy, attention whore seeking momma’s boy! Like Joe Pesci in all his movies gets his ass whooped. Except in My Cousin Vinny.