Horror, Splatter & Torture Porn: Is the Apocalypse Nigh?

Ad hominem attacks are not argument. Just saying. They are attempts to deflect from the matter at hand, and to make the other party defensive. If I didn't let Merlin pull that on me in the "Song of Ice and Fire" Chapter by Chapter thread, you're not going to manage it.

So let's discuss the matter at hand without it.

I think Rogue and I once agreed that five per cent of the movies of any years are good, and the rest are dross. I would guess that the percentage of good to dross in this particular genre is probably much smaller, I will grant you that perhaps 3 to 5 per cent are tolerable--I will not say good. I'm told by people whose judgment I respect that "The Descent" is a good film. But saying that the genre is justified by the miniscule amount of decent work is disingenuous, IMO.

You openly admitted that you would probably not see these movies if there was no disgust/violence in them. I assume that includes the 'good' ones.

I don't agree that because I haven't watched these movies, I can't comment. I have tried to watch them. They are quite literally--for me--unwatchable. I want to know why you can watch--spend money to watch--poor quality stuff (the 97 per cent). Because to judge by comments in several threads, most of you watch nearly of all that's available. You don't seen to use discrimination, and so the quality of the product appears to be utterly irrelevant.

 

I have liked some horror films, but I will admit that it's not my favorite genre.

No, I have not watched the first "Saw"--which is only relevant if it's the only one you've ever seen, which it obviously isn't. Again--just because there a few tolerable films in the mix does not excuse the vast majority. I note that even though you describe the sequels as poor, you seem to have watched them all. The fan of these films doesn't watch for quality (well, maybe Rogue does), but it appears that the majority of you don't. So why do you watch?

Is it the misantrophy? The misogyny? The titillation?

 

I think we're conflating torture porn with horror in general. Torture porn, for all its visibility because of the success of Hostel and Saw (which isn't strictly torture porn anyway), is a very small subgenre that started losing popularity almost as quickly as it acquired it. The term was coined in the mid-00s, retroactively used to describe a few movies from earlier in the decade, and the subgenre has already largely petered out (as a fan of horror but not so much of these particular subgenres, I'm glad to see the "Splat Pack" and the slasher remakes drastically declining in popularity). Depending how loosely you want to define torture porn (Is Buried torture porn? Is I Know Who Killed Me?) there are only somewhere between a dozen and three dozen of these films out there that any besides the most obsessive gorehounds will ever have heard of, of which I've seen probably somewhere between 5 and 10. Of them, most have been either boring, or upsetting for the wrong reasons -- I, like many people, enjoy being safely scared and unnerved, so when a movie is upsetting me through its misogyny or the stupidity of its characters rather than because I'm emotionally hooked into a horrible situation, it's a failure in my book. To say someone watches "nearly all" of this stuff is not necessarily a meaningful distinction when that boils down to maybe 2-4 movies a year over the course of a decade -- in my case less than ½% of all movies I watch could probably remotely be considered torture porn. And I can justify watching even that many of them in the hopes that I will stumble across one that really gets under my skin. The closest one has come so far has been Martyrs.

But given your mention of The Descent we're not just talking about torture porn, but about horror in general. And yes, there is a good deal of good horror out there still. Granted we don't seem to have many if any visionaries like Polanski or Cronenberg or Argento or Bava working the genre these days -- big names consistently bringing horror to mainstream attention. But I'm happy to sit through a few mediocre creature features or flicks in the creepy children genre or zombie movies in order to find gems like Lake Mungo, which is the best ghost story in a very long time and features zero gore whatsoever, or Pontypool, or Sauna or The Host or The Descent or Let the Right One In or Session 9 or Ravenous, or ambitious films that don't quite work but at least fail in interesting ways like Heartless, or even the works of guys like Larry Fessenden or Lucky McKee or J.T. Petty whose grasp sometimes exceeds their reach but who manage to produce a corpus of work in the horror genre that is generally above average for the low-budget genre stuff and provides an alternative to whatever the more mainstream stuff is dominating the multiplexes.

So when I watch torture porn, which comprises only a

 

Okay, if 3 per cent of romcoms are good/decent, do you watch all of them?

I'm betting you don't watch any at all.

Just guessing.

 

I see a few romcoms. Not all of them. But then, I don't see all horror movies or all torture porn films, either, as I've pointed said. (I'll also say, however, that being a moderately socially anxious person, I do find horribly socially awkward scenes in romances, dramas and romcoms more discomfiting than violent scenes in action or horror movies.)

I could probably sort and tally all of the movies I watched in 2010 or this year to date and come up with a picture of what genres dominate my viewing, except that sounds like a boring and time-consuming task, and enough movies don't fit squarely into one genre that it sounds pretty frustrating as well.

 

I'm an aficionado of the thriller. It's my favorite genre, I guess; but you get all kinds of thrillers, which I define as a movie with a real sense of tension and suspense involving serious physical or emotional harm - there's noir, action, mystery, espionage, some westerns, courtroom dramas, adventure, even some films that are really more dramas than anything else (The Godfather, for instance; The Shop on Main Street for another) . . . and, yes, horror, in all its stripes. I go to all them looking for a palpable sense of suspense and an engaging experience. I watch a lot of movies that fall outside this particular genre classification; comedies, love stories, art films, etc. I find that every genre scratches its own itch, but I am more forgiving of flaws in a thriller than, for instance, in a love story. It's a preference, but I don't let it define my intake or my eclecticism. There is an itch that a really good horror movie scratches that you won't ever get from watching a ton of courtroom dramas; I talked earlier about what that itch is - the genuine dread/fear/terror/horror about some part of the human condition which is then cleansed through the catharsis of great art. Maybe it's the fear of being subsumed by a parent (Psycho), the fear of losing a child (Don't Look Now; Poltergeist), the fear of a disfiguring or crippling ailment (The Fly), the fear of outside influences on our lives and our families (The Ring; Saw; Signs), the fear of pregnancy (Rosemary's Baby; Grace), the fear that our lives are senseless and meaningless (Night of the Living Dead; Se7en) or that we're controlled by a cruel fate (Frankenstein; The Were Wolf; Final Destination) or just simply that we are profoundly alone and disconnected (The Sixth Sense; The Tenant; The Phantom of the Opera). I'm not saying the subtext is the only reason we watch these films, but I'm saying that even very extreme situations do have an emotional relationship with the lives most of us lead and the fears we struggle with and it is that emotional connection that we're looking for. There's a ton I haven't even talked about and, of course, by pigeonholing the above movies I've reduced most of them unforgivably. But you get the drift of what I mean.

 

Okay, how many film horrify (as opposed to disgust)you?

 

It's a good question. I'd actually say Saw did neither; it just scared me; it was a thriller, but the fear never reached the level of horror.

The Tenant certainly horrified me as did Rosemary's Baby. Se7en is definitely a film that crossed over into transcendent horror during the infamous climax. And I think The Fly was horrifying; it was somewhat disgusting as well, but there was the sense that there was a living person, an actual character, inside the transforming beast, so that pushed it up into horror for me. And Freaks. Definitely Freaks; the part where the freaks pursue the strong man under the wagon in the rainstorm is horror, not just disgust and not just fear.

A lot of "horror" films neither horrify me or disgust me; The Ring, for instance, doesn't create any real vivid emotions of horror, but neither is it particularly disgusting or graphically violent. It's just a great suspense film that twangs on your fear response. I think there aren't a lot of films that really are "horror" films; films marketed as "horror" films tend to either be "disgust" films or "fright" films, in my experience. I like a good fright film though, so no harm no foul on that one. A movie can be very scary or frightening in a thrilling way without having to be either horrifying or disgusting.

 

Okay. Of the 50 or so films of 2011 I've seen, the genre breakdown (according to Wikipedia, which doesn't always categorize films exactly as I would) is like this:

3D Computer-animated musical comedy

Action
Action
Action computer-animated
Action Crime
Action Fantasy
Action Thriller
Action thriller
Supernatural Action
Thriller

Adventure

Animated Western

Black Comedy
Blue Comedy
Comedy
Comedy
Comedy
Crime action comedy

Romantic Comedy
Romantic Comedy
Romantic Comedy Drama
Romantic Drama

Crime Drama
Drama
Drama
Drama
Drama Action
Drama comedy
Drama with surrealist and experimental elements
Legal Drama
Sports comedy drama

Epic Fantasy
Family science fiction
Fantasy Action
Fantasy Adventure
Fantasy Comedy

Historical Epic
Historical Epic

Horror
Horror slasher
Supernatural Horror

Romantic Fantasy
Romantic Thriller

Science Fiction
Science fiction
Science-fiction Action
Science-fiction Action
Science-fiction Techno Thriller
Science-fiction Thriller
Thriller science fiction

Superhero
Superhero
Superhero
Superhero
Superhero Action Comedy

 

And the romantic comedies were...?

 

I saw Lars Von Triers' AntiChrist recently and think it fits my definition of respecting the power of such subjects and adapting them to film. It has some pretty horrific imagery. I'll black out the descriptions but I can say that they are the pinnacle of violence and sadomaschism I have seen on film

Dafoe's He's testicles are crushed and his wife stimulates his penis until it ejaculates blood. She commits a really graphic and pretty disgusting act where she mutilates her private parts

This images legitimately sickened me and yet I felt as though they were not gratuitous as to the vision of the film which was about the fear of sex and the power that it has. The film very much plays like a version of expressionism and these powerful images are exploited to evoke an emotional reaction. I think the best way to approach the issues of torture is that it does bring up very strong emotions and AntiChrist realizes this and embraces the power such images have.

Of course this film is very stylized and I think it is still possible to deal with torture on a human level in film. I think though that we really don't want to and thus cartoony things come in it's way. AntiChrist isn't a real film but it is about human beings and it acknowledges the consequences of said horrors.

 

And there's also the possibility that van Trier is a giant pretentious put-on.

 

There's that too

 

Antichrist is probably still not as horrifying (or as hilarious) as that panel discussion thing at Cannes when he said he understood Hitler ("I can see him in the bunker . . . there will come a point at the end of this" *spoiler alert: there didn't come a point*)

 

Lars Von Trier, an Avant-Gardist for Saps

Ha! Took awhile, but on the 'net I found a critic not willing to lather von Trier with critic-ese...

 

i actually agree with the basic thrust of the article - that von trier is largely a "mock artist" and an aesthete. he has his moments, and they can be powerful, but there's a lot of "phoniness" in his work as well, melancholia included. i don't think that he makes films just to shock people though. there is definitely something real within him that is driving his work, it's just that he often actively works to obscure or even obliterate that connection. there is an almost reflexive impulse in him to distance himself from what he puts on screen, though i feel this is beginning to erode as of late (slowly).

perhaps part of the problem is that the man can't relate to other people much at all. that would explain why some of the characters' motivations don't make sense - he is incapable of getting outside of his own head. it's something i also detected, and that frustrated me, in kubrick's eyes wide shut.