Gorno and Torture Porn: a look back.

Well SCREAM kind of simultaneously saved and killed the horror genre. It's not like horror was alive and well in the mid 90's. The unstoppable horror franchises from the 80's had all limped their way to unceremonious deaths (JASON GOES TO HELL anyone?). The genre was in bad shape, generally. The STV schlock from Full Moon was really where the most movement was coming from. SCREAM revitalized the genre. And yes, it also spawned the BREAKFAST CLUB style of horror, and the casts rounded out by CW rising stars (this we're still feeling today, alas).

But I personally think the 00's were a really shitty low point in horror history, creatively. The whole Platinum Dunes revolution. The SAW films and their imitators. I'm not disagreeing that the flics from the late 90's were lame (DISTURBING BEHAVIOR, eh hem). But torture porn is lame in it's own way too. I certainly don't view it as a triumph. It's like in the 70's when rock stopped being something people wanted to dance to. Then we got disco. Torture porn is disco. Yeah, it's getting butts back on the dance floor. But the music sucks.

Also, I hope you're using "fag" in the SOUTH PARK sense, given that Kevin Williamson is actually gay. Otherwise, uncool.

Yeah, people seem to forget where horror films were before Scream came out and what a breath of fresh air that film was at the time. It gets lost in it's aftermath but there is no doubt Scream is a seminal horror film and more important to the genre than people seem to be willing to admit. Also, it was a really smart and original take on horror films at it's time. Even more so than say, a well liked film like Behind the Mask was. Actually, I doubt Behind the Mask exists if Scream never happened.

I'll give Friday the 13th Part 6 the nod for being one of the original post-modern slasher films out there but Scream went all the way with it.

That said... this has been a pretty weak decade for horror despite the monetary success and a handful of solid flicks.

They're all horror movies... just because you don't like something or it doesn't have what you prefer in it you can't dismiss it. First and foremost Scream is a film about a masked killer that is systematically murdering teenagers (and the Fonz) over the course of an entire film. That is a horror film whether you like it or not.

Agreed. I was saying Scream took the post-modern aspect further. Friday the 13th 6 is an all time favorite of mine and surely better than Scream.

Saw wasn't really that original or adult. It was a solid gimmick with an terribly misguided mess of a plot as far as I'm concerned. At the very least, let's not act like it was anything more than a gimmick. Still an important film within the genre but I'm not going to act like I didn't hate it.

I like remakes... preaching to the choir there.

You're absolutely right. This is why I think Scream get's shit on... it's thrown together with all the other rubbish from the decade... sequels and copycats. With proper frame of reference though it was a solid film at the time and a very original take on horror when horror so desperately needed it. Even Fangoria didn't know how to describe it back in '95 when they first reported on it. It was that original.

^Wow that's quite a disparate list. (I mean CryrusGrissom's)

I'd been thinking of starting a thread on this topic but the post above makes me want to put it here:

Is a "good" horror movie one that is entertaining a la Evil Dead II? Or is one that really horrifies, one that makes you sick with revulsion?

And if it's the later, why would you pursue such movies?

Scream is a great film, and torture porn is a misnomer of sorts, since the delightfully grimy Nazisploitation and Ero Guro genres (and their ilk) predated the term by decades.

It's obvious he's [CryrusGrissom] just a gore hound for the most part.

What a surprise, I hated Paranormal Activity. Haha

As for "going for the jugular", sometimes it's just for the sake of "going for the jugular". I would venture that most of the times that's the case. Look, most of my favorite horror films are the 80's slasher stuff... plotless retreads and all. I can't get enough of them (probably because they are directly tied to my formative years). I'm not going the high and mighty root here. I'm just not a gore for gore's sake kind of guy. The ones that are needlessly violent just to be violent fall flat with me. Not all of them, just many of them.

I like fun and charm in horror films. The old Friday the 13th movies are great examples of this. The new Friday the 13th is exactly what's wrong with horror films today. They forgo charming and endearing characters (in a naive sort of slasher film way) for sexy douchers that none of us would ever like or root for unless we had a chance to fuck them. And no, it doesn't make seeing them suffer anymore fun, it's just an exercise of the genre at that point... a boring one at that.

Yeah, no shit. Here here.

What are the other films you're lumping in with SCREAM? What are the ilk? I'm curious.

Also, I was slamming the 00's glut of Platinum Dunes-style remakes. Not remakes conceptually.

Tremors (1990)
Misery (1990)
Nightbreed (1990)
Naked Lunch (1990)
Frankenhooker (1990)
Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat (1990)
Cape Fear (1991)
The Pit & the Pendulum (1991)
Exorcist III (1991)
Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Candyman (1992)
Innocent Blood (1992)
Braindead (1992)
New Nightmare (1994)
Cronos (1994)
In The Mouth Of Madness (1994)
Dellamorte Dellamorte (Cemetery Man) (1994)
Return of the Living Dead III (1994)
The Prophecy (1995)
From Dusk Till Dawn (1995)
The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
The Relic (1997)
Event Horizon (1997)
The Frighteners (1997)
Ringu (1998)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Ravenous (1999)
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Audition (1999)
Blair Witch Project (1999)


Sure it was a less 'wet' decade for Horror but I don't think the 90s was quite the disaster for Horror as is often made out.

I dont love Scream by a long shot (and it got watched to death in my college years) but I feel like it was a necessity in a way, it has kinda become hated in retrospect not for being a bad film, but perhaps for opening the gates for the many that followed.

I was always the freak of my bunch of mates 'cos I loved Horror films until that film came out (not that it bothered me, particularly), suddenly they all loved it again and Scream got arses in seats for the genre; it made Horror marketable and popular, the classic mixed blessing.

It's sucess doubtlessly helped make this past 10 or 12 years so swamped in genre flicks even if, initially, it did pave the way for a slew of less than stellar Slasher flicks. Saying that, I would always wade through tosh like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cherry Falls, Urban Legend, Valentine & Scream 3 (UGH!) to find a Final Destination!

Regarding the 'Torture Porn' thing, I agree with Gabe in that I have never really been on board with the haters or the fans as I have never really been on board with the term. Watch Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood to even approach that phrase being a fitting description.

Presumably Scream & its sequels, and I KNow What You Did last Summer & ITS sequels.

To Answer Cylon Baby's question, I personally prefer a horror film to at least try to be scary (or maybe to take itself seriously would be a better term?) than to be tongue in cheek. That's not to say tongue in cheek, or a horror/comedy mix can never work for me; I'm not overly fond of the Evil Dead films, but liked Shaun of the Dead a lot. And I laugh just as much as anyone else at Return of the Living Dead's humorous bits. But I still haven't seen all the films in ANY horror franchise, becasue it seems inevitably, as the shock and mystery the first installment in the series wears off, they fall back on parodying themselves. Sometimes they get it right, and a film can be genuinly amusing (F13's sequels seem better at this than most), but the horrific aspects that attracted me to the original are so watered down by that point I don't particularly care to follow them any more. Once they reach that point, I tend to lose interest & seek something more serious & potentially scary again.

The above ideas should be credited to Death Surge and Greg David, who posited them in an earlier thread I started about horror comedy a few years ago.

I'm an unabashed gorehound, but I can appreciate a good film w/ no gore, too. The Ring is a particularly well done example. And I didn't drool over High Tension as much as many others did, partly because I thought the furniture decapitation scene was just dumb. You don't necessarily need gore to make a film one I'll want to watch (but I admit it does help), but at least try to be scary.

Torture porn fucking wishes.

Also, does this mean I Know What You Did Last Summer is Progressive Rock?

King just wrote an article in Fangoria about this. His conclusion (and he used a few hundred words to get across his point, so I'm condensing) was that horror fans want to understand their fears and the threats in this world. He compared the running zombies in DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004) to suicide bombers: unafraid to die, with no human emotion, etc. (I'd never thought of that, actually.) He pointed out that horror fans don't have much trouble facing fear, unlike the People magazine crowd, but they want to understand.

Plus, it's fun. Why would he want to stop writing horror?


I suppose torture porn reflects the news and world events. My college sociology tells me so. But I think that's too easy of an answer. I remember director interviews around that time citing the better, ruthless '70s horror films, and condemning those 'squeaky clean' '90s horror films. HILLS HAVE EYES, etc. for me, was definitely a breath of fresh air.

Another consideration is profitability. THE RING made a ton of money, so we get the GRUDGEs, PULSE, ONE MISSED CALL, DARK WATER, and whole bunch of others. People saw HOSTEL and SAW, so...

I personally used to love extreme gore. HIGH TENSION was one of the best things I'd seen in years. But around HOSTEL 2, the third or fourth SAW, I gave up. It's shocking until it isn't shocking, and then suddenly you need real emotion, real story, and real characters to move you again. That's how it happened with me. Now I don't even bother with MARTYRS and INSIDE, etc.

While I like to see blood and guts, I have to agree with Iggy. I would much rather prefer a horror movie which scares the crap out of me than just a generic slasher.

The last movie which still to this day freaks me out is "In the Mouth of Madness". This movie did not provide what I call jump scares, but was very much, for lack of a better word, a mind fuck.

Personally, revulsion plays zero part in my enjoyment of horror films. I want to be entertained - which could be from being scared (THE RING) or creeped out with suspense (THE SHINING) or laughing (SHAUN OF THE DEAD) or just having a great time (DRAG ME THE HELL).

Gore doesn't scare me. That's why torture porn simply doesn't work for me. I find nothing scary about the SAW movies. They want you to squirm in your seats. But the films aren't good enough to do that to me. If you want me to be queasy, your movie has to be great. It can't be schlocky junk like SAW IV. You have to make me forget I'm looking at foam rubber and corn syrup. Films like MARTYRS and AUDITION can do this to me. And HOSTEL mostly worked for me because Roth understood that his movie should be fun and bouncy to offset the torture elements - and I actually enjoyed the first half of this movie more than the gory second half.

For me horror isn't really about gore. It's about tone and themes and subject matter. I love the classic Universal monster movies and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE almost as much as I love RE-ANIMATOR and THE THING. For me gore is like tits in a comedy. I don't see comedies for tits. Buuuut... if some tits are thrown in there I'm a happier man. If that analogy makes sense.

Ha ha. That end of my analogy isn't rock solid. I'm not a big prog-rock fan, but I wouldn't say it's IKWYDLS. I definitely stick with my torture porn is disco comparison though.

You're right... it was a disaster for "slasher" movies. Another reason to give Scream a little love regardless of it's aftermath.

We can act like torture porn was some kind of reaction to 9-11 and the world of the 2000's (and who knows... maybe one really was) but it was just a successful gimmick that spawned copycats that tried to capitalize. That's why they got made. It's the same for the Scream imitators in the 90's. As much as things change, they stay the same.

That's how horror films are treated in Hollywood, trends and quick bucks. Regardless of how much you like some there is a very good chance they got made because they could be made cheaply and could make a quick buck, not to be some larger comment on society. There are examples to the contrary but I'm speaking in generalities.

Does it really matter though? Of course not, I just hate when people try to justify their love for something with delusions instead of accepting that sometimes we love stuff that is inherently silly or simply visceral. Please don't counter this with Bride of Frankenstein and Silence of the Lambs stuff, I'm talking slasher, torture porn Japanese ghost story shit here.

I love 80's slasher films. They're silly and derivative of each other and rarely do anything "smart". I don't feel like they say anything about society at all and they are a very clear indication that I don't take myself or my recreation that seriously at times.

There... see, that wasn't so hard!

EDIT: As a grown man, I haven't been afraid of a horror film in over 2 decades so "scary" doesn't really come into the equation for me.

I always felt the current trend of torture/gore porn was a rerun of the horror trends back in the mid-late 70's. Grindhouses were running flicks like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left, Dawn of the Dead, Mondo Bizzaro, Fulci and Argento flicks, etc. all of which ramped up gore and torture until the trend eventually petered out, evolving into 80's - 90's trends (slashers, franchises, etc.), and the general watering down of horror.

IMHO, this is just the cycle repeating itself. Watch - these films (Saw, etc.) will water down and fade away, and we'll get more mild horror films for awhile (emphasis on psychological dramas more so than horror) until some clever ass starts the cycle back up again.

How do so many people forget how brutal the first Scream was? It was cut for theatrical release.

Yeah, nothing brutal about Drew Barrymore being stabbed over and over again while her parents listen to it over the phone and then being found hanging from a tree with her guts spilling out... oh... all of which was after watching her boyfriend get gutted.

My theory is that folks that didn't see Scream when it came out just lump it in with the rest of those kinds of films and don't really even remember a frame of actual footage from the movie or they just honed in on the talkyness of it and choose to forget that there was actual "horror" involved.

That's what I was thinking. If you like the SAW films more than SCREAM, I have to assume it's because you only care about gore (which is your prerogative). Cause SCREAM is a very finely made film, and despite some of the talk here, it does not place more importance on comedy than horror. I saw it in the theater and girls were shrieking at parts. Bashing on SCREAM for what came after seems like bashing on JAWS for its sequels and all the other killer animal movies.

I was thinking (& going to post) the same thing. It's like in any other artistic medium: music, literature, film, whatever. There's a trend moving us way far in one direction, and then there's a reaction to it that shoots the pendulum back the other way. Like the Renaisance as a reaction to the dry, didactic, church driven trends of the mideival period, and the Enlightenment's subsequently injecting reason into the post Renaissance era, to be followed by the Romantic era declaring "Fuck rationality!" and making emotional outpourings the order of the day. I think Tim is spot on, here, and we'll see trends more or less in the way he predicts.

The fast zombie as suicide bomber analogy is a good, and probably apt one. NOTLD's slow zombies could arguably represent the slow, homogenous march of America's communist enemies, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, new & more immeidate threats have entered the social/political arena. Only natural they'd be reflected in cinema. I once posited that the home invasion films (Haute Tension, The Strangers, etc.) are sort of a call back to domestic terrorism, in that home isn't the safe haven it once was, and these films reflect that.

And for the record, I never hated on Scream. I think it does have an important place in the history of horror cinema, and was a damned good film in & of itself. I haven't seen any of the sequels, or any of the Last Summer films, however. I figure the point must have been lost (or at least watered down) by that point.

One last point: Saw wasn't nearly as gory as people seem to think it is. Sure, lots was implied, but you don't actually see the traps go off on camera & rip into faces, or whatever. And the ankle is sawn off off camera, as well. I'd argue that the first film, anyway, relied more on the IDEA of being in this helpless situation and forced to make these horrific choices than it did on gore. This film, too, doesn't deserve the hate it gets because the sequels sucked so bad (I stopped at III myself).

Think you nailed it. The Strangers was a tough one to watch, especially the ending, because that was more of a situation that could happen (we've had a couple of home invasions near my neck of the woods - no killings, thankfully, but the fact somebody could fuck you up in your own home is more of a visceral violation than anything I could think of. Easily put the neighborhood on edge for a bit). Definitely echos the post 9/11 world we live in.

Also, we must not forget films like Seven when it comes to horror - granted, not a true horror film, but that flick hit all the notes properly (suspense, gruesomeness, dark as fuck, and your imaginations really get going just by dialog alone). The final psychological torture Brad Pitt went through (as well as the audience) when he was asking Spacey "What's in the box?!?" was fiendish in concept, yet simple in execution.

Every decade has just as many shitty horror films as the others. Doesn't matter if you are looking at the 70s, 80s, 90s, or 00s. Or even earlier. No decade is really better than any other. The only difference between them is where the larger amount of QUALITY horror flicks comes from.............indie or studio? That's it. Most of the time it is more indie focused (70s, 00s), but sometimes you get a decade where it is fairly even (60s, 80s, and to a certain degree the 90s).

We are hitting a period in Hollywood right now similar to the 60s, where the studio system is on the verge of going bust again in a few years time. At that point it will turn to more independent works and younger visionary directors once more to rebuild it, just like what happened in the 70s. Meanwhile, this whole time we are still getting a lot of quality works from other countries. The cycle is just continuing as usual. Until it does go bust again though, we will continue to get mostly shit from Hollywood. It's just the way it is.

I don't really get the suicide bomber as fast running zombie thing at all. A suicide bomber walks (to arouse as little suspicion as possible) into the middle of a populated center with a bomb strapped to his chest and detonates it. A fast moving zombie runs at a person and tries to eat them. I'm not even near any place where one idea would lead to the other. Somebody flesh this one out for me. "Unafraid to die, no human emotion"? Isn't that every zombie since Night of the Living Dead?

I hate that kind of nonsense. It's just another case of trying to relate two things that have nothing to do with each other. Like Saw wouldn't have existed if 9-11 didn't happen. Fast moving zombies are that way because it's more action packed and frenetic as opposed to the slower moving zombies that are great for tension and mood.

I completely agree. As for Saw and 9/11? It's influences lie mostly in Italian horror cinema. James Wan is a huge Argento fan. It has nothing to do with 9/11. As for Hostel, Roth's (and Tarantino's) inspiration came from actually reading about such things going on. Again, no 9/11. I find it ridiculous that people keep trying to tie everything that has happened in the horror genre lately to 9/11.

Interesting thread, and I really don't have a lot to add except that "torture porn" movies stink on ice.

As it was stated above by MightyWorm, seeing people ripped apart with no real "scare" attached it does absolutely nothing for me. Give me a good jump and scare any day...

I don't think it's always a conscious imitation of real world fears on a filmmaker's part that initiates these comparisons. But the prevalent news items of the day do form a backdrop for your thinking, allowing unconscious influences to seep in. Current events & technology tend to creep into horror films, and color the films of a certain time period (a great example is the fear of nuclear war/energy spawning the giant irradiated monster flicks of the 50's).

Further, a film of a certain stripe may get made & receive little or no attention at any time. But if something clicks or resonates w/ the viewing public, because what's going on in the world at the time makes the viewers more receptive to it, it may be more successful. 9/11 and terrorism's newest forms may not have been imitated, but it affected perceptions.

It's a little silly, though, to say fast zombies cannot = suicide bombers because suicide bombers often walk into the crowded places they blow up. The point is, that suicide bombers hit you when & where you don't expect. They blindside you, the way fast zombies did the first couple times we saw them. They're sort of becoming old hat by now, but in DOTD 04 & 28 Days, they took most of us kind of by surprise.

Zombies ALWAYS took people by surprise. Fast or slow; surprise and the unexpected were always part of a zombie film's bag of tricks. I'm just not buying the connection. Good point on the old monster movies of the 50's and 60's and their connection to technology. That's a very clear example of how horror films have directly related to real world events.

The 9-11 connection doesn't make sense to me because I see no clearly supported connection. You can surmise that horror film's current popularity is connected but that is unsupported speculation at best. 9-11 was a HUGE event yet horror films are no more (or less) popular now than pre-9-11.

Furthermore, 9-11 hasn't altered the style of horror film. Current styles aren't really any different then in the past (except for quicker cuts and faster pacing, Hello fast zombies!). There was the torture porn trend but as someone mentioned previously, those were in the same vein as the grindhouse films of the 70's so 9-11 or not they would have come back around regardless (so there is no way of knowing if this was part of a cycle or a product of 9-11). Fast zombies existed back in '84 and most likely made a comeback because of previously mentioned stylistic sensibilities rather than any underlying impact of current events.

To make a 9-11 connection there needs to be some kind of clear change pre and post event. I'm not seeing anything particularly new or different to indicate anything of the sort.

EDIT: I don't disagree with this:
I just don't see anything that indicates this has happened in the last decade. It would be speculation at best.

I still maintain that to at least some extent, the helplessness we all felt as a nation contributed to torture porn's popularity. We felt like we couldn't stop the most horrific acts of terrorism the world had ever seen from happening, and weren't too confident we could stop any in the future, either. The guy-tied-to-a-chair-being tortured vibe resonated w/ people, because that's how they themselves felt. I would posit that the much smaller spike you saw in the subgenre's popularity in the 70's, w/ last House on the Left and similar, was caused in part by the national feeling of helplessness at the loss of the Vietnam war. Here was the mightiest nation on earth, one that had never lost a war in its nearly 200 year history, getting beaten by some pissant little country no one had ever heard of (well, the northern half of it, anyway). All our powerful weapons & technology counted for naught. No matter what we threw at them, no matter what we tried, we could not break this enemy, and they wore us down. There was the sense that we could have stayed there fighting that war of attrition in just that way, forever. And thus yet another domino fell, to what people at the time perceived as the very real threat of the worldwide spread of communism. And we were helpless to stop it. And we'd probably BE helpless to stop the next ones after that.

As I recall, some of us had a very in depth discussion of the relation of horror cinema to the fears of the times a year or two ago. I think DM8 started the thread, but I can't remember what it was called. Why don't he get his ass in here so he can link to it?

Edited to add: "straight" (i.e., white middle class) culture probably also felt helpless in the face of perceived threats from the counterculture and racial minorities. Those people were dangerous, by God, and they're moving in next door! They're everywhere! What's to stop one of them from mugging me, or breaking into my house and stealing something? Or getting my sweet little Susie or Rusty into drugs and free hippie love? Internal threats (like terrorist cells today) were perceived very acutely then, whereas I'd suggest they were mostly of external origin (Nazis, Commies, foreigners in general) in the decades before that.