The Difference Between Torture Porn and Movies with Torture

I am not sure if there is anyone more abused in movie than the horror movie fan. Sure, unlike fans of musicals who have to live with only getting one or two films a year (and before this decade, perhaps didn’t even get that much), horror fans get treated to a new film every couple of weeks. The sad part however is that most horror movies suck. They are not merely mediocre or even bad, but they are downright terrible. It pains me to say this, because there are few genres I enjoy more than horror. At its best, horror films can have a visceral impact on the audience like no other genre. But while relatively few horror films have even come close to my top ten list any year this decade, there is always at least one – if not two, three or four – horror films on my worst of list at the end of the year. Modern horror filmmakers, it must be said, lack imagination and intelligence. They just throw crap on the screen and sees what sticks.

Horror films this decade seem to fit in one of two camps: films aimed at teenage girls that mostly concentrate on ghost stories, and have some pretty young girl in some sort of distress. Often, these films are remakes of Asian horror films, which after the success of The Ring, has become an epidemic. These films are of little interest to me. I watch them sure, but most of them suck. Even the best in this genre, which is perhaps this years The Uninvited, are merely average. Ghost stories don’t really scare me very much, and these films are so sanitized of blood, that they do not even give me a visceral thrill. They just sit there on the screen.

It’s the second category that I am more interested in – the so called “Torture Porn” films. According to Wikipedia, which is after all the most unimpeachable source of information on the internet, the phrase was coined by David Edelstein to describe Eli Roth’s Hostel, and has since taken on a life on it’s own as critics have applied the label to pretty much every horror film that has a lot of violence in them. But not all these films are equal – and in my mind not all of them can be considered torture porn.

The phrase torture porn is easy enough to explain and understand. Essentially what it means is that these movies function much the way porn movies function, except replacing sex with torture. The purpose of the movie becomes the torture, not the story or characters, but the violence itself. All porn movies have a plot, but in people watch porn film to see people fuck. It’s as simple as that. People watch Torture Porn to see people get tortured.

Some entries in the torture porn genre are clear and obvious. Eli Roth’s Hostel and Hostel Part II probably represent these films at their worst. Both films have no real characters to speak of, no real plot or deeper meaning. The stories of the films, in short, are an excuse to string together scene after scene of torture and pain. I know Roth claims that his films have a deeper meaning – that they are about the “why” of torture, and that his films shine a light on America’s obsession with torture in the post Guantanamo Bay/Abu Gharab era, but excuse me when I say that that is bullshit. His films offer no insight at all into the minds of the people who commit the torture. Rather, they are about the physical pain of being tortured, and the sexual release of it all. I doubt there is a more reprehensible scene in any movie this decade then when poor Heather Matarazzo is strung upside from the ceiling naked, while a woman cuts her up with a scythe and then slits her throat with a sickle and drains her of all her blood as she baths in it. Roth shoots this scene in an almost erotic way, sexualizing the torture to a despicable degree. I know that some of Roth’s defenders have claimed that since the murderer’s name is Mrs. Bathory, it is a reference to Elizabeth Bathory, the famous Hungarian Countess of the 1700s, who of course bathed in the blood of young girls, because she believed that it would make her look younger. Admittedly, this probably is Roth’s reference point, but since we never see this woman before or after the torture, and no one ever refers to her by name, it is a pointless reference. The scene is not about Mrs. Bathory’s depravity, but about Roth’s sick joy in filming it. Take any of the scenes of bloodletting torture in the Hostel movies, and it’s the same.

I could go on about other examples for other movies, most notably Captivity whose only goal is torture pretty Elisha Cuthbert repeatedly throughout the movie and is pretty much as despicable as Roth’s movies. The Saw movies are another fine example, but I mainly give them a pass because the torture and violence in those films is so over the top ridiculous that they are hard to take seriously. I could throw in Turistas or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or and it’s prequel or Wolf Creek and quite a few other films as well. Some consider Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects to be torture porn, and while you could certainly argue that if you so choose, the film really is more of a pitch black comedy. Can you take that movie seriously for a second? What Zombie did in The Devil’s Rejects is something akin to what Quentin Tarantino does – takes all of his influences, puts them in a blender and comes up with something altogether different and interesting. Besides, The Devil’s Rejects has much more in common with films like Bonnie and Clyde and all the other “lovers on the run” movies than of the horror genre per se. Since I have already posted by review of remake of The Last House on the Left, including a lengthy discussion of the violence, I won’t bother to go into that one again. Instead, what I’ll do is explain the difference between horror movies that have torture in them, and torture porn by using two examples – The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and The Hills Have Eyes II (2007). The first one is a near great horror film, the second is merely exploitation.

Alexandre Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s cult classic The Hills Have Eyes in 2006 represents American horror films at their best this decade. The film is sick and twisted and depraved true. It is a difficult movie to watch, as almost unspeakable violence and torture and rape happen in the film. The Film became a sizable enough hit, that Martin Weisz directed a sequel the following year. Everything I said about the original is true of the sequel. But why then do I consider one to be a great film, and the other to be merely exploitive crap?

The reason is simple – in Aja’s film, all the violence had a point. There was a message behind all the violence that made being that uncomfortable in the theater watching the film worth it. Aja re-imagined Craven’s film, which let’s be honest was more than a little shallow, as a Sam Peckinpah style test of masculinity. The film owes almost more debt to Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs as it does to Craven’s original.

The main character in Aja’s film is Doug (Aaron Stanford), a typical bleeding heart, liberal intellectual whose father in law scorns him by saying “Doug’s a Democrat. He doesn’t believe in guns”. When the family is attacked, leaving Doug’s father and mother in law and his wife dead, his teenage sister in law raped and his baby daughter kidnapped, Doug has to learn to step up and be a man – and fight back. Now is not the time for diplomacy, but for action. You can ask for no clearer symbolism then when shoves a flagpole, with the American flag flapping on top, through the skull of one of his attackers. Doug is clearly modeled after the Dustin Hoffman character in Straw Dogs, who has to learn a similar lesson. He even has the same shaggy haircut and glasses (which, by the end of the film, will become cracked the same way) as Hoffman in that movie.

The movie, therefore, at least has a point of view, even if it was I disagree with (I suffer no delusions about myself – I AM Doug), But the movie does some more interesting things as well. Take for instance the role the women in the family play. Brenda (Emile de Ravin) is a gorgeous teenage girl. We catch Doug, as does his wife, ogling Brenda early in the film as she sunbathes in her bikini. Therefore, before the main action in the movie has even started, Doug has sexualized Brenda in the eyes of the audience. The other two women in the family, Doug’s mother in law (Kathleen Quinlan) and his wife (Vinessa Shaw) are seen almost exclusively as mothers – and are therefore desexualized. When the bad guys attack, they dispatch the two mothers quickly – almost without thought – before they rape Brenda. This draws a direct line between Doug and his attackers. They both lust after Brenda, but Doug does nothing about it. The rape scene in the film, although stomach churning, does more with what they imply, then what they actually show. The rape needs to happen for the plot to function and themes to be brought forth, but they do not dwell on the physical nature of it for all that long. As an audience member, we are disgusted and uncomfortable – but we should feel that way. The fact that Doug has a baby daughter, and not a son, is also noteworthy. What better symbol of pure innocence is there then a baby girl?

Now, let’s move on, briefly hopefully, to the sequel. This film dispenses with the family setup, and instead, we now have a group of army recruits on a training mission sent out into the desert, where the same group attacks them, and slowly picks them off one by one. It is clear that the screenplay, co-written by Wes Craven this time, does indeed have a political point of view. One could argue that these soldiers are being sent out into the desert to fight an enemy they do not understand, making it an allegory for the Iraq war (and, strangely, taking the opposite viewpoint of the first film). But director Martin Weisz is too ham fisted, and his actors too incompetent, to give this theme any real weight. Weisz isn’t interested in the political ramifications of the film, or in developing the characters in any more than the most perfunctory ways. He wants to kill people in a brutal way, and that he does. The violence in the movie has been ramped up from the first film, but it’s all hollow and meaningless, because we don’t care what happens to anyone. We are watching simply for the sake of watching people die.

Nowhere is this more evident then in the rape scene in this film. Among the recruits, there are several women (all of whom are knockouts of course). When the bad guys capture one of them, they drag her into a room, and we see the door slam. We know what is going to happen behind that door, and for a while it seems like the filmmakers are going to make the right choice and not show us, as the filmmakers cut away to another scene. The door slamming provides the plot with the necessary explanation, and we need no more. But then Weisz returns to that room to the moment right after the door has slammed. The rape, unlike the one portrayed in the original film, is much longer, much more graphic, much more disturbing. The difference between them is that while rape served a thematic purpose in the first film, here it doesn’t. We are just watching a young woman get brutally raped.

In terms of style, both films are similar. The both feature the same de saturated colors, and dirty, grimy darkness. But while Aja appears to know how to draw out his themes and characters, how to slowly build his story so that we care what is going to happen, Weisz doesn’t. He knows the words, but no the music. This is why, I walked out of the theater deeply shaken and disturbed at the end of the original film, and why I walked out of the theater at the end of the second film and felt dirty and gross – like I needed a shower to wash the filth of the movie off of me.

Roger Ebert has often said that “Movies are not about what they’re about. They’re about how they are about what they are about”. I believe that movies are capable of being made about every subject on earth. Great movies can, and have been made, about rape, incest, pedophilia, torture and ever other sick and depraved subject on earth. But there has to be a point behind what the filmmakers are showing us. Rape for rape’s sake isn’t a valid artistic goal – it’s depraved and exploitive in the worst sense. Rape in a movie that uses that rape to illuminate a point of view about something is a valid artistic goal. I’m not sure if in this piece I have done a good enough job explaining the difference between these two points of view. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. But in the words of Justice Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it”.