WHAT IS TORTURE PORN? YO!

I was reading a movie review of a "found footage" horror movie called UNDOCUMENTED.  It was more of a positive review even though the writer didn't like much of what was happening in the film.  He seemed to agree with the political agenda of the film more than the film itself.  The movie sounded like a bunch of people getting tortured and that was the bulk of the horror.  The writer went on to say that he doesn't like to call "torture porn" torture porn.  He calls it "torture horror" because the idea isn't to sexually turn on the audience.  I know the guy was trying to be smart and separate himself from the overly used term.  In a way he is right.  But in a more accurate way he is wrong.  So yea, I am basically just going to give my opinion on what I define as torture porn.  HAPPY HALLOWEEN TIME!

The word "porn" is a little misleading.  We immediately think about sex because that is what happens in porn, right?  But that is not what the word "porn" in "torture porn" is referring to.  Think about what happens in an adult film in terms of story pacing.  Keep in mind that I am not talking about porn that features two chicks, some douchey guy with stupid tattoos and a couch or sometimes when they are being creative with location a staircase.  I am talking about story driven porn.  You know, all those scenes you watch with the fast forward button firmly pressed until you get to the good stuff.  What I am saying is that the story stops completely and the film focuses on a single act for a long period of time.  The banging.  The same thing happens in musicals.  People are talking progressing the story until everything stops and they all start singing about one thing that is going on in the movie for five minutes or so.  I wouldn't however suggest that we start calling it "torture musical" unless we were actually talking about THE GLEE or THE MOULON ROUGE.

Basically what happens in a torture porn is that the main character spends a great amount of the film's running time trapped in one location.  Usually they are tied to a chair or table.  (Now a lot of you folks out there might find the bondage aspect a big turn on.  All I can say is good luck with all that.)  The dialogue is reduced down to nothing more than crying and pleading.  It gets irritating really fast.  Then the film tries to out "extreme" all the other horror movies out there.  I call this bad writing.  It is the biggest thing wrong with horror nowadays.  There really isn't a good story just a story concept.  Example:  Teenagers go into abandoned hospital to film low budget horror movie.  Mad doctor kills them in the face with different medical instruments.  THE END.  There are no interesting characters and there is no story.  There is just an excuse to get people murdered horribly in a creepy location.  I get why horror directors at one time were considered one step above porn directors.  Torture porn spends more time on the act of torture than telling a story.  That is torture porn.

I blame THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.  Yea, I like that movie too but it seems to me that a good chunk of the horror community's horror education goes only back to that movie.  Anything before that isn't extreme enough for them.  They see horror as more gruesome than scary.  I see too many films inspired by TCM.  TCM starts off with a bunch of kids who run afoul a family of cannibals.  The movie builds on the hot dry dingy atmosphere and delivers some shocking horrors BUT(!) then it descends at the end to nothing more than a girl tied to a chair pleading for her life.  Thankfully she breaks free and escapes so the movie can end.  THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE created the formula that a lot of film makers copy.  I could name hundreds of films that are similar but you know them already.

Ironically I don't put the first SAW or the HOSTEL films in the torture porn category.  Maybe I am being hypocritical or naive because there is big time torture in those films too.  In fact the main horror is experiencing the torture.  But neither film lingers too long on that aspect.  In fact SAW stylishly(?) fast forwards through the extreme moments.  To me those films had more going for them.  They take place in more than one location, SAW had an interesting villain with elaborate contraptions of death similar to THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES.  HOSTEL was creative enough to have Takashi Miike make an appearance and both films have some neat visuals.  SAW had the lumbering villain in the cloak who spoke through a creepy puppet for some reason.  He wasn't trying to kill but to hand down life lessons.  You can see a little more thought put into the film.  Just in general I think there is more imagination in both film series.  HOSTEL part 2 had two parallel story lines that come together at the end with a unique conclusion.  Would any other American filmmaker end his film the way both HOSTEL films end?

A good porn director focuses on the build up to sex because that is the more interesting part.  The audience's imagination and anticipation keeps them interested.  A good horror director does the same.  It is imagination that makes a horror movie good not just a bunch of gross out stuff.  If you just went by gross stuff on screen then couldn't you consider FACES OF DEATH horror.  I wouldn't.  I would call it just a bunch of dead old people getting cut up on.  Who wants to watch that?  That should be called "autopsy porn" or something.  By the way I used the word "porn" seventeen times in this essay.  Oops!  I mean eighteen.

HI, MOM!

Jason