The Cruelty Is the Point: Why Torture Porn Offered Western Cinema’s Most Damning Response to the War on Terror
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In medieval Europe, whole communities came together at public executions, drinking and dancing and collectively purging their sins through ceremonial bloodshed. In early 21st-century America, smaller groups gathered at multiplexes for a similar rite: Exorcizing national guilt by watching graphic torture scenes in horror movies. The latter was, of course, sanitized — the actors in these films were only pretending to be in pain, and the audience was distanced from the action by the invisible wall of a movie screen. But the psychological processes at play weren’t so different.
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So-called “torture porn” — a term everyone but the critic who coined it, David Edelstein, seems to hate — developed in the 2000s alongside parallel waves of ultraviolent nihilism in French, Japanese, and South Korean cinema, not to mention the neo-grindhouse revival. But there are a few things that set this specific horror subgenre apart. First is the use of torture as a set piece, similar to a song-and-dance number in a musical: Watching these scenes produces revulsion, not delight, but the action still stops periodically to revel in the sensation.
Then there are its ties to the global War on Terror. Scholars like to point to 9/11 as a sort of inciting incident of the “torture porn” sub-genre, and its persistent themes of random violence and anti-American sentiment do reflect the paranoia that permeated the weeks and months after the attacks. But the unofficial house style of the sub-genre is more evocative of Guantanamo Bay, CIA “black sites,” and the infamous photographs of U.S. soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
Ironically, it’s a Canadian film, the nearly forgotten “Territories” (made in 2009, but not released until 2010), that uses this aesthetic the most literally. Our villain is a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard who’s established his own sovereign nation somewhere along the U.S./Canada border. An ‘00s equivalent of the Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender after WWII, he uses actual CIA “enhanced interrogation” tactics like loud music, flashing lights, sleep deprivation, and sexual assault to terrorize a group of random young people unlucky enough to pass through his territory. It’s the Jesse Plemons scene in “Civil War” stretched out to feature length, but somehow even bleaker.
“Saw” — which, it should be noted, was written and directed by two Australians, albeit for an American company — debuted at Sundance the same month that the ICRC officially ordered an investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. And although the original film still has one foot in ‘90s serial-killer thrillers like “Seven,” certain visual parallels to the War on Terror do stand out. The filthy tiled chamber outfitted with metal shackles and fluorescent lights where much of the film takes place resembles an interrogation room, for example. And the killer watches his twisted moral plays on surveillance cameras, which became ubiquitous amid post-9/11 panic about “security.”
More importantly, “Saw” has a twisted logic that speaks to the moral ambiguity that truly defines this period, and is the most trenchant signature of the torture-porn sub-genre. In 2007, George W. Bush declared that the U.S. government “does not torture people,” in direct opposition of widely available photographic evidence. That wasn’t torture, he explained. Those were “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And they were being used in the name of protecting the American people, creating a cycle where extreme threats require extreme responses, whose severity in turn prompts even more heightened threats.
“Saw” sinks into a self-perpetuating spiral of suffering as well. As the sequels — and lore — grow deeper, the film’s moral universe calcifies into a grim, but ultimately righteous cycle of eternal return where the sins of the past are revisited and corrected in the present. Evil is vanquished through evil in these movies, sure. But those lines were distressingly blurry in real life: By the mid-’00s, the U.S. military’s rationalizations for “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition” were as flimsy as Jigsaw’s excuse that he’s teaching people to “appreciate life” by trying to kill them with spectacular Rube Goldberg devices.
The moral hypocrisy of the War on Terror tanked global approval ratings of America and its allies in the ‘00s, stoking a related anxiety that’s key to the other cornerstone of “torture porn.” Compared to “Saw” — which is currently on its tenth installment, with an eleventh on the way — the “Hostel” franchise was short-lived. The first film was released in 2005, and the series was DOA by 2012 after a disastrous third installment. But the first two films, both directed by Eli Roth, represent the best of the subgenre. (“Hostel: Part II” is probably the best “torture porn” movie, period.) “Hostel” plays on a set of fears promoted by Western governments — again, to justify war crimes, but also to keep citizens from questioning the necessity of those crimes — that claims that the rest of the world “hates us for our freedoms.”
In truth, it’s really more about being annoying and entitled, like the obnoxious Americans (and one drunk Icelander) at the center of Roth’s original film. “Hostel” is not structured like a pornographic film — all of the torture scenes are in the back half, which would make for a very frustrating porno. But it does blend its violence with plenty of sex, as a trio of obnoxious bros get exactly what’s coming to them when they follow their dicks to Slovakia. These guys see Eastern Europe as a playground whose virgin territory (the “virgin” part is metaphorical) is theirs for the taking. But impunity is punishable by death in the post-exceptional ‘00s. Now Americans are as vulnerable as everyone else, and the rest of the world wants its revenge.
Audience identification shifts throughout “Hostel,” from the annoying Americans to their torturers and back again. (“Ichi the Killer” director Takashi Miike makes a brief cameo as one of the rich sickos.) It’s one of the few films to feature a “final boy,” and ultimately we identify with him the same way as we do any “final girl,” cheering his escape and sharing his relief at escaping death. But the film also invites viewers to consider if they would chase the thrill of murder if they could, examining their own darkest instincts in the process. By watching these characters get punished — and vicariously participating in that punishment — viewers get to indulge their own violent impulses, as well as their subconscious guilt about violence being perpetrated in their names.
Fears about anti-Western sentiment and its consequences are also exploited in 2006’s “Turistas,” which flashes a U.S. Department of State “Travel Advisory” on screen during its opening credits. Early on, a British backpacker — the only one in the group who speaks any Portuguese — warns her American travel companions that rumors of organ-harvesting rings have resulted in “hostility” towards foreigners in Brazil. And indeed, everyone they meet seems to be part of a conspiracy to kill them (shades of “Hostel,” which also builds a whole world around its imagined thrill-kill empire).
The fear mongering about “lawlessness” in “dangerous” countries in “Turistas” hews uncomfortably close to racist rhetoric about “savages” in Italian cannibal movies. But the film also has a self-flagellating streak: While the individual characters in this film are oblivious and annoying, they’re also innocent. They’re ritual sacrifices, standing in for the real problem of rich foreigners who come to Brazil to siphon its wealth (and supply of fresh organs). Like the annoying backpackers in “Hostel,” the travelers in “Turistas” don’t deserve their fates. But their countries do.
Moral relativism takes on a more abstract form in “The Collector” (2009). If you squint a little, there’s a political dimension to this film’s depiction of invading a home (country) to steal a diamond (natural resources), only to find a pre-existing violent conflict already in motion. But although it’s extremely gory — almost as gory as the infamous French New Extremity film “Martyrs,” which is saying a lot — the lack of imagery related to the War on Terror makes “The Collector” mostly useful as an example of “torture porn’s” amoral streak. The protagonist is a thief, but next to a serial killer that staples innocent people’s eyes shut and impales them on walls of spikes, he’s not so bad.
The flimsiness, or total absence, of moral justification for the extreme violence in these films is the final key to what makes “torture porn” a distinct, political phenomenon. Detractors accuse these films of sadism for its own sake; that’s not incorrect, but it’s also beside the point. The lack of a reason is the reason. These films are a cry of despair and helplessness in a world where the categories of “good” and “evil” no longer exist in any meaningful way. We sympathize with the torturers, because we have to believe that the actions of our governments are in some way justified in order to carry on with our lives. And we identify with the victims, because we know deep down that they aren’t. “Torture porn” unites these contradictory realities.
“Torture porn” declined in the early 2010s, as horror movies turned their attention away from collective trauma towards the individualized inner world of grief. The home-invasion sub-genre, a close relative that sometimes overlaps with “torture porn,” continues to express subconscious fears about safety and security, but in mutated fashion: In the “Purge” movies, and in the more recent “Speak No Evil,” the invaders don’t come from far away, but our own communities.
In the polarized political climate of the 2020s, the threats now come from within. But atrocities are still being carried on in our names. Some we witness in real time on social media, and some we won’t find out about until much later. And “torture porn” will be there, waiting, when we need to process them. The form a potential revival might take is unknown, but it is worth noting that the ‘00s version of this phenomenon mostly consisted of Western filmmakers projecting their fears onto non-Western countries. What would it look like if the invaded were making these movies, and not the invaders?
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