What's With Horror Becoming So Torture Based?

[Seil]

Because "torture porn" just sounds really obscene to me, I went with a more vague description in the title.

So the other day I was browsing the PSN marketplace, wondering what I should start in on now that my semester's over and the Christmas holidays are starting up, and I happened upon the Saw II demo. I've always tried to steer clear of the Saw movies, because like Hostel and some recent remakes, it's just turned into violent sadism. But I was interested in seeing how they transferred a film largely about being chained up in a dirty bathroom to a video game. Lo and behold, the first thing I had to do was cut my face open to get a key - a bit of plot lifted from one of the films. ...Yeah, violent sadism.

I like collecting things, and one of the things I've made a strong effort to collect are classic horror movies. I'm talking about the original Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween, The Omen, Friday The 13th, Poltergeist, Childs Play, The Exorcist... There's a lot of really good old films out there. The reason that I find them is because I think a lot of the time, they're better than the remakes. Sure the remakes have updated effects, all the references and props are more current and there's less eighties hair, but they do something really well: scare you.

The popular ones, like the flicks I mentioned above, have great pacing, they show really only what they need to, and they don't go heavy on the blood to do it. Before you know that Chucky is alive in Child's Play, the little, out-of-focus flashes of him running around make you tense. Having flashes of Michael in Halloween watching Laurie throughout the beginning of the film make him all the more creepy. Not hearing anything about Freddy for most of the film makes him more frightening, and even when his history is (partly) explained, once you hear that he's dead - and still coming after you - you get scared.

Now the Chucky films have turned into a joke, with Bride Of Chucky literally having a character reading a book called "Voodoo For Dummies." Freddie's backstory is told to you in the trailer of the film. Michael is shown out of his mask, in therapy. There was an art to horror films - but endless remakes and rewrites are taking their tolls - and I think that people realize this. Hell, in Hellraiser, the image of a character without skin was terrifying, just having him flesh-less, but as the series progressed... well, lets just say it relied less on the visual of such a character and more on the act of skinning someone.

That's the problem; films of the past made you feel tense, shocked, disgusted, worried... Let's go back to Child's Play - you've got Andy, a young boy, who you've grown attached to. He's first seen making breakfast in bed for his mom - a big bowl of marshmallow cereal with milk spilt on the floor, burnt toast with half a stick of butter and some orange juice. He's shown to be a cool kid. So when he's actually in danger, when he's crying to the adults that Chucky's going to kill him, you feel for him. You're worried for him, you're mad at the adults who don't believe him and you're scared that Chucky is going to get him.

So the new film isn't as scary as the old one - well, what can you do? You could do what they did in The Omen remake and add bits like a dead little girl forcing someone to stick their finger in her head. Or you could go the Rob Zombie route and have your characters die slowly bleeding on the floor. But some people feel it better to just go in a completely different direction and start a new film series - take Hostel, for instance. Sure, you've got the tried and true horror movie start-up of a bunch of partying teens, but when you focus your horror on having the teens tied to chairs and tortured, you're not making a horror film, you're making a snuff film. (And though I'm including the Silent Hill movie into the snuff category, I'm not moving the games there, as in Silent Hill 2 and 3, the gruesome monsters and violence was used symbolically, as inner demons made manifest, while in the movie, specifically in the end barbed-wire scene, it was just... there.)

For some reason, this trend is moving into games. You've got stuff like Manhunt, you've got the Saw games, hell, you could even go back and say Postal was kinda like that. I'm curious as to why we've gone from a slower paced, more scary horror, to a super-violent, look-it's-not-even-five-minutes-into-the-film-and-Michael-is-killing-everyone-in-the-hospital type of film. And why is the latter becoming more and more popular?

[Marc v4.0]

Cause the old stuff just isn't scary anymore.

...I recall Elm Street being really really gory

[Seil]

It was. You had the stabbing death at the beginning, Johnny Depp getting liquified... But I'll argue that that was handled with more tact then anything Eli Roth has done.

Seriously do not look for any pics from Hostel.

[Satan's Onion]

My own supremely uninformed hypothesis: It's a whole hell of a lot harder to slowly and smoothly build tension and fear through plot, character and cinematography than it is to invest in a fuckton of fake blood and latex flesh and create ultra-violent setpieces, one after the other. I mean, the first one requires a collaboration of people with the talent for telling a story in a visual medium; you might get talented people in the second but what you really need is a huge effects budget.

[Shyria Dracnoir]

The internet's desensitized us. With the advent of the internet, you have an entire universe of shocking and depraved imagery available to anyone with a keyboard. Everything from Rotten.com to Ogrish and any of the other numerous shock sites out there. With this kind of stuff freely accessible to a massive (and sadly, often young) audience, filmmakers feel that they have to up the ante in order to compete. Who's going to pay nine bucks to sit in a theater to get the same visceral thrill they can get for cheap as free with the right URL. Either way, it's a nail in the coffin for subtlety and intelligence in horror films.

Originally Posted by Satan's Onion

My own supremely uninformed hypothesis: It's a whole hell of a lot harder to slowly and smoothly build tension and fear through plot, character and cinematography than it is to invest in a fuckton of fake blood and latex flesh and create ultra-violent setpieces, one after the other. I mean, the first one requires a collaboration of people with the talent for telling a story in a visual medium; you might get talented people in the second but what you really need is a huge effects budget.

Exactly. For all their cheapness, thrills like that almost always get a reaction (even if that reaction amounts to a serious case of the dry heaves), which is why so many creators who lack the talent, time, wit, or all three to come up with more complicated scares fall back on them.

[Amake]

If I'm going to take a stab at societal trends, I'd say it has to do with a lessened emotional intimacy among the movie-watching demographic. You know, the whole we're so distant from each other these days thing. Intimate photography of mangling flesh makes a ready substitute, while also supplying the morbid touch required for us to deal with and put into concepts the spiritual death and rebirth of civilization as I've ranted about before.

[Seil]

If I'm going to take a stab

Ha.

My own supremely uninformed hypothesis: It's a whole hell of a lot harder to slowly and smoothly build tension and fear through plot, character and cinematography than it is to invest in a fuckton of fake blood and latex flesh and create ultra-violent setpieces, one after the other. I mean, the first one requires a collaboration of people with the talent for telling a story in a visual medium; you might get talented people in the second but what you really need is a huge effects budget.

I don't think it's as simple as "studios are getting lazier," but then again there are a few good flicks being released these days - like Trick 'R Treat.

The internet's desensitized us. With the advent of the internet, you have an entire universe of shocking and depraved imagery available to anyone with a keyboard. Everything from Rotten.com to Ogrish and any of the other numerous shock sites out there. With this kind of stuff freely accessible to a massive (and sadly, often young) audience, filmmakers feel that they have to up the ante in order to compete. Who's going to pay nine bucks to sit in a theater to get the same visceral thrill they can get for cheap as free with the right URL. Either way, it's a nail in the coffin for subtlety and intelligence in horror films.

While the above is mostly true, I believe that we're less desensitized than we think. THere's a few bits in the Rob Zombie remake of Halloween that are watchable, that create fear just by updating the visuals. It's still got Zombies handprints all over it, but that doesn't change the fact that a new coat of paint on a memorable scene makes the all the difference.

[Geminex]

The internet's desensitized us. With the advent of the internet, you have an entire universe of shocking and depraved imagery available to anyone with a keyboard. Everything from Rotten.com to Ogrish and any of the other numerous shock sites out there. With this kind of stuff freely accessible to a massive (and sadly, often young) audience, filmmakers feel that they have to up the ante in order to compete. Who's going to pay nine bucks to sit in a theater to get the same visceral thrill they can get for cheap as free with the right URL. Either way, it's a nail in the coffin for subtlety and intelligence in horror films.

But by your reasoning, the subtle horror should be becoming more, not less, common. Because you're right, there's tons of 'shock sites', blood at gore, etc... available out on the internet. That's what we're becoming desinsitzed to, so it has less of an effect on us, doesn't scare us as easily.

What we aren't over-exposed to is more subtle horror, creeping dread, tense anticipation. All the good stuff that seil mentions in the OP. Because you can put gore in a picture, but it's hard to convey said subtle, gradual, creeping horror on the internet. Unless you're reading through a thread and know that the latest post is by [insert forum member of choice here].

Anyway, shouldn't the subtle stuff be more capable of scaring us? And as such, shouldn't horror movies aiming to scare their audiences make use of it?

IQ, I don't think you can generalize the movie-going public. Or any subset of society, for that matter. Y'think emotional intimacy has dropped that drastically over the recent decade?

[Amake]

Originally Posted by Geminex

IQ, I don't think you can generalize the movie-going public. Or any subset of society, for that matter. Y'think emotional intimacy has dropped that drastically over the recent decade?

I think I can safely say that the people who watch Saw are interested in watching Saw. And what are they if not a subset of the moviegoing demographic?

But yes, it was a pretty shoddy hypothesis. The only trend we can be sure about is that Saw and movies like it have gained popularity. Probably in large part as everyone else suggested because they're cheap to make, so a lot of them get made.

But still, quality movies do get made and they have a certain staying power. Take Pan's Labyrinth. If the market was flooded with movies of that caliber I don't know if we could take it. Or if each of them would mean as much.

[Marc v4.0]

I thought the idea of MM being an actual person, one with a face and a motivation and a history, added a new dimension to the character which actually made the character more frightening.

I felt the Zombie remake was a great reboot to a series that was quickly falling down the same hole as Friday the 13th (I was glad Meyers was never given a 'in the future in space' version, poor Jason).

That aside, I don't really think it makes any sense to be grouped together with 'Torture Flicks'. If it is just a matter of horror movies that rub you the wrong way, that's fine, but it makes a rather weak example of the subject matter the topic actually presents, gory torture movies.