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?