Horror.com Forums - Talk about horror. - the end of torture horror films

Some interesting reading from IGN :-

Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II opened last month to disappointing box office returns (it has only scored around $17 million domestically to date as opposed to the first film's $47 million total U.S. take). Roth recently announced on his blog that his planned adaptation of the Stephen King story Cell has been postponed, though it is unclear if the disappointing ticket receipts for the Hostel sequel had anything to do with this or not (Roth also has railed against the piracy that the film suffered from prior to its opening, attributing that as a contributing factor to the sequel's diminished box office). Some have speculated that the Hostel sequel's lukewarm reception indicates the beginning of the end of the cycle of torture porn, that the public has grown weary for the time being of dangling dead girls and bear-traps on the head. Not everyone is so sure, however.

"I just think that summer is tough, man," says Saw producer Oren Koules of Hostel: Part II's June release date. The Saw films have always come out around Halloween, he notes, in the far less hazardous post-summer season. "We've always been like, 'Keep our little fall for us.' Coming out in summer, I don't know which week of Pirates it was, which week of Knocked Up it was [that Hostel: Part II came out]. You've got zillions of people going to those. We don't mess with that stuff. We're in our little fall quiet zone. Put out a couple of Academy movies and leave us alone! Halloween used to be a dead weekend. If you look traditionally, Halloween was not a good weekend. And we have a bunch of these Halloween weekends by default."

At any rate, Roth is quick to sing the praises of his fellow torture horror filmmakers. He sees them as a cut above many of the writers and directors of the past who have worked in the horror genre specifically with the intention of using it to go on to presumably bigger and better things, with little regard for the films they were making to achieve that end goal.

"Guys like Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall who did The Descent, James Wan and Leigh Whannell with Saw, Darren Lynn Bousman, and Alex Aja with Hills Have Eyes… Every film they make, they want to make a classic," Roth says of his peers. "It used to be directors would step in to the genre and use it as a stepping stone and go on to something else and didn't really care about it, but we care so passionately about these movies that we want to have smarter ideas, smart horror with real resonating themes that are very real to people, that are very carefully thought out. We are using horror films as vehicles. I like to use them the way the '70s guys did as vehicles of social commentary. You can watch them on one level as a blood and guts movie and you can watch it again and go, 'Oh, yeah, I never realized that.'"

An admirable goal for any filmmaker, certainly. But when horror films and other forms of mass media continue to get blamed by some groups for tragedies like the recent Virginia Tech massacre, one can't help but wonder — is there any validity to such claims? Is the intense depravity of torture porn somehow connected to such real-life acts of violence? Can we really blame all our woes on Oldboy and his friends?

Bob Waliszewski, Director of Focus on the Family's entertainment publication Plugged In, does see these films as having an adverse effect on young people, but he also believes that it is the adults in these children's lives who are not properly keeping them away from such material. He cites the following quote from a Plugged In review of Saw:

"In all honesty, Saw's perverse pictures weren't the most disturbing things I saw while reviewing it. It was disconcerting enough to sit through a theater full of mothers with their 8-year-old boys in tow and groups of 12-year-old girls chaperoned by solitary adults. It was nearly intolerable to witness them, kids and adults, applauding when a man on screen got his brains bashed in, and laughing when Lawrence sobbed helplessly on the cell phone while his wife and daughter struggled at gunpoint with their kidnapper."

"Why is it that a reviewer … can go see this film and point out the gruesome torture and point out how it was so awful, and at the same time there's people bringing their 8 year olds, there's fathers bringing their 12 year olds who aren't just grimacing? They're laughing at scenes," asks Waliszewski. "This probably happened to some degree in the last batch of horror films we had, the Friday the 13th, the Freddy vs. Jason kind of stuff. And now those parents are saying, 'Oh, I kind of enjoyed that!' And then they're bringing their little kids in with them. What is the possible effect on an 8-year-old boy who's just watched the gruesome dismemberment and the brutal sexuality and a combination of the two onscreen, as he grows up into adulthood? It can't be pleasant."

One thing is certain when it comes to this particular debate: The ante has been upped on the depiction of violence nowadays when the real deal is only a couple of mouse clicks away via video sites like YouTube and, for the more curious, specific websites that deal in the genuine article. Even television has taken the grisly stuff to unprecedented levels.

Roth notes that the TV series 24 has essentially run very similar imagery to that seen in the first Hostel, in particular a bit involving, he says, "People taking power drills and drilling it into someone's shoulder. Literally." The result, according to Roth, is that filmmakers have to then top that.

"So when you go to the cinema it needs to be a more exaggerated version of that because otherwise [the viewers] go, 'I can just see that on TV,'" he says.

The director also points out that real-life images of violence have been available to the public in the past, but that after the Vietnam War the U.S. government attempted to keep a lid on such footage. Inevitably, though, the age of the Internet has proven that nothing can be kept quiet for too long.

"People say we lost Vietnam because of the television campaign," he continues. "With a film like Hostel, they want to see something that's harder and they need to see something that's more violent than the images they're seeing on [the news]."

The studio which has been such a driving force behind torture porn, Lionsgate, stands at a crossroads now. With Hostel: Part II underperforming and Saw IV on the way in October, the folks at Lionsgate clearly must be on edge. The genre has treated them very well up until now, but where do they go from here if Saw IV receives the same reception as the Hostel sequel? The studio's executives declined to be interviewed for this story.

But even if box office continues to flail for these films, the wave will continue for a while longer still. After Dark Films releases its Elisha Cuthbert torture exercise Captivity today, and other films are in the pipeline around town too. And no matter how gory CSI gets, or how commonplace the genuine article becomes via the Internet, it seems certain that there's no turning back from here for horror films, whether they're of the torture variety or not.

"People have actually argued for a long time that we've reached this threshold or something and that eventually we're just going to be numbed to any sort of violence we see," says Jennifer Ashlock, a professor of sociology at the College of Notre Dame. "I think the jury is still out on that. There's a lot of hysteria about it and that's why I'm turned off of it. One reason I can say that that's not really happening is because what scares us always changes over time."

And in all likelihood, we're never going to stop being scared, either.