Stuff: Horror will no longer be worth watching when it is no longer worth banning.

Lately, the question of "how far is too" far seems to have started popping up around the horror blog-o-sphere. There was a mini-symposium on the matter at Vault of Horror, featuring B-Sol and BJ-C (the inseparable Tracy and Hepburn of horror blog world), and ragin' RayRay (political blogger behind Non-Partisan Witch Hunt).

Now there's a interesting back and forth between Curt, the Groovy One, and Sean, who is quite the deal in his own right and it is a failing on my part and not his that I don't have a nickname for him ("the Thin White Lantern"? too obscure? too jumbled?), about the literal bloodbath scene in Hostel II: Electric Drill Boogaloo. This starts in Curt's post on said movie and continues on Sean's blog.

Whether horror can or cannot (or should) go too far isn't something I really intend to address here. I believe my views on the matter are fairly eccentric and reductionist so there's no need to hash them out in open debate. Instead, I though we'd focus in on a curious trope that pops up in both exchanges.

In clarifying his reaction to the bleed out of Wiener Dog, Sean says:

It was precisely because it had all that "it's only a movie" nonsense surrounding it--and I'm thinking less of the Euro-horror sensuality in the scene itself, which is fine, and more of the splatstick stuff in the climax, which undercuts the whole film--that it bothered me so much. It's kind of like the bit in Inside that made me turn off the movie. If I'd been watching Henry or Dahmer or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or something similarly weighty and serious in intent, I'd have stuck with it, but to violate that particular taboo in the name of a slick, glossy (if gory), credulity-stretching thriller? Thanks but no thanks. Ditto the demise of Weiner Dog. Paradoxically, it's precisely the lack of realism that makes these sequences tougher both to watch and to justify. If i'm going to watch a nude woman get tortured to death, I want to feel like I'm eating my vegetables, not Cookie Crisps.

In his contribution to the roundtable exchange, B-Sol gives Roth's first Hostel flick a verbal smackdown:

My main problem with Hostel was that I found it to be a movie created for the sole purpose of showing me graphic depictions of dramatized torture. The plot was paper thin, as were the characters, and it was quite obvious that Eli Roth's goal was to titillate through violence, without even the flimsiest of dramatic justifications.

BJ-C hits a similar note discussing the on-film slaughter of animals in the infamous exploitation flick Cannibal Holocaust:

The same could be said for the Animal massacres in Cannibal Holocaust. However, as much as I personally cannot agree with killing animals for the sole purpose of "entertainment", the film was killing the animals to make a point.

Finally, RayRay sounds off with a comparison between Rob Zombie's debut and Roth's sophomore effort:

At the same time, movies like the Hostel series and Turistas, and other so called 'torture porn' I can consider having gone too far. Why? I suppose this has something to d with my distaste of the unnecessary cruelty embodied by such films. "Unnecessary cruelty? But that's what those movies are about!" some might retort. Yes, and that is all they are about. One might even then question me about the difference between House of a Thousand Corpses and Hostel. And I would say that the difference lies in the stresses the director one puts on what we see.

In House of a Thousand Corpses, the director created characters to identify with and against that had substance, and in one or two, they were more than a little campy. The violence was a means to an end, as well as a symptom of some greater sickness in those characters. There was more to the movie than just violating the human form.

In Hostel violence was the goal. While the premise wasn't terrible, the story never carried further than the murder of tourists. When you think about it, the most clever thing about Hostel is the director makes you into one of the purveyors of snuff, because the big payoff is all about watching what's going to happen to that Asian girl. In Turistas the payoff was watching a dissection of a girl. Is it the violence and the guts, though? No. Rather, it is the lack of story to contextualize the violence.

There's a lot in here I agree with. The bloodbath scene in Hostel II, for example, is oddly dissonant, and not in a satisfying way, with the rest of the flick. I didn't have the same problems with how realistic it may or may not have been, mainly because I don't see the Hostel films as particularly realistic in the first place. But I can see where Sean is coming from. I agree with RayRay that the decisions a director makes to present his material have a moral component to them and it is legit to compare how two directors hand similar material with that in mind. I can't contest B-Sol's argument that Hostel's plot and characters are not particularly complex.

However, there is one element that I feel runs through all these threads that I strongly disagree with.

Again and again we get some sort riff on the idea that violence, even perhaps the most extreme violence, would be okay if it were somehow wedded to a higher purpose. Violence shouldn't be "the point" of violence, but should rather serve "weighty and serious in intent" or be, somehow, necessary. Even, curiously, genuine acts of unnecessary suffering – if one is to admit that animals can in a meaningful analog to the human understanding of the term – are apparently justified if the acts of inflicting the makes some sort of thematic point.

That this refrain shows up again and again (and not just in these exchanges - we could find in almost any mainstream press review of any Hostel or Saw film, for example) is probably unsurprising. We've heard it before. In fact, there's something almost incantory about it evocation.

I don't buy it.

First, basing your critical interpretation on the basis of artist motivation is like building a house of cards on quicksand. What exactly is it that makes, for example, Henry more "weighty and serious in intent" than, say, Inside. One could site the presumption of "reality" (notably, all the examples Sean gives of movies one would be willing to suffer the presentation of extreme violence in are based, however loosely, on actual serial killers). The former is about genuine acts of violence, hence we can object to the level of violence the real situation demanded of the filmmakers, while the latter is simply a violent fantasy. This link somewhat to RayRay's point: In a fantasy, where there is no real life horror to capture, any extremes are purely the filmmaker's whim.

Close examination of the films in question, however, tends to undermine the assumption that Henry is somehow documentary in nature, and suggests that Inside would have just as much claim to being rooted in the realities of human vileness. Though loosely based on the exploits of a real killer, Henry the character in the film and Henry the real life serial killer should not be confused. The film, for example, treats as fact several of the crimes the real Henry falsely confessed to. Though much is made out of his prolific murderousness, the real Henry could only be linked to eleven crime, at least one of which was doubtful enough that even the former Texas Governor, former POTUS, and big time capital punishment booster was unable to, in good faith, carry out Henry's death sentence. Then there's the character of Becky. The "love" of the real Henry's life – the love interest of his movie, if you will – was a 12-year-old, not the adult we see in the fictional work. We could go on, but the important thing is that Henry is a work of fiction, regardless of what inspired it. But what about Inside? It is clearly a work of fiction too. But, if we're going to count inspiration for something, then Inside can claim just a valid a "true crime" pedigree. The makers of Inside were inspired by a true case of pre-natal kidnapping. Apparently, it does happen (in one particularly repugnant case, a woman removed the fetus from her pregnant victim's belly using a set of car keys).

What then of intention? Certainly Inside was made to be a shocker while Henry was conceived as meditation on the existential void of essential loneliness that dehumanizes us. Or, you know, it might have originally been conceived as a wrestling documentary. The project that would eventually form into Henry began life as a documentary about pro-wrestling in Chicago. The producers of this doc had previously worked with director McNaughton on a previous film, Dealers in Death, a documentary about Chicago gangsters made up entirely of public domain footage. They thought they had a lock on the wrestling movie because they had a line on a stash of old wrestling footage that a collector was willing to part with for a song and a dance. But, unexpectedly, the collector jacked up his price and left the producers with a small pile of development capital and no project to use it on. They told McNaughton that he could shoot a feature, but they demanded it had to be a horror film. McNaughton, under deadline pressure, started up attempts to make a creature feature – preferably, he thought, one featuring aliens – but he quickly surmised that his miniscule budget couldn't take the strain the FX would demand. Stuck for an idea, McNaughton caught an episode of 20/20 profiling Henry Lee Lucas. He pitched the serial killer idea to his backers and they ran with it.

This is, curiously enough, not all that different from the germination of Inside. The creators of that film started out to make a horror film. The story goes that they polled their friends in an effort to determine what scared people the most, the idea being that you could quantitatively determine what you horror flick should contain in order to scare the crap out of the greatest number of people. The poll idea, while kind of charming in its "can-do" logic, was a bust. This left the writer/director duo stuck for ideas. Luckily, the quixotic polling process did lead them to an odd story about a woman attacking a pregnant mother and stealing the baby from her womb. This true crime tidbit became the basis for their story. Curiously, the original conception for Inside was that, like Henry, it was going to be shot in a low-key, "realistic" style. Like Henry, this had more to do with budgets than artistic vision. However, when actress Béatrice Dalle joined the cast, the film suddenly got major cred in the eyes of the moneymen and the budget was bumped up. The filmmakers decided the that whole "verité" horror thing had been done to death, so they went with a more distinct and rigorously structuralistic look – a nod to art house filmmakers and the Poe story The Masque of the Red Death. (This actually speaks to the feed-me-my-leafy-greens point Sean makes. The visual cues that signal "just a movie" to Sean were, to the filmmakers, meant to breakaway from a visual pattern that they felt had ceased to actually communicate anything of value. To them, the shock of the semi-documentary style and its tag-function as "hey, this is The Real™" had both been worn away by overuse. Again we see the problem of pinning down intent.)

So which of these films is more "weighty and serious in intent"? The one that originally started out as a wrestling doc, then would have been a movie about alien invaders (if the money had been there), and ended up a fictionalization of a 20/20 episode? Or the one grew out of a misguided effort to pseudo-scientifically determine what the scariest things in horror films were, then morphed into a micro-budget "true crime" thriller, and then expanded due to the involvement of a popular actress and the belief that the whole "realistic" visual style had become a trite cliché? More importantly, even if one of these films was more weighty and serious in intent, how would you prove that?

I don't think you could, because the intent of the filmmaker is something you can't know. It is something you infer, which means that it is, at least partially, in the eye of the beholder.

Which brings us to the second problem: the popular hypothesis that some horror films have no point, so the violence in them is unjustified. By my reckoning, there's two major problem with this premise (there's a host of lesser problems, but I'm going to focus on just two that I think really sink this particular ship).

This "point" that separates good violence from bad violence is, suspiciously like the line between porn and erotica, one of those semi-critical concepts that everybody is happy to simply not define. We know a point when we see it and, by extension, when can tell when a movie doesn't have one. According to B-Sol and RayRay, Hostel is either pointless or, more specifically, that it's point it torture. B-Sol says: "My main problem with Hostel was that I found it to be a movie created for the sole purpose of showing me graphic depictions of dramatized torture." RayRay concurs: "In Hostel violence was the goal."

Except it isn't and wasn't. At least, that's not what I saw. And there are others who would seem to agree with me. After all, if the sole purpose of the film was to show torture and violence, why have most of the torture and violence occur of screen or happen quickly? Of the eight deaths in Hostel, only one is the direct end result of an extended torture scene. The other deaths (off-screen death presumably by torture, suicide by train, pedestrian-auto collision, head slammed against toilet) are pretty tame by even the R-rated baseline of the genre. Furthermore, why leave all the gore and violence, which is allegedly the point of your flick, until the last quarter? If story, theme, characterization, and all that other stuff is just filler, Roth surely could have jettisoned it for the standard hyper-compressed unstorytelling techniques of the slasher and got to the bloody business in the first 15 minutes of the film. Aside from that, what about the dramatic and themes other have seen in the flick: from an indictment of American exceptionalism, to a comment on bandit economics of post-Communist Eastern Europe, to a critique of the immorality of market logic? Personally, I'm fond of the last reading.

So who is right? I'm certain that B-Sol and RayRay are familiar with positive reviews of Hostel that suggest there's more to the film than pointless slaughter. I assume they find these reading unconvincing. If the film had a point, then by their logic it could not have "gone too far." The film might still suck ass, but it's violence would no longer be problematic. But I'm just as certain that the reviewers and bloggers who claim to have found these themes can make cases for them. Which is why using "the point" as some sort of measure of validity is, ultimately, a waste of everybody's time. If the point can't be expected to remain stable from person to person, then how can anybody feel comfortable pronouncing it as the measure between responsible representations of violence and unworthy representations of violence.

Arguably, you could say that holding a hardline on this makes all criticism of anything except the most formal elements of a film moot. I would disagree. I believe that claiming one sees a theme or idea or trope within a film does not necessarily assume that it is the only theme or trope or idea in a film (or book or painting or whatever). While I don't believe that works simply validate any and all interpretations – I think it is valid for critics, and even Joe Schmoe bloggers like myself, to demand that others support their interpretations with valid argument – I do think that the very nature of expression and criticism means that any given work, perhaps even regardless of artistic merit, can support a wealth of interpretations. That said, the argument that a work has no point, the charge of depthless meaninglessness, does necessarily preclude the idea that other interpretations might validly exist. Eli Roth's claim that Hostel is about American arrogance and my belief that it contains a critique of market capitalism might both be right. B-Sol and RayRay's interpretation assumes nobody else could be right.

Which brings us to the third and final point of this post.

And I thank any and all of you that have had the patience to sit through this.

Point #3: The idea of a film with no deeper meaning is a lazy critical crutch because no such thing exists.

Let's try to imagine at film created with the intention of including no content except the depiction of violent torture. It literally has no plot. Because chronology would imply a plot of sorts, let's say that the scenes are shown in randomly selected order. Avoid allowing characterization to creep into our imaginary film, we don't show the same victims and torturers. The film then becomes non-continuous shots of unrelated individuals at various, but non-continuous stages of torture. But, now we've got a problem. How do we randomize the individuals? We can't just cast people as victims and torturers. Our casting decisions would be open to interpretation. We could use only found footage, which would ensure that the footage would contain victims and torturers we had no power of choosing. However, the risk with found footage is that interpretable materials would start to creep in. Too many army uniforms and a viewer could start to formula a hypothesis about the use of political and military might and its morality. What if the found victims included more women than men? We could mix found and newly shot footage to ensure a sort of perfectly neutral mix of figures in our film, but then you start inviting comparisons between what's real footage and what's fake, opening up a can of worms about representation and reality. And I didn't want to mention it before, but the cuts between the shots are another problem. We can't just make cuts, as that would constitute an artistic, stylistic choice. But if we truly randomize the process, we might destroy our original purpose: to show violent torture. It could become an unintelligible series of strobe-like images. We'll have to make a call, which means there will be a decision that viewers can critique.

Let's stop here – though I think we could go on – because I think we've gone on long enough to make the point. Every film, no matter what its final form, is the product of a creative process that inevitably leaves traces of interpretable clutter behind it. No matter how lame or great, no matter powerful or dull, there's always already something beyond the literal. Even if you could somehow remove all human agency from the creation of a film, the fact that you removed all human agency from the creation of the film introduces space for interpretation.

You'll never make a perfectly flat film. To even try is to automatically fail.

This might be obvious. I suspect it is. If so, then why do critics continue to drag out the impossible accusation of pointlessness?

I'm not sure. I think it's a pretty much a slur. It is a semi-ritualized way of justifying the dismissal of a work and its proponents that has nothing to do with actual appreciation of film. I think it replaces attention with presumption. It is a call to stop thinking, to quit questioning, to stop really caring. Worse, at its core, I think the charge contains the implication that films – and by extension any art – don't matter in any way beyond personal taste.

Though, honestly, maybe that's fair to say of film. Perhaps I should just be comfortable with that.

Link proliferation: Very absorbent.

An All-Male Creative Team You Say?

"Intern Katy" at Jezebel gives this all the intro it needs.

An all-male creative team in Switzerland have created this vampire-themed ad for o.b.

Thanks to Heather for the tip.

"Demonic Interference Can Be Ruled Out."

The typically cocky New Scientist rules out "demonic interference" as the cause of an outbreak of grisi siknis, or "crazy sickness" in Nicaragua.

From the article Q&A with Elie Karam of St George Hospital University Medical Centre in Beirut, Lebanon, who studied an outbreak of mass hysteria in Lebanon during 2004:

What are the typical symptoms?

The first group can be summarised as anxiety symptoms: tremors, shaking, difficulty breathing and feelings of suffocation. The second type is referred to as a dissociative symptom: the person does not recognise where he or she is, seems to be in a trance, looks as if they are in a daze, etc.

Younger individuals, and females, are more likely to be affected.

So far only 43 cases are documented. Karam went on to discuss treatment and community response issues.

Is there a cure?

Not as such. Symptoms always abate within a few weeks. Reassuring the community to reduce fear is key, as is keeping publicity and media attention to a minimum.

The photo above is actually from a 2003 outbreak in Nicaragua that spread through a documented 60 victims.

Pole Position

Speaking of WTF medical stories, the young lad pictured above survived being run completely through by a metal pole. From the Telegraph:

Mihir Kumar was celebrating the Holi festival in Ranchi, India, when the accident occured.

He slipped off the roof of his family home and landed on a five foot-long iron rod that was left standing on a building site.

The pole punched through his rib cage and came out the other side.

His father said Mihir "endured terrible pain".

He was rushed to hospital where he underwent three-hour surgery at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences to remove the rod.

He is now recovering in hospital.

Dr Sandeep Agarwal, one of the three surgeons to operate on the boy, said he had miraculously escaped major internal injuries.

What Slashers Owe Torture Porn

The Atlantic has a puff piece on the slasher revival that contains an interesting claim about the role of Saw and Hostel in the revival of the slasher.

Saw and Hostel succeeded, above all, because they are serious slasher flicks. The extremity of their goriness reclaimed the splatter death from mainstream movies (where it’s become unremarkable to see a man fed screaming to a propeller, or run through with a drill bit). And the immersive nastiness of their aesthetic—decayed bathrooms, foul workshops, seeping industrial spaces, blades blotched with rust—distilled the slasher-flick elixir: atmosphere. No franchise thrives without it. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had it: a choking, sunstruck intimacy, with madness pulsing in the eyeballs. Halloween was suburban-autumnal, a minor rhapsody of long shots and breezy streets and scuttling leaves, the whole effect tingling like wind chimes inside the empty psychosis of the slasher Michael Myers. Friday the 13th was strictly B-movie in its technique, but it succeeded in perforating an American idyll: summer camp was never the same after those nice guitar-strumming sing-along kids got slashed in their lakeside cabins.

Where the torture porn flicks adaptations in a Curtesian sense?

It's Alive! And Worth a Fortune!

Above is the "most valuable poster in the world." It's the Frankenstein six-sheet (nearly 7 x 7 feet). As far as anybody knows, there's only one in existence. It's currently the property of a New York. It hasn't been appraised in some time, but estimates put the value at more than $600,000. That sounds low to me as the highest earning one-sheet, for Universal's original The Mummy, fetched a little more than $535,000 at auction.

Stuff: I know all there is to know about The Torture Game.

Actually, I was completely ignorant of the topic until very recently.

Yesterday I received an email from fellow LOTT-D member Absinthe of Gloomy Sunday fame. It contained a link to a thoughtful piece by the whimsically named Winda Benedetti, the "Citizen Gamer" columnist for MSNBC. In the column, Ms. Benedetti takes a look at The Torture Game and its more popular and grisly sequel, The Torture Game 2.

The article links to game, should you wish to try your hand at abusing the nameless victim pictured above. I do believe, though I have not tried it myself, that you can customize the face; this is a boon to those finicky gamers who derive no pleasure from torturing strictly anonymous and generic victims. Ms. Benedetti describes this fairly simple game thusly:

Here, a pale, androgynous human hangs from ropes on the computer screen before you. Among the devices at your disposal — a chainsaw, a razor blade, spikes, a pistol … and a paintbrush (take that!)

There’s little in the way of instructions and no points to be earned. Instead, this dangling ragdoll offers you a canvas to do with what you will — stab him with spikes, flay the skin from his body with a razor, pull his limbs off with your bare hands, paint him every color of the rainbow. No matter what you do to him, he never screams and his expression never changes. He only utters a vague “uuungh” when you’ve inflicted enough damage to kill him.

And that’s pretty much it.

I would only add to this that the victim is not exactly androgynous. He is clearly a he. Even Benedetti uses the masculine pronoun for the victim throughout the article. The awkward use of the term androgynous reflects the fact that, like a Ken doll, he possesses a smooth patch of blank flesh where his sexual organs should be. This underscores an odd detail regarding media torture that I completely overlooked in my series of post on so-called torture porn films: torture porn, in films and games, are remarkably sexless.

Sadly, sexual abuse and rape are a fact of torture. The photos out of Abu Ghraib, themselves a sort of "game" in that they seem to have been staged by the soldiers for the purposes of entertainment and were not a record of standard interrogation procedure, are a brutal reminder of this. Soldiers at the prison made their charges simulate and perform sexual acts on one another. They photographed them in various stages of nudity. In what is perhaps one of the most infamous photographs, PVT Lynndie Rana England, cigarette dangling from her lips, uses both hands to point at the penis of a naked prisoner who is being forced to masturbate for the camera.

By contrast, few examples of torture porn, either in film or in video games, incorporate this. This may sound odd considering Hostel's affection for the nubile flesh of Eastern European co-ed's, but one of the most obvious consequences of the extreme imbalance of power that exists in a torture situation – rape and sexual abuse – rarely figures in. None of the Saw films feature sexual violation or humiliation as a component of Jigsaw's traps. In fact, when sex does appear in the Saw films, Jigsaw's violence is usually presented as a scourge meant to punish the perverse or purify the sexually corrupt (among his victims we find a prostitute, an adulterer, and a producer of violent kiddie porn). In the Hostel franchise, the second film features the threat of a rape that is not, ultimately, carried out and ends in the castration of the would-be rapist, as if he was being punished for taking the act of torture into a still somehow taboo realm of sexual violation. Captivity, perhaps the most nakedly sexualized of the torture porn flicks, is still weirdly virginal. The victims are pretty women, but their trials are strictly non-sexual and, curiously, meant to de-sexualize them: good-looking women get their faces melted off, for example.

Why are our fantasies of torture so sexless? I'm not sure I have a good answer.

The limitations are not technical. Graphic sexuality, though never as popular with gamers as graphic violence, would be nothing new to the world of film or video games. In fact, there's a steady, if mostly non-mainstream, history of sexual violence in video games stretching back to the 2600s bizarre Custer's Revenge - in which you dodged arrows in order to rape a Native American woman (at least, we're told that's what was happening – it was the 2600 and every looked pretty vague) – and running all the way up to the modern GTA franchise – in which players are rewarded for killing prostitutes. If sex organs are missing from The Torture Game 2 it is only because the game's programmer didn't want them to appear.

Perhaps the barrier is strictly social. Sexual violence remains beyond the pale in a way non-sexualized violence does not. As a culture, we have shown a remarkable capacity for rationalizing and defending real and imagined violence: it must exist in the real world for security, as a bulwark to social order, to maintain the law, as reflection of our immutable animal nature; it must exist in the fictional world for catharsis, to reflect the facts of the real world, to give vent to primal urges suppressed for the sake of society. But add a sexual element to that violence and we sense that the field shifts. We're dealing with a different sort of taboo. We either play dumb or reject it. In the former case, we call it camp, stress its unimportance, or otherwise reject the notion that it carries with it the weight of representation. Could anybody enjoy Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS if they could not dismiss the idea that the film was a sincere and genuine sexualized exploitation of the Holocaust? Has any positive reviewer of that film ever just come out and said, "What really gives Ilsa its kick is that, in the back of the viewers' minds, we cannot dismiss the knowledge that we're desecrating the mass graves of 6 million Jews"? Ironically, our enjoyment of "exploitation" cinema might rest on the mental judo trick that we simply disbelieve that it is really exploitation in any fundamental way. In the latter case, we morally rebel. It is hard to imagine, for example, anybody arguing that, unfortunate as the sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib was, it was essential for national security. (In fact, right-wing defenders of the administration attempted both lines of reasoning: claiming that the abuse was the product of a few morally reprehensible bad apples and dismissing it as part of a meaningless "frat-like prank.") However, that same excuse is regularly offered for all manner of excessive violence – from civilian casualties to support of violence regimes to brutal interrogation techniques – provide it doesn't carry the added taint of sex.

Then again, it may have to do with the real appeal of torture porn being something almost pre-sexual. Benedetti writes:

Unlike most video games that come with a healthy dose of hack-and-slash, “The Torture Game 2” offers no story to give context to your actions. Your victim … he’s simply hanging there, waiting for you. Meanwhile, the game’s ragdoll physics lend a sickeningly hypnotic charm to the whole affair. With every touch of your cruel hand, every cut of the chainsaw, your victim sways, bounces and dances like some fleshy marionette.

This description reminded me of Freud's story of the fort/da game. There's something strangely comforting, regressive, and almost innocent about the fantasy of complete power. The Torture Game 2 speaks to this fantasy by what it leaves out. The victim can't talk. If he could plead and beg, it would be clear that his entire existence isn't simply predicated on your will. The victim is also sexless. This allows players to avoid that most taboo and anxiety-ridden area - an area that brings with it the danger of an implicit recognition of the fundamental and irreducible otherness of people.

These are, of course, just random thoughts. I'd be curious to hear y'all's take on this.

Stuff: A Defense of Torture Porn – Part 3: The Infernal Machine

To recap the previous entry, I attempted a shot at defining what makes something torture porn. Though I imagine my jerry-rigged set of subgenre tags leaves much to be desired, we've got to proceed from somewhere, so I'll continue to reference my five basic criteria:

1. A strictly non-supernatural outlook emphasizing human agents
2. A hyper-realistic visual look
3. The dramatization of paranoid helplessness
4. Self-aware earnestness
5. Overtly political post-Clinton outlook

This entry will focus on the first three criteria in an effort to answer the charges that torture porn is inherently uncreative, senseless, and un-artistic.

Some critics maintain that the issue with torture porn isn't the level of violence, but the fact that torture porn is allegedly an artistic dead-end. Critics claim these flicks place a premium on the realistic representation of pain and suffering, the ultimate goal of which is the evocation of an automatic physical response. These flicks exist to show hurting in order to kick in a primal fight-or-flight response. At its most elaborate and thoughtful, this criticism takes a form I'm going to call "High Horrorism."

High Horrorism is more of a stance towards horror than a critical orthodoxy, so trying to pin down some magic list of tenets for the approach would be impossible. Still, I think you can capture a sense of the High Horrorist ethos in broad outline. High Horrorism is the creative flipping of Victorian horror norms. At its center is an early 20th century psychological concept: the uncanny. The uncanny was first proposed as a literary concept by Ernst Jentsch, who in 1906 used it specifically to describe "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate." In 1916 Freud expanded the concept to include notion of the familiar that is unfamiliar. He specifically focused on uncanny repetition: doubles, random numbers that keep popping up, that sort of thing. High Horrorism has expanded this concept even further defining it broadly as, with all apologies to Led Zeppelin, "what should never be." Real horror, as opposed to an unthinking visceral response to shock, is pondering the depthless void that opens up when one is confronted with the impossible that is. A strong line of the High Horror aesthetic traces from the works of the Romantics (Shelley, Hoffmann: whose story inspired the coining of the term "uncanny," Poe) to the Victorians (Stoker, Blackwood) on through to the last significant gasp of literary High Horrorism: the early Moderns (M.R. James, the ghost stories of Henry James, Lovecraft). High Horror tends to run towards the supernatural, the stylish, the inexplicable, and the abstract. Horror is, in some ways, the opposite of the real. To make the impossible possible becomes the goal of the horror writer and that is best done through a combination of stylish pyrotechnics and heavy use of symbolism. Horror is a break in real: it is never realistic. Like their Victorian predecessors, High Horrorism is still obsessed with sex, deviance, and the fluidity of identity politics; though the influence of Modernism – through Freud and the twin James's – flips the script and tends to view these suppressed forces as something in need of liberation or exploration.

For proponents of High Horrorism, torture porn fails on several levels. First, relentless realism is the bane of true terror. Realism creates works that are flat. The terror they evoke is pre-intellectual, readily explicable, and dissipates as soon as it is understood. Torture porn, they say, can't haunt your dreams. You need proper ghosts for that. Torture porn is also lacking in valuable symbolism. Torture is torture. It doesn't appeal to your deeper, hidden anxieties and fears. It doesn't explore the dark recesses of sexuality or identity. It is what it is. Finally, torture porn is small potatoes compared to the "unnamable" horrors that are the stock and trade of High Horror. The suffering of single individuals, while repugnant and morally revolting, is nothing compared to the revelation of a vast and cruel void over which all life teeters.

These criticisms are not entirely without merit insomuch as they rightly pinpoint the strength and artistic value of High Horror. High Horror has a rich history and continues to be a well-spring of important genre work. Furthermore, I agree that a significant amount of the power torture porn has is invested in the fact that human suffering evokes an immediate and powerful response the precedes intellectualization. That seem undeniable to me. However, the binary thinking that would hold High Horror up as the superior opposite of torture porn doesn't work. Mainly due to the fact that High Horrorists' characterizations of torture porn is almost entirely incorrect.

The first three criteria of torture porn would seem to be the most self-explanatory, but they also seem to me to be the least acknowledged. Taken together, our first three criteria amount to this: torture porn is not, in method or in aim, realistic. It is a fantasy. It represents a nightmare vision of the world to an audience that has, by and far, simply outgrown the psychological models and social preoccupations of the High Horror generation. With the taboos of Victorianism and Modernism packaged and sold as entertainment, the dark and secret places of High Horror have become an amusement park. Psychological depth is now leveled and medicated (what Freud is to High Horror, Zoloft is for the torture porn set). We no longer explore the jungles of our psyche; we just pave them over. The void that so terrified Victorians and their intellectual descendents is now the norm: a secular scientific mindset tells that a vast and cold universe that mocks the scale of humanity is, in fact, the reasonable way to look at things. It's Cthulhu's universe; we just live in it. Modern creators of horror and their latest generation of fans know the uncanny too well. They live there.

First, let me defend my claim that torture porn is fantasy by focusing on the visual style that has become torture porn's most distinctive trait. The look of torture porn is not realistic, but hyper-realistic. It is a highly artificial approach that takes the trappings of realism and blows them all out of proportion. The result is a lavish, over-stuffed look – most often taking an archetypal image and stuffing it to the breaking point. This is most apparent in the dungeon settings of the two Hostel flicks and the bathroom set of the first Saw. Both sets are not just dirty, but absolutely coated in grime and slime. One imagines you could get tetanus of the eyeball just from looking at them. But neither represents what (sadly) we know torture looks like. Real torture, when governments undertake it, is conducted not in sewers, but in relatively orderly places that look disconcertingly like hospitals. Why leave a filthy crime scene behind? Mud and crud tends to trap potential clues like hair, foot and fingerprints, and so on. The answer, of course, is that these aren't "real." They visually represent the feelings the idea of torture evokes. Men in rubber aprons, faces hid behind monstrous brass and steel facemasks, power tools inexplicably left to rust (despite the fact that they are supposedly the property of an elite club of super rich people) – it all suggests the moral, spiritual, ethical decay of what's happening. The whole visual approach adopted by Roth and Wan is not realistic some much as it represents the typical strategies of film realism – a little grime here, some busted glass there – and invests it with symbolic purpose. The very fabric of their films' worlds reflects the mental state and fate of their characters.

As a historical aside, despite the roots of torture porn going back to exploitation cinema, I think the visual style owes much to the high-gloss, high-res squalor of David Fincher's Se7en. The home set of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is another influence, but it lacks the finish of Fincher's flick. Whatever debts torture porn directors owe to grindhouse cinema, it is not the source of their visual style.

If you had to pick an iconic symbol for this visual approach, it would be the surreal and absurd death raps of the Saw. Jigsaw's various devices are more than just traps, they are over-the-top representations of brutality. Where a few levers and screws would do, Jigsaw's machines are jumbles of inexplicable gears and spikes, covered in grease with illegible meters studding them. The clank and grind like they might, at any second, fall apart on their own. They are also always absurdly outsized. In the first Saw, one wonders how it is possible that the fairly pint-sized Amanda could ever hold up the contraption she's forced to wear, let alone escape from it. In their absurd machininess, Jigsaw's traps resemble the Romanticized steam-and-gear devices worshiped by streampunk types, only in this case we've got a nightmare vision of technology instead of a semi-utopian fantasy of human invention. (The Hostel equivalent of this is, I think, the mysterious and evocative device that appeared in the marketing, notably on the DVD box-cover. Monumental, black, sinister, vaguely insect-like: though a real object, the visual presentation made it a repository for meaning and fear. It is, by the way, a towel clamp and is generally used for holding back medical curtains.)

Jigsaw's traps bring us to the first and third criteria. They are visual metaphors for a paranoid helplessness that is to torture porn what the inexplicable void is High Horror. The old boogymen of High Horror – sex, human irrationality, the primitive self – just don't seem that scary anymore. What is scary is living in a system where all those things, with all their destructive capacities, will be bought and sold, catered too, and encouraged. Long before anybody ends up on a torture table, the characters in torture porn are trapped. Either they are being hunted by an impossibly smart cult of murderous death-trap tinkerers or they have been commoditized and traded on a wired-up global victims market. Ultimately, the only way to survive an encounter with either system is to assimilate into the system. In Saw it means you play by Jigsaw's rules. In Hostel you have to drop enough long green to pay for the privilege of switching positions with your torturer. But, even then, you've done nothing but survive. The overwhelming logic and perfect operation of these systems means that there no way out, no position from within the system that you can fight it or change up the game. It isn't irrational so much as inhumanly rational. It's the modern void: despite all the advances made politically, medically, culturally, and technically, the defining feature of the modern world is exploitation. You're a victim or you're an exploiter.

In torture porn, real horror isn't finding an inexplicable break in the real. In fact, such a break would be liberating as it would imply something greater than the system and the possibility of transcending the system. In torture porn the horror is the real. The impossible and the unspeakable are readily available and organized for maximum market efficiency. All you need is the scratch. Compared to all-consuming logic of power and victimization, Cthulhu is kind of a wuss.

It should be pointed out that this horrific vision of inescapable fate is not to be taken as an actual diagnosis capitalism, neo-conservatism, or any other "-ism." Though Roth and the crew behind Saw have, I'm sure, opinions on globalism and the like, these are not primarily works of propaganda. They are allegories that point to no specific analog. In real life, we see these systems everywhere and are aware, on some level, that we are morally implicated in them. We buy some jeans and are vaguely understand that we might be somehow complicit in truly horrific behavior. Saw and Hostel are symbolic moral labs were we can mentally explore those notions' worst extremes. (This extends, I believe to the behavior of watching violence for entertainment purposes, but we'll talk about that next time).

Okay. That's enough of that. One more to go, then we'll return to our regularly scheduled, review-centric horror blogging. Can you dig it?

Stuff: A Defense of Torture Porn – Part 2: What Are You Talkin' About?

First, I'd like to thank everybody who took time to comment on the previous post. I'd especially like to thank Sean, who took my misreading of his definition of torture porn with a level of friendliness and class that is often sadly lacking on the Internets these days. In recognition of his utter and complete classiness, ANTSS would like to take this moment to officially append the honorific Screamin' before his name. Arise Screamin' Sean. One of us! One of us!

Alright. Back to business.

I start this post somewhat at a loss. In the previous post, I dismissed the notion that there was such a thing as torture porn. You, dearest reader, could be forgiven for wondering what exactly we still have to talk about. Or, even, why I continued to use the term "torture porn" in the title. How can I propose to defend something that doesn't exist?

Before we go any further then, let's define our terms. This is a horror blog, so I'm going to be talking mostly about horror films. I'm going to continue to use torture porn as the term for a subgenre of horror film. I'm also going to set a sort of canon. I believe that there are only two significant film franchises that everybody agrees belong to the torture porn genre: Saw and Hostel.

To make the genre tag meaningful, I'm going to propose a handful of stylistic and elements that I believe genuinely tie these films together:

1. Torture porn is strictly materialistic and humanistic in outlook: These films do not rely on supernatural elements or non-human agents to justify their set-ups or deliver their shocks. But this is not the same thing as saying that they are realistic. A point we'll get to later.

2. Torture porn relies on a hyper-realistic visual style: These films have a gritty, more-real-than-real look that emphasizes a sort of lavish squalor. Critics often mistake this for "gritty realism," but it is, in fact, an elaborately artificial approach that has its roots not in horror genre pictures, but mainstream crossover works.

3. Torture porn dramatizes paranoid helplessness: This is somewhat clumsy, but it is as close as we can get to the common "there's torture" while actually fitting the plots of the movies under discussion. The amount of torture in any given "torture porn" film is pretty small. What the majority of these films show is people slowly, seemingly inevitably, heading towards a horrible fate. I'd argue that, rather than the torture, is the source of their impact.

4. Torture porn's primary tone is one of self-aware earnestness: Unlike its most immediate predecessors, the exploitation cinema of the 1970s and the slasher flicks of the 1980s, torture porn is meta (like so much post-Taratino genre cinema, it is awash in allusions and references) but un-ironic (despite its hyper-referential nature, it is not meant to mainly be a giant in-joke for genre fans). This self-awareness means that these flicks also take the relationship between the viewer and the film seriously, something utterly lacking from the pandering of exploitation cinema or the winking irrelevance of slasher flicks.

5. Torture porn is often overtly political, but removed from 1960s/1970s style liberalism: Both Saw and Hostel wear their politics on their sleeves. The former has increasingly given over screen-time to the mystical libertarian philosophizing of Jigsaw, the Ron Paul of cinematic serial killers. Hostel, which muddled through several intertwined themes in the first film, focused it anti-globalization message in the second flick. What's interesting about these flicks is that they take for granted the fights older critics, especially those raised on horror from the 1960s to the 1980s, continue to fight: identity politics, liberal/conservative divisions, religion versus freethinking. Torture porn is decidedly modern. While exploitation and slasher cinema had its last gasp in the Clintonian Era (with Tarantino and Scream), torture porn represents the cloudy morality, global scope, and paranoia of the now – an era of Bush's Wars and a Democratic candidate who openly praises Reagan.

Arguably, other horror films belong in the canon. The critical and popular bomb Captivity was deliberately TP'ed-up in an effort to cash in on the alleged popularity of the hot new subgenre. It was so completely rejected by fans and foes alike that it would be hard to justify discussing it in the context of trying to discover what makes torture porn so popular. Captivity suggests the premise is false: it isn't very popular. Faux snuff like The Poughkeepsie Tapes and August Underground hit many of the criteria, though I have doubts about them meeting the second criteria. One could also make a solid argument for Girl Next Door, the direct to DVD adaptation of the Jack Ketchum book of the same name, and the Japanese shocker Audition. But, as I mentioned in my previous post, these are fairly cult-grade flicks. They hardly represent some flood of torture porn into the mainstream. I'm sure there are other horror flicks I'm forgetting, but I think this is a suitable framework for thinking about these flicks for now.

(As an aside, I feel these distinctions provide some useful purchase on non-horror flicks as well. The brutality of 24 doesn't really fit the template because it doesn't fit our third criteria. The terror suspect's fate simply isn't that important and the crucial paranoid helplessness of the victim is never the point. Instead, the will-he/won't-he of the torturer is the crucial point. The Passion of the Christ wouldn't count as torture porn because it fails to meet the first criteria. Regardless of whether or not one believes in Christian theological doctrine, the movie exists in a dramatic world where, for example, mystical connections like the rending of the curtain in the Temple and Satan are real. However, this is a horror blog and I leave non-genre connections and explorations to somebody else.)

Okay. That's enough for now. Personally I'm no big fan of horror bloggers just spinnin' their wheels, fill-auss-o-phizin' like we're more than hobbyists. If I was reading somebody else's blog, I'd get bored just about here. So, we're going to shut this down at this point. The next installment of this series will focus on the criticisms of "realism" in torture porn. Don't miss it. I'm going totally cop English major tude and dub something "High Horrorism" in tribute to "High Modernism." It will be ostentatiously pretentious. Be there.

Stuff: A Defense of Torture Porn – Part 1: The Genre That Wasn't

If there is a JLA of horror-bloggers with classic taste and post-grad approaches to film criticism, it is probably the League of Tana Tea Drinkers. The LoTTD regularly gets together to shoot the shit about horror tropes and trends. If you're interested in thoughtful blogging about horror, usually horror from the Universal Age to the 1980s, then they are well worth checking out.

Recently the august members of the League took up the not-so-burning issue of "torture porn," the supposedly mainstreamed horror subgenre known in the critical and fan press primarily for its extensive images of human suffering. The League's reactions were officially mixed; but even those with no particular issue against the conceptual category seemed to, at best, damn it with faint praise.

What makes this almost unanimous reaction of condemnation, be it faintly dismissive or stridently disgusted, all the more interesting is that, by their own admission, none of the League seem to be able to pin down the subgenre or point to unique characteristics.

The first blogger to sound off brings up that narratives of brutal human suffering, often for the flimsiest or least palatable reasons, are fairly common in the Western artistic tradition. He sites Biblical tales, such as the beheading of John the Baptist, and Shakespearian scenes. He misses Dante's Inferno, perhaps the most extended literary riff on torture and suffering ever committed to paper, but his point is firmly made: extended and graphic takes on human torture are nothing new.

To hammer the point home, the next League member lays out a wonderful list of torture-centric flicks. Running from the 1930s to the 1960s, the mad genius behind Blogue Macabre drops the titles of a handful of notable horror films, all of which use torture as an important narrative element. He could have gone even further back. Part of the plot of the silent film Waxworks hinges on the torture techniques of Ivan the Terrible. Still, keeping it within the parameters he discusses, the blogger makes his point. Is the alleged subgenre in question is actually something new under the sun?

(Before we get of the criticism of the second blogger, I think there is something worth noting about the use of the term "classic horror." The period this initial critic pulls titles from extends nearly three decades: the 1930s to the 1960s. Later, another round-table participant will push the bar to include grindhouse exploitation cinema into the realm of worthies. Finally, the term "classic" will get appended to 1980s slasher flicks. The classic period of horror, with all the connotations of quality and cultural worth the term "classic" implies, would seem to run from the birth of the Universal monsters up through the late '80s, when the slasher phenomenon would enter a self-parodying doldrums. In short, everything is a classic except for what is happening right now.)

For all this exploration of the roots of torture porn, none of the critics ever successfully try to map out the genre they're critiquing. The Saw and Hostel franchises are mentioned repeatedly. The Hills Have Eyes, presumably the remake, is mentioned once, though where the extended torture scene in that film is eludes me at the moment. The neo-slashers Wolf Creek and High Tension get name-checked, though the later seems like a real stretch to me as we get none of the extended and focused abuse that supposedly marks the genre. Turistas was marketed as a tropical Hostel, though many viewers (like ANTSS favorite Mermaid Heather) would doubt the appropriateness of the label. The Devils Rejects, that bizarre splatter-Western-road-crime flick, has moments of great tension (the psycho-sexual harassment of the women at the motel) but nothing approaching the sustained physical abuse of Hostel. You certainly wouldn't say that scene was the central point of the flick.

Even given the problems with the canon as constructed here, at least there's a real effort here. Several of the critics dismiss the films at hand without having seen them. One of the critics freely admits that he's never seen any of the alleged "torture porn" films (he openly bases his critique on the marketing and second-hand buzz of the flicks and, in my book, gets full points for putting all his cards on the table) and another seems to take her refusal to actually watch the films she's critiquing as matter of pride.

Here's my question: if extreme violence and torture are not new and nobody can point to a body of works that show enough common traits to lump them together in any meaningful way, then what the hell are we all talking about?

The truth about the torture porn genre is that it simply doesn't exist.

We have, at most, two franchises that everyone can agree on: Hostel and Saw. Of those two, Hostel's second outing was a mediocre box-office performer. Only Saw, which has successfully made itself into a Halloween ritual for teens, continues to reliably bring in the dough. And, it should be noted, that the vast majority of the violence in the Saw flicks is not, by most standard definitions, torture. The injuries and deaths inflicted upon the victims in Saw are usually self-inflicted, most often through a relatively fast acting device, and are acts of psychopathically misguided benevolence. All the other nominees for the genre are questionable, flops, or so obscure that nobody gives a crap. It is a stretch to call this a genre. Compare it to, say, the two genuinely significant subgenre's of the '90s and double-aughts – J-horror remakes and zombie flicks – and we're talking about an incredibly insignificant portion of the horror bandwidth.

To complicate matters, the term itself was not coined to meaningfully identify a subgenre of horror. The credit for this muddled term goes to New York Magazine reviewer David Edelstein, who entitled his 2006 film think-piece "Now Playing at Your Local Mutliplex: Torture Porn." Edelstein certainly focuses on horror flicks like Hostel and the like, but it should also be noted that he drops in The Passion of the Christ and Reservoir Dogs. More importantly, the identifying trait of "torture porn" is not that it depicts violence. The kicker is that the makers of these flicks evoke what Will Self calls "moral displacement." Discussing the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, Self says: "We lose sight of whose exact POV we are inhabiting. The sadist who is doing the torturing? The policeman? The incapacitated accomplice? It is this vacillation in POV that forces the sinister card of complicity upon the viewer. For in such a situation the auteur is either abdicating—or more likely foisting—the moral responsibility for what is being depicted onscreen from himself to the viewer." It is this complicity, which is a morally, aesthetically, and philosophically complicated sticky wicket, that is the key feature of the films Edelstein was designating as torture porn. As a sort of totemic figure, Edelstein evokes "Will Graham in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon—a genius serial-killer tracker because he can walk through grisly crime scenes and project himself into the killers’ heads. He’s both the instrument of justice and the empathic consumer of torture porn."

Edelstein's coinage is a far cry from current, depleted, and somewhat pointless use of the term we find dominating horror debates. I'll borrow the definition of a favorite blogger of mine. Sean Collins writes: "Torture porn" (noun): Horror films in which the physical brutalization of a person or persons, frequently to death and always while somehow immobilized or held captive by the brutalizer or brutalizers, is the primary locus of horror in the film. [Update: Sean Collins has replied to this post and explained some of the important nuances I may have missed in unpacking his definition. Check out the comments section. Thanks Sean!] Let's set aside that this does not, even on a plotting-factual level, describe several of the films labeled torture porn by the folks in the LoTTD round-table. What bothers me more is the "primary locus of horror" part. It takes what was most interesting about Edelstein's original coinage – that it isn't just what we see, but how we see it that is the source of unease – and strips it down to the point of becoming a tautology. The point of the torture porn film is torture because that is the point of a torture porn film. It is this impoverished version of Edelstein's term that helps fuel the most common criticisms of the genre: that the pain is the only point, that they are all the same, and that they sacrifice style and artifice for a relentlessly unaesthetic "realism" in the pursuit of sharpening the impact of the gore. It feeds into the very notion that you could dismiss these films without seeing them because, well, their torture porn, right? You know what you need to know.

As it is used in the horror blog-o-sphere, torture porn is a little more than a slur. It doesn't describe any meaningful subset of films, fails to illuminate any significant feature of the films being discussed, and encourages the off-handed dismissal of the films under consideration.

Whew. Let me rest my fingers a bit. In the next section, coming soon, hopefully, we'll discuss common criticisms of horror porn. You wanna talk about torture porn? Wait until you slog your way through that!

Movies: Cabinessence

Watching Cabin Fever long after seeing director Roth's Hostel mini-franchise take off is a curious experience. First, it gives one a profound notion of just how far Roth has progressed as a director and writer. Second, it points to some stubborn qualities that, since we've seen them appear in three flicks (and even his fake trailer for Grindhouse), we can definitively point to as the limitations of Roth's talents.

Cabin Fever tells the story of a group of highly-grating twenty-somethings who rent a secluded cabin in the unnamed wildness of some meticulously backwater place. After a bit of exposition to establish that these characters have some history together, Roth inflicts them with a particularly nasty flesh-eating virus that not only begins to strip away their flesh, but also makes them victim to an unending barrage of horror film allusions. As the virus gets more bloody and mushy, paranoia sets in and our protagonists turn on one another. This is particularly unfortunate as their rotting condition attracts the attention of the local populace and constabulary, both of which hold remarkably simple, if blunt, views about how public health issues should be handled. Stuck between gun-totting mountain-folk vigilantes and a disease that's part ebola and part Red Death, our heroes find themselves trapped in a bleakly unpromising position.

Cabin Fever is the work of a director who is unusually accomplished on a technical level, but utterly lacking in anything particularly interesting to say or do. CF looks good. Roth suffers from the unfortunate beginner's-notion that simply turning a camera on a pretty lake will give you beautiful shot; but, for the most part, the rich detail that made his two later films so visually arresting is on display. The set design for the titular cabin is packed with fine details and Roth shoots it in such a way that it shifts from generically cheesy to sinisterly claustrophobic. He's also excellent at getting the maximum bang for his buck out of the effects folks. In this we see the foundations of Roth's style.

What Roth has improved on considerably is characterization. When I reviewed Hostel, I opined that the American tourists were annoying enough that they almost justified the existence of snuff-clubs. Compared to the teens in Cabin Fever, the jackass youngsters of Hostel come off like witty/smooth combos of Oscar Wilde and Cary Grant. Watching Roth try to invest the cast of Cabin Fever with some life is painful. For realz. Like reach for the remote and fast forward until we some blood painful. It's debatable if the girls from Hostel 2 are a step backward (though the character work in that flick is, I think, redeemed by his work with the predators, who remain Roth's most interesting characters to date). Still, even the girls of H2 aren't as bile-inducing as this crowd. I should point out that this isn't, I think, the fault of the actors. They've got a script which requires them to act against rotted hobos, extreme skateboarders (in an inadvisable cameo by Roth), and other bizarre non-sequiturs. They're game, but the can't make us give a crap about these thoroughly disposable characters.

What Roth hasn't improved on is controlling his narrative arc. It strikes me that Roth gets a boss idea, figures out how to justify the idea, and then doesn't know how to close the deal. In all three of his films, the trap he sets up from the beginning slowly closes around his characters. The strength of his ideas is that they are built like traps. There's a relentless, unforgiving, mechanical fatedness to his concepts. However, in the last act, one character always suddenly bursts free of the trap and then, adrift, ends up running through a pointless and anti-climactic dénouement. It happens in CF, with a character suddenly running into what I assume are supposed to be comedic scenes, a deer "attack", and other time-padding senselessness. It happens with the looping escape-unescape-escape in Hostel. And it happens with the flatly unfunny close in Hostel 2. In a debut flick you might think this was just lack of experience. But, given the fact that every flick he's done has it (and even the Thanksgiving trailer spins wildly out of control), one has to wonder if he's just blind to the fact that it robs his films of some of their punch.

Should you catch Fever? Pretend you can see me shrug. It is functional flick with some nice gross-out moments and a novel slasher-without-a-slasher feel to it. But fans of Roth's lavish squalor with find that approach still a work in progress here. The film further suffers from the fact the Roth's annoying characters and meandering end make the film's opening and closing a bit of a slog.

Movies: A right to be hostel.

Greetings fright fans. I apologize for the dead air. After weeks of homebound freelancing, your humble horror host went out and joined the vast ranks of the regularly employed. I'm still getting over the shock of waking up before noon, but I think I've recovered enough to start writing again.

Since we're discussing personal stuff, I also would like to point out that, for some reason, it seems like I cannot carry out even the most basic task these days without cutting, scratching, or otherwise perforating myself. As it stands now, I have a single finger that doesn't have some nasty little slice on it and my right forearm has an angry red 4 inch long slice on it. It's healing, but ugly and unpleasant.

As yet, we've got no good explanation for my sudden vulnerability to life's sharper corners. I'm not generally accident-prone. My wife thinks it's because my skin is dry, and therefore more likely to split on impact with pointy things, due to seasonal weather changes. She thinks I should put on lotion. I think I might have cut in line in front of an ancient gypsy and she's cursed me to a supernatural death of a billion little cuts. I feel I should devote my energies to finding this witch and forcing her to reverse the curse. This may require I go freelance again, 'cause gypsies are tricky and I can't be tied to an evenings-and-weekend-only schedule if I'm going to find her. My wife says this is "idiotic." Oh, please: "seasonal weather changes." Honestly.

Speaking of perforating: today's flick is Hostel: Part II, Eli Roth's follow up to his seminal horror hit Hostel. For those who follow the blog, I did not have a great opinion of the first flick. Capsule review: Hostel was a great looking gore fest that failed to hide its trashy and cheap core with a shallow cover of awkwardly ill-thought-out anti-Americanism. It was this emptiness at its core, its inarticulate grasping towards anything to say while throwing young bodies into the chopper, that made it, somewhat justly, the poster-flick for the short-lived but much analyzed "torture porn" moment.

With Hostel: Part II Roth found an intellectual purpose sufficient to justify the horror. Instead of relying on a vague and nonsensical notion that the victims of the first flick deserved to be tortured to death by rich foreigners because they are boorish, Roth wisely shifts the guilt from the backpackers to the real villains: dudes and dudettes who would pay money to torture people to death. In this sense, the film is a quantum leap ahead of its predecessor. Unfortunately, putting the film on more solid thematic grounds doesn't entirely eliminate the sense that we've seen most of this material before. Roth now has a good reason to subject us to the horrors of his snuff club, but he's lost the shock value that was such a crucial piece of the first flick's power.

Like the first flick, this film follows the misadventures of three American students – wealthy art students studying in Rome – as they are lured to Slovakia, checked into the titular boarding, and trapped in the pay-to-play abattoir of the first flick. Despite the fact that Roth's changed the gender of his main characters (and made them just slightly less stereotypically the "ugly Americans"), the plot is remarkably similar. We've got two close friends and the outsider third traveler: hotties Beth and Whitney and awkward pity-friend Lorna, played with Dawn "Wiener Dog" Warner gusto by the fabulous Heather Matarazzo. Like the first film, none too subtle hints of homosexuality linger about one of the protagonists. They are even dispatched in the same order as their male counterparts. (I don't think it'll surprise anybody to find out that poor, not-hot Wiener Dog gets it first – being trussed up naked in Roth's most obvious homage to Blood Sucking Freaks and then being bled dry in a literal bloodbath for a client identified as "Mrs. Bathory.") The major change is that Roth has wisely twined this narrative with a parallel story detailing the journey of two clients – Todd and Stuart – as they go from their comfortable upper class yuppie existences to become torturers in the Elite Hunt Clubs slaughterhouse.

In the characters of Todd and Stuart, Roth's finally targeted a rhetorical villain worthy of his nightmare: free market capitalism run amok. This theme hid on the edges of his first film, unacknowledged by a director trying to cash in one an easy generic "Americans are dummies" vibe. While he tried hard to make his backpackers the morally and intellectually bankrupt ones, he was creating a vision of Europe where everything, including people-flesh, was available for a few Euros. And yet that system, the debasing of everything to the level of commodity, seemed to escape his notice. H2 gets the bigger picture and makes it the picture. Roth's second Hostel flick is one of the most effective satires of capitalist ideology I've seen. The flicks most chilling moment comes not in gory torture chambers beneath the post-Soviet brutalist factory in Slovakia, but during a brilliant montage in which a collection of wealthy men and women bid Ebay-style for the right to torture-kill our unwitting heroines. It's a scene made all the more chilling in relation to the recently much publicized scandal involving the ex-governor of New York and an Internet prostitution ring that offered its wealthy clients women ranked and priced for easy purchase. (In a touch Roth would, I think, appreciate, the images of women on the real site always had the prostitutes' heads removed from the picture, giving the weird sense that one was just buying a headless body.)

Roth's new found satiric sharpness is welcome, but it doesn't overcome the biggest problem with Hostel: Part II: we've seen it all before. Roth's best stuff is the new subplot involving the clients – and this film is at is best when showing the bizarre world of the clients and club owners – but he still spends most of his time with the fairly uninteresting and cookie-cutterish victims. Roth doesn't have any sympathy for the victims in his flick. He's made them a bit brighter, a bit less annoying, but they are still there mainly to end up in the torture chair and no amount of characterization tweaking hides that. Given Roth's bent towards the torturers, he'd be better off just making that his focus. The time he spends basically re-shooting his first flick, but with chicks where the dudes used to be, feels wasted.

Hostel: Part II is a mixed bag. Roth finds a framework that really makes the whole concept transcend its original torture porn premise. Unfortunately, it suffers from the fact that we've already become inoculated to his brand of shocks. In a way, the Hostel franchise has fallen victim to its own success.

Stuff: Happy birthday, you little Lego blocks.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Lego! It sure as shootin' is!

To commemorate, here's the worst idea in Lego film adaptations ever: Lego Hostel.

Um, enjoy. Or something.

Movies: Apparently it's the "porn" part of "torture porn" that makes it acceptable to the MPAA.

As a general rule, I try to avoid bringing up politics in this blog. We're talking about blood and gore and cannibals and the like and I guess I just don't see why I should drag down the level of conversation to the gutter of politics. Sure, in a general way, I touch on issues when they pop up, for better or (more usually) worse, in the films and books I review. But mostly I reckon you didn't come here for my views on politics – after all, I'm just some dude who blathers on about horror stuff, what the hell are my qualifications to tell you what to think about politics?

Besides, there are few pits of rabid prejudice, poisonous spite, and crippling ignorance deeper than the political-blogosphere.

I say this all as a preemptive apology for linking you to a political blog in this entry. Today's story is important enough, I think, to merit the act; but that doesn't make doing it any less unsavory.

Think Progress, a liberal issues blog, posted an interesting story recently on a MPAA decision regarding the one-sheet for a recent documentary on the death of an Afghan taxi driver identified only as "Dilwar." According to the documentary makers, Dilwar was captured by US forces in Afghanistan and, thought he had no ties to terrorist groups or activities, was tortured to death by interrogators at the US prison at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan.

The poster for the film (shown above) features a doctored image of two soldiers leading away a hooded man in handcuffs. The image contains pieces from two different journalistic photos.

Variety reports that the MPAA declared that the poster was unsuitable and that the documentary makers would have their rating revoked if they used the poster in their advertising. The MPAA objected to the image of the hood.

The point is this: this poster, with its allusion to the actual practices of torture currently condoned by the government of the United States, is considerably more restrained, tasteful, and socially significant than more violent torture-themed posters approved for horror flicks like Hostel and Saw. The one-sheet for the latest flick in the Saw franchise features a woman strapped into a torture device and wearing a hood made of red fabric and a boar's-head mask.

What's the lesson? If your film features torture, you'd best make sure it is gratuitous and, if possible, pointless. There's nothing less acceptable in film then the ugly truth.

Movies: God willin' and the creek don't rise.

Wolf Creek, the much praised Oz import horror flick, had some serious hype to live up to. I did not catch the movie when it was in theaters, but I heard nothing but raves for the picture. That said, I was always a little hesitant to pick it up. The flick is often compared to both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hostel. This is a blessing and a curse, as far as I'm concerned. I'm a huge fan of the former, but comparisons to the latter flick almost always put a damper on my desire to check out a film. Now that I've finally given in and watched the film, I feel that Wolf Creek, while it did not live up to the hype, is still an excellent horror flick.

The plot is not particularly original. At this point, any horror film plot that hinges on a car breakdown stranding our protagonists in a bad place cannot truly said to be original. In this case, our "bad place" is played by Wolf Creek Park, a particularly isolated chunk of rural Australia that is home to a 1) a large meteor crater and 2) a psycho that is equal parts Steve Irwin and Ed Gein. A group of twenty-somethings hit the park while on holiday. After some essentially useless characterization, they find their car has crapped out and, instead of immediately assuming that this is the start of a particularly brutal horror flick and running for the hills, they accept the aid of Mick, a friendly, scene-stealing outback dweller who brings to mind the works of A.B. Banjo Peterson or Paul Hogan, depending whether you like your Aussie stereotypes classic formula or Hollywood-ized. Fortunately for horror fans, Mick turns out to be one genuinely sick puppy and, instead of fixing up the stranded tourists' ride and sending them on their way, he proceeds to heap gory outrages upon them.

In many ways, the comparisons mentioned above do a disservice to the film. While the film lacks the surreal horror that makes TCM one of those classics you can visit again and again, the tension in WC is in some ways richer for breaking the slasher stereotype (created in large part by TCM) and focusing the on the genuine conflict between the victims and their attacker. (Well, two of them anyway – but more on that later.) And the Hostel comparison is superficial at best. Both films involve vacationing youths in the clutches of sick torturers, but the tension in Wolf Creek is a product of dramatic narrative devices rather than a result of a sort of endurance test in which the only question is how much gore will an audience sit through. Certainly there is gore in Wolf Creek, but it isn't the point of the film. Instead, the real draw is the cat and mouse game played-out between the killer and the victims.

I also think that writer/director Greg McLean is more visually talented and clever than either Hopper or Roth. Hopper nailed the perfect look for the first TCM; but that sun-drenched, faded masterpiece seems to have been his only significant aesthetic statement. McLean gives the viewer lush, lavish images. He uses the rural Australian landscape to wonderful effect, but is also adept at giving use the meticulous squalor that, ever since Se7en, is contemporary horror's visual shorthand for "the guy who lives here is crazy." Apparently becoming homicidal also triggers a hording impulse and diminishes the drive to keep your home tidy: "Maybe I should dust off my collection of headless mannequins. Naw. Think I'll just go find someone to kill instead." In the special features, McLean mentions that he was a painter before becoming a filmmaker. One look at one of his wonderful panoramic shots of the outback and you can see the painterly influence. Roth has a similar keen sense of textures and detail. Think about how powerfully dread-inspiring the empty torture chambers were in Hostel. One imagines Roth carefully placing each patch of dried blood to achieve maximum effect. But, Roth's skill is limited by his own shallow imagination. His visual borrowings are little more than in-jokes for other cinephiles. Roth's allusions to Pulp Fiction and Blood Sucking Freaks are Easter eggs for film fans, but they don't particularly build meaning into his works. McLean, on the other hand, borrows from famed cinematic representations of Australia – most notably Walkabout, Mad Max, and Crocodile Dundee - in an effort to make a statement about stereotypes and clichés. McLean's killer isn't a product of the outback or Aussie class conflict so much as he is a nightmare stitched together from patches of a celluloid dream of Australian masculinity. This isn't a somewhat sterile trivia game; it is constitutes the central the DNA of the film.

The film does suffer from two major flaws. First, the pacing is off. The film runs a full 40 minutes or so before we get to the point. We follow our three vacationers through generic looking parties and watch them goof-off as they drive through endless stretches of rural highway. If the characters were more engaging, this wouldn't be such a problem, but there's really very little to hold the viewer's attention for this long and tedious stretch. Instead we get understated, realistic performances that, instead of drawing you into the world of the characters, makes the viewer feel like they've come across somebody's home videos. The second major flaw comes in the film's use, or lack thereof, of the male victim. It is always nice to see women taking active roles as something other than helpless victims in horror flicks, but this film simply forgets that we were introduced to three victims. As soon as the scares start coming, we leave the boy behind, giving him a single, short scene (which reveals nothing of what's happened to him) until, after nearly a half hour of solid tension and action, we jump to The Forgotten Man and wrap his story up in 5 quick minutes. This oversight is even stranger given that much of the early characterization of Mick is developed by playing this rough, unbalanced outback type against the urbanized, "new" Australian man. We get set up for a conflict between two models of Australian masculinity only to see the whole theme dropped.

Of these two faults, only the first is a serious one. It's the sort of imbalance one might expect, and therefore forgive in a first feature. But this drag in the beginning almost had me reaching for the fast forward button. Wolf Creek is very good, and thought flawed, it marks the intro of a potentially great horror director. Like High Tension, another breakthrough flick which was flawed but introduced the horror world to a serious newcomer, the film is worth seeing both on its own merits and as the beginning, I hope, of an long career in fright flicks. Using my recently revamped Members of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors Rating System, I'm giving this movie a Ryan P. McCue in recognition of everything it gets right, and in anticipation of good things still to come.