Movies: "The Most Successful Horror Movie Series."

According to Reuters, this year at the San Diego Nerd Prom, Guinness World Records will officially bestow the title "Most Successful Horror Movie Series" onto the Saw franchise.

Admittedly, by "success" Guinness is talking strictly in financial terms. Still, the numbers are impressive. Adjusting dollars for purposes of comparison, we get the following worldwide box office revenues:

Halloween (10 films, including the two Zombie directed remakes) = $366,893,444
Friday the 13th (12 films, including the 2009 remake) = $465,239,523
Nightmare on Elm Street (9 films, including 2010 remake) = $446,590,447
Saw (6 films) = $738,465,450

I don't have a lot of new analysis on this, so I'll just do a quick re-cap of a point I made previously regarding the series. I think the overwhelming, and to many bloggers completely baffling, success of the Saw franchise is mainly a generational thing. Bloggers, by and larger, represent an older generation: the post-boomers, Gen X, whatever you wish to call it. There's is a tiny generation. They were dwarfed by the boomers and now they are vastly outnumbered by the rising generation after them (which is, so far, the largest generation America has ever seen). When we talk about the horror icons that are precious to horror fans from the Slasher Era, we're talking about characters beloved by one of the smallest cohorts of horror filmgoers ever to buy movie tickets. That these same characters dominate criticism on the blogosphere gives them an air of importance and relevance that, in reality, is simply a byproduct of the fact that most bloggers are self-selected representatives of that same tiny cohort. In fact, outside of the clique of '80s horror nostalgists, I suspect these characters just aren't that important to most folks. By contrast, assume that every generation has some minor portion of folks who become horror fans and that this proportion to the larger generation is roughly stable, then you've got a truly massive cohort of horror fans who want their own icons, their own stories. And perhaps that's the real crime of the wealth of remakes and reboots: It robs one generation of its own chance to be a part of a story, instead holding them hostage to the tired, reheated stories of a previous generation.

Movies: Fresh blood for an old saw.

The only franchise to emerge from the overhyped and still ill-understood "torture porn" moment at the opening half of the decade, Saw opened its sixth installment this weekend. And, as we have for the five pervious installments, trusty horror-wingman Dave and I made or way to Court Street for the ritual.

At this point, I'm not sure I look forward to the release of a new Saw flick. My motivations for going are somewhat murky, even to me. Dave and I both admit that there's a sense of challenge, as if to quit going before the filmmakers quit making them would be some sort of admission of defeat. Though we both understand that this is pretty absurd. Along side that "don't let them win" impulse, I do feel genuine affection for the series. But, honestly, it's kind of like the purposefully irregular visits one makes to the friend that used to be cool way back when but has long since turned into an embarrassment. You can't pretend that you've got no feelings for the schmuck, but you kind of dread the encounter. In that vein, I very much enjoyed the first couple of Saw flicks and, even after the quality of the films started to bottom out, I still found great joy in the Saw ritual of getting drinks, hanging with the Courtesans (who, in contrast to my increasing resignation, are the last practitioners of that energetic school of New York media criticism whose final great gasp was the Astor Place Riot), and discussing death traps over burgers later. That said, I'd be first to admit that, without that ritual framework, the movies since the third or fourth installment wouldn't have been worth seeing. (I assume this was part of the charm of the original slashers - though the fact that the latter flicks still have their fans who defend them on the grounds that they're quality works both confuses me and makes me wonder if we're still talking about the same phenomenon.)

So, you can imagine the shock last night when I walked out a Saw flick pleasantly surprised. Though I know this is weak praise for those who dismiss the series outright, Saw VI is the best installment in the series since the second flick back in '05.

The filmmakers announce their intention to give the increasingly sluggish series a shot in the arm with their opening trap (the pre-title sequence trap scene that is to Saw what the intro mini-adventure is to the Bond series): a savage and minimalist zero-sum game in which two crooked loan officers must compete to see who will trim off the most flesh from themselves before a timer runs down. In this half minute scene, we get a taste of everything the newest crew is bringing to the table. Gone is Jigsaw's tedious moralizing, replaced by a sort of dark avenging "you hurt people, now it is your time to hurt" motivation. He sinks into the background and, instead, we watch as the two players get more and more desperate and violent. This scene plays so hard and so fast (nearly real-time) and so brutal that it provoked appreciative golf claps from the notoriously finicky Courtesans.

For this sixth outing, the filmmakers work hard to re-ground the series in its primary dramatic focus - the fate of the people trapped in seemingly impossible dilemmas - and ruthlessly undertake the work of clearing away three film's worth of distracting and hopelessly tangled backstory. The filmmakers are extremely successful at the first task: Director Kevin Greutert and screenwriters Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton deliver the one of the leanest and most focused Saw films of the franchise. The business of the pulling the franchise out the the continuity k-hole it's been tumbling down since Saw III remains, when the credits role, an unfinished task; but given the scope of repairs that are called for, the progress they make in simplifying the baroque mythology of the Saw universe is praiseworthy.

As with most Saw flicks since the second film, Saw VI contains two related plots lines: one which focuses on an extended trap sequence and another which gets all ouroboros with the franchise's overly-elaborate continuity. Saw flicks are generally better when the former is given more screentime than the latter. Happily, VI has got the ratio right.

The majority of the flick focuses on the staff of the appeals review office of the Umbrella Health Insurance, the office responsible for scraping off desperate sick folks whose infirmities threaten the bottom line of Umbrella. The ten-person staff, from the sad sack janitor to the hungry khaki-clad strivers in the cubical pens, ends up in a series of traps, their fates decided by their sleazy "it's just business" salaryman boss, William. This plotline somewhat resembles the trial series that forms half of Saw III, though this plays considerably harsher. In III, the player - Jeff - had to repeatedly decide if he could forgive the people in the traps (he blamed them all for a miscarriage of justice involving the death of his son). If he could, he could free them and move on. In VI, William's put a grimmer position: His co-workers are stuck in a series of traps built so that William must repeatedly chose which people will live and which will die.

The secondary plot involves Hoffman, Jigsaw's surviving disciple, and Jigsaw's wife, Jill, carrying out what they believe will be the last Jigsaw game. Hoffman also takes on the task of eliminating anybody who can link him to the Jigsaw murders, a bloody process that goes a long way towards thinning out the extensive cast of secondary characters and the loose ends they come with. All the while, Hoffman and Jill eye each other warily, each certain that the other is going to try a double cross. Too often the film drags in these parts - most notably during an extended imagined discussion between Jill and her deceased serial killing hubby - but the work needs to be done given the amount of unnecessary baggage the filmmakers need to jettison. By the end of the flick, the filmmakers have managed to rework Jigsaw's character (yet again) into a more familiar and flexible vigilante type. The Amanda relationship is redeemed, salvaging a truly unique character dynamic that the makers of Saw III squandered. Finally, Hoffman is recast as a more direct, less philosophical sadist - sparing us, hopefully, from future lectures about the pedagogical value of traps. The Saw world is still a bit shaggy, but this pulls the franchise back from the self-reflexive circularity that was becoming liability. As in Saw V, I still can't imagine a first-time watcher understanding any of this secondary plot; but, unlike V, I can imagine a viewer still enjoying the film despite this material.

Visually, this isn't the most attractive Saw flick. I suspect that the strict budgets that have made the franchise so profitable are starting to take their toll on the films themselves. Many of the sets and traps look messy rather lavishly squalid. The lighting is no longer as crisp and the colors are too often overwhleming or washed out. The film is competent, but not stylish. In contrast, the editing has improved. The seasickness inducing editing that was a hallmark of the series has calmed somewhat into a still jittery, but more effective style. Most of the actors turn in adequate performances, with Peter Outerbridge (William) and Shawnee Smith (Amanda). In fact, Outerbridge turns in what might be the first truly genuinely effecting moment of the franchise. When Outbridge's William locks eyes with one of the people he has doomed, the Saw series finally hints at what the real emotional cost of tough moral decisions might be. Even the normally painfully-wooden Costas Mandylor finds a groove. By making his character more brutish, it actually makes Mandylor's inert persona into an asset.

I don't know if Saw VI will turn out to be an outlier or if it reveals that the franchise is going in a new, more vibrant direction. Either way, it is a welcome addition to the series.

Movies: I want to play a game, Part 3 - Don't everybody all volunteer at once.

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Movies: I want to play a game, Part 2 – Hate the game, not the player.

To boil down everything we discussed in the previous post to its most essential point: If you were a victim in a Saw movie, the only salient survival factor that could be known, and therefore acted on, would be the number of players in your particular game. There are at least two other potential factors that could determine whether you survive or not, but they are unknowable prior to your death or escape and there's crap-all you can do about them. You're better off assuming that they aren't in play.

Once we've established the focus of our thought experiment on the number of players, we can divide the traps into two groups: 1) single- and two-player games and 2) games with three or more players.

At this point, the skeptical reader might well ask, "CRwM, why arbitrarily divide them into these two groups?"

Fair question. The reason I divided them into these two groups is that, after working through all this, I found that single- and two-player games essentially have the same strategy. Once you go above two players, though, there's a host of new issues that you have to take into account. However, because we haven't walked through the thought experiment together, that what I think is a natural division looks arbitrary from this point in the journey. Which is to say, lighten up Francis.

On to the survival strategy for single- and two-player games.

Let's get single player games out of the way because they're the simplest and least interesting.

A truly single player game is one in which only a sole person in the trap can affect the outcome of the game with their choices. The player could be the only person in the trap - examples of this include the web of razor wire web and the flammable slime traps from the first film and the fly-trap death mask from the second film – or they could be the sole decider in a trap that involves others – examples: Amanda's test, Jeff's various trials in Saw III, the hair-puller from Saw IV.

The strategy for a single player game is simple. Always play. You don't, you die. Arguably, there are reasons that somebody might choose to die. Many of the traps are disfiguring or involve profound psychological trauma. Though it never really happens in the flick, it isn't hard to imagine a game player deciding that the cost of escaping just isn't worth it. But, for the sake of this thought experiment, we decided to assume that every player wants live regardless of the costs.

So, if you're in a one-player Saw trap, assume it is well built, assume it is a valid game, choose to play along, and you will have done everything you could to live.

Told you it was simple.

Two-player games are a little more interesting. First, they rarely happen in Saw. There's only been two of them. Second, each of the games was a unique game type that demanded different strategies. Third, the characters in the first two-player game failed because they understood the form of the game they were playing but couldn't bring themselves to play, but the characters in the second game misunderstood the game and one of them still survived.

In the jargon, Jigsaw's two player games are either zero sum games or deadlock games. Because the term deadlock game is somewhat obscure and the term zero sum game has a common usage that doesn't fully jibe with the meaning of the term in game theory, we'll get some quick definitions out of the way.

In a zero sum game, the sum of wins (+1) and losses (-1) always come out to zero. If somebody wins, somebody else lost. In Sawian terms, it means that there are two players in a trap and only one of them can get out alive.

Jigsaw doesn't make many traps that are zero sum games. For all the bizarre radical individualism in his personal religion, Jigsaw's big on teaching lessons about interdependence and teamwork. However, he does occasionally build a zero sum game trap. Most notably, the bathroom trap that anchors the entire first film is a zero sum game. Dr. Lawrence and Adam get locked in the world's filthiest bathroom. The good doctor can only get out if he kills Adam. Failure to kill Adam means not only will he be screwed, but his family gets it as well. Adam is expected to saw his own foot off and escape, leaving the doc and his family high and dry. Basically, only one of them can win. It's built into the game.

In the film, both Adam and the doc bite it. They fully get that they are playing a zero sum game and are ultimately unable to play on those terms. The opt not to play – instead they try to work their way out of their predicament – and both end up dying.

Sadly, the only way to survive a zero sum game is to play before you get played. If, as we agreed to assume for this discussion, survival is your ultimate goal, then no matter what the other player chooses, you must choose to play.

The other type of two-player trap is the deadlock game. To explain a deadlock game we need to touch on dominant and dominated strategies. In simplest terms, a dominant strategy benefits you no matter what the other player chooses to do and a dominated strategy screws you no matter what the other player chooses to do. Not every game includes dominant and dominated strategies; but when they do, always play the dominant strategy and never play the dominated strategy. In a deadlock game, the dominant strategy also leads to the most mutually beneficial outcome. It's one of those happy cases where everybody following rational self-interest actually leads to the best result.

The best example of a deadlock game in the Saw franchise is the mausoleum trap at the beginning of Saw IV. This over elaborate trap works thusly: Player 1 and Player 2 a both connected by a neck shackle to chains that lead to an automated winding drum in the middle of the floor. The game begins when one of the players's movements trigger the winding action. The winding action pulls the two men closer together. Eventually, it will strangle them both. The key to player 2's neck shackle is connected to the back of player 1's collar. Once player 2 is free, he can get retrieve a key for player 1's collar. Player 1 has his eyes sewn shut and cannot see. Player 2 has his mouth sewn shut and cannot effectively communicate with player 1. Various stabby and slicey weapons are shattered about. This is a deadlock game. Both players can win if they both play the game correctly. There's no need for either one to die. In fact, doing the rationally self-interested thing means they both escape.

But we don't always do the rational and self-interested thing. In this case, the problem is that one of the players literally cannot see what the rationally self-interested action would be. Unable to communicate, player 2 can't explain to the blind player 1 what is going on. Assuming he is under attack by the trap maker, player 1 starts lashing out with stabby things left about the field o' play. Player 2 is eventually forced to fight and kill player 1. He frees himself and escapes.

There are two neat survival tip hidden in that mess. To really be a player in a game, you need to be able to make a genuine choice to play or not play. If, for some reason, you can't understand what it means to opt in or out, then you aren't really choosing to do either and you don't fit our definition of a player. That sounds bad, but it doesn't need to be. Think in terms of the mausoleum trap. If player 1 had simply not acted in any way, player 2 could have easily freed them both. What's the take home: Don't act like a player if you're not a player.

One of the most interesting things about the mausoleum trap is that it's a deadlock game that, if one of the players does not choose the dominant strategy, becomes a zero sum game. This curious shift in the mausoleum game is important; it provides us with the key (fittingly enough) to surviving games with three or more players. But, that's for the next entry. Let's recap.

ANTSS READER! You've just found yourself in a Jigsaw trap with one other person! What do you do!?!?!

First, determine the number of players in the game. You may need to decide that, for some reason or another, you are not actually a player in the game, but just another trapped person. That's cool, but act like what you are or you'll fuck everybody up.

Second, the players need to determine the actual rules of the game. If you can't complete this step, go back to step 1: Somebody thinks they're a player, but they aren't.

Third, no matter what your partner chooses, always, always, always choose to play.

Movies: I want to play a game, Part 1 – Think like a victim.

There was, for a brief time, a horror blog meme in which people waxed bloggy on the horror films victim that you would save if you could. (Mine's the first victim, the hippy chick, in Jaws, but that's beside the point.) While I never officially participated in this ring o' posts, it did get me thinking about a curious viewing habit of mine: I never really ponder saving a victim in a horror flick. Instead, I find myself wondering if, in their place, I could find a way to escape their fate. For example, I'll imagine that I'm one five kids trapped in the posh country house with Jason lurking outside. What would I do? I think the answer, for the curious, is to split up. Despite the logic of a million horror movies saying otherwise, splitting up is the best strategy. Each person separates and books it in as straight a line as possible in different directions. The different directions thing is key. Splitting up to search an old farmhouse, for example, isn't really splitting up. Splitting up makes distance and time work in your favor. For every victim Jason managed to claim, it becomes increasingly unlikely that he can claim another victim as the distances between potential victims increase and Jason's knowledge of potential victims' locations decreases. Continue running until you reach an Air Force base with access to nuclear weapons.

I first noticed this habit of mine watching Two Thousand Maniacs, Herschell Gordon Lewis's low-fi splat Southern revanchist fantasy. In that flick, one of the victims is nailed into a relatively small wooden barrel. Dozens of long nails are then hammered into the sides of the barrel, making it a sort of economy-class iron maiden. Then the barrel is rolled down a hill. The victim, presumably, bounces around inside, being pulped by repeated impact with the nails. After seeing that flick, I got obsessed with question of whether or not one could survive that death trap. I eventually came to the conclusion that, if you agreed that that painful mutilation was better than death, then you should shove your feet and hands against one side of the barrel and prop your back hard against the other side. This will, unfortunately, cause massive damage to your hands, feet, and back. But, if you could hold that pose for just a minute or two – which, granted, is no small thing – then you could prevent yourself from being bounced around, which is where the real damage of the whole barrel roll thing tips irrevocably into fatality. Sadly, the whole thing's academic as the first thing the ghost rednecks do when the barrel stops is look inside to see their handiwork; but still, you'd have given yourself a few more painful moments of suffering existence and the chance to try to think your way through another deathtrap. For what that's worth.

As it is Halloween, it's time to roll out yet another installment of the critically reviled, yet perennially popular long-running Saw franchise. This got me thinking: If the structure of each kill in the Saw flicks is, essentially, a game in the truest game theory sense of the term. Therefore applying a little bit of game theory logic to the traps of Saw should allow us to generate a few survival strategies for Jigsaw victims. What does game theory tell us about Jigsaw's traps.

Reader beware: I'm no expert on the subject of game theory, so this series is something more along the lines of a thought experiment informed by limited exposure to game theory. We're just thinking aloud here. Still, I think the results are interesting.

First, let's define some terms. We'll keep it simple. Games are discrete events that have a set number of players, a defined number of strategies (in Jigsaw traps, these are always "play along" or "don't play along"), and a set number of outcomes. NB: Not all game theories games meet this criteria, so you can already see were abusing the concept. This is why I've never been awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics.

All this sounds obvious, but it is important. Within the Saw franchise there characters who start off in a trap alone only to realize that they are, in fact, part of a bigger game. For our purposes, we'll say that every time you change any of the three criteria of a game, you're in a new game. If you are wandering through a trap maze and you suddenly find yourself with a group of people all in the same fix, consider yourself in a new game.

The idea that each trap is a discrete event is sometimes very easy to figure out: Often a Jigsaw trap involves a single person making a single yes/no choice. But more complex games confuse the issue. In Saw II and Saw V both featured characters working their way through a trapped filled environments. Is each trap a separate game or is the game over when the players are either all dead or have exited the environment? This is wrapped up, curiously enough, in a later issue: the number of players. We'll discuss it in more detail later, but for now let's agree that in games with one or two player games, each trap is a new game. In games featuring three or more players, the entire time spent in the trapped environment is a single game.

Every game needs players. Players are defined in our little thinkie thought post here as any person within a Jigsaw trap that can affect the results of the game by making a choice of whether or not to play the game according to Jigsaw's rules. Again, this sound obvious, but it is an important distinction. Throughout the franchise, we meet characters trapped in Jigsaw games that are not actually players. In the first film, Amanda (not yet a Jigsaw cultist) must decide whether or not to kill a man for the key trapped inside him. If she does not kill the man, a bear-trap like device on her head will spring into action and rip her head apart. There are two people in this trap, but Amanda is the only player as only she can affect the outcome of the game with her choice.

Number of outcomes is tricky, mostly because some strategies lead to certain outcomes, but others only might lead to specific outcomes. Namely, your dead meat if you don't play along, but playing along does not ensure that you're going to survive. Case in point, the man in the web of razor wire web in the first film (seen in subsequent flashbacks): Though he tries to play Jigsaw's game, his body gives out. Furthermore, living through the trap might not be a given victim's best-case scenario. In actual game theory, this would not be incidental. In some Jigsaw traps, part of the game's logic involves the victim pondering whether or not living mutilated or implicated in a crime or whatever is worth playing the game. For the purposes of making the conceptualizing Jigsaw's traps as games as easy as possible, we'll consider just two outcomes: Players either live or die, and living is always better than dying.

For all the gonzo Rube Goldbergian inventiveness of Jigsaw's traps (and we'll consider traps designed by any member of his cult to be a Jigsaw trap), there are only three variables that actually make any difference to a victim's survival.

1. Trap rigor: Is the trap well made? In his early period, Jigsaw made a few traps that a person might survive simply on the basis of blunder. Such a fuck-up appears in the fourth film. This is an unlikely out, but it is there.
2. Game validity: Is there really an out? Like ideological and religious leaders everywhere, the second Jigsaw starts to fade, his followers start to screw-up his teachings. Specifically, Amanda and Hoffman both construct traps that don't actually have escape routes. If this is the case, you're screwed no matter what.
3. Number of players: How many people can affect the outcome of the game? Remember that we're counting only those people who can alter the course of a game by choosing to play along or not as players.

That's it. At rock-bottom, whether you've got a bear trap on your head or you're on the bottom of a Jacuzzi full of puréed rotting pig corpses, those are the only three variables that matter. (There's a single exception to this – we'll get to that later.) You'll note that, from the perspective of a victim within a Jigsaw trap, you can only be conscious of the last one. If factors 1 and 2 are in play, there's no way you could know it and, therefore, no way you could reasonably factor it into any strategic response. Maybe you'll get lucky and the trap has an unforeseen out that you'll stumble across (this happens twice in the series: in Saw 4 and Saw 5) or maybe you're screwed no matter what you do (this happens at least twice in the series: S3 and S5 - curiously, the death trap in S5 also happens to be the trap that lacks vigor, so it was built to strictly kill, but had an unforeseen out): Either way, you cannot be sure and your better off acting as if you are in a rigorous trap that's a valid game.

This means that you focus on the remaining factor: How many players?

From a perspective of survival strategies, all of Jigsaw's traps can be organized into two categories, each of which demands a separate approach.

1. One and two player games.
2. Three or more player games.

In the next post, we'll discuss how you'd survive one and two player games.

Stuff: "Viva la femme" or "Rob Zombie hates you right back; but, unlike you, he gets to talk his smack in the Times."

For the first time ever, more women buy tickets to horror flicks than men. This interesting detail is somewhat buried in an otherwise unremarkable piece in the NY Times.

The Grey Dame of Journalism has posted a piece on the state of the fright flick. The article checks in with Jennifer's Body writer Diablo Cody, her co-conspirator Karyn Kusama (that somebody would think following up Girlfight with a scare pic starring Megan Fox is a positive career move says something about the mainstreaming of horror, but I don't know what), and Halloween exhumer Rob Zombie.

It starts off with the popular "why should chicks dig horror question" which is really only interesting in light of new data that suggests women are now buying more horror tickets than men.

Long before the first big-screen vivisection of a female breast, the novelist H. P. Lovecraft wrote that horror was "supposed to be against the world, against life, against civilization." But the delight that the genre’s filmmakers, especially those behind the Saw franchise and its torture porn kin, take in depicting a steady stream of starlets being strung up, nailed down or splayed open, makes it clear that modern horror is against some more than others.

And yet recent box office receipts show that women have an even bigger appetite for these films than men. Theories straining to address this particular head scratcher have their work cut out for them: Are female fans of "Saw" ironists? Masochists? Or just dying to get closer to their dates?

The article evokes the perennially popular Clover theory of the "final girl," supported by a Cody anecdote:

"When I watched movies like 'The Goonies' and 'E.T.,' it was boys having adventures," she said. "When I watched 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' it was Nancy beating" up Freddy. "It was that simple."

By far the best quote comes from Rob Zombie, who has decided to give a great and glorious middle finger to the hordes of bloggers who felt his reimginamakethingy of Halloween II didn't measure up to the original (a charge that is somewhat like accusing somebody of not being developmental challenged enough to be in the special Olympics).

"The '80s are the decade that ruined everything for everybody," he said. "The soul went away, and it became gore for the sake of gore, and kids were cheering at killings and yelling and screaming. It became a roller coaster ride. And of course once something becomes a roller coaster, all you can do is build a bigger, more extreme roller coaster. That’s where I think horror movies really got perverted."

I'm actually sympathetic to the views expressed by C, K, and Z in the piece, though I find this particular line a bit off-putting:

For Ms. Cody this was great news, an opportunity to re-educate a jaded audience about what a horror film is.

The incessant impulse of horror fandom to school the ignorant masses around them is, I think, perhaps the worst aspect of being a horror fan. The ceaseless rants of some fans are not only monotonous, but inevitably tinged with a sort of nostalgic myopia. It's a shame to see to such a statement in an otherwise inoffensive article.

That line aside, I think the article points to a interesting, if unasked, question about the changing nature of horror and its fandom. If women are, for the first time, eclipsing men in horror fandom, is there something new and distinctly "feminine" about modern horror? And if so, does the backlash against modern horror reflect some sort of old boys versus new girls conflict?

[UPDATE: Reader Madelon wisely points out that the claim that women are buying more tickets than men should, given the article's lack of hard data, be looked at with some skepticism. Even if it is true, what would it mean? Are women buying more tickets or are men buying fewer? Are the audience numbers the same, but the cost of tickets being distributed differently?

We do have some anecdotal evidence of the shift. The LA Times reports that Final Destination's performance edge over Halloween II had a gender angle:

Fifty-three percent of theaters played "Final Destination" in 3-D, helping its overall take since 3-D theaters typically charge $2 to $3 more for tickets. That can't explain its entire $10.9-million advantage over "Halloween," however. Tracking had indicated young women were more interested in "Destination," while young guys preferred "Halloween," and it seemed girls came out in bigger numbers and were able to persuade their male friends to join them.

EW gives us a slew of data going back to 2002's remake of The Ring:

Today, however, the genre's biggest constituency of die-hard fans is women. Name any recent horror hit and odds are that female moviegoers bought more tickets than men. And we're not just talking about psychological spookfests like 2002's The Ring (60 percent female), 2004's The Grudge (65 percent female), and 2005's The Exorcism of Emily Rose (51 percent female). We're also talking about all the slice-and-dice remakes and sequels that Hollywood churns out.

''I don't think there was anyone who expected that women would gravitate toward a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' says Chainsawproducer Brad Fuller of the 2003 remake, which became a female-driven $81 million hit. ''For us, the issue now is that it's harder for us to get young men into the theater than women.'' And female audiences stay loyal. ''I've seen married women who are, like, 35 years old at horror movies and they're like, 'Oh, our husbands are with the kids and we all came out together,''' says Clint Culpepper, the president of Screen Gems, which is releasing a remake of the 1987 slasher film The Stepfather in October. ''Men stop seeing horror at a certain age, but women continue to go.''

Even the movies popularly known as torture porn, in which hot babes in hot pants are often subjected to medieval torture devices, apparently hold an appeal for young women. Executives preparing to unveil the video-on-demand channel FEARnet didn't expect women to have the stomach for a subgenre often considered exploitative. ''When we launched the network, we went out and did focus groups and it was the women in the room who really wanted a horror channel more than the guys did,'' says FEARnet president Diane Robina. ''I actually thought that the women would be less into the Saw films, but they were much more into them.'']
I can't help but think on the vast and bizarrely infantile reactions the horror blog-o-shpere has had towards the Twilight franchise. Not only is there a weirdly playgroundish "ewww girls" thing at play, but anti-Twilight critics seem pretty quick to appeal to gender coded insults: I'm thinking specifically here of references to "Twatlight" (which makes the woman/franchise connection about as explicit as it gets) and the constant refrain that the male leads of the franchise are homosexual (which seems to assume that all gaze is male and to show hardbodied young male flesh couldn't possibly a reflection of female desire, but must be some perversion of the correct straight male way to look at things).

The fanbase of Twilight clearly skews female. (I once asked a neighbor's kid which he'd be more embarrassed to be seen carrying through the school halls: the Bible or a copy of Twilight. He said he'd get teased less carrying the Bible.) But, data shows, so does the audience for Saw - a fact that considerably less is made of. Still, criticism of Saw occasionally follows a weirdly similar pattern. Both are criticized for their "soap opera" aspects. The tangled love stories of former and the endlessly recursive backstory of latter are both consider failings rather than strengths. People propose that interest in either franchise is symptomatic, or a byproduct of some intellectual deficiency, rather than the wholesome "fun" interest fans have in other horror franchises. Twilight fans, we're given to believe, are simply stupid young women who will "grow up" and learn to like real entertainments. Saw fans, we're told by critics who assume to be in the know, are perverse gore hounds who get sick kicks from suffering. Nothing, we can be sure, like pleasure of fans that enjoy watching the mass murder perpetrated by Freddy, Michael, Jason, and company.

Perhaps this is all coincidence. Maybe there an essential form to the Interweb rant that makes attacks on Twilight and Saw seem weirdly similar. Further, are we really in a notably period of fandom backlash? One could easily make the case that fan communities usually tend towards the artistically conservative and dismiss the new. All that's different is the ability of such fans to spread their message. The idea that we're in an unusually important period of retrenchment would then be simply an illusion of the Interweb.

Still, somebody smarter than I (and that's most of y'all out there) should look into the rise of a female-dominated horror fandom, its impact on the product, and the reaction of older fans and self-styled old school protectors of the faith. The results might come to nothing; or they might just cast an interesting on the future of the genre.

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.

Movies: I seen what I saw.

Before I start in on what promises to be a long and rambling review, I need to talk about the Kaiser Dog.

My friend Dave and I have made Saw a Halloween tradition for several years now. Around this time every year, we meet up at Pete's Waterfront Grill on Atlantic in Brooklyn and then catch Saw. I bring this up because the most amazing thing I saw all night was Pete's "Kaiser Dog": a hot dog that's wrapped in bacon and then deep-fried altogether, served with gruyere cheese, sauerkraut, and spicy mustard on black bread. It boggles the mind.

Alright. Now that I've gotten that off my chest . . . confession time.

I've got a weird confession: I don't trust horror critics who don't follow the Saw films.

Well, I mean, I guess I trust them, personally, as much as I would any random faceless stranger I knew strictly from Internet contact.

What I mean is that I don't trust their opinions about horror. I don't understand how such folks can expect to be taken seriously. I'm sure they're lovely people who are kind to children, love their country, pay taxes, drink responsibly, support local music, and help old ladies cross the street. But when it comes time to sound off about horror movies, I pretty much tune them out.

I'm going to go out on a limb and start this review with an unnecessarily confrontational and aggressively over-generalizing claim: If you haven't seen the Saw films, then you really don't care about horror films. Horror-centric critics, both pro and amateur, that opt out of the films, taking either a stand of principled ignorance or an uncritically dismissive attitude, are essentially announcing that they've intentionally removed themselves from the single most important modern horror series currently running.

Okay, that's done. Let's see if such an absurd claim can be defended.

One of the two poles around which the media-hyped non-phenomenon of "torture porn" congealed, Saw survived a tepid critical reception and divisive reactions in the horror-fan base to become the only significant long-running horror franchise created since the height of the 1980s slasher boom. As they've done every Halloween since 2004, Lionsgate has rolled out yet another installment in the series. This gives the franchise the sort of staying power reserved for slasher icons.

Financially, the Saw flicks are, by some accounting, the most profitable horror franchise of all time. The first flick made Lionsgate just over $1 billion dollars worldwide and on all formats (on an initial investment of just over $1 million). Since then, every installment of the series has debuted in as a top five box office contender, snagging between $30 to $34 million dollars on its opening weekend. Since Saw 3, there's been a slight dip in overall profits, but each installment still regularly nets about $150 million in worldwide ticket sales.

Now, admittedly, this is pretty small potatoes when compared to genuine blockbusters. The Disney-backed tween entertainment juggernaut High School Musical 3 rolled over Saw 5 without so much as breaking a sweat on it eugenically perfect lab-grown brow. But, within the confines of the genre, the franchise stands astride the field like a freakin' colossus. In all of 2008, only three genre films came close to Saw 5's opening weekend mojo: Cloverfield, The Strangers, and The Happening. Of these, only The Strangers really required horror fans do all the heavy lifting. Cloverfield and The Happening enjoyed significant crossover attention from people who don't normally bother to go check out horror flicks.

Sure, sure, sure. So it makes bank? So what?

The "what" is this: Even the weakest Saw flick can reliably depend on the fact that the vast majority of horror fans that still watch flicks in the theater will show up to see it. If you wanted to take a quick demographic snapshot of the population that actually supports horror films in theaters, who actually go to see new horror films when they come out, you could do much worse than taking stock of the audience for the Saw films.

The franchise's genre-specific critics who have avoided the series on principle and can’t speak to the pictures are – from a statistical point of view – basically irrelevant. They've made themselves so. They simply no longer share a definition of horror that includes the same material that a majority of the community does. They're like self-proclaimed experts on popular music who really only ever listen to jazz. They are, of course, free to proclaim the utter and unquestionable superiority of jazz over all other forms of popular music, but unless they can cough some knowledge of other music, then their claim is bullshit. Such critics might have a lot of spiffy stuff to say about jazz. They may be veritable libraries of jazz info. But, ultimately, their aesthetic judgments are simply untenable because they made from a position of ignorance.

Despite the tut-tutting of critics who think that the Saw franchise is propped up by a phalanx of teen movie-goers who basically show up because they've got no better option on Halloween, the numbers suggests that Saw out-performs strong horror contenders regardless of the time of release and regardless of whether or not it has got competition. Even when there's a strong October contender, such as the remake zombie flick Quarantine which appeared to challenge Saw's October dominance earlier this month, Saw rolls right over it. Quarantine actually made it on to top-ten box office list its opening weekend, making it one of about ten horror flicks to perform so well all year. Still, Saw's opening weekend just about doubled the rabies-zombie flick's entire month-long performance.

In short, the majority of the audience for horror is watching these films. And they've been doing so in astounding numbers for half a decade now. When somebody claims to be a critic of modern horror films – even if its only in the role as a hobbyist – but doesn't know these flicks, then they're making the implicit claim that they have basically been out of loop with the largest development in the field in the last twenty years.

All this isn't to say that you have to like the Saw films. In some previous posts I did about the alleged torture porn sub-genre, I made the claim that we have yet to see a truly classic "torture porn" film. This would include all five Saw flicks, in my opinion. None of them are so awesome that they'll ever rise to the level of, say, The Shining or Jaws. Twenty years from now, the entire franchise will have most likely settled into the cult status that was the reward of the slashers that came before it. That said, even a critic with an axe to grind is basically talking out his or her ass when they talk about modern horror and can't discuss contemporary horror's single largest moving target. If you make some claim to make about modern horror, unless you're specifically restricting your claim to some minor subset of current films and say as much, you are pretty much making a claim about Saw. If you don't know Saw, then you don't know what your talking about.

Anyway, that's the official policy position of ANTSS.

Doubters, of course, will say that this opinion is really just an elaborate justification for the fact that I've seen every Saw flick in the theater and I'll hiding my resentment over the fact that I'll never get that money or time back.

To those critics I say, what's the point of a self-aggrandizing delusion meant to shield one's fragile ego if you're expected to be rational about it. I've said my story and I'm sticking to it.

Now, on to the review proper:

In Saw V, the mind behind the long-running franchise face a pretty difficult issue: how do you keep the series going when 1) almost all your significant characters have died off, including your star villain, and 2) what do you do with increasingly elaborate and nonsensical backstory that the series drags behind itself like a millstone.

The makers do an admirable job of handling the first issue, but make a mess of handling the second.

To move the series forward, this is the first Saw were the primary trap-maker and killer is not the original Jigsaw. Though the original Jigsaw appears in several flashbacks, the mantle of "Jigsaw" has been passed to Detective Mark Hoffman, one of the officers introduced in Saw 3. Hoffman escapes from the slaughter-house that is the setting for the third and fourth Saw flicks – a charnel house of death traps that pretty much dispatched every significant character from the franchise – with the belief that everybody who could connect him to the Jigsaw murders is dead. Unbeknownst to Hoffman, one other investigator, the relentlessly determined Special Agent Strahm, made it out alive, if a little worse for wear.

What follows is a cat and mouse game between Strahm and Hoffman, the former closing in on the new Jigsaw while the latter hastily prepares as death trap for his pursuer.

As that plot unspools, a second plot unfolds involving a group of five prisoners – all linked by a single murderous mistake – who must negotiate a series of four death traps, each of which seems to demand the death of one of the players if the others are to survive. (For fans of the show Dexter, Dex's long suffering girlfriend Rita – sporting black hair – appears as one of the victims.)

These developments – the bifurcated plotting and the removal of the original Jigsaw – have lead to some complaints from fans of the series, but I personally didn't mind them. The Jigsaw killer has never been an icon in the way the '80s slashers were. It's his methods that are the hallmark of the series. He's got a set of best practices (the traps and ideology), a brand name (Jigsaw), and a mascot (the doll). A truly post-modern movie maniac, Jigsaw isn't a killer so much as a murder franchise. From the second film, the filmmakers have established that the original Jigsaw planned to train little Baby Jigsaws and send them out into the world. That we're now dealing with Jigsaw 2.0 is not only expected, but it is preferable to either dragging out the original killer's influence as if there was no operational limit to his ability to predict human behavior or doing what the slashers would have done and reintroducing him as a supernatural entity.

As for the second plot, the complaint is that the whole thing feels disconnected from the main mythology of the flick. Personally, I took that as an intentional move. Unlike the first Jigsaw, Hoffman is concerned primarily with screwing over Strahm and protecting himself. He's not above picking semi-random victims, building traps that can't be escaped, and generally acting in less cultish, more selfish manner than the original. If the victims in second plot seem like gory red herrings, it's because they are. There purpose there as nothing to do with their crimes and everything to do with trapping Strahm. If people were weird quasi-religious experiments for the first Jigsaw, they're essentially disposable trap fodder for the new one.

What the filmmakers handle less ably is the ever more elaborate backstory of the series. In fact, with several retconning flashbacks, this film simply adds more layers of unnecessary complexity to the tale. At this point, despite the fact that we're starting all over with a new killer, I don't think somebody could start the series with this film. There's way too much knowledge assumed on the part of the filmmakers. This is unfortunate as I don't think anybody watching these films takes the evolution of the Saw mythology half as seriously as the filmmakers do. Every film they've tweaked Jigsaw's motivation slightly – he's gone from crazed cancer patient to religious messiah figure to libertarian social philosopher to his latest incarnation: Zen death trap builder – but the results are always a wash. What could possibly make all the effort Jigsaw puts into to building his traps make sense? The constant revision of the storyline is equally un-involving. Has anybody ever praised a Saw film for its incessant twisting of character backgrounds? I'll admit that the attention paid to the evolving mythology of the series was a pleasant change from the slipshod continuity of the '80s slashers, it now threatens to devour the flicks and reduce all characterization to a series of recurrent cameos.

The production values also seem a tad lackluster in this outing. While some of the traps are classics of their type, the sets seem dull rather than sinister. Shot compositions have a flat, ready for video feel; the washes of sickly color lighting that were so important to the earliest installments are either absent or bizarrely used (as when ordinary water appears to glow neon blue). The acting is adequate for the film's needs. Though we'll never see another cast as almost comically over-qualified as the cast from the first flick, everybody here holds down what they need to do. The unfortunate exception here is Strahm, who screenwriters decided would essentially narrate all of his investigations lest we miss some crucial point. The result is wooden and annoying. To be fair, this might not be the actor's fault. Who could possibly have made such an annoying character trait work?

Within the series, Saw V is middling entry. Its strictly workman like visuals and tangled interest in a backstory that's become more of a hindrance than a boon undermine the interest in a fresh beginning promised by a new villain. Though a handful of the traps are some of the most evil contraptions ever built for the series, this alone doesn't raise the level of the flick. Regular fans of the series will find plenty to discuss, but I suspect they'll find the flick had more promise than it delivered on. People approaching the series for the first time should avoid this one. It's opaque to anybody who hasn't been following along all this time.

Stuff: Torture couture.

I visited NYC's Fashion Institute of Technology yesterday. Their museum is currently hosting a wonderful exhibit on goth fashion: Gothic: Dark Glamour. At first, I was a little hesitant to go. I was worried that I was basically going to walk into a slightly upmarket showcase for Hot Topic-grade junk, but I was honestly blown away. The exhibit's relevance as a historical overview is secured by its scope and depth, while the artistic merit of the show rests on the fact that the designs and items collected are truly beautiful and fascinating.

The show tracks the development of the gothic look back to Victorian mourning clothing – notably the fashionable widow's weeds worn by young women: a look Victorians wittily referred to as "the trap rebaited." From there, you get a flowering of "dark" looks from the 1980s, with a second boom at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century. The exhibit's focus is on high couture designers and their works, but some room is made for examples of youth streetwear and a couple of examples of the "elegant gothic Lolita" look the developed in Japan.

There's a ton to discuss about the exhibit. The show covers the role of Japanese designers in redefining the gothic with a distinctly non-Western flare (interestingly, despite the gothic's Euro origins, the show is dominated by brilliant work from American and Japanese designers), the figure of the dandy, the role of the French Revolution in the development of the gothic novel, proto-vampiric imagery in fashion discourse prior to the publication of Dracula, and so much more that is really is a must see for anybody interested in what horror tropes do once they leave the confines of literature and film.

Given the scope of the show, I'll focus on a single element – the work of Japanese designer Kei Kagami.

Let's start with a comparison.

First, a movie poster:

Second, a fashion photo:

The former is, of course, a poster for Saw. The latter is a picture of a dress designer by Kei Kagami. Kagami's first solo runway show and the premiere of Saw both occurred in 2004. Apparently, while the folks behind Saw were developing their film's look, Kagami was developing a similar look based on his training at the Bunka Fashion College of Tokyo, Central St. Martin's College of Art & Design in London, and a stint as a studio assistant for John Galliano (one of the few non-Japanese or American designers heavily represented in the goth exhibit).

Here's more Kagami.

Interesting, despite the general tendency of horror bloggers – including myself - to go to great lengths to distinguish the nakedly industrial aesthetic of works like Saw and Hostel from the more Romantic look of traditional gothic fare, Kagami firmly places his work within the gothic tradition and sees no contradiction. He has referred to his look as "neo-gothic" and, more entertainingly, spins gothic tales about himself and his work. When singer and fashion reporter Diane Pernet asked Kagami about the inspiration behind a particular line of shoe designs, the designer gave the following story, with Kagami's caps-free writing style preserved:

let me tell you the story of ' a ghost rider that took me to a cemetery in North London '. this ghost story is not scary at all but what happened was true .

let me tell you the story of ' a ghost rider that took me to a cemetery in North London '.
this ghost story is not scary at all but what happened was true .

one day i went to a biker's cafe called ' Ace Cafe' in north London .
on the way home i found a beautiful vintage bike , maybe it was one called ' Vincent black shadow '( sounds already spooky ) , so i decided to chase it. it was a fast bike , i could not really catch up with it but i kept chasing it as long as i could see it .

but when i turned at the last corner , i could not see it anymore , it just disappeared .
i stopped my bike and what i could see was only the entrance of Highgate cemetery .
so i visited this cemetery in the weekend .
there was not the Vincent black shadow there but a beautiful world in shade of Highgate.

Kagami currently operates out of Milan. He has showrooms in London, Milan, and Hiroshima.

Stuff: Where's your no-God now?

At the risk of becoming the "all torture, all the time" blog, I humbly submit a visual comparison: what fake torture looks like versus what real torture looks like.

In my previous series on so-called torture porn films, I made the case that the spectacular scenes of suffering that are the hallmark of franchises such as Saw and Hostel are not realistic. Rather they're a sort of over-the-top representation of our worst dark fantasies of what torture is. Now, through the miracle of the Interwebs, you don't have to take my word for it. You can see for yourself.

Representing the world of spectacularly fake torture will be represented by the "Angel Trap," the absurd Rube Goldbergian device that dispatches Detective Kerry (played screamingly by Dina Meyer) in Saw III. Needless to say, it is not safe for work and you may have to log-in to youtube and confirm your age before viewing.



Notice the sickly green and yellow lighting scheme, the steampunk-meets-butcher-shop complexity of the device, the dank dungeon like surroundings.

For what torture really looks like, we check into, of all places, Vanity Fair. VF columnist, contrarian gadfly, neo-con apologist, public intellectual, and crusading atheist Christopher Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded. Waterboarding is one of the approved "aggressive interrogation techniques," or, more colloquially, tortures currently being used by the United States government. VF cameramen recorded the short and unpleasant affair. By way of your first major contrast, this clip is work safe, at least in terms of gore and whatnot. However, if you do get asked about it, you'll have to explain what the heck you're watching and I doubt that will sound good to your employer. I should also explain that very loud music is blasted throughout a considerable portion of the clip. I have no idea if that's in the film or post-production.



Normal lighting, no maniacal ventriloquist's dummies handing out life lessons, no bloodshed. In fact, compared to the hyper-real violence of torture porn, it is almost mundane. Actually, it is mundane insomuch as it is not a fantasy of suffering, but the real thing.

In posting this, I don't wish to make a political statement (though I do have extremely strong feelings on the issue), just an aesthetic one. I hope this puts paid to the notion that so-called torture porn films are characterized by their lack of stylization and their narrow visual pursuit of realism.

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.