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Could critics of 'torture porn' at least watch the movies?
The current cycle of horror movies subjecting victims – usually young women – to prolonged, graphic ordeals shows no sign of letting up. But, asks Nigel Floyd, has media coverage distorted the true nature and aims of such films?
Being a specialist horror film critic has its perils. Whenever the genre enters one of its grislier phases, female friends start to question how a seemingly feminist-friendly man could enjoy and write about such apparently misogynist fare. The imminent UK releases of Roland Joffé’s ‘Captivity’ and Eli Roth’s ‘Hostel: Part II’ – part of the current cycle of so-called ‘torture porn’ – have once again touched a raw nerve.
A recent Guardian feature on the subject, by women’s editor Kira Cochrane, provoked many such comments. As in most pieces by journalists who have not seen all the films they cite and lack detailed knowledge of the horror genre’s complex genealogy, the article lumped together a number of distinct titles: the then-unseen ‘Hostel: Part II’, the lame ‘Turistas’ (aka ‘Paradise Lost’), Rob Zombie’s tawdry fan-boy trash ‘The Devil’s Rejects’ and Greg McLean’s fiercely intelligent ‘Wolf Creek’. As any discerning horror fan will know, conflating these titles is at best sloppy, at worst misleading and prejudicial. Based on an actual viewing of these films, what they purportedly have in common is far less telling than the ways in which they differ.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, writer Joss Whedon, genre-savvy creator of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, launched an online attack on the billboard campaign for ‘Captivity’. The four-panel ads used horrific, exploitative images and titles – Abduction, Confinement, Torture, Termination – to present what Whedon astutely called ‘a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman’. Yet even he condemned the film on the basis of its publicity alone. Now, I had seen the first cut of ‘Captivity’, prior to re-shoots seemingly designed to make it even more like ‘Saw’, the hit shocker that kick-started the ‘torture porn’ trend. Since a third of the footage and the ending had been re-shot, however, it seemed only fair to refrain from comment until I’d seen the finished version.
The most interesting part of Whedon’s commentary is the parallel he draws between the supposed narrative of ‘Captivity’ and the stoning to death of Iraqi teenager D’ua Khalil Aswad in a so-called ‘honour’ killing, an atrocity which several of those involved filmed on their mobile phones. Supporting his argument, ‘Six Feet Under’ writer Jill Soloway, writing on the Huffington Post website, remarked that the ‘Captivity’ billboard campaign came from ‘such a despicable place that it somehow managed to recall Abu Ghraib, the Holocaust, porn and snuff movies all at once’. Surely this is the salient point. ‘Captivity’ and ‘Hostel: Part II’ are not the spontaneous products of diseased minds; they reflect and engage with violent behaviour and contemporary fears about the ubiquity of voyeuristic digital images.
Like the bloodhounds used as the logo for the Elite Hunting torture factory in ‘Hostel: Part II’, horror filmmakers sniff the air and smell the depravity that surrounds them. There is no denying that post-‘Saw’ torture movies have tapped into something in the ether: Roth’s film echoes (and derives associative potency from) the appalling images from Abu Ghraib, but one would be hard pressed to claim that it advances our understanding of the torturer’s mindset. Nor does the reworked ‘Captivity’ say anything new about the sadistic, controlling gaze of voyeurism.
In the end, that confused and repellent film depressingly lives down to the generalist critics’ expectations. ‘Hostel: Part II’, on the other hand, while boring, does not entirely conform to their reductive template. Its most gratifying element is the way it anticipates and wrong-foots its critics, cleverly subverting their assumptions about its inevitable misogyny. Operating an equal opportunities policy for torturers and victims, Roth hits the male audience members right where it hurts. But it is only by analysing and contextualising the actual film that one can cut through the fat to the heart of the matter.
‘Captivity’ is reviewed this week. ‘Hostel: Part II’ is out next week.
User comments on this story
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- Godfrey Hamilton said...
- Once again I find myself urging committed fans of the horror genre to track down a copy of UC Berkeley Professor Carol Clover's groundbreaking book "Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film", which despite its self-consciously clever title and despite its frequent recourse to the knottily academic language beloved of critical theorists, makes the urgent point (and unlike Kira Cochrane, who simply has to come up with SOMETHING to fill column inches, Ms Clover has closely WATCHED the films, from "I Spit on Your Grave" to "Last House on the Left" and much obscure psychosexual horror in between), makes the urgent point that horror and exploitation films pitched at young male viewers, invariable feature a heroine with whom -in her humiliation, suffering and eventual hard-won emrgence as survivor/"Final Girl"- the male viewer is prepared to identify on a remarkably profound level which he would otherwise be consciously unwilling to do watching less visceral genres. Having said that, I live in Los Angeles and the "Captivity" billboards were seriously unpleasant (there was one at the top of my street), but what was interesting was that the chorus of (invariably female) complainants saw what they wanted to see: one indignant letter-writer to the Los AngelesTimes claimed she was revolted by the image of a "woman with a meathook stuck into her mouth". There was no such image; it was a rubber feeding tube, inserted into a nostril. I would argue that the forced-feeing tube with its many and various connotations, from Women's Suffrage to H Block to Abu Grahib, was more horrifically potent, but there you are- some sort of evidence that these images are so mmediate precisely because they DO tap into primal anxieties and body-horror. For a serious exploration of "the sadistic, controlling gaze of voyeurism" to which Nigel Floyd alludes, we must hark back to the timeless "Peeping Tom", and remember what the censorious and witless "critics" (many of them, like Guardian journalists, posing as, well, moral guardians) did to poor Michael Powell. They destroyed his careerr, and were it not for Scorses's blessed intervention, bloody nearly destroyed Powell himself. I'm no fan of the puerile Eli Roth, but I'd rather listen to the man who makes the movies and watch his/her output (and let's not forget "American Psycho"'s writer and director have impeccable feminist credentials, or that Rita Mae Brown wrote "Slumber Party Massacre") than read Guardian hacks (hackettes?)making their personal narratives up as they go along, and getting the facts wrong because they don't know what they're talking about and haven't got the nous to want to find out. Posted on Jul 06 2008 03:41
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- Fingal said...
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I think most of this commentary is pretty disingenuous. These films are sold with a particular promise - whatever their content, their advertising is titillating. That may be the fault of the marketing department rather than the film-makers, but it would be dishonest to deny that it is there. The barker promises something great inside the tent and the rubes turn up to see it: they may not find it, but it's not like they weren't promised it...
Also, context really matters here. These films are sleazy at least partly because they are bad. Saw is like a remake of Seven by stupid people blind to the latter film's existential horror; Hostel is just clumsy and full of ridiculous deus ex machina events; Wolf Creek, though clearly the work of a talented film maker and, in places, very tense, is uneven in tone, deeply upsetting and utterly unsatisfying.
Also, all these films have a kind of hypocrisy to them: they want to tell you how upsetting horror is, whilst revelling in it. It's like being lectured by a rather stupid frat-boy - none of the cold, intelligent contemplation of violence that you find in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Last House on the Left. Now there are two genuinely good horror movies. Posted on Dec 16 2007 23:56 - Report as inappropriate
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- Simon said...
- Watch the french film 'Irreversible', it redefines torture porn Posted on Aug 24 2007 20:44
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