2007-06-22 - 6:15 a.m.

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about the snappily titled phenomenon of ‘torture porn’ recently. Apparently, horror films are all about torture now, as opposed to good honest roller-coaster scares, and they’re also much nastier and more misogynist than they’ve ever been. According to some horrified onlookers, we’re entering some dreadful period where upon a grunting audience gleefully laps up the sickest shit that a new degeneration of movie brats hawks at the screen. This new stuff is so shocking, so vile, so inhumane, that it poses a threat to our very notion of society. Kids are watching this filth, you know. They seem to think it’s all just fun and games, but then what happens when somebody does lose an eye? After all, in 'Hostel', you actually see a girl’s eyeball pop after a nasty man presses a blow torch against it. What happened? What’s gone wrong? It’s probably something to do with George Bush and Iraq. Most things that go wrong these days are, apparently. You can spend all day watching hostages being decapitated, after all, so horror films must reflect this new depiction of media-friendly cruelty, yes?

However, according to some witless cretin called Kira Cochrane who writes for The Guardian (surprise!), horror films have suddenly taken on an anti-women agenda. It’s all about women being tortured now, y’see, which never happened in the good old days of Nosferatu and King Kong. Presenting women as celluloid victims is a disturbing new trend to which our attention must be drawn before we all regress to ape-like savages. What absolute hogwash. In an article entitled ‘For Your Entertainment’ (http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2069286,00.html) Cochrane espouses the biggest load of ill informed shite I’ve ever read in a national newspaper – and that’s including Environmentalist propaganda. Here’s a typical quote from this barrage of shrill poppycock: ‘You can currently buy a Rapist Number One action figure online for your kids, should you so wish.’ Oh, God! Oh Jesus Christ! She’s talking about a toy version of the character Quentin Tarantino plays in 'Death Proof' – The Rapist. She fails to grasp that this is a friendly jibe at the expense of the low-budget flicks that Grindhouse is parodying. Let us not dwell on the absurd notion that parents will lavish this gift on their children (encouraging them to go out raping!), and that it is only the sort of thing that nerdish men buy for themselves in Forbidden Planet. Cochrane also vomits, ‘In most of these films, both men and women end up being sliced, gored, dismembered, decapitated. In that sense they offer audiences equal-opportunity gore. But it's the violence against women that's most troubling, because it is here that sex and extreme violence collide.’ Contradict yourself much, Kira? So it’s only sexual if it happens to women? Right. Is it any wonder men like seeing women sliced up when hectoring twits like you presume to speak for the gender?

The weird thing about reading this nonsense in the caring, sharing, homo-friendly, liberal Guardian is that it’s exactly the sort of censorious guff that the right wing tabloids used in the 1980s regarding the dreaded ‘video nasties’. Back then it was the release of grimy classics like ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ and ‘Last House on the Left’ on home video that got our moral guardians all hot under the collar. Now, apparently, it’s ‘Wolf Creek’ and ‘The Devil’s Rejects’ that pose an insidious threat to our dear little ones. Women are being tortured! Pornographically! That’s, like, the worst torture of all. It’s bound to cause a generation of mallrats to develop into women-hating torturers. It’s just got to. Adults, you see, can’t make an informed decision about what films they want to watch. They can’t separate fact from fiction. We need some cunt from the Guardian to tell us what we shouldn’t be watching, if we value our collective souls that is. This stuff doesn’t happen in reality. It’s those nasty, smirking – male – film directors who are presenting women as victims and men as all powerful, priapic conquerors. Our children are now playing with rapist action figures! Oh, isn’t life just rotten? Did Emmeline Spankhurst struggle for nothing?

Unlike Kira Cockme, I’ve seen a lot of horror films. An idiot can see that they’re not remotely more violent or more degrading than they’ve ever been. There is no ‘disturbing new trend’ or whatever moronic phrase Cochrane and her fellow hand-wringers might use. Fuck me, Jack the Ripper was doing his beastly deeds – in Real Life - before cinema was even invented. Men have always done nasty things to women, and vice versa. Art reflects this. That's mostly how it works. Cochrane even admits this, ‘Of course, watching one of these films won't turn a sane, decent individual into a killer or a torturer, but you have to wonder what effect this widespread meshing of sexuality and graphic violence will have on the young men at whom they are primarily aimed.’ The same effect it’s always, had, you fuckwit: none, save for some escapist titillation that fades with the credits. Can you imagine the consequences if sex and violence were kept off screen? Just think about all the frustration that would build up in the festering minds of the sexless and cunt-struck. Keep these silly fantasies hidden, and I’m pretty sure some ‘loners’ would be tempted to act them out in real life. Maybe if old Jack had access to ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ and a VCR he wouldn’t have felt the need to stalk Whitechapel as an embodiment of fin de siècle fears. This is of no consequence to Cockedoff, though, who has hit upon what she thinks is a valid thesis and will back-peddle vigorously in order to prove it. Never mind doing the research first and then coming to a conclusion. Why bother, when there’s a moral crusade to wage? After all, children are playing with rapist action figures as we speak! She can’t even quote sources properly: ‘fitting the age-old horror archetype of the "final girl" who persists to the end - usually, it seems, to help justify the misogyny that has gone before)’ Age old? The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book ‘Men, Woman and Chainsaws’ which was published in 2004. Unlike Kira Cockring, I have read the book, and found it to be a salient account of the role female characters play in the horror genre. Clover astutely points out that rather than derogate the female protagonist, the audience is encouraged to empathise with her. We’re on Jamie Lee Curtis’s side! Fucking hell! Presumably, in Kira Cockup’s antediluvian horror film, there would be no women at all – just men slashing away at one another. That way, we wouldn’t have to worry about charges of sexism from ninnies like herself. Not that anyone was anyway.

The stupid thing is that this new batch of ‘gorno’ flicks are actually much tamer than their illustrious predecessors were. Watching garbage like ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ and ‘Hostel’ I got the sense that these guys had the gumption to realise that the 1970s were the ne plus ultra of the horror film, but just didn’t have the skill to do anything other than imitate. Hostel is full of references to other horror films, not because Eli Roth is casting a grateful wink at his elders, but because he’s a hack who can’t come up with anything good by himself. Still, mention 'Iraq' and that justifies his dull little film. Back in the 70s, horror got far more real and personal. Monsters were out and a slow burning sense of wrongness crept in, like carbon monoxide into the nuclear family homestead. This was when America was subjected to the double whammy of Vietnam and Richard Nixon. Riots! Beatings! Get a haircut, hippie! These stark realities manifested themselves quite wonderfully in films like the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. To this day, no matter how many times I watch it, the final scene of TCM, with Leatherface wildly swinging his chainsaw around in the morning sun, sends a shiver down my spine. Nothing that Eli Roth shows in Hostel comes close to the artfulness that Tobe Hooper managed to concoct in that baking Texas heat. So a girl gets her eye burnt out? Whoop-de-do. Blow me. It was mildly amusing, but hardly shocking. It’s no match for Sally screaming for her last shred of sanity in the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. At times Roth seems to realise it’s not what you show, but what you don’t – a trick I suspect he gleaned from the Mr Blonde Vs Ear scene in 'Reservoir Dogs'. And yet, when all is cut and fucked, he’s just a hack. It’s just teenagers getting spliced. There’s no art, no sense that you’re being taken on a mystery tour by a madman. Those weird, documentary-style films from the 70s with their nightmarish sense of the uncanny, their incongruous soundtracks, their broad daylight brutality and crow-black humour were real horror films. In fact, they were just real. Fuck so-called ‘torture porn’, and fuck even harder those that claim it’s some sort of moral nadir for a genre they don’t get in the first place.

previous - next