Yeah, gore has always been there. It’s just that it’s being too serious nowadays.
When I was younger, there were two types of horror: Pure horror and splatter. The latter was always comedy, not to be taken seriously. The former didn’t focus on the blood and guts.
Now we’ve got pure gore and “torture-porn”, which hasn’t got a bit of funny in it. Git off mah zombie-infested lawn.
Any time this question comes up, I flash back to seeing Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore or Fulci’s Zombii and figure the whole thing is a wash.
Whether or not the torture movie is artful, I think the distinction to be made is one of fantasy vs. reality.
Jason/Freddy/Michael Myers/Pumpkinhead are all the same basic thing: a supernatural boogeyman. They magically appear in front/behind the fleeing victim, and take a hell of a beating before going down. There’s a complete suspension of disbelief there that puts it into the realm of fantasy and allows us to have a good time. Sure there’s teenagers being hacked to bits in highly improbable and inventive ways, but they’re caricatures and honestly, the whole thing is absurd at face value.
Movies like Hostel, Hills Have Eyes and Wolf Creek are about real people doing fucked up shit to other people because they’re just plain messed up. The victims are often helpless, unable to escape and die horrible, hopeless, pathetic deaths after having their dignity and/or humanity stripped away. Is that horrifying? Yes. But it hits too close to home. The possibility of having that actually happen to someone is possible, since you hear about it in the news (like those sicko russian kids).
There’s a difference between making you jump or make a “bleaah” face from some grossout gore and squirming uncomfortably in your seat. People have fun in the former one. The latter makes you feel dirty for watching it.
For me, if I want to watch something that terrifies me and feel the utter hopelessness of a situation and witness the degradation of human beings I’ll watch The Descent. It’s scary as hell and it has monsters in it so there’s at least one layer of separation between it and the “real world”. That separation keeps it enjoyable for me.
(For the record, I realize that the inbreds in Hills could be considered monsters, but the theme is the same as the other movies listed. I also realize that in the first Halloween, Myers is only borderline supernatural, but he’s that way in all the subsequent sequels. Finally, yes, I would put Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the latter category, as Leatherface and his family are not supernatural at all and it plays on potentially real things happening to regular people, it’s just that the aging of the film gives it suspension of disbelief at this point)
“Hits too close to home”. “Irreversible is [comparably] artful”.
Hostel is far from being a great movie, but its problems have little to do with gore, torture, or any combination thereof. Particularly when Tom can say with a straight face that Monica Belluci being raped on screen is an acceptable use of brutality in comparison. Or (for those of you who’ve seen it) the Man Bites Dog “scene”, which stretches the thin but effective conceit of the film to the limit.
Hostel has the misfortune to be made by an American, so automatically it’s too much and classless for the “I like to watch things die but artistically” crowd. Slap some subtitles on that bitch, and remove the sequelitis that tragically accompanies so much American horror, and no one would so much as bat an eye.
I think rasputin’s on to something when he acknowledges the level of disassociation that is required for him (and perhaps a broader audience in general) to enjoy a movie that graphically displays cruelty. But there’s no need to upgrade a matter of personal taste to cognitive dissonance. I still can’t believe that Wolf Creek and The Hills Have Eyes get a pass in comparison.
Well that’s my problem with it. Of course I haven’t seen any of these other movies. I have very little interest in horror outside of hybrids like comedy/horror (Shaun of the Dead) or action/horror (various monster fighting films).
I have nothing against violence in movies, but I need all the participants to be engaged with it as a matter of status or intent. Gunfighters in a showdown, fine. Gangs in a gang war, fine, armies in a real war, fine, kung fu people chopping each other, fine.
Crying people being tied up and brutalized? No.
Is it possible that I can agree with every poster in this thread? My reasoning for disliking Hostel/Saw has, obviously, not been fleshed out fully in my own mind. Rasputin pretty much says what I think my reasoning is, however, as LK says, it could simply be that my distaste for those types of films is so strong that it throws off my reasoning.
The random super serial killer runs right up to the peak levels that I can tolerate. It is nightmarish, but when it is over, you wake up, and you realize there are nutjob killers out there, but that you are OK and the chances of that ever happening to you are slim to none.
The other films whether it is with a European trip gone horribly wrong and then with Poor Cary Elwes and his family getting taken bring too much into focus the depraved shit that really goes on in the world. It doesn’t look at it and say it is ugly, it stares at it, holds your head up and eyes open (a la Clockwork Orange), and then leads you painfully though it step by step. These movies seem to revel in it in a way that is different than the previosuly mentioned slasher flicks. (That in itself makes little sense, I realize, as how much more revelling can you do than cheering for a cool death scene.) Maybe I was not meant for this debate. :)
I have to ask why you people think that Saw and Hostel are depictions of things that actually happen, and could happen to youuuuuuu!
Paranoia
So why is that a problem? I don’t like sports hero movies or most romantic comedies, that doesn’t make them inherently problematic, especially relative to one another in a genre where I am ill equipped to discriminate. Violent horror in particular opens the door for a moralistic presumption of higher ground where there isn’t any.
If you’re indicting violence as a whole in film, I could understand that. I would think it was silly, but at least consistent. But where soldiers killing each other is suddenly filled with intent by definition, or worse yet (as seen in the other posts here) other brutal horror movies have that, and yet Hostel is in a magical other category, shit just gets stupid.
Because it is essential to find arbitrary distinctions like that, no matter how surreal, in order to distance one’s own chosen entertainment from what those sickos enjoy.
So people don’t like the sub genre, I get it. I’m not a huge fan myself, but I’m not going to pretend it’s worthy of special condemnation because it’s not my bag. As extarbags notes, it’s not the realism.
I think the reason some people, like me, really dislike the torture-porn stuff is because it’s harder for us to just step back and be detached when watching movies. Lots of people are completely indifferent to what’s happening on screen, because to them it’s clearly “just a movie” and they don’t get as emotionally invested.
I can’t disengage like that, especially when seeing a film in a theatre, and so my empathy compels me to be disturbed and to question the mindset of people who gleefully enjoy such things and aren’t similarly affected.
I disagree that all violence should be equally disturbing – depictions of deliberate human cruelty and sadism (for example, intentionally mutilating a living creature), are naturally far more disturbing (“who could do such a thing”) than pieces of Saffron Burrows being belched out and re-eaten by a Mako shark even if the physical consequences to the victim are similar.
The only thing I have problems with is depictions of violence against animals. Rape, children-killing, head-off-cutting, screwdriver-in-eye-stabbing etc…, no problemo with that. But that scene in ID4 where I thought the dog was going to DIAF? I nearly cried!
I mean, yeah killing the dog sucks, but rape and children killing still bothers me a tad more. Those two cannot really be lumped into your routine decapitations and tool stabbings in my book. Maybe I am just old-fashioned.
Meanwhile, I question the mindset of people who watch 90% of the other shit in the theaters and are entertained by it. That does not make it an objective measure of a person’s empathy or decency, just their taste. I have Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind (movie) on my shelf, but that doesn’t make it the same as someone who watches the former to revel in white supremacy or the latter because they enjoy fables that lie about history. Those are movies that, unlike Hostel, have had a real world impact as part of a broader ideology that’s difficult to measure but much more harmful than a bunch of teenagers playing the current round of gross out at the multiplex.
I disagree that all violence should be equally disturbing – depictions of deliberate human cruelty and sadism (for example, intentionally mutilating a living creature), are naturally far more disturbing (“who could do such a thing”) than pieces of Saffron Burrows being belched out and re-eaten by a Mako shark even if the physical consequences to the victim are similar.
It’s when you get into “naturally” more disturbing that I have a problem. That’s essentially a broader version of the same argument Tom’s advancing, when he’s the one that recommended Funny Games. What you both mean is stuff you like to watch vs stuff you don’t, no more and no less. There’s nothing natural about it.
Then go watch two of Tom’s “artistic exceptions”, Irreversible and Funny Games (don’t do that).
For me it just gets into why I watch or read horror - I want to be creeped out, set on edge, jumping at shadows. I don’t find slasher flicks (Nightmare on Elm Street 1 excepted, but that’s at least as much supernatural horror) or torture porn scary, so they’re just exercises in creative violence. And unless that violence is visually impressive and imaginative (like the violence in many kung fu films), that doesn’t do anything for me.
“Cheerful fun of slasher films”: You’re going to those movies to see people die. That’s the only reason. You want to see Jason chase some kids around, have them hide, maybe fight back a bit, and then he lops their heads off, or sets them on fire, or grabs their sleeping bag and beats them against a tree until they’re a bloody mess.
To me it’s not matter if being tone deaf at all – it’s how one has been slightly tweaked to make murder entertaining (and acceptable) and the other shows you the brutality of what really happens when a madman gets his hands on you. You can claim that one formula is artless, but the end result is the same – a bunch of corpses stacked up like deadwod.
For the record, Lizard King, I have never given a blanket recommendation for either Irreversible or Funny Games. In fact, I would – and have – discourage the average moviegoer from seeing them. What I have done – and what you’re distorting because either I’ve explained myself poorly or you’re being argumentative – is try to explain why I appreciate those two movies, neither of which is “fun”, “enjoyable”, or a “rollicking good time at the movies”.
William, I was responding to your earlier comment in which you said you didn’t understand the “separation in attitudes” between torture porn and slasher films. It seems from the post you just made that you do indeed understand the “separation in attitudes”.
Huh? If you’re going to judge these things by their “end result”, you’ve just lumped Hamlet and Tosca in there. Nice job.
The fact remains that for those of us who know and love horror films, there’s a clear-cut distinction between Hostel and Friday the 13th.
-Tom
I guess what kinda makes me uncomfortable is not that films like SAW and Hostel are made. It’s that they seem to be popular. They and their II, III and IV get theatre releases here. So enough people enjoy and pay to watch torture porn to make it a worthwhile investment. I find that a discomforting thought. Plus it shows that I really have gotten old.
Isn’t there a Saw 5 already? Anyway, I find them really good as replacement for sleeping pills. Saw is the iFart of movies.
I don’t think I implied you did. We’re obviously talking about the subset of people who claim to “enjoy” watching horror movies, that’s about the only “fun” I was hinting at. My point was that you made an artistic exception for them and not for Hostel, and that it’s not based on the clear cut standard you seem to be drawing here:
The fact remains that for those of us who know and love horror films, there’s a clear-cut distinction between Hostel and Friday the 13th.
So you appear to be suggesting that I don’t know or love horror films, or that I am otherwise unable to see something obvious. I don’t really think that’s the case, but I don’t understand the purpose of that statement. I’m not trying to persuade you to like Hostel or anything of the sort, I just think your category based rejection where brutal, ugly films you like are artistic exceptions is not as clear cut as you think.
Conversely, I do agree with you that there is a difference between generic slasher films and the Hostel movies, I just don’t think we are focusing on the same difference. And I think the “moral” difference you seem to be drawing is one that gets a lot fuzzier once you clearly understand and are able to appreciate other shocking or explicit niche films. Nor do I agree with Harms’ approach of body count equivalency, or whatever it is he’s arguing for.
Probably, that’s the sequelitis I was referring to. And I think that aspect was inspired by those original slasher films and their ability to continue being remade with the exact same formula long past when they should have quit and evolved.
An interpretation of torture porn’s appeal that interested me - a viewer could be empathizing with the victims, alongside having the thrill of seeing boundaries violated. Going from the discussion here (of all the films discussed in the thread, I’ve only seen Irreversible and Man Bites Dog) the victims in these films suffer extreme physical discomfort and psychic distress at the hands of an authority which they cannot challenge. The empathizing viewer sees their own inflexible lifestyle, in which their meaningful decisions are often outside of their control. Teenagers are the most obvious fit to this description. This from Jordan Peterson on TVO’s Agenda.