There are a lot of terms thrown around in regard to the horror genre, but the one that has always given me the most eye-rolls is the term “torture porn,” in relation to films deemed so violent that they border on the fetishistic. While I can appreciate that people’s tolerance for violence, and explicit violence in particular, varies, it’s such a lazy and silly way to refer to something that it grates on me that it’s still used to this day. The term originated with a film critic and has become yet another way to shame a genre known for pushing boundaries and diving deep into the extremes.
Horror has always been about those extremes though. Even the most subdued films, the “heightened horror”, and the “elevated horror” deal with dark subject matter that keep them from just being another drama. Whether it’s a film that deals with the murder of one’s children or about the fear of mental degradation, it’s still dark stuff. Horror is a genre that’s always been one that really played to the audience, though. During the heyday of the drive-in, they had more films about the Red Scare, full of teenagers with fast cars and living on the fringes of the community. The 70s showed the fear of the humans, of one another, and the fear of our differences – city to country. The 80s were the fears of excess. And all of it is a matter of turning up the heat or turning it down. HALLOWEEN was notoriously very bloodless and seems chaste by today’s standards but it also was a product of the time and filmmaker. FRIDAY THE 13th was more extreme because it had to stand out.
Flash forward to the time when HOSTEL and SAW came out, and we had gone through another war, through September 11, and we had seen that the moment for our nation to come together was gone, and now we were back to who we were again. This was a time when footage of people being beheaded by religious militants was all over the internet as well. So you have to take ALL of that into consideration when you look at the world that birthed “torture porn.”
For me, the term is ridiculous because there IS torture porn. Porn that revolves around the idea of and reality of torture. It’s the far side of the BD/SM scale, in the dark shadows. It’s there. As all extremes are. These horror films were extreme, and some were puerile, but they were not meant to sexually arouse anyone. They were meant to horrify and shock. We were, again, in a time when you could hop on the internet and easily see someone brutally tortured, killed, and sometimes beheaded. So often we want to slam horror as a CAUSE for violence and the darkness in us when all it can ever be is an echo of those very things. They aren’t the party, they’re the party favors. A better term is perhaps “extreme” horror, as it still flags the films and tells you – here there be dragons – but it doesn’t damn the films outright for content you may disagree with.
Ah, but without the handwringing, will anyone know your stance at all?
The thing is that the term is far more powerful than most of the films themselves. They are usually very shallow affairs that hang too much of their point on the extreme violence and gore. It’s like a porn made up of just scenes with no context. A greatest hits of gore. And there’s a point where it gets desensitizing and boring.
Which is why we saw the rise of “elevated” horror that harkened back to days of implying without showing.
There are a lot of awful, extreme horror films that serve little purpose other than to be exercises in gore. To shrug off films that go to dark places, though, and use violence as a tool is to really throw your hands over your head and pretend as if you’re offended. We have seen classy films, dramas, for example, be very dark, very violent, and very disturbing. Heck, go watch a war film, and you will often get more gore and outright horror than many of the films put under that banner. Because they make you feel smart, though, it’s OK. You don’t have to like horror or extreme films, but labeling them and clutching your pearls does the entire genre a disservice.
Sometimes you have to go to dark places to say something true about the world. Something unpleasant.
The biggest sin the HOSTEL movies commit, to me, is that they are often childish and rely on dumb gags and sex to lighten the blow of what should be very heavy films. The movies have a LOT to say about Americans, the world at that time, and the transactional nature of life, but it often gets lost in a flurry of boobs, gore gags, and frustrating characters.
The first HOSTEL is all about the ugly American. The young tourist who treats the world as their party, dipping in and out of countries and doing as they please, and then dashing without consequences. They are on their grand holiday before they buckle in and fly right. It’s something that won’t resonate with most because most of us won’t ever experience that sort of wealth or opportunity.
Phew!
The first HOSTEL plays too much like a 90s sex comedy and then shifts tone into a very dark world, and it’s interesting and could be very jarring if it didn’t feel like a huge relief to be past the sexploits. The first film, heck, both, are interesting in how reserved they are. I was shocked by watching HOSTEL and realizing how much happens offscreen. For a movie that helped create a term like “torture porn,” it sure didn’t luxuriate in long scenes of murder. Heck, what you find in the TERRIFIER films is far more brutal and disturbing. It’s the whole premise, though, that is upsetting. The idea is that people are being kidnapped and then bought for the sole purpose of murdering them. It’s part of that whole snuff movie ghost that haunts our culture. It’s the specter that both exists and doesn’t exist.
What is missed is that gore and extreme violence can say something. It can have a purpose. There’s the geekshow side of it, but there’s also the fact that it can show a world where human life means so little that it becomes a commodity. There is a thrill to be found in extreme gore and horror. There’s a jolt in seeing the special effects that show awful things happening to a person that we’d never want to see in real life. These movies walk us up to and point out the line we have in us while giving us the thrill of almost seeing it. We all know that the person who was eviscerated on screen went home at the end of that day and went on with their lives. But we sometimes need to be reminded that there is real horror in the world that many of us are insulated against because of our circumstances and choices in life. And the movies that want nothing more than to wallow in the extremity, well, they will have their fans, but won’t be memorable for anything other than the thrill ride they offered.
The horror of the HOSTEL films is the What If aspect of it. What if someone really paid for another’s life, to do with it as they pleased?
What if?
Yes, I absolutely think people have paid for someone’s life to do as they please. Whether it was to torture them, assault them, or murder them. I think it happens overseas more, for various reasons, but I believe it happens. Men going to foreign countries to scratch a nasty itch is nothing new. It’s the idea that you might not want sex but want darker things that haunt people.
But we have to know it happens.
The act of it being filmed is the real question.
I am sure SOME have been and probably sold, but not a lot. Most terrible things happen to people who went afoul of someone, a lover, a gang, or a group or person they knew. It’s passionate, not dispassionate. It has motivation.
What makes HOSTEL as a concept work is that it shows us people so wealthy, or trying to appear very wealthy, who are so bored with their worlds that they need a new extreme. It was an idea played up in “The Most Dangerous Game.” The idea of hunting someone. Here, there is no hunt, just the kill. And that’s not a left-field idea as you see it IN hunting, where people go to exotic locales to hunt an animal in a very structured environment where they are sure to catch their prey without issue.
The first HOSTEL is an interesting movie that works better during the second half, when the truth of the situation is revealed, and it’s a good idea too to not just to make it a movie about people being sold and tortured, but about someone trying to escape. The movie, really, is less about torture and more about the lead-up to it.
HOSTEL 2 is by far the nastier of those first two Roth films, and it’s the acting of Heather Matarazzo that makes it so upsetting during a brutal scene she endures. The second film, like the first, though, sets up the three friends traveling abroad and letting themselves be led astray and into danger. We get lots of travelogue sort of stuff and less of the lechery, which was a nice change. What we see in the second film, too, is more of the machinations of the hunt club that runs these hostels and the torture rooms. We get to see the bidding process and learn a little about the people buying these bodies.
The second film works well with the first, following three women, and the story of the film is a very good conversation about young women exploring themselves and misogynistic men wanting to punish what they cannot control.
The second film is definitely more gruesome, and one death in particular is torturous. Generally, though, the movie doesn’t focus much on the murder rooms. It makes sense, as the more mystery around them, the better, but really, that’s what I wanted to see. A promise is made that I am going to be freaked out, so freak me out!
That’s the irony here: that the movies about murder and torture are much more reserved than we are led to believe. They are gruesome, gory, and brutal, but they are more interested in the set-up than they are in the payoff. Oh, you get the death, but what comes before it is far more impactful. The movies, at their core, are about kids wandering off the path and into the dark part of the woods, only to find wolves there.
I still enjoy the HOSTEL films – though, Man Alive, do the Blu-rays look murky – but they feel very dated. The stories of three crummy guys looking to party and the story of three girls looking for an adventure and being kidnapped in Eastern-bloc countries just feel very much mired in the same sort of fear of the Other that our country still struggles with. In a way, we’re reflecting back on what we know of ourselves – that we often do the same things to people who come here from foreign lands – but it also feels a little gross. The films play better as urban legends. As passed down stories like – my friend knew a guy who got drunk with some girls in Germany, and he passed out and woke up missing a liver.
Travel is scary, and being abroad has to be as unnerving as it is exciting because you are really all alone. The heart of the film is true, and the idea is great, but it’s just the execution that is dodgy. And you can hate the films all you like and call them all manner of things, but torture porn seems a bit of a stretch when even in the uncut versions, so much of the violence is left behind steel doors.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 