Tonight:
9°c
New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
Has the splat pack gone too far?
By David Sexton, Evening Standard 28.06.07
Bijou Phillips in Hostel: Part II
Look here too
Until last weekend, I'd never seen any "torture porn", as the latest genre in horror is catchily known. So I gave myself a short course, watching DVDs of Hostel and Saw, before going to a preview of Hostel: Part II, which opens tomorrow and is already prompting revulsion from niceminded critics.
I'm medium squeamish. I've never understood how anybody can bear to watch those documentaries showing operations but I've never felt too troubled by violent films. These movies proved to be a grotty combination of the two, with the operations being both amateur and without the benefit of anaesthetic.
Click here for a brutal introduction to the splat horror genre
Review: Hostel: Part 2 - the critic's verdict
But do I really feel that I myself have been genuinely de-sensitised or ever so slightly depraved? Sorry, no.
The term "torture porn" seems to have been invented in an article in New York Magazine last year, grimly speculating why America has developed such a fresh appetite for blood, guts and sadism.
Hostel, made in 2005 by Eli Roth on a budget of just $3.8 million, had been a surprise success, grossing $150 million and at one point overtaking Narnia at the box office. It's utterly gruesome.
Three American college boys backpacking around Europe are lured to a sinister hostel in remote Slovakia, by promises of sex. But the place exists solely to kidnap people to be tortured to death in specially equipped basements by wealthy perverts who belong to an organisation called "Elite Hunting". Horrible torments, involving drills, chainsaws and blowtorches, are fully depicted.
It's not like a conventional scary movie which depends on sudden surprises and shocks to unnerve the audience in a more or less pleasurable way. In Hostel, the horrors are flatly presented and the feelings evoked are dread and revulsion. The sequences go on and on while the victims scream, first in terror and then in agony.
In Hostel: Part II, again written and directed by Roth, which, like the first film has Quentin Tarantino as an executive producer, the three American students lured to the hostel are female - and the monsters who have won the right to torture them to death in an eBay-style internet auction are American businessmen. Otherwise, it's the same again: horrible physical cruelty is explicitly rendered.
One girl, hanging upside down naked, is scythed to pieces by a woman who lasciviously bathes in her blood. A man is torn apart by Alsatian dogs. There are a couple of beheadings. A girl's face is cut in two with a circular saw, a man castrated with secateurs. A conscious man has his legs cut to pieces and eaten by a cultivated fiend listening to opera. And so forth.
Shocking as these acts are, what makes these films different from previous horror is not so much what happens but the way it is depicted. The tag "torture porn" deserves to stick because they have the same dogged commitment to showing flesh, without too much bother about motivation or morality.
Eli Roth has been waxing indignant about the label, saying the term is insulting and reveals the limited understanding of the critics who use it. Yet his own language confirms its accuracy. Talking to Francine Stock on BBC Radio 4, he claimed everybody loves the gore, "the gruelling violence in those moments that go overboard and are a little bit fun" and proudly announced that he himself calls the moment in the first Hostel film in which a terribly burned girl has her protruding eyeball sliced off as "the eyegasm".
That's disgusting - and one distinguished film critic responded to the first Hostel by announcing: "I have never had to sit through a nastier, sicker movie and, now that I have seen it, I profoundly wish I hadn't." Nonetheless there he was on Monday, courageously attending the preview of the sequel, like a canary sent down a mine to be asphyxiated first. Presumably he hadn't been depraved himself either.
On being challenged, Roth predictably points out that you have to choose to see his films. "People want to see the nastiest thing they've ever seen in a film and I guarantee you it will be one of the most shocking things people have ever seen in a mainstream movie - and the good news is that if you don't want to see it, you don't have to."
If he really cared about that, perhaps he might choose to have his films distributed only in cinemas? Because once available on DVD, they are sure to be seen illicitly by teenagers and other vulnerable viewers making less clearcut decisions.
But, of course, Roth also maintains that his films are more than just gleeful exploitation of the laxness of the censors, who are so peculiarly accommodating when it comes to violence, as opposed to sex, let alone their real bugbear, rude words. Roth's movies are a serious response to life post 9/11, don't you know? The brutalities of Hostel have been influenced by "seeing things like the Daniel Pearl decapitation" and al-Qaeda videos on the internet - although he maintains that comparedto such real horrors, his work is just "theatre, magic tricks".
He further argues that his nasties offer people valuable catharsis (though he's too cool to use the word). "People are flocking to movies like Hostel because they need to let it out - people are scared," he says.
He's delighted to report that his films are hugely popular on American military bases. Soldiers can't show fear on duty and so need to do so elsewhere, he says. "Watch Hostel and for the next 90 minutes, you're not only allowed to be scared, you're encouraged to be scared, you're encouraged to be terrified and you're encouraged to scream. It feels good and, look around, everybody else is screaming - I think people need to feel that." So, here we have the schlock-merchant as social worker.
But if we need not credit all these protestations from Roth, we do have to take seriously the growing popularity of these films and those of his peers and imitators. That really is a little frightening. A lot of people evidently do want to see such horror and their motives are murky. You could put it like this: "What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?"
And where is it put like that? In a horror novel, naturally enough: Hannibal by Thomas Harris. In that book, Hannibal Lecter attends a popular exhibition of Atrocious Torture Instruments in Florence. But he doesn't bother to look at the engines of pain. Instead he inspects the people who have come to look at them - because "the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd."
I would not myself ever watch "torture porn" for pleasure and would be uncomfortable if anybody to whom I was close wanted to do so. Although I don't suppose it directly influences behaviour, in sane adults at least, I know from my own experience that it can affect you in ways that aren't under your own control, inspiring nightmares, if hardly prompting imitation.
But it's too easy to blame the director or the studio or the over-liberal censors for delivering such horrific entertainments. For enough of us now lap them up. Some of us like being slapped this hard. The true asafoetida of the human spirit is found in the faces of the crowd. And that's no act.
• Hostel: Part II is released tomorrow
