Torture Porn: Why this Horror Genre Moniker is a Misnomer

This tale starts with the horror movie Hostel, directed by Splat Packer Eli Roth. When Hostel premiered on January 6, 2006, it ushered in Eli Roth as a true blue horror director who possessed competency and confidence. In an article by film critic David Edelstein of the New York Magazine entitled Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn, the dubious term “Torture Porn” was first coined and in subsequent articles about Hostel was picked up and used to describe the revitalized horror sub-genre the film belong to. From the outset, I could never understand the title they were ascribing to Hostel and its brethren. Let’s examine each part of the Edelstein’s term shall we. First up is Torture. Torture is “the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.” I take no issue with this part of the term. It is accurate. The next part of the term, Porn, I completely take issue with. Not only does Porn have nothing to do with what is going on onscreen, when placed along side Torture, it has nothing to do with the definition of either word. Porn is the abbreviation of Pornography which is “obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic merit.” Seeing a naked ass on screen is not pornographic, especially since you could see five asses per season on the television program NYPD Blue, which aired on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), a television station owned by Disney. And a breast is not pornographic in many situations, especially if the possessor is being hacked to pieces by a fictional serial killer wielding a prop knife.

This brings us to the question: Does the presence of a naked breast or an ass make a movie Porn? Is Trading Places Comedy Porn? Is Old School? What about American Beauty? Should that fall under the genre of Drama Porn? What should we call the Halloween franchise under the Edelstein criteria? Since the films star Michael Myers, involve Knife torture, terror, copious nudity (which is Porn in the minds of some non-dictionary owners) and a serial killer that suffers from the Curse of Thorn, the Halloween franchise should be called Thorn Porn. In your garden variety Porn film, there is usually some kind of sexual stimulation or penetration. Where is this present in the horror movies (the Saw franchise, Cannibal Holocaust, Hostel I and Hostel II, Wolf Creek, Ichi the Killer, Baise-moi, etc.) the Torture Porn moniker has been capriciously applied to? There is no sexually climaxing or getting off (for real) in these films. It’s all fake and make believe. So once again: Where is the Porn? Where are Teagan Presley, Hanna Hilton, Bobbi Starr or Sunny Leone? I do not see them.

Maybe the pejorative Torture Porn moniker was created to describe the fact that the directors of these horror films (James Wan, Ruggero Deodato, Eli Roth, Greg McLean, Takashi Miike, Virginie Despentes, etc) are getting off “mentality” from what they have created and filmed. If that is true, how is that Pornographic? A person that enjoys his work is a lucky person. A newscaster who enjoys his evening newscast does not have his work considered Broadcast Porn (well, not unless there is something lewd going on underneath the table we are not privy to, like in Police Academy). The same is true for a torture horror movie that may or may not contain nudity. It is not Porn or a sexual fetish film of any kind. It is a horror movie that involves torture that contains nudity. The correct moniker for this horror sub-genre should not be Torture Porn. It should be Torture Horror.

Anyone with access to a dictionary and the proclivity to look up the word is probably aware that I did not use the first definition of Pornography. That definition is “the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement”. So within the confines of this definition of Pornography, Edelstein’s Torture Porn label treads congealed, blood-strewn water more readily. I still do not like the connotation, the dirtiness his title implies. It takes a horror movie, an expression of thoughts and ideas (the good ones anyway e.g. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) and smears them with a sheen of unwarranted depravity. Do some Torture Horror films use gratuitous nudity for their own sake, for a selling point, sure. Everyone knows sex sells. We are bombarded with sexual innuendos in television commercials every single day. There are some horror movies, however, that use sexual titillation for a purpose, to advance a storyline or to show a normal slice of life within the confines of the horror movie. Examples of this would be the nude scene(s) in The Stepfather and The Last House on the Left.

David Edelstein’s Torture Porn moniker is the unfortunate by-product of some horror films’ perceived overuse of the naked female form and what some critics would call gratuitous violence. Some would see the nudity in a few of these films as a substitution for substance and a thoroughly thought-out plot line. In some cases, this is absolutely true but not in all.

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