The Torture-Porn Panic and What It Missed

In late January 2006, David Edelstein published a piece in New York magazine under the headline “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn”. He had Hostel on his mind, which had opened at number one in the United States three weeks earlier on a budget somewhere under five million dollars, and he swept Saw, Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects and — the detail everyone forgets — Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ into the same bag. It was a good phrase. It was catchy, it was accusatory, and it had the rhythm of a diagnosis. Within eighteen months it had escaped the article entirely and become the name of a genre that nobody had set out to make.

That is what phrases do when they are well made. The trouble is that this one was a container built for one film and then used to store a decade. Everything the label caught, it flattened; and while critics were busy counting severed limbs in multiplexes, the films that were actually doing something serious with cruelty were playing in twenty-seat rooms with subtitles, and mostly went unexamined by the same people writing the panic pieces.

The label never fitted the films it was named for

Go back to Saw (2004) with the phrase in mind and the mismatch is immediate. James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s film was shot in eighteen days for around 1.2 million dollars and grossed north of a hundred million worldwide, and it is a puzzle box with a corpse in the middle of the floor. Its structure is closer to a locked-room mystery than to anything pornographic: two men chained in a bathroom, a chain of flashbacks, a twist that reorganises everything you have watched. The film’s most notorious moments — the reverse bear trap, the razor-wire maze — are largely delivered as aftermath or as compressed flashback. The camera is frantic rather than lingering. Wan’s instinct throughout is to cut away and let the sound design do the damage, which is a technique inherited from a tradition of suggestion that runs straight back through Val Lewton and the whole restraint school. You can dislike Saw for a dozen reasons. Wallowing is a strange one.

Hostel (2005) fits even worse. Eli Roth’s film spends its first act as a hangout comedy about two American backpackers being obnoxious across Europe, and it is genuinely funny in a way that curdles precisely because it earns the laugh first. The atrocity arrives late, it is short, and the film’s real subject is the assumption of safety that its heroes carry like a passport. Roth’s joke is that the Americans think they are the customers, and they are the stock. The picture that panicked New York magazine is a satire about purchasing power, made by a director who was in his early thirties and had grown up on the same Italian gore cycle as everyone else with a video shop membership.

Only Wolf Creek (2005) sits anywhere near the accusation, and Greg McLean’s film earns its brutality by making you wait ninety minutes in the company of three likeable young people before it does anything to them. Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and objected to it on principle, and his objection is worth taking seriously precisely because it is coherent: he thought the film invited the audience to enjoy the helplessness of people it had spent an hour teaching us to like. That is an argument about what a film does to a viewer. It is a much better argument than the one the label carried, which was closer to a shudder with a headline attached.

What the panic was actually reacting to

The dates are the tell. Saw premiered at Sundance in January 2004 and went wide that October. The Abu Ghraib photographs reached the American public in April 2004. Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition and the phrase “enhanced interrogation” were the ambient furniture of the culture in which these films were financed, shot, marketed and consumed. The horror genre has always metabolised what the news cannot say plainly — the atomic-age creature feature did it with mutation, the 1970s paranoia thriller did it with surveillance and conspiracy — and the mid-2000s cycle did it with a man in a room being asked to prove he deserves to live.

The panic read the imagery and skipped the argument. Critics wrote as though a decade of directors had spontaneously discovered sadism, when what had actually happened was that a country had spent two years arguing on television about whether torture works, and its cheapest, fastest, least prestigious art form had answered before anyone else got round to it. Saw’s Jigsaw is a moral bureaucrat who insists his victims consented by living badly. That is a satire of a specific rhetorical move that was being made nightly on cable news, and it is not subtle. It did not need to be.

There is a second thing the panic missed, which is money. The cycle happened because it was cheap and because it worked. Saw returned roughly eighty times its budget; Hostel returned something in the order of fifteen times its own. Once that happened, everything with a basement and a power tool got green-lit, and most of it was terrible. The correct target for the outrage was the imitation, and imitation is what any profitable formula produces. This is the same mechanism that gave the drive-ins a hundred Corman knock-offs, described in the assembly line of American International. Nobody wrote a moral panic about Beast from Haunted Cave.

The cruelty that had a thesis was somewhere else entirely

Here is the part that still irritates. While the English-language press was assembling its case against Hostel, French cinema was two years into a run of films that were vastly more punishing and vastly more considered, and the same critics largely left them alone — partly because they arrived with subtitles and festival credentials, which is a hierarchy the desk has complained about before in the anglophone blind spot.

James Quandt had named that movement in Artforum in February 2004, calling it the New French Extremity, and he did not mean it as a compliment either. But look at what it produced. Martyrs (2008) puts a young woman through an ordeal so sustained that the film becomes physically difficult to sit through, and then reveals that the ordeal has a metaphysical purpose, that her tormentors are a philosophical society, and that the whole apparatus is a study of what suffering might buy. Pascal Laugier’s film hurts on purpose and then hands you the reason, which is the exact opposite of a film that hurts for the ticket price. Inside (2007) is a home-invasion two-hander of almost unbearable intimacy that is really about grief and about the theft of a future.

These are the films the label should have been fighting with. They are the hard cases. If you want to argue that extremity can be morally serious, Martyrs is your evidence; if you want to argue that it cannot, Martyrs is the strongest thing you have to beat, and beating it requires actually engaging with what Laugier has built rather than counting the blood. The Korean cinema of the same years posed the same problem — I Saw the Devil (2010) escalates its revenge until the escalation itself becomes the indictment. Australia sent The Loved Ones (2009), which is a torture film performed as a teen comedy and is funnier and nastier than anything Roth made. None of these were what the panic was about, because the panic was about a marketing category, and marketing categories have borders that critics should not respect.

The honest case against the cycle

Having said all that, the panic was not simply wrong, and pretending otherwise is the sort of fan reflex that gets the genre nowhere. Something real did happen to the culture around these films, and it happened downstream of them.

The imitation cycle was genuinely joyless. By 2007 the formula had been reduced to its most reproducible element — a person restrained, a device, a duration — and the results had no puzzle, no satire and no argument. Captivity (2007) is the low point of the era largely because of what surrounded it: its billboard campaign in Los Angeles, a four-panel abduction sequence displayed above traffic, drew a genuine public backlash and sanction from the MPAA for going up without approval. That is a film selling the one thing the panic accused the whole cycle of selling, and the panic had a point about it.

The market noticed too, and quickly. Hostel: Part II (2007) is a smarter film than its predecessor — it inverts the perspective and follows the buyers — and it landed hard commercially. The Saw series ran an annual Halloween slot for seven years and was declaring itself a final chapter by 2010. The audience got bored before the critics finished writing. That is usually how these things end.

The lasting damage was to nuance. Once “torture porn” existed as a filing category, any film with sustained cruelty could be dismissed unread, which meant a critic could skip the actual work of distinguishing Martyrs from its knock-offs. The reaction against the label produced elevated horror as a marketing counterweight — a way of promising a nervous audience that this one would be tasteful — and that promise has its own distortions.

What to take from it

The useful lesson is about criticism rather than about horror. A phrase that describes one film well will be used to describe forty films badly, and the speed at which “torture porn” travelled from a magazine column to a Wikipedia genre heading in about two years should make anyone cautious about coining the next one. The BBFC learned a version of this the hard way in the 1980s, when a list assembled in haste turned a random assortment of Italian cheapies into a permanent canon of forbidden objects — an accident this desk has picked over in the video nasties panic. Prohibition is a preservation technique. So is a good insult.

If you want to test the argument yourself, watch Saw and Martyrs in the same week, in that order. One is a machine that runs on plot and has been unfairly saddled with a reputation for wallowing; the other genuinely wallows and knows exactly why it is doing it. The category that put both of them on the same shelf was doing no work at all. Arrow’s disc of Martyrs and the widely available restorations of the early Saw films make the double bill easy to assemble, which is more than the culture of 2006 managed for either of them.