Torture Porn, Pt. 1: The Victim Experience?

Okay, I realized there's no way I'll cover "torture porn" in a single post, so I'm breaking it up into a series.

By way of preface, before getting to the movies, I thought I'd explain what changed my mind about exploring this subgenre of horror. Back when the LOTT-D gang of horror bloggers convened a roundtable discussion on the topic, I hadn't seen any of the movies and had no desire to. They didn't seem to promise any kind of experience that would interest me. Consider this trailer for Hostel:



The experience this trailer sells is the torturer's--specifically, it's that of someone fulfilling a fantasy of torturing someone to death. Stuff like this gave me the impression that the appeal of torture porn is the purely Grand Guignol spectacle of watching helpless victims get tortured, and that the much-publicized graphic violence and gore are there to titillate, or perhaps alternately to disgust or somehow horrify an audience of voyeuristic onlookers. That kind of experience doesn't interest me in the slightest; in fact, I find it downright repellent. That hasn't changed.

What has changed is that I've come to wonder if torture porn might offer a quite different kind of experience that truly does fascinate me.

The horror graphic novel Hack/Slash Omnibus, vol. 2 opens with a torture porn story in which heroine Cassie Hack is at some ghoulish tormentor's lack of mercy. That presents a significant contrast to the Hostel trailer above, in which text captions impose a torturer's viewpoint on the flashing images of torture. Here, on the other hand, Cassie anchors the point of view in the victim role, and mediates our experience of the scene through her helplessness. That called to mind for me a point about torture porn made by CRwM at his blog And Now the Screaming Starts:

Torture porn dramatizes paranoid helplessness: This is somewhat clumsy, but it is as close as we can get to the common "there's torture" while actually fitting the plots of the movies under discussion. The amount of torture in any given "torture porn" film is pretty small. What the majority of these films show is people slowly, seemingly inevitably, heading towards a horrible fate. I'd argue that, rather than the torture, is the source of their impact.

I'd read this before, but I guess I just had to see it in action before I could really get it. CRwM goes on to explain how the visual style creates a sense of setting that intensifies this experience of helplessness:

First, let me defend my claim that torture porn is fantasy by focusing on the visual style that has become torture porn's most distinctive trait. The look of torture porn is not realistic, but hyper-realistic. It is a highly artificial approach that takes the trappings of realism and blows them all out of proportion. The result is a lavish, over-stuffed look – most often taking an archetypal image and stuffing it to the breaking point. This is most apparent in the dungeon settings of the two Hostel flicks and the bathroom set of the first Saw. Both sets are not just dirty, but absolutely coated in grime and slime. One imagines you could get tetanus of the eyeball just from looking at them. But neither represents what (sadly) we know torture looks like. Real torture, when governments undertake it, is conducted not in sewers, but in relatively orderly places that look disconcertingly like hospitals. . . . The answer, of course, is that these aren't "real." They visually represent the feelings the idea of torture evokes. Men in rubber aprons, faces hid behind monstrous brass and steel facemasks, power tools inexplicably left to rust (despite the fact that they are supposedly the property of an elite club of super rich people) – it all suggests the moral, spiritual, ethical decay of what's happening. The whole visual approach adopted by Roth and Wan is not realistic so much as it represents the typical strategies of film realism – a little grime here, some busted glass there – and invests it with symbolic purpose. The very fabric of their films' worlds reflects the mental state and fate of their characters.

Once I saw this example in Hack/Slash of a torture porn victim experience of the sort CRwM describes, the genre really started to intrigue me as possibly offering more than just the gleeful/disgusted reveling in bloody Grand Guignol spectacle. Specifically, this victim experience began to resonate for me with other horror experiences that have affected me powerfully, and that I've sought out and enjoyed.

When I was young, Ambrose Bierce's story "Chickamauga" seared into my mind the eerie scene of a deaf child's encounter with many soldiers after a battle--maimed, bleeding, clearly in great agony. The most memorable detail for me was that their faces were so pale, the boy first thought they were clowns. Their weird movements, caused by pain, injury, and weariness, struck him as funny at first.

Shortly after reading this, I had a nightmare: one evening, my whole school class, including many friends, was going somewhere fun in a semi-truck. I got to ride in the cab, but the rest of them rode in the back. When we got where we were going and opened the doors to let them out, they all staggered out with horribly pale faces. They'd been breathing poison fumes during the whole long ride (I must have heard some warning recently about breathing exhaust), and had been suffering greatly. Their groans were awful, and the way they collapsed and crawled around was similar to the way I'd visualized the movements of the soldiers in the story. I could only watch, horrified, as they all died there in the parking lot.

Ever since, there's a certain quality of suffering, of having suffered, of having gone through something horrible, of being reduced or having been reduced to one of these haunting, pale-faced figures, that holds a tremendous morbid fascination for me when I encounter it in horror.

I've mentioned before that the visceral punch of "Chickamauga" has influenced my conception of vampires; their paleness and everything else about them that indicates their unliving state should be a reminder that they've died and blasphemously risen from the grave, and that these have been horrible, eternally traumatizing experiences for them. A vampire, to my mind, should essentially be like one of those Chickamauga soldiers who stands back up and goes on functioning, but who remains a pale, twisted wreck of a man despite all the occult power, strength, and invulnerability conferred by his unholy resurrection. No vampire should ever quite shake off the "victim experience" of having died.

Around the time in high school when I started taking a really active interest in horror, the trailer for Serpent and the Rainbow hit me especially hard, with an alarmingly pale and frightfully distressed Bill Pullman begging, "Don't let them bury me--I'm not dead!":



I couldn't possibly not have gone to see that (and, despite the jarringly off-note pyrotechnics of the grand finale, the movie totally delivered to my satisfaction).

This will probably be an overlong tangent, but it occurred to me as I was thinking about this that Batman's "Knightfall" story arc (of all things!) struck a similar chord for me in an entirely different context, as it played out issue by issue. That arc depicts Batman "slowly, seemingly inevitably, heading towards a horrible fate"--running a punishing gauntlet of foes before the new enemy behind it all breaks the hurt, weakened, and demoralized hero's back. The covers, especially of later issues, work hard to convey how badly all these fights, one after another, are grinding Batman down:



His physical pain and mental agony are rendered here much more vividly than usual. He looks tortured. What really kept me on board the whole way through, however, were the "next issue" ads that grimly summarized the toll that has been taken out of Batman so far, and the toll he's still going to have to pay. Here's one of my favorites:

And then there's the last one, chilling in its simplicity and stark finality:

These don't promise a pleasant experience, but they certainly promise a compelling one, and for me a morbidly compulsive one. Watching Batman walk his Via Dolorosa might not have struck exactly the same chord for me as imagining the soldiers from "Chickamauga" slouch and drag themselves along the ground, but the quality of suffering was certainly close enough to resonate powerfully in my psyche, arrest my attention, and engage my empathy.

And that brings us to torture porn. Once I began to suspect it might deliver intense victim experiences that would strike these deep, old chords in me, I realized there was no way I could continue to refrain from exploring it.

So do the movies deliver that? I'll discuss the two Hostel movies next. Stay tuned, and stay groovy!