Not torture porn the genre, mind you–“torture porn” the term.

The Horror Blog’s Steven Wintle today called the label an “utterly useless term”. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you already know that you can’t swing a dismembered arm in the horror blogosphere without hitting just that very kind of expression of both dismissal and angry contempt from the cognoscenti. You hear it quite a bit from filmmakers, too.

But why?

First of all, why is it “useless” as a descriptor? You know what it means. I know what it means. We all know what it means and what movies it’s meant to encompass. “Torture porn” (noun): Horror films in which the physical brutalization of a person or persons, frequently to death and always while somehow immobilized or held captive by the brutalizer or brutalizers, is the primary locus of horror in the film. I’d imagine the intent would be clear upon introduction to many people who’d never heard the term before–sure, “porn” might give them the wrong idea, but it’s a hell of a lot more instantly grokkable than, say, “graphic novel.”

My guess is the dislike of the term stems from the facts that it’s frequently seen as pejorative, that it tends to lump together films that we horror buffs like (Hostel, Wolf Creek) with films that we don’t like (Chaos, the Saw franchise, sequels to remakes of classic ’70s genre antecedents like The Texas Chainsaw Massacare and The Hills Have Eyes), and that it lumps together films that, in terms of things like plot structure and financing and intent, don’t really have much in common. But isn’t all of that true of the term “horror” itself?

On this blog, I myself have tended to use other terms when referring to the movies generally placed under this rubric, like “meat movies” or “the current brutal-horror cycle.” But that’s because I made them up and like them, not because I have any beef with “torture porn” per se. I know exactly what it means and so do most people who care about this sort of thing.

Own your torture porn, people. Live your torture porn. Love your torture porn!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.