Sean and the Missus, Negril, Jamaica, August 2007.

The David Bowie shirt was an eBay find–I wish I could dig up the vendor, but alas. It’s a shot of Bowie holding a revolver, from The Man Who Fell to Earth, part of the era during which David was the best-looking man in the world.

Sorry, old habits die hard.

My post in defense of the term “torture porn” has resulted in some interesting responses. In favor are Bruce Baugh and Craig Moorehead, opposed are Steven Wintle and Kimberly Lindbergs, and somewhere in between are Jon Hastings and Jesse Mazer.

Steven’s response is the lengthiest, so I’ll take it point by point. He starts by arguing that appending the word “porn” to the equation adds a qualitative connotation above and beyond what a straightforward might do. (In order to illustrate the point, he tacks the word on to a whole bunch of different genres to striking and humorous effect here.) “I’m sure someone will come along to correct me on this,” sez Steven in the original post, essentially tossing me a softball right down the middle, “but I’m fairly sure ‘Torture Porn’ is the only horror sub-genre label that denotes not only the content of the film but also suggests a particular quality, as well.” Now, I’ve already suggested that the term “horror” itself has a pejorative connotation. But even putting that aside, there’s the entire “-sploitation” super-genre: exploitation, sexploitation, blaxploitation, nazisploitation, et cetera and sometimes ad nauseum. Then you’ve got “trash,” an appellation enthusiastically embraced by many niche horror bloggers. And surely “splatter,” “slasher,” and “creature feature” were not coined in the same value-neutral fashion as, say, “romantic comedy.” The recently en vogue “grindhouse” sure wasn’t. Hell, I think “torture porn” fits a lot more comfortably in the same continuum as “weepies” and “chick flicks” and “queer cinema” than Steven would admit.

Next, he quibbles with my attempt to play Webster, saying he’s encountered at least three applications of the “torture porn” label that hold to different definitions than the one I proposed (“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”). He cites this John Campea post, arguing that “torture porn” refers to films that focus on torture to the exclusion of all other considerations, as exhibit A. In this case I think the problem lies not with the term, but with the person using it–he’s clearly out to use the phrase to describe only “bad” movies with torture on them. He’s written good movies involving torture clean out of the term, in a micro example of what the “transcending the genre” crowd does with horror writ large. But just because he has doesn’t mean we have to! As the above list of horror sub-genres demonstrated, we horror fans have embraced any number of labels with the scent of disrepute lingering about them, and I don’t see why a few misguided attempts to conflate “torture porn” with “horror movies that suck” should steer us away from doing so again.

Steven’s second example of a rival, irritating “torture porn” definition is one where it’s used to attack both film and audience, indicating a film designed for people who “get off” on torture. Steven means this in the “enjoying watching other people suffer” way; Jon takes it a step further and says it implies that they enjoy watching other people suffer “in a sexual way.” Again, I wouldn’t let certain critics’ attempts to use the term to deride the films’ audience dictate whether I must use it the same way. But regarding the linguistic point, Jesse points out “food porn” as an example of a genre wherein the “porn” tag is not meant to imply that people literally get aroused by watching the Food Network (unless, of course, Nigella Lawson is on), just that the food content is designed to bypass your usual rational filters and hit you straight in the lizard brain. Along those lines I’ve seen references to kitty porn, shoe porn, and T-shirt porn (I coined that last one myself, naturally). In my view, the violence in torture porn movies and in many horror movies in general is spectacle in the filmic sense, material that through its confrontational, aestheticized, frequently plot-independent presentation is meant to bypass the typical processes by which we view and comprehend film narratives and access you in a rawer way. “Torture spectacle,” though, doesn’t have that catchy internal rhyme to it. (I kid.) If the porn fits, wear it.

Finally, Steven points out that there are, in fact, literal torture porn films, movies involving extreme S&M and sex. Well, yeah. But this just reminds me of the argument that there are literal “graphic novels,” novels containing graphic sex or violence or language or whatever. That’s certainly a drawback to that particular term–and even if it weren’t, one need look no further than From Hell artist Eddie Campbell’s blog on any given day to see that you can haggle about definitions until armageddon–but take a look at my bookshelf and you’ll find a lot of book-length comics with the words “graphic novel” above the ISBN.

Here’s Mike Mignola on Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus, his pulp-inflected new Hellboy spinoff. Which is AMAZING, by the way.

And here’s ToyFare Magazine’s Top 100 Toys of the Past 10 Years, containing oodles of stuff you didn’t know you needed. (Super-Grover!)

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!

Wizard went wall-to-wall Iron Man this weekend, posting interviews with the movie’s director Jon Favreau, stars Robert Downey Jr. and Terrence Howard, and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, plus a set visit report.

I managed to sneak a peek at the San Diego Comic Con footage from the movie, and they really seem to “get it”–more so than the past year or two of comics starring the character, if I may be so bold–from Downey’s hilariously confident yet not arrogant performance to the use of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” on the soundtrack. This could be pretty cool.

I’ve watched the Mist trailer quite a few times now, because it’s based on my favorite Stephen King short story and that’s how I roll, and one thing I meant to comment on but didn’t was how wonderful Andre Braugher is as the supermarket’s main Flat Earther, Brent Norton. In the story, Norton’s one of those trademark King “man, I can’t WAIT until he gets eaten” infuriating know-it-all types, which is a blast. But Braugher seems to be playing it extremely cool, as well he should: Norton has to be believable as a character to whom other people would rally. If his approach to the mist is tantamount to sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting “la la la la not listening to you not listening to you,” the conflict evaporates. He needs to be persuasive. I know this is just based on the trailer, but so far I’d follow Braugher’s unflappable Norton before Tom Jane’s tough-guy David Drayton.

This free-associated post title is brought to you by Lost writer Brian K. Vaughan, who’s talking about his upcoming tenure on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight comic book at, yeah you guessed it, Wizard.

I think [“Werewolf Women of the SS”] would be a great movie but I don’t know how they’re feeling now because “Grindhouse” didn’t live up to [Dimension’s] expectations. So I don’t know if they really want to make movies based on the trailers. [Laughs] I think “Grindhouse” was a great idea and doing more of them would be great but—and we’ve discussed this to death because we have the trailer and it’s the same company doing “Halloween”—the main thing that went wrong was that the average person was confused about what it was. Because there were two movies—“Planet Terror” and “Death Proof”—but the actual movie was called “Grindhouse.” I’ve talked to people I consider to be fairly intelligent and they were confused. “Like, wait, is this a movie? Do I have to pay twice?” Because movies are all the same—all the trailers, all the marketing. So when something is different, people just get confused. I just don’t think people got what it was and stayed away. I thought it was pretty self-explanatory. But the concept of “Grindhouse” is a very obscure concept. Not to me, not to [director Quentin] Tarantino, but to the average person. Kids today are like, “What’s a double feature? What are you talking about?”

—Rob Zombie, in a really interesting, really long interview with Wizard’s Chris Ward about Halloween and all things horror. It actually makes me want to go see Halloween, in fact.

Wizard’s also got an interview up with Tyler Mane, the new Michael Myers.

Presenting the scariest three minutes of my entire life:

At the 25-second mark I was pretty convinced I was about to die.

The movie doesn’t say, “Here’s the dirty truth about you people,” but rather, “Look into my eyes, then tell me you don’t see yourself” — a distinction that separates hacks from artists.

–Matt Zoller Seitz, “Caveman valentines: The French Connection, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs“

Okay, so I finally got to see the trailer for The Mist thanks to the good people at YouTube:

And it looks pretty good–I actually had a Mist-related nightmare last night, for whatever that’s worth, although that’s probably at least in part because the TopSpinner and that swinging boat ride at Astroland literally had me convinced I was going to fall out of them and plummet to my death. Like Jason, I was happy to see that Marcia Gay Harden’s Mrs. Carmody isn’t a Jonathan Edwards fire-and-brimstone whackjob, which works great in the story but not so much in a movie. It seems like they’re painting her as your run-of-the-mill pastel-wearing minivan-driving evangelical, who’s read every Left Behind book and sees what’s going on and is like, “Finally!” That’s actually pretty scary. The problem is that it’s nowhere NEAR as interesting as giant tentacle monsters, and the trailer seems to overvalue the scare factor of an angry church-fundraiser organizer and her yokel minions in the context of A MONSTER APOCALYPSE. As for the SFX that have come in for some criticism, well, yeah, I hate boring glory shots of what the computer team hath wrought as much as the next guy, and we’re not talking Weta Digital here. But on the other hand I love the Mist monsters so much that I’m not sure how much I’ll care. We’ll see.

Also on the giant monster invasion beat, MTV’s Movie Blog has posted a Dragon Wars creature gallery, and it’s pretty bitchin’. (Via Cinematical.) This movie is already experiencing some “the effects suck!” backlash, and let’s face it, the effects will probably be noticeably cheesy. But also let’s face it, so what? This isn’t like The Host where we’re all supposed to think the ridiculous-looking giant monster is a new milestone in horror filmmaking–it’s a Godzilla-like B-movie. If primitive stop-motion and guys in suits still delight us while we’re watching the just-for-kicks monster movies of yore, I don’t think digital should be any different.

Finally, they’re making a movie out of the old arcade video game Joust, the one where you fly around on giant ostriches and fight pterodactyls who eat eggs, if I recall correctly. (Via Cinematical again.) The high concept is “Gladiator meets Mad Max,” which on the one hand is cool, and on the other hand sounds like one of those comic books that are so common right now that exist primarily as mercenary glorified movie pitches. Let’s just hope they keep the flying ostriches.