Why 'Torture Porn' Isn't

Eli Roth's Hostel movies are a slightly different story, but then again, they're quite different from each other, too. The first is an unabashed exploitation movie, primarily influenced by Takashi Miike, the Japanese cult favorite who cranks out as many as three new movies per year, frequently with incoherent plots and over-the-top cartoonish violence, but who's best-known here for the more artful and restrained Audition (which nonetheless culminates in a guy getting his feet cut off with piano wire). Hostel, which features a cameo by Miike, begins with about a half-hour of ridiculously beautiful naked European girls, then sends our heroes—a couple of dumb-ass, college-aged American tourists and their Icelandic companion backpacking across Europe—off to be tortured and slaughtered by rich businessmen who have paid for the privilege. None of what follows can be called realistic—a guy slips on blood and accidentally chainsaws himself, a Japanese girl has her face melted until her eyeball hangs out—but it's worth noting that never once is the audience invited to take pleasure in the pain of the heroes, or feel sympathy for the villains. Unlike Jigsaw, or Freddy Krueger, there's nothing appealing about Hostel's bloodthirsty bourgeoises whatsoever, and we root for their comeuppance, which they mostly get.

The recent Hostel: Part IIplays things less campily than the first and does invite us to see things from the villains' point of view, though it ultimately ends up mocking them. The idea here is similar to the thesis posited by the Tyler Durden character in Fight Club: When the real world traps you, you can learn how to feel alive again by committing violence. Roth goes further, by having his characters believe that killing someone will make them "real" men, only for them to realize, after it's too late, that it only makes them crazy. Roth has said this is a satire of the military mindset in Iraq, but Hostel: Part II also makes an allusion, mid-film, to Elizabeth Bathory, the infamous Hungarian countess who bathed in the blood of young virgins in hopes of staying young. It proved as futile, of course, as the kills our misguided businessmen make in the hope of reinvigorating their own fading youth.

For all the howls of contempt Hostel: Part II has received—after watching a bootlegged copy, Movie City News' nominally liberal David Poland ranted about a "coarsening of the culture," like some puritanical televangelist might—there actually isn't much gore onscreen, especially relative to Roth's previous films (the disease movie Cabin Fever being by far the goriest—and based on mysterious life-threatening illnesses Roth himself contracted over the years). Roth does a lot with sound and cutaways in Hostel: Part IIto make you think you're seeing more than you are, and though the climactic act of violence is quite explicit, it isn't torture.

Director Roland Joffé's Captivity is less defensible, as it isn't "about" anything more than the psychological torture of a victim who must fight her way to freedom. But it's notable that many of the film's tortures—being force-fed eyeballs, getting buried in sand, crawling through tight spaces—are only slightly more extreme than many of the stunts on TV's Fear Factor, where contestants do such things voluntarily.

When Paris Hilton went to jail, people cheered and mocked her screams for her mother, yet in Captivity, when a similarly vapid supermodel is imprisoned and tormented, those of us who enjoy watching it are called misogynist and sick. Funny, I didn't hear anybody say that about those who enjoyed Paris' real-life captivity, but God forbid someone should make a movie in which Elisha Cuthbert acts like she's being abused in a fictional setting because that would be sexist.

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Every successful horror movie that comes to my mind features the same basic formula—a character, or group of characters, is tormented for most of the movie by something dangerous or evil. The torment may not take the form of actual torture, but it's certainly no shopping spree either, whether it's merely ghostly noises keeping a person awake all night, or an evil demon possessing bodies and committing mass murder. One or multiple heroes survive the torment, figure out the key to overcoming it, and get a big cathartic moment in which he/she/they triumph over the adversary. Such moments may be fleeting—nowadays, especially, the evil thing/person is likely to turn the tables once more at the very end. But in all the best horror movies, the cathartic moment is there, which is crucial to our own mini-exorcisms as viewers with fears. One of the reasons David DeFalco's ultra-unpleasant Chaos—in which teens attending a rave in thewoods get brutalized by evil rednecks who look like pro wrestlers—doesn't work is that there is never any hope whatsoever for the victims: The villains' triumph is inevitable, and they never once show any vulnerability, merely commit atrocities like force-feeding a girl her own nipple till she vomits, then killing her and having sex with the corpse; you get the sense DeFalco only cares about being as depraved as he possibly can be. Similarly, the protagonists in last year's prequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning have no chance, since we know full well that Leatherface and Sheriff Hoyt can't be defeated or have their crimes exposed prior to events we've already witnessed involving them.