Horror's the New Porn

Joss Whedon comes out against ‘Captivity.'


Whedon’s the guy who wrote Buffey the Vampire Slayer and the Serenity TV series and movie. We think he may be on to something.

We saw the Captivity billboards in LA when they first went up. Our initial thought was they were stupid and disturbing. (They were soon removed.) The new ad for Hostel II bugs us too. (It's brilliant, and the voice they use is outstanding. Best vilain's voice since Darth Vader. But... take a look. )

And the recent movie Turistas. Great take on the rising fear that the rest of the world hates us, but it doesn't really get going until they eviscerate the young coed. Sequence is like some horrible episode of Camp Crystal Lake:CSI.

No question horror’s big right now. Part of “a return to the extreme, graphic violence that characterized much of the type of low-budget, exploitation horror” of the 70's, as described by Wikipedia. But there's a new element that perhaps wasn't there before -- explicit, graphic violence and torture. We are now in an era when some of our best filmmakers are producing films that spend the 1st half teasing us with half-naked tomatoes, then spend the raining hour torturing and dismembering those same women (and occasionally young dudes.) It’s the new pornography.

From an advance review of Hostel II , posted as we were writing this:

"Someone needs to explain to me how the hell the torture sequences got past the MPAA Ratings board. Most of the sequences not only involve blood, decapitation, and brutal violence, but also sex. That’s right, Eli Roth has successfully gotten the MPAA to okay sequences that involve both violence and sex at the same time (this is something they’ve had trouble with in the past). The first torture sequence was so much for one of my other reviewer friends that he ran from the theater. Not because he didn’t like the movie, not because he wasn’t enjoying the film, but because he was getting physically sick." via iFilm blog.

We never bought into the “women as sex objects is degrading” bandwagon, but this latest escalation's still disturbing.

Photo via flickr