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Elaborate death traps and the torture of innocents: good or bad?

"Torture porn." It's a phrase I've used from time to time to reference the rise of movies (the Saw series, the Hostel series, Turistas, Chaos, and so on) featuring extended and messy deaths and punishments for its sweaty, attractive stars. You might guess that turn of phrase means I'm not much of a fan, and you'd be right. But for better or worse, torture porn is the face of modern horror movies. God help us, let's take a look.

To understand modern torture movies we must first look to the 1970’s, that heyday in American horror films when little-known guys with names like Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper were scraping together cash and friends to make some of the most disturbing films ever put to celluloid. Slasher films (as we understand them now) hadn’t really made their mark yet – Halloween, almost single-handedly responsible for the slasher glut of the 80’s, opened in 1978 – so these guys were operating in largely undefined territory. What’s a man with vision and no budget to do?

In Craven’s case, you get hired by a loose affiliation of drive-in theater owners to fill out the second slot in double-bills. Jesus tap-dancing Christ, those must have been the days; no Independent Spirit Awards, no Sundance, no IFC, just groups of mildly irresponsible merchants sponsoring undiscovered geniuses with instructions to scare the bejesus out of teenagers. The whole idea is kind of refreshing, don’t you think? I wish movies were still made that way. In fact, I wish pretty much everything was made that way.

Craven’s super-disturbing The Last House on the Left (1972) was the result, and movie horror hasn’t been the same ever since. There are no elaborate traps or gimmicky villains in Last House, just a group of ignorant thugs doing what ignorant thugs do for a good time. Imagine Beavis and Butthead with a spark of the wrong kind of imagination, and you get the idea. Young women are raped, tortured, and killed for no good reason, and when the thugs responsible find themselves quite by accident in the house of one of the girl’s parents… Well, let’s just say there are some ugly impulses lurking beneath the surface of Middle America. The Beavises and Buttheads don’t stand a chance.

It’s creepy stuff, even 35 years later. The chase scenes set to wacky music in particular remind me of a similar scene in Ravenous, and in both scenes we’re force-fed the physical comedy of someone running, vainly, for their life. Slapstick and a grim, trembling-heart sense of impending doom: A double-shot mixture both repellant and alluring. I’m squirming just writing about it.

Well, that’s very well and good. Kudos to Craven for charting new territory in celluloid horror. A fair question: What’s the point? Setting a stage of stark, pointless brutality and the ultimate nihilism that results from people doing bad things to each other seems to be a rigged game. Where’s the catharsis, the revelation? Where’s the punch line, for god’s sake? Why should we care?

Those are excellent questions, and about half the time I don’t have answers for them beyond the trite (“I don’t know, why do people pick at scabs?”) But take a second look. Note the defensive tone, and the underlining frustration of each question: the lack of a why for any of it.

Remix those questions into something a little more revealing: Something like The Last House on the Left does not follow the strictures of story. No one learns anything, or at least not anything good. Events that should lead to the peak of someone’s life lead instead to a sinkhole. Why? Why are we being made to watch this? And why, despite the lack of “why,” does it still make sense?

What Craven did, what Hooper did, what Carpenter and others did, was defy the accepted mode of storytelling by inverting it. Instead of the revelatory catharsis of the traditional story’s climax, we’re instead given people who sink to levels both familiar and unbelievable. Desperation moves otherwise ordinary folks to do the unthinkable. Yet these grim endings still feel “right,” if only because they’re symmetrical to their beginnings. They make sense, given what we’ve seen before. We just may not like what they say.

And what are they saying? Like most stories, it’s that old saw, “bad things happen to good people.” The traditional story will tell us why. X led to Y led to Z, and now it all makes sense. Now we know why so-and-so suffered, and more importantly, how it can be stopped. We want everything to be tidy, with no loose ends, and with everything explained in big neon letters.

What Craven, Hooper, et al are telling us is that more often than not there is no reason. Leatherface and Michael Myers may have tragic pasts, but we’ll never know about it; they are insurmountably Unknowable, and no amount of reason or logic will stop or slow them. The world grinds people underfoot every damn day, and nothing you or anyone else can do will stop it. There is no why. If you have trouble handling that, well, sit down with my buddy Job. He has quite a story to tell you.

Which brings me to my problem with modern torture pictures. They find their grim catharsis in the wrong place. Where the old torture pictures “proved” to us that the world was ultimately chaotic and unreasonable, the new crop focuses instead on its methods and, yes, a little of that traditional storytelling.

It wasn’t enough, for instance, that the guy pulling the strings in Saw was simply an anonymous madman. He had to be some terminally sick old guy who wants people to appreciate life. Or something. These “revelations” add nothing to the horror of the preceding – in fact, I think they rather detract from it – but the fanboys are in the director’s chairs these days, and they can’t wait to pull back the curtain and see what was “really” going on. As if that makes any difference to the guy who died crawling through barbed wire. These creators are slaves to traditional narratives, and it’s a damn shame.

But if that bungled misunderstanding of what made early torture pictures work handicaps the modern incarnations, the techno-fetishism kills them outright.

Let me explain. Or rather, I can just tell you how to spot the slow creep of techno-fetishism. Watch the original Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy vs. Jason back to back. After many years and many, many sequels to the original Nightmare, Freddy changed from monosyllabic, elemental creature of nightmare into a wise-cracking jackass with claws for hands. Jason, too, went from red herring to grim personification of Death to someone who got shot by SWAT teams. Which is scarier? Okay, now which is more lowest-common-denominator “entertaining”? The makers of Freddy vs. Jason, cleverly, knew that all actual horror had left both franchises years ago, and instead filmed what amounted to a supernatural UFC match. Entertaining, but not what you’d call true to its roots.

Modern torture films are in a similar creative slump, with the Saw films as the worst of the lot. These are films that are literally all about elaborate deaths, not as squirm-inducing portraits of nihilism but as entertainment. We do not and cannot empathize with the victims, if for no other reason than all the sets look like something out of a Nine Inch Nails video circa 1994. We are made aware of the artificiality of each scenario, which is the one thing guaranteed to kill genuine horror stone dead. All we can hope for is a mild interest in seeing how Busty Blonde #3 gets hers… an unhealthy inheritance from the slasher genre, and thanks a lot for that one, guys. Horror movies, like so many things in life, are now all about Cool Toys.

Modern torture movies, then, don’t find their grim catharsis by staring in the face of madness. It’s more about the gore, the special effects, the crazy deaths and talented stunt people. Yes, there are signs that maybe things are changing – The Devil’s Rejects was an invigorating homage and Hard Candy made it all real again – but I’m not optimistic. How could I be? I liked Last House on the Left.