The Problem of Saw Torture Porn

The Saw films initiated in 2003 byJames Wan and Leigh Whannell rep-resent the most lucrative horror fran-

chise of the new century, and, with EliRoth’s two Hostel films (released in 2006and 2007), figure as the most prominentexamples of a reactionary tendency of thegenre as it descends into what is popularlyknown as “torture porn,” a form alarmingin its diminishing of the genre, and its disre-gard of the psychological content and socialcriticism of the horrorfilm at its height (al-though Saw and itssequels try mightily tomask their intellectualbankruptcy and retro-grade politics).

An attempt to evaluate these films seri-ously provokes doubt about such a project’sworth. Excruciating forms of torture andfree-form bloodletting seem to be their chiefdraw, not the inane moralizing that tries toprovide intellectual cover. The numerousgory tableaux of Saw tend to make one seethem as further indicators merely of a brain-dead culture rather than inextricably linkedto the political reaction and cynicism thatpervades the cycle, making Saw a perfectemblem of the recent era’s rightist ideology.Most important, the cycle ispart of a tendency that jetti-sons the horror film’s mostprogressive aspects, a pro-ject visible over the last thir-ty years.

The bloodshed of theSaw films contains a strongelement of one-upmanship,as steadily increased budgetspermit the filmmakers topursue more extravagantways of destroying thehuman body for the delecta-tion of the male adolescentaudience, constructed assuch regardless of age orgender. Fanzines and Web-sites discuss the forms oftorture in the Saw films (anude woman sprayed withice water in a freezer locker;

a woman shoved into a pit of syringes; awoman decapitated by shotgun blasts) to thenear-total exclusion of context, aside fromoutright absurd ruminations about the vil-lain’s motivations. The consequences of vio-lence for the individual and society, for allthe bogus moralizing of these films, isnowhere in evidence. Indeed, if Saw is anindicator, the lessons about screen violencetaught by Penn, Peckinpah, Aldrich, Siegel,Scorsese, or master horror directors such as

George A. Romero, seem lost on the currentgeneration of filmmakers and audiences.But the franchise is important, at the symp-tomatic level, as a measure of the possibledefeat by the contemporary film industry ofone of the most contentious and subversivegenres.

The horror film has fallen on hard timesafter distinguished beginnings in theWeimar cinema, notable contributions atUniversal Studios in the Thirties, and inter-esting or at least curious films from Val

Lewton, Terence Fisher, William Castle, andRoger Corman, among others. The Sixtiessaw the emergence of the horror genre assubversive form, an impulse well chronicledby Robin Wood in his pivotal, much-anthologized essay, “An Introduction to theAmerican Horror Film.” Hitchcock’s Psycho(1960) and The Birds (1963), Polanski’sRosemary’s Baby (1968), and GeorgeRomero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)established the genre as keenly critical of

middle-class life and allits supporting institu-tions, particularly thepatriarchal nuclear fami-ly. Most important, thehorror film began toeschew the supernatural

in favor of the psychological, as the genrelooked to horror as the product of middle-class life, not caused by external demons ora mad scientist’s freak accident. The genreinvestigated the neurosis that is basic, as theheirs of Freud inform us, to the creation ofnotions of normality and otherness. Evenwhere the supernatural appeared it waslargely a device for the exploration of socialoppression—in Rosemary’s Baby and RobertWise’s The Haunting (1963), ghosts anddevils are emblems of the entrapment of the

female by patriarchy.But the radical current of the cin-

ema—in the horror film and else-where—faded with the cooptation ofSixties resistance movements. Thepsychological themes of the horrorfilm, with their adjacent social criti-cism, became grossly transmogrifiedinto the misogynist teen-kill “slash-er” films of the Eighties, the mostdegraded example being the Fridaythe 13th cycle. The most representa-tive moment of the collapse of thehorror film’s subversive agenda isJohn Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)with its intriguing psychological pre-lude disregarded by the narrativeentirely as the “evil” masked killer(so described by his psychiatrist)becomes the unstoppable, undermo-tivated bogeyman of Eighties horrorcinema.

The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) is the murderous protagonistof the Saw series of films. (photo courtesy of Photofest).

The latest fashion in fear or politically

toxic mortality tales? Make your choice.

The Problem of Saw:“Torture Porn” and

the Conservatism ofContemporary Horror Films

by Christopher Sharrett

32 CINEASTE, Winter 2009 A SPECIAL FOCUS ON THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM

32 SAW ARTICLE 11/4/09 8:53 PM Page 32

With the Reagan era, the horror filmdegenerated into the archetypalthrill ride representative of the cor-

poratized, poststudio cinema. The subversivecomponent nearly vanished, as the genrewas relegated to a lowbrow vehicle forshouting “boo!” that its snobbish attackersaccused it of being since its inception. Fansof the genre have taken heart in recent yearswith Romero’s return (Land of the Dead[2005], Diary of the Dead [2008]), someentries into the “Masters of Horror” TVseries, especially Joe Dante’s Homecoming,and one or two reasonably intelligentremakes, including Alexandre Aja’s versionof The Hills Have Eyes (2006). All of thesefilms seem a response to the atrocity thatwas the Bush era.

But there is substantial reason to curbour enthusiasm, especially given the prob-lematical influence of the serial-killer filmsomnipresent in the Nineties, the worstimpulses of which are manifest in the Sawfilms. There is no underrating the impact ofSaw; at this writing there are six films in thecycle and a 3-D Saw on the horizon. TheInternet is clotted with mindless palaverabout the supposed moral virtues of thecycle’s monstrous protagonist, with Web-sites dedicated to dissecting (if you will) therighteousness of the villain/hero’s motiva-tions (the assumption is, of course, thatthese motivations are adequately on display,developed in the cycle’s exposition).

The films concern the fiendishly cleverplots of a terminally-ill cancer patient

named John Kramer, aka the Jigsaw Killer(Tobin Bell), who has already achieved sta-tus as a horror icon. Jigsaw is in the tradi-tion of the Ming the Merciless-style, omni-scient villain whose most distinguishedincarnation is probably Dr. Mabuse; hismost degraded realization in the recent peri-od is as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter inthe risible Silence of the Lambs (1991), thenin a host of highly derivative films, even theintriguing, often ingenious Se7en (1995) towhich Saw owes more than a little, and whichmay be representative, as Richard Dyer sug-gests (in a BFI monograph) of a pronouncedsocial disintegration. While Dyer points tovirtues in Se7en, I think at this point it maybe instructive principally as a compromisedindex of an apocalypticism rampant in ourculture with the general dismissal not onlyof Sixties radicalism but all tendenciestoward social transformation. The same pointmight be made regarding the Saw films.

Dressed in a black-and-red bathrobewhose hood gives it the appearance of aninquisitor’s vestments, Jigsaw devises intri-cate, usually deadly traps with which to“test” negligent fathers, cheating husbands,drug-addicted kids, “career women” whoignore their family duties, and so on; thetests are for the purpose of teaching the truevalue of life. At times Jigsaw resembles aNew Age therapist as he encourages obses-sive cops to “let go” of their fixations. Aconceit of the series is that Jigsaw isn’t reallya serial murderer but a moralist whosedevices are created to teach the erring vic-

tims the reality of their indulgent foolishnessas they attempt to free themselves by mak-ing a decision that will supposedly aid inovercoming their sins (e.g., a voyeur mustchoose between losing his eyes or being tornto pieces); the derivations from Se7en are inthese instances especially glaring. Thenotion of teaching the good old-fashionedvalues through torture and murder mighttend to make one read the Saw films as aparody of the Bush years, were there any realsigns of intelligence on display, including atouch of humor given a manifestly ridicu-lous character and situation.

But the filmmakers are far too smitten bythe idea that Jigsaw might “have something”to his morality. The films are enamored ofthe cleverness of their plot structures, whichare not nearly as intricate (or interesting) asthe flash cuts and wrenching, nonlinearediting would make them appear. The cycleis intended as one long, complex narrative,with the viewer obliged to come back foreach installment to fully “get it.” The trickisn’t uncommon to serial art, but in thisinstance depends on a conceit that has becomeprevalent in film scenarios, chiefly because itis a very easy way of getting a story told, andwith a touch of mystical wonderment.

Like any number of films of the lasttwenty years (Magnolia, Crash), the Sawfilms partake of notions of synchronicityand coincidence, conceits drawn in the pre-sent moment from “chaos theory,” with itsidea that “everything fits together,” and thatall lives are interlocked at some cosmic

Two of Jigsaw’s victims await their grisly fate, unless they learn their moral lesson in time, in Saw IV (2007) (photo courtesy of Photofest).

A SPECIAL FOCUS ON THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM CINEASTE, Winter 2009 33


level—it takes a genius like Jigsaw, the cruelbut necessary father, to point this out. Thekiller’s jigsaw insignia (he cuts a puzzle piecefrom the bodies of his subjects) suggests thatsuffering will eventually lead to a full andgenerous understanding of a seeminglymeaningless existence (and viewers to acomprehension of the series), a notion notout of sync with Christian doctrine. Thepuzzle framework of the Saw films is itself atopic for discussion. While I know little ofchaos theory’s scientific value, it seems tohave been one of many concepts influencingpostmodernity’s conservative drift, replac-ing political analysis with metaphysics in avariety of disciplines.

The Saw franchise is another of the post-modern cinema’s examples of a vacuous cri-tique of capitalist society from a decidedlyconservative position. The sickly-greenpostindustrial world of Jigsaw, an environ-ment whose overcast, bilious color palettehas become the norm in numerous filmsprojecting the nation as wasteland, suggestscapitalist culture as a “fallen world” at theend of its road—for vaguely moral ratherthan political and economic reasons. Jig-saw’s workspace is festooned with the debrisof a collapsed industrial society, his clut-tered lair simulating Dadaist installations,therefore incorporating adversarial cultureinto narratives more fascinated with wallow-ing in decay than raising questions as to thewhys of its presence. For all his engineering

genius and sheer fortitude—considering heis dying a cancer death—Jigsaw’s worldlooks very out of date, his traps made of rustedpieces of iron and precyberspace technolo-gies. He appears atavistic on various levels, themost crucial being his yearning for a moreconservative society.

Jigsaw seems at certain points to embracean absurdist worldview, acknowledging thecruel randomness of events as he imposes arigid morality, trying to make a new orderout of chaos—hence his jigsaw puzzle trade-mark. In the initial film, Jigsaw is merely acancer patient callously treated by the med-ical establishment. As the cycle progressesand more elements are ladled onto the char-acter, he is revealed as an angry husbandwhose wife suffers a miscarriage while takingcare (foolishly) of loony drug addicts at aclinic, thereby depriving Jigsaw of a son. Theson is finally incarnated as an ugly motor-ized puppet peddling about on a tricycle,programmed to announce via strategically-placed televisions the impending “games” ofJigsaw to his targeted victims. That theunborn son is manifest as a monstrous pup-pet speaks less to Jigsaw’s grief and self-loathing than his rage at the destruction ofthe nuclear family—his son is not to be, inpart because his wife isn’t good at takingorders. The violation of the Oedipal trajectoryis at the heart of the franchise, with Jigsawthe angry white male lashing out at a societyhe will either remake in his image or obliterate.

A dominant theme of the series is thesearch for a young sidekick who will carryon Jigsaw’s work, another concern the fran-chise derives from Se7en and key assump-tions of adventure fiction. In Se7en, thesense of apocalypse is especially heightenedas the older cop Somerset (Morgan Free-man) can no longer teach, and the youngcop Mills (Brad Pitt) refuses to learn. Theolder man/ young acolyte construct is basicto genre fiction (its most sublime renderingmay be Ford’s The Searchers, its most ham-fisted Star Wars). The idea that patriarchallaw has found itself in an epoch where it canno longer be transmitted to adept male dis-ciples causes an undercurrent of hysteria inrecent cinema. Not surprisingly, the centralcharacters of Se7en and Saw reach back totradition as a way of asserting their authori-ty and wisdom. The Morgan Freeman char-acter in Se7en listens to Bach as he studiesDante and Thomas Aquinas for clues tofinding a murderer influenced by thesesources. Jigsaw is a particularly erudite engi-neer and universal mind whose Torquema-da-like lessons seem a last-ditch attempt topreserve stability in a disorderly world. Thesense of disorder in Saw, from the clutteredmise-en-scène to the manic editing to thenauseating color scheme, exteriorizes themale’s panic. Although Jigsaw seems self-possessed enough, there is a sense of theworld over which he presides slipping intochaos, conveyed by a lighting scheme that


Another of Jigsaw’s victims is tortured—for his own good, of course—in Saw IV (photo courtesy of Photofest).


refuses sunlight (again, Se7en), except inflashbacks connoting a lost golden age(moments in Jigsaw’s married life). Thebourgeois household under siege, symboli-cally or in fact, has for some years been anemblem of the decline of the West, with Sawa relevant representation.

Jigsaw’s pursuit of a disciple is frustrated.He seems on the verge of success with a youngdrug addict named Amanda (ShawneeSmith) who claims that Jigsaw “helped” herby subjecting her to a skull-crunching devicethat became a logo of theseries. But instead of “tutor-ing” subjects by allowingthem options (lose yourarms but gain a new life),Amanda ends up becominga flat-out killer, and onewith an exceptionally dirtyvocabulary and overwroughttemperament. The femalestrays too far from paternal will; she is thearchetypal hysteric who can’t get past herneurosis to understand the male’s superiorwisdom. She is replaced by an unwholesomecop named Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), whomay well have been Jigsaw’s initial choice (ifmy reading of Saw V is correct). He seems atleast as savage as Amanda, but, at this momentof the franchise, he is on the ascendancy,although there is a strong sense that Jigsaw’squest will come to naught, since “true” moral-ity is nowhere to be found, the remainingrighteousness in Sodom long gone.

Jigsaw, the disgruntled, middle-class white male professional, fits in along tradition of male characters fedup with democratic institutions, deter-mined to set their own rules. TheWestern is of course replete with suchfigures, but Jigsaw might be associatedwith the resurgence of the new vigi-lante cinema, including the remake ofWalking Tall (2004), as well as DeathSentence (2007), based on the sameBrian Garfield source novel that pro-duced the Death Wish cycle of the1970s. (It is not coincidental thatJames Wan, Saw’s creator, directedDeath Sentence.) More significant isNeil Jordan’s The Brave One (2007),structurally the most dependent on theoriginal Death Wish. The new WalkingTall may be the most dismissible of thecycle, its one claim to the new “liberal-ism” of the genre the casting of formerwrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson,a nonwhite actor, whose presence doeslittle to unite issues of race to its stalestory of the armed strong man restoringthe beleaguered community.

The new vigilante cycle is smartenough to provide various liberal ideo-logical patinas to conceal its agenda,making Saw’s presence all the moredisturbing, suggesting that the per-ceived need for liberal cover is paperthin. The new vigilante is cannily

embodied in the Jodie Foster character ofThe Brave One. By casting a lesbian reasonablyopen about her sexuality, directed by a “serious”filmmaker, the film axiomatically gainssome legitimacy—the poster art, showing adistraught woman clutching her head in tor-mented meditation, her other hand limplyholding a pistol, seems to want to debunkthe notion of the phallicized woman madepopular in mass art over the last three decades,adjacent to the cooptation of feminism (theliberal sentiment is limited—I’ve noted that

the DVD art has Foster aiming a 9mm at theconsumer). Foster’s character is a street gun-fighter, but a pensive, self-critical one, whoquotes D.H. Lawrence’s notion of the essentialAmerican soul as hard, isolate, and a killer.

Yet for all her self-awareness she isn’tinvolved in fighting, say, gaybashers. She isresolutely heterosexual, and at the film’sheart is vengeance for an assault on the nor-mative middle-class couple (that Foster’smurdered fiancé is nonwhite does nothingto mitigate the idea of a specific race andclass under siege). At the same time, the

film’s despair seems precipitated by a crisisin confidence, the sense that the Bush crowdhas delegitimized bourgeois institutions bypromoting a climate of fear (9/11 allusionspepper the film). The anxiety is not that farremoved from that of the post-Vietnam/Watergate legitimation crisis that propelledthe earlier vigilante films, and the disasterfilms that thought it good that everythingshould go up in flames since the empire’sprospects for conquest were suddenly sodiminished. In the current decade, as in the

Seventies, the project of thevigilante cinema is aboutrelegitimation, about beingable, to use a line from TheBrave One, to “walk thestreets unafraid.” While thefilm pretends to denounceviolence (“the brave one” is theperson who lives without thegun), it shamelessly targets

poor minorities, necessarily portrayed as total-ly deranged, with no more embarrassmentthan the Charles Bronson Death Wish filmshad about such focused racial signification.The most important unifying principle link-ing the Death Wish cycle to The Brave One isthe dismissal of social institutions, assumedto be effete and worthless, and the pickingup of the gun not in support of revolutionaryviolence but as validation of the bourgeoissubject’s right to strike out at a dysfunction-al system whose key role is to protect themiddle class and its property rights.

Neither The Brave One nor the newWalking Tall ushered in a new wave ofvigilante films per se, but we mustn’tbe too literal-minded in studying theterrain. The incredible popularity ofcomic-book-superhero films, theiradolescent awfulness one index of thepolitical consciousness they represent,with a rebooted, “darkened up” Bat-man in the lead, speaks to the need ofthe pissed-off citizen to strike back, orto find a strong dad who can.

The Saw films are predicated onthis essential principle. While Jigsawwanders about his lair in a robe ratherthan roams the streets with a gun, hiskinship with the vigilante tradition isevident and noteworthy. The poisonedurban decay that makes up the mise-en-scène of the franchise is not theproduct of a collapsed social system,even when the occasional bigwig is thevictim (a soft-headed judge is torturedwith a cascade of pig innards). Individualchoice, the clarion call of the Americancivilizing project, informs Saw and isits consistent ideology. Although Jig-saw’s project seems to be one of “re-formism,” his course is one of obliteration,including self-annihilation. The impulsetoward destruction and suicide hasbeen basic to the conservative vision ofAmerica since its inception, preferringconflagration to rational social change.

“Jigsaw, the disgruntled, middle-class

white male professional, fits in a long

tradition of male characters fed up with

democratic institutions, determined to

set their own rules.”

Michael (Noam Jenkins) tries to free himself from oneof Jigsaw’s deadly torture devices in Saw II (2005)(photo courtesy of Photofest).



Eli Roth’s Hostel films looked immedi-ately suspect due to their affiliationwith the loutish Quentin Tarantino,

who serves as producer and promoter.Indeed, Tarantino’s sensibility is clearly ondisplay, including incessant, pointless allu-sions to other films (including Tarantino’s),and a child braggart’s consciousness of cine-matic formulae. The vacuity of Tarantinohas, sadly, shaped the outlook of a sizablesector of the new filmmaking generation, hisself-absorbed nihilism not yet deterringviewers from regarding him as a formidableauteur (although Inglourious Basterds mayput a dent in his façade).

But even with the Tarantino burden,Roth’s films, particularly Hostel: Part II,would seem to be the most self-consciouslypolitical phase of torture porn. Roth’sattempt to portray capitalist society of theBush era as based solely on predation isapparent enough, but Roth seems not tohave noticed that the point was made, andwith considerably more wit, intelligence,and political awareness in Dawn of the Dead(1978) more than thirty years ago, a workinsightful enough to know that predationisn’t unique to one phase of the capitaliststate. Roth’s statements in interviews andDVD commentaries reveal a mind bothconfused and uncommitted. While he

decries the Bush era, he separates it from theimperialist project basic to the nation’s his-tory. He supports the death penalty, is “notagainst war in general,” and above all retainsallegiance to a basic vision of his audiencethat necessarily informs his art: “They wantto see people gettin’ fucked up—bad!”1 Wehave, then, the time-honored problem of anart work partaking amply of the problems itsupposedly wants to criticize.

The Hostel films concern college kids onsexual holiday in Eastern Europe—boys inthe first film, girls in the second—who areset upon by a wealthy, male-dominated“hunt club” that pays huge amounts ofmoney to its contractor to capture, mutilate,and kill feckless young travelers. The filmsborrow awkwardly from the Hansel-and-Gretel narrative framework that informsmuch horror. The torrents of blood in thesefilms are not mitigated in the slightest byperceptive wit or inflections to the genre.There is the very ponderous introduction ofcharacters, an equally ponderous journeydeeper into danger, the slow reveal of suspi-cious characters, and then the prolongedfinal act wherein the youngsters meet theirfate. What some see as brilliantly ironicstrikes me as suggesting that the concept ofirony has become lost: the sheepish, hen-pecked businessman, rather than his more

macho buddy, predictably becomes the Id-turned-loose in Hostel: Part II. And Roth’ssense of equivalency is ill conceived. Hewants to show how the young, thoughtlesspredators become the prey, but the youngpeople, although self-involved and obnox-ious, aren’t particularly predatory (Rothseems not to have noticed that gender rela-tions in patriarchal culture have an inher-ently exploitive aspect not confined to richkids on vacation), and are certainly the mostattractive figures of these films, while theEastern European murderers are wholly sin-ister and merciless, and in several instancesrepulsive.

Compare these groups to, for example,the good and evil families in Tobe Hooper’sThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or WesCraven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977), or,more crucially, the rival families of Ford’sMy Darling Clementine (1946), Wagon Mas-ter (1950), or Anthony Mann’s remarkableMan of the West (1958). Roth’s juvenile viewof otherness is most visible in his portrait ofpostcommunist Eastern Europe, a typical“oriental” land depicted as both exotic andprofoundly threatening. The decayed factorythat is the home base of the murderers, likethe rest of the industrial wasteland por-trayed in these films, has no connection toeconomic policies of the West that

Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II (2007) actually has pretensions to political significance, but the director freely acknowledgeshis audience’s basic desires: “They want to see people gettin’ fucked up—bad.”(photo courtesy of Photofest).



destroyed not justthe Soviet state butalso the last vestigesof socialism, indeedleaving nations ripefor a parasiticaleconomy for whichRoth’s ideas find notangible, resonantmetaphor. Hostel:Part II has beenpraised for the privi-leged role it gives thefemale, particularlythe penultimatescene in which oneof the women travel-ers castrates a busi-nessman-killer, joinsthe hunt club, anddecapitates a womanwho lured her intothe killer’s lair—thewoman’s head isused as a soccer ballby a group of feralchildren, themselvesthe subject of grislyviolence earlier inthe film.

The triumphant woman of Hostel: Part IIis little more than another instance of thefemale constructed as male, internalizingfully the values of the predatory dominantsociety the film pretends to critique.Any view of the film as feminist mustconfront moments such as the film’scenterpiece, the “Countess Bathory”sequence, wherein a statuesque nudewoman from the photofantasies of Hel-mut Newton uses a scythe to slash toribbons a trussed-up young female vic-tim (who is portrayed as the homeliest,the least “with it” of the travelers, andnecessarily a target for the murderersand the audiences who enjoy the cyni-cism of the film’s assumptions).

The Saw and Hostel horror films areonly a few examples that make verydoubtful a view that the essential sub-version of the horror genre is showingsigns of return. Films such as TheDescent, Dark Water, and Silent Hillseem to relegate the female to the posi-tion of phallicized male, or to suggesther hopelessness without the male, orpunish her for neglecting her duties askeeper of the household—the latterpoint is most obvious in the endlessEnglish-language remakes of Asian hor-ror focusing on maternal duty. Of thedeluge of gory Asian horror films nowavailable in the West, the most com-pelling and intelligent seem to me KinjiFukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000), inwhich Japan’s educational system (onecould imagine the U.S. system in thesame depiction) is a monstrous institu-tion destructive of the young, teaching

murder and mayhem, and the Iron Manfilms of Shinya Tsukamoto, quasisurrealfilms suggesting the mania of the new Japan,driven insane by corporate, technologicalcapitalism. Tsukamoto’s films (now almosttwenty years old and not really representa-

tive of Asian newwave horror) por-tray a society at thebrink of exhaustionand collapse, al-though their onlyresponse is nostalgic,offering (in IronMan: Body Hammer[1992]) Ozu-likeglances of an olderJapan, perhaps astotal fantasies to givea sense of the seduc-tive and essentiallyconservative impulseof nostalgia. Yetthese films showhow gory violencecan still be intelli-gently put to use indescribing a civiliza-tion in crisis.2

It should benoted that some re-cent horror filmshave been unfairlypainted by reviewerswith the torture-

porn brush. Rob Zombie’s films seem per-ilously close to Tarantino in their obsessivefocus on pastiche, but House of 1000 Corpses(2003) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005) comeacross as raucous, anarchical celebration,

combining horror iconography withsoft-core porn (with which bluenoseshave always associated the genre) toremind us of a time when the genrecould shock tender sensibilities, even ifZombie’s work is too mannered to do so.

Confronting the torture-porn phaseof the new horror film can, of course,make one feel open to charges of prud-ishness as concerns increase, and theserious viewer will conscientiously con-sider whether or not s/he is prudish.Fans of the horror film must be pre-pared to make distinctions, and sayclearly why Dawn of the Dead is a sig-nificant work of the genre while Saw isrelative rubbish except as a symptom ofthe state of culture. It is important, Ithink, to place Saw and other suchfilms in the context of genre history,recognizing that the issue at the centerof any critique is not so much hoaryarguments about the role of violence incinema, but the regressive nature ofpopular cinema in the current moment,its sense of the worthlessness of humanbeings, and the horror film’s embraceof dominant ideas about power andrepression. �

End Notes:1 Eli Roth commentary, Hostel: Part II, SonyDVD, 2007.2 I am grateful to Tony Williams for his remarksto me about Asian horror, and for his regularbriefings in Asian Cult Cinema.

Beth (Lauren German), an art student on vacation in Italy, is capturedand tortured in Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II (photo courtesy of Photofest).

Todd (Richard Burgi), an American businessman,is involved in a murder-for-pay contract in EliRoth’s Hostel: Part II (photo courtesy of Photofest).



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The Problem of Saw Torture Porn