From what I can glean, it presupposes that (a) there are people who watch horror as one might watch porn, looking only for the gory stuff, which gets them off in some way, (b) these audiences are not interested in story or context or even suspense, but just want the gooshy parts, and (c) there are films that exist simply to deliver them.
I really hate the term "torture porn." It implies a lot, and none of it is good or flattering to fans of horror (or of porn, for that matter). Posted by Samizdata at 7:26 AM on October 26, 2015 I was just mentioning Pontypool to a college English professor with a Oxford D.Phil the other day.
But, seriously, I hope some day to see where all the Session 9 love comes from. GenjiandProust: " I would have added Pontypool (very original and tense, with a great use of a very small cast) and Session 9 (lots of atmosphere) and left off Drag Me to Hell, which has some fundamental problems, including one of the most leaden twisted ever twisted, and maybe one of the 28 Days films (do they both need to be there?), but I was really pleased to see May, which makes a nice double feature with Ginger Snaps."
Good sound design can make all the difference in a scary movie for me. When you bear in mind it was a subtitled film, and it was just the sound effects that affected her, that's pretty firm tick by the box marked 'disturbing'." It turned out just the sound of that scene was unpleasant enough to drive her out. After a few minutes she got up, gave me a look of non-approval and left. She is not at all a horror fan and held up the paper so she could ignore what was going on. However, in Audition's favour: I was watching it while my SO was reading the paper in the same room. I would likely have put Babadook ahead of Audition in terms of my personal enjoyment.
Posted by Mothlight at 7:12 AM on Octoīiffa: " I'm not really a fan of horror but have watched a decent number of these. (Actually, I don't like the term torture porn at all because I feel like there is socio-political subtext to Hostel and even the Saw movies, but Audition is pretty deliberately explicit about turning its tables on chauvinism and the male gaze - punishing its audience for its tacit complicity in and therefore approval of the shenanigans of the earlier part of the film - so that's really a bad rap to give it.) It's not fair to decry it as "porn" if there's genuine social and political meaning there. It's an interesting movie about gender stereotypes and the perniciousness of casual sexism, and the revenge scenario is about pushing those points home in the most vivid way possible.
The 1990s were kind of a lousy decade for horror movies, but if you populate that list with the movies from this list that really belong there ( Audition, Cure, and even The Ring pretty much owes its spot on this list to a predecessor that came out in the 1990s) it looks a little better and this list, covering a full 15 years, looks a little worse.īut surely The Audition is torture porn-ish? I'm a serious horror fan, but even I couldn't watch the final few scenes of that movie with my eyes open.Īudition is not "torture porn" because there's a point to the violence on screen. It might squeak in to the same list for the 1980s. Well, compared to what? I love Audition and agree that it belongs at the top of this list, but if I were making a list of the best horror movies of the 1970s, it wouldn't even be in the top 10. The face that people think this list is missing their favorite titles really just helps make the point that it was a very very good decade for horror.