Steve Jones

Northumbria University · Department of Media

Over the last century within the philosophy of mind, the intersubjective model of self has gained traction as a viable alternative to the oft-criticised Cartesian solipsistic paradigm. These two models are presented as incompatible inasmuch as Cartesians perceive other minds as “a problem” for the self, while intersubjectivists insist that socialit...

Torture Porn is a term that has generated a great deal of controversy during the last decade, critics utilizing the term to dismiss contemporary popular horror cinema as obscene and morally depraved. Arguing primarily in defence of torture-themed horror films, this book seeks to offer a critical overview and examination of the Torture Porn phenomen...

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated w...

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are...

Since the early 2000s, zombies have increasingly swarmed the landscape of popular culture, with ever more diverse representations of the undead being imagined. A growing number of zombie narratives have introduced sexual themes, endowing the living dead with their own sexual identity. The unpleasant idea of the sexual zombie is itself provocative,...

Despite being a prevalent theme in popular cinema, revenge has received little dedicated attention within film studies. The majority of research concerning the concept of revenge is located within moral philosophy, but that body of literature has been overlooked by film studies scholars. Philosophers routinely draw on filmic examples to illustrate...

Long-running horror series are reputed to yield diminishing returns (both in terms of profit and quality). At first glance, the A Nightmare on Elm Street series appears to fit that established pattern. For instance, lead antagonist Freddy supposedly ‘deteriorates’ from sinister, backlit child molester to comic-book ‘Las Vegas lounge’ stand-up act b...

This chapter explores the relationship between ‘hardcore’ horror films, and the discursive context in which mainstream horror releases are being dubbed ‘extreme’. This chapter compares ‘mainstream’ and ‘hardcore’ horror with the aim of investigating what ‘extremity’ means. I will begin by outlining what ‘hardcore’ horror is, and how it differs from...

After a seven-year hiatus, the Saw franchise returned. Critics overwhelming disapproved of the franchise’s reinvigoration, and much of that dissention centred around a label that is synonymous with Saw: ‘torture porn’. Numerous critics pegged the original Saw (2004) as torture porn’s prototype. Accordingly, critics characterised Jigsaw’s release as...

V preteklem stoletju se je na področju filozofije duha intersubjektivni model sebstva uveljavil kot prepričljiva alternativa pogosto grajane kartezijanske solipsistične paradigme. Omenjena modela sta velikokrat prikazana kot nekompatibilna, saj kartezijancem duh drugega predstavlja »problem« za sebstvo, medtem ko intersubjektivnost vztraja, da je d...

Besedilo postavi na preizkušnjo dve ustaljeni kritiški podmeni. Prva izhaja iz zagovora podžanra »mučilne pornografije« (torture porn) kot politične alegorije ameriške vojne proti terorju v času Busheve administracije. Jones opozarja, da branje mučilne pornografije kot odseva sočasnega realnega konteksta pomeni oropati ta podžanr njegovih daljnosež...

Despite the closure of virtually all original grindhouse cinemas, ‘grindhouse’ lives on as a conceptual term. This article contends that the prevailing conceptualization of ‘grindhouse’ is problematized by a widening gap between the original grindhouse context (‘past’) and the DVD/home-viewing context (present). Despite fans’ and filmmakers’ desire...

Despite its prevalence, the term " extreme " has received little critical attention. " Extremity " is routinely employed in ways that imply its meanings are self-evident. However, the adjective itself offers no such clarity. This article focuses on one particular use of the term – " extreme porn " – in order to illustrate a broader set of concerns...

To date, scholarly debate about the content of snuff-themed fiction has predominantly focused on two co-joining issues: realism and affect. That emphasis is unsurprising given snuff's ontological foundations. Unlike other horror subgenres – such as the werewolf film, the zombie movie, the slasher flick, and torture porn – simulated snuff is not pri...

‘Torture porn’ films centre on themes of abduction, imprisonment and suffering. Within the subgenre, protagonists are typically placed under relentless surveillance by their captors. CCTV features in more than 45 contemporary torture-themed films (including Captivity, Hunger, and Torture Room). Security cameras signify a bridging point between the...

In proportion to the increased emphasis placed on abortion in partisan political debate since the early 2000s, there has been a noticeable upsurge in cultural representations of abortion. This article charts ways in which that increase manifests in contemporary survival-horror. This article contends that numerous contemporary survival-horror films...

Since the early 2000s, zombies have become an increasingly significant presence in popular culture. Zombies are social monsters, epitomizing aspects of social horror. What is at once central and yet strangely absent from current debates about zombies is any detailed consideration of sex and sexuality. This oversight is startling, not least since se...

The undead have been evoked in philosophical hypotheses regarding consciousness, but such discussions often come across as abstract academic exercises, inapplicable to personal experience. Movie zombies illuminate these somewhat opaque philosophical debates via storytelling devices – narrative, characterization, dialogue and so forth – which approa...

Drawing on the well-established understanding of the zombie as metaphor for the deadening effects of consumer capitalism, this chapter seeks to account for three distinct changes that contextualise 21st century zombie fiction. The first is situational: the global economic crisis has amplified the anxieties that inspired Romero's critique of consume...

Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) and The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011) are based on a disturbing premise: people are abducted and stitched together mouth-to-anus. The consequent combinations of faeces and bloodshed, torture and degradation have been roundly vilified by the critical press. Additionally, the sequel wa...

Given that numerous critics have complained about Saw’s apparently confused sense of ethics, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to how morality operates in narrative itself. Coming from a Nietzschean perspective - specifically questioning whether the lead torturer Jigsaw is a passive or a radical nihilist - I seek to rectify that...

The aim of the following three chapters is to establish how ‘torture porn’ has been constructed as a category, outlining characteristics that have become associated with the subgenre. Part I will establish what ‘torture porn’ means, and the conditions under which those meanings are defined. The aim of examining ‘torture porn’ discourse is to clarif...

Critics’ judgments directly shape the meanings of ‘torture porn’. As Newman (1996: 134) notes, it is ‘usually film critics’ who label films, and this is certainly true of ‘torture porn’, a term that was coined and propagated by journalists. The press’s responses to torture porn are culturally powerful, gaining gravitas from the mode of disseminatio...

These are some of the hyperbolic terms used to describe ‘the 21st century’s vilest new genre: torture porn’ (N.a. 2007a). It is hard to imagine that fictional films could warrant the loathing instilled in these adjectives, and resultantly in the term ‘torture porn’ itself. Following David Edelstein’s 2006 New York article ‘Now Playing at Your Local...

Although Edelstein (2006) uses the ‘porn’ metaphor to portray contemporary horror as ‘extreme’, he remains vague about what constitutes gratuity, and why he employs ‘porn’ to convey excessiveness. His incendiary article dwells on moral ambivalence more than gore, and he barely mentions sex. That foundational imprecision is evident in subsequent con...

Tallying filmic representations with national events is an established critical mode, one that is particularly popular in horror studies. Scholars have variously deciphered 1950s horror as analogising radiation fears (Skal, 1993: 247–8), and construed Dracula as a commentary on the plight of Victorian women (Kline, 1992), for instance. More recentl...

Rambo (2008) marked the return of Sylvester Stallone's iconic action hero. What is most striking about the fourth film (as the response from reviewers testifies), is its graphic violence. My intention here is to critically engage with Rambo (2008) as rewriting the series' established aesthetic of violence. My overarching aim is to highlight how the...

Although overshadowed by its filmic adaptations (Hideo Nakata, 1998 and Gore Verbinski, 2002), Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) is at the heart of the international explosion of interest in Japanese horror. This article seeks to explore Suzuki’s overlooked text. Unlike the film versions, the novel is more explicitly focused on the line between self-...

Torture porn has been vilified on grounds that are at best unconvincing and at worst incoherent. The subgenre’s remonstrators too often ignore the content of the films themselves, and fail to make sufficiently detailed connections between the subgenre and the cultural sphere. Reactions to torture porn rarely consider what values the films apparentl...

Both the slasher movie and its more recent counterpart the 'torture porn' film centralize graphic depictions of violence. This article inspects the nature of these portrayals by examining a motif commonly found in the cinema of homicide, dubbed here the 'pure moment of murder': that is, the moment in which two characters' bodies adjoin onscreen in...

Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami's series of six seppuku films (1990) are solely constituted by images of fictionalized death, revolving around the prolonged selftorture of a lone figure committing harakiri. I contend that the protagonist's autoimmolation mirrors a formal death, each frame `killing' the moment it represents. My analysis aims to expl...

The mythic Snuff film has remained a persistent cinematic rumour since the mid-1970s. The discourses that surround Snuff are preoccupied by two factors: (a) the formal aesthetic, and (b) their alleged role as a kind of titillating pornography. Although critical narratives have been established to account for the subgenre, little has been done to un...

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identi...

Horror film sequels have not received as much serious critical attention as they deserve - this is especially true of the Saw franchise, which has suffered a general dismissal under the derogatory banner 'Torture Porn'. In this article I use detailed textual analysis of the Saw series to expound how film sequels employ and complicate expected tempo...

In this investigation of the Japanese film Kairo, I contemplate how the horrors present in the film relate to the issue of self, by examining a number of interlocking motifs. These include thematic foci on disease and technology which are more intimately and inwardly focused that the film's conclusion first appears to suggest. The true horror here,...

The article discusses the implications of the "Treehouse of Horror" Halloween specials of the animated television series "The Simpsons" to the sitcom formula of the program. It says that the Halloween episodes have indicated carnivalesque moments which disrupted the everyday routine of the show. It tells that the characterizations of carnivalesque...

This chapter explores the tentative line between erotic spectacle and horror; a judgement that is problematic given that is based on an axis of moral or ideological normality. The contexts of viewing impact on the status of ‘obscene’ images, both in terms of the communities that view them and their motivation for viewing; for sexual arousal, out of...

The James Brown song ‘I’m Real’ (1988) features lyrics regaled from James Brown’s back catalogue, alongside vocal samples extracted from his earlier hits. As one of the most sampled artists of the hip-hop era, James employed sampling in order to reclaim his position as the “Godfather of Soul” and express his disatisfaction at having his work overtl...

Decalogue 5 appears to be overtly preoccupied with the specific political issue of capital punishment, yet it is equally concerned with the larger moral contexts which are inherently social - the Law, as the film decrees, manifests our responsibility to each other. While Kieslowski presents us with a murder paradigm which is fundamentally depersona...