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Torture Porn

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Abstract

Torture has been thematically present as a trope in the horror film since its inception in the 1930s Hollywood cycle. Torture porn is part of the post-9/11 shift in the horror film expressing a resounding surge in fear of terrorism and, specifically with torture porn, of our own ambivalence about torture and invasive government surveillance. The depiction of sex in torture porn varies from duplicitous, or menacing, to absent ( Saw ). In films of the torture porn cycle, the torture of characters, and (in mitigated form) of viewers, is constructed not only through narrative accounts of captivity and duress, but also through a range of stylistic choices. Critical reception of the torture porn cycle, given both its timely, controversial subject matter and its high voltage emotional impact, was heated, spurred interest, advanced box office, and in time furthered the decline of the cycle.

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Pinedo uses critical race theory to analyze how Get Out (2017) simultaneously engages and subverts horror film tropes to depict the disposability of black life in post-racial America, in the process, extending Clover’s figure of the Final Girl beyond its original theoretical and empirical limitations. The film’s central image is the ‘sunken place,’ a form of social death depicted as a void within which black subjectivity is constricted and isolated while a white person controls his/her fate. This chapter explores how the film and promotional strategies construct both black subjectivity and the moral monsters that would systematically degrade a class of human beings without remorse. It shows that racial politics in Get Out falls on the critical cross line between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Brown tackles thorny debates in horror studies concerning the terms “torture porn” and “Asia Extreme.” In response to the shortcomings of the two terms, Brown develops the Artaudian concept of “cinema of cruelty” in relation to two exemplary revenge horror films—the Japanese horror Audition (Ōdishon; dir. Miike Takashi, 1999) and the Korean horror Oldboy (Oldeuboi; dir. Park Chan-wook, 2003)—each of which offers engagements with graphic violence but situates that violence in a way that eludes the conceptual restrictions of “torture porn” and “Asia Extreme.”
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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: As Annette Kuhn points out in Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925, debates over film censorship are dominated by those who see it as a repressive act, an act of cutting out, of excision, of rejection, of exclusion, of freedom of expression undermined and subjects forbidden. Within these debates censorship is conceived as a problem, and questions revolve around "the extent to which prohibitions on the content of films constitute a justifiable exercise of power" (Kuhn 2). The problem with this "prohibition model," Kuhn suggests, is twofold: first, it implies that censorship is an act carried out by a singular empowered person or institution; and second, it assumes that the process of censorship can only be conceived as a "repressive" power. As such, the censor can never hold anything other than a negative relation with the rights and freedoms of others. What Kuhn sets out to demonstrate is that the power to censor texts does not lie in the hands of a single public body; instead, the regulation of cinema takes place within the context of a network of relations between a number of interrelated though frequently competing institutions, practices, and discourses. Or, as Foucault might put it, the regulatory apparatus extends beyond any single institution to a "thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions" ("Confession" 194). As a result, Kuhn suggests the regulation of cinema should be understood "not so much as an imposition of rules upon some preconstituted entity, but as an ongoing and always provisional process of constituting objects from and for its own practices" (7). Censorship, then, is always a matter for debate, and what is considered appropriate or necessary censorship is always in tension. Perhaps more important, the work of these regulatory discourses is never simply "prohibitive" or "repressive." Rather, as Foucault suggests, power is always productive in its effects. Indeed, as Lee Grieveson argues in relation to early cinema, early debates on censorship were not only directed toward the "cultural control of cinema, on what could be shown" but frequently engaged with the question of "how cinema should function in the social body" (23). As a result, these regulatory discourses not only worked to produce "censorable texts" but, in their treatment and handling of "controversial" films during this period, regulatory bodies like the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in Great Britain and the National Board of Censorship (NBC) in the United States worked to shape cinema in very specific ways. For example, after a series of highly controversial films were released in Great Britain in the early 1910s the BBFC chose to refuse all health education films a certificate not because "such films might be 'indecorous,' but because the cinema was . . . not a suitable place to air matters of potential controversy . . . Cinemas, in other words, were seen as exclusively for 'entertainment' films, and entertainment films were to be neither educational nor controversial" (Kuhn 66). Similarly, in the United States the NBC was forced to seriously reconsider its policy of promoting cinema as a site of public education after the release of two highly controversial "white slave" films in 1913. It admitted that the "lack of dialogue and emphasis on the dramatic" made film a "difficult medium" to achieve educative goals and concluded that cinemas were "primarily places of amusement and not of serious discussion and education" (qtd. in Grieveson 184), prompting the nascent American film industry to move away from the production of potentially controversial "educational" films and focus instead on "the self-enclosed space of the fictive and the harmlessly 'entertaining'" (Grieveson 184). As Grieveson suggests, far from "repressing" the film industry, the regulatory debates that unfolded in the early years of the twentieth century significantly contributed to the American film industry's self-definition as a producer of entertainment and significantly shaped the development of the fictional, narrative, and ideological norms central to classical Hollywood cinema. However, while the practices of these censorship bodies may well have been "productive," they were not exactly "libertarian." And although institutions like the BBFC, the NBC, and later the Hays Office were set up in order to guard against the threat...
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Technological innovations have meant that the way images of the victims of war and other categories of body horror are procured and disseminated has changed. Soldiers in theatre may record what they witness, and upload this material online. Terrorist groups have staged the executions of hostages for the camera and distributed this imagery via the internet. Thus, the circulation of body horror is enabled in ways that evade the prerogatives of the mainstream press to produce news which accords with notions of “taste and decency”, using practices which protect publics from imagery which may cause harm yet also often map with a propagandist function to conceal the carnage of war from public view. The essay explores online spectatorship which takes place outside that which is deemed appropriate for the publics of news, arguing that we must move beyond the reductive ways in which looking at body horror has been conceptualized. Neither witnessing, as the posited correct form of spectatorship, nor the pervasive pornographic analogy used to render moral judgment on such looking account for the diversity of spectatorial positions taken up by those who choose to look at online imagery of the dead and suffering.
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Commissioned and edited to appeal to a crossover Film and Music Studies readership, Terror Tracks is an anthology that analyses the use of music and sound in the popular genre of Horror cinema. Focusing on the post-War period, contributors analyse the role of music and sound in establishing and enhancing the senses of unease, suspense and shock crucial to the genre. The anthology shows the various patterns of use an inflection in a range of scores – orchestral, popular, rock and electronic – and how these relate to non-musical sound. Lively and accessible, Terror Tracks is an important contribution to study of Horror cinema.
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