"Torture Porn" Makers Shrug Off Label

By Rachel Corbett, Women's eNews. Posted March 20, 2008.

(WOMENSENEWS) -- When the movie "Hostel" raked in $19 million on its debut weekend and gripped the No. 1 spot for a week in 2005, some critics heralded the comeback of horror, which had been in a box office slump for a decade.

But to others, the film's shocking violence and grisly torture scenes marked the beginning of a descent into a subgenre that New York magazine film critic David Edelstein dubbed "torture porn."

Women have long borne the brunt of on-screen terrorizing says Jill Soloway, a consulting producer of ABC's TV show "Dirty Sexy Money." But she says the difference is the element of torture in movies that followed "Hostel," such as "Captivity," which prompted a storm of criticism for its graphic ads.

"There's all this blood spurting and it's like waiting for the money shot in a porn movie," says Soloway.

Eli Roth, who directed "Hostel" and its sequel, "Hostel Part II," and other directors say the term torture porn misrepresents their work, which depicts exaggerated violence as a way of expressing horror with real violence and war.

"Torture porn is an absurd term," Roth said in a phone interview. "People are forgetting that it's not real violence."

In Roth's first "Hostel" film, three U.S. frat boys visiting European red-light districts are lured to Slovakia, where they've been promised a village full of beautiful, sex-starved natives and are subjected to decapitation, chest-drilling and cannibalism.

The film's female characters receive similar treatment, but often while they are naked or dressed in lingerie. The leading woman in the sequel, "Hostel Part II," is nearly raped but ultimately outsmarts her attacker by pretending he arouses her, catching him off guard and castrating him. "The film is about control in sexual power," Roth said.

Lindsey Horvath, who works in film advertising and is president of the National Organization for Women's Hollywood chapter, doesn't see it that way. "We think the term is devastatingly accurate," she said about calling the films torture porn. Both she and Soloway emphasize that they do not want to censor the films but have organized against graphic, torture-porn advertisements, since they are in public view, where onlookers don't make an active choice about seeing the images.

Controversial Billboard Ads

Last March, Soloway, Horvath and others campaigned to remove billboard ads for "Captivity" that depicted actress Elisha Cuthbert being gagged by a black-gloved hand, tubes shoved up her nose and left for dead with one breast about to fall out of her shirt. The words on the ad were: "Abduction," "Confinement," "Torture" and "Termination."

The Los Angeles-based Motion Picture Association of America rejected the ads on the grounds they were too indecent for public display. The ads ran anyway -- appearing on some 30 billboards across Los Angeles -- although they were eventually pulled a week later by the After Dark production company. The company claimed the wrong files had been mistakenly sent to the printer.

Upset that the ads ran, activists then pressured the association to remove the R rating given to "Captivity," and make it unrated, to restrict its appearance in theaters and video stores. The Motion Picture Association suspended the "Captivity" rating, delaying its release from May until July, when it eventually grossed $2.6 million at the domestic box office.

"Captivity" director Courtney Solomon took his depictions of sadism one step further by hosting a premiere party for the film with a sado-masochistic theme. He hired the SuicideGirls -- punk rock West Coast strippers -- to spank guests and chain each other up in provocative positions. Adding to the ambience was a shirtless man suspended from a rack by piercings in his flesh.

See more stories tagged with: gender, media, feminism, torture, movies

Rachel Corbett is a Women's eNews intern and freelance writer based in New York City.

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