The pretty woman as helpless victim of the evil maniac/torturer/rapist has been a cliche of horror movies for as long as there have been horror movies and the idea of the uppity bitch getting her comeuppance from the man she spurned is even older than that (listen to some murder ballads someday for some examples). Torture or the threat of torture has likewise been a long staple of horror and filthy exploitation movies have a long tradition as well.
But what is new is the open voyeurism with which torture porn movies like Saw or Hostel have been embraced by the American movie audience. These no longer are movies in which torture is just one part of the horror, but the main attraction. And now it seems there’s a new movie on the same times, Captivity which goes just that little bit further, combining the promise of torture porn with the old bitch getting her comeuppance revenge plot, starring professional victim straight out of 24 Elisha Cuthbert. From the post
at Kindly Póg Mo Thón it seems to combined the worst in misogyny with the worst in torture voyeurism:
You know Captivity, the movie with the torture-porn ad campaign, including a huge four-panel billboard in LA, showing Elisha Cuthbert being Abducted, Confined, Tortured and Terminated. I’ve seen her being buried in sand on the side of a bus stop in New York, and seen her crying behind a chain-link fence that she held with her bloody fingers on the subway.
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My brother worked on it. He doesn’t have a credit, but he worked part-time on the crew during the shoot in Moscow, where he lived at the time, in 2005. Before it became torture-porn. When it was “just” a movie about a psycho who kidnapped a model whose only crime was not being available to him and held her captive in his basement. Before the eyeball milkshakes, designed to appeal to Elisha Cuthbert’s “fan base” and the people who dig the Saw movies. And bonus! The emotionally-stunted, pretty-people-hating psycho kidnapper is fat.
It reminded me of something. It reminded me of Abu Ghraib, which showed the same confusion of sex and torture. At Abu Ghraib prisoners weren’t just tortured and humiliated, their captors used sex as torture, creating images reminiscent of BDSM porn, which was also how it was defended by the likes of Rush “druggie” Limbaugh. (Forgetting real BSDM practicioners of course don’t rape people…) I’m convinced that for a large number of Americans, Abu Ghraib gave them permission to enjoy torture: if the president allowed it, it must be alright. Hence the market for Saw and Hostel and Captivity.