Autumn is upon us. Barren trees with branches that reach out like a witch’s spindly fingers, longer nights and cold breezes that make old houses creak fill the backdrop for the season of horror stories. This fall, viewers looking to be scared out of their skin will have several new movies to occupy their time.

Movies “The Town that Dreaded Sundown” and “Housebound,” both premiere this weekend. While horror movies can be fun, there are some that take the genre and turn it grotesque, a style which some call torture porn — think the “Saw” franchise, “The Last House on the Left”, “Hostel” and “Captivity.”

This strain of horror movies was at its height during the mid-2000s but has reared its ugly head again. Not only will “Saw” be re-released in theatres on Halloween to celebrate its 10th anniversary, but “Catch Hell,” which was released last Friday, focuses on the kidnap and torture of a movie star.

Torture porn takes the fun out of being scared. It brutally and graphically puts people through unimaginable harm just to see how much the audience is willing to sit through. These works of fiction push the limits of what viewers can take, and raise the bar for what people consider cruelty in real life.

David Edelstein was the first to give this sub-genre its title. In his 2006 New York Magazine Article, “Now Playing at Your Local Movieplex: Torture Porn” Edelstein points out that unlike the hack ‘em up thrillers of the past where gore included splashes of red corn syrup, today’s horror films, such as Gaspar Noe’s “Irreversible,” feature scenes of exacerbated cruelty, the most notable: a nine minute scene of a pregnant woman being anally raped.

Up until the 2000s the horror genre rarely strayed far from this plot: teenagers on a road trip ignore bad omens and are murdered one by one by a serial killer. The final girl triumphantly defeats this masked murderer and gets to escape from this night in hell without her friends, but at least with her life. See “Friday the 13th,,” “Jeepers Creepers” and “The Evil Dead.”

The torture porn industry has made a chilling development — in these films the final girl no longer exists. There is no moment of triumph for the victims. In The “Devil’s Rejects,” no one survives and in “Wolf Creek,” the killer gets away.

Also, these torture porn movies often change point-of-view, switching from the victim to villain to bystander. The audience doesn’t know whether to be anguished by the pain, impressed by the psychopath’s ingenious torture devices or troubled by their inability to help the victim. All they feel is disturbed.

Of course views of dissent point out that these are just movies, that it’s all pretend. We don’t expect to see the U.S. government fight off the Decepticons as Bay’s movies suggest, nor are we anticipating to fall into a Delorean and be whisked off to the future with Marty McFly. But these images of extreme violence cannot be shrugged off like these fantastical franchises.

Torture porn seeks to disturb its viewers, and it does so beyond reason. “The Psychology of Teen Violence and Victimization” compiled several studies of violent video games, movies and TV shows and the effects they had on their viewers. The conclusion specified that people of all ages overexposed to violence could become desensitized to violence and come to think of violence as the norm.

After seeing a man’s skull crushed like a melon in lifelike aftereffects, you might shrug at instances of real violence, like mass graves in ISIS controlled territories, brutal rapes of women around the world and domestic violence. Torture porn turns horrific violence into entertainment — it shouldn’t.

Erin G. Kelly is a senior broadcast and digital journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected].

Published on October 13, 2014 at 12:02 am