What is horror if not a series of highly confronting images presented with increasing levels of gore and blood?
David Edelstein coined the term “torture porn” for highly disturbing and confronting horror films around the main characters being subject to horrendous, well, torture. Saw became the face of the subgenre in the early 2000s, but the genre itself has been around much longer in slightly different forms.
There are a few go-to elements of the “splatter” genre, with it consistently seeing women in horrendous conditions, and them more often than not triumph at the end of the day with blood smeared all over them. What a fun concept for your night in, in front of the television.
I Spit on Your Grave was a trailblazer for splatter, with its incredibly dark subject matter later leading to the Academy Award-winning Promising Young Woman in a roundabout way. The gratuitous amount of detail in the 1978 film led to it being declared a “video nasty” in the United Kingdom and receiving overwhelmingly negative reviews at the time.
It has received a more positive reaction since, and director Meir Zarchi described Camille Keaton’s performance in the film a brave, and the two were married for four years. A 2010 remake was far more polished but lacks the real intensity of its violence.
A modern Australian classic Wolf Creek was a surprise hit in 2005, with it chronicling three backpackers who get abducted and tortured by a serial killer heavily inspired by real-life killer Ivan Milat. It’s definitely not the best film to show someone who plans on going Down Under, however. The legacy of Wolf Creek is it being one of Australia’s greatest contributions to cinema.
There are the original six films Edelstein cited for his article, and among them is Hostel. A film that saw a middling reception for the most part, and nearly sparked an international incident with Slovakia on its depiction of the country as being run-down and a third-world country. Director Eli Roth defended it, saying “Americans do not even know that this country exists”.
Probably the most confronting subgenre, it feels bizarre to know people get a real kick out of it. This is essentially a list of movies you should not show someone on a first date unless you’re missing a few cogs.