A Killer is Chasing Me! Thank God I Had Time to Tie Up My Shirt!

I’ll admit it. I’m a huge wimp when it comes to scary movies. I get nightmares, have to sleep with the light on, run my foot underneath my bed just in case… all generally embarrassing stuff. I know my tolerance is lower than most people—this was proven when I was very young and my entire family watched E.T and loved it, while I sat on a rocking chair with a blanket over my head the entire time—and I fully accept my childish fear.

By Jess

That being said, I have watched a few freaky films in my time and totally appreciate their craft and originality. Nightmare on Elm Street, Aliens, The Exorcist, Sixth Sense (come on, the first time you saw it…you were kinda scared), are some of my favorites, although I may still have to watch them from under a blanket.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been noticing a trend when it comes to horror movies these days. A trend that doesn’t make me want to watch from behind my hand, but turn the damn thing off all together. We’re not just making horror movies anymore, we’re churning out torture flicks.

Newsweek explains my argument in a much more eloquent way. According to them, since last fall, seven horror movies have topped the box office, the Saw franchise, Hostel, and The Hills Have Eyes leading the pack. And what do all these movies have in common? Blood. Gore. Tits. New York Magazine’s David Edelstein is even quoted as saying the trend verges on “torture porn”.

Sex and violence have been wrapped up together since the Greeks wrote their tragedies, but today’s filmmakers seem determined to push the limits of both as far as they can possibly go. Every once in a while we get a movie like Neil Marshall’s The Decent, which stays away from heavy sexuality, but more often than not, today’s horror movies aren’t complete without play-by-play disembowelments and heavy female objectification. Sure, nearly naked or naked chicks are a major component of the genre, but I can’t help wondering; as the violence becomes more and more graphic, what happens to our opinion of the sexuality that juxtaposes it? Are audiences going to be hungrier for something more? Something worse? Where do we, as strong women, draw the line in Hollywood’s slasher portrayal of us?

What do you think, girls? Got an opinion? Why are audiences so eager to watch scenes that could be labeled as sadistic? Wes Craven, master of the horror genre, claims our current appetite stems from a post 9-11 world, a world full of uncertainty and violence and manifests itself in lots of different ways, from “people drinking a bit more to kids going to hard-core movies.” And seriously, who else was scared shitless by E.T?

How do you feel about T & A in torture flicks?