"Torture-tainment" Opens up Pandora's Box
Stephen Shaefer - Boston Herald
Jul 30, 2009
Reel Horror
There's more gore in store at your local cinema - and it shows no signs of letting up.
Friday's "The Collector," a home invasion thriller with an especially nasty bent, is the latest entry in the horror genre dubbed torture-tainment.
"Saw" and "Hostel" started the trend of gruesome violence with story lines built on kidnapping, torture and organ theft, spawning franchises and imitators.
Horror historian and screenwriter ("Pumpkinhead") Gary Gerani, whose "The Top 100 Horror Movies" is due this Christmas, sees torture-tainment horror movies as reflecting the times.
"Horror movies react to the real world. When the first color Hammer films came out in the '50s," he said of the then-gory British revivals of "Dracula" and other monsters, "people hadn't seen the color of blood on the screen and it was new. But veterans of World War II had seen real blood, and for the postwar era the public demanded horror films be more realistic."
Today, Gerani said, "It's the Internet and the computer" that changed everything.
"To me it was like opening up Pandora's box; people are angrier and more brittle because they're in touch with ugly reality. So now horror movies must be rougher because we know the world we live in and can't run away from it. Since the '90s, all movies, not just horror movies, have a dark irony to them. They're nasty today."
"Saw VI" is due this fall, and "Collector" writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton have already been hired for next year's "Saw VII."
But Brandon Gray, who analyzes the Hollywood box office on boxofficemojo.com, notes, "Horror is talked about a lot, but it's not as popular as action, comedy or adventure movies. Rarely does it become a blockbuster."
Still, he added, "As long as it's cheap to make and profitable, it will continue to be around in some form."
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