The sub-genre commonly referred to as "torture porn" is generally considered any horror movie in which the antagonist tortured and/or mutilates their victims, often without that redeeming bit at the end that returns some small slice of the audience's humanity to them when they leave the theater. Coined "torture porn", there's often a psycho-sexual component to the gruesomeness, if not for the characters in the film than for the audience members that consider themselves fans of depravity. With the release of the first Saw film, we watched the former star of the Princess Bride, Cary Elwes, cut off his own foot with a saw (hence the name) after a number of people in strange circumstances died in equally visceral ways. The novelty of this first film, and the cerebral component to it (attempting to decipher the sequence of the story and the purpose of the killer), make it a cut above the rest. However, the genre has degraded in subsequent films, as well as others just as depraved but with even less ingenuity, into one of valueless shock closer to rubbernecking on a highway as you pass an injury accident to actually taking in a "film". Point in case, the Human Centipede: First Sequence, which has a maniacal German doctor sewing victim's mouths to other victim's anuses, was evidently popular enough that the director released a bigger budget sequel to it yesterday, Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence. Although the premise sounds like something some angsty stoned teenager dreamed up in his garage, it seems to be warranting the full trilogy treatment.

A Salon.com article I recently came across from June of last year attempts to demystify the cultural fascination with torture porn films like the Saw, Hostel, and Human Centipede movies. Thomas Fahy, a professor from Long Island University and the editor of the book, The Philosophy of Horror, attempts to explain it.

I do think there is a general sense in these films that we live in a cultural moment right now in which there is a great deal of violence and lawlessness and immorality. Retribution is part of the appeal of this, especially if we feel that we’re living in a time where there are people committing atrocious crimes -- including CEOs of hedge funds.

According to Fahy, the rise of these types of films is just, as the old saying goes, "art imitating life." The problem with this is that we actually do not live in more violent and lawless times. Violent crime is at a record low in this country, and as far as lawlessness, if you don't count cybercrime nearly every other criminal act is on the downswing as well (despite the fact that we've been weathering an economic recession, which usually breeds crime). However, Fahy says it's the perception of our times that dictates what people want to watch and are interested in talking about.

I'm all for being scared, even revolted...but I don't enjoy feeling less human when I walk out of a movie theater. For my money, I'd take a cerebral horror film like The Shining or Jacob's Ladder over the dump truck approach to horror movie shock-value any day. I don't know that I agree with Fahy's characterization entirely either, that the popularity of torture porn is just a symptom of our cultural ills right now. There were gory horror films in the 70's, when economic troubles, political unrest, and the fallout of the Vietnam War had people up in arms. Those films didn't contain the same kind of inhuman brutality and relish for barbarity that many of the films today possess. What's even more concerning are the widespread appeal and mainstream distribution that the movies are getting, appealing to audiences that seem to not find enough brutality and injustice in the real world (they need to go see an extreme version in a dark theater with a bunch of strangers). In any case, after a movie about surgically forcing people to eat excrement, can we still call it art?