Tortured Souls

Moving further toward negative numbers on the Laff-O-Meter, no doubt, will be Saw IV, which will–no doubt–manage to trump the third installment’s litany of psychic and physical traumas. One amateur reviewer attempted to enumerate Saw III‘s instruments of sadism: “chains, bombs, acid, skin rippers, ice, pig guts, guns, and a very creative and sickly disturbing trap called the rack.” It is only a partial list. But pathological pop torture, as a form of paid-for entertainment, is now an establishment fetish. Back in 1985, the rock group Megadeth released an album titled, Killing is my business . . . and business is good! But only in the movies does it get this good. On its opening day just before Halloween, Saw III grossed “$14 million from 3,167 theaters,” as Nikki Finke explains. “That massive debut was better than Saw II (which earned $12.1 mil its first day out for a $31.7 mil weekend).” That’s two million viewers in one day, for one film, of a booming, mainstreamed genre. The images of torture-porn venerated in these movies are either desensitizing or warping. It is difficult to figure which effect is more disturbing possibility: That audiences quickly forget them, of that they are never forgotten.

What can a whole culture do, trained in pop pathology of the darkest variety, but devour itself and its young?

MIND YOU, I’m not morally opposed to gore on film. I like zombie movies. I love, I thrill to zombie movies. From the seminal surrealism of Night of the Living Dead to the goth-punk irony of Return of the Living Dead III, the zombie corpus offers a pantry of horror delights. Mall-invading zombies, in dated and modern versions; house-invading zombies, in monochrome and living color; military test zombies; self-conscious zombies. In the ultimate early-’90s predicament, the son of one of those military-test generals winds up with a zombie girlfriend. The zombie genre celebrates diversity. Zombies walk, run, climb, master the art of opening doors, and–just maybe–love.

The entire premise of zombie movies is the carnage and half the fun is the over-the-top gore. We can tolerate unnaturally gruesome acts against unnaturally reanimated corpses without losing a little piece of our soul. Fighting the inhuman is only human. To shy away from shooting, burning, or decapitating one of the ravenous fiends is to fail to understand the nature of the post-zombie world. Anyone could be a zombie, and you cannot afford to shed a tear over what must be done to an undead brother, grandmother, child. You must mercilessly divide the world into Us and Them.

The deeper lessons of the zombie corpus are more complex. Surviving humans turn on each other, in extremis, like jealous jackals. Moments of profound sacrifice are not only possible but sometimes necessary. An excess of despair, not an excess of humaneness, is the real enemy. The inescapable gore is not a free pass to revelry in blood sport. People who laugh when killing zombies are often the first survivors to die.

ZOMBIE FILMS–though there are crude exceptions–are of an entirely different piece than the modern torture flicks, such as Turistas and the Saw movies. In zombie land, the horror is absurd, but real. Stripped of civilization, our shared humanity is our only leg to stand on. In the depraved abattoirs of torture-film chic, real live people kill real live people. Slowly. Stripped sometimes of clothes and always of dignity. As part of a game. This is new territory. Only 15 years ago, American Psycho convulsed a large part of America with its scenes of visceral bloodlust. But that was in print, without pictures, and the entire affair was dressed up as social commentary, as a damning indictment of yuppiedom. Such excuses were needed by polite society in those Victorian days.

Sadly, the richness and pathos of zombie films does not run through the whole vein of the horror genre. Horror flicks, in general, the most corrupt and forgettable forms of art ever devised. For every 28 Days Later there is a Dr. Giggles, Monkeyshines, and Leprechaun IV—Leprechaun in Space. But the celebration of human disposability that’s the hallmark of low-budget horror flicks has historically gotten a free pass, mostly on account of the cheese factor. The revolted human mind can still tell in an instant that it’s fake blood. The special effects crews working the early Freddie and Chucky and Pinhead movies protected us, letting our terrified souls find safety–and nervous laughter–in their amateur production values.

Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, knew the limits of his medium. That other Psycho didn’t require anything more elaborate from the FX department than a bottle of Bosco chocolate syrup and a knife in a casaba melon. Hitchcock shot in black and white partly to mute the gore. It followed naturally that bloody murder was simply the exclamation mark to a long poem on the psychological nightmares of the mind. No hall of horrors was necessary–no Cell, no House of 1,000 Corpses, no torture chambers, no abused, nubile college girls. Once upon a time, if you wanted to make a truly terrifying film, you stayed away from the spaghetti brains and rubber limbs and ratcheted up the auteurship. And if you were able, somehow, to get a budget big enough for realistic dismemberment and you still wanted to make your mark, well–you were George Romero.

STARTING IN THE LATE ’90s, all of that changed. Fueled by the collective dementia of a generation of boys who grew up cooped up with video games, porn, and premature memories of Jamie Lee Curtis, horror movies became truly vile. Technology caught up with imaginations that had bored deep into dehumanization. Ironically, the locus of horror started shifting away from non-human monsters and toward super-human wretches–serial killers, serial torturers, inbred families of freaks, omnipotent carnival barkers of protracted, inevitable Death. Layer upon layer of humanity was peeled away until the poor protagonists–and, by extension, the audience–came to see the abyss at the center of all of us, the psychosis at the end of hope, the futility of survival, the ineradicability of mutilation.

The crowning triumph of this new class of horror films is the permanent torture season ushered in with Turistas. The power of curiosity to kill innocence is old news. We are, time and again, willing to pay whatever price knowledge exacts. Socrates tells the story in the Republic:

Our new fetish for elaborate torture games is a rape of the human that the best horror films, such as Night of the Living Dead, struggle against. In the great zombie horror movies, the possibility of our humanity remaining intact is never entirely sealed off. Instead, the new torture movies present a closed world of inescapable internal doom. The rot of mind and soul devours all; the horror takes place in play chambers where choice is strapped down and humiliated, and reason profanely mocked.

The difference isn’t between happy endings and sad, or one bucket of blood or two. We all have different look-away points. One man’s rad is another man’s revolting. The problem is that the new horror transcends these judgments. It invades the human soul and allows evil to triumph over the dignity of the human.

James G. Poulos is an essayist and doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. His commentaries are to be found at Postmodern Conservative.