Angst In My Pangst

I watched Haute Tension last weekend. A stomach-churning assault on the senses, one of the top-notch examples of gore/extreme violence films I’ve seen in recent times. I claim to have a stronger stomach than most, but last year’s Wolf Creek and Haute Tension both seemed to tear my reserves to shreds. Both these movies take pleasure in dispensing with the security blanket of the standard teen horror movie where, in the first half an hour, it is established who ( the “safe girl”, eight times out of ten, and the “unlikely boy” the rest) will survive the bloodbath that’s due. After finishing HT, I made this mental promise to myself to lay off gore movies for a while, and then I went and checked my friends’ page on Livejournal where adgy talked about another French flick called Inside, that made him squirm. There is a good reason most of my promises are mental.

The phrase ‘Torture porn’ gets bandied about quite a bit nowadays (along with the synonym I detest – ‘gorno’). And the phrase mostly came into being because of the work of these bunch of directors, collectively called The Splat Pack, are reviled by many and worshipped by quite a lot of fans for the horror renaissance they’ve brought back into mainstream Hollywood. Out of them, Eli Roth is over-rated ( I dug Hostel a LOT, mostly for the concept, but the execution was more over-the-top than horrifying, and the sequel was overhyped and sucked) and of all the directors in this collective, he’s the only one to whose work the aforementioned term can be truly associated. I haven’t watched any of the Saw movies to pass judgement on Darren Bousman. Rob Zombie is TRULY a genius, and I am looking forward to the works of Neil Marshall and Greg McLean, and post Haute-Tension, I am interested in checking out the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which I had dismissed as one of those teen slasher movies in the vein of Slumber Party Massacre and What I did Last Summer.

The detractors of torture porn draw attention to the fact most of the violence in recent horror ( well, let’s not mull over definitions of “horror” here ) films are directed at women, and bring in an element of sadism and humiliation that appeals to a predominantly male audience. Critics like Roger Ebert and David Edelstein have gone on record saying such films are pointless and not art by any means. I don’t agree with both points. When you equate all such horror films with “porn”, you are effectively saying that the predominant element, the “point” of the whole exercise, is the violence, the same way there is not an iota of story in a porn film. A horror film, ANY horror film, and in particular the recent ones, have plots. They might be hackneyed or cliched, but they aren’t the knock-knock-who’s-there-the-plumber-oh-let’s-fuck variety that you associate with porn. I look at the horror medium, again, I am talking ALL sub-genres of horror here, as a challenge by a film-maker or a writer to like-minded enthusiasts, a challenge that says, “Ok, you’ve seen it all, now see if you can take this“, and creates something that pushes the cocoon of taste, tolerance and stability that the enthusiast has built up for himself. An author has a tougher job to do so, mostly because he has his words and the reader’s mind to play around with, while a film-maker can use both sight and sound to help his cause.

Just an aside. Sometimes, I see people shutting their eyes tight during a crucial scene in a horror movie, to avoid the tension. I cannot. I just have to see for myself. Especially if the sound’s on and there is a lot of screaming, in which case my mind conjures up worse things than what I see on screen.

But honestly, such cases are rare, because the challenge comes with a caveat – you have to allow the film-maker into a primal part of your brain, you have to agree to let yourself be scared. It’s easy to cheat. Get a bunch of friends together and laugh at the scenes. Think of how the scene would be if a Bappi Lahiri tune is playing in the background. Imagine you are part of the crew of the film ( this one’s my favourite cheat, guaranteed to work everytime), and think about what a pain it was to shoot the scene, about how the actors were giggling when they were shooting and what a bitch the makeup artist was. As soon as you dissociate yourself from the reality the film is trying to establish, you are no longer emotionally invested in it and probably you can sit through it without much inner turmoil.

But that’s not much fun, is it? Sometimes you need to let the demons in. I did, with both Wolf Creek and Haute Tension ( I even did it with this film called Kaakha Kaakha, where, a pivotal scene was a remake of one in a Hollywood movie, and one done very tastefully. Which in my book means that there was very little blood onscreen, implied violence rather than in actuality). In all these cases, I had to stop the movies in the middle to get some fresh air and calm my stomach. All three movies that I mention have this atmosphere of despair about them until the very end, and I think that got to me more than the gore and the violence. The fact that nothing can be right in this world, the good guys don’t always win, and there are no happy endings. And that I believe is what irks the critics more than the violence onscreen, that there isn’t a happy ending, which they would interpret as “a point”, to all that is happening onscreen. There is no cause-and-effect scenario either – most of the Splat Pack films do not go around explaining the whys and wherefores of the events in them, they are more concerned with getting the viewers to identify with the characters ( to what degree they succeed is moot), the precise tones of blood that would look realistic onscreen, the correct dirty texture of the sets, the perfect sound design. Most importantly, the antagonist in all these films is not a supernatural character or an over-the-top villain. It is someone who is everyone. The boogeyman of the twenty-first century is one of us, these films say, and by watching the events unfold onscreen, you are a part of the violence. In Wolf Creek, it is the jovial local who goes out of his way to help the charactersl; in the Hostel movies, it is someone who has money to spend on an experience of a lifetime. In Haute Tension…well, why don’t I avoid the spoilers here, enh?

All of these so-called torture porn movies have one thing in common – they are genuinely trying to disturb you, they are trying to make you stop munching that popcorn and feel uncomfortable in your seat when you watch it. Whether it changes your life or not is immaterial, really.

I will tell you what kind of films really make me unable to watch them – it’s the faux-snuff films. I tried watching some of the Guinea Pig films and shut down the player by the first five minutes or so, and deleted the files as well. The home-video feel to a movie is something I just cannot take, it is one element that makes my eyes water, and my mind becomes unable to indulge in any of the cheats I was talking about earlier. That’s a reason why I never got around to watching The Blair Witch Project.