Torture Porn, page 15
As this chapter will illustrate, protagonists who make such decisions also suffer as a result of their choices. In torture porn, ethical decisions are rendered as life-and-death matters, accentuating why taking ownership over moral principles is both so necessary and so demanding.
‘Once You’re In, There’s No Way Out’:2 space,
torture, and character arcs
Spatial control is among the most pernicious of torture techniques. As Martyrs’s antagonist Madame proposes, spatial control is torture’s only necessity: ‘it is so easy to create a victim ... lock someone in a dark room.
They begin to suffer’. Donald O. Hebb’s highly influential 1950s isolation-based torture experiments confirm Madame’s proclamation. Hebb (in Otterman, 2007: 42) concluded that ‘without physical pain ... the personality can be badly deformed simply by modifying the perceptual environment’. Similarly, the CIA’s Kubark Manual (1963) suggests that torturers should ‘create an environment that elevates the interrogator’, so they ostensibly control ‘all aspects of the interrogation’ (McCoy, 2006: 136). The same logic is utilised in torture porn narratives. The action is often set in artificially constructed torture chambers, such as the experimentation areas of Breathing Room, The Killing Room, Torture Room, and Basement. These titles distil the narratological emphasis placed on constructed torture-spaces across the subgenre.
In fact, characters’ motions through space commonly drive torture porn’s plot arcs. Torture porn narratives typically open with what appear to be torturer/tortured dichotomies. As the narratives progress, however, the dichotomy collapses. That failure manifests spatially: the physical distances between torturer and tortured also fold. For example, in Untraceable, torturer and tortured positions intertwine as those parties are brought into closer proximity. The physical distances seemingly provided by cyber-interaction diminish. As killwithme.com’s users ‘enter’ the site and precipitate some stranger’s demise, they also cross a moral line. Similar movements are pivotal in other torture porn films. Roadkill’s protagonists use a CB radio to play a humiliating prank on a trucker. The trucker then bridges the physical distance radio-mediation offered the pranksters by physically hunting them. The Hills Run Red revolves around protagonist
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Tyler’s infatuation with a lost horror feature. Seeking its maker, Tyler is eventually abducted by the film’s director and becomes part of the movie which, it transpires, is constituted by genuine murder. These narratives each begin with mediated interactions that separate torturer and tortured: cyberspace, radio, and film. As the narratives progress, distanced inter-faces are replaced by physical engagements: abduction and suffering. The initial ‘safe’ distances between torturer and tortured are closed.
The spatial language used to describe these events – entering, crossing, bridging – conveys how vital torture porn’s spaces are to fathoming the subgenre’s moral exchanges and the transpositions characters undergo in these narratives. For instance, Paxton’s decision to kill the Dutch Businessman in Hostel is the culmination of a broader narrative arc in which the characters move from ‘seeing’ to ‘feeling’. Hostel’s opening is constructed around its protagonists’ sexual voyeurism. Travellers Josh, Paxton, and Oli simply want to ‘check out’ naked women. When they become physically involved with the hostel’s Sirens (Natalya and Svetlana), the narrative becomes more broadly fixated on touching rather than just watching. Subsequently, the travellers are each abducted and tortured. The protagonists begin as observers, and increasingly become involved in intimate physical interactions.
The same is true for the Dutch Businessman who tortures Josh. The torturer first encounters the travellers on their train journey to the hostel and meets Josh again outside a club prior to Josh’s imprisonment. What appear to Josh and to Hostel’s viewer to be chance meetings are reframed by the abduction. The Businessman was aware that he would be Josh’s torturer and was stalking his prey. The Businessman too moves from seeing to touching. His encounters with Josh become increasingly physically intimate. Josh’s first interaction with the Businessman culminates in the Businessman briefly touching Josh’s knee. Josh’s over-reaction to this gesture signals from the outset that touching equates to infringe-ment, foreshadowing the travellers’ shifts from voyeurs to participants –
consumers to consumed – and Paxton’s eventual positional slippage from tortured (touched) to torturer (toucher).
This correlation again stresses that witnessing is active involvement, since witnessing is intertwined with torture. In Josh’s death sequence, Josh and the Businessman are reflected in a mirror just before Josh’s throat is cut. A matching shot is offered in the climax: on the threshold of homicide, the Businessman catches his reflection of himself and Paxton before Paxton slits the man’s throat. These parallel shots verify the characters’ relative positions. During the act, the torturers are reflected to themselves as torturers, and the tortured witness their own torture. The two incidents are connected by these shots, evidencing
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Figure 6.1 and 6.2 Parallel shots, analogous acts: Josh’s throat is slit by the businessman, and the businessman’s throat is cut by Paxton in Hostel (2005, USA, dir Eli Roth)
that Paxton’s role has altered by Hostel’s denouement. Additionally, Paxton’s mid-narrative recollection regarding his failure to rescue a drowning girl he made ‘eye contact’ with is evoked when he saves Kana. Cutting off Kana’s dangling eye indicates Paxton’s transference from inaction to interaction, from watching a girl drown at a distance to physical involvement in a woman’s suffering. Closing that distance entails messy visceral engagement, just as Hostel’s other developments from watching to touching do. Reprising his earlier recollection with a visceral, literal form of ‘eye-contact’ may be a rather dark joke, but it evinces how important proximal collapse is to Hostel’s character arcs.
The positional slippages found in torture porn are power-shifts, which manifest via characters’ engagements with space.
‘How Can You Escape ... If They Can See Everything?’:3
power as spatial control
Scarry (1985: 18) theorises that torture is power-based, inasmuch as pain is an ‘obsessive display of agency’ that validates the torturer’s control
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over the tortured. However, that control does not begin with suffering.
Power derives from consent violation and imprisonment, which infringe on the tortured’s autonomy. Torture-spaces are terrifying before any violence occurs, because they are isolating and alienating. During incarceration, captives are severely disadvantaged because they are separated from their usual support-networks – their kin, community, friends – and their familiar surroundings. The torture-space itself represents an initial power-bias that captives must overcome.
That partiality is usually inflated in torture porn films. One method of stressing the captives’ disadvantage is to exaggerate their confinement, thereby expounding their impotence. For example, Trunk creates a claus-trophobic atmosphere by depicting lead protagonist Megan trapped in a car-boot for the film’s duration. Breaking Nikki too utilises an excessively small prison-space – a locker converted into a cell – to intensify the captive’s horrific isolation. In contrast to these highly restrictive spaces, distanced long-shots are employed in Wolf Creek, Storm Warning, and Naked Fear to convey entrapment without confinement. The protagonists are dwarfed by the environment that surrounds them, attesting to their profound remoteness. They are alone and vulnerable, lost in spaces that they are unfamiliar with, and are unsure how to escape. The abductees are just as disempowered as they are in confined areas, despite being able to move through space.
In parallel to the tortureds’ disempowerment, the torturers’ power is expressed as spatial control. Torture porn’s abductors fashion torture-spaces to allow continuous monitoring of their abductees. CCTV features in over Figure 6.3 Trapped in the expansive outback: Kristie cannot evade her killer in Wolf Creek (2005, Australia, dir Greg McLean)
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Figure 6.4 Martin is attacked after discovering the CCTV monitors in Detour (2009, Norway, dir Severin Eskeland)
40 torture porn films, including Deathbell, Are You Scared? , and Vacancy.
This prevalent leitmotif expresses the torturer’s power. In Captivity, The Killing Room, and Hunger, for instance, CCTV is used to monitor a single confined room. The abductors are able to study their captives in intimate detail in these cases, making prisoners fully aware that they are watched incessantly. Such monitoring is not limited to small spaces, however. In Detour, for example, CCTV grants visual access to an entire woodland area, meaning antagonists can stalk their targets from afar. The captors’ ability to oversee such a large area creates the impression that they are everywhere, meaning the protagonists face all-consuming peril. In Detour, that feeling is amplified by alerting the audience to the antagonists’ use of CCTV
before the protagonists are aware that they are under threat. Dramatic irony underscores the protagonists’ vulnerability and the antagonists’
power. A musical sting accompanies Detour’s first CCTV-shot, confirming surveillance’s sinister function. When protagonist Martin discovers the captors’ CCTV system, live-feed footage of his girlfriend (Lina) is juxtaposed with past recordings of their journey on adjacent monitors. The CCTV motif establishes that Martin and Lina were disempowered from the outset, meaning their capture feels inevitable. Martin’s terror at this realisation is underlined by the score – atonal low drones and high pitched violins – as well as physical threat. One screen exhibits a gagged woman sobbing, elucidating the imminent peril that Martin and Lina face. As soon as he sees the footage, Martin is physically attacked. Their abductors’ control is embellished via the CCTV motif, building tension and demonstrating the odds Martin and Lina eventually overcome in thwarting their captors.
In these ways, the subgenre’s torture-spaces are akin to a form of prison architecture – the panopticon – designed to facilitate inmates’
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‘permanent visibility’. The panopticon, as Michel Foucault (1995: 201) has it, is constructed to assure ‘the automatic functioning of power’.
Exam, Saw, and Breathing Room’s locked-box gameplay arenas epitomise that logic. As with other post- Saw challenge-based narratives – such as The Task, Steel Trap, Panic Button, and Die – the captors’ control is established via concrete rules coupled with the threat of physical violence.
Yet the space functions as an ‘architectural apparatus ... for creating and sustaining ... power’ (Foucault, 1995: 201), meaning only minimal enforcing of physical threat is required. The captors establish cues in advance, but leave the captives to torture themselves and each other.
These abductors utilise torture-spaces to foster the idea that they have absolute control over the abductees.
99 Pieces embodies these panoptical traits. The protagonist (Joshua) obeys the nameless antagonist’s instructions, evacuating his house of food and light bulbs, turning off his water supply and boarding up his windows. The torturer takes complete environmental control only because Joshua agrees to imprison himself. Joshua conforms to his tormentor’s ‘points system’, whereby Joshua elects whether to sacrifice food, water, or electricity on a daily basis. In one instance, Joshua decides to sacrifice his food ration, and then covertly eats. The torturer immediately punishes Joshua. Via minimal enforcement early in the narrative, the torturer creates the impression that he is omnipotent and omnis-cient, evincing his overarching threat. Such spatial control is the most devastating tool at the torturers’ disposal, since it coerces the captive into self-submission.
99 Pieces is representative of home-invasion themed torture porn,4
in which spatial incursion carries additional symbolic weight: the antagonist colonises the protagonist’s immediate, familiar spaces, rendering them unfamiliar. As 99 Pieces’s tagline has it, ‘[y]our home is now your nightmare’. The home’s connotations as the owner’s territory – which they control, and which provides them with security – are inverted, suggesting the captor has complete control over the captive.
In contrast, the vast majority of the subgenre’s torture-spaces – such as Creep’s underground rail network, Matchdead’s desert trailer, or Hunger’s dungeon-bunker – are outside the abductees’ usual experiential spheres.5
Estrangement is also highlighted in cases where captives are ‘outsiders’
who interlope into foreign territories; for example, where city-dwellers infringe on rural areas ( Wolf Creek, Storm Warning, The Hills Have Eyes), or where holiday-makers enter other countries ( Turistas, Donkey Punch, Borderland). In such cases, the captives’ isolation is augmented for the audience because their homes are never depicted. Tonally, the captives’
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chances of escape are disparaged because it is difficult to grasp where they can escape to. Their distance from home – their sanctuary – is implied to be insurmountable, accentuating their disadvantage.
In contrast to captive protagonists – who are alienated in all circumstances – even where antagonist torturers are transient and incur on normative spaces ( Roadkill, Switchblade Romance, Rest Stop), their power is undiminished. They violently shape the environment to befit their immoral deeds. The protagonists are disempowered, fettered, and shrink in number. Antithetically, antagonist torturers seem invulnerable, even when apparently defeated. In Hoboken Hollow for instance, Trevor evades his captors, reporting them to the police. However, the narrative cessation reveals that his captors’ slave-ring business is unhindered. The same is true of Wrong Turn, The Hills Have Eyes, and Hostel: escaped captives manage to kill key torturers, yet sequel movies elucidate that the torture regimes established in these films are not impeded by such losses.
‘Dying is Easy ... Staying Alive is Torture’:6
disempowerment, passivity, and renormalisation
Thus, the role-labels ‘torturer’ and ‘tortured’ convey that the former is active and latter is passive. That difference is reified via their respective relationships with space. The tortured qua tortured lack control and are acted upon. In contradistinction, torture-spaces are artificially constructed to meet antagonist torturers’ needs. The large-scale machinery that characterises Saw’s torture-spaces is prototypical of such architecture. The antagonists’ spatial-constructions permit them to engage in immoral pursuits such as torture and murder. In other cases – particularly in rural torture porn – these activities include other prohibited behaviours such as cannibalism ( Scarce, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), incest ( 2001 Maniacs, Wrong Turn 2), and bestiality ( Storm Warning, The Ordeal), which are facilitated by the locale’s lawlessness and remoteness. However, despite these constructions, neither the abductors’ immoral behaviours nor their power are naturalised in these films.
Captors’ imperative-violating behaviours are narratologically antagonistic and are portrayed as horrific, tonally.
Captors attain their power by seizing control over space and people.
Therefore, their power is neither natural nor incontestable. Initial abductions are able to occur for the same reasons that captives may later overthrow their abductors: in torture porn narratives, power is not fixed.
That fluidity is actualised via a noticeable dearth of official authority figures in torture porn’s environments. Much like in the slasher film
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(Rockoff, 2002: 11–12), torture porn’s diegetic spaces are rarely governed by apparatuses that effectively curb immoral action.7 Where police are present, they are corrupt ( Saw, The Unforgiving, and Header), or are quickly slaughtered ( Captivity, Gag, and Inside). In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning for example, lead executioner Tommy Hewitt is made redundant from the town abattoir, and kills his manager when he is told to leave. The town sheriff’s feeble attempt to apprehend Tommy is thwarted by lead antagonist Hoyt Hewitt, who murders the lawman and adopts his uniform. Hence, the Hewitt family take over the township by violently usurping its two main authority figures (manager and sheriff).
The Hewitts then express their authority spatially, turning their home into a microcosm of the town. Their abode becomes both a slaughter-house and the sheriff’s station, reifying their control over the territory.
In parallel to captors’ aggressive seizing of space, captives are frequently subsumed into the antagonists’ immoral way of life. This sometimes entails attempting to diminish the captives’ ties to their established world-views. For instance, in Broken, ‘The Man’ requires his prisoners to relinquish their previous lives and submit to his control, stating ‘I’m your family now ... you have no name ... forget your past’. He literalises his rhetorical control by manacling the abductees. Similarly, in Timber Falls, The Ordeal, and Wrong Turn 2, captives are forced into conformity with the captors’ daily life, a system of control that is literalised by strap-ping the protagonist to a chair at the antagonists’ family dinner-table. In Scarce, Razor’s Ring, and Frontier(s), abductees are similarly imprisoned in their captors’ homes. In each case, captives are made to join abductors in committing acts that infringe on the prisoners’ beliefs. Scarce, Razor’s Ring, and Frontier(s) depict captives being served meals of human flesh, for example. Although the protagonists are not immediately aware that they have participated in distasteful acts, the narratives expose those problematic deeds. For instance, as protagonist Ricky eats his meal in 2001 Maniacs, the camera dwells on the distinctive tattoo adorning the meat on Ricky’s fork. A fleeting flashback insert-shot confirms that the tattoo belonged to Ricky’s fellow traveller Kat. Dramatic irony underscores both the protagonists’ vulnerability and their unawareness regarding the antagonists’ intentions.
