All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of “Torture Porn”

Abstract

“Torture porn,” a new extreme subgenre of horror cinema that centers on the attempts of abducted characters to survive torture procedures at the hands of their captors, has fallen prey to criticisms by politicians, pressure groups, and media pundits for what is held to be its potentially damaging sadism and moral vacuity. Seen thus from the limiting perspective of the logic of media effects, this trend in recent horror film looks like moral pollution, but as I argue, seen in terms of Deleuzian affect theory and a model of spectatorship focusing on masochism rather than sadism, it may actually have a transformative and liberating potential.