1. Hostel (2005): The Hostel franchise is problematic for a variety of reasons. First and foremost it’s part of the torture porn or “gorno” subgenre and that automatically raises red flags for me. In one scene during the second Hostel film a woman is hung upside down from the ceiling completely naked—now tell me there isn’t something inherently wrong with that. Worse is the classic “scary Eastern Europe” undertones that many horror movies use to make their Western viewers feel uncomfortable, leftover fears from the Red Scare era. Hostel’s only merit is the possible critiques of elitism running through the film: The antagonists are rich sociopaths bidding on travelling young adults. Even so, if it is indeed a social critique it is utterly overshadowed by the rest of the film.

2. FeardotCom (2002): This movie was essentially a thinly veiled excuse to show image after image of brutalized women presented in a sexualized manner. It’s like a strange cross between bondage and actual brutality, and by the time this film ended, I just felt sick to my stomach. There are so many ways to portray a misogynistic antagonist, but countless shots of naked, bound and bleeding women is just not the way to do it. Fear.com gets a bit F in my books.

3. Human Centipede 2 (2011): This one is a no-brainer. In fact, I’ll admit I didn’t even watch this movie: I read the entire plot on Wikipedia out of curiosity. As if the first Human Centipede wasn’t repulsive enough, they made a second one that took gross to new heights. It seems like the ultimate goal of this film was shock factor—scene after scene after scene. There’s no real thought put into it. So how does mediocrity equate to something problematic? Let me think: the scene where a baby’s skull gets crushed, the scene where a guy masturbates with sand paper. I’m not going to keep going, but I assure you there’s more.

4. Skeleton Key (2005): Skeleton Key is absolutely rampant with racism. Using the slavery era and public lynchings as the historical context to the plot, the film creates no sympathy for its black characters; they are the antagonists. Not only does it demonize its black characters, leading lady Kate Hudson is presented as the frightened white woman haunted by a vengeful black ghost. As many thumbs down as possible for Skeleton Key.

5. The Hills Have Eyes (2006): There’s one infamous scene that renders The Hills Have Eyes remake horrible:  a graphic rape scene that really serves no purpose in the film’s plot. The film is scary enough without this scene—it’s thrown in for pure shock factor,  devoid of any type of social critique, or really anything that would justify putting such a graphically misogynistic scene in a movie.

In the next Oh, The Horror, I’ll list some great horror films that feature a woman of colour in the lead role.

What are torture films? The biggest examples are the Saw and Hostel franchises, and the ever-controversial Human Centipede 1 and 2. However, there are lots of torture films, even among B-grade horror films; it’s a big trend. Remakes of older horror classics seem to always end up nauseatingly gory, bordering on the torture genre. I’ve frequently had the problem of putting on what appears to be a classic slasher, stuck-in-a-house-with-a-serial-killer kind of film, and had it turn out to be a torture film. I immediately switch it off.

First off,  the genre shows a complete lack of creativity. Ghosts and ghouls, hellish dimensions , the iconic images of hockey masks or striped sweaters and fedoras, parasitic otherworldly life forms terrorizing researchers in the Antarctic—now that’s creative. Even the simple black and white silent film Nosferatu changed how we saw vampires forever. That is horror creativity at its finest. Performing surgeries on live people—that’s grotesque. If I wanted to see that, I’d go to one of those bizarre hospital auditorium thingies. If I wanted to see innocent people get brutalized, I can turn on the news. Viewing horror films does have a definite element of sadism, but torture films take that sadism to the extreme.

Torture films are scary, yes. But is being scary the only way we can make good horror? Is profiting on the viewing of extreme pain and suffering healthy for audiences? There’s a difference between paying for creepy thrills and mild psychological scares, and dishing out cash to watch ultra-realistic slicing and dicing of characters wailing in agony. Sure, it’s fictional, but the total desensitization to images of extreme violence is real.

It’s one thing when you’re joking around with your friends cheering for the slasher running ridiculously down the street with an axe and another when people are excitedly taking in graphic scenes of eyeballs being removed and limbs being cut off. Half the time, the freaky part isn’t watching the movie, but knowing that some people are actually truly enjoying this macabre show. I guess some directors figured that the invention of realistic fake blood and advanced special effects meant they could sacrifice good plots, creativity, and subtle, albeit creepy, scares for total violent mayhem.

And on top of that, torture films are notorious for the sexualization of women’s deaths, hence the idea of calling it torture porn. In fact, all horror films are notorious for this, but I see it more deeply in the torture genre, because the women are often tortured whilst naked. Guys die with all their clothes on, women get cut up with their breasts exposed. Guys die in a spree of violence, women are first groped and licked before their horrific demise. Even when explicit scenes of rape are not shown, they are alluded. It bothers me that somewhere, someone out there is getting a sickening adrenaline rush from watching a naked woman undergo brutality.

It doesn’t matter that it’s fictional; it does something to our society. It’s also a direct reflection. Women are brutalized in real life and the murder of women is so frequently accompanied by rape. Patriarchy has normalized this, and film is just as much as a part of that normalization as any other medium. When horror normalizes misogynistic imagery, we internalize it. And if you’re not convinced that we internalize it, then just look at some of the comments and tweets every time there is a news story about a woman getting beaten and raped—hundreds of “she deserved it” and insensitive “jokes.” So despite the fact that this violated and dehumanized character is fictional, I take it personally. As a woman, it feels real to me.

So, excuse me while I impatiently wait for this trend to end. I guess I’m just not into repetitive frames of senseless violence and if that makes me oversensitive, then I’ll gladly be oversensitive rather than utterly desensitized, or worse, salivating over scenes of tortured women. Monsters under the bed, Satan’s spawn, and high-tension slasher chase sequences are more my thing.

Next week I’ll be looking at mental illness in horror films regarding the ever-popular trope of the “psycho” killer and horror’s obsession with psychiatric hospitals.