Take on the role of a merciless torturer. Earn money from video transmissions of your torments and then buy new victims and torture tools to expand your prison.
Ehh I think there's a bit of difference, you're generally supposed to sympathise with the characters in 70s and 80s horror movies while the 00s generally made the victims as insufferable and shitty as possible so I can definitely see them as an aspect of normalising torture. Like it always felt like those movies were like "these are bad people so it's ok to feel nothing as they get brutalised".
Didn't old school slasher movies also make the victims deliberately shitty and annoying with the kills often serving as comeuppance for premarital sex or smoking weed or whatever
Sometimes yeah, but it still feels, at least to me, that more often than not horror movies from that time expected the audience to sympathize with the victims.
perhaps not everything can be tied neatly to capitalism at all. perhaps people enjoy an adrenaline rush in a safe, controlled environment like a movie theater - and laugh the rush off in the same way one does after riding a roller coaster.
I thought this while rewarching Blade 2 a year or so ago. When it gets to the part where he's pushing a vampire's face against a spinning motorcycle tire I started to think "man, there sure are a lot of movies from the early 2000s where the protagonist tortures someone for information and it's presented as cool and necessary".
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Was the noughties torture porn craze significantly different from the video nasties of the 70s and 80s?
I don't think you can tie it down so neatly to a specific phase of late capitalist politics.
Ehh I think there's a bit of difference, you're generally supposed to sympathise with the characters in 70s and 80s horror movies while the 00s generally made the victims as insufferable and shitty as possible so I can definitely see them as an aspect of normalising torture. Like it always felt like those movies were like "these are bad people so it's ok to feel nothing as they get brutalised".
Didn't old school slasher movies also make the victims deliberately shitty and annoying with the kills often serving as comeuppance for premarital sex or smoking weed or whatever
At least Pamela Voorhees actually had a reason to be mad about those things
Sometimes yeah, but it still feels, at least to me, that more often than not horror movies from that time expected the audience to sympathize with the victims.
Cannibal exploitation films definitely played up the boorish tourist angle.
Fair enough, I was thinking more about mainstream horror from the time.
perhaps not everything can be tied neatly to capitalism at all. perhaps people enjoy an adrenaline rush in a safe, controlled environment like a movie theater - and laugh the rush off in the same way one does after riding a roller coaster.
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I thought this while rewarching Blade 2 a year or so ago. When it gets to the part where he's pushing a vampire's face against a spinning motorcycle tire I started to think "man, there sure are a lot of movies from the early 2000s where the protagonist tortures someone for information and it's presented as cool and necessary".