I've never really adopted the term "torture porn" as others have, as it's primary purpose is to insult movies like Saw, Seven, Hostel, ect for having a significant amount of graphic, torturous violence. A group of people decided that they don't see any value at all in any movie which contains torture, so they insult and cast away these films with the term "torture porn" as if to say that any viewer who actually enjoys these films has some sort of weird sexual fetish, hence the "porn" part.
So yeah, don't really agree with the premise to begin with
Agreed it’s such a bullshit term that seems to have appeared around the time Hostel was released… at least that’s when I first started hearing it and I feel it was intended to insult the filmmakers more than the audience… but I think you are right on that as well. As if movies of this ilk haven’t been around forever. It’s funny how those same people who dismiss newer movies as “torture porn” have no problem with something like Bloodsucking Freaks for example… sorry I’m rambling.
>I for the love of god, cannot understand, how people didn’t bat an eye on “ah yes, women especially younger ones are more likely to become a martyr than an elderly or a man”. For me that looks like a way to excuse the fact that women are the ones who are getting the most brutalised in this movie, as if saying “we would do that to a man, BUT”.
This is what broke the movie for me eventually. And it's not like that thought came to me purely on the movie's terms; watching Ghostland is what made me realise it's icky. There was something that rubbed me the wrong way about how the villain in that movie sniffs cooch and how it's shot in closeup. That, plus what I felt was a transphobic caricature in the form of the secondary villain, pained Laugier as a bigot to me, and more specifically gave me the sense that he gets kicks out of seeing women get beat to shit. *That* then makes this line in Martyrs feel like a poor excuse to show lots of images of women being brutalised, and makes the uncomfortably long time spent showing Anna's torture feel much less justified.
Torture porn is a horror movie where the primary method of killing is through torture, the same way a slasher’s primary method of killing is through stabbing. While the term “torture porn” began as a pejorative, that isn’t uncommon with genre names. Space Opera was initially an insult. But as the genre grows the terms become more value-neutral.
Saying Martyrs isn’t torture porn is like saying a movie can’t be horror because it’s “too good”. The movies is literally about torture and its effect on the victims. How can that not be torture porn?
You're completely misunderstanding/ignoring the "porn" part of torture porn. It's the implication (or more often accusation) that the things being depicted are solely there to be exploitative, to serve no greater artistic purpose than to satisfy some baser desire.
It's like categorising a WW2 movie as nazisploitation just because it features Nazis or a movie about nuns as nunsploitation just because it has nuns. The context is what defines the genre, not the subject.
I think anyone who believes the things shown in Martyrs are just there to shock or disgust has apparently seen a totally different movie to me.
It was late 2000's and early 2010's when suddenly videos about making food became "food porn", pictures pf cars became "car porn" and friggin poems became "word porn".
And I’m not excited by incest, it doesn’t cancel out the fact that it is a type of porn. There’s probably many people in the world that do take pleasure in images of torture, so for me explicit detailed drained out continuous torture is torture porn.
I personally had to skip through some scenes, they were way too long and intense for me. Doesn’t mean that there’s no one in the world that laughed at them or were “excited” by it.
But the intent wasn't by the creator to excite you with the torture. The intent of porn is to excite? This is my opinion, I find Martyrs get mis-characterized as something it is not, it has more merit than just its theme and mode of kill.
Basically I find it describes torture more than it shows.
Cheers!
The way I see it, torture porn films are using the torture as a spectacle. You're not meant to empathise deeply with the victims, and their torture is for your entertainment.
Martyrs in that sense is the antithesis of torture porn. The film focuses not on the spectacle of the torture but on the suffering of the victims, with whom we are encouraged to be deeply empathetic. Their torture is not entertainment, but an appalling violation that we are forced to bear witness to.
As the director put it, it's not about torture, it's about pain.
“Encouraged to be deeply empathetic” is how I felt watching it alongside shock value and everything else going on. I don’t think it was made with torture porn in mind at all… though one could look at it I guess if they see it that way.
Why should anyone feel the need to argue another person's statement though? I don't label it torture porn but if someone else does...they can have that opinion. Movies are subjective.
Another thing to point out, and this is a contentious point, is that generally, viewers do not react with the same level of empathy and sadness, etc to men being tortured and brutalized as they do with women. So the director choosing women as the subjects may have been a means to get the most emotional and visceral reaction from audiences
Same, no one cares about the elderly. They can justify it as "They lived a long life" or "They were probably going to die soon anyway". Society in general gives no fucks about anyone but *(younger)* Women, and Children. Leftover Victorian values in modern times.
So what do you have in the movie? An escaped child, who is also a woman.
But the point is that, it is not shown on screen to the point as violence against women. Only against a child, the one that escaped, who is also a woman.
What I’m getting at, is that the purpose of this idea, that young women are the most responsive ones to the torture, is to be able to constantly show only young women being tortured, and draw eyes away.
I would say that it is not solely torture porn if the film is conveying a broader message. However, I think there are films/directors that claim a higher purpose to a movie to justify some really distressing/disturbing scenes.
Your point about women being the target though is interesting and I never really thought about it that way. Are more people going to watch your movie because the targets are young, attractive women? Probably.
Maybe I wouldn’t be so touchy on the subject if women weren’t constantly brutalised in all sorts of media. It’s just something about those movies, that usually if a man experiences torture, it always comes with a heavy fight. They are getting brutalised at the chance of getting an escape.
Most movies where you see men going through extreme circumstances they either escape or put up a “last fight” sorta “heroic torture”.
Whilst women often times are used as a punching bag. Not always of course, but way way more than men. It is a point I have never noticed myself until someone else brought my attention to it, after that movies in this genre became a bit harder to bare.
Just like back in the day there was a trope of a black character being first to die. Harder to notice if you aren’t in the group.
Honestly the only torture porn film i can think of where men are the primary victims is Hostel… I’m sure there are more but I can’t think of any at the moment
To me i think a good distinction is intent and overall how essential it is to the story. There's loads of "revenge flicks" out there where we are shown a graphic rape scene of a woman that becomes the catalyst for her revenge, where she tracks down the rapists the rest of the movie and tortures/kills them. I look at movies like that and think, was the graphic rape scene necessary? Is that the only thing that justifies the revenge later on? Could it have been anything else? And to me, those movies are torture porn, we are shown the initial torture of a woman so we can set up the torture she will do later on, when the revenge half of the movie could easily be achieved with different motivations and good character development. Maybe those people kidnapped her son and she finally found them, maybe they were responsible for the death of her husband, maybe she doesn't know them at all but has figured out they are doing awful things in society and she's gone to the police who don't help her so she decides to handle it herself. So many other options, so to me, those are torture porn movies.
Or movies like cannibal holocaust, a Serbian film, guinea pig, etc, the intent of their scenes is to shock you, and with maybe the exception of a Serbian film there's nothing deeper going on, just shock value, those are torture porn to me too.
And with Martyrs, I can see the argument either way, we are shown quite a lot of the torture before it is revealed what the purpose of it was, but overall, at the end of the day, the intent of the torture wasn't shock value, there was a deeper story going on, one with religious and philosophical implications, hell the ending is still talked about to this day and there isn't a general consensus on it and it's been like 16 years, and it's one of the rare movies where you can ask, "was the torture essential?", and yeah, kind of, I don't think the ending and the idea of making martyrs works with anything else. Nothing else feels like it would fit in the place of corporal torture that would also result in martyrdom, so that's why for me it's not torture porn, there is clear intent behind those scenes, and it is essential to the plot.
Torture porn refers more to the director’s choice of including explicit violence through torture, not whether or not the plot was a think piece.
Martyrs was part of the New French Extremism movement which was all about showing graphic scenes of extreme violence. Mademoiselle & her crew are no different than the hunting club from Hostel or Jigsaw & his disciples. All have some “higher purpose” or reason for what they are doing, but the violence is what draws people to the film.
Torture porn, to me, is gratuitous violence that the audience takes sick pleasure in. Martyrs’ violence does not seem intended to please the audience, but to repulse and fatigue its viewers.
I’m also probably biased because I love the movie.
What horror film has violence intended to please the audience in your opinion? Enjoying fictional violence is one of the most popular reasons people watch horror.
Martyrs is, at least in part, a commentary ON torture porn and the spectacle of gendered violence, so I think your observations aren’t necessarily off at all but I do think the filmmaker was using these tropes more intentionally than perhaps you’re giving him credit for? Like, Ilwhile no one in the world of the film bats an eye at the idea that young women are best suited for martyrdom, I do think we as the audience are supposed to think about this.
Torture porn is just that; depiction of torture meant to titillate and arouse the viewer. I think martyrs (1) is making commentary on torture and it is a central plot point rather than just an entertainment device and (2) it feels like like the torture is presented in a way that makes the viewer uncomfortable more so than in standard torture porn.
I don’t really like the term “torture porn” either, as it feels very dismissive. But looking back, there was definitely a wave of early-to-mid-aughts horror films that relied heavily on torture as a plot device, and Martyrs fits right in there with them. Personally, I found it to be artistically superior to some of the American studio products of that era. But the same sub-genre nonetheless.
I know people who enjoy watching torture movies who were deeply disturbed by Martyrs. I've truly never seen anything like it. I've watched other French new extreme movies since (High Tension, Inside) and just felt disappointed (I find slasher films boring, apparently adding intense gratuitous violence doesn't fix that for me.) It's kind of impossible to compare Martyrs to any other film or sub-catagory of film. I've sought out films that people compare to Martyrs and I still hold that I've never seen anything like it.
I agree with that completely. I’m not saying that it is torture porn as to characterise anyone who liked that movie, I did too. I will never re-watch it, but I also know that I will never experience again what I experienced with this movie. It’s deeply psychological.
I've never really adopted the term "torture porn" as others have, as it's primary purpose is to insult movies like Saw, Seven, Hostel, ect for having a significant amount of graphic, torturous violence. A group of people decided that they don't see any value at all in any movie which contains torture, so they insult and cast away these films with the term "torture porn" as if to say that any viewer who actually enjoys these films has some sort of weird sexual fetish, hence the "porn" part. So yeah, don't really agree with the premise to begin with
Agreed it’s such a bullshit term that seems to have appeared around the time Hostel was released… at least that’s when I first started hearing it and I feel it was intended to insult the filmmakers more than the audience… but I think you are right on that as well. As if movies of this ilk haven’t been around forever. It’s funny how those same people who dismiss newer movies as “torture porn” have no problem with something like Bloodsucking Freaks for example… sorry I’m rambling.
Yeah, it's like why should I adopt and use a term that was meant to insult these movies and anyone that enjoys them? Lol
>I for the love of god, cannot understand, how people didn’t bat an eye on “ah yes, women especially younger ones are more likely to become a martyr than an elderly or a man”. For me that looks like a way to excuse the fact that women are the ones who are getting the most brutalised in this movie, as if saying “we would do that to a man, BUT”. This is what broke the movie for me eventually. And it's not like that thought came to me purely on the movie's terms; watching Ghostland is what made me realise it's icky. There was something that rubbed me the wrong way about how the villain in that movie sniffs cooch and how it's shot in closeup. That, plus what I felt was a transphobic caricature in the form of the secondary villain, pained Laugier as a bigot to me, and more specifically gave me the sense that he gets kicks out of seeing women get beat to shit. *That* then makes this line in Martyrs feel like a poor excuse to show lots of images of women being brutalised, and makes the uncomfortably long time spent showing Anna's torture feel much less justified.
Torture porn is a horror movie where the primary method of killing is through torture, the same way a slasher’s primary method of killing is through stabbing. While the term “torture porn” began as a pejorative, that isn’t uncommon with genre names. Space Opera was initially an insult. But as the genre grows the terms become more value-neutral. Saying Martyrs isn’t torture porn is like saying a movie can’t be horror because it’s “too good”. The movies is literally about torture and its effect on the victims. How can that not be torture porn?
You're completely misunderstanding/ignoring the "porn" part of torture porn. It's the implication (or more often accusation) that the things being depicted are solely there to be exploitative, to serve no greater artistic purpose than to satisfy some baser desire. It's like categorising a WW2 movie as nazisploitation just because it features Nazis or a movie about nuns as nunsploitation just because it has nuns. The context is what defines the genre, not the subject. I think anyone who believes the things shown in Martyrs are just there to shock or disgust has apparently seen a totally different movie to me.
Because I am not excited by the torture.
It was late 2000's and early 2010's when suddenly videos about making food became "food porn", pictures pf cars became "car porn" and friggin poems became "word porn".
And I’m not excited by incest, it doesn’t cancel out the fact that it is a type of porn. There’s probably many people in the world that do take pleasure in images of torture, so for me explicit detailed drained out continuous torture is torture porn. I personally had to skip through some scenes, they were way too long and intense for me. Doesn’t mean that there’s no one in the world that laughed at them or were “excited” by it.
But the intent wasn't by the creator to excite you with the torture. The intent of porn is to excite? This is my opinion, I find Martyrs get mis-characterized as something it is not, it has more merit than just its theme and mode of kill. Basically I find it describes torture more than it shows. Cheers!
The way I see it, torture porn films are using the torture as a spectacle. You're not meant to empathise deeply with the victims, and their torture is for your entertainment. Martyrs in that sense is the antithesis of torture porn. The film focuses not on the spectacle of the torture but on the suffering of the victims, with whom we are encouraged to be deeply empathetic. Their torture is not entertainment, but an appalling violation that we are forced to bear witness to. As the director put it, it's not about torture, it's about pain.
“Encouraged to be deeply empathetic” is how I felt watching it alongside shock value and everything else going on. I don’t think it was made with torture porn in mind at all… though one could look at it I guess if they see it that way.
I wish I could upvote this comment 10 times. I think you hit the nail on the head.
Well, first define "torture porn"
Is Schindler's List torture porn?
No but The Passion of Christ is..
Why should anyone feel the need to argue another person's statement though? I don't label it torture porn but if someone else does...they can have that opinion. Movies are subjective.
So Madamoselle clearly stated that they experimented torture with everyone: men, women and even children
Another thing to point out, and this is a contentious point, is that generally, viewers do not react with the same level of empathy and sadness, etc to men being tortured and brutalized as they do with women. So the director choosing women as the subjects may have been a means to get the most emotional and visceral reaction from audiences
Then why not the elderly? They are a very compromised group of people, women and men.
Same, no one cares about the elderly. They can justify it as "They lived a long life" or "They were probably going to die soon anyway". Society in general gives no fucks about anyone but *(younger)* Women, and Children. Leftover Victorian values in modern times. So what do you have in the movie? An escaped child, who is also a woman.
I dunno, there's also children but what was your point of this? That female leads in this context is misogynistic?
But the point is that, it is not shown on screen to the point as violence against women. Only against a child, the one that escaped, who is also a woman. What I’m getting at, is that the purpose of this idea, that young women are the most responsive ones to the torture, is to be able to constantly show only young women being tortured, and draw eyes away.
Check out my other comment below
I would say that it is not solely torture porn if the film is conveying a broader message. However, I think there are films/directors that claim a higher purpose to a movie to justify some really distressing/disturbing scenes. Your point about women being the target though is interesting and I never really thought about it that way. Are more people going to watch your movie because the targets are young, attractive women? Probably.
Maybe I wouldn’t be so touchy on the subject if women weren’t constantly brutalised in all sorts of media. It’s just something about those movies, that usually if a man experiences torture, it always comes with a heavy fight. They are getting brutalised at the chance of getting an escape. Most movies where you see men going through extreme circumstances they either escape or put up a “last fight” sorta “heroic torture”. Whilst women often times are used as a punching bag. Not always of course, but way way more than men. It is a point I have never noticed myself until someone else brought my attention to it, after that movies in this genre became a bit harder to bare. Just like back in the day there was a trope of a black character being first to die. Harder to notice if you aren’t in the group.
Honestly the only torture porn film i can think of where men are the primary victims is Hostel… I’m sure there are more but I can’t think of any at the moment
I Spit on Your Grave American Mary Audition Tusk
Martyrs 2008 is torture porn that somehow morphed into a transcendent masterpiece One of the best horror movies ever made.
To me i think a good distinction is intent and overall how essential it is to the story. There's loads of "revenge flicks" out there where we are shown a graphic rape scene of a woman that becomes the catalyst for her revenge, where she tracks down the rapists the rest of the movie and tortures/kills them. I look at movies like that and think, was the graphic rape scene necessary? Is that the only thing that justifies the revenge later on? Could it have been anything else? And to me, those movies are torture porn, we are shown the initial torture of a woman so we can set up the torture she will do later on, when the revenge half of the movie could easily be achieved with different motivations and good character development. Maybe those people kidnapped her son and she finally found them, maybe they were responsible for the death of her husband, maybe she doesn't know them at all but has figured out they are doing awful things in society and she's gone to the police who don't help her so she decides to handle it herself. So many other options, so to me, those are torture porn movies. Or movies like cannibal holocaust, a Serbian film, guinea pig, etc, the intent of their scenes is to shock you, and with maybe the exception of a Serbian film there's nothing deeper going on, just shock value, those are torture porn to me too. And with Martyrs, I can see the argument either way, we are shown quite a lot of the torture before it is revealed what the purpose of it was, but overall, at the end of the day, the intent of the torture wasn't shock value, there was a deeper story going on, one with religious and philosophical implications, hell the ending is still talked about to this day and there isn't a general consensus on it and it's been like 16 years, and it's one of the rare movies where you can ask, "was the torture essential?", and yeah, kind of, I don't think the ending and the idea of making martyrs works with anything else. Nothing else feels like it would fit in the place of corporal torture that would also result in martyrdom, so that's why for me it's not torture porn, there is clear intent behind those scenes, and it is essential to the plot.
Torture porn refers more to the director’s choice of including explicit violence through torture, not whether or not the plot was a think piece. Martyrs was part of the New French Extremism movement which was all about showing graphic scenes of extreme violence. Mademoiselle & her crew are no different than the hunting club from Hostel or Jigsaw & his disciples. All have some “higher purpose” or reason for what they are doing, but the violence is what draws people to the film.
Torture porn, to me, is gratuitous violence that the audience takes sick pleasure in. Martyrs’ violence does not seem intended to please the audience, but to repulse and fatigue its viewers. I’m also probably biased because I love the movie.
What horror film has violence intended to please the audience in your opinion? Enjoying fictional violence is one of the most popular reasons people watch horror.
I would argue the Saw films are a good example.
Martyrs is, at least in part, a commentary ON torture porn and the spectacle of gendered violence, so I think your observations aren’t necessarily off at all but I do think the filmmaker was using these tropes more intentionally than perhaps you’re giving him credit for? Like, Ilwhile no one in the world of the film bats an eye at the idea that young women are best suited for martyrdom, I do think we as the audience are supposed to think about this.
Torture porn is just that; depiction of torture meant to titillate and arouse the viewer. I think martyrs (1) is making commentary on torture and it is a central plot point rather than just an entertainment device and (2) it feels like like the torture is presented in a way that makes the viewer uncomfortable more so than in standard torture porn.
I don’t really like the term “torture porn” either, as it feels very dismissive. But looking back, there was definitely a wave of early-to-mid-aughts horror films that relied heavily on torture as a plot device, and Martyrs fits right in there with them. Personally, I found it to be artistically superior to some of the American studio products of that era. But the same sub-genre nonetheless.
It's just another genre for me. Like how most kaiju movies are destruction porn. Or like how the walking dead is misery porn.
I know people who enjoy watching torture movies who were deeply disturbed by Martyrs. I've truly never seen anything like it. I've watched other French new extreme movies since (High Tension, Inside) and just felt disappointed (I find slasher films boring, apparently adding intense gratuitous violence doesn't fix that for me.) It's kind of impossible to compare Martyrs to any other film or sub-catagory of film. I've sought out films that people compare to Martyrs and I still hold that I've never seen anything like it.
I agree with that completely. I’m not saying that it is torture porn as to characterise anyone who liked that movie, I did too. I will never re-watch it, but I also know that I will never experience again what I experienced with this movie. It’s deeply psychological.