First Shot: The jigsaw is up

I’m not normally one to celebrate the death of anything that includes the word “porn,” but years from now, this outwardly innocuous non-holiday weekend will be remembered as the moment when torture porn bit the dust. Thanks to the wide margin by which slow-building upstart Paranormal Activity trounced Saw VI at the box office, it’s all but assured that, from now on, dark fantasies of random victims tormented to within an inch of their lives will exist only on Dick Cheney’s Christmas wish list.

On second thought, maybe that’s too sweeping a generalization. There may yet be a commercial feature or two in which unwary kids get flayed and filleted. Old habits die hard, and it takes more than the collapse of a once-profitable subgenre to wipe an entire development slate clean. But in terms of any genuine, continued viability, the bloodletting stops here.

In the movie business, see, appearances are all, and everybody loves a master narrative. Which is why the events of this weekend are going to taken as an irresistible sea change, no matter how much dosh the Saw flick does or doesn’t end up raking in. (After all, everybody remembers the simultaneous release of Nevermind and the Use Your Illusion albums as heralding the arrival of grunge and the death of hair metal – conveniently ignoring the fact that the G’n R discs nonetheless went on to sell some 24 million copies.)

And though I normally abhor the sanctimony of mainstream middlebrow critics, I have my own reasons for joining the inevitable chorus of “Good riddance.” Torture porn has been a black eye on horror for too many years now, contributing to the tragic misconception that the genre has nothing to offer beyond scattershot sadism designed to titillate America’s supposedly value-free youth audience. I’m so happy to see it go, in fact, that I’m only mildly resentful at having to give the win to Paranormal Activity – which, as I’ve already established, struck me as a hugely disappointing hype job that’s about as scary as the deleted scenes from The Bucket List.

But I have to give credit where it’s due: Two years from now, the October release slate will not be burdened by the sight of rusty bear traps clasped to youthful faces. Instead, we’ll be up to our ears in el cheapo directorial debuts in which painfully overacting Facebook junkies confront the supernatural, their mundane domestic flailings rendered with the same caught-on-tape “verisimilitude” that was already moribund by the time George A. Romero latched onto it.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s a third path for mainstream horror to take that can avoid the pitfalls of both amoral gore and humdrum pseudo-naturalism. Maybe some impressionable film student caught last Tuesday’s William Castle marathon on TCM and was struck by the idea that horror can be sardonic, morbid fun. Perhaps the genre will be revivified by the idea that gimmickry is its own reward. And just possibly, the Full Sail graduates of tomorrow will follow Castle’s example and waltz onto the screen at the outset of their own features, asking us if we know what the word “ghoul” means and then helpfully producing a pocket dictionary to clue us in if we don’t. (Looking all the while, of course, like a grinning cross between Benito Mussolini and Rondo Hatton swathed in London fog.)

No, I’m not holding my breath. But the good news is that I’m no longer holding my nose, either.

Posted by Steve Schneider on 10/26/2009 1:38:33 AM Permalink | Comments: 0

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