Who’s who of the torture genre

This time, I have back to my theme of torture genre movies and the rationale behind these movies. So, here it follows:

“Sex sells. Violence sells” …… This seemed to be the motto of the Bollywood cinema in the late 80’s and 90’s. And perhaps this remains the underlying truth. The same remains true for Hollywood too. Though, the people there and in other regions are more experimental than sticking to one formulae.

Though, in this writing piece, we will concentrate on the people who actually focused on this formula and perhaps the concentration was a little bit too much. There have been movies which dealt with just sex or just violence and then there are movies that dealt with both. We will focus ourselves on the two later types.

Once more to redefine the type of movies that I am talking about, the movies have the flowing features:
· Movie should depict extreme violence by humans (and not spirits, ghosts, devils, zombies etc)
· Or otherwise there should be gore and quiet graphic scenes of mutilation (either human or animals)
· The depiction of violence should be on-screen and not just intended
· The movie should have more than few scenes of such violence

Ruggero Deodato, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tinto Brass, Paolo Cavara, Dario Argento – These are the names of few of the directors who have made movies with the theme of violence ingrained in them. In the above names, few Paolo Cavara made the movie as an exception to their general trend of movies whereas some else like Ruggero Deodato and Dario Argento had most of their career revolving around these genre of movies.

Most of the above names perhaps aren’t very well known, with the exception of perhaps Tinto Brass who is famous for his movie Cannibal Holocaust. Cannibal Holocaust is a movie that takes some special guts from the viewer and is banned in many countries too. Also, all the above directors are from mid 70’s and 80’s. There are many more but these people have directed some of the movies which I came across while my search for these movies.

Why I searched for these movies? Well, it wasn’t for this blog that I am writing. I had searched for these movies a long way back before writing this blog and perhaps that’s why it was easier for me today when I was trying to refresh my memory. But, for the reason why I started looking for these movies, you will have to wait for the blog which will deal the consumer motive aspect of the movies.

For the most recent movie makers of these kind, one name that clearly comes to mind is Eli Roth – the director of the movie “Hostel”. Apart from him, some others are Rob Schmidt, Jonathan Liebesman, Alexandre Aja. All these directors are pretty new and young in the field. To add to the makers of these kind of movies, one name that perhaps didn’t have the intention of selling the movie based on sex or violence, but still his movie stands out, is Gaspar Noé – the director of the movie Irreversible.

This has been a pretty restrictive exercise with the names of only few of directors / makers of the torture genre of movie-making. But the idea of this exercise was to give a ground that such movies exist and so exist the makers of these kind of movies.

In the horizons of cinema that extends to well beyond our imagination, we can still group most of the movies under some particular genre. And this genre that we are discussing now, though not as big has its own share of takers and perhaps a lot of other philanderers who may not swear by such movies, but do occasionally watch such movies. As for the regions where such movies are made, I still don’t have a very exhaustive idea about all the movie making places. But one place that still has to see such kind of movie with extreme gore made is the Indian canvass. None of the woods including Bolly, Molly, Kolly or any other have yet made one which had such extreme scenes. Violence has been there as had been suggested in one of the comments to my blog, about the movie “Shakti” but the movie didn’t have more than couple of scenes of extreme violence. And well, even though the scenes were a bit horrifying but they still don’t fall in the category of extreme onscreen violence depiction. South Asia including Korea and Japan have had such movies made. And so has Hollywood and some European moviemakers too. That’s the extent of my knowledge as of now.

Before ending this blog, let me write something about Irreversible. It’s a French movie with the beautiful Monica Belluci as lead actress. Why it made to my list is because of it’s very graphic violence and a very real rape scene that almost makes a person cry out. Watching this movie did disturb me but it didn’t make me think as to why was it necessary to have such graphic scenes when there can be other ways to depict it. But then, that’s just me. I am sure there will be lots of people who would think that it was very unnecessary to show such scenes.

Though, I have mentioned what kind of movies I am writing about, but I have refrained from describing any of such scenes till now. I will do that in some later post. But for here, let me describe a particular scene from a movie that I had read about while my search on these kinda movies few years back. That movie had a protagonist who has a job of doing autopsy on corpses. The movies shows this guy doing sexual act on a dead girl and then scenes of mutilating the corpse during autopsy and feeding his dog with one of the girl’s body parts. After having read about this movie, I did think whether there would be people in this world who could actually have sex with a dead body unknown to them. I was not sure then, but today, I guess I won’t be that surprised to know if such a person exists. Anyways, why I described this scene here was because today while trying to look for these kind of movies, I tried to find out this movie and I was unable to. It’s very remote chance that any of you would know about this movie or the maker of this movie. But if you do, please let me know.