Controversial director Pascal Laugier, the creative force behind the divisive Martyrs, is dividing audiences and critics again with his latest release. A Canadian-French production, Incident in a Ghostland, had a limited theatrical release. But before the studio even released Ghostland, it was courting controversy. One of its stars, an on-set accident seriously disfigured actress Taylor […]
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Coinciding with the American ‘Torture Porn‘ movement in the early to mid-2000’s, the ‘New French Extremity’ subgenre, a term coined by scholar Alexandra West, re-acquainted horror fans with levels of gore and violence missing from theater screens since the early 1980’s. The New French Extremism was an eclectic collection of disparate films that were part […]
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The ‘New French Extremity” movement of the 2000s produced some of the most controversial and transgressive horror films this century. Not surprisingly then, North American filmmakers who ran out of 1980s slasher films to remake have begun looting these French horror treasures. One of the first Extremity films to get the remake treatment was Martyrs, […]
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Two trends characterized horrors films in the 2000s: (1) the cycle of Hollywood remakes of 1980s slasher films and (2) the emergence of the “torture porn” subgenre. Numerous horror scholars have examined the “torture porn” cycle of horror as part of a larger societal response to 9/11 and emergent debates around torture and interrogation (Wetmore, […]
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