In between the release of Saw and Eli Roth’s Hostel, Oz-ploitation flick Wolf Creek put itself at the forefront of the Torture Porn cycle of the early 2000s. Writer and director Greg McLean (Rogue) shocked and divided critics with his brutal and loose take on Aussie backpack serial killer Ivan Milat. Though it was a […]
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In a Jan 26 2006 New York Magazine article, David Edelstein coined a now familiar phrase – ‘Torture Porn‘. Though he was initially commenting on Eli Roth’s Hostel, Edelstein stepped back and identified what he saw as a new horror trend. Following Saw’s unexpected box office success in 2004, a handful of movies released in […]
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Welcome to summer! What better time of the movie season then for studios to release a killer shark into the water. Unfortunately, not every killer shark movie can be Jaws. Or even just The Meg. But there’s a pretty simple premise to exploit for even a middle-of-the-road killer shark movie. And when all else fails, […]
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before … four strangers wake up chained and imprisoned in a grimy basement? A mysterious captor subjects the groups to a series of increasingly cringeworthy tortures? No, it’s not 2007. The Dare is just Netflix’s latest addition to it’s horror library. A throwback ‘Torture Porn‘ movie, The Dare, […]
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Today, it’s easy to pick out something frightening about the Internet. The Dark Web, conspiracy websites, identity theft, data-mining, online predators – take your pick. But back in the early 2000’s, long before SnapChat or TikTok, the Internet was still a nascent entity. Downloading a single song could take an entire day. And people really […]
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Metal maestro Rob Zombie has a somewhat checkered history as a horror filmmaker. Critics complained that House of 1000 Corpses was too derivative. Fast forward several years and Zombie turned in a half a good movie with his Halloween remake. Though Zombie flashed some cool ideas with the sequel, his tendency towards ugliness overpowered the […]
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Somewhere in between ‘masked slashers’ and ‘insidious conjurings’, torture porn briefly reigned in horror. From Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects to Eli Roth’s Hostel and the ‘New French Extremity‘ movement, horror fans flocked to movies characterized by extreme graphic violence. However, it all started with James Wan’s Saw in 2004. The low-budget movie kickstarted a […]
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Before Blumhouse was adapting teen party games like Truth or Dare and Seven in Heaven, IFC Films released Would You Rather in 2012. At the time of its release, the low-budget indie horror film didn’t make much of an impact. It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of relevancy. The movie’s story about a millionaire […]
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