When Halloween rolls around, Shannon Lawson likes some blood and guts with her tricks and treats.
She's seen all of the super-gory "Saw" movies, and plans on seeing the latest one, which is opening today. Lawson, a store supervisor at Spencer's Gifts at Washington's Crown Center mall, isn't put off by the copious bloodletting and unrelenting nastiness.
"Some of the stuff is kind of crazy, but it's just a movie," she said.
Lawson is by no means alone. The "Saw" movies, along with the similarly harsh "Hostel" films, have been consistent box-office champions since the first "Saw" hacked its way into the multiplexes in 2004. The "Saw" movies are now a Halloween tradition - as sure as night follows day, "Saw IV" is expected to be followed by "Saw V" next year.
While horror films have been providing jolts and shivers since at least the days of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," the celebrated 1919 German silent movie that's regularly shown in film classes, some critics have labeled the recent wave of horror films "torture porn" for the degree to which they revel in extreme sadism and cruelty.
The "Saw" and "Hostel" series have a good bit of company. This past summer, the Lindsay Lohan flop "I Know Who Killed Me" had her playing a small-town woman tortured by a serial killer. "Captivity," directed by two-time Academy Award nominee Roland Joffe, centered on a model being - you guessed it - systematically tortured by a psychopath, and came with an eyebrow-raising, blood-soaked billboard campaign that was withdrawn after a number of protests. Movies made by heavy metal musician Rob Zombie, such as "The Devil's Rejects" and "The House of 1000 Corpses," also have upped the ante on the depravity.
"Some of these movies are so viciously nihilistic that the only point seems to be to force you to suspend moral judgments altogether," critic David Edelstein wrote in New York magazine two years ago. Edelstein is credited with coining the term "torture porn," and admits he doesn't understand or like most of the movies that fall under that designation. Most of his fellow pencil-chewers agree with him; the last "Saw" film received an abysmal 27 percent rating on the "tomatometer" on Rotten Tomatoes, the Web site which tabulates the percentage of positive and negative reviews each film receives. And "Saw IV" was not screened for critics.
Aside from the sheer brutality on display in "torture porn," the latest wave of horror films have come under sharp criticism for their treatment of women. There's violence aplenty in these films, their detractors say, but the worst of it always seems to be directed at women. In the first "Hostel," for example, a blowtorch is applied to a woman's face, and, in "Wolf Creek," a woman's spinal cord is viciously severed by a serial killer in the Australian outback.
"The clear logic behind all these films ... appears to be that if a young, good-looking, barely-clad woman is sexy while alive, she's even sexier when she's being tortured, or when she's a bloody corpse," Kira Cochrane, the women's editor of Britain's Guardian newspaper, wrote in May.
Scholars have long suggested that horror films reflect contemporary concerns and anxieties in a way that few other film genres do, and that holds true with these movies, according to Adam Lowenstein, an associate professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
Right now, Americans are widely disillusioned with President Bush and the Iraq war, alarmed by the threats of terrorism and global warming, and frustrated with everything from high gas prices to a sluggish housing market, and that helps account for the popularity of these films, Lowenstein believes.
"Part of the reason these films are successful is the mood of the country," he said. Though it's not being done self-consciously, he believes they mirror the zeitgeist in the same way that the original versions of "The Night of the Living Dead" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" reflected the country's dark mood during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Moreover, the carnage that was pumped into American living rooms during the Vietnam War raised the stakes on the types of things that could be shown at movie theaters, according to Ricky Dick, the proprietor of the Castle Blood haunted attraction in Beallsville and a horror movie buff.
"War took on a whole new meaning when I could watch it on TV," he said. Forty years later, Iraq, 9/11 and Abu Gharib are taking on a similar role.
Dick also pointed out that movies are now competing with hyper-violent video games for the dollar of young, predominately male moviegoers, and, perhaps, the creators of movies like "Saw" feel like they need to keep the mood menacing "just to get attention."
But Bruce Lentz, the owner of Incredibly Strange Video in Dormont, scoffs at the notion that the "Saw" or "Hostel" movies offer a glimpse into the dark corners of America's psyche. "I think it's a fad," he said. "In a couple of years, no one is going to want to see this stuff."
Lentz's store specializes in off-beat and obscure horror, science fiction and exploitation films, and he refuses to stock the "Saw" films - he doesn't have any qualms about what they depict, he just doesn't think they're well-made. He watched "Saw II" on DVD and "I quit watching it halfway through and cleaned out my catbox."
Movies from the 1970s like "I Spit on Your Grave" and "Cannibal Holocaust" also made moviegoers reach for their barf bags, but the difference is those movies were usually shown at "grindhouses" in rundown neighborhoods or at drive-ins on the edge of town. But the "Saw" movies have pride of place in the multiplexes - in fact, many are giving over more than one screen to this weekend's "Saw IV" opening.
For better or worse, you can now find "I Spit on Your Grave" on Netflix, and the ready availability of once hard-to-find exploitation films has influenced the current generation of horror filmmakers, Lowenstein said.
There are some other lessons to be learned from film history when you approach movies like "Saw" or "Hostel," he added. In the 1930s, the original "Frankenstein" was banned in Kansas on the grounds that it "tended to debase morals," and the negative reaction to the 1960 psychological thriller "Peeping Tom" just about destroyed the career of director Michael Powell. It's now considered one of the greatest films ever made in Britain. What was once considered irredeemably shocking can become run-of-the-mill or even classic.
"We suffer from historical amnesia if we think they've crossed a line. We live in shocking times, and films have to compete with that."