These issues can be seen in a large variety of films that have been dubbed by the popular press as ‘torture-porn’. Although they are marketed as gory horror movies, they have a lot to say on the way cinema has developed its approaches towards masculinity, violence, and what it means to be American. These include debates surrounding gender, sexuality, political influences, and the critical reception of the film. This dissertation will discuss the issues raised in Eli Roth’s film and its two sequels. As aptly described in the book Horror!, Hostel ‘makes good on Pulp Fiction’s promise to ‘get medieval on your ass’’.
This work, which was produced and presented by Quentin Tarantino, contains a number of references to Pulp Fiction (the characters even watch the film on a television in the hostel). If one were to wind forwards through cinema history eleven years, we would see this threat brought to life in a film by Eli Roth: Hostel (2005). However, the threat of torture becomes very apparent when the two victims, finally freed, face their attackers, with one of them detailing how he and his friends will cause them pain with ‘pliers and a blowtorch’. Although the rape is presented as disturbing, no specific torture occurs. One of them is taken off into another room to be raped. It features two men being terrorised and brutalised. Pulp Fiction (1994) is not a horror movie (or initially part of ‘mainstream Hollywood’, though it was adopted by the mainstream public and later distributed by The Walt Disney Company), but there is a scene in the film that occurs in a cellar that could have been ripped out of the blood-filled ordeal horror movies of the 2000s.
The clearest of these is perhaps a 1994 film by Quentin Tarantino. The rise of torture horror in mainstream Hollywood can be traced back to a variety of different origins. I’m gonna call a couple of hard, pipe-hittin’ niggers to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.
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