Tortured Souls

THERE'S NO MORE OCTOBER EXCUSE. Not anymore. If it's Halloween, once ran the tagline, it must be "Saw"--an annual celebration of torture, dismemberment, and Snowden's secret from Catch-22: "The spirit gone, man is garbage." How fast the spirit departs nowadays--holiday spirit or no. The latest entry in the no-longer-seasonal cinematic genre of Torture Flick is Turistas, a movie I decline to see. The acting is supposedly pointless--put deep in shade by delights as these, which the New York Times calls as "laughable as it is repulsive:"

. . . the evil doctor . . . places one victim's internal organs next to her fetching naked breast, a gesture that neatly encapsulates the sexual panic and misogyny that characterize the stupidest examples of extreme horror.

Moving further toward negative numbers on the Laff-O-Meter, no doubt, will be Saw IV, which will--no doubt--manage to trump the third installment's litany of psychic and physical traumas. One amateur reviewer attempted to enumerate Saw III's instruments of sadism: "chains, bombs, acid, skin rippers, ice, pig guts, guns, and a very creative and sickly disturbing trap called the rack." It is only a partial list. But pathological pop torture, as a form of paid-for entertainment, is now an establishment fetish. Back in 1985, the rock group Megadeth released an album titled, Killing is my business . . . and business is good! But only in the movies does it get this good. On its opening day just before Halloween, Saw III grossed "$14 million from 3,167 theaters," as Nikki Finke explains. "That massive debut was better than Saw II (which earned $12.1 mil its first day out for a $31.7 mil weekend)." That's two million viewers in one day, for one film, of a booming, mainstreamed genre. The images of torture-porn venerated in these movies are either desensitizing or warping. It is difficult to figure which effect is more disturbing possibility: That audiences quickly forget them, of that they are never forgotten.

What can a whole culture do, trained in pop pathology of the darkest variety, but devour itself and its young?

MIND YOU, I'm not morally opposed to gore on film. I like zombie movies. I love, I thrill to zombie movies. From the seminal surrealism of Night of the Living Dead to the goth-punk irony of Return of the Living Dead III, the zombie corpus offers a pantry of horror delights. Mall-invading zombies, in dated and modern versions; house-invading zombies, in monochrome and living color; military test zombies; self-conscious zombies. In the ultimate early-'90s predicament, the son of one of those military-test generals winds up with a zombie girlfriend. The zombie genre celebrates diversity. Zombies walk, run, climb, master the art of opening doors, and--just maybe--love.

The entire premise of zombie movies is the carnage and half the fun is the over-the-top gore. We can tolerate unnaturally gruesome acts against unnaturally reanimated corpses without losing a little piece of our soul. Fighting the inhuman is only human. To shy away from shooting, burning, or decapitating one of the ravenous fiends is to fail to understand the nature of the post-zombie world. Anyone could be a zombie, and you cannot afford to shed a tear over what must be done to an undead brother, grandmother, child. You must mercilessly divide the world into Us and Them.

The deeper lessons of the zombie corpus are more complex. Surviving humans turn on each other, in extremis, like jealous jackals. Moments of profound sacrifice are not only possible but sometimes necessary. An excess of despair, not an excess of humaneness, is the real enemy. The inescapable gore is not a free pass to revelry in blood sport. People who laugh when killing zombies are often the first survivors to die.

ZOMBIE FILMS--though there are crude exceptions--are of an entirely different piece than the modern torture flicks, such as Turistas and the Saw movies. In zombie land, the horror is absurd, but real. Stripped of civilization, our shared humanity is our only leg to stand on. In the depraved abattoirs of torture-film chic, real live people kill real live people. Slowly. Stripped sometimes of clothes and always of dignity. As part of a game. This is new territory. Only 15 years ago, American Psycho convulsed a large part of America with its scenes of visceral bloodlust. But that was in print, without pictures, and the entire affair was dressed up as social commentary, as a damning indictment of yuppiedom. Such excuses were needed by polite society in those Victorian days.