Captivity: Is Torture-Porn Dead?

Based on the poor box-office performance of Hostel 2 and Captivity, pundits everywhere are cheering at the death of the "torture-porn" subgenre of horror. Because of this, expectations and marketing for Saw IV are being cut back, and numerous other torture-porn films that were in the pipeline are being canceled.

So is torture-porn dead? I beg to differ. A quick look around the web at porn sites (and yes, I look a lot) shows the genre to be thriving. I think it's more a case of the same things that have slowed ticket sales industry-wide. I mean, who wants to pay $20 to sit in a cramped seat, listening to people cough and talk while you're trying to observe someone's head being slowly crushed! Seriously! Pipe down, you clod, we're trying to watch hot metal pincers rip out someone's vajayjay, and you're totally spoiling the mood! And the price of popcorn? That's more painful than what those incestuous mutants onscreen are doing to those men.

It could also be a case of "why buy the cow when you've got a hemophiliac virgin hanging upside down in the basement at home to slaughter, anyway?" If the popularity of torture-porn on the internet is any indication, people probably have their own victims tied up in lethal predicaments being filmed right in their own homes. Those poor souls are likely trapped in situations that are much more creative and messy than anything Hollywood could cook up in their ivory towers, far-removed from the streetwalkers you and I are abducting.

So, is torture-porn dead? No, it may be in a slump, and seemingly redundant and stagnant when compared to the many instruments of suffering its audience employs on a nightly basis on wayward Czech tourists. But all it needs is new innovation (can you say, "giant flaming corpse blender"?) to capture people's imagination, and it'll come staggering right back to the top, oozing putrid diseased lymphatic fluid to and fro, until it collapses and is devoured by rats.