Abstract
At the beginning of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), a young American tourist named Josh (Derek Richardson) finds himself inside a seedy Amsterdam brothel. As he waits uncomfortably for his friends in a corridor that leads to various sex chambers, he hears loud screaming and assumes that a prostitute is being beaten. He bursts into the room to discover that rather than shouting for help, the woman in the room is fully clad in S&M gear and is giving a customer a severe, but consensual, whip**. What is remarkable, however, is not the realisation that the presumed assault is actually an act of sado-masochism but rather the dominatrix’s assumption that Josh is spying on their sexual practices. Her automatic response: ‘you watch, you pay’, is indicative of the self-awareness that underlies the graphic displays of horror films in the twenty-first century. An emphasis on the voyeuristic consumption of violence and the impact of surveillance culture on the individual has become an increasingly significant aspect of the genre and constitutes the primary plotline of films such as I.C.U. (Aash Aaron, 2009), The Tapes (Lee Alliston and Scott Bates, 2011), and Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (Tom Six, 2011). Some films have undertaken a critique of voyeurism but nevertheless trade on shock value.
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Notes
Charles Derry. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2009), p. 312.
Yaman Akdeniz. Sex on the Net: The Dilemma o f Policing Cyberspace (Reading: South Street Press, 1999), pp. 22–26.
Robert Jensen. Getting O ff: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (Reading: South End Press, 2007). ‘Shock sites’ are different from sites with shock content insofar as the latter are willingly accessed by users, who must search for extreme images themselves. The former are normally used to shock users through an unexpected confrontation with obscene and even illegal material, and tend to be ‘comprised solely by the image/video itself’ — See Steven Jones. ‘Horrorporn/Pornhorror: The Problematic Communities and Contexts of Online Shock Imagery’, in Porn.Com: Making Sense o f On-Line Pornography, Ed. Feona Atwood (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 124 and pp. 130–134.
Clay Calvert. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering Culture in Modern Culture (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 76–83; Gilles Deleuze. ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Negotiations 1972–1990, Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 178.
Richard B. Woodward. ‘Dare to Be Famous: Self-Exploitation and the Camera’, in Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera, Ed. Sandra S. Phillips (London: Tate, 2010), p. 230.
Dean Lockwood. ‘All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of ‘Torture Porn’, in Popular Communication 7 (2009), 45.
The websites for these prisons offer tours of the installations and even factsheets with the breakdown of the costs of lethal injections; see Michael McGuire. Hypercrime: The New Geometry of Harm (New York: RoutledgeCavendish, 2007), p. 118.
Slavoj Zizek. ‘Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye’, in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 225.
Christopher Sharrett. ‘Introduction’, in Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, Ed. Christopher Sharrett (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999), pp. 10–11.
Lockwood, ‘All Stripped Down’, p. 45; Catherine Zimmer. ‘Caught on Tape? The Politics of Video in the New Torture Film’ in Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror, Ed. Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), p. 94.
I reference 9/11 for the sake of brevity but as Homay King has demonstrated, Clover field also references other contemporary disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the SARS epidemic; see Homay King. ‘The Host versus Clover field’ in Horror After 9/11: World o f Fear, Cinema o f Terror, Ed. Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), p. 125.
Matt Hills. ‘Cutting into Concepts of ‘Reflectionist’ Cinema? The Saw Franchise and Puzzles of Post-9/11 Horror’, in Horror After 9/11: World o fFear,Cinema o f Terror, Ed. Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2011), p. 108.
Ronald Bogue and Marcel Cornis-Pope. ‘Paradigms of Conflict and Mediation in Literary and Cultural Imagination’, in Violence and Mediation in Contemporary Culture, Ed. Ronald Bogue and Marcel Cornis-Pope (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 1.
The literature over the past fifty years in support of this view is so substantial as to make even a selection of it partial at best. See for example Otto N. Larsen. Violence and the Mass Media (New York, Evanston and London: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 115–162.
W. James Potter. On Media Violence (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 1999). Karen Boyle. Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates (London: Sage, 2005).
Jeff Lewis. Language Wars: The Role o f Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 5.
For opposing views on the continuous versus instantaneous models of 9/11, see David Holloway. 9/11 and the War on Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and Kristiaan Versluys. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
See ‘For Evans’ Sake, Dando’, in The Sun (14 September 2009). German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen went as far as to cal19/11 ‘the greatest work of art ever’; Arthur C. Danto. The Abuse ofBeauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Carus Publishing Company, 2003).
Martin Barker and Julian Petley. ‘Introduction: From Bad Research to Good — A Guide for the Perplexed’, in Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, Ed. by Martin Barker and Julian Petley, second edition (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–26.
Kevin J. Wetmore. Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 2.
Reynold Humphries. ‘A (Post)Modern House of Pain: FeardotCom and the Prehistory of the Post-9/11 Torture Film’, in American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millenium, Ed. Steffen Hantke (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 64–65.
Kim Newman. FeardotCom Review’, in Sight and Sound 13/7 (2003), 43.
Carla Meyer. ‘A Cursory Drama: ‘Cyber’ Isn’t the Only Crime in the Standard Thriller Untraceable’, in Tribune Business News (25 January 2008), n.p.
Philip French. ‘Untraceable Review’, in The Observer (2 March 2008).
Michael Gingold. ‘The Poughkeepsie Tapes Film Review’, in Fangoria.com (21 December 2010).
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© 2013 Xavier Aldana Reyes
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Reyes, X.A. (2013). Violence and Mediation: The Ethics of Spectatorship in the Twenty-First Century Horror Film. In: Matthews, G., Goodman, S. (eds) Violence and the Limits of Representation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296900_9
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