Pornography’s Triumphant Return to Mainstream Cinema

The 70’s classic Deep Throat brought explicit sexual content out of the rancid basement Times Square underbelly and into the rancid above ground Times Square cineplex.   The film grossed between $300-$600 million depending on your source on a nothing budget making it perhaps the most profitable film of all time.  Someone made a lot of money….but I promise you it was none of the “talent” on screen. America experienced a brief comfort with husbands dragging their wives to sample this forbidden fruit in a room full of hundreds of complete strangers. 

Yet once the home video market hit and then later digital there was no point in embarrassing oneself by standing in line to sit through an hour of “story” to sample the 5-10 minutes that people really wanted.  And porn, like bankruptcy, dissolved slowly then quickly out of the nation’s theaters. That is, until last weekend.  Pornography it should be noted is assumed to be, but is not always, sexual.  My personal definition goes like this: If you remove said intense stimuli (sex, violence, destruction) , do you still have a movie / story? In the case of Robocop, absolutely. In the case of Terrifier? No.

The torture porn phenomenon Terrifier 3 now stands at $30 million haul and may just pass the $200 million Joker sequel in the coming weeks.   I remain pretty much a free-speech absolutist. The alternative is just too dark.  So, this is not about whether such entertainment should be made.  Make whatever.  Yet, when it slips out of the brown paper bag and into mainstream pop culture earning more than a DC Comic spin-off, that is cause for reflection.

This is more of an analysis of society’s comfort and indeed embrace of the sadist torture of young women than it is a full-on review of the movie.  As my mentor in reality tv told me years ago….the audience will tell you what they want. And as I would never comment on anything I haven’t seen, I’ve watched them all. So here’s a recap of the proudest moments in case you haven’t had the pleasure. None of these moments are implied or off-camera.

The original Terrifier features the evil supernatural clown stripping a young girl naked upside down while she is then severed with a hack saw from her pelvis to her clavicle.  It is all shown in writhing detail as her friend watches in revulsion, duct-taped to a chair.  In the second, more profitable installment, a young woman is scalped, and partially skinned before her arm is broken backwards and twisted off. The clown then pours bleach all over the open wounds to make the girl writhe in further humiliation and pain in front of her horrified mother.  In the latest installment, a 10-year-old boy is hacked to pieces during Christmas for his mother to absorb followed by her own severed demise all witnessed by her 7-year-old daughter. We are then treated to a young naked couple shredded to giblets as a chainsaw is shoved into orifices and genitalia and mammary glands are pulled apart.  All this is followed by a whimsical blood angel by our villian on the stained tile floor.  It is worth noting the extent to which the holiday of Christmas is derided during all of this.  Our creative team even saw fit to bestow our final girl with a crown of thorns, in case no one caught the metaphor.  It’s not obvious.

If only such depravity was in jest. Unfortunately, thanks to my current occupation, I have absorbed similar pre-civilizational barbarism done by Hamas to hundreds of Israeli youths last October 7. These moments don’t quite ring as entertainment for me. Babies in ovens, girls having their breasts sawed off while being raped alive, severed limbs and torsos of vibrant young people caked in dust turned purple from blood. These savages would have fit right in as story consultants for the next installment of the Terrifier series. 

Perhaps I’m older.  Perhaps I’m wiser with two teenage girls of my own.  But there is something unsettling about a society that absorbs these images to applause and can’t wait to see how the next one will further assault their senses. Movies like this are an endurance test of sorts, to see how far the filmmakers and SFX team can go to make an audience close their eyes, turn their heads, throw up, or ideally, I suppose, walk out. It no doubt is a source of pride to make something that people don’t want to remember.

I support horror as entertainment. Part of me admires the filmmakers tenacity to slowly grind out low budget versions for a decade before hitting their magnum opus. Yes, I love The Thing, Re-Animator, The Exorcist, all films threatened by the MPAA with a boarder-line X rating due to graphic violence. Yet the films were not sold as needing a vomit bag as the storytelling was sufficient. Remove the shock sequences and you still have a movie.  Not the case with pornography. Terrifier 3’s obscene success is important because it’s an indication of a society desperate to be emotionally violated.  Maybe our phones have so isolated and numbed us that we’re forced to seek out any stimulation that elicits a response, no matter how vile.

 It is the modern equivalent of Roman gladiators where it wasn’t enough to just have combat for entertainment.  The spectacle needed to get progressively more violent and sadistic for the audience to feel their pulse increase. It’s worth asking which society is in more desperate need of help – one that finds graphic sex as entertainment, or one that views young women being skinned alive, sawed in half and humiliated in pain for 10 minutes to sustained audience applause…