‘Some are Victims. Some are Predators. Some are Both’: Torturous Positions

The notion that torture porn fosters ‘sadistic’ responses results from a failure to probe how torture porn’s filmmakers use form — narrative structure, sound cues, camera position, and so forth — to convey sufferers’ emotions and perspectives. The sadistic gaze argument is also flawed because it implies that torture is an interaction between two dichotomous parties — torturer and victim — whereby torturers are entirely ‘evil’, and victims are wholly innocent. For instance, Hicks (2009) describes torture porn as being constituted by ‘graphic depictions of innocents imprisoned by sadists’. Alex Williams (2006) also separates ‘sadist’ and ‘victims’ when synopsising Saw II: Williams brushes over the violence protagonists do to each other in the film by attributing ‘sadism’ to John, Saw’s lead antagonist. The adjective ‘sadistic’ is often used to describe torture porn’s antagonists (see Williamson, 2007c; Wigley, 2007), the violence depicted (see Beckford, 2008), the subgenre’s audience (see Kenny in Johnson, 2007), filmmakers (Molitorisz, 2012), and the films themselves (see Gordon, 2006). Protagonists-turned-torturers, on the other hand, are not directly accused of sadism in any of the press articles consulted while compiling this book.