Violence and Mediation: The Ethics of Spectatorship in the Twenty-First Century Horror Film

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, whipping. 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.