How Gitmo Killed the Torture Horror Movie Genre

Last month, The Buzz Log's Mike Krumboltz reported the "death of torture flicks" after analyzing horror film trend lines. It seems that Americans no longer have the stomach to watch long, drawn-out death scenes that made movies like "Saw" so popular once upon a time. Krumboltz noted that "it seems weary moviegoers have disemboweled the torture genre for good."

What Krumboltz failed to ask, was why.

It's no secret that current events influence not only Hollywood, but the viewer's appetite for any given type of movie. Historically, Superhero films have enjoyed great success during times of war. This was the case in the 1940s during what is sometimes known as the "Golden Age" of comics and seems to be true again today. It has been theorized that during times of war, people enjoy simple tales about good triumphing over evil. That equation is reversed in horror films.

Perhaps that is why horror films and their glorification of the triumph of evil over good-or at least the triumph of evil over the girl dumb enough to go into the basement alone-are not as popular. But that doesn't explain why the specific horror sub-genre of torture films is specifically losing popularity with fans.

What might explain it is the morally ambiguous stance that America has officially taken on the matter of torture. The President says that we don't torture-we use "enhanced interrogation techniques." But the executive branch is apparently so terrified that any reasonable person in the past hundred years would find what our agents are doing in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere to be a violation of the Geneva Convention, that he's done an end-run around the courts by getting Congress to suspend Habeas Corpus for our detainees.

According to WorldPublicOpinion.org, 58% of Americans oppose any use of torture for any reason. Americans don't agree with their besieged Attorney General Gonzales that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" or "obsolete." Even living under orange alerts and terrorist threat, even living in a politically divided nation, the majority of Americans agree that being a nation that does not torture is one of the fundamental things that separate us from the people we're fighting.

Despite this, given the new torture order that President Bush issued last week, there can be little doubt that their sentiments are not being reflected by their government. Until the next election, Americans may feel powerless to do anything about it. One place they can register their disgust, however, is at the ticket booth.

Americans may very well have decided that even if their tax dollars are going towards the practices of waterboarding and extraordinary rendition, their disposable income need not fund its glorification on the big screen. Hollywood ought to listen, even if the Bush Administration won't.