Bava As Much As Bataille

Why you're wrong about early-2000s horror.

Jul 29, 2023

Author’s Note: *Britney Spears voice* It’s been a while… I shelved a second May newsletter and a June edition entirely because — well, that’s a little hard to explain.

Basically, all of these events transpired in basically this order starting at the beginning of May to roughly a week ago: I moved all of my earthly possessions to Atlanta, two days later I started a new job, that weekend I drove back home for Mother’s Day, I onboarded for my new job for two weeks, I continued doing freelance editing on the weekends, I got extremely burned out, I had a bit of a depression spiral, I turned 30, I flew to New Orleans, I read and wrote feedback for nine piece of fiction, I battled a fruit fly infestation in my apartment, I flew to Arizona for work, felt burned out again and teetered on another depression session, exactly a week after I got back from Tucson I flew to Paris, fun, fun, fun, got stranded by JetBlue in New York on the way back and took a 20-hour train back to Atlanta. (Wow, can’t imagine why I was feeling burnt out and depressed and couldn’t write.)

But, here I am: Fresh from Paris, which was grand despite the intervention of the axis of evil (JetBlue, New York City and JFK’s international terminal), and I’m doing another silly one this time. I promise these essays will get smarter and more interesting now that I have time and mental clarity and am not going to the Atlanta Airport every fucking weekend. Until then, here’s some rambling about grotesque, violent stuff.

I recently read part of this essay on the banks of the Seine, so this is for the French — forever in pain and revolt against the tyranny of the flesh.

David Edelstein coined the term “torture porn” in a 2006 essay for New York Magazine, but two years earlier, writing for Artforum, James Quandt was already contemplating Torture Porn’s grotesque frère, called New French Extremity.

As Quandt wrote it, New French Extremity was: “Bava as much as Bataille, Salò no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement.”

The first time I read this, I just thought: Hell yeah, dude, that’s metal as fuck. Anyone who knows me, knows that I think about spumes of sperm, like, three times a day? This was, of course, meant to be a critical lens through which to view the films and filmmakers Quandt was discussing (François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux), but I can’t think of any other sublimely perfect paragraph to sum up my girlhood love of horror.

I came of age in the nervy-wervy post-9/11 years. The era from roughly 2002 to 2008 was obnoxious and garish and mean. We wanted cheap, easy pleasures. We wanted celebrity sex tapes and parties and dumb fun. McMansions, logo mania, Paris Hilton. We delighted in cruelty and slurs and rape jokes (Dane Cook, Daniel Tosh and Anthony Jeselnik were the preeminent comedians of the day, God help us). It was a decadence of patriarchy and traditional gender roles and machismo. I’ll try not to be too nostalgic about it.

Because in this era of excess and hedonism and horror, I found my body. Not in an EmRata kind of way (or, I’m not sure, I never read that book) — but, in the visceral, human way of knowing.

If there’s one true idea found in horror, it’s this: The body is beautiful; the body is grotesque. The body is pleasure; the body is pain. Bodies are made of flesh, nubile & gnarled, a fallible boundary for our most important piece of architecture. We’re all body all the time, but especially in the moment when it fails us.

Torture Porn would become the moniker for the horror of that era — a mix of titillation as much as pain. It’s true: It’s a subgenre that delights in the flesh. Torture Porn films are, much like the pop culture of the time, maximalist and hedonic. They intend to arouse excitement and revilement at once.

There’s a healthy measure of skepticism in the term Torture Porn, of any sense of pleasure that may arise while watching. In her essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” feminist film critic Linda Williams wrote, “Alone or in combination, heavy doses of sex, violence, and emotion are dismissed by one faction or another as having no logic or reason for existence beyond their power to excite.”

In early-2000s horror, it’s both doses of sex and violence (sex as violence and violence as sex) that mark these films as profane.

I’m a lifelong horror lover. I like it all: from B movies to Syfy creature features to giallos to Stranger Things. But, if horror was only kitschy thrillers, only Spielbergian dreams of jump scares and an excess of emotion — or, on the opposite end of our current zeitgeist: bloodless, toothless art house films about, like, grief disguised as white supremacy or whatever — I don’t think I’d be watching.

I’m the bitch who thinks the best Nightmare might be Freddy vs. Jason (and definitely knows it’s the best Friday movie). I like movies loud, chaotic, messy. I like a scary movie with a little backbone, some grit, something I can sink my teeth into.

The Splat Pack was the epithet given to the coterie of directors making the most repulsive films of the early aughts. Splat Pack films are rooted not only in their time but in place. They were anxious films for an anxious era. Terror was so rampant, America declared war on it.

There was no longer a question of if we were safe, but, instead, we worried, what would we do now? Who would we become in the process? War mongers and tortures, our government swiftly replied. From this response, Torture Porn was born.

America may have been in a post-9/11 death drive, but the anxiety permeating the zeitgeist at this time had international implications.

Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek, about a sadistic serial killer hunting Australia’s Outback, is a declaration of cultural cringe. The killer is an amalgam of a real Australian serial killer and Crocodile Dundee. There’s a sense that the Outback, or even Australia itself, is the true villain.

Of course, no one does violent discontent with the State like the French. New French Extremity films took to task everything from nationalism, racism and xenophobia to alienation from society because of modernism, alienation from the self because of capitalism, rural stagnation, urban policing and Catholicism.

One of the most talked about NFE films, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, is a devastating and grotesque rumination on suffering and religious trauma. High Tension is a film about a killer who uses decapitated heads to fellate himself. It’s a multifaceted genre.

But, one thing all these films have in common is a commitment to excess.

Alexandre Aja cut his teeth in New French Extremity with his fracture of a film, High Tension, before directing one of the most violent films of the era for American audiences. Aja’s 2006 remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes is one of the best anti-war, anti-American movies about 9/11 I’ve ever seen.

The initial attack is ratcheted up to a New French Extremity level, becoming a chaotic montage of blood, rape and terror. It kicks off with the family patriarch being burned alive on a stake, that if you cross your eyes just might resemble a burning tower. Following the death of his wife and kidnapping of his infant daughter, the film’s main hero has to arm himself to the teeth and go into the desert to fight savage others to protect and avenge his family. This man starts the film as a pacifist (!) and ends it by murdering a man with an American flag (!!). The only way it could be even more on the nose is if the daughter’s name was “Democracy” and he had to invade the hills to defend her. It’s high parody, in my opinion.

I’ve also always read Hostel as deeply critical of Americans and American culture, despite the claims of xenophobia I’ve heard lodged against it. Hostel is the kind of excessive that makes you wonder how anyone can take it seriously enough to be legitimately offended (though many people appear to be). It’s a film that stuffs every single second of its runtime with some new obscenity and just when you think it’s pushed you as far as it can, a deluge of puss bursts forth from a rent eye socket.

The Hills Have Eyes was the first “real” horror movie I saw in theaters and during the set piece of extreme violence, it was the first movie I ever had to mentally remove myself from the diegetic world of the film. I had succumbed to the promise of Craven’s other Vietnam-era film, The Last House on the Left, which advised on its poster in 1972 that to keep from fainting viewers must “keep repeating, it’s only a movie… only a movie… only a movie…”

Watching Hills was the first time I was ever, in the most literal sense of the word, moved by a piece of media. I physically recoiled in my seat and cast my panicked gaze around at the other faces in the theater that night, searching for some confirmation that my visceral reaction was correct. I had entered Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.

If most horror revolves around the fear of the other, a lot of American Splat Pack horror — the good stuff, at least — is about the fear of the familiar.

Splat Pack overachiever, Rob Zombie, traffics in grotesque Americana. From the roadside attractions from hell in House of 1000 Corpses to the road trip nightmare of The Devil’s Rejects, Zombie’s films are obsessed with the detritus that collects in America’s forgotten corners. As in The Hills Have Eyes, it’s the American government and our culture of apathy (particularly for poor, rural areas) that created these monsters.

In these films, America is the land of the free, home of the sadistic, and you’re better off not looking too far into its history and mythos, lest you end up consumed by it.

The 2002 New French Extremity film, In My Skin, by Marina de Van revolves around a woman who feels so alienated from her own body by modernity and capitalism and her own success at both, that she can no longer feel pain no matter how deeply she lacerates her own skin. And, she does give it the old college try. She begins to ritualistically cut and tear her body, reveling in the autonomy the self-inflicted damage lends her. In the world of these films, the only sense of freedom or control we have is through the destruction of the self.

Then, there’s the grandfather of the era: 2004’s Saw by James Wan and Leigh Whannell, which similarly finds restoration in self-mutilation. Victims of the Jigsaw killer must cut off their noses to save their faces, so to speak, in a series of bizarre and violent exercises in endurance and bloodletting. This leads to the film’s most famous (or, in my opinion, second-most famous) scene in which Cary Elwes decides that a foot and intense pain are nothing compared to the lives of the people he loves. As he uses a hacksaw to cut through his own flesh and muscle and bone, he must experience, I imagine, the most brutal form of ego death. The Saw franchise is a place where the body is not a holistic system but a set of discrete parts that we must discard in order to be spiritually reborn.

Martyrs, which came out at the tail end of the era in 2008, seems to stand in opposition to these other films. While up for interpretation, I’ve always read Martyrs as a polemic against pain. In it, a pain-worshipping cult believes that trauma, or prolonged suffering, leads to spiritual transcendence and ultimately knowledge of the afterlife. The film itself, however, argues that it’s actually love and compassion and connection that bring us closest to the divine and there’s no meaning to be found in, or reason for, pain.

Martyrs is the best movie I’ll never watch again. It doesn’t merely tell us that suffering is irredeemable but impresses that upon our own bodies and minds with brute force.

These film understand the body is as much an obstacle as a playground. The frat boys tearing through brothels on a quest for pleasure in the first act of Hostel, then become the bodies to be bought and sold for other people’s amusement in the third.

Similarly, any pleasure you may find in a Torture Porn film is ultimately used against you. This doesn’t negate the pleasure, or the pain, but they exist in a space where both are possible.

Early aughts horror films are enjoyable because they weren’t made to be watched but felt. Because they come from people who love horror, who understand horror and its uses. This excitement for the genre is something that I’ve found lacking in the current horror landscape, though that might be changing soon.

Yes, I’m disgusted too. Horror films from the early aughts let me sit in this disgust, in my discomfort with the things we do to each other and how vulnerable our bodies are. They are relentless, offering no sentimentality, no purification through pain. Many have argued that horror movies are cathartic, but the most extreme films move beyond relief. Some stories resist catharsis.

Quandt was right that this is the purview of Bataille and Sade as much as Artaud and Bertolt Brecht. It’s cinema that implicates us — you — and I can’t help but feel that’s why people are so quick to denounce it. If you recoil, as you should, who are you recoiling from? If you’re disgusted, as you should be, why does it linger long after the credits roll?

Even a film like Martyrs, which is so ruthless and pushes you beyond the intellectual world of logic to a place of pure emotion, to true empathy and understanding beyond words.

I find this exercise in overwhelming sensation extremely feminine — this understanding of the body as a site of anxiety as much as pleasure, a tool of control as much as freedom.

I used to have a love-hate relationship with the insult of “Torture Porn.” It felt like an attempt to shame me against any pleasure — aesthetically, physically, thematically — I might take from horror films.

Now that I’m older, I’m more resilient against shame. I take my pleasure when and where I can, in whatever form it may appear.

I suppose we think pleasure should only come from a place of purity and good intentions.

I understand this desire, but I can’t very well relate to it.

If you have the chance to delight in the excess and fallibility of your own body, you should take it. You should embrace disgust and discomfort and sit in it for as long as you can. I hope for everyone reading this that one day you can be really and truly moved, even by a nightmare.

I think if you really want to get at this thing we’re all saddled with, this humanness, the thing with a pulse behind a mass of slick meat, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

I enjoy these films because they’re like one giant scream with no end. A two-hour-long scream — uncomfortable and alarming. If you had any sense, you’d be screaming too.

Bava As Much As Bataille

Why you're wrong about early-2000s horror.

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