Never thought I would see August Underground mentioned on Geekhack! Good list. Gonna check out Snuff 102.
Salo upset me on a lot of levels, and I couldn't really process it while I was watching it. I just kind of had to laugh at it. Men Behind the Sun, though, was a movie that angered me by how much it disgusted me. August Underground Mordum bored me, as it was like watching a bad internet skit go on for 90 minutes with nary a frame of good in it. It was just trying to be upsetting and it was failing, at least in my book.
But I suppose that the point is: what do you want out of a film? In some ways the proliferation of these so called 'torture porn' films is to fill a gap in the market, however what is that gap? Do these films have a beautiful allegory juxtaposed with brutal violence? Usually they don't. Are the people that are watching these films doing so for sexual gratification that they cannot get from some other source? I doubt it. It is my suspicion that a lot of these films are popular merely for the obvious reason that we can all, after having watched them, be cool and name drop the 'worst of the worst' and say 'I saw it and laughed'. This is not really a bad thing, it is just supply and demand. I like watching the films, not to name drop (but then I am cooler than cool because I am undermining the thing that makes cool people cool).
I suppose that my point might be interpreted that if one wants to be 'upset' then why choose a fictional tale? I suppose those tales are are linked into a real-life situation could evoke (in the more empathetic of us) a level of 'upset' that is due to imagining that this is indeed what happened. If you want this then there are many movies (Ed Gein: Butcher of Plainfield, Raising Jeffrey Dahmer, The Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, The Green River Killer, etc.) which depict a tale that could evoke 'upset'. In some ways it is all down to mentality, anyone who has seen videos of real murders can see that they aren't really dramatic enough, in general, for some Hollywood blockbuster, however often some of the more specialist films can get the depiction fairly accurate; often at the expense of a story.
It all probably comes down to the issue of why which watch films in the first place. If a person watches films to make them 'upset' or 'shocked' then I suggest that they might invest some time into trying to think about what might actually shock them or make them upset. I suppose that if asked why I watch the genre of films that I usually watch I would probably argue that most other films sicken me, I want the 'enemy' to triumph, why must our films conform to the monotonous toil that societal living can be? I would be cautious to use the term escapism due to the connotations with escaping reality, however perhaps it is a form of escapism that is restricted to society. There is a fine line between playing a character and becoming a character.
