Ever since this genre started showing up – I believe SAW is credited with being the first – I knew I wanted to avoid it. Only the sickest people would want to sit for two hours, enjoying popcorn, their loved one snuggled next to them, watching the spectacle of people being tortured slowly and lingeringly, until, in some cases, they are dead.

Yesterday, because I was transcribing an Eli Roth interview for a friend, I decided to take a break and check out some clips from his films. If you’ve not watched torture porn, don’t start. Ten minutes of this stuff was all I could take. In the most misogynistic and gratuitously sick scene, a young woman is literally strung upside down and gagged. Then, another naked woman reclines in a bath underneath her, and uses a scythe, I believe it is, to slowly carve her victim open and bathe in her blood. The female victim is like a butchered pig in an abattoir. With the added perversity that Eli Roth makes a woman sadist stand in for his own masturbatory pleasure.

There is no amount of “subtext” that this artistically illiterate director can invent to excuse himself from a gross dereliction of responsibility to audiences everywhere. We’re at the point of serving up human suffering-as-entertainment on a grand scale not seen in the western world since the dying days of the Roman Empire. At least in the medieval times of public hangings there was some vague notion – however primitive – that justice was being served. But once you venture down the road of enjoying the torture and death of complete innocents, via an entire plot seemingly stitched together to achieve nothing more, you find yourself in a very, very dark place indeed.

Let’s not even start on Quentin Tarantino, from whence all these peddlers of twisted, teenage fantasy smut get their inspiration.

Here is Susan Sontag on the connection between popular culture and the passive acceptance of imperial powers that visit real-life torture upon the world.