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On April 28, 2004, CBS aired the Abu Ghraib photographs on 60 Minutes II. The images showed American soldiers in a prison outside Baghdad, grinning, posing, giving thumbs up next to naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in human pyramids. The story had been circulating for months in reports that nobody in power seemed particularly motivated to act on. Seeing the photographs was different. They made undeniable something the country had been quietly working to keep abstract: the United States was torturing people, and the people running the program looked genuinely unbothered about it.
Six months later, in October 2004, Saw opened in theaters. $18 million opening weekend on a $1.2 million budget. Then Hostel in January 2006, making $47 million domestic on $4.8 million. And then, right around the time Hostel was still running in theaters, film critic David Edelstein published a piece in New York Magazine that handed everyone a way to stop thinking about both films at once. He called the genre “torture porn,” and the phrase stuck the way only the most convenient phrases do.
It moved the films into the category of things decent people don’t engage with. Porn isn’t a genre in Edelstein’s framing. It’s a verdict. Once the verdict lands, you don’t have to do anything else. No argument required.
Which is a problem, because these films were made in a very specific moment in American history, by directors who were paying attention, and what they were doing deserves more than a pass.
The Label Arrived After the Films Had Already Said Something
Here’s the thing that keeps nagging at me when this subject comes up. The timing. Saw came out in October 2004. The Devil’s Rejects hit in July 2005. Wolf Creek and High Tension the same year. Hostel in January 2006. Edelstein’s New York Magazine piece (the one that coined “torture porn”) also ran in January 2006, weeks after Hostel opened.
The films existed first. The label arrived after the fact, applied retroactively to a body of work that was already done, already finding audiences. The critics didn’t stop the genre. They gave audiences a framework for feeling superior about not watching it, which is a different and somewhat less impressive accomplishment. The Splat Pack, a label British film journalist Alan Jones coined in Total Film around the same time for Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Alexandre Aja, Neil Marshall, and Greg McLean, had already done the work. The moral panic came after.
And here’s what nobody covering the genre at the time seemed willing to say plainly: these directors were making these films in 2004 and 2005, inside an America that was having a loud, public, genuinely uncomfortable argument about whether the government was allowed to torture people. That argument was on the Senate floor, on cable news, in newspapers, at dinner tables. The critics who dismissed these films for being too fixated on suffering somehow couldn’t see the connection between what was on the screen and what was on the front page. This is either a remarkable failure of critical attention or a very deliberate choice to look elsewhere.
What the Country Was Actually Doing at the Time
We tend to soft-pedal how strange the 2001 to 2006 period actually was, partly because enough time has passed that it starts to feel abstract. So let’s be specific about it.
After September 11, the Bush administration authorized what it officially called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a phrase that covered waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation lasting for days at a stretch, and other methods that most of the world’s legal systems classify as torture. The program was classified. The public framing was that these measures were limited, carefully administered, and necessary. Then Abu Ghraib happened, and the photographs showed something that no official framing had prepared anyone for. American soldiers, cheerful and casual, posing with prisoners in conditions that narrowed the gap between “enhanced interrogation” and the thing you actually see in those images down to almost nothing.
The official response split immediately. President Bush called the Abu Ghraib abuses “a stain on our country’s honor” in a May 2004 address. Dick Cheney took a different position, one he never really walked back. Asked years later about waterboarding, he said it was “absolutely” justified. In a 2014 NBC interview he was unambiguous about the whole program: “I’d do it again in a minute.” This wasn’t a fringe view. The administration made sustained, formal arguments that certain detainees didn’t qualify for the same protections as others, that some suffering was a reasonable cost, that the ends justified it.
Senator John McCain, who had personally been tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and knew the subject from a direction Cheney did not, sponsored the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibited cruel and degrading treatment of detainees. The Bush White House opposed it. McCain got it passed anyway.
That’s the specific country Saw and Hostel were released into. Not a vague cultural unease. A named, active, very public argument about what the American government was permitted to do to a human body, and whether the people doing it were heroes or war criminals. Horror decided to take that argument seriously. The mainstream critical establishment, apparently, did not.
What Saw Was Actually Doing
Saw predates Abu Ghraib in one genuinely interesting way. James Wan and Leigh Whannell wrote the original script in 2001, before the torture debate became a front-page story. They weren’t consciously making a political film. They were making a movie about a killer who traps people and forces them to choose between surviving and giving up. That’s horror. Character under pressure, consequences made physical.
But watch it in context and the film’s internal logic starts pressing on something uncomfortable. Jigsaw doesn’t think of himself as a torturer. He’s someone who runs a test, giving people the chance to prove they actually want the life they’ve been wasting. The suffering isn’t the punishment. It’s the proof. You are put in a trap because you have sinned, and the trap is proportionate to the sin. The framework is almost Calvinist: your situation is your own fault, and what you do with it reveals who you really are.
This is also, uncomfortably, the framework the Bush administration used to justify enhanced interrogation. Not torture. A process. A necessary measure that, whatever it looked like from the outside, was ultimately about something the detainee brought on themselves. The person controlling the situation gets to define the terms. The person in the trap doesn’t get a vote. If they suffer, that’s a function of their choices, not the jailer’s.
The franchise that followed gradually stopped being interested in that logic and became interested mainly in the contraptions, which is a less compelling thing. But the first film holds up as something tighter and more unsettling than its reputation allows. The question the movie keeps returning to, whether this person deserves what’s happening to them, is not a neutral question to raise in an American theater in October 2004.
What Hostel Is Actually About
Hostel is the more nakedly political film and the one that got treated most unfairly by the label.
Eli Roth’s film, if you actually watch it rather than react to the premise, is about a specific kind of American arrogance. The protagonists are loud, entitled, treating Eastern Europe as a backdrop for their own pleasure, incapable of imagining that the people around them have perspectives of their own. They aren’t innocent. They’re oblivious, which in the world of the film turns out to be more dangerous. The horror doesn’t come from being in the wrong place. It comes from having operated for so long as if their nationality was a kind of armor, and discovering that it isn’t.
The reveal (that there is an organized market for torturing tourists, with membership fees and price tiers broken down by nationality) gets described as a shock premise. It’s actually a precise economic metaphor. Americans cost more to participate because they’re valued more by the system; American lives have been assigned a higher dollar amount by the global hierarchy these men have always benefited from. And then the logic inverts: Americans also cost more to purchase as victims, for exactly the same reason. The film is about what happens when the people at the top of a hierarchy get fed into the machinery of that hierarchy from the other direction.
Scholars who have taken the film seriously (and there are several, which suggests the dismissal left real work undone) have read it as a film about the commodification of suffering inside a global economy, about who gets to participate in violence and who becomes the product. That reading holds. And it arrives with uncomfortable timing: the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, which involved transferring detainees to countries where harsher treatment was available, was not yet fully public when Hostel was in production. By the time the full scope of it emerged, the film had already beaten it to theaters.
Calling this “torture porn” means deciding the film has no argument, only appetite. It means treating the suffering on screen as the product rather than the subject. And once that frame is in place, you don’t have to engage with what the film is actually doing. You can just walk out.
Why the Dismissal Mattered
Horror has a reliable pattern of processing anxieties the rest of the culture isn’t ready to face directly. This is practically the first thing anyone says about the genre in a serious critical context, and it’s true enough that it’s worth sitting with what it actually means in practice rather than treating it as a given. Night of the Living Dead was cast and shot in ways that landed differently in 1968 than they would have a decade earlier. The Thing asks its audience to sit with the impossibility of knowing who to trust during a period when that question had a very specific political charge. Horror carries the freight other genres can put down.
The 2004–2006 window was exactly that kind of moment, and the “torture porn” label foreclosed the conversation at the worst possible time. By 2006, when Edelstein’s piece ran, the country was three years into the Iraq War, two years out from Abu Ghraib, and actively, unresolvedly arguing about what the government was permitted to do to a prisoner. Horror was processing that argument in real time, as it has always done with the things the culture most wants to look at sideways. The critical class looked away instead. They found a phrase that performed distaste without requiring any actual engagement, and they used it, and the films got buried under a reputation they’ve spent two decades trying to get out from under.
None of this is an argument that every Splat Pack film is good or that the Saw sequels deserve a full critical examination. Some of these movies really are just interested in the gore, and that’s a legitimate thing for a horror film to be interested in, and the genre has always had room for films whose only goal is testing how much the audience can take. That’s fine.
But Hostel is not that film, and Saw is not entirely that film. They were made by people who were living in a specific country at a specific time, paying attention to what that country was doing and what it was telling itself about what it was doing. The squirming the films produced in their audiences was not a side effect. It was the argument.
The critics didn’t want to feel it. So they named it something else and moved on.
The thing they were pointing at, for the record, was us.
