Torture porn tarted up in a lab coat?

I love TV but I don't get to watch much of it, outside of a few family friendly shows I'm pretty oblivious to what's on, so I could be way off base. Torture porn is probably too strong a term for this but anyway.....

I've had this idea tickling around in my head for a few days. It started with an article in the paper about women being a huge part of the horror film market. which surprised me, even though I enjoy a good horror film myself now and then. The article was written from a sort of feminist perspective, discussing the idea of "the last girl" (the good, smart girl who gets away at the end).

At the time I was reading the book "The Ruins". In the book the characters talk about when they get resuced and they make a movie of the story, how will it be fictionalized: who will be "the last girl", etc.

Then I volunteered to help Mo's teacher with a project. It was a boring, repititous, very time consuming project. I threw everything in a box, carted it home, plunked down in front of the TV, and started channel flipping.

It seems that daytime TV features mostly crime solving shows, both true stories and fiction stories. I couldn't help but notice how bloody and graphic these shows were -- hacked up bodies everywhere. The difference was that the people doing the hacking were scientists instead of madmen -- the good guys and not the bad guys.

To me, it all seemed like soft-core torture porn.

What do you think?

humans appear to crave a certain amount of violence and gore....or at least a certain amount of adrenaline...and perhaps TV has replaced (at least to some extent) horrors like the coliseum, public executions, bear and bull baiting etc.

Long before the first big-screen vivisection of a female breast, novelist H.P. Lovecraft wrote that horror was "supposed to be against the world, against life, against civilization." But the delight that the genre's filmmakers, especially those behind the "Saw" franchise and its torture porn kin, take in depicting a steady stream of starlets being strung up, nailed down or splayed open, makes it clear that modern horror is against some more than others.

And yet recent box office receipts show that women have an even bigger appetite for these films than men. Theories straining to address this particular head scratcher have their work cut out for them: Are female fans of "Saw" ironists? Masochists? Or just dying to get closer to their dates?

"Jennifer's Body" (coming to theaters Friday) " a high school retro-horror romp written by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama ("Girlfight") and starring Megan Fox as a satanically possessed sex bomb who literally feeds on boys " offers another, more reassuring explanation for the draw: Audiences love a woman who can take back the knife.

Cody, 31, whose Academy Award-winning screenplay for "Juno" featured a distinctive female voice, says she gravitated toward horror as a girl because she could see herself represented on screen. "When I watched movies like 'The Goonies' and 'E.T.,' it was boys having adventures," she says. "When I watched 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' it was Nancy beating" up Freddy. "It was that simple."

More comfortable watching a woman in peril than a man, young, male viewers " initially slasher movies' core audience " get the best of both worlds, identifying first with the predator and then with the would-be prey. That women also identify with the scrappy heroine is something of a happy accident.

"Jennifer's Body" was designed with both feminists and 15-year-old boys in mind, a seemingly eccentric blueprint that, as Kusama points out, is in line with the best movies of the slasher tradition. "It may be one of the best ways for a young male audience to experience a female story without feeling like they have been limited by a female perspective," she says.

Here that perspective is doubled, with Jennifer and her innocuous shadow, Needy (Amanda Seyfried). The story of the girls' tormented, toxic relationship is set off by various depictions of Fox " a combination of brain-locking beauty and recombinant evil " rummaging through some poor guy's torso. Between Needy's cautious yearning and Jennifer's pure, trampling id, the film presents a portrait of female identity in flux.

It was an effort that often bedeviled Cody and Kusama, who tried to balance brute violence and lesbian kisses with the film's more substantial metaphors. "The tricky thing is if you're going to subvert those tropes, they have to be there," says Cody, whose script is a self-described "crazy, chaotic homage" to the horror films of her youth. "Karyn and I talk about the film as a kind of Trojan horse. We wanted to package our beliefs in a way that's appealing to a mainstream audience."

That audience is not known for its flexibility: The bulletproof formula of screams, skin and death, pioneered when Janet Leigh and half her blood supply went sliding down the Bates Motel's shower wall in "Psycho," took hold because it's easy, and it works. Horror films have adapted with Darwinian fortitude over the years, allegorizing everything from cold war paranoia and eco-anxiety to the breakdown of families. And yet the success of slasher movies, which exploded with films like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in 1974 and came to dominate what we now think of as scary movies, might have stalled cinema's most resilient genre.

For the most part, except for a few breakouts like "Shaun of the Dead" (and remakes of still-vital foreign horror films), mainstream American horror has become, like pornography, mainly a cinema of graphic escalation. Though often associated with exploitative fare, director Rob Zombie, whose recent release, "Halloween II," revamps another 1970s proto-slasher, says the genre's indulgence has been its undoing.

"The '80s are the decade that ruined everything for everybody," he says. "The soul went away, and it became gore for the sake of gore, and kids were cheering at killings and yelling and screaming. It became a roller-coaster ride. And of course once something becomes a roller coaster, all you can do is build a bigger, more extreme roller coaster. That's where I think horror movies really got perverted."

One feminist who would agree is novelist Rita Mae Brown, who wrote a slasher sendup called "The Slumber Party Massacre" (1982). "Horror films are one of the last places where women will make progress," she says, "because they go to the root of adolescence."

Cody's attempt at subversion led to pressure simply to tow the slasher line. "That temptation was there," Cody says. "I think there were some people involved who would have liked to have made a straight horror film." Ultimately, however, Cody's script prevailed intact. She says, "Some of us ... like to be scared; we like to have visceral reaction in the theater. Maybe I'm starved for adrenaline, but for me watching a horror movie is very pleasurable. So making one was kind of a dream."