Yes, on the
recurring motifs of 2000s cinema thread. I wouldn’t blame Tommaso for not particularly wanting to watch them though, I suppose as a horror fan I’ve more of a stomach for some of the gore and slightly morbid interest in watching the films to keep up with genre trends. Perhaps I’ll be able to add my take on the Saw films to the discussion (since I suppose I might one of the few here to have all five on DVD!) before we move back to Antichrist in particular, though unfortunately I haven’t seen that particular film yet so I can’t really comment on it beyond what I’ve read.
My perception of this debate is that it’s a high vs low culture one – that the Von Trier film might just be worth suffering through for a higher goal set against a trashy populist horror piece with little redeeming merit whose reason for being is only to appeal to the baser instincts (in sci-fi terms it’s 2001’s battle of wits with a computer vs Saturn 3’s getting molested by one while wearing skimpy clothing!)
I do see Von Trier’s film as distinct from a Saw or Hostel, but then I see the Saw and Hostel films as ploughing different furrows from each other too. Noting that all the films have a torture theme in a way obscures the more interesting differences, and while ‘torture porn’ is a fun phrase to throw around I do feel it is a reductive one.
The Saw series, for all its edginess and hyper-nasty marketing, is now the epitome of a mainstream horror franchise – you can’t reach Part VI (out this Halloween with tie in interactive video game!) of any series without it becoming a staple of the genre, whatever your feelings about its merits. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the entire Saw series for me is a film based on relatively ‘real world’ torture can have begat such a long running series – there is something a little more perverse and troubling about that than a more fantastical horror sequel such as a Nightmare on Elm Street 6, Exorcist 4 or Halloween 5 in some ways. At the same time it is one of the few mainstream American horror films released this decade (beyond one-offs like The Mist) that wasn’t a remake, so at least it has that going for it! (though I think the first film was an Australian co-production?)
Yet of course Saw is not really that ‘realistic’ - with its complex and intricate traps that would take a degree in engineering to create and its vision of the US as a dank cityscape filled with crumbling derelict houses and warehouses in which to build elaborate contraptions it is probably best to approach the series as a melding between the serial killer thriller genre but with the emphasis on the horrific aspect as the audience is much more focused on the bad guy's (or girl's) perspective and is often wryly detached from the fates of many of the victims in the series, which makes it akin in some ways to the Friday the 13th films, since in that series there is some dark amusement in just seeing how the next interchangeable cast member is going to be bumped off!
The series could be seen as skating along that same boundary of legitimacy versus exploitation that Silence of the Lambs did (Oscar winning respectable thriller or trashy baroque horror film that got lucky with the critics? Or both?) and in many ways it is blackly comic exploitation of a subject, but all horror films are really exploitation films in that they pick up on a theme or a fear and expand on it, and like fantasy films blow it out of proportion so the audience has to confront it head on. I would disagree that such films that emphasise the experiential and the cathartic should be disdained for their lack of worth, they’re just aiming at doing different things, and even a relatively mainstream series like the Saw films can have interesting elements or ideas that can justify a viewing. Personally the thing I like the most about the first three films is watching Shawnee Smith develop a character from memorable cameo in the first film to almost dominating the show in the third. I think I said this in the other thread but I remembered her previously from her spunky heroine role in the remake of
The Blob (one of the few remakes I would endorse, with a rather fun poke at religion at the end!) and it was extremely nice to see her get another memorable role, albeit completely different from that other film, and tackle it seemingly with such relish.
I do have a rather ambiguous relationship with the series however. I didn’t mind the first though the ‘tracking the serial killer’ influence from 90s thrillers is most felt in this one with the added element of the pair of people trapped in a dingy bathroom being the new twist on what was an extremely tired subgenre by that point – a lot of the Danny Glover ‘gun drawn and chasing the killer through corridors’ material could be lifted straight from Copycat, Kiss The Girls or Silence of the Lambs. I really didn’t like the ‘trapped in a trapped house’ idea of the second which felt rather derivative and over focused on its victim plot (in this series, as in the Friday the 13th films, the interactions between the victims is usually the least interesting element when set against the cop vs villain interactions, and as the Saw films specialise in creating unlikeable bickering victims (since they’ve usually done something terrible, either individually or as a group, that they have to be ‘punished’ for) in order to minimise the impact of the torture when it arrives, too much of their presence can reduce any sympathy to nothing!)
I’d hold up the third as my favourite, in which all the convolutions of the previous films quite neatly fit together. If the series had concluded with this one I'd have been quite satisfied! The fourth gets a bit too tied up in trying to tie together all the loose plot strands of the other three films through telling a parallel story. I did quite like the fifth too, as it’s the one where the increasingly baroque death traps fully reveal their debt to Poe, beginning with a gory fully played out version of The Pit and the Pendulum and ending with a shrinking room/buried alive twist. As the series has progressed it has constantly alternated between procedural plot sequences and grand guignol set pieces with a final twist to recontextualise all that went before, and on those terms, and as an academic exercise in wondering just how the filmmakers are going to work their way out of the corner they usually paint themselves into after each no holds barred finale, I quite enjoy all the films!
One of the reasons why I would feel uncomfortable with lumping all films featuring torture together is that I feel that is disregards the deeper intent behind the films. While many of these films featuring torture can be see as a response to the conflicting feelings it causes when it occurs in the real world and the feeling of governments and other organisations being complicit in carrying it out in ‘our name’ while we feel helpless in the face of impossible to prevent atrocities, at the same time we shouldn’t see something like Abu Ghraib as being the only motivation behind these films, more just an additional factor that contributed to a resurgence of interest in the subject and its moral implications. However it is more interesting to look at the way an initial inspiration is taken and used in very different ways. For example the Hostel and Saw films initially seem well matched companions, but Hostel really has more in common with the ‘foreign panic’ films – inspiring other torture fests such as Turistas and Live Feed but related just as much to Taken, Frantic, And Soon The Darkness or So Long At The Fair as naïve tourists get kidnapped and/or killed in a foreign country.
Saw, I think, is the melding of torture with the elimination reality/game show in which groups of often unlikeable over confident idiots with severe character flaws get forced to whittle their numbers down until a ‘winner’ is found while watched over by self appointed judges with even more severe character flaws. It even features a perceived prize of the contestant having been ‘enriched’ or having ‘learnt something’ by their experience – in other words a way for the torturer (and the audience) to feel the moral superiority of feeling that it is fine, even necessary, to have put these people through a gruelling task because they’ll grow through the experience, a horribly patronising attitude that perfectly describes any current show on television from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? through The Apprentice to Masterchef or Pop Idol!
The way that the main villain of the Saw films eventually dies and drops out of the series altogether, only to keep up a constant voiceover through various cassettes that keep popping out of holes in the wall or bodily orifices with an almost supernatural foreknowledge of every convoluted plot twist only adds to that feeling of a critique of elimination television and the tricks it plays with its contestants. I also like the way that once the guiding force has departed it is left to others to carry on his work, with varying degrees of success or adherence to his principles, which strangely adds a certain religious element to the series (the way that various victims often end up in cruciform poses only seems to underline this blackly comic commentary).
So I feel the Saw films would actually be better linked to other works exploring the same territory, such as Dead Set, Series 7 or the rather more extreme and reprehensible, but under the radar and underground rather than mass marketed, Red Room films from Japan.
The big issue that I have with the Saw films though is the perverse safeness of it all. For a film about pain and suffering, the films become strangely jittery about showing too much gore and the full effects of such violence, and this is usually down to the hyper-editing full of flash frames. Maybe this is just a way of trying to keep the rating to an R but that sanitisation often makes the films more callous in their depiction of the violence.
Plus I would also argue that there have been some
big opportunities for truly transgressive imagery missed over the course of the series. Again I’m likely expecting too much from a relatively mainstream franchise, but if you have a shrinking room crushing somebody to death and don’t follow that through (including maybe the baptism of blood that the character in the glass coffin underneath then receives as an artistic flourish), then what was the point of doing the scene in the first place? Only the brain surgery scene from Part III and the lingering autopsy beginning Part IV really felt as if it was mining some newly horrifying territory.
Onto Antichrist! I’m afraid I don’t really see the point of comparing the film with Saw. Lars von Trier’s films are often worlds unto themselves and often internally driven projects, so I’d find it difficult to believe that he was particularly influenced by other horror films to make his own. I do believe that Nekromantik has a bloody ejaculation scene as its climax, if you’ll pardon the pun, but I’ve no idea if film was an influence or not, or if it was more likely just a coincidence of imagery. If possible I’d like to make a connection to The Fountain, which features another woman using a research project to reveal to her partner some of her hopes and fears about their relationship through heightened imagery – I don’t know how much this potential connection will be borne out until I finally get to see the von Trier film however!
From what I’ve read about the film, it seems far more interesting to move past considering the use of graphic imagery and maybe look at Antichrist from the perspective of von Trier’s other films, which all seem to focus on the clash between nature and culture, with civilisation seen as a kind of hypocritical pretence which most of the main characters in his films set about destroying, either consciously or unconsciously – and then civilisation/culture fights back to restore the status quo, usually through a sacrificial death or two.
; but these extreme moments and my reaction to them didn't reduce my admiration for von Trier's film at all; it was only my knowing about what I can stand seeing and what not that made me do it. Two sleepless nights at age 20 after first seeing "Salo" were an experience I don't necessarily want to repeat twenty years later... 
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Saw VII: This Time Even The Metaphors Are Tortured (for their own good, of course!)