What is it about?
This essay rethinks the value of so-called "torture porn" by exploring the new media devices that regularly deliver the subgenre's abuses.
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Why is it important?
Films such as SAW (2004), HOSTEL (2005), and CAPTIVITY (2007) are frequently read as allegories for American foreign policy under George W. Bush. Though hardly wrong, these accounts overlook the relationships to bodies in pain that television, digital video, and the Internet organize for characters and spectators alike. By contrast, this essay argues that torture porn says more about the public encounters with violence that media make possible than about the images of brutality they deliver into private homes.
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This page is a summary of: Plugging In andBugging Out: The Torturous Logic of Contemporary American Horror, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, June 2014, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2012.710512.
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