(Catherine Lamy, Buzz illustrator)

Until recently, kidney theft was just an urban legend. Two people meet, sleep together, and then one of them wakes up in a tub full of ice. The rest is self-explanatory, seeing as this story has been a staple of American folklore even being used in the 1998 film Urban Legend.

In January of 2008 this legend became a reality. According to ABC News, Dr. Amit Kumar was charged with trafficking more than 600 kidneys throughout India since 1993. This news received very little media attention, bringing up a very interesting question: has the American public been desensitized to stories of human mutilation and torture?

Enter the torture porn genre ...

Torture porn has little to do with actual pornography. The genre gets its name because of its alarmingly exploitative nature. A horror subgenre, torture porn consists of individuals undergoing extreme amounts of torture and mutilation, almost always to the death, while they are fully conscious of what is happening to them. The torturers range from serial killers to peers to individuals who pay money in order to be able to kill. The victims scream in agony for minutes at a time, and audiences watch as blood flows and as flesh is peeled away like the skin of an orange.

When Eli Roth’s Hostel debuted two years ago, it caused a stir of controversy for its depictions of long, bloody, and realistic torture, with the true horror of the film being in that the torturers are everyday men and women who pay for the sadistic ability to torture and kill young travelers.

Hostel was a hit. A big hit. It had one of the most impressive opening weekends in January history, proving audiences were ready for a new style of horror.

Two months after Hostel hit theaters, Alex Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes made its big debut, and upped the ante. This time an all-American family is subjected to mutilation, rape, torture, and murder as they cross paths with cannibalistic mutants in the New Mexican desert. The Hills Have Eyes was also a big hit, but at what cost?

Many viewers actually cried at The Hills Have Eyes, which presents a question: is the film entertainment or is it an exploitative exercise in testing audiences’ limits?

If torture porn is characterized by its extreme violence and exploitative content, then the real beginning of the genre’s recent boom can be traced to Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. In the film, Jesus is subjected to relentless, vicious torture and humiliation. Audiences cried at this manipulative, gruesome film, much like they did at The Hills Have Eyes, yet The Passion of the Christ is seen as an important experience and it even generated mild Oscar buzz. Why, if it contains all the elements of a torture porn film and elicits the same reactions, is The Passion of the Christ not viewed in the same light as The Hills Have Eyes? Maybe it is because The Passion of the Christ came before the boom of torture porn and such graphic images were new and shocking.

For most of 2006, torture porn proved to be an extremely bankable genre for movie studios, with almost all films released doing moderate to good box office business. Soon, the genre showed signs that it was beginning to wane. Although the Saw films still bring in audiences, others like Turistas, Captivity, and, in a sign that the genre’s nail was about to hit its coffin, Hostel: Part II were all flops both critically and commercially. The genre disappeared as quickly as it emerged, with some critics even proclaiming that they refused to review any more films that carried the torture porn stigma.

So what happened? It is actually quite simple: audiences got bored with what they were seeing. Seeing people repeatedly raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered grows tedious after awhile. The American public has been desensitized to brutal torture in film, and this desensitization has carried over into everyday life.

Kidney heists are now an actual threat, yet people have no interest in hearing so. Tales of murder and torture in Iraq are common for Americans to hear on the news and think nothing about. The line between entertainment and reality has been blurred. After 9/11, terrorism was at the forefront of every American’s fears. Now, after countless hours of exposure to the subject through news and popular films, Americans no longer list terrorism as affecting them as strongly as it did seven years ago. The same can be said for torture and graphic violence in the aftermath of torture porn. It’s a case of been there, done that, and audiences are looking for something new.