In January 2006, David Edelstein wrote an article in New York Magazine entitled “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” In that article, Edelstein criticized film makers like Eli Roth for featuring torture so prominently in their horror films. To quote Edelstein, “As a horror maven who long ago made peace, for better and worse, with the genre’s inherent sadism, I’m baffled by how far this new stuff goes—and by why America seems so nuts these days about torture.”
Edelstein’s initial piece was more nuanced than a lot of discussion that came after it and we wanted to take a moment to share our thoughts and we did so on October 22, 2007. We may not have been prompt in our reply to Edelstein, but we were in theme with the scary season.
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