Escalating depravity
Movies that “disturb and disgust” appeal to the “tang of evil”
Gene Edward Veith

A new breed of movies makes the old slasher and horror flicks look like Disney cartoons.

As film critic Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Daily News describes them, movies like Hostel, Wolf Creek, and The Devil's Rejects feature "intense scenes of torture, mutilation, and depravity." Their very purpose, according to Darren Lynn Bousman, director of the Saw franchise, is to "disturb and disgust."

The first Saw movie was about helpless people being forced to commit unspeakable cruelties to each other, else they and their families would be killed. To free herself from a bear trap about to spring on her head, a woman has to cut open a man and rummage around in his intestines to find a key. the rest