By Don Kaye
Special to MSN Movies

Note: After this essay was published on MSN Movies, director Eli Roth, whom Don Kaye mentions often here, responded with an email. To read Roth's rebuttal, go here ... and afterward, sound off on our message board.

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Stephen King once wrote, in his seminal book on horror, "Danse Macabre": "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."

From the spate of horror movies that have flooded the market over the past couple of years, it's obvious that many of the filmmakers behind them aren't too proud either. Starting with the "Saw" series (a fourth installment arrives this Halloween), followed by "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Hills Have Eyes" remakes and their sequels, and director Eli Roth's much-debated "Hostel" franchise and now "Captivity," the amount of gruesome, cruel and depraved physical violence against the human body shown onscreen has grown to the point where it now makes one think of those waves of blood pouring from the elevator doors in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." Horror cinema seems like it has become an ocean of gore, and the current trend has even gotten its own name: torture porn.

What is torture porn?

The term "torture porn" has little to do with real pornography. There is virtually no sexual activity involved, although the victims are usually nude or partially nude. Instead, it expresses the idea that its viewers are intensely, pruriently aroused by the sight of human bodies -- usually young, nubile ones, and quite often female -- getting torn into bloody chunks in the most awful ways imaginable. In 2005's "Saw II," a woman struggles in a pit of hypodermic needles, while another girl finds that the only way to remove her arms from a trap is to slice them to ribbons. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning" (2006) invited us to watch a young man get dismembered on a table while his girlfriend cowered below. Roth's notorious "Hostel" (also 2006) featured a young woman with her eye dangling down her cheek, while this summer's sequel served up the now infamous "bath of blood" sequence as well as a man getting his privates plucked off with a pair of pliers. Good times.

In each case, the effect is one of disgust, rather than the hair-raising shiver of true fear. And in just about all the movies described above, the characters are never developed enough to make us even feel much for them; they're simply straw men and women, set up to be sliced apart. All that's left is revulsion. "The greatest crime (with these films) is that they're just dull," says maverick director Larry Fessenden, who has been making his own uniquely personal horror films for more than 15 years. "You can't even remember them, because it's just the same sort of vile, mean-spirited, fast-cutting stuff ... How does that stay with you or resonate with you in any way at all except to make you feel unwashed, like you've just spent an hour and a half surfing porn sites?"

More gore!

I've been a horror fan almost since I could watch movies, which is somewhere around the age of 4. I asked my grandmother to shut off the TV and put me to bed when they opened the coffin and showed us a rotting 3,000-year-old Kharis in the nearly as ancient "The Mummy's Hand." I have no problem with gore, although I once asked my mother to remove us from the theater when a dripping spear punched through a man's back in the 1973 Vincent Price shocker "Theatre of Blood." Yet as I got older, I watched in a sort of shocked glee as George A. Romero's zombies ran rampant in the original "Dawn of the Dead" (1979) and sat in astonishment as a long wooden splinter pierced a woman's eye in Lucio Fulci's "Zombie" (1980). But the parade of films like "Saw" and "Hostel" has left even this lifelong horror freak numb.

Next: More Torture Porn