Claude Brodesser-Akner of Advertising Age explains why torture porn — which is not literally pornography — is the hottest (and most hated) thing in Hollywood:
Welcome to the era of “torture porn,” the latest solution to Hollywood’s runaway studio budgets and bloated marketing.
In late March, owing to what Mr. Solomon insists was a printing mix-up, outdoor billboard ads for “Captivity” banned by the Motion Picture Association of America went up all over Los Angeles anyway. They showed the film’s star, Elisha Cuthbert, with a black-gloved hand over her mouth and the word CAPTURE. Next to it, as her mascara-stained eyes look tearfully out a cage, is the word CONFINEMENT. In the next panel, titled TORTURE, tubes are coming out of her nose, draining blood. The last frame shows the actress hanging dead, lying on her back with one breast prominently displayed. The word in this panel: TERMINATION.
“Parents went nuts,” said Mr. Solomon.
The press had a field day. Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote, “I felt like I needed to take a shower just from having been within a hundred feet of it.”
The creative community gagged. Jill Soloway, an executive producer of HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” blogged on the Huffington Post that “it managed to recall Abu Ghraib, the Holocaust, porn and snuff films all at once.”
As you might imagine, outrage is not necessarily a bad thing when you’re marketing a horror film.
Horror films make their money by bringing in decent box office numbers with very low costs — both production and marketing:
Made for just $1.5 million, ["Cabin Fever"] would go on to make $30 million worldwide as Lionsgate’s first wide-release horror movie. “Saw,” also released by Lionsgate, was made for $1.2 million in 2004 by producer Oren Koules. It would gross more than $103 million worldwide. Last year’s “Saw 3″ cost $10 million but managed more than $160 million worldwide. Suddenly, Big Hollywood was paying attention.
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Unlike big-studio horror movies, torture porn isn’t just made cheaply; it’s marketed precisely and frugally.
“Generally what studios do is just take a movie and basically bombard people,” said Mr. Koules. “Hit them over the head with TV, radio, billboards. But there are six or eight really important horror websites, such as BloodyDisgusting.com and DreadCentral.com. We give them special blogs, we give them information, we let them release posters. So when Eli’s movie comes and does $30 million opening weekend, people say, ‘I didn’t see it 10,000 times on TV?!’ Well, that’s because playing it in a ‘Friends’ rerun doesn’t help anyone.”
Articles on the sport have changed dramatically in tone over the years, from tales of “human cockfighting” to