Abstract
Tallying filmic representations with national events is an established critical mode, one that is particularly popular in horror studies. Scholars have variously deciphered 1950s horror as analogising radiation fears (Skal, 1993: 247–8), and construed Dracula as a commentary on the plight of Victorian women (Kline, 1992), for instance. More recently, monographs by Kevin Wetmore (2012), Linnie Blake (2008), Adam Lowenstein (2005), and Kendall Philips (2005) have offered political-allegorical readings of horror cinema. The allegorical trend has been particularly propagated by torture porn’s ‘directors, experts, and fans’ (Riegler, 2010: 27) when defending the subgenre.2 The consensus is that torture porn comments on the War on Terror: encompassing 21st century terrorism, 9/11, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the Bush Administration’s torture sanctions. Critically invested readings of torture porn’s significance have developed from such linkages, and so the allegory interpretation constitutes an important branch of ‘torture porn’ discourse.KeywordsNarrative StructureCurrent AffairNarrative ContentNarrative PerspectiveHorror FilmThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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