Martyrs: A Celebration and Critique of Extremity and Excess in 21st Century Horror

In this essay, I want to explore the dialogue between French and American horror films, specifically those pertaining to body horror and torture. I will be focusing mainly on the film Martyrs by Pascal Laugier, which debuted at Cannes in 2008. In my initial research of this topic, I sought to find the sources behind the uptick in no-holds-barred violence and depravity has become (relatively) more mainstream in both American and French cinema in the new millennium. I was interested to find that not much had been written about the relation between the two film industries and their respective body-focused horror sub-genres, despite their temporal proximity in the history of film. I will begin by giving an overview of the horror sub- genres body horror as foundation for the rest of the analysis, where I will explore it’s uses in French and American cinema. I will conclude by giving an in-depth analysis of how Martyrs plays with the tropes of both New French Extremity and American “torture porn,” which creates a paradoxical celebration and condemnation of film’s obsession with visceral pain and suffering.

Although the term “body horror” was coined by Philip Brophy in the early 1980’s, the markers by which we measure films within this sub-genre existed long before David Cronenberg and John Carpenter were filling our screens with the blood and guts of mangled and mutated bodies. In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstram writes that even in Shelley’s Frankenstein we saw early iterations of what would become nightmare fuel in body horror films — the “deviant body,” the “manipulation and warping of the normal state of bodily form and function” (Cruz, 161). In the evolution of film as a medium and mode of entertainment, the ways in which we represent the deviant body has transformed into something much more visceral than what directly preceded it.

Horror by its very nature is a genre that attempts to illicit a specific emotional response from its viewers — an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust. Body horror, even more specifically, seeks to do this by playing “on the fear, not of death, but of one’s own body and its potential destruction” (Cruz, 161). Another definition is a text that “generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body” (Reyes, 52). These definitions are still very broad. Getting punched in the face and having it swell up is fairly abnormal to your average viewer, but action films are rarely constituted as body horror. As mentioned above, Frankenstein is a form of body horror, a creature sewn together from bits and parts of deceased humans — but on the flip side, so are movies like the many installments of the Saw franchise. The lack of clarity between these films has lead to even further categorizing. In this essay, I’m going to be exploring the most recent iteration of body horror: torture porn.

First off, I hate that name. The term was famously coined by David Edelstein of New York Magazine in a review of Eli Roth’s Hostel. According to film scholar Aaron Michael Kerner, torture porn is a “distinctly American genre,” and that much of the fixation around bodily harm via methods of torture stem from the fact that “the tidy ‘moral binary’ that popular American culture proffers, if not always a fiction, is certainly shown to be one in our post-9/11 world” (Kerner, 24) The countless viewers of the Saw franchise (the series has grossed over 975 million dollars worldwide) probably won’t list that as the reason their buying tickets, but I think that Kerner’s argument is right. Horror films (and novels, for that matter) have always reflected the underlying anxieties of society, be it the threat of communist invasion manifesting itself as an alien invasion of blobs hell bent on destroying individuality, or the violent images of the Vietnam War being synthesized into films like Dawn of the Dead and Friday the 13th (Dewan, NYT).

While the argument can be made that the rise of the torture porn genre can be attributed to specific anxieties, we can’t gloss over the fact that the “porn” aspects are not present and that audiences don’t seem to derive some sort of pleasure out of watching these on screen avatars be tortured. Even the genre’s scholarly proponents acknowledge this, and Aaron Michael Kerner has a wonderful shot by shot analysis of the torture sequences in Hostel as being a successful “assimilation of pornographic strategies” (Kerner, 133-136). This is reinforced by Carol J. Clover’s work regarding the “body genres” of cinema: horror and pornography. Clover says these two genres are distinct in that their success relies on the transference of sensation on screen. It seems that torture porn is the most literal culmination of the body genres. Even with an understanding of these parallels, it’s still unclear what exactly the viewer derives from the experience of watching a scene like this unfold.

In most of my research I’ve found that most film scholars consider this genre to be American, or at least seem to focus on the roots of sadism and violence in American culture specifically. The term “New French Extremity” was coined by critic James Quandt in an essay entitled “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” written in 2004.

“The critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux – and now, alas, Dumont.... a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn – gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore – proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical (Godard, Clouzot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Buñuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism mostly).”

This movement is considered a precursor to the slightly less highbrow French horror films like Martyrs, Frontiers, l’Interieur, and Haute Tension, among others, that were released in the latter half of the early 2000’s. Although in reading Quandt’s critique it’s clear that he abhors the sort of “shock tactics” that have become more popular in French Cinema, there is an understanding that these filmmakers were once a part of a more respectable section of the film industry.In a genre where the lines drawn are already blurry at best, I find it really interesting that the rise of the American “torture porn” and the French “extremity” are rarely seen as being in a dialogue with each other. They are countries apart, and present in decidedly different industries, but the rise of such similarly extreme and wanton violence in separate countries at the same time seems to suggest that there is something more universal that has given way to the “vicious nihilism” on our screens. Films like those I mentioned above came after the initial heyday of New French Extremity in an academic sense, and they seem to be a sort of twisted love-child of that movement and the more popular American torture porn discussed earlier.

While researching for this paper, I watched a lot of “New Wave” horror films from France (this qualifier used to differentiate the newer crop of French horror films from their more art-house friendly forebears, a term used by Matt Smith in his essay “Confronting Morality”). Not every one includes forms of torture in the same clinical way it is shown in films like Hostel or Saw, but body horror is an element present in all. Be it a pregnant woman terrorized by an intruder who wants to steal her unborn child, or a group of Arab teens who fall prey to a group of Neo Nazis in the countryside, you'd best believe that blood will be shed and you will see every last excruciating close-up of where it was drawn. As a personal aside, I’m a huge fan of horror, the bloodier the better — but these were on a level beyond anything I had ever seen. And one stood out from the pack.

Martyrs was released in 2008. The film tells the story of two girls, Lucie and Anna, who at different times in their lives fall prey to a mysterious cult obsessed with documenting human suffering. The film begins with Lucie as a young girl, escaping the cult and being placed in a mental hospital. This is where she meets Anna. Fifteen years in the future, Anna is found by the cult that imprisoned Lucie as a child. She learns from a woman referred to as Mademoiselle that the cult believes that in inflicting intense pain on their victims, they will be able to reach a certain type of nirvana and divine knowledge about life and death through horrible suffering.

This conversation between Anna and Mademoiselle happens about midway through the film, with about forty-five minutes to go. For the entire rest of the film, the only things shown are Anna being tortured, day in and day out. There is no story, there is no plot — just images of Anna suffering. There is a brief moment, I hesitate to even call it a scene, where Anna almost escapes, but the moment is so short that I wouldn’t qualify it as a reprieve from the horrifying actions being carried out on the screen. The torture culminates with Anna being skinned alive, and reaching “nirvana.”

The film shares a lot of visual resemblance to other films specifically within the American torture porn genre. Often repeated motifs in American torture porn films include, “exhibition of the body,” “medicalization of torture,” “testing the limits of the body,” “banality of space,” more specifically “victims bound to chairs,” and finally, perpetrators that are “quite banal in their demeanor and dress” (Kerner, 37-43). These aesthetic tropes are not always found in films of the New French Extremity and New Wave Horror, but they are all present in Martyrs.

Anna’s significantly maimed body is on display for the cult members, but every moment of her “martyrdom” is treated with a sort of detached clinical feel — the operating room is clean and nondescript. The whole premise of her reaching martyrdom is achieved through pushing her body to the physical limit — but those forcing her through this process are not only calm and normal but suburban families who carry out their cult worship in locked rooms in their basements, unbeknownst to the outside world.

At first glance, I think it’s easy to think of this film as just another depraved interpretation of the same torture porn that we’ve weirdly become accustomed to — that’s what I told myself when I sat down to watch it for the first time, after having it sit on my hard drive for four full years, me too scared to actually watch it. When I finally did, I actually couldn’t make it through, and that was before they started flaying her alive.

What really frightened me, I came to realize, was not the torture, it wasn’t the gore — it was the lack of hope for escape. The body horror elements are truly horrifying, but something that struck me as being a huge difference between the other films I would group together with this one, where subjects are brutally tortured and maimed for the viewing audience’s twisted pleasure. Martyrs never once gives you any inkling that there is a way for Anna to escape. This goes beyond the story — it’s something that becomes clear through the editing. As I mentioned above, Anna is captured about midway through the film. Once she is in captivity, there follows a series of scenes where the same basic things are repeated: she is beaten, she is fed nearly inedible food, and left in solitary confinement. Each time one of these events happens, the scene fades to black, the cycle of abuse flickering in and out, over and over again. It becomes clear that escaping, although not rendered completely impossible, is not the impetus that is driving the film forward. That’s where this film differs from American films that have so much of the same content and visual motifs. Consider the Saw franchise: the major things we takeaway from viewing one of these films is “wow, those grotesque traps and the way these people’s bodies are destroyed are horrifying” — but something that’s a major theme and plot point in the films is that the torture is a game, something that can be beat. If you don’t leave with an arm or a leg, at least you leave with your life if you play your cards right. Even Hostel, which bears a lot of visual resemblance to Martyrs with their isolated rooms outfitted with all methods of weirdly clinical torture instruments, makes it clear that the action driving this particular plot is the will of the captives to escape from their captors. All of them might not be successful, but suspense is built around the understanding that all of the main characters will make some attempt to flee and elude their sadistic torturers. I think that small bit of hope is often what keeps people watching — yes, they came for the blood and gore, but they want to see some sort of retribution by the end of the film. Martyrs does not afford the audience that luxury. There is an expectation that someone will make it out alive which is grown from a trope known at “the final girl,” a term coined by Carol J Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Films. She describes this recurring character as “The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified” (Clover, 35). Anna seems to be another version of this trope. Throughout the film, she is subjected to horrible things (even before she is taken in by the cult, she witnesses Lucie murdering a family she believes wronged her) and she remains resilient in that she physically survives — but she does not escape her fate, and eventually gives into the torture and loses herself in it. If you want to watch the whole film, you need to be alright with watching violence being enacted with no promise of vindication.

In an essay about the state of violence in American cinema, Will Self wrote specifically about the experience of watching the mutilation scene in Reservoir Dogs: “...something deeply sinister begins to intrude. We lose sight of whose exact POV we are inhabiting. The sadist who is doing the torturing? The policeman? The incapacitated accomplice? It is this vacillation in POV that forces the sinister card of complicity upon the viewer.” The piece, entitled “The American Vice,” was written in 1996, but is prescient of the trend in horror films that would arise after the turn of the century. I find it even more important to think about when thinking about Martyrs.

Anna’s suffering is watched within the world of the story by her captors, the mysterious cult who hopes to divine knowledge from her if she is able to achieve “martyrdom.” But Anna’s suffering, more literally, is being watched by us, the audience. In the forty-five minutes of pain we watch her endure, we relate to her because we see her body as our own — but we also find ourselves in the place of the torturers. We are confronted with the question that so many torture victims ask in these films: “why are you doing this?”

What is the point of watching these body doubles endure pain? Is it out of pleasure? Does it give us a release? Are we, like the cultists, searching for some higher understanding of humanity through suffering?

What’s interesting about the scenes in which she is beaten is that they aren’t exactly graphic, especially in comparison to the rest of the film. Beyond the flayed body, the majority of the visceral and gory violence shown on screen occurs when Lucie is fighting off a demon who is hell bent on causing her pain. Anna realizes that the demon is merely a figment of Lucie’s imagination and that the wounds that Lucie has are self-inflicted. On first viewing, I thought that the inclusion of this was sort of a non-sequitur. In a movie so specifically concerned about people inflicting pain onto others, having a seemingly supernatural entity turned psychotic hallucination came off to me as a weird way to include some sort of “monster” in a film that didn’t really need any more monsters. But maybe Lucie’s suffering is a commentary on the audience, asking us why we as an audience enjoy being tormented by images of imaginary agony. Martyrs, while a cult classic, is not the type of movie you would watch without going into it with an expectation of what sort of horrors you will witness. With any movie classified as torture porn, there is an understanding at the outset that you know what you’re going to get — it might be common for people to overestimate their threshold for violence and gore, but it seems like anyone sitting down to watch Saw understands that some body parts might get, you know... sawed off.

Kerner wrote that one of the reasons that Americans might find torture porn comforting due to our need to victimize ourselves in order to wash our hands of responsibility in a post 9/11 world:

“Indeed, viewing ourselves as the victim offers a limitless credit line, unburdened by guilt to rectify the wrong perpetrated against us. Torture porn flirts with this constantly and in its negotiation of the subject begins to reveal the moral bankruptcy of the position. Tortured Americans reaping vengeance against their captors; Americans perpetrating violence against one another; antagonists that take on the attributes of a protagonist—torture porn employs reversals, inversions, maybe even perversions, and what gets revealed is that, finally, the tidy ‘mental hygiene of the victim,’ which whitewashes our own violence in the real world, does not add up.”

Martyrs offers the victimization, but none of the retribution. By the time of it’s release, five Saw films had been released, as well as two Hostel films — it was not created in a vacuum, and I would argue that it’s existence in the genre goes beyond adding another terrifying way to mess up a human body. Martyrs acts as a critique of the idea of torture porn as a whole.

At the end of the film, after Anna is flayed alive and set to hang in a christ-like pose under hot lights, her attendant notices that her expression has changed. She wears the elusive face of martyrdom, as the cult defines it — glassy eyes, staring off into nothingness, somehow looking into the great beyond. The attendant arranges for the cult to come view Anna in her state, and before she is shown to the public, Mademoiselle visits Anna and asks her what she saw. Anna whispers in her ear, inaudible to the audience. Upon leaving Anna’s side, Mademoiselle goes to another cult member and asks them: “could you imagine what comes after death?” He replies no, and she tells him to keep wondering, and shoots herself. It cuts to Anna, staring blankly into empty space, and fades to black, where these words appear: “Martyr: from the greek, maturos. Witness.”

In the world of the story, Anna is the martyr and the witness — her body and mind were sacrificed to obtain knowledge of some higher understanding of life. But according to Mademoiselle, what she saw was either so inconclusive that her life’s work had been for nothing, or what Anna had seen was so disturbing that Mademoiselle couldn’t bear to tell anyone else. Or both. But I don’t think that’s the only witness the film is referring to. For who are we, the audience, if not witnesses of whatever horrible acts are carried out on screen. Like Mademoiselle, when confronted with the reality that there is no speakable meaning behind our desire to watch films like this, what do we do? We are faced with the fact that we watched these events unfold for no real reason other than to watch Anna endure pain. What does that say about us as an audience? When the comforts of retribution, vengeance, and poetic justice are stripped away, we realize that all we’re doing is bearing witness to something disgusting for the sake of entertainment. Like Lucie, we have created ways for ourselves to be horrified — Lucie’s demon is formed out of a sense of survivor’s guilt, so what are our demons born out of?

Of course, Martyrs is then a paradoxical film. Even if the film’s purpose is to raise a mirror up to the audience and ask them these questions I posed above, it still is a contribution to the laundry list of films in both French and American cinema that seem to exist purely to disturb and upset the general viewing population. I’m sure many seasoned horror fans will be able to watch this film all the way through and move on to the next — but hopefully for some, it begs the question:

Why are we watching this?

Works Cited

Brophy, Philip. “Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.” Screen 27 (1986): 2– 13. Print.

Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, No. 20, Special Issue: Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy (Autumn, 1987), pp. 187-228. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928507

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University, 1997.

Cruz, Ronald Allan. (2012). Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror is Biological Horror. Journal of Popular Film and Television. 40. 160-168. 10.1080/01956051.2012.654521.

Dewan, Shaila K. “Do Horror Films Filter The Horrors of History?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Oct. 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/10/14/movies/do-horror-films- filter-the-horrors-of-history.html.

Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York Magazine, nymag.com/movies/features/15622/.

Halberstram, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.

Kerner, Aaron. Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Quandt, James. “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.” The New Extremism in Cinema from France to Europe. Edinburgh University Press. (2011) http:// www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r2b4v.5

Reyes, Xavier Aldana. “Body Horror.” Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror. University of Wales Press (2014). http://www.jstor.org/stable/ j.ctt9qhjr0.6

Self, Will. “The American Vice: When It's Too Violent to Watch.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 28 Sept. 1996, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4704563/When-its-too- violent-to-watch.html.