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It's REAL EASY to make any audience squirm with a torturously violent situation. Anyone can do it, and that means it takes no talent.
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A bold statement, and of course untrue - there are considerable skills required to combine convincing special effects, subtle CGI, an unnerving soundtrack perfectly timed, and intense direction of actors. If any of these goes wrong, the effect is severely diluted and sometimes laughable - the complete opposite to what was intended.
Not to mention that to properly shake up the audience, they must have grown to care about the fate and motivations of the characters - 'torture porn' films are clearly as able to do that as films in any other genre.
If these movies are simply enjoyed as 'spectacle', then so be it - the art crowd will never let this kind of stuff in anyway. But it just so happens that films like
Wolf Creek,
Hostel and
Saw are much more than a sum of the gruesome parts they depict, in both execution and originality.
Which ironically is more than can be said for
Cabin Fever, which trips itself up paying homage left right and centre. With the director's next effort, unshackling himself from fanboy attitudes really paid off.
You can find plenty of good and bad suspensful and gore-free horror films if you look for them, both old and new.