Torture Porn/Sandbox

Any work which gives focused attention to Cold-Blooded Torture and/or mutilation of someone, for the purposes of exploitation.

This isn't to show how wrong it is, as much as to give the audience some visceral thrills. Thus works will give lots of details (whether written, verbal, or visual) of the torture.

Although the term was popularized in the early 2000s with the rise of films focusing on this, the trope has been around for a lot longer.

Now despite the name not referring to actual pornography, some Exploitation Films have combined both (and have thus become notorious for it).

Gorn is a Sister Trope, and they quite often overlap. Another sister trope is Mutilation Interrogation, in which graphic torture is a staple.

Contrast Too Kinky to Torture (the victim enjoys it more than anyone else).

Not to be confused with hardcore S&M (since the torture there is more playing around), nor finding torture to be Fetish Fuel (although some suspect some of these films invoke that).


 * Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and its follow ups.
 * The Saw films.
 * Hostel and its sequel.
 * A Serbian Film
 * Anything from The Guinea Pig Collection, especially Flower Of Flesh and Blood, which was mistaken for a Snuff Film.
 * Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom
 * Ichi the Killer, when Kakihara or the twins are around.
 * The French film Martyrs, which starts as a bloody revenge flick on a seemingly normal family, devolves into humiliation torture, and ends with.
 * The Human Centipede and its sequel.
 * Mel Gibson got this kind of reputation through his movies The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, which both featured prolongued and graphic scenes of torture, punishment and human sacrifice. Whether it was exploitative or not is up to the viewer.
 * Certain Giallo films. Most don't feature gore, just minimal specific incidents of violence which could hardly be classified as 'torture porn', but some of the most extreme ones (on the borderline with the horror genre), such as Fulci's Non si sevizia un paperino (Don't Torture A Duckling), do qualify for this trope.
 * Just about everything released by Troma. Their comparatively highbrow Tromeo and Juliet stayed comparatively true to the spirit of Romeo and Juliet, while also including a scalping, traumatic amputation, incest, electrocution, someone turning into a pig-woman, and hideously, hideously disfigured inbred children.
 * Cannibal Holocaust contained scenes that were believable enough, at the time, to result in the arrest of the director, foreshadowing Charlie Sheen's snuff film fears by about twenty years. Includes rape with a foreign object followed by bludgeoning of the victim, dissection, cannibalism (of course), and an incredibly well-designed impalement scene which still is occasionally posted online as a real occurrence. To make it worse, all the animals that died in the movie were actually killed, leading to the "No Animals Were Harmed In the Making of this Film" disclaimer at the end of every movie; and the director made all the cast sign contracts to keep out of public sight and take no new work for a year to help sell the illusion that the film was genuine.
 * The director in fact had to bring the actors onto a talk show to prove that he hadn't actually killed them during filming.
 * Pink Flamingos, the film to start with if you're interested in the work of John Waters, plays with this trope mockingly. One scene, one very long and uncomfortable scene, features a man having sex with a chicken (resulting in bloody lacerations for the nude gentleman and an onscreen death for the chicken), and another features what can best be described as "a heartwarming torture sequence wherein women are beaten in a basement and raped with a turkey baster, with the resulting babies being sold to lesbians." Thankfully, John Waters is parodying the "True Crime" genre, so it's usually meant to be (disturbingly) funny.
 * Franken Fran: In one episode Fran (unknowingly) takes part in a torture porn movie.
 * There's a reason that Jack Bauer from 24 has a trope named after him. The ways in which he aquires information from his prisoners - and how these ways are both shown and described - fall into this catagory.
 * The Last House on the Left: Most of its drama comes in the form of the torture and rape of two young women.
 * I Spit on Your Grave