My new chapter "Spierig Brothers' Jigsaw (2017) - Torture Porn Rebooted?" appears in the new anthology Horror: A Companion (2019, Peter Lang) edited by Simon Bacon. Read my chapter here, or find more information on the book here.
Abstract:
After a seven-year hiatus, the Saw franchise returned. Critics overwhelming disapproved of the franchise’s reinvigoration, and much of that dissention centred around a label that is synonymous with Saw: ‘torture porn’. Numerous critics pegged the original Saw (2004) as torture porn’s prototype. Accordingly, critics characterised Jigsaw’s release as heralding an unwelcome ‘torture porn comeback’. This chapter investigates the legitimacy of this concern in order to determine what ‘torture porn’ is and means in the Jigsaw era.
