The past few years have seen a fairly successful new cycle of horror films, christened “torture porn” by David Edelstein of New York magazine, who writes: “As a horror maven who long ago made peace, for better and worse, with the genre’s inherent sadism, I’m baffled by how far this new stuff goes-and by why America seems so nuts these days about torture.” It has also been dubbed ‘gorno,’ a portmanteau of ‘gore’ and ‘porno.’ I prefer the latter, both for reasons of pith and because it is less politically charged. This cycle – which started with Saw (James Wan, 2004) and includes the Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005 and 2007) series, Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005), I Know Who Killed Me (Chris Sivertson, 2007), and the controversial Captivity (Roland Joffe, 2007), among others – emphasizes gore over any other element including stories or even stars, filled as it is with unassuming, uninteresting protagonists who find themselves the victims of calculating sadists. Both the marketing and the reception of these films emphasize the affective power of the impressively gory sequences of violence. Negative reviews of the films go beyond questioning their aesthetic qualities or entertainment value to malign the morality of the films’ putative viewers. While many of these films will not even merit inclusion in the horror canon, their success and the wide media interest in them does merit some further inquiry. Ultimately, the films are not so much porn for sadists but – as a result of their postmodern flatness and construction around narrative ‘shocks’ – more akin to very dark slapstick comedy. Though laughter is not typically a viewer’s response, the ‘inappropriateness’ of the images in the films often makes it feel as though the director is playing a sick joke.