Bodily destruction guides and binds many popular subgenres of violent cinema. From gialli and international mondo and splatter films, to many Hong Kong works bearing the Category III rating, to more recent films with the specious torture porn designation, a common prevailing priority is to shock the audience through boundary-breaking acts of onscreen violence. Yet for all of their innovative attention to bloody atrocities, these strands of cinema often use reductive narrative techniques to string one death to another. In such films, merits of plot, structure, and extra- and subtextual significance are usually appreciated ironically and/or dismissed as unintentional. Just as Hollywood’s tired narrative formulas become predictable and unadventurous over time, even outsider violent cinema loses its spark if it fails to do anything but recycle its own well-worn tropes (however shocking they might have once been).
Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002) and Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q (2001), on the other hand, represent a distinctive alternative to both mainstream Hollywood cinema and other films with a single-minded intention to shock. While their excessive content transgresses even further beyond mainstream taste than much of the cinema described above, their structural vigor and keen attention to processes of spectator perception and participation, buttress the films with a depth and unity that is missing from much of ‘shock cinema’. These works, as variations on the Orphic myth, use exaggerated corporeal violence in order to explore intense psychological and societal struggles.