Salvation Magazine Issue 1 - Magazine - Page 19
CON
WANT TO
, Decadence and Death
-based designer whose aesthetic 昀椀ts right into our
s. For your home and décor delectation, read on...
Reviews
R
E
PORN HORROR
The ASSinine side of
Exploitation Cinema
Damien Granger
Hardback, Limited Edition of 666
plus 12 large format Horror Porn
cards
424 pages French Language
Sex and violence have long been
the yin and yang of both exploitation cinema and the wider world
of the commercial horror 昀椀lm. The
producers of the early Hammer
昀椀lms knew that having Christopher
Lee biting a girls neck gave them
the perfect opportunity to show as
much cleavage as they could get
away with. By the 1970s cleavage
had given way to bare and often
blood covered breasts and full
frontal nudity, while mainstream
directors like Sam Peckinpah
and Stanley Kubrick were mixing
extreme violence with explicit rape
and sex scenes in 昀椀lms like Straw
Dogs and A Clockwork Orange.
Meanwhile in the shadowy world
of exploitation cinema, directors
had long known that breast is best
and that the way to get bums on
seats and dollars in their wallets was to keep costumes to the
minimum and to mix all that 昀氀esh
with as much salacious violence as
they or their distributors could get
away way. Directors like Lee Frost
and Shaun Costello led the way in
the late sixties and early seventies
with Frosts’ Naziploitation epic,
Love Camp 7 and Forced Entry,
Costello’s nasty and sordid tale of
a deranged Vietnam vet whose
hatred for women sees him raping
and killing them before he eventually shoots himself.
Porn Horror covers these and
other early maverick directors
extensively, including references to
many 昀椀lms like Faster Pussycat
Kill, Kill, The Gruesome Twosome, Vixen et al which are now
almost mainstream to exploitation
connoisseurs before immersing
itself totally in the murky and disturbing world of horror porn…
…Horror Porn is, by its very
nature, an unsettling mix. Pornography is designed fundamentally
to elicit a strong sexual response in
the viewer while horror, conversely,
is designed at its most basic level
to scare, frighten and revolt the
viewer. So mixing the two is never
going to make for happy bedfellows
and is perhaps where Porn Horror
the book falls down as its pages
are 昀椀lled with graphic and highly
explicit pornographic screen shots
which feel both prurient and, like
the 昀椀lms themselves, seemed designed to titillate rather than inform
the reader.
That said, Porn Horror is the 昀椀rst
book that I’m aware of to o昀昀er a
comprehensive overview of what is,
if not taboo, then certainly a dark
V
I
E
and transgressive part of pornography and it does it well, o昀昀ering
a veritable cornucopia of porn’s
underbelly including several 昀椀lms,
like pink title Twilight Dinner, that
have been released by Salvation.
Granger knows his stu昀昀 and 昀氀its
from heavy seventies SM orientated
titles like The De昀椀ance of Good
and The Taking of Christina
through to contemporary online
and digital productions like Zombie
Strike Origin and I Know Who
You Fucked Last Halloween.
In-between he covers Japanese
pink and tentacle cinema, horror
inspired porn from Joanna Angel
and Jack the Zipper through to
wonderfully named titles like Spankenstein, Hannibal Lickter and
the Texas Asshole Massacre.
Ultimately Porn Horror is a
lavishly produced niche book about
a niche aspect of pornography. It
would be nice to see it reissued in
English and as a subject explored
further. For example as a genre it
is the one most likely to be cited as
likely to cause actual copycat violence or at the very least desensitise
the viewer and as such many of
these 昀椀lms would be unrealisable
in many countries. And yet there
is ‘horror’ porn which uses horror
motifs and subjects and mixes these
with sex, there is horror parody
and there is the horrible in which
violence is gratuitous and ghastly.
Whether one can have all, some or
none is a debate for another book
and another day but I think Granger’s Horror Porn made a good start,
just don’t expect to 昀椀nd it on sale
in your local branch of WH Smiths
any time soon
Nigel Wingrove
Animal
Lisa Taddeo
This tale begins when the married
lover of our main protagonist commits suicide in front of her, while
she is on a dinner date with another
married lover; and so this sets the
tone for the rest of the book. Often
shocking, with visceral descriptions
of violence and abuse, we follow
Joan on her pilgrimage to LA to
confront someone from her past.
Joan drip-feeds details from her
life via 昀氀ash backs, as the book progresses including more and more
allusion to a life changing trauma
when she was a child that involves
her parents - that has ultimately
led to her current behaviour and
situation. The reader is introduced
to a series of characters that she
crosses paths with, that mostly
act as vehicles for Joan to discuss
her past trauma with, or ignite a
memory that we are told describing
W
S
a past event relevant to the plot. We
昀椀nd out little about this parade of
people, even the person she goes
in search of has little depth when
we meet them, other than to be a
sounding board for Joan’s character.
This is a compelling and wellpaced book but feels like it’s a few
rewrites from being great, perhaps
it was hurried to print to follow up
Lisa Taddeo’s hit non-昀椀ction book
Three Woman. Joan’s story is one
of sadness and su昀昀ering that forces
the reader to confront how they feel
about how they have treated/have
been treated by romantic partners,
and how the world at large often
treats women in society. Taddeo
builds up her picture of Joan as
a deeply scarred individual, but
we learn little else about her, the
number of terrible things that have
and do befall Joan throughout the
book pile-up until the story is so
saturated with trauma 昀椀lled stories,
described with such horrifying
realism, that it ends up becoming
desensitizing. Ultimately the book is
disappointing but has such promise,
especially in her eloquent prose;
and is still worth reading even if it
doesn’t quite live up to the expectation – which was very high after the
success of her last book.
Pippen Ravenscourt
Consent
Vanessa Springora
This novel is the exploration of one
woman’s experience at the hands
of a sexual predator when she
was newly 14 and he 50 years old,
lasting for 2 years. Springora examines ‘theft of her adolescence’ by a
‘narcissistic pervert’ along with the
examination of the culture among
the literary community in Paris
during this period, (1980s-1990s)
that allowed it and even encouraged it to happen. This included
both the police and Springora’s own
parents being complicit in tolerating a known paedophile to continue
with this behaviour and to pro昀椀t
from writing about it openly.
Springora presents her interpretation of her experience both as a
14-year-old child believing she was
in love, enjoying the danger yet still
aware something was uncomfortable; and as an adult looking back
at her younger self through the
eyes of her now older and wiser
self. Springora eloquently discusses
how abusers such as her claim
there was consent and that rape is
only committed when violence is
involved, which is more relevant under French law as there is no o昀케cial
age of consent that makes statutory
rape illegal.
Salvation/17
