Screen writer

Get over 'torture porn', writes Donald Clarke

Are your sons and daughters still safely locked up following the last dangerous media phenomenon that was set to transform them into psychopaths and sex maniacs? Yes? Well, another wave of cultural atrocities is tumbling their way.

Following the launch of such charming film franchises as Saw (man saws off his own foot) and Hostel (girl has face burnt off with blowtorch), media fulminators from both the right and the left have decided to get themselves all worked up about the supposed onslaught of something called "torture porn". The Daily Mail worries that children will turn from scouting to recreational evisceration. The Guardian expresses concern at the particular relish accorded the chopping up of female victims. Climb aboard the hand-basket to hell, everyone.

Such films should, of course, be approached with a certain degree of caution. The censor's increasingly detailed comments - "Explicit slasher/horror gorefest. Drug use, strong sexual dialogue/situations and nudity," our own watchdog said of Hostel - offer potential viewers (and their parents) due warning that those with delicate sensibilities had best stick to Jane Austen.

But the current furore surrounding torture porn does feel tediously familiar. Back in 1954 a US senate sub-committee was set up to investigate the dangers posed to youths by horror comics. The powers-that-were were sufficiently alarmed to demand the establishment of a Comics Code Authority which, charged with deterring the depiction of everything from rape to "toiletry products of questionable nature", remained irritatingly powerful until quite recently.

In the 1960s, Mary Whitehouse, founder of Britain's National Viewers and Listeners Association, waged a campaign against the rubbery aliens that enlivened Saturday afternoons for the first generation of Dr Who fans. Yet the Dalek is now available in chocolate cake form from Marks & Spencer. How long before they make a pastry of the torturer from Saw?

Apocalyptic declarations that some particular class of media is about to lead us all to Gomorrah come along once a year or so. Teenagers who grew up playing Grand Theft Auto, the notorious video game involving car crime and indiscriminate murder, are now sitting their finals at university. Crash, David Cronenberg's much-banned adaptation of a J G Ballard novel, emerged on video with no concomitant increase in the number of people having sex in - or, thankfully, with - motor cars.

Each of these campaigns has been characterised by dubious claims from the doom-mongers. The most conspicuous of these surrounded the absurd witch-hunt that greeted the so-called video nasty boom in the 1980s.

Society survived the release on video of Driller Killer. Of course it did. Society had, after all, previously survived the eyeball-gouging scene in King Lear and worse atrocities in the plays of John Webster.

Our own will probably endure the screening of a few films featuring tourists seeing more of their own innards than they might like.