Abu Ghraib’s pornographic image-making directly inspired the torture-porn film genre

Evidence

The relationship of the crimes detailed at Abu Ghraib in photographs—1,800 or so images of naked, tortured, sodomized, bloody, and dead Iraqis—were interspersed with “selfies” of the soldiers performing sex acts on themselves and others. Abu Ghraib was essentially a set for snuff films, pornographic movies in which real people are murdered. Even those advocating torture recognized the pornographic aesthetic. Rush Limbaugh described the images as “[s] tandard good old American pornography.” A more apt description might be torture porn, the name given to a genre of films that was inspired in part by Abu Ghraib. These are movies that portray the gruesome and extended torture of human beings trapped in a prison-like cellar, room, or other setting. At Abu Ghraib, the difference was, it was real. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 754

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s interest in how the manufactured image circulates and shape-shifts — here the monster imagery becomes entertainment, echoing lynching postcards.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how military atrocity imagery and horror cinema feed each other — the Abu Ghraib-to-Saw pipeline.