Extreme European Horror: A Serbian Film and Martyrs

Censorship is a funny thing, recently I've looked at material that was banned somewhere, and I find myself stunned that anyone would bother banning it. A Serbian Film was released back in 2010 and has become illegal in a number of countries, with one person being imprisoned in Spain for showing it at a film festival. Just as Human Centipede 2 is merely a well-done horror film involving an odd scatological pre-occupation, just as Michael Savage is actually just a conservative talk show host who brings up some very legitimate points, A Serbian Film is more-or-less just a horror film/thriller in which the villains are extreme sexual perverts. That's all a Serbian Film is. It's not child pornography or a snuff film. It is a fictional horror film in which child pornography and snuff cinema exist as plot elements. I'd have to take a long cold look at the censors on this one, because if you take this film deeply seriously for a second you've probably taken it deeply seriously for too long. Granted, this movie is not recommended for mixed company, polite conversation, children, or the easily offended. The villain, who is an unforgettable and a very convincing one, is a sexual pervert of the most intense kind. Vukmir is an educated man who speaks of art, a trained child psychologist. He is a man who defiles for the sake of defilement. He loves rape, incest, torture, and- a term that would appear to make it's first appearance in this film- "newborn porn". It is stated that he is working with the Serbian government, so the element of fascism comes in as well. The protagonist Milos is a retired porn actor in Serbia who lives with a wife and very young son. His brother is a crocked cop which becomes important at the end, there is an early scene with the brother receiving oral sex while watching a video of the young son's birthday party. This is not a subtle film there is a lot of very heavy-handed foreshadowing. I could see exactly more or less where it was going fairly early on. A former porn star contacts him about a potential job that will pay for his family for life and he meets this director Vukmer. Very quickly it becomes clear that this is no ordinary porn, when he is told to beta a woman and masturbate on her face with an underage girlfriend. It goes from there: Milos goes in to quite, Vukmer shows him a cute little porn genre called "newborn porn", Milos is drugged with animal aphrodisiacs and forced to perform one heinous and unnatural sex act after another- raping a woman- decapitating the woman- raping her corps while blood spurts out. Of course it ends with the Greek tragedy and there's the forced rape with the family members I knew it would go there from scene one. Vukmer is killed at the end, no tears there, and Milos commits shoots himself and his family, and in the last scene, Vukmer's cohorts are there with a camera ready to use the families bodies for more super sick porno. Meaning, these villains will defile for the sake of defilement from the moment of birth until even after the victim is dead. Vukmer is a very convincing and very troubling character. Should it be illegal? That's insanity. In fact, I even found the descriptions of how disturbing this film supposedly is on-line fairly ridiculous. These European extreme horror films though, they're really scaring the hell out of someone in charge though, so they must really be hitting on very sensitive issues for governments to come in and suppress this material. Of course, if you rally enough for a return to Judeo-Christian ethical tradition as the fundamental guiding principle of the state, governments may come after you for that, just ask Michael Savage. The French film Martyrs from 2008 didn't get banned or create legal problems, but is considered to come out of the same wave of extreme European horror that produced the Human Centipede films and A Serbian Film. It exhibits a very similar fixation with torture, but it is taken in a different direction which has far less to do with sexuality. The films starts with a girl in underwear running down the street away from something. There is a film shown of the girl's being taken in by doctors to an orphanage that reveals that while tortured and abused this little girl, Lucie, was not raped at all. Spoiler alert! In religious art, there are those images of the saints who are being burned alive or are set on fire and have the look of some sort of transcendence. The torturers in Martyrs are religious fanatics that are trying to recapture. the phenomena of the martyring, of a kind of metaphysical transcendence through extreme pain. In rough plot summary, because the film is long, Lucie and her friend Anna from the orphanage as adults go to exact revenge on Lucie's torturers. Lucie comes into a family home and executes the family with a shotgun, and then Anna shows up. There's an odd bit about Lucie hallucinating that a dead girl is attacking her. Lucie kills herself. Anna finds a woman in the basement whose been gained up much the way Lucie was. Then a bunch of black clad figures with guns shot the girl that was chained up in the basement, this female cult leader type explains the concept of martyring to Anna and then they chain Anna up and of course torture her in hopes of creating a martyr. There's a certain logic to it. At the end Anna, skinned alive, becomes a martyr. I am far and away more impressed by Martyrs then by A Serbian Film, although a Serbian Film has the distinction of being disturbing enough to be made illegal and a really chilling and very believable villain in Vukmer. A Serbian Film really has the stink of sexual sleaze to it, which Martyrs does not. What they both share is that they partake in the process of upping the ante of depictions of torture on camera, and cinematically they've gotten quite good at it. A Serbian Film is what it is, but I feel Martyrs is really clever, I highly recommend it. Less extreme but another good horror film to come out of Europe in recent years is the Norwegian film Dead Snow. I'll probably get around to reviewing Dead Snow on here at some point. There's a British film that showed at festivals called Inbred that looks very good.