Alix, you will be giving a workshop on "erotic in horror"  at the It Came From Lake Michigan film festival in October. Following that subject a bit, it seems that in a lot of horror over the last 30 years, the sure way to get killed was to have sex, to survive you had to be "virginal". Do you think there was a trend in horror to "punish" the sexually active/empowered characters, both male and female, if so do you think it is still the case today?

I think in there used to be a definite punishing of the sexually active in horror. When you look at the Friday the 13th, Halloween and other horror series there is a trend in killing off sluts and assholes. Movies made for mass appeal kill off almost everyone except the virgins. Look at Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy kills the girl who has sex with the bad boy rather then go after the virginal Nancy who opts to not sleep with Johnny Depp

 (I'll never figure that one out and I'm sure Heather Landenkamp hasn't either).

Ironically, Nancy shows her tits in the tub later in the movie so it wasn't always about the nudity. I think there was a clear distinction between nudity and sex. In I Spit On Your Grave, it's perfectly fine for Jennifer to prance around her back yard completely

naked but when she is raped she kills her predators brutally in the nude. When I was younger and felt that women nude in films were bad, society didn't agree and wanted the sexually active to get killed and the virgins to be nude. It's almost like the movie industry thought it had some kind of obligation to provide sex-education. Very bad sex-education. "Don't have sex or Freddy will kill you in your sleep." Ha, I can still remember being told

that if I was promiscuous I would get hurt or killed by a sexual predator or my partner.

I don't think that the trend today calls for the killing of the sexually active except in the b-movie genre and teen horror movies. There the formula is definitely followed: kill all the sluts and assholes. There still seems to be some kind of sex-education going on there. Horror today is more sophisticated and people don't really ask for sex so

much in horror. If there is sex it is part of the horror like a rape. But today horror is not all about monsters and zombies. It's about the monsters in the mind. To me anything with violence is Horror. The Soprano's is Horror to me. All those people getting whacked was more terrifying then a Dario Argento movie.

 
I've heard a lot of film critics using the phrase "torture porn" to describe some of the more recent horror hits like the "Saw" and "Hostel" movies. What is your take on that? Also, as someone involved in the erotic industry, how do you feel about the label "torture porn" in general?

First, I want to address the term "torture porn". It implies that porn is made for shock value and I

don't believe it is. Porn is made for masturbation and as a sexual aide. Silly people like Max Hardcore

and Rocco Siffredi want to make shocking porn. They want to push the limits and make people gasp

and look away. For me and most of my peers, porn is not for pushing limits or shock. Most people have normal limits and don't have the frat boy mentality that shock jocks would like us to have so they get higher ratings. I was told that Max Hardcore makes his movies of girls vomiting on cocks and speculum enlarged anus' to get shock jocks talking about it and to cater to the frat boy market which in reality isn't that large.

But, torture porn could also mean that people get-off by seeing a brutal mutilation of the human body. It's very unsettling. But that definition doesn't support the shock definition. It still gives porn a bad

name. I think the critics throwing this term around might want to re-think their new buzz word. And that's all it is a "buzz word/term". The definition is loosely based on what it really means. Critics say

it to be cool so they don't have to write interesting sentences hiding the fact that they can't write at all. It's a little scary to think that people are masturbating to blood and guts. The amount of people

going to see films like this is amazing and may be a sign that the frat boy market is getting larger and beyond immature men. I'm surprised these films don't have x ratings.

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