From around 2006 to 2008, in my ‘scene kid’ phase, I was listening to a lot of deathcore – a genre combining death metal with metalcore – as a lot of scene kids were. We wanted to hear breakdowns, guttural vocals, and pig squeals (vocals that go “breeeee”). It was part of the cultural zeitgeist. Around this time, I was listening to bands like Bring Me the Horizon (when they were still deathcore), Job for a Cowboy, Despised Icon, Whitechapel, Suicide Silence, Killwhitneydead, Carnifex, and All Shall Perish. These deathcore bands were big at the time, although they weren’t so big that they would play the biggest venues or main stages at festivals. (While Bring Me the Horizon do now sell out the biggest venues, like the O2 in London, and have headlined Reading and Leeds Festival and Download Festival, they don’t play deathcore anymore – except if you’re lucky.)
Part of the rise of deathcore was driven by Myspace, which helped popularise the genre. Another reason was that it was a new genre to get excited about, and it was an extremely heavy type of music that felt more palatable than death metal, due to its metalcore and hardcore influences, like more melodic riffs and slow, rhythmic breakdowns, rather than just relentless speed and blast beats.
Notable EPs and albums during the popularity of deathcore – from the mid to late 2000s – were Job for a Cowboy’s 2005 EP Doom, Bring Me the Horizon’s 2004 EP This Is What the Edge of Your Seat is Made For and their 2006 debut full-length Count Your Blessings, Suicide Silence’s The Cleansing (2007), All Shall Perish’s The Price of Existence (2007), Whitechapel’s The Somatic Defilement (2007) and This Is Exile (2008), Despised Icon’s The Ills of Modern Man (2007), and Annotations of an Autopsy’s 2007 EP Welcome to Sludge City.
Some of these bands made into the charts, although deathcore was rarely featured on mainstream TV. The popularity of deathcore faded after the late 2000s, but it has made a comeback with bands like Lorna Shore and Slaughter to Prevail (nowadays, a band like Slaughter to Prevail can headline and have a 2000s deathcore band like Suicide Silence and Whitechapel as support, as they have for their 2026 European and North American tour).
I never really paid much thought to the rise of deathcore, until recently, when I was thinking again about the popularity of torture porn horror films in the 2000s, spurred on by reading Anna Bokutskaya’s book on contemporary horror, Feeding the Monster. Bokutskaya discusses how various subtypes of horror reflect the personal and collective anxieties of the age. For instance, there are many contemporary trauma and grief-related horror films – so many so that some film critics and fans believe the genre has been overdone, become oversaturated – with Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), The Babadook (2014) tackling grief, and His House (2019), Candyman (2021), Mother! (2017), Skinamarink (2022), and Saint Maud (2019) addressing various types of trauma from the personal to the racial to the intergenerational. This no doubt mirrors a shift in people’s worries and concerns, and a culture increasingly open to exploring emotional pain, mental health issues, relationship problems, mistreatment of women, and racism.
Viewing horror films as reflections of cultural anxieties made me reflect more on the phenomenon of torture porn in the 2000s. A while back, I had come across the idea that the rise of this particular type of horror likely reflected significant events, namely, the violence and torture many of us were witnessing in the post-9/11 world. Following 9/11, with the War on Terror and the Iraq War, the Bush Administration authorised torture techniques such as waterboarding, and we could all see images from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, with prisoners being sexually abused, tortured, and humiliated by US Army personnel. Whether or not these torture methods were condoned or castigated, many of the big horror films of the time seemed to mirror our collective anxieties on the subject – whether someone approved of torture or not, it’s all something we can fear, and seeing reports, images, and video footage of actual torture no doubt created or exacerbated such a fear.
Torture porn films became a way to see our fears magnified into the most extreme situations while allowing us to confront and experience this fear safely. Eli Roth, the director of Hostel (2005), said in an interview that “at times of terror people want to be terrified but in a safe environment. With all the things going on in the world like Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, where our government did nothing for anybody, people want to scream, but there’s nowhere in society where you can go scream at the top of your lungs. Horror movies let you do that.” (Hostel also reflected the xenophobia and ignorance that surged post-9/11: it follows American backpackers going to a new country, Slovakia, and getting tortured by groups of sadistic ‘violence tourists’.)
In addition to Hostel, popular torture films of the 2000s included Saw (2004) – which grossed over $103 million worldwide – as well as the rest of the Saw franchise, The Devil’s Rejects (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), The Hills Have Eyes (2006 remake), The Human Centipede (2009), and films belonging to the New French Extremity movement: Martyrs (2005) – which I wrote about here – Inside (2007), and Frontiers (2007). The Human Centipede also seemed to be of its time in another way: as Joana Psaros writes, “It has more in common with the gross-out “Two Girls One Cup” than the legitimately witty Eli Roth’s Hostel. 2 Girls 1 Cup was the unofficial title of a 2007 scat fetish porn film that went viral on the internet (I hate that something like this has a certain air of nostalgia to it).
I believe that, like torture porn, deathcore also reflects the cultural zeitgeist of the 2000s. I think a band like Killwhitneydead is exemplary of this since they actually used samples from horror films in their music, such as The Devil’s Rejects, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003 remake), and Saw 2 (2005). The lyrics in Killwhitneydead’s music are often very similar in themes, content, and imagery to what you might see in a torture porn movie, and this applies to many other 2000s deathcore bands as well. Tracks that come to mind are ‘Entombment of a Machine’ by Job for a Cowboy, ‘Welcome to Sludge City’ by Annotations of an Autopsy, and ‘Vicer Exciser’ by Whitechapel.
Of course, death metal, which existed long before deathcore – beginning in the early 80s – often has lyrics about torture, murder, gore, and mutilation. But I’m interested in the rise in popularity of deathcore in the 2000s. Deathcore in the 2000s achieved a higher level of mainstream popularity and commercial visibility than the peak of 1990s death metal did. It seemed that aspects of death metal – such as grisly vocals and lyrics – left the underground and shed (some) of the stigma of being only for weird and twisted death metal fans. Deathcore was not just for pure metalheads (or deathheads?); it also found a huge audience among emos and scene kids (like myself at the time). In fact, it is one of the genres most often closely associated with scene culture.
Since music, like film, reflects many aspects of the current zeitgeist, 2000s deathcore did this too. Kids at the time, like me, were hungry for brut4al (br00tal) breakdowns (cringe), as well as brutal-sounding vocals (Oli Sykes of Bring Me the Horizon, Mitch Lucker of Suicide Silence – RIP – and Phil Bozeman of Whitechapel have all been much-loved for this). The normalisation of, and attraction to, violent and torture porn-esque lyrics can also be tied to the post-9/11 cultural climate in which violence and torture became normalised. These instances of violence and torture were on our minds, whether consciously or unconsciously. And much like torture porn, as Roth argues, deathcore can serve as a safe and healthy way to express and confront these topics and themes. The music is not for everyone, of course, nor is torture porn – and when I listen back to some of those 2000s deathcore bands, part of me is surprised I loved it so much, not because it sounds ‘evil’ as much as it has an almost gross or disgust factor to it, like torture porn. (Annotations of an Autopsy come to mind as a band that exemplifies this gross-out, abrasive sound – the vocals sound even pretty comical at points.)
I therefore see torture porn and deathcore as parallel expressions of the 2000s zeitgeist in which they emerged and rose to fame. Relatedly, I’d also like to return to the popularity of 2 Girls 1 Cup for a second, not to detail the video itself (don’t worry, I definitely don’t want to do that), but to show how the virality of certain content can reflect or contribute to other forms of cultural output. For example, the 2000s also saw the consumption of ‘death porn’, shown on shock and gore sites like Goatse, Ogrish (which later evolved into LiveLeak) BestGore, and DocumentingReality.
These sites fed morbid curiosity; they fed users much more extreme expressions of violence, torture, and death than what was seen in torture porn films or heard in deathcore – because what was seen and heard was real. These sites showed real-life imagery and videos of accidents, self-injury, suicide, war, and execution. Shock and gore sites were, and still are, some of the darkest corners of the internet. These sites were part of the same zeitgeist in which torture porn and deathcore were a part.
I also remember when the ‘BME Pain Olympics: Final Round’ video – released in 2007 – was going viral, which featured footage of extreme self-mutilation (I only recently found out it was actually fake and involved prosthetics). This (in)famous video was shared around like a cursed VHS tape in the 2000s. The consumption of this (real-life) content could also be viewed through the lens of the 2000s zeitgeist. (Of course, these shock sites are morally problematic, unlike torture porn and deathcore, since they also involve real victims, and visiting these sites, since the content is real, is much more likely to be psychologically distressing. Another major concern was that, owing to their popularity, copycat videos would be produced, which could involve serious and even more extreme crimes.)
Again, torture porn and deathcore are not for everyone, and I think it’s safe to say that shock sites probably shouldn’t be for anyone, as I’m not sure they allow for healthy confrontations with the themes explored in film and music. However, my aim in this essay has not been to promote torture porn or deathcore, although I can still personally enjoy some examples of both today. Rather, I wanted to show why both forms of cultural expression became so popular in the 2000s, and through this analysis, I believe we can all appreciate – even if not enjoy – the ways in which these films and bands reflected the culture of the time. It is, therefore, perhaps simplistic to dismiss either as nothing more than superficial nastiness.
Steve Jones, the author of Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw (2013), challenges how the term ‘torture porn’ – coined by film critic David Edelstein in 2006 – has been used to disparage films belonging to the genre. He found that the dismissal and derogation involved in the term affected how critics and the public treated these films. The genre became synonymous with moral depravity, social decline, dehumanisation, misogyny, and gratuitous violence over artistic merit and substance. These criticisms can certainly be made against certain films, or aspects of certain films, and torture porn could also be a symptom of desensitisation to real-world suffering. But again, this narrative is simplistic. It lacks nuance. For example, Jones challenges the assumption that “torture porn is a misogynistic subgenre per se,” noting that “sexual violence is nowhere near as widespread in torture porn as the subgenre’s detractors have propounded” and “misogynistic attitudes are contextualised as sources of horror in torture porn.” He said in an interview:
Torture porn’ points directly towards a body of contemporary films, which are characterized as if they epitomize social ills. However, ‘torture porn’ implicitly draws on much broader contexts. Those contexts range from 1970s anti-porn feminism to the Abu Ghraib scandal; from the history of critical attitudes towards popular culture to contemporary concerns about Internet porn and sexualization; from centuries of philosophical thought regarding ethical behavior to long-standing social-psychological attitudes about the body and its baseness. My approach to ‘torture porn’ aims to unpack some of those inherent contextual relationships. Once those contexts are made apparent, it is more difficult to dismiss these films as ‘trash.’ Ultimately, my argument is that the films themselves have cultural, political and philosophical value. Paradoxically, although ‘torture porn’ has been commonly used to denigrate these films, that pejorative label can provide ways of accessing these films’ inherent and very serious value.
One area of analysis that Jones focuses on is how the pejorative label ‘torture porn’ invites us to consider what we mean by ‘porn’ in the first place. Many also reject the use of the term ‘torture porn’. Film historian Adam Lowenstein, for instance, argues that torture porn doesn’t actually exist and that the genre should instead be referred to as ‘spectacle horror’. He writes that spectacle horror is “the staging of spectacularly explicit horror for purposes of audience admiration, provocation, and sensory adventure as much as shock or terror, but without necessarily breaking ties with narrative development or historical allegory.”
Death metal and deathcore have likewise faced similar dismissal and negative connotations as torture porn, or spectacle horror. The fans of this music may be viewed in negative terms, like the fans of torture porn: there must be something seriously wrong with them. It is sometimes difficult (somewhat understandably) for some people to separate the enjoyment of art involving gruesome, abhorrent actions from the endorsement of those actions and their perpetrators. However, this returns us to the same old stale debate about whether enjoying violent video games leads to more violence (they don’t).
While, of course, we need to be alert to the dangers of how some films and music may perpetuate harmful attitudes, there’s no good evidence that enjoying deathcore or torture porn films makes people more immoral or violent. Rather than proving that someone is sick and twisted, or making them so, enjoyment of these art forms often helps people’s emotional well-being, such as by providing relief from stress, anxiety, and trauma. Indeed, research continues to illustrate these benefits (in those who enjoy extreme metal music and horror, of course; if you don’t like that kind of music or find a lot of horror particularly distressing to watch, then they won’t offer much therapeutic value). These genres of music and film can help people process their emotions, thereby facilitating catharsis.
So, as well as being symptomatic of the 2000s zeitgeist, torture porn and deathcore could’ve helped a lot of people deal with their fears and anxieties at the time, and this speaks to the continuing potential of horror and metal to do the same for people today.
