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URBAN Dictionary defines “torture porn” as horror movies that feature gratuitously violent images with no credible story lines. After The Passion of the Christ was released — some joked that it actually escaped — the term “Christian torture porn” surfaced in a number of reviews.
For example, the late Roger Ebert wrote:
The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of the torture and death of Jesus. This is the most violent film I have ever seen … Many audience members … will enter the theater in a devout or spiritual mood and emerge deeply disturbed. You must be prepared for whippings, flayings, beatings, the crunch of bones, the agony of screams, the cruelty of the sadistic centurions, the rivulets of blood that crisscross every inch of Jesus’ body. Some will leave before the end.
And one film-goer actually died! Peggy Law, in her fifties and said to have been in “good health”, was attending the first morning showing of “The Passion” in Wichita, Kansas in. 2004 when she suffered a heart attack during the film’s graphically violent crucifixion scene. The screening of the movie was stopped.
True, Ebert’s review didn’t use the term “Christian torture porn” but Tim Lacy’s U.S. Intellectual History Blog did.
Lacy wrote:
It’s not a stretch, I think, to call this Christian torture porn. It feels as if Gibson is attempting to torture viewers into belief, or redemption, through a pornography of suffering.
So how do you follow-up the gory torture and death of Jesus? According to the deranged traditionalist Catholic Gibson, with themes in the two two-part sequels including Hell, Sheol, the fall of angels, and the origin of Satan. He described them at one point as “an acid trip.”
According to The Christian Post Resurrection: Part One is scheduled for May 6, 2027, coinciding with Ascension Day, while Part Two will arrive on May 25, 2028, during Memorial Day weekend and another Ascension Day observance.
Note: My memoir, available in ebook and paperback formats, are available here.
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