After the 9/11 attacks on America, it changed not just how people live, but also its culture, especially movies. Because the attack itself is so scary, there is a lot of not just horror movies but also action movies that recreate that, for example, the likes of Plane crash scene from “War of the Worlds, the New York attack scene for the whole film in Cloverfield but instead they marketed in like some kind of “American Godzilla” what we got is a reminiscent of terrorist attack of 9/11.

According to some scholars’ work, Noel Carroll specifies that “art horror itself” is not just a natural horror. The monstrous horror villain can come from a human form, such as Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, and John Kramer (From the Saw movie) . One of the examples itself is the Saw franchise, where most of the Saw movies do not have a clear protagonist (until Spiral)in the movie, and instead, every person with a bad lifestyle, like doing drugs, stealing other people money, lying to an authority multiple times, can result in being kidnapped and tortured by Jigsaw, so-called “Rehabilitation”. As a result, James Wan & Leigh Whannell, the creators of the franchise, always intended to make the franchise a “crime thriller” instead of people labelling it as a “torture-porn” and the way Jigsaw tests the victim, just like the United States itself, where every clock is ticking like a bomb during a terrorist attack and that is why people find the connection between Saw and “9/11 event”.

One of the best examples is another movie that wasn’t a horror movie but has horror stuff in it. At its core, the movie itself is a psychological thriller involving terrorism, how a man survives buried alive after being kidnapped Iraqis terrorist with the CIA and military involved in this situation. But the movie itself has a horror element to it to makes feel more tense. (Zimbardo 2007: 19)

In conclusion, in Post 9/11 American people are engaged in a national debate about the morality of torture, fuelled by horrifying pictures of manifestly decent men and women enacting brutal scenario and a large segment of people have no problem with this kind of thing. (Schleingers 2004: 41)

Source:
– Wetmore, K. (2012). Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema. New York Continuum Continuum.

‌- Schlesinger, J. R., & States., U. (n.d.). Speeches of Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger.

‌- Revisiting The True Fear Behind SAW (2004). (n.d.). http://Www.youtube.com. Retrieved January 22, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T01JZr6PSLg

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