Since I’m recovering from post-convention fever (that is, laziness), I felt like rewatching some old favorites. Pre-Code films are awesome, because they are just as fixated on torture, mutilation, and sexual deviance as so-called “torture porn” and “hardcore horror” films.

Animal cruelty and sexual perversion collide in The Most Dangerous Game (1932), when big game hunter Rainsford and his lover Eve (Fay Wray) are shipwrecked on an island owned by a wealthy foreigner. The antagonist, Count Zaroff, is himself a big game hunter who has become bored with hunting animals, and and is now a hunter of humans. This film, based on the  novella by Richard Connell is still relevant today given the connections between big game trophy hunting and serial murder. This psychological connection was also recognized by Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness in his brief discussion of “elite hunting” (note this phrase was borrowed by Eli Roth in the Hostel franchise), which is differentiated from hunting in which the objective is to consume the animal’s meat.  

 

In true serial killer fashion, Zaroff keeps a trophy room fillled with the heads of his victims, and confesses that a successful “hunt” makes him desire physical “love.” Following the “hunt,” he believes the Rainsford to be dead, he plans to rape Eve as a means to celebrate his conquest. Rainsford saves her and kills the Zaroff, who is then torn apart by his own dogs. Having survived the ordeal, the protagonist is able to empathize with the animals he himself hunted, and renounces his hobby.