It’s
okay to simulate extreme violence in video games, movies, and TV shows,
but most Americans take offense when media makers mix graphic violence
with porn.

Graphic Sexual Horror documents the rise and fall of the notorious bondage website, Insex.com.
The site’s founder, Brent Scott, is “the Michelangelo of bondage,” who
comes off as both an intellectual art professor and a mad genus given
to rage. Scott started off depicting his twisted bondage fantasies with
paint, but when money got tight he launched Insex.com. It soon took off
as one of the first sites to trash glamor bondage where models are beautiful,
polished, and smiling while being hog tied on a bed. Insex.com had a
dark edge of realism. It was gritty and grainy like the home videos of
a serial killer.

No matter what reaction you have to his content, Scott’s talent is evident
in his intricate sets, torture devices, and horrifying scenarios—you’d
expect he was a consultant on graphic horror movies like the Saw
series. Even Scott sees his craft as art: “the art of feminine
deconstruction.”  He utilized creepy dungeons, barns, meat lockers, and
warehouses in which he employed custom torture devices made from rusted
locks, leather bands, rope, tape, plastic bags, masks, boards, and
chains. His torture scenes, at least the ones that could be shown on
the DVD, included putting pins under fingernails, dunking caged women
in vats of water filled with leeches, suspending bound women like human
chandeliers, chaining naked and gagged women to stakes in the snow,
tying women to nooses with just enough length for them to stand on
their toes, locking women in tiny cages and making them piss on the
heads of other restrained models, pepper spraying vaginas,  wrapping
breasts until they turn purple… The models didn’t have to pretend they
were being tortured. Their tears, screams, bruises, lash marks, and
rope burns were real.

The
most compelling thread in the documentary is the ethics of exposing
these willing-ish women to torture. Footage of models being interviewed
prior to a scene, saying that they agree to be whipped, lashed,
electrocuted… is juxtaposed with scenes of these women screaming as
they’re whipped, lashed, electrocuted…  Many recent interviews with
former models even offer positive reflections on their time with Insex:
one woman realized how much she liked BDSM while another fell in love
with Scott and became his camerawoman. However, the experiences of the
majority of the models is more ambiguous.

All models were given a safe word, or in many cases a grunt pattern.
However, the use of safe words was heavily discouraged. Many
performances were streamed live and lasted for hours. Members’ comments
were read by an automated electronic voice during the session, often
directing the action in a creepy Stephen Hawking tone. If the models
used their safe word, they wouldn’t receive the substantial bonuses for
making it through a session and they would not be invited back. Many
needed the work to feed drug or spending addictions. Scott knew each
model’s limits, but often pushed these to capture true horror. Scott
also asked many of the girls to stay and play with him for free after a
session, which would involve things like watersports or sex. The models
didn’t have to stay but if they refused they often weren’t invited
back. The idea of exploitation emerges but it is only superficially
addressed in the film.

Another ethical question a site like Insex raises, but the DVD
ignores, is if this type of porn is an outlet or an instigator for
destructive desires. Scott’s own interest in bondage stemmed from a
childhood incident when he was tied up by his female cousins and
tickled until he reached his first orgasm. His BDSM preferences were
reinforced during his military service in Vietnam where he saw bondage
stage performances. Scott admits the work of serial killers like the
Hillside Strangler influences him. He also concedes that running Insex
turned him into a monster who thought he could do whatever he wanted
with models because he was paying them. Obviously extreme BDSM sites
fulfill fantasies that some people develop naturally, but do they also
produce a new generation of people who rely on these extreme images to
get off, and is this a bad thing?

While the film is lacking as a serious documentary that delves into
the morality behind bondage porn, it delivers plenty of footage of
graphic sexual horrors for fans of BDSM. Just don’t watch it with a
person who doesn’t know what she’s getting into or she may start
beating you halfway through, then torture you by forcing you to watch Legally Blonde to erase the depraved images.

Graphic Sexual Horror was written, directed, edited, and produced by Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Bell. Check out more about insex and this film at graphicsexualhorror.com