Four years ago, around this time, I was dragged to a movie party by some guy friends. It was a cold Thursday night and, as we entered the dark apartment filled with an array of alcohol bottles, blue lights and a very foul smelling iguana that seemed to be accustomed to roaming free, I felt a pang of discomfort that I blatantly (and stupidly) ignored.

We sat down and I snuggled between the two boys for protection and watched as the host started the “surprise” film. Thirty minutes later, I stood violently shaking in the tiny fluorescent-lit bathroom, trying to erase from my head the initial rape scene from “A Serbian Film.”

That’s right, I said initial, because this was just the beginning of a slew of sexually violent scenes that left my head spinning. To put it into perspective for you, I frequently watch French horror films (most of which make American slasher films like “Saw” and “Hostel” look weak) and have been to two GWAR shows, yet this film left me sleepless and disgusted for three days.

The scenes that show realistic horrors such as rape, incest, pedophilia, kidnapping, mutilation and torture are particularly disturbing when they occur in relentless waves, leaving the viewer drowning in a sea of self-loathing as they continue to watch such horrors.

“A Serbian Film” was the first movie that I experienced to do such a thing without giving me time to recover between scenes, and to this day, it scares the absolute shit out of me. While I respect the fact that “art” is an expression of creativity and is open to interpretation by the masses, the idea that someone woke up one day and said “Hey, I want to write a scene where a girl gets decapitated while giving a blowjob!” leaves me both disgusted and deeply afraid. Every scene represents something utterly depraved that could or has happened in some society throughout history, and this film addresses that head on.

This discomfort led me to ask myself, why is it that we watch movies like this? Is it perhaps the fact that we all feel like potential victims and find some sick sense of power in the images that are on the screen? Or is it the fact that these torture-porn style flicks are too scary to resist looking at, like when you drive by a car crash? While I am not going to hold anything against you gonzo-film enthusiasts, I will ask — what does this film mean for the future of horror cinema?

When we watch horror movies, we get to experience things that are nasty and evil, yet so commonly hiding within our subconscious. If this weren’t true, they wouldn’t be written in the first place. Horror movies will continue to make money because they liberate some of the worst thoughts and nightmares hiding in all of us. Although some of us are less inclined to feel this way than others, the satisfaction of stepping away from such imagery unscathed feels incredibly cathartic. Because of this, movie producers continue to challenge the boundaries of what is extreme, creating an escalating level of “scary” for the upcoming works to have to live up to in hopes of shocking their way to success.

We know that the images on screen are fabricated and we hope that they never do become reality, but the idea that they could happen because someone else creates the image makes them the perfect fodder for our darkest thoughts. In truth, we seem to desire these displays of horror to help us cope with real ones. Therefore, many of these films are becoming increasingly graphic over the years to satisfy an increasingly desensitized customer.

For me, films like “A Serbian Film” and others with similar content cross the line of what is appropriate. While I respect and have come to understand certain fetishes, sexual scenes deliberately focused on gore and graphic violence is where I draw the line. Torture porn, vicious slaughter and brutal rape is not sexy, nor should it be eroticized in any way because it is a horrible part of reality. The fact that many of our new-wave horror films contain content like this only seems to reinforce the idea that deep down, we are all capable of being monsters and we are never truly satisfied.

We are turned on by fear, and we like it that way. That is why horror movies are so successful. While the pairing of sex and violence may not happen often enough for any sort of classical conditioning to occur, I say that the argument is only strong right now while the popularity of such extreme themes in American cinema is in its budding stages.

When it is no longer enough to just watch actors get sodomized with shotguns, where will the horror genre go next, and how will that affect the masses? Where will horror films go once we stop getting stimulated by the disturbing scenes of sexual violence that have become so normal? If current trends of desensitization of viewers continue, “A Serbian Film,” and other works like it, may be a preview of what is to come, and that is the scariest thing of all.

Anneliese Hucal studies public relations and prelaw. She can be reached at dcoffey@unr.edu.