By Jonathan Greenaway, MoreHorror.com

Whenever the conversations drifts round to horror movies there is a complaint I've heard mentioned more than any other, and I’m sure fellow fans will have heard something like this before. ‘I can’t watch that kind of film – it’s just too violent!’ In all honesty, this is nothing more than a slightly watered down version of the oldest objection to any kind of culture; ‘WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?’ I mean, they used to say that about the Beatles for goodness sake, so I, along with most people, tend to not pay huge amounts of attention to the knee-jerk reaction of hating violence in films. As with most cultural modes, horror has been subject to fear and suspicion by people who not only dislike it, but don’t understand it.

However, with the advancement of film budgets and, more specifically, the advancement of makeup and effects there could be something worth talking about here. Let me be as clear as possible – there is nothing wrong with violence in movies, and for an example, let me turn to a film that is widely criticized as starting the torture porn genre, the 2004 horror film Saw. The film and the accompanying six sequels were loved and reviled in equal measure for the traps, gore and the occasionally gaping plot holes.

Whilst it is true that as the series rolled on the traps became more and more explicit and the level of gore was ramped up. I recently re-watched Saw and was struck by something. For a film that that is purportedly at least partly responsible for this generation’s ‘won’t someone think’ moment, there is surprisingly little gore or violence in it. Also, as a film, it isn't…that bad actually. Before anyone thinks that I’m trying to draw a parallel between a lack of violence and film quality that isn’t the case.

For all of it’s implied gore there is some pretty strong stuff for the time in the film (since hugely outstripped by sequels and low rent spin offs) but for all of the violence the film itself never feels like a piece of exploitative torture porn. The reason is, the film manages to follow a few simple rules of good story-telling – firstly the script manages to work well setting up the situation, stakes and characters that are interesting to watch, which may sound simple but is a triumvirate that many horror films neglect. Most importantly, any violence in the film is a means to an end, rather than being an end in and of itself.

What I mean by this, is that the violence we see in the film is designed to serve a specific dramatic function – namely, that of advancing the plot. Every character in a trap manages to tell us, the audience, more about the world of the movie, the characters in it and how this all works together. Crucially, any violence that Jigsaw is responsible for allows the audience to understand the villain without revealing so much that he loses whatever air of mystery and danger he possesses.

Now, Saw is far from the only film to do this successfully, but if there is one reason why I've had so much negative to say against a lot of modern horror is that the violence they feature doesn't serve the plot – if anything the plot is there to get the violence on screen as bloodily as possible. You know the kind of thing, you watch a film and someone will say, ‘why are they doing that?’ Well, simply, because a lot of these films rely on characters acting stupidly just so the violence that got them the 18+ certificate can be shown.

In Saw whatever violence there is doesn't seem to be the only thing the film is about as there are other ideas, and characters driving events. I’m not trying to claim that I've come up with a hard and fast rule of story-telling here, but I think it might be a good rule of thumb. Try it out the next time you watch a horror movie and see whether the gore that’s there is the only thing going on. Hopefully not, right?