[Panic Fest 2020 Review] The Dare is a Game I Didn't Enjoy Playing

I’ve never been a fan of the term “torture porn.” While I think some movies do equate the anticipation of seeing something horrific happen to a group of people with an almost sexual-buildup, the perjorative term has been used to dismiss a subgenre that had a lot of subtextual things to say about our cultural fascination with torture in the early 2000s. To be fair, it’s not a subgenre I’m particularly fond of...but I can appreciate some entries. Outside of the resurgence of Saw and maybe some low-budget releases I’m not aware of, it’s been a minute since we’ve seen a defacto entry in the much maligned subgenre.

Enter The Dare which is, in a lot of ways, the very definition of torture porn.

Giles Alderson’s horror thriller opens with a killer POV stalking an empty street, a full moon hanging in the distance, naturally. Inside one of the houses Jay (Bart Edwards) is enjoying a rare night with his family when the stalker appears in the house, his wife gets knocked unconscious and then Jay, too, gets knocked out as well. 

He wakes up, a bag on his head and a chain on his arm, chaining him to the wall. Jay quickly realizes he’s not alone. There’s Adam (Richard Short), Cat (Alexandra Evans) and a barely conscious man Cat calls Paul (Daniel Schutzmann) who is covered in cuts and bruises and has his lips sewn shut. 

Jay freaks out about his wife and kid but he’s quickly told, “he doesn’t want them. Only you.” And before you know it, we’re following a boy named Dominic (Mitchell Norman) who is being held in a decaying slaughterhouse by a man named Credence (Richard Brake). When Dominic misses a catch, spilling offal, Credence sprays him with animal blood from a long hose and tells him “I’m your father now.”

The narrative spends its time following young Dominic and, I don’t think this is a spoiler, an older Dominic (Robert Maaser) as he acts out the treatment foisted on him by Credence on this new group of people. It’s torture porn...with flashbacks of a different kind of torture porn. Credence, in the past, believes in healing through pain and, in some sequence, has Dominic stab an open wound and “watch the evil. Watch it leave me…”

Meanwhile, in the present, Dominic exorcises the evil from our four “heroes” by having them do terrible things to each other. The film lingers on challenges like skinning chunks of flesh off of poor Paul or crucifixion or forced insect feeding or worse. So we have a masked killer, forcing other people to do terrible things to each other...and this isn’t the only thing taken from Saw. Once we get to the titular dare, the audience is probably well ahead of the game in terms of story and how everyone is connected--you know they are. 

The Dare is competently made and filmed. The practical effects are gnarly and bloody and it knows it, as the camera focuses on skin-flaying and gore and eye-slashing. Blood guts and more will splash the mostly one-room location. Those jonesing for a jolt of gore will definitely find plenty to enjoy here...it’s not my bag. And the characters are just so insufferable I didn’t particularly care.

But back to that torture porn designation. I bring it up because The Dare feels like it purposefully combines sex and violence in uncomfortable ways. First, there’s the muscle-bound masked killer. He’s a Jason-but-sexy killer who wears a tight-fitting white tank top that highlights his gym rat muscles and shows that tormenting people isn’t his only pastime; consider him an Abercrombie model by way of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And in one moment, a man, after being nailed to a wall, has a dream of a sexual encounter with his wife before the masked killer jump scares into his fantasy and he pulls his hands off the nails. 

Sex and violence. Torture porn at its most emblematic.