Editor’s note: This article discusses sexual abuse, child abuse, suicide, and violence, and contains plot details from Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) and the indie horror game my eyes deceive (2024). Some readers may find these topics disturbing.
Funny Games (1997) is a story about home invasion. It starts off similarly to any other “home invasion” horror movie – a happy family at a lake home is interrupted by two strange men that begin making more and more demands. There’s a turning point, a god help them sequence in which the family, and the viewers, see the true nature of the at-first polite men. They are held captive, told to do things for the entertainment of the captors. In some sick kind of voyeurism of brutality, we too are entertained by this..
But we expect the family to win. To get out of it alive. Because we are used to happy endings. When the mother pleads “Why don’t you just kill us?” Peter, one of the captives, states “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” And we, as the viewers, believe in this importance too. We want to continue to see it through and relish in waiting for that happy ending.
Perhaps this is why the ending renders such a negative reaction. Point blank, without tension, without crazy zoom in shots, without care, the family dies off in surprisingly non-dramatic ways. The last person standing – the mother – is killed without care and dumped in the lake in a shot so fast if one blinked they would miss it. Our hopes are crushed. The worst part was this: the killings were done in such a non-extravagant non-flamboyant way. We aren’t granted the satisfaction of seeing something grisly.
Director Michael Haneke created the movie as a deconstruction of how viewers relish in the “torture porn” of similar films. The movie actually includes a scene where the family fights back and succeeds – but the captor simply takes out a TV remote and in front of our eyes, goes back to time. A fourth wall break that removes any possibility for a happy ending. Haneke seems to suggest that as watchers, we actually enjoy watching the torture of the family. Horror fans go to watch Funny Games because the description of “poor innocent family terrorised by mysterious men” appeals to us. Sure, we root for the family, we want to see them through to the end, but by purchasing the movie tickets, by clicking on the title on whichever site carries it, we innately want to watch something horrible. If we truly wanted to watch something where a family overcame adversity without anything sinister happening (because let’s face it, watchers probably knew at least one person would die) we would turn on Modern Family.
There’s a Marx quote adapted by philosopher Slavoj Zizek – “first as tragedy, second as farce”. Zizek uses it to reference the repetition of history; how society, under our own conditions, has the privilege of having the chance to learn from past mistakes. Yet we simply don’t change. Every step forward, every progression, is met with a leap backwards. This continues to apply to media. An interpretation of our history as a perversion of it. We exploit certain themes in storytelling to elicit negative responses – to gush over the horribleness, but at the same time to bathe in the brutality. If first, we learn about the Dahmer murders to mourn over the victims, we secondly make a Netflix show that immortalizes the murderer. Our lives are saturated with this to the point where our media drips with these stories. We live in, and for, tragedies.
As a collective we can’t get enough. We remember the names of the murderers before those of the victims. It extends further yet from true crime. Logan Paul can film a dead body in the woods for content, edit that video, and decide it’s perfectly fine to post it. The more horrible something is, the bigger the reaction. Then, shock value is born naturally.
Shock value is defined as “usefulness to surprise and usually upset people.” Funny Games comments on our need to watch something as riveting as the “surprising” torture and murder of a family in order to be entertained. Yet though shock value isn’t a new premise, it’s one that seems to be overly relevant.
my eyes deceive is an indie horror game developed by nouhidev that was released on Steam in 2024. You play as a young girl locked in a shelter under the narrative that the outside world is stricken with a deadly disease – as your “papa” tells you. The ending, however, reveals that the father was sexually abusing his daughter under the guise of care. The game made waves throughout communities because of its striking ending. People praise it for it’s “provocative” story, and the developer themself stated how it was a game aimed to shed light on child abuse.
Yet there’s a line between using such trauma to tell a story or create commentary, and using trauma to make a story. my eyes deceive is a game that capitalizes off of shock value because it uses the child abuse plotline as a throw-in as an attempt to give substance to the story. To make it more memorable from provoking a reaction from an audience. Though child abuse is referenced in the story, the game doesn’t actually say anything about it. Granted, there’s an ending card that mentions how horrific child abuse is, but the plotline uses child abuse as a plot. The obvious parallels to the real Josef Fritzl case – where Fritzl imprisoned and assaulted his daughter – are also ignored. The developer claims there was no intention to reference the case, yet the similarities are jarring to the point that without a proper recognition of the potential parallels, the game feels more of an appropriation of the case – without properly acknowledging it, and it’s very real victims.
The danger of such media isn’t that it deals with sensitive subject matter – rather, these subjects do deserve recognition and an awareness. The problem with shock value is that themes such as rape, murder, or abuse are used to elicit an unnatural emotion from the reader because the actual lazy writing can’t cut deeper than the surface. When done well, these themes in stories can point to overarching character development that adds something to be said and analysed. Games such as Mouthwashing deals with abuse in a way that makes it clear that trauma isn’t a tool to spice up a story to suddenly make it more interesting – they address the trauma that comes with abuse, and lets the viewer come to profound conclusions on their own.
Shock value captures our short-term attention by exploiting specific themes – capitalizing off horrible events, and twisting it to an advantage. It’s the countless TikToks talking about Megan is Missing because of a “brutal barrel scene” and how “disgusting” it looks, which of course, only drives the movie’s popularity. When media on sensitive subjects is done well, the viewer is able to take home a broader message. Crank, written by Ellen Hopkins, is a book that illustrates the dangers of drugs by telling a complete narrative that doesn’t rely on pointing at certain scenes and exclaiming on how crude they are. The narrator is humanized rather than seen as an object to point and gasp at. Cows by Matthew Stokoe, on the other hand, is a book that uses shocking scenes to make the book itself. Readers won’t remember any notable message, any heartbreaking character development, but they will remember the scene in which the main character defecates on a plate and forces his mother to eat it. When there’s no larger message to be said, shock value is a placeholder to a story that could have been.
President Donald Trump, as a real-world example, uses shock value to monopolize media coverage. By obfuscating what he literally means, he’s able to get countless articles written about what he says and the actions he frequently threatens to take. In 2020, when he essentially suggested his supporters to attempt to vote for him twice, the media was sent sputtering for coverage. Though we may say we don’t condone this behaviour, we endorse it by talking about it and by giving it attention.
At the 2025 Grammys, Kanye West’s wife Bianca Censori donned a birthday-suit-adjacent look, and needless to say, searches about it soared after the fact. Alongside the tweets by Kanye the dress is a clear popularity stunt, and by talking about these clear attempts for attention, we ourselves are fanning the fire. Ironically, I myself am feeding the machine by talking about it in the article.
Realistically, the best thing to do about shock value is to not care. To not share, not post about, or engage with such problematic media. To realize that though we are the watchers of Funny Games waiting for the execution scene; to gawk is what the producers of shock value want.
There’s an unspoken rule in writing to not assume your reader is stupid and to let them come to conclusions or profound realizations by themselves. Shock value does the opposite, spoon-feeding disgusting imagery or stories to garner attention. It’s a tool we cannot afford to get comfortable with, because in the era of mindless media frenzies, shock value undermines our ability to critically think and consume media.
But at the end of the day, we simply cannot get enough. It’s a car crash we cannot turn our heads away from. A fight we overhear in public and cannot help but eavesdrop on. These games, books, and publicity stunts are things that we gossip about. It doesn’t matter if they are exploitative or just senseless – they exist as pure spectacle. We live to commodify the extraordinary; the exploitation of true crime victims leads to viewers eagerly listening to how a victim was murdered. We cannot stop talking about the outrageous and the terrible out of an unbridled fascination. Our reactions are the biggest asset to these pieces of media. How we share about how upsetting a book is leads to more copies sold. How we exclaim how disgusting a movie scene leads to more streams. Shock value is just this: a usefulness to upset people.
Because isn’t all we want just entertainment?
