The power of images of terrible savagery is hard to shake from the mind. In all the hand-wringing about the 15 British navy hostages, nobody seems to have mentioned one possible reason why they capitulated so easily to their Iranian captors. I’m willing to bet it was deeply ingrained terror inspired by the jihadi execution videos and other horrific images of captivity they and most other young people these days have seen on television, the internet and at the cinema.

“A guard kept flicking my neck with his index finger and thumb,” Arthur Batchelor — at 20, the youngest sailor — told the press. “I thought the worst. We’ve all seen the videos.” But the worst that Batchelor claims happened to him, in fact, was being kept in solitary confinement for a couple of days, slapped a few times and called “Mr Bean” by his captors. Which is not exactly waterboarding.

No, it was Batchelor’s own overheated imagination that helped scare the bejesus out of him, fuelled by a melange of images he dredged up: those execution videos, photos of degraded and abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib — and, like many in his age group, probably Hollywood’s reimagining of this modern terror in hit films such as Hostel and Saw, in which young people like him and his comrades are held captive and sadistically tortured. “At some points, I did have fears we would not survive, because my imagination was running,” Batchelor admitted.

Faye Turney, meanwhile, the only female sailor, was terrified she might be raped by her captors. Which would be a reasonable fear if she had seen any of the recent crop of “torture porn” horror films, including Hostel, Saw, Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects and Turistas, in which kidnapped young women have to contend with brutal sexual violence before being slaughtered for kicks. Hostel, for example, which director Eli Roth explicitly claims was inspired by images from Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq, is about the truly appalling things that happen to some young tourists when they fall into the hands of wealthy men who pay for the pleasure of stripping and torturing them for sadistic kicks. One young girl has her eye burnt out with a blowtorch. Saw III features a young woman strung up naked in a meat locker and sprayed with cold water that hardens to ice. That’s just for starters.

Few critics dare attack Tarantino, Hollywood’s Shakespeare of ultraviolence; his many acolytes revere him because he “brought back violent movies unapologetically”, in Roth’s words. (Roth, whose Hostel was produced by Tarantino, directed one of the spoof trailers in Grindhouse, in which a knickerless cheerleader is seen bouncing on a trampoline until a knife pierces through it and appears to impale her in a highly sensitive part of her anatomy.) Roth is referring to 1992’s Reservoir Dogs and 1994’s Pulp Fiction, whose brutal torture scenes opened the floodgates to the “torture porn” we are currently suffering.

These gruesome films from Hollywood’s so-called Splat Pack are incredibly popular with people in their teens and early twenties, and have been astonishingly successful at the box office. The first Saw, for example, was made for just over $1m; it and its two sequels have now taken about $400m at the international box office and probably as much again in DVD sales. Saw IV and Hostel: Part II, of course, will open later this year.

Although most of these films were made outside the studio system, their violent lingua franca has migrated into mainstream Hollywood entertainment. Casino Royale, the latest Bond movie, for example, featured a graphic scene of torture, as did Mel Gibson’s most recent bloodfest, Apocalypto. The TV series 24 invari-ably uses torture as an effective dramatic device. Ultraviolence has become such a critical and accepted part of the mainstream that nobody is surprised when a film like 300, which offers little more to its audience than astonishingly bloody gougings, flying limbs, decapitations and a body count that would not have been out of place in a Nazi concentration camp, has taken $200m in its first month of release in America.

Now there are signs that the current wave of “nasties” and the barrage of ultraviolence in mainstream films is causing even liberals sleepless nights. It’s not surprising to hear conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly call Saw III “a sickening spectacle that could have never happened in America even 10 years ago”. But it is surprising when an academic, Thomas Doherty, chairman of the film studies programme at Brandeis University, says there has been an “utter collapse of censorship restrictions on matters of violence . .. I wouldn’t censor films like Hostel and Saw, although they really are pretty gnarly, but if I were on the classification and ratings administration, I’d start giving them NC17s”.

An NC-17 rating would mean that, technically, nobody under 17 could see the films in a cinema — which is why studios edit to avoid them and gain R ratings.

These allow even young children to see them as long as they’re accompanied by somebody over 21, ideally a parent. God help us. And, as every cool teenager knows, these films can be sold as “unrated” on DVD, where they include scenes that were censored to get the film a cinema release.

Joss Whedon, creator of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wrote a furious letter to the MPAA saying “the ad campaign for Captivity is not only a literal sign of the collapse of humanity, it’s an assault. I’ve watched plenty of horror — in fact, I’ve made my share. But the advent of torture-porn and the total dehumanising not just of women (though they always come first) but of all human beings has made horror a largely unpalatable genre. This ad campaign is part of something dangerous and repulsive, and that act of aggression has to be answered”.

While the MPAA has so far refused to give Captivity a rating, blocking its release, it appears unwilling to do more than excise a few seconds here and there from any of the graphic horror or mainstream action films Hollywood is churning out today. Splat Pack directors such as Roth and Rob Zombie — who also directed a spoof trailer in Grindhouse, in which a naked young woman is branded with a swastika — have learnt how to get their bloody terrors past the MPAA ratings board. “Explain why the extreme violence is necessary to tell the story in a way that’s more socially responsible,” Zombie tells other film-makers. The MPAA buys such nonsense, obviously.

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