6. Beyond Hollywood

It's ironic that torture porn has become so strongly associated with Hollywood, especially since it had its most recent rebirth at the hands of two Australian filmmakers who had planned to shoot it in their native land.

But while many of the biggest examples have come out of America, it's long been a horror staple around the world.

Here in the UK we got WΔZ in 2008, which sees detectives Stellan Skarsgard and Melissa George trying to solve a complicated crime involving equations and rituals.

"It's about altruism in nature and about whether you'd kill someone you love in order to survive yourself. It's a very cool film," says George.

"In nature, there are some animals who will put themselves on the front line to be killed in order to save their kingdom, because they are the same gene pool.

"They don't care. They just want to survive. One monkey will go out in front of another and get killed in order to save 300 of them behind him.

"Whereas, humans, we're a separate gene pool. So we are exploring the idea that if someone said to you 'I will stop doing this to you if you kill your lover…'

"How much pain would you take, before you kill somebody that you love? It's very awesome. It's got a genius storyline."

Australia's Dying Breed channelled the charnel horror of cannibals for a tale of hikers looking for a tiger who end up discovering man-eating men searching for new breeding stock.

With Saw's Leigh Whannell among its cast, it scored controversy points thanks to a quickly-banned poster that featured a human eye and other bits baked into a pie. Charming!

More recently, Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which arrives loaded with mutilation and blood, can easily be fitted into the genre, even if the filmmaker's ambitions and symbolic inspiration were a little loftier.

And there's also Martyrs (above), the French horror which arrived in March of this year, whose director aimed to change things up a little.

The idea from the beginning was always to bring something original, something fresh and trying to do an unexpected film," says Pascal Laugier.

"So, yeah, I consciously played with the archetypes of the horror genre. Trying to bring something new.

"As a general fan - I don't want to sound arrogant - but I was honestly a little bit tired about how things were becoming. Sometimes I had the feeling that a lot of the directors were doing horror films just to show the audience that they shared the same collection of DVDs.

"I wrote the film on a very emotional level, trying to be as sincere and as honest as possible. I certainly didn't want to do a tongue in cheek movie."

Martyrs follows - spoiler alert if you haven't seen it -  a group who are trying to discover the secrets of the afterlife through - you guessed it - torturing young women. We follow one of their former victims as she aims for a little vengeance, but the movie twists and turns around the idea.

It'll come as no surprise that Martyrs is being considered for a US remake.

And talking of remakes…

Next: Remakes Muscle In