By Joshua Tyler
| Published
I recently coined the term “zealot porn” to help explain a new kind of entertainment. Zealot porn is what happens when you make programming specifically designed to torment characters for their personal ideological views, with the goal of your viewers deriving pleasure from their suffering.
zealot porn (noun) — Media that graphically depicts violent punishment of ideological opponents, crafted to gratify the viewer’s sense of moral superiority and deliver cathartic satisfaction through retributive spectacle.
The key to zealot porn is that not only must the characters on screen be portrayed as zealots, in order to dehumanize them, but the people watching must themselves be zealous opponents of the characters’ ideology, in order to fully enjoy their suffering. Zealot porn is what happens when you make stories about zealots for zealots.
zealot (noun) — a person consumed by devotion to a cause or belief, so blinded by passion that reason becomes collateral damage.
This new genre took its clearest and most defined form in the second season of Peacemaker, when creator James Gunn crafted a scene designed to give his viewers the jollies over watching the murder of people who seemed like they might think good things about Nazis. Obviously, no one likes Nazis, but whether you personally like or dislike the views of the people being harmed isn’t relevant to whether or not something is zealot porn.
What matters is the intent of the media you’re watching, and whether that intent is to give the audience pleasure by dehumanizing and punishing people for their views. What those views are or their morality is irrelevant to defining the genre.
Early Zealot Porn
Zealot porn is not a new invention, but it’s been a long time since it was accepted in the mainstream. In the early days of Christianity, Romans fed believers to lions in front of cheering audiences. That was a low-tech version of zealot porn.
Using media like movies and television as a zealot porn delivery mechanism is, however, a recent phenomenon.
Past creators would have balked at the idea of dehumanizing characters for the audience’s base pleasure. Entire books have been written about it being a bad idea. It’s why George Orwell wrote 1984.
On a creative level, it would have formerly been considered bad writing. Normally, good writing aims to humanize the writer’s creations and make them relatable. Zealot porn does the opposite.
Early media that skewed closest to zealot porn are propaganda films from World War 2 or some of the more extreme grindhouse or blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. Most of those, however, focused more on the idea of dismantling a system or punishing someone who’d actively done something wrong. They’re revenge fantasies and not really zealot porn. In the most despicable cases, as with movies like Triumph of the Will, they focused on hurting people based on some immutable outward physical characteristic.
The idea that it’s acceptable to dehumanize and destroy someone for their thoughts is new in the mainstream, and it’s a growing phenomenon.
Quentin Tarantino Births Modern Zealot Porn
If you’re looking for the start of modern zealot porn, its roots can be found in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 movie, Inglourious Basterds.
The movie presents an alternate history in which a group of American commandos wipe out the evil Nazis and kill Hitler, without the need for a global war. It isn’t about character arcs or military realism; it’s about watching the most evil regime in history get flambéed to the sound of David Bowie.
catharsis (noun) — the sudden, involuntary purge of buried emotion that floods the mind like a breached dam, leaving behind a raw, emptied stillness that feels strangely like peace.
Nazism was a uniquely perfect ideology to use in birthing modern zealot porn, because nearly everyone has been pre-conditioned toward a zealous hatred of Hitler and his cronies. So Tarantino gives audiences, raised on decades of history classes talking about how uniquely evil Nazis were, exactly what they want: Nazis humiliated, carved, and annihilated. Punished for their beliefs even more than just their actions.
Inglourious Basterds is bloody, indulgent, and engineered specifically for moral satisfaction.
Still, Inglourious Basterds largely focused on murdering those embedded in the Nazi regime’s power structure. It didn’t, for the most part, take pleasure in killing random Germans walking down the street who might be thinking Nazi thoughts.
Inglorious Basterds is a more high-class type of zealot porn, but its existence helped give a green light to the growing wave of more extreme copycats that followed.
If zealot porn has a father, it’s Quentin Tarantino.
Robert Rodriguez Targets Conservatives For Destruction
If zealot porn has a mother, it’s Robert Rodriguez.
Robert Rodriguez’s Machete began as a fake trailer and mutated into a full-on immigration revenge epic. Danny Trejo stars as a former Mexican Federale turned one-man army after being betrayed by corrupt politicians and anti-immigrant vigilantes.
Where Tarantino created a movie designed to visit violence on a historical group almost universally agreed to be evil, Robert Rodriguez targeted his movie at a mainstream, modern group of people and their current (and widely held) beliefs on border security.
To make that work, he had to dehumanize his targets by twisting their views to cartoonish extremes. Rodriguez takes anti-immigration rhetoric and dumbs it down to absurdist levels, so that he can turn those who agree with it into fodder for righteous decapitation.
Every kill in his 2010 movie is meant not just payback for Machete’s betrayal but for decades of what his audience would perceive as xenophobic cruelty. The film is indulgent, cartoonishly violent, and completely lost in the bubble of its own politics.
Kevin Smith Finds Catharsis In Crazy Christians
If zealot porn has a weird uncle, it’s Kevin Smith.
Two years after Inglorious Basterds, filmmaker Kevin Smith applied Robert Rodregeuz’s anti-Conservative formula to fundamentalist Christians with the movie Red State.
The Evangelicals depicted in the movie are a cartoonish, demonic caricature of what real-life hard-line Christians are. That’s a key piece of the zealot porn formula, since it serves to dehumanize the real-world group, thus allowing the audience to take pleasure in their violent end.
By the movie’s end, Red State takes intense pleasure in their doom. As an audience, it feels acceptable because the movie makes them into monsters before it does its worst.
Later examples of purified zealot porn won’t go through as much trouble, but Red State, like Inglorious Basterds before it, was still pushing at the boundaries of what audiences would find acceptable. It’s more restrained than its predecessors but also more pointed in its attack on its character’s beliefs.
The Zealot Porn Thrives In Independent Film
Once Tarantino, Rodriguez, and Smith showed creators the way, there was a brief explosion in copycats. Those copycats stuck mainly to the topics those three had already covered.
God Bless America followed in Rodriguez and Smith’s footsteps, gleefully cartooning conservatives for the righteous satisfaction of its audience in 2011. Iron Sky continued Tarantino’s zealous crusade against Nazis in 2012. All of those movies followed a similar pattern, where they turned their ideological opponents into cartoonish straw men to justify dehumanizing them before the slaughter.
Like Machete and Red State before them, none of these movies gained the widespread acceptance and viewership that Tarantino earned when he kicked things off with Inglourious Basterds. Their targets were often too divisive, and most people still recoiled at the idea of getting satisfaction from watching the suffering of people who might share the same views as their neighbors.
The Purge Takes Zealot Porn Big Time
It wasn’t until the arrival of The Purge franchise’s first sequel, in 2014, that zealot porn began to flirt with mainstream acceptance again.
The first entry in the series is a simple survival horror, but the second movie, The Purge: Anarchy, begins drifting into zealot porn as it sets up cathartic violence against wealthy elites. By the time The Purge: Election Year rolls around in 2016, it’s closer to an early-stage blockbuster zealot porn franchise. Each Purge sequel picks a different ideological target.
The Purge: Election Year takes aim at conservatives by turning them into cartoonish caricatures worthy of slaughter, in the mold of Kevin Smith’s Red State.
2018’s The First Purge goes back to the old standby by turning white Americans into modern-day Nazis, thinking racist thoughts, and in need of some murdering.
That push transitioned into zealot porn against nationalists in 2021’s The Forever Purge. That movie takes a weaker approach to it than its predecessors, and isn’t as clearly dedicated to its satiation through zealotry.
The Hunt Bait And Switches Audiences
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that most of the earliest zealot porn entries are aimed squarely at pleasuring left-wing viewers. Their targets are always conservatives or Christians, and they expect their audience to be the most liberal of liberal extremists.
The Hunt tried to trick audiences into thinking it was a commentary on the phenomenon of conservatives being targeted by billing itself as a movie about elite liberals hunting conservatives for their views. In reality, it’s another example of zealous slaughter of conservatives as the movie turns the hunted right-wingers into idiotic caricatures and tries to make the case that they had it coming due to some conspiratorial tweets.
The movie’s only real hero is totally apolitical, which I guess is in its own way a commentary on political polarization, but a weak one.
The Hunt is more of a muddled commentary on the rising popularity of zealot porn than an example of zealot porn itself.
Streaming Pushes Zealot Porn Forward To Its Final Form
Movies had begun paving the way towards making zealot porn socially acceptable, and streaming television took the next step.
The Boys is the best example of this. It started as a show primarily designed to deconstruct and hate on the standard tropes of superheroes. Over time, it morphed into something increasingly political. It creates supervillains designed to embody the political ideology its writers loathe most and then constructs situations in which they’re either humiliated or killed in the worst possible ways.
No character embodies that more than the character of Homelander. He isn’t just evil, he’s the delusional cartoon version of what bubble-dwelling liberals imagine Fox News viewers to be. And even while he survives, the show does everything it can to humiliate and degrade him. Meanwhile, the show’s creators used social media to openly invite audiences to see him as an avatar for Donald Trump and his ideological supporters.
Whenever Homelander or one of these symbols gets publicly humiliated, exploded, or blackmailed, the show delivers a dirty hit of catharsis to its similarly minded, zealous viewers. That’s exactly what they’re going for.
Peacemaker Perfects Zealot Porn
Peacemaker has now taken zealot porn to the next and purest level. All previous efforts used cartoonish oversimplification to dehumanize their ideological opponents, before brutally making them suffer.
Peacemaker doesn’t bother. Returning to the genre’s roots by setting the show’s second season in a world run by Nazis, Peacemaker doesn’t show its residents as engaging in evil before killing them. It simply kills them, because they’re residents of a Nazi world. The show assumes that the viewers will do all the dehumanization in their heads, on their own.
That works because we’re dealing with Nazis, but as Inglorious Basterds demonstrated, it’s unlikely to stop there. What comes next will be a new wave of zealot porn, which takes the dehumanization of wrongthinkers to previously unseen levels.
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