This is an older list of mine, and I've made the decision to revise it for better clarity and to better capture a snapshot of what the "torture porn" era was really like. NOTE THAT THIS LIST IS STILL BEING REVISED. Some titles may disappear and some may still be added. Please be patient. 

I decided to use the starting year of 2004 as that was the year the original Saw was released; while it was not the first horror film to push the boundaries of sadism and violence within a relatively wide US release (House of 1000 Corpses and High Tension had already come out as two more obvious examples), Saw marked a real shift in the genre to a more nihilistic, sickly greenish-tinged, torture and suffering-based type of film where shock value and pushing boundaries came to the forefront, as did a few telltale themes.

For inclusion in this revised list, I have chosen a few distinct subtypes of the torture porn genre: the Saw clones (inventive traps, victims pitted against each other, significant emphasis on pain, maiming and disfigurement, past indiscretions coming to light, a villain who wants to "play a game" or force a victim to choose between two different, seemingly equally horrible fates); the Hostel clones (carefree young people, often on vacation in foreign lands, kidnapped by sinister characters and subjected to black-market organ removal, snuff film stardom, unwilling "red room" or "dark web" participation, sexual abuse, and occasionally just to satisfy a simple bloodlust); the Backwoods Brutality films (a degenerate couple, family or single person abducts and tortures young people, usually in a backwoods setting but not always, often for ideological reasons but also for things like forced breeding, slavery and often just to be horrible people; only the Backwoods Brutality films that make significant use of torture and sadism will be included here), the occasional Se7en/Saw hybrid clone, and the torture porn/home invasion hybrids that occasionally popped up in the relevant time period. Some films will not readily fit into any of those categories however, or in multiple categories, and are included because their marketing and/or general tone and style mark them as obviously attempting to be included with the genre.

I have also included the most important (to me) progenitor films themselves for as complete an overview as possible. I have decided to no longer include most New French Extremity films as they are really a separate outcropping of their own, and films such as A Serbian Film or Human Centipede and most of the "faux snuff" type films that are riffing off of the August Underground series or Guinea Pig far more than Saw or Hostel. Some however will likely sneak through, do not come for me about it please.

I used a vague cutoff year of 2015; while the torture porn trend was mostly confined between 2004-2010, there have been several stragglers which have come out later yet still firmly belong among their more timely siblings. A few will have release dates even later still, as even though the societal, cultural and political framework that spurred the trend has, for the most part, moved on, torture porn is not an entirely dead phenomenon even to this day, as there seems to be another cycle of nouveau-torture porn that uses some of the same tropes yet updates the aesthetic for modern audiences.

Movies not on Letterboxd:

The Abducted (2015)
Brutal (2012)