And here's a featurette with Brody, Polley and director Vincenzo Natali (Cube), plus executive producer Guillermo del Toro.

Splice is already playing in select theaters around the U.S., but hopefully it'll be coming to your town (and ours) sometime soon!

The answer is obviously complicated. For some people, torture puts any story beyond the pale: a couple of weeks ago, scifi writer Karen Joy Fowler told me in an interview that she refuses to watch Battlestar Galactica because there's too much torture in it. But millions of movie fans have turned near-future flick Hostel, about an imaginary Eastern European country that houses a torture-entertainment center for the rich, into a cult hit and franchise. And the TV series 24, which is also a near-future dystopia, also has millions of drooling fans who don't seem to mind that superspy Jack, our main character, is constantly torturing people with everything from ugly lamps to fists.

Enough has been said about torture porn that I don't need to repeat the arguments too much here. They all boil down to one question: Does watching torture make us more likely to tolerate it in real life?

I had a brilliant professor in college who always answered that question with a roll of her eyes. "Look," she would say, "If it were true that we always did what the media told us, then every single advertisement would work. We'd buy everything we see advertised." Because she's right about that, we know it's not the case that everything we see in the media leads to behaviors in real life. The question of torture then boils down to whether it's necessary for a given story.

Let's look at one of the most famous examples of torture in scifi. Canadian flick Cube, which came out in the late 1990s, was your classic, Saw-style "a bunch of strangers trapped in a weird place have to solve puzzles to escape horrible grody death" kind of flick. For people raised with videogames, a form of entertainment where you solve puzzles to avoid dying, the scenario was familiar. And the puzzle was even pretty cool: the characters have to figure out a sequence of prime numbers in order to escape from a giant cube building full of rooms that move around all the time. As they're figuring out the prime number sequence, they venture into rooms that stab them, poison them, chop them up into little cubes, and generally spew gore everywhere. Do we need the torture along with the cool math game? I'd say yes. The entire movie depends on the audience understanding the characters' urgency, but at the same time the scenario is surreal enough that bringing in the torture enhances our sense of bizarre otherworldliness.

But how about Wes "Scream" Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, a classic cult movie from the 1970s that was just remade into a less-than-amazing franchise? In the original, gritty-freakout movie, a family whose truck breaks down is waylaid by atomic cannibal mutants in the desert. The torture is campy and hideous at the same time. In fact, the entire point of the movie is really the torture, and the escape, of our normal American family. Like Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes is literally about torture and what it can do to you. So the movie couldn't exist without torture, and in fact the torture itself is the point. How will people be dismembered? Where will the blood splatter? Will they really DO that? Without torture, there would be no movie.

Let's return to Battlestar Galactica's torture with these two examples in mind. Unlike The Hills Have Eyes, BSG is not about torture. It's about a horrific dystopia where torture has become part of everyday life. Like Cube, BSG uses torture to explore the urgency of the situation its characters are in. So do we need the torture to feel that urgency?

One might ask the same question about a scene in Iain M. Banks' novel The Algebraist, where we are treated to an intense scene of torture in order to show how evil one particular character, Luseferous, really is:

[Luseferous] had decreed that the final punishment of the assassin should be his own teeth . . . Accordingly, his four canine teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing . . . These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw, puncturing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorseless growth. The lower set curved up and over his head, and after a few months worth of extension, came to touch his scalp near the top of his head, while the upper set grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck . . . Both sets of teeth then started to enter the assassin's body, one pair slowly forcing themselves through the bony plates of the man's skull, the other entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck . . . The fangs burrowing through his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonizingly, kill him . . . This unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber . . . his nutrition and bodily functions catered for by various tubes and implants . . . The fellow's ears and mind still worked.

Perhaps it could have been less detailed, but I would not have remembered it so vividly if it had not. Similarly, I would not have felt the horror of the humans' and Cylons' situations without seeing Six tortured by humans, and Baltar tortured by Cylons. I am not sure if making something memorable is justification, but it is certainly emotional realism. And in a genre whose entire narrative substance is the unreal, the science fictional, a dose of emotional realism can be potent indeed.

The Cube by day:

At night:

This is what the interior will look like:

3XN via Yanko Design

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• A Clockwork Orange: Malcolm McDowell was given an experimental injection and forced to watch images of violence and sex until the mixture made him barf. Can you imagine throwing up whenever you watched porn? That's the very worst torture of all.
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• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Khan takes an earwig and drops it inside of Chekov's helmet, where it slowly crawls into his ear, spitting some kind of bloody acid as it goes. Then it wraps itself around his cerebral cortex and makes him Khan's bitch. That scene made me sleep with earplugs for about six months when I was a kid, and it still creeps me out.
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• Doctor Who — "Vengeance on Varos": Colin Baker (during his chubby years) visits Varos, a planet where people are shown public scenes of torture and execution for entertainment. Sort of like American Idol, with a sadistic Ryan Seacrest. The Doctor was a bit of a dick in this episode, getting a lot of people killed and leaving the torture machines intact when he left. Nice guy.
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• The Empire Strikes Back: Darth Vader takes Han Solo into his private torture room on Bespin and lowers him onto a really nasty looking torture rack. As Han's screams echo throughout Cloud City, someone had the bright idea to turn this into a fucking action figure! "Here Timmy, enjoy torturing Harrison Ford!" Genius.
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• Brazil: Jonathan Pryce gets tortured by his former friend Michael Palin wearing a hideous babyface mask in Terry Gilliam's dark vision of the future. In fact, there's a whole branch of the Ministry of Information called "information retrieval" to get jobs like this done, just like George Bush's CIA does. Everything becomes unraveled when a typo gets the wrong man killed. No spellcheck for you.
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• Cube: Seven strangers wake up inside a giant cube, where each new room contains a deadly trap that they have to figure out. In the first three minutes of the movie, a guy gets chopped into square pieces by a swinging razor-bladed gate. So you know you're in for something really special. Plus, there's high-level math involved in figuring out the puzzle, which is a special kind of torture right there. Damn prime numbers.
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• Star Trek: The Next Generation — "Chain of Command": Patrick Stewart should have walked away with a special Oscar for over-the-top acting in this episode, but I still love the damn thing. Picard is kidnapped and brainwashed over and over by a Cardassian agent, played by the excellently evil David Warner. Warner keeps asking how many lights are on the wall, and although Picard is promised comfort and luxury if he says there are five lights, he never breaks. At the end of the episode, as he stumbles out of the torture room, he turns and shouts, "THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS!" Just watch the damn thing below, it still gives me goosebumps.

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