Viewers quit 'torture porn'

25 October 2016 - 08:42 By ©The Daily Telegraph

Fans of The Walking Dead are still reeling from the latest bloodthirsty episode. The seventh season of AMC's horror drama began with what has been called the "goriest" episode in the show's history, with even hardened fans of the zombie franchise expressing their disgust on social media.The sixth season ended with a bloody cliffhanger, as the vile Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bludgeoned an unseen victim to death with a baseball bat wrapped in razor wire. Last night's follow-up revealed that he had in fact killed two characters, Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn (Steven Yeun), and their deaths were shown in eye-watering detail.Glenn's death was particularly gruelling, as the character had been seemingly "killed" once before in a previous episode - only for it to be revealed he had survived.Last night's beating left his fate in no doubt, however. Glenn was seen with one of his eyeballs dangling from its socket.Rolling Stone called it "excessively gory", while Forbes critic Erik Kain complained that Glenn's "gross" death lacked any sense of tragedy: "When Glenn 'died' last season it was a scene of horror and tragedy, but it didn't involve his eye bulging out from his head," he wrote."Tonight's killing was tasteless and gory and gross ... I'm not sure if this was great drama, or just torture porn."Several viewers have said that they will no longer watch the programme. "Goodbye forever," one fan wrote on Twitter, adding that the show had "jumped the shark" (or introduced a sequence so over-the-top the show has lost credibility).Although The Walking Dead may be a turn-off to many, the show still has a number of high-profile fans, including John Cusack and John Cleese."I can't get enough of it," Cleese told NowTV last week, adding the "gentle sprinkling of horrific barbarism" was part of the show's appeal. ..

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