A few weeks ago, my family and I went to the local cinema to enjoy a wholesome, family-fun movie: Saw V. There was plenty of blood, guts and torture for adults and children alike to enjoy. Wait, this wasn’t the heart-warming flick you had in mind?

These days it seems as if decapitations, mutilations and disfigurements are pervasive components of cinema. Movies now expose more extreme violence to children. Directors such as Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever) have made a living shooting gruesome horror films.

Saw V begins innocently enough with a man lying strapped to a table, a swinging pendulum blade aiming to slice him in half. The man is forced to place his hands inside a machine, push a button and have his hands crushed to a bloody pulp in order to stop the pendulum. Even after he commits to the task, the pendulum guts him like a fish.

The Saw series, despite decreasing ratings for each successive movie on the Internet Movie Database, has seen little decline in ticket sales from each respective opening weekend. According to Box Office Mojo, Saw V grossed only $3.5 million less in its opening weekend than Saw III, the opening-weekend winner of the series. Saw V took in $30 million in its first weekend while it only cost $10.8 million to make, a fraction of a big-budget movie such as The Dark Knight which cost $185 million. The movie, which opened on Oct. 24, came in second place after the popular High School Musical 3, which also opened that weekend. This is significant because Saw V has an R rating.

Other horror movie hits have seen similar success. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake grossed $107 million, Hostel took in $80 million and The Strangers brought in $75 million in ticket sales worldwide, all well above their relatively meager budgets.

In an article called “Hostel II Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinema Experience in Torture-Porn,” author Gabrielle Murray believes the horror genre often waxes and wanes in popularity. Murray, a professor in the Cinema Studies Department at La Trobe University in Australia, writes “Prior to this growth in explicit productions, the horror genre had been in one of its cyclic declines.”

So what makes these types of movies so intriguing to audiences? Daisuke Miyao, a professor at the University of Oregon and author of several books about film such as Global Hollywood, said these films can appeal to people because they are “spectacles that we do not experience in our daily lives.”

In a 2006 interview with Neil Cavuto, Roth said that people need a release in times of war, such as Iraq. “In times of terror, people want to be terrified in a safe environment. You want to scream. And there really is no place in society where you can go and just scream at the top of your lungs and get it out of your system. And horror movies really provide that safe environment to do that.”

Roth also said horror movies such as Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original) and Dawn of the Dead were made in response to Vietnam War coverage.

Think these movies are just for adults? Think again. Children are now exposed to an unprecedented amount of violence. According to Science Daily, in an August issue of the journal Pediatrics, Dartmouth researchers revealed that 12.5 percent of 22 million children aged 10-14 are watching these types of movies.

Even previews for movies are not immune to violence. In a study overseen by Mary Beth Oliver, a professor in the College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University, previews contained an average of 6 violent scenes a minute characterized by “aggression, gun scenes and explosions.”

Still, horror movies are a niche genre. Hostel II failed to garner the same success as its predecessor; the movie grossed $8.5 million its opening weekend and went on to make more outside the U.S. Movies like Turistas and Captivity fared similarly.