After watching Hostel, Kôji Shiraishi said he could make a much more disgusting and shocking movie. He was pretty successful with Gurotesuku, as it was jarring and, as the title might lead you to believe, grotesque. There was very little (if any) plot, and it was just set up so this unnamed torturer could just mutilate and humiliate his captives.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily call this an art house film, but he made it solely for the purpose of shocking his audience.
I agree with the article: "It's a powerful feeling to share an audience's collective gasp, such as the one elicited by a startling suicide in Michael Haneke's Caché. That can't be duplicated in solitude." I saw Gurotesuku (and Antichrist, for that matter) alone and was overly turned off with the images with which I was being confounded, and I had to look away because it was more than I could bear at times. However, these images didn't resonate with me afterwords, and were forgotten. These disturbing images were not necessarily "easily digested" but they were "quickly forgotten." After the credits had rolled, I turned closed my laptop and went about my day.
The power of a collective viewing of film is becoming more and more of an isolated experience as we are able to watch movies on iPods or on mobile devices, which detracts from the shared experience (or the spectacle, for that matter). Shocking on an individual level does not nearly have the same impact as shocking an audience. It's hard to ruffle feathers on a bitesize screen.
