Torture porn hasn't been a staple of Horror movies since the 90s. Your classmates analysis is woefully out of date. We've got entire new genres of horror now, like Analog, and Creepypasta. Also, in the last ten years p, we have the introduction of the new-ish voices of women, gay, and black directors, in a genre that was almost entirely controlled and distributed by straight white men, and these new voices have different ideas about what scares us.