The 2006 film Hostel has made serious numbers and sparked up a lot of talk in the world of cinema and beyond.
The horror movie follows young American men Paxton and Josh, who, during a backpacking trip across Europe, get kidnapped and tortured by a group of sadists in a Slovak city. The two are led into a hostel with the promise of meeting young girls, only to experience violence instead.
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The movie was originally disregarded
Shortly after it had come out, Hostel was quickly disregarded as an unnecessarily violent depiction of a fictional event, being called “torture p**n” and nothing more.?
Despite this disgust projected towards the movie by critics, Hostel remains a cult classic among cinephiles.
The director talked about what makes it scary
The movie depicts various forms of violence and torture, including that which seems to be motivated by sexual pleasure.
But Hostel director Eli Roth has revealed that aside from the physically violent and b****y scenes, what made the movie scary was that it was not so far from fiction.
Roth revealed the movie is based on real-life events
Speaking with LADbible, the movie’s director stated that the story was inspired by real-life events and a shocking online website he had come across.
The story around the American tourists who suffer from rich elitist people’s s****m was inspired by a similar crime in real life.
People have done similar things
Roth explained that he had started working on the movie around the same time as the images of American soldiers’ abuse towards Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib had come out.
The images circulating the American media and the internet showed soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in sadistic ways.
Prisoners experienced horrific violence
The photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq displayed horrific and undignifying scenes such as a naked prisoner held by a leash.
There were also numerous serious allegations against American soldiers of sexual assault and violence equivalent to torture.
The violence was part of the reason why Roth created the movie
When talking about this, Roth said, “We were seeing images coming out of Abu Ghraib, going, ‘God, is this what the Americans are doing?’”
The thought of what people could do behind closed doors disturbed him, prompting the director to portray it in his movie.?
A terrifying website also played a role
While pondering the photographs, Roth also came across a thread on the deep web where people paid money to learn what it was like to kill someone.
The website offered a service where, for $10,000, it claimed it could take you to a place in Thailand where you could kill a volunteer.
The director was horrified
Talking to Dread Central, Roth said he had tried to test the legitimacy of the website but had ultimately reached a dead end when it asked for his card information.?
“To get any further I would have had to give personal information and I figure these people kill people for a living,” he said.
Despite the dead-end, Roth was still shocked
“We’re talking about the sick things that people with money do in secret. At the time, it seemed like, ‘God, does this really happen?” Roth said.
The question of “does this really happen?” led the director to vent about such phenomena in his movie.
Many still found Hostel offensive
From BBC and New York Times film critics to the Slovakian government, many found the movie to have gone too far in depicting violence.?
Despite this, Roth has stated that “Hostel seems like a kind of documentary” because of its cruel connection to the real world.
Last Updated on November 1, 2024 by Sarah Kester
