How A Controversial Thriller Birthed a New Era of Extreme Hollywood Horror
Let’s talk about the long, bloody legacy of Eli Roth’s Hostel.
It's an age-old adage that audiences like to be grossed out. Viewers have loved to be scared for as long as art has existed, and with cinema, the boundaries of human terror have been pushed to their limits. But how far is too far? Is there a limit on what viewers will accept, or does our insatiable hunger to bear witness to greater and greater terrors mean there will always be an audience for the worst thing you can think of? That's certainly the philosophy of one Eli Roth, and the film made 20 years ago that birthed a new era of Hollywood horror.
Inspired by a conversation with Harry Knowles (yikes) about looking for "the sickest thing [one] could find on the internet," and an alleged "murder vacation" website located on the dark web, Roth decided to create a no-holds-barred gore-fest that leveled up the gruesomeness he pulled off in his flesh-rotting debut, Cabin Fever. The result was Hostel, and it certainly lived up to his blood-stained agenda.
The film follows two American students on their backpacking trip across Europe. An obviously sleazy man encourages them to visit a hostel near Bratislava, Slovakia, with the promise of limitless hot chicks and no-strings-attached sex. It turns out that they've walked into a sinister underworld where bored rich people pay to torture and mutilate others. Cue the slicing, dicing, chainsaws, and blowtorches.
Hostel is not for the weak-stomached. It's detailed to the point of agony, surgical in its vivisections of these screaming prisoners whose only crime is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. While the douche Americans suffering throughout are just unlikeable enough to root against, their torture is not an act of revenge or catharsis for the audience. It could be anyone being torn to shreds, and Roth would still be having a blast doing it. There are deeper themes you can read into here. Some critics read Hostel as a critique of Bush-era American ignorance and a satire of modern consumerism — but you could also easily see it as being as shallow as a puddle of blood. The violence is the point, and Roth wants you to relish the voyeuristic thrill of seeing something you’re not supposed to.
Gore-nography, or torture porn, obviously didn’t originate with Hostel. Outside of Hollywood, Asian filmmakers like Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike (who cameos in the movie), and Kinji Fukasaku were gaining acclaim and notoriety in equal measure for their boundary-pushing approaches to cinematic violence. The fingerprints of Audition and Oldboy are all over Hostel, as are the works of David Cronenberg and George Romero. Hostel was also released the year after Saw, which divided critics with its extreme violence but won over a legion of horror fans. Still, it’s also true that Roth’s film was viewed differently, that its explicit and giddy gaze towards human suffering was seen by many as “a step too far.”
Indeed, it’s with Hostel that the term “torture porn” entered the pop culture vernacular. Critic David Edelstein compared it to other hyper-gory horrors of the time, like The Devil’s Rejects, Saw, and Wolf Creek, questioning why "America seems so nuts these days about torture." He explicitly compared the "forensic fetishism" of the subgenre to adult cinema in its execution. Crucially for the genre, the gore is frighteningly realistic, a sharp contrast from the era of Video Nasties of the ‘80s where the charmingly homemade special effects offered emotional distance from the slasher carnage. Watching Hostel, even if you’re aware on a technical level how its kill scenes are executed, you cannot help but flinch at the realism of Roth’s spectacle.
Hostel inspired a brief rise in “torture porn” movies, before they retreated back into the margins.
Understandably, Hostel proved to be controversial. Many critics derided it as cruel and small-minded. Members of the Slovakian Parliament condemned the film for its offensive portrayal of their country. But it also made $82 million on a $4.8 million budget and received two sequels. Clearly, audiences wanted this. There was a genuine demand for this level of extreme horror, one where violence is, frankly, cool. During this time, gore-nography and torture porn were commercial safe bets, but it didn’t last long. Even flaying can become boring to viewers after a while.
Gore-nography is a niche of horror that became an unexpected hit for general audiences thanks to films like Hostel, but it’s no surprise it returned to the margins after a few short years, to be appreciated by hardcore fans and largely ignored by casual viewers looking for some safe scares. There are exceptions, such as the growing popularity of the Terrifier franchise, the finale of Weapons, and the return of Saw. The Substance toyed with hardcore body horror in a sleazy satirical context to skewer impossible beauty standards, while Julia Ducournau had viewers puking with her cannibal frenzy Raw. However, mainstream Hollywood horror has largely skewed PG-13 in recent years, partly because such films play to larger crowds and can make more money (imagine the hard-R Five Nights at Freddy’s.) The chances are, though, that Roth-esque ultra-violence will return to our screens more prominently. If there’s one thing that can be relied upon, it’s humanity’s collective morbid curiosity.
