In case you haven’t seen it, 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 trapped by a group of elitists 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 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, including that which seems to be motivated by pleasure.
But Hostel director Eli Roth has revealed that aside from the physically violent and bloody 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 violence 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 awful ways.
Prisoners experienced horrific violence
The photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq displayed horrific and undignifying scenes.
There were also numerous serious allegations against American soldiers of extreme violence towards prisoners.
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 k*ll someone.
The website offered a service where, for $10,000, it claimed it could take you to a place in Thailand where you could k*ll 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 k*ll 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.
