‘Hostel’ (2005): A Look Back at its Undeniable Infamy

I’m going to be perfectly candid with you: I am not a fan of Eli Roth’s Hostel. The main reason stems from its eclipsing what I find to be a far superior film of the “torture porn” epoch and the granddaddy to them all: Saw (2003). I saw Saw in theatres and was immediately taken by its complex and gripping characters, twist-laden plot, and hyper-stylized gore. I dubbed it “torturespoitation” when talking to my friends – following the portmanteau style of great exploitation movements of the past. 

And then Hostel came out. And it. Ruined. Everything. 

Suddenly this brilliant and thought-provoking movement, turning the tables on the media’s exploitation of violence-for-viewership and reacting to the atrocities of a post-9/11 world, was saddled with the moniker “torture porn.” Popularized in David Edelstein’s February 6th, 2006 article, Now Playing at your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn, the name was crafted for scandal. This exciting new movement in extremism had been named to create bias and revulsion. As a gore kid, the bombastic, horrific death scenes didn’t bother me. I loved the commentary, the societal “call out” these films were making, and the name “torture porn” just degraded that, making it feel, well, icky. And, in my eyes, it was all Eli Roth’s fault. 

For another thing, the film plays like it’s National Lampoon’s Eastern European Vacation. The characters are preoccupied with pot and p**sy, with a tone like Eurotrip’s (2004) awkward Americans in Amsterdam sequences, right down to the inappropriate touching on a train scene. They get checked into room 237 at the Slovakian hostel in a wink so blatant Fred Dekker would flinch. The banana-peel blood-slip gag is like something out of Looney Tunes (chainsaw brought to you by ACME products!). And with Roth’s demand for realism, all these moments just feel cheesy and out-of-step with the overall tone. 

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Ultimately, Hostel comes off as a superficial spectacle that took over the torturesploitation landscape and, in my opinion, degraded it from a more thought-provoking fair and caused the studio machines to churn out low-budget facsimiles of no-narrative, maxi-gore movies for the masses. 

However (and this is an important however), when you look back at Hostel, and exactly how it got made, and listen to why it was the way it was…there is a dawning recognition that Hostel was a truly necessary element in the makings of early 2000s horror. Not just for the sake of the subgenre but also for the sake of horror filmmaking itself. 

Horror films had been in a slump since the early ‘90s, which was when Mr. Roth first conceived and co-wrote Cabin Fever with his NYU roommate Randy Pearlstein. It was his feature debut, but no one was buying horror. Even after the success of Scream, Roth was saddled with the constant burden of “make it more like Scream” from every potential financier who showed the slightest interest.

“However (and this is an important however), when you look back at Hostel, and exactly how it got made, and listen to why it was the way it was…there is a dawning recognition that Hostel was a truly necessary element in the makings of early 2000s horror. Not just for the sake of the subgenre, but also for the sake of horror filmmaking itself.”

And, just as in many movements before, studios beat the teen-meta-slasher-movie horse to death. The landscape was focusless by 2000, and horror was yet again a zero-sum game for many up-and-coming filmmakers. And while some underground hits, like Cabin Fever, revved the engines of horror fandom, it hadn’t yet caught the mainstream zeal. Instead, it just left Roth with an enticing number of studio offerings that were all still in development. 

This is when Quentin Tarantino stepped in. 

When Hostel opens, the first title card you see is “Quentin Tarantino Presents.” It’s somewhat befuddling – how on earth did Tarantino get involved with this?! The confounding answer is he convinced Roth to do it.

It must be tempting as a filmmaker on the rise to just grasp at the dollar signs of gift-wrapped projects with studio-level backing, but Roth was uninspired by the projects being thrown at him. He would have to wait years before getting behind the camera again. So, when the Prince of Independent Cinema, Quentin Tarantino (for those curious, the King of Independent Cinema is Lloyd Kaufman) reached out after putting Cabin Fever on his short list of “top films of 2002,” Roth answered the call.

They shared project ideas, and, as Roth told Dread Central in 2006, “I told him [Tarantino], this and this and this, and I said, ‘Well, then there’s this other thing,’ and I told him the idea for Hostel and he was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? That’s the sickest fucking idea I have ever heard. You’ve got to do that. Fuck it. Do it low-budget. Go to Europe and make it as sick as you want to make it … This could be your Takashi Miike film. This could be a classic American horror movie.’” (the Japanese horror icon, Takashi Miike, would end up with a cameo in Hostel).  

And that’s when the rebellion started. No studios. No executives pushing agendas. Just two filmmakers inspired by the sadistic realities of the world to create something no one was expecting. They were able to bring on Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB to maximize gore potential. The prestige of the names attached to this project is baffling, and it did exactly what it needed to do. It brought the independent gore scene out of the obscure shadows and into the foreground of our culture. It scalded our eyes out with irreverent grue and didn’t waste time trying to appease or placate.

The characters, who were seemingly depthless upon more critical viewings, are actually fair representations of college kids abroad. It’s a film that doesn’t make you think too hard, and you don’t have to. When you ride a roller coaster, are you thinking about the engineering behind the loop-de-loops and the torrid backstories of the people who made it? Nope! You’re just whooping and hollering, experiencing a rush of cinematic cheese that would catapult a movement. 

It may not be inspiring, but it was necessary, like films that were shown in eras past. Dracula would live in a vacuum without Frankenstein. The Last House on the Left would be all but forgotten without I Spit on Your Grave. It’s like a rule of twos: one film makes the statement, and the second cements it as a subgenre. The rest are all just gravy on the mashed potatoes. 

It was because of Hostel that film theorists took a critical eye towards the horror landscape in 2006 and saw it as a direct reaction to the post-9/11 world. It was because of Hostel that more independent and foreign horror projects were getting hoisted into the mainstream. As much as I believe Saw is superior, it’s very likely that without Hostel…a large number of late-2000s horror would either live only in obscurity or may never have happened at all. And that’s to the credit of Eli Roth, who – when given the opportunity to fall in line with studio projects or strike his own path (and potentially hit a sophomore slump) – hitched his wagon to the original ‘90s cowboy and got to work. 

But Tarantino was more a champion than an honest-to-pete producer. Chris Briggs, along with partner Mike Fleiss (Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake), joined Roth and helped shape the vision onto screen. Chris had backpacked through Europe and wanted to make something that highlighted the excess American backpackers tend to seek on such walkabouts. He had the title and basic “lure travellers to a hostel where bad things happen” premise but no real story or idea of what the “bad things” would be.

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Roth was on board, but it wasn’t until Harry Knowles of Ain’t it Cool News told Roth about a website chronicling the exploits of wealthy businessmen traveling to Thailand to murder willing victims for a premium price that the full story would come together. It took Roth three weeks to complete the script, and everything moved quickly as distribution was secured by Screen Gems and financing pulled together while Roth scouted locations in Eastern Europe. 

Roth would also find many of his actors locally, championing the idea of using foreign talent over the standard Americans-playing-foreigners trope. Eyþór Guðjónsson, who played Oli, was actually a businessman and real estate investor – someone Eli had met in Iceland while promoting Cabin Fever – and he wrote Oli just for Guðjónsson. He had never acted before, but upon Eli’s assurances he would not be asked to do anything he was uncomfortable with, he came on board.

Additionally, Barbara Nedeljáková, playing seductress Natalya, is a Slovakia native and took great pleasure in the deliberate hyperbole of her country’s “dark side” – from the torture bunkers to kids who’ll kill for chewing gum. It’s an eclectic cast built around a love for doing things as real as possible. A truth that extends to the use of practical FX over CG, which only added to Hostel’s infamy. 

When Hostel was released 15 years ago, Eli Roth was a filmmaker on the rise. He had little fear and believed ultimately in the vision of his projects. He filled a need in the early 2000s for more fearless filmmakers to follow. His ilk of the time, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, Greg McLean, Adam Green, and countless others (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Soska Sisters, though they came up around 2009), were the new class of horror director. And Hostel, like Saw before it, served as a proving ground whose influence, impact, and legacy cannot be denied.