Schlock and awe

Were he to walk around with a monocle, baggy pants and a megaphone, Eli Roth couldn’t correspond more closely to my idea of what a director should be.

Combining such fine attributes as mad genius and endearingly garrulous snake-oil salesmanship, one can easily figure how Mr. Roth has drifted in with his geek chic friends, a crowd including Ain’t It Cool supremo Harry Knowles and Quentin Tarantino. Like those gentlemen, Eli’s commendably sick preoccupations were forged during the golden age of video, simpler times when kids scoured top shelves for the freakiest titles around.
Sprawling inelegantly across a couch in the Soho Hotel, the hotshot horror-master gets almost wistful at the thought.
“They were romantic times, huh,” he says. “The problem was that I was born in 1972. Horror movies were not on TV and I couldn’t even conceptualise a horror. There was always a mystery about movies my brother had seen like Last House On The Left and Dawn Of The Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. When video exploded in the early ‘80s, I watched every single movie. By the end of Mortuary 3 I had run out, but I did learn a valuable lesson about making them die slowly on a meat hook. So I was like, ‘Lets watch Slayer, The Scalps again’. They were great days but I’m happy about the DVD renaissance. Thank God someone took the time to clean up Creepers or all those Italian films from the '70s by Sergio Martino and Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.”
Happily, Mr. Roth continues absorbing all the grindhouse gunk and world cinema extremities he can find. He would introduce the movies of Chan Wook-Park to both Harry and Quentin (Old Boy was later named Ain’t It Cool’s film of the year and was honoured by a Cannes jury presided by Mr. Tarantino) and today he ventures scattershot opinions on everything from Lindsay Lohan vehicles (“I cried like a baby at the end of Freaky Friday”) to 1974 exploitation classic Thriller aka They Call Her One Eye. (“ I love Christine Lindberg!” he gushes.)
Where Cabin Fever, Eli’s directorial debut, distilled all these depraved youthful viewing habits (though possibly not Freaky Friday) into a killer virus flick with a super punch line, Hostel - his superb sophomore effort - feels the work of a maturing, sicker gore-hound.
“The idea for Hostel came from a website Harry showed me,” explains the director. “It was the sickest thing I’d ever seen – worse than bestiality, worse than Japanese chicks vomiting in each other’s mouths - so I just had to make the movie. The site had these rooms in Thailand, where for $10,000, you could walk in with a loaded gun and kill somebody. The concept of businessmen so bored with money and hookers that they would pay just to see what it would be like to take someone else’s life is out there. But I really saw a parallel with LA guys saying ‘Let’s go to Las Vegas and gamble and get hookers and go to strip clubs’. It’s the single most boring place on earth. But if they want control over another person then it’s like a ride. Same with Amsterdam. So I wanted to start somewhere like that and then begin the slow descent into hell.”
Set up to resemble a backpacker sex tourism urban legend, Hostel sees uber-American boys Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) head into the former eastern bloc in search of the Sierra Madre of easy pussy. Their Slovakian wonderland, though pleasing at first, transpires to be nothing more than a honey-trap for an international snuff ring. Carnage quickly ensues.
“I hate to say it,” sighs the Boston born auteur. “But at some of the American screenings I’ve had people ask me how I came up with the name Slovakia. Less than 10% of Americans have passports, so partly I was playing with their idea of Europe. I also think it’s the time for American horror – really twisted horror. Everyone feels really dislocated and disenfranchised right now. Like you’re the only person screaming at the TV during Katrina during the fucking days it took for the US army to come in. It’s terrifying. Bush and Cheney are monsters sending kids to die for their oil companies. What did Bush say? We dodged a bullet. Well, if he comes within 500 feet of me he will be fucking dodging bullets. There’s a definite sense that nobody will protect you from the worst shit that’s out there. I’m just trying to reflect the whole sorry mess.”
The visceral misfortunes heaped on Hostel’s young protagonists place the film firmly in the emerging ‘horror porn’ genre, alongside Lady Vengeance and The Hills Have Eyes remake. Like these films, Mr. Roth has drawn on the Korean new wave and the terrifically tawdry Italian giallo cinema of the seventies, to sculpt Hostel into a fine melee of blood-splatter, nerve endings, tits and ass.
“I don’t get the studio idea of a horror movie”, explains Eli. “You’re paying to be horrified, right? So my movie has buckets of blood and violence. Anyone who isn’t into that should stay away. This is total exploitation. Except it turns exploitation on its head. I want the audience to be complicit in the guilt of the characters. I want them to say ‘Yeah those girls are hot’, and then for all the stereotypes these guys have of eastern European girls bite them in the ass. I like to think that after the torture sequences every one is even again.”
So one might say you’re a feminist director now, Eli?
“Totally,” he nods. “I live in a culture of pornography, with websites showing euro bride try outs – ’hey we are American, fuck me for citizenship then get out of here bitch’. It’s a porn site. It’s not real. But humiliation is what people are getting off on now. Regular sex is not enough, it’s got to be sex and then humiliation. Then, they want to humiliate a foreign girl – see what that’s like. That is why people want to kill you because you are American. There is a very real American feeling that you can walk into any country in the world and every one will fuck you for citizenship. I wanted to show how it feels when that is stripped away and turned on you. How it feels when you’re one of these women.”
He breaks off suddenly to gesture toward my knee.
“Nice boots, baby”.