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Rev Horror

Hostel

Dir. Eli Roth (2005)

A group of college kids travel to Eastern Europe, where they find themselves in a twisted plot for rich people to fulfill their murderous desires.


I have a love/hate relationship with Hostel. As a bit of an aside, I have obviously loved horror movies my entire life, and for most of the beginning of my relationship with my wife, she enjoyed them right alongside me. That is, of course, until we watched Hostel shortly after its release in 2005. Torture porn was just beginning to be the focus of mainstream horror, and while a lot of this was okay because it hearkened back to the gross-out stuff from earlier decades, Hostel was just too much for her to handle. It completely turned her off of the genre, and it's only now, almost twenty years later, that she's finally starting to open up to watching them again. For this alone, I boycotted the film for many years, despite actually enjoying it the first time around.


The film's plot centers around Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and his group of college friends, who travel to Europe to have an amazing vacation filled with drugs, women, and all of the sorts of things that college kids love. After one of their group goes missing, Paxton begins investigating to find his friend, finding himself thrust into a world of kidnapping, murder, and corruption. When he eventually falls prey to the same murder-for-pay plot, he must escape before the same brutally violent outcome befalls him as well.

It's this shift in genre that makes the film what it is, a wildly effective extreme horror that was unlike anything else out there in the genre. The first half of the film is stoner sex comedy, the type of stuff that you'd see in films like Euro Trip or Animal House, minus (most of) the comedy of course. Once the characters start to realize what's really going on, things quickly derail, and the brutal, unflinching horror ratchets up perhaps more than any other mainstream horror had done until this one was released. It was a huge departure from what came before, though the genre had certainly started to turn its attention to more gritty, hyper-realistic films in the years leading up to Hostel's release.


Hostel was the first film to actually be called "torture porn," a moniker that stuck and was then applied to a ton of films that came after (and a few that came before). The popularity of the film led to dozens of imitators, films that refused to pull punches and leaned heavily into the gore-as-plot that turned a lot of folks off of the genre during the subsequent years. While a lot of these films were cash grabs with little artistic merit, they also led to the creation of the New French Extremity movement that sought to combine the extreme gore with a legitimate attempt at social critique and compelling storytelling. Compared to some of the films that have come afterwards, Hostel isn't even that extreme.

It's difficult to believe, in retrospect, that Eli Roth's film was what kicked the trend off, but indeed it was. And, despite turning a lot of critics' stomachs, it's one of the better attempts in the genre, not only having something to say but also telling an incredibly disturbing tale as well. It's true that it's extremely graphic, and it's true that the writing often seems a means to the next gross end than it does a compelling storytelling technique, Roth's insistence these events really happen somewhere and his realistic attempt to tell his audience about it is as psychologically damaging as it is visually upsetting. Despite its potential to turn of more sensitive viewers, the economic critique in the film, about how the richest among us have total control over everyone else, is not only valid but important, even if Roth chose to tell it in shockingly brutal ways.

The trend that Hostel started has, at this point, been fully explored. With films like Terrifier 3 bursting onto mainstream cinemas and dozens and dozens of almost as violent films releasing every year, it's difficult to imagine all of this happening without a film like Hostel paving the way. In considering everything that's released since, Roth's exploration of murder-for-pay isn't even all that bad. Whether this is a good thing greatly depends on the audience, and while I greatly dislike the effect its had on my communal viewing habits, I am never going to criticize any film that seeks to move its genre forward. The only real question, then, is whether the direction of horror in the mid-2000's was actually forward. I tend to think that it was, even though there were some serious missteps along the way.


Who this movie is for: Gory horror fans, Torture porn lovers, Backpackers


Bottom line: Hostel is super violent, excessively gory, and juvenile in just about every way. It's also extremely disturbing and one of the most important films in determining the direction of the genre in the last thirty years. Whether this is a good thing is up to you, but the shocking violence, the copious nudity, and the social critique of the film is both wildly effective and perfectly fitting within a genre that has always pushed boundaries. Regardless of its importance, however, this one isn't for those with weak stomachs.


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