Hostel (2006) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 19

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There’s no need to get hostile, it’s just a movie.

Hostel is a no-holds barred look into the world of extreme tourism. It creates a brutal look at horror and sets a new level for graphic violence.

Before Viewing

If it weren’t for the terrifying imagery of abandoned buildings and sharp instruments of destruction, the subtitles of the trailer might strike a different tone. The words tell of a secret place where all one’s fantasies can come true. That is, if your fantasy is to maim, torture or kill someone. Brought to you by the people behind Cabin Fever, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Kill Bill. This film is Hostel.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

In Amsterdam, three young college students, Paxton (Jay Hernandez), Josh (Derek Richardson), and Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), are out partying and enjoying all the town has to offer including hash bars and brothels. Returning to their hostel one evening they discover they are locked out and a young man nearby named Alexei (Lubomír Bukový) invites them into his place. He tells them if they want girls, avoid Barcelona. Bratislava, Slovakia is the place they need to be. The next day they hop on a train East.

On board they meet a Dutch Businessman (Jan Vlasák) who comes on to Josh, before apologizing and moving on. At their stop they get a cab ride to the local hostel, which appears to be a hedonistic place. Their roommates are two attractive, uninhibited women, Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova). They invite the boys to the spa and later they all hook up at a disco and go home with the women. Oli meets the female desk clerk, Vala (Jana Havlickova). The next morning the male desk clerk tells Paxton and Josh that Oli checked out earlier that morning.

A Japanese woman, Kana (Jennifer Lim), approaches the two indicated in broken English that her friend also left with Oli. It is revealed that Oli has been decapitated, and the person that did it sends a text to Paxton, “I go home.” Later at the disco, the girls slip tranquilizers into the guys drinks. Josh passes out and is taken, but Paxton–who feels ill, passes out in the club’s pantry and is locked inside. Josh awakens in a torture room where the Dutch Businessman proceeds to drill into him, slice his achilles tendons, and then finally kill him.

Paxton returns to the hostel the next morning and is told that he had checked out with Josh. he discovers two new girls in his room, running through the same “script” as Natalya and Svetlana. While wandering around looking for them a roaming pack of young boys steal his phone. He reports the disappearances to the police but they cannot help. He discovers Natalya and Svetlana in a local pub who let him know his friends are part of a new “art exhibit,” and agree to take him. Inside a dilapidated factory Paxton discovers rooms where various people are being tortured, before being grabbed himself.

A German Surgeon (Petr Janis) enters to torture the bound Paxton, but slips, cutting his leg off with the chainsaw he carries, which also slices off two of Paxton’s fingers. Paxton manages to escape his restraints, kill the Surgeon and a guard, and leave the room by stowing away on a cart of body parts. He finds a locker room and changes into a suit. As he is about to leave he meets an American Client (Rick Hoffman) who reveals the place is the Elite Hunting Club, a business that allows people to pay to mutilate and murder tourists. Paxton flees, but notices Kana being tortured in a room, whose face has been horribly disfigured. He frees her and they steal a car and head back to town.

In town Paxton sees Natalya and Svetlana talking to Alexei. Understanding the connection, he runs them over with the car, killing two of them. The following car drags Natalya to her death. At the train station Kana sees her reflection which upsets her, and she jumps in front of an oncoming train–which allows Paxton to escape on another one. Coincidentally, he overhears the Dutch Businessman on the train, so he follows him to Vienna. The Dutch Businessman gets off the train with his young daughter, who carries a distinctive teddy bear. They use the bathrooms, but when she doesn’t come out he enters, only to find her teddy bear. As he frantically searches for the little girl, Paxton is seen covering her mouth in the window of a departing train.

“I like to have a connection with something that died for me. I appreciate it more.” – Dutch Businessman

Hostel was director Eli Roth’s follow-up to his successful 2002 horror film Cabin Fever. That film caught the attention of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction) who offered to produce a new film for Roth. What Roth came up with was a gritty, dark, exploitative look at extreme violence and torture. Of course, it was not the first of its kind. Last night’s film, The Last House On The Left, explored a number of the same themes thirty years previous. However, Hostel went much further, and in doing so created a new subgenre definition for horror movies to come, “torture porn.”

The term torture porn has been attributed to critic David Edelstein, and concerns extreme depictions of torture, mutilation, violence, sadism, and nudity. While Hostel was the first film to have the term applied to it, its usage was retroactively attached to the previous year’s Saw as well as other films. This extreme depiction of violence and gore on screen evolved from what had previously been known as the splatter genre; an overly bloody film that took joy in its depiction of gross and disturbing acts. Blood Feast (1963) is considered the first film to be labeled as a splatter film, but other lower budget films, like I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), plus the early horror films of Peter Jackson, including Braindead, all fit into this subgenre of horror.

What Hostel brings to the mix, is a modern eye for cinematography, current special and makeup effects, and the desire to push the bounds of what audiences would be able to stomach. The goal of the film appears to be how far can Roth push the levels of good taste and how often can he make the audience squirm. Most directors of horror films use a mix of graphic elements with the tension associated with the event. For example, Freddy Kreuger stalking a suburban teen to then kill them, resulting in a geyser of blood, as in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Roth sets that up in a similar way, showing the Dutch Businessman coming towards Josh slowly with a drill, with the most graphic usage occurring off-screen, but the difference is in the amount and frequency of these shots. While standard slasher films might have 8-10 kills with an equal number of gross or strange depictions, Hostel has that many with the first victim. Its brutal, and frank depictions of the acts are akin to overt shots of genitalia in pornographic films, leading to a series of gratuitous close-ups, which in the long run end up desensitizing viewers to the horrors being depicted.

The film follows a long line of horror films that present the dangers to first-world characters in third-world (or even run-down first-world) settings. Films like The Wicker Man, Midsommar, and The Serpent and the Rainbow, or even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes all play on the idea of a traveler or stranger in a strange land, and the horrors that they encounter. This contemporary take on the idea plays upon the fears of travelers in a place where they do not speak the language and do not understand the customs. The network of people working with the Elite Hunting Club, from Alexei who appears to be the advance man working in other countries, to the women that work in the hostel, all are counting on unfamiliarity of these events and places with the tourists they send in. To audiences, the threat of the “bubble gum gang” seems like a potentially major threat, as a horde of young boys, mostly under 10 years old, surround characters in a shakedown, demanding gum or “a dollar.” It’s only later that Paxton uses their streetwise mentality to his advantage in delaying the killers sent for him.

While Hostel plays on a lot of fears–the fear of foreign places, fear of torture, fear of the unknown, and has a lot of gory and cringe worthy moments, it comes off as a poor-man’s attempt at remaking The Most Dangerous Game. This was originally a story published in 1924, and later adapted to film in 1932, about a man being hunted on a remote island by an aristocrat. It has been adapted under that same title numerous times, but also used as the basis for a number of other films including John Woo’s Hard Target (with Jean-Claude Van Damme) and the recent Apex (with Neal McDonough and Bruce Willis). In this film, the backstory of the Elite Hunting Club is provided by the American Client, played effortlessly by Rick Hoffman. Rich people pay exorbitant amounts of money to torture, maim, or kill tourists, with Americans coming in at the highest dollar value. The story is a continued riff on the original premise that the rich can do what they want without repercussions. A notion that was true 100 years ago as well as today.

Hostel was really a breakthrough film, unleashing many other similar types of films into theaters. It helped peg Eli Roth as an up and coming horror auteur, and pushed the boundaries of what audiences could expect from his horror films. With a boom in this genre during the 2000s, including films like The Human Centipede, Martyrs, and Antichrist capitalized on the labeling, but have since died down. The reduced popularity of the genre is probably due to the intense and disturbing nature of the imagery. Audiences can only take so much before they lose interest, or become desensitized or disgusted, and stop attending the films. Hostel is an interesting film that crafts a unique idea (which would be copied multiple times afterwards) with a horror twist. Its tension may not be as great as Saw, but its contributions to the horror films of the 21st Century cannot be overlooked.

Assorted Musings

• Both director Roth and producer Tarantino (as well as a number of other crew members) have minor cameos in the film. Roth is seen in a hash bar wearing a Red Sox jersey as his friend takes a bong hit. Tarantino has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo as a man in a window shouting at the three boys to be quiet, when they are locked out of their hostel.
• As with any successful film of this time, it was milked for sequels as soon as possible. Hostel Part II came out two years later, featuring Jay Hernandez and also Barbara Nedeljakova, in a different role. The following year, Hostel Part III was released. Eli Roth was not involved in this film, and the location was changed from Slovakia to Las Vegas.