Writer/director Eli Roth is always looking for ways to scare people; yet unlike most horror auteurs, Roth knows that real life stories, and their revelations about the darker corners of human nature, are often much more frightening than monsters and boogeymen. With his debut feature, CABIN FEVER, he turned newspaper headlines about a fatal flesh-eating bacteria into a horrific bloodbath among a group of young vacationers. Now, with Lions Gate Films’ HOSTEL, Roth once again draws inspiration from real events, this time with even more disturbing results.
Roth discovered the creative seed for HOSTEL during a late-night conversation with his friend Harry Knowles, the web-master of Aintitcoolnews.com. “We were talking about the sickest thing you could possibly find on the internet,” Roth recalls. “Something that went beyond the usual bestiality, skateboarding accidents or even those two Japanese girls vomiting into each other’s mouths in a bathtub.”
Knowles claimed he had stumbled across something so frightening he was hesitant to confess its discovery to Roth, which only made the director more curious. Knowles eventually forwarded Roth the link to a website; and what Roth discovered disturbed him more deeply than he could have imagined: somewhere in Thailand, a business was profiting on the visceral thrill of murder. For a fee of $10,000, anyone so willing could be escorted to a room, handed a loaded gun and offered another human being to kill.
“The concept instantly made me nauseous,” remembers Roth. “But it also felt real. People are sick. There are no limits to what they will do to another person for their own pleasure, and that’s the most horrifying thing of all. It’s what always stuck with me.”
The site claimed that in Thailand the practice was perfectly legal, as the victims were participating of their own free will. They were desolate, poverty-stricken people whose families were starving to death. By way of their self-sacrifice, they would make enough money for their loved ones to survive. “The website made it sound as if the prospective killers were benefactors, like they were doing a service for the victims by way of this bizarre life insurance scheme,” says Roth.
Roth was so jarred by this discovery that he immediately began work on a documentary on the subject; but he soon began to wonder about the dangers of uncovering the truth. “If I actually found anyone connected to an organization that profited from murder, why would they think twice about taking me out?” he reasons. Unsure of how to proceed safely, Roth set the idea aside.
In the meantime, Roth’s debut feature, CABIN FEVER, was released in theaters and became Lion Gate Films’ top grossing movie of 2003, eventually grossing over $100 million worldwide. Roth began a flurry of meetings in Hollywood, eventually meeting with Mike Fleiss and Chris Briggs, the producers behind THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake. Fleiss and Briggs wanted to make a horror film called HOSTEL, about young backpackers traveling through Central Europe. “I had done a fair amount of traveling and backpacking during college, as had Chris and Mike, and we loved the possibilities for a horror movie set in an environment we hadn’t seen since AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON,” says Roth. “But none of us really knew what the film was about beyond the title and the setting.”
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