Editor’s note: as this is a full discussion of Hostel, it does contain plot spoilers.
Whilst people being tormented is of course really nothing new in the horror genre, the advent of the Noughties did seem to bring about a change in the types of brutality we were seeing on our screens. From the hack ‘n’ slash movies of the Eighties, the hack ‘n’ slash sequels of the early Nineties and even the post-horror stylings of Scream, those under attack could, at least, run and hide from their assailants. By the time the new millennium turned around, though, we started to see a new type of horror movie take off. Sure, films like Saw (2004) and the film I’ll be discussing here, Hostel (2005) weren’t the first to implement torture on their protagonists. Far from it. But the levels of cruelty and the unwavering focus upon it certainly felt newly aggressive and confrontational, so much so that we soon had a new descriptive term…
‘Torture porn’. The phrase has come to haunt the genre over the past decade or so with more tenacity than anything supernatural. And, when it’s attributed to a film, it’s not typically intended as a compliment. Such a description (which refers, as far as I’m concerned, to that close-up, unflinching shooting style already mentioned rather than to anything sexual) usually means anything grisly, pointless and prolonged on-screen: horror as a pissing contest, nothing more, an exercise in endurance for fans, as perpetrated by crass filmmakers who want maximum bang for buck. Fuck knows I’ve complained enough about ‘tied to chairs’ movies in the past (look at my biog page here on the site, for instance) and I’ll complain again in future – where I see no evidence of plot or thought or originality – just more of the same, people being fucked up by household tools, The End. However, for reasons I’ll explain, I absolutely do not count Hostel as ‘just another torture porn movie’. In fact, I think that disparagingly referring to Hostel as a ‘torture porn’ movie at all is either wilfully misunderstanding the film, or just not getting it. Maybe it is, to an extent, judged by its legacy, and the 1,001 bad films which have tried to copy it. If so, then people need to knock that shit off and take another look. Hostel is very modern, very timely and a damn sight smarter than a lot of people are prepared to give it credit.
None of this is true by accident, either. Whatever you think of him and his work, director and writer Eli Roth understands horror’s capacity to mirror social anxieties, and the guy deserves kudos for saying as much when he was interviewed on Fox News about the ‘mysterious’ popularity of horror, during which interview he was clear about horror’s role as a safe space, a place which grants catharsis during times of trouble. Given that belief, it’s easy to see how Hostel operates as a nexus for a variety of contemporary anxieties, most of which relate to money, status and power.
At first, our main protagonists have plenty of all three, and they’re happy to say as much. Our group of travellers in Europe – two Americans, Josh and Paxton, and an Icelandic friend they’ve made during their trails, Oli – are almost from their first seconds on-screen gloriously easy to hate, the worst stereotypes of young guys abroad. We first meet them rocking up in the capital of clichéd decadence, Amsterdam (even Josh asks, as he looks around at the Eli Roth cameo during the café scene, “Are there any Dutch people in Amsterdam?”) and they seem determined to “rail chicks” from the get-go. When not debating whether it’s ‘illegal’ to fuck women in comas, throwing their weight around or having Josh declare “I’m an American, I have rights!” as they get thrown out of a club, first impressions of these guys are not great, no doubt intentionally so, but the point is – they’re behaving as countless guys of their age and wealth do. They have nothing and no one to fear. Whilst the current economic climate has lessened the effect which a wallet-full of dollars (or to a lesser extent, pounds sterling) used to grant to travellers moving around in Europe, particularly in former Eastern Bloc countries like Slovakia, it hasn’t killed it off entirely, and you do still see people abroad flashing their cash and acting like arseholes, certain that everything is going to go their way because of who they are and where they’re from.
Yet, in Hostel, it’s this belief that gets toyed with, this set of assumptions which provides the basis for the horror to follow, and it’s done well, reaching a nasty, memorable conclusion. We know this from the get-go too: we always know that some sort of comeuppance is around the corner for these guys. Before we’re invited to judge them, in fact before we see them at all, the opening credits have rolled over the interior of the torture chamber…we’ve seen sluices, blood, surgical tools, and worked out that it’s so commonplace for whoever-it-is cleaning the place that they can whistle while they work. We’ve been shown this for a reason; we just have to wait to see what will happen, and know that – somehow – that bubble is going to burst.
This type of foreshadowing goes on throughout the film, and it’s used very well. As an audience, we can pick up on clues that things may not always be peachy; if you’ve seen the film more than once, then you see more and more evidence that bad things are coming. Early in the film we get Josh thinking aloud, “Paying to go into a room to do what you want to someone ain’t exactly a turn-on.” Turns out it is. Still, their new friend Alex’s assertion that Slovak girls are ready and waiting for Americans (“They hear your accent, they fuck you”) is enough to convince the boys to head there, and their sense of entitlement ensures they believe every word Alex says. Why wouldn’t they, after all? Paxton, Josh and Oli have been humanised in our view to an extent by the time they reach their new destination: we know that they are variously not as one-dimensional as they seemed. Josh has suffered heartbreak. Paxton’s bright and, significantly, bi-lingual (more on that later) and Oli’s a father. Still, it won’t save them. They’re fatefully slow to grasp any idea of risk anyway and, when they arrive at the hostel in Slovakia itself, any doubts they might have had just melt away when they see their gorgeous, female room-mates…
Make no mistake. The women from here on in own the movie. It’s just that the guys are slow to get it, believing as they do that they’re the ones still calling the shots until it’s way too late for them. And the foreshadowing continues; when they all arrive, check out the pretty girl sitting on the tomb outside the hostel for one neat symbolic nod as to what’ll follow, and then of course Roth gets his horror geek on by allotting the guys Room 237. The beautiful women in this Room 237 might not take a supernatural turn like in The Shining, but it isn’t long before we get hints as to what they’re really doing: ever notice that it’s Willow’s Song from The Wicker Man which plays over their first seduction scene? By echoing the siren song one of horror history’s most captivating, but ultimately dangerous women, we’re left in little doubt that in some way, Natalya and Svetlana are not what they seem.
The extent to which this is true is, though, shocking to the extreme. Paxton’s pep-talk to an ever-doubtful Josh just before that poor guy’s last night on earth reminding him that they can “fuck these girls for one more night” before moving on couldn’t be more wrong. In the other sense of the word, they’re the ones being fucked. And they’re being more than played; they’re being sold by women. Oli and Josh might have realised this, or they may not have – but Paxton gets it loud and clear, when he returns to the hostel room and gets treated to the exact same routine which Natalya and Svetlana gave all three of them two days before, only performed by two different girls. The moment of revelation here is superb. Suddenly, he understands that he and his friends are part of a dangerous plot, the hostel is part of it and – those beautiful girls which they came there to exploit? They’re the ones in control, always have been.
Natalya’s parting shot to Paxton, as she finally escorts him to the ‘art exhibition’ where his friends have already been killed, is simple but hugely effective. He calls her a ‘fucking bitch’, a lazy retort often thrown at women for a multitude of reasons. Her laughing response, one pithy enough to get repeated over the end credits of the movie? “I get a lot of money for you – and that make you my bitch.” It’s an idea which, whilst of course a dramatic overextension, sums up a lot of fears held by certain types of travellers, particularly those travelling in lesser-known countries and cultures. Maybe those beautiful girls drawn to their sides don’t like them at all. Maybe they detest them, even. Maybe they’re even laughing about them in their own language, or making plans about them. Who knows? It’s also worth pointing out that men are carved up on screen more in this movie than women are. For all of their fist-bumping and over-confidence, it’s men that suffer for their assumptions in Hostel, and it’s women that exploit them.
Whilst putting its protagonists through the mill, Hostel touches upon other anxieties for travellers – other ways in which their assumed high status is threatened. A significant one of these is language. As an English-speaking person, I know all too well that I’ve come to expect people everywhere to be able to understand me when I speak. To an extent, this arrogance is borne out; a lot of people worldwide are exposed to Anglophone culture for their whole lives (TV, music and movies, for instance) and many see speaking English as a prestige form, a way to get ahead, and so they will try to learn it. Those of us who have English as a first language can therefore be seriously lackadaisical about those who don’t, and conversely, feel very uncomfortable when we’re reminded that we’re the foreigners, we’re the ones lacking.
Hostel gives us a language lesson along those lines – with bloody high stakes, of course. Our three protagonists all speak English (despite the fact that Oli is Icelandic and Paxton also speaks German) so they expect everyone else to do so too, in all situations. “How the hell are we meant to understand this without subtitles? Fucking gay,” exclaims Paxton of the foreign-language movie playing in the hostel lobby. Later, “speak English!” he demands of Natalya and Svetlana, when they lock him out of their conversation by speaking in a tongue he doesn’t understand. Here, an inability to communicate goes from being someone else’s problem, to an annoyance, to something downright dangerous. And whilst being able to speak German almost saves Paxton from the man about to hack him up at the disused factory, it doesn’t save him in the end: they just gag him, so the man no longer has to listen to his appeals for his life in a language he can understand. An inability to speak the lingo doesn’t just underline the vulnerabilities of being ‘so far from home’, though: in Hostel, it’s turned on its head and being English-speaking will effectively sign your death warrant too. The guard gets Paxton to ‘speak’: when he turns out to be American, that means they can ask the biggest bounty for him. Maybe this is an inversion of the relative newsworthiness of reported deaths abroad, according to some US news outlets, or maybe it’s just another way that the film shows that being American doesn’t always guarantee you all the power – just the opposite. Throughout, Hostel picks away at accepted power norms.
Hostel isn’t a perfect film: the last half hour is a sequence of happy (?) accidents which free up Paxton to execute his gun-ho revenge, and moments like Takashi Miike’s staccato cameo or the dangling eyeball scene feel clumsily-handled. However, I think it has been done a severe disservice by people who have dismissed it out of hand. It has been even more wrongly labelled ‘torture porn’.
This film is, after all, a great conspiracy movie. Moments of revelation in the film pack a punch because every time, they destabilise something our protagonists take for granted and which, perhaps, we would have taken for granted too. In fact, although the film is known for its gore, that gore is surprisingly low on screen-time until an hour is up. The real horror here is how three regular guys are made to realise their powerlessness, and their eventual treatment, becoming “exhibits” at an “art show” simply underlines how far they have been reduced along the way.
Sure, the ‘stranger in a strange land’ motif has been explored differently and more subtly in other films and other genres. I can accept that. Hostel doesn’t attempt to take away from that, nor does it attempt to own the idea either. What it does do, and what it does well, is to merge a modern horror movie style with an array of very modern concerns and preoccupations. As a calling-card for this particular set of anxieties and the particular time in which it was made, I maintain that Hostel deserves a great deal of credit and, although it has been emulated many times in the nearly ten years since it appeared, this should definitely not be used to dispense with it. Neither gratuitous nor aimless, Hostel has plenty to say for itself and as a bloody rap across the knuckles for a generation which may have once felt itself invincible, it’s still a clever and engaging horror story.