Horror Aughts #8: 'Hostel' and The Chainsaw Politics of Comeuppance
In 2006, Eli Roth served up toxic masculinity and then gouged its eye out
‘Horror Aughts’ is a column in which I revisit scary movies from the 2000s that were big commercial hits at the time but have been largely forgotten ever since.
If Eli Roth’s low-budget torture-porn hit Hostel came out today — nearly 20 years after its release — it’d likely be canceled in an hour or two. Its hateful homophobia mixed with a general subjectification of women couldn’t fly far in the current social climate. Terrific tits and gratuitous gay jokes don't sell horrors like they used to (not a complaint). Yet partly because of those poorly-aged views, Hostel makes an intriguing case for a horror fossil to be surveyed two decades later. Especially since Roth had no agenda to pursue other than making an outrageous, mean, and malicious piece of schlock to leave us with a queasy stomach as we stumbled out of the cinema.
In 2025, the equivalent to Hostel’s plot would be sending a trio of obnoxious, insufferable, and insensitive white American bros to Ukraine in search of pussy and party. In fact, Alex (Lubomir Bukovy), the resident stoner in the film, mentions Odessa before suggesting Bratislava in Slovakia to the three jackass protagonists, who regrettably end up visiting the latter while backpacking through Europe. He says the local girls there are incredible, and once “they hear your accent, they fuck you.”
That’s all it took in the mid-aughts to appeal to three horny Yankees to trot into an unfamiliar country without having a clue of what it was like — you know, besides “the girls are hot” part. A spot-on summarization of how most dudes in American horrors were portrayed at the time: flexing, dumb douchebags constantly hungry for sex and lame macho jokes. Although Roth has never been a sophisticated or particularly skillful director/writer, he deserves credit for nailing our disillusionment in the average young American male before toxic masculinity became an ongoing contemporary discussion.
Though Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), one of the protagonists, is technically from Iceland, he smoothly falls in line with Paxton's (Jay Hernandez) and Josh’s (Derek Richardson) manly and unscrupulous worldview. They’re all egregious and entitled assholes using their dicks as compasses. And without a doubt, they deserve every ruthless mutilation, eyeball-threatening torment, and flesh-tearing power drill coming their way.
Throughout the film, Roth never once tries to absolve the three from being scumbags — though there are brief attempts to humanize them — which was surprisingly refreshing back then and still is now (even if James Wan already touched on this aspect with Saw a year earlier). Hostel makes its shameless characterization a primary feature, sticking to it consistently to morally prepare us for the splatterfest that awaits us in the back half. Sympathy scarcely gets handed out here — save for an innocent and innocuous Asian girl — which works superbly in line with the film’s overall message: cruelness goes both ways.
There’s something to be said about the inherent irony (or boldness?) that an American filmmaker sets out to torture his fellow countrymen in a harsh, hostile, and horrifically bloody Eastern European manner. As someone born and raised in Central Europe (and having visited Slovakia a half-dozen times growing up), I was thoroughly impressed by how Roth depicted the locals and the grimy, dismal milieu in Bratislava. Sure, he villainized poor Slovakians (which surely torpedoed the country’s tourism for a while) by portraying them as Bad Barbaric Beasts selling elaborate torture and murder for wealthy psychopaths.
But I couldn’t argue with how bleak and barren those countries often looked (including my own) in those times. The mounting, spine-chilling dread inevitably falls on you as you watch the characters walk through desolate streets and abandoned industrial concrete buildings. Those places exist and are kept out of tourist paths for a reason. Roth simply saw the potential in them and infused it with an idea replete with a sense of trepidation and terror.
Of course, if you asked him, and many did, he’d explain, “Hostel was very much a reflection of my disgust with the Iraq War and the Al-Qaeda beheadings. It's not just about people who want to kill us, but about capitalism gone awry and American imperialism.” There’s always an allegory in horror if you care to look for it, but Roth’s second feature works better if you don’t. It just weakens the white-knuckled rawness and in-your-face gore the movie has been building up to all along.
And boy, oh, boy, the last 30 minutes deliver a soul-scorching catharsis drenched in blood and guts and slimy eyeballs. All the flagrant debauchery and obtuse crudeness we were put through in the first half pays off handsomely here, immersing us in a dark yet realistic-enough world that we shouldn’t and wouldn’t want to know of. The human slaughterhouse is a neatly fitting and nauseatingly ferocious climax that took moviegoers by storm in 2006, ramping up $47 million domestically and $81 worldwide at the box office. Gotta admit: Roth knew how to pull the rug from under us, and we fell for it like a bunch of noobs.
It worked because Hostel wasn’t just a cheap ($4.8 million budget) sensation: In his script, the writer-director carefully validated the comeuppance that found the three protagonists, turning them into victims of their own raunchiness and assholery. And he’s done that by utilizing his wild and wacko horror imagination, unleashing an over-excessive punishment (10 times worse than you'd expect) on these dudes who wanted to have a good time with impunity. Jokes on them, the ice cream licked back.
To bring this to a close, I’ll leave you with this: A reader asked me a few weeks ago, “Why would you ever want to re-watch any torture porn?” My answer: Curiosity. To see how they aged and whether they preserved any relevance for today. Frankly, I did not expect a resounding yes from a two-decade-old Eli Roth picture that no one really talks about anymore. And I have to say: Hostel is a much more effective horror than I ever gave it credit for. Inelegant, schlocky, and full-on? Sure. But it’s also a relentless B-movie hitting your nerves with a blood-soaked meat pounder.
More Horror Aughts:
Wild to hear that Hostel holds up in 2025. I dragged my best friend to see it on opening weekend when we were both in high school, and to this day, it’s the only film that’s made me physically gag. (The eyeball-blowtorch scene, of course.) I agree, though, it’s excellent at stringing the viewer along, even with nearly irredeemable protagonists.