Hostel is a 2005 horror film written and directed by Eli Roth. The film follows a group of American tourists, as they end up somewhere in Slovakia where they are all eventually taken one-by-one by an organization that allows people to torture and kill others.
Principle photography took place in the Czech Republic, and many of the scenes were shot in Český Krumlov, a town in the South Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. The torture chamber scenes were shot in the wing of Prauge hospital that had been abandoned since 1917.
The cast for Hostel is large, with several characters and a couple of cameos, including Jay Hernandez as Paxton Rodriguez, Derek Richardson as Josh Brooks, Eyþór Guðjónsson as Oli Eriksson, Barbara Nedeljakova as Natalya, and Jennifer Lim as Kana. And of the three notable cameos they include Takashi Miike, a Japanese filmmaker and actor with over 100 movies, as an elite hunting club client leaving the premises, Quentin Tarantino as a shirtless partier screaming out of a hotel window, and Eli Roth himself as an American tourist in a local coffee house.
Hostel opened theatrically on January 6th, 2006, in the United States and earned $19.6 million in its first weekend, ranking number one at the box office. By the end of its run, six weeks later, the film grossed $47.3 million in the US Box office and $33.3 million internationally for a worldwide total of $80.6 million.
After Roth’s 2002 film Cabin Fever he was met with praise by several industry figures, including Quentin Tarantino, who placed Cabin Fever in his top 10 of the year and immediately reached out to Roth in hopes of working with him on a future production. Roth had been offered several studio direction jobs, mostly in the form of horror film remakes such as The Last House on The Left, The Fog, and a film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. However, Tarantino advised Roth not to take any of them and instead create an original horror story.
The concept for the film came from a conversation Roth had with Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles, in which the conversation between the two eventually approached “The sickest thing one could find on the internet, Knowles then shared with Roth a Thai “Murder Vacation” website he came across on the dark web where one could pay $10,000 to shoot someone dead.
Roth had also met with Mike Fleiss and Chris Briggs after Cabin Fever to discuss future projects, where Briggs stated “I wanted to make a movie called Hostel about backpackers, but I have no idea what it’s about.” and upon hearing the pitch, Roth began to write the draft later that day. Originally, Roth planned on making the movie in the style of a fake documentary that would incorporate real people and locations from supposed real underground “Murder Vacation” spots, but when they could hardly get any reliable evidence on the topic, the idea was scrapped in favor of using a traditional fictional narrative.
The movie was accompanied with very strong complaints from people in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, officials from both countries were very disgusted with the films portrayal of their countries as underdeveloped, poor, and uncultured lands suffering from high criminality, war, and prostitution, fearing it would “Damage the good reputation of Slovakia” and make foreigners feel it was a dangerous place to be.
The tourist board even invited Roth to an entirely all-expenses-paid trip to their country so he could see that it is not made up of run-down factories, ghettos, and kids who kill for bubble gum. A Slovak parliament member from the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union commented, “I am offended by this film. I think that all Slovaks should be offended.” In his defense, Roth explained that the film was not meant to be offensive, arguing that “Americans do not even know that this country exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans’ ignorance of the world around him.” Roth also argued that despite The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, people still travel to Texas.
Overall, despite its mixed reviews, I think that Hostel is a pretty decent movie, it’s a unique concept that was based off a supposedly real underground torture ring and I think it gets the horror of that just right, like the fact that any random person could be involved and you would have no idea until its too late.
Hostel is also a movie that makes it really hard to feel bad for the main characters but you eventually just have to root for them because the other characters are just that much worse.
