Why Eli Roths Hostel Was So Controversial After Release

Why Eli Roth’s Hostel Was So Controversial After Release

The movie, which was filmed in the Czech Republic, depicted Slovakia as poor, undeveloped, and uncultured, full of crime, violence, and prostitution.

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Why Eli Roths Hostel Was So Controversial After Release

Director Eli Roth’s American horror film Hostel earned itself some controversy upon its 2006 release. The movie centers on the characters Paxton and Josh, two college students who travel across Europe with their Icelandic friend Óli. Eventually, the friends are kidnapped by members of a mysterious organization that kidnaps, tortures, and murders tourists. The movie, which many critics panned for its excessive gore, spawned two sequels.

The original movie—which Roth has a cameo role in—starts out in the Netherlands, where Paxton, Josh, and Óli (played by Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, and Eyþór Guðjónsson, respectively) visit a nightclub and a brothel. When they return to the hostel they’re staying at, they’re unable to get inside due to a curfew. They end up staying with a stranger, Alexei, who eventually convinces them that they should re-route their travels and go to Slovakia next, rather than Barcelona.

The friends end up in Slovakia, where their hostel roommates are two women. One night, Óli goes missing. Paxton and Josh are told that he checked out, but in reality, he has been abducted and decapitated. Later that night, Paxton and Josh’s roommates slip them tranquilizers, and Josh wakes up in what seems like a dungeon, where a man he met earlier in Slovakia appears and tortures him. Paxton is taken to an abandoned factory later; he sees Josh’s corpse, and he’s brutally tortured. Paxton escapes the factory and boards a train out of Slovakia. While certainly containing what some might consider to be excessive violence and gore worthy of its “torture porn” label, Hostel became controversial with Slovakian people, who were concerned the movie would give their country a bad reputation.

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Why Eli Roths Hostel Was So Controversial After Release

As is evident, Hostel is an extremely violent and disturbing movie. Like the Saw movies and many others in the early 2000s, Hostel wasn’t afraid to show torture scenes on the big screen. For all of its gore and violence, the movie had a controversial release in Slovakia—the setting of the film—and the Czech Republic, where most of the movie was filmed. Many Slovak and Czech citizens were disgusted by the movie’s portrayal of their countries, and worried it would harm their image and deter travelers, particularly those from America. Indeed, Hostel imagined Slovakia as poor, undeveloped, and uncultured, full of crime, violence, and prostitution. As Linda Heldichova, a member of the Slovak culture ministry, said at the time, according to BBC: “We are unanimous in saying that this film damages the image of our country.”

The tourist agency of Slovakia apparently even invited Roth on a fully-paid trip to the country so that he could see for himself that it wasn’t a place of corruption and violence. Roth was argumentative when controversy began to surround his movie. Ultimately, he said that he never meant to offend the countries, and that the main audience of Hostel—U.S. citizens—didn’t even know that the country existed. He also reportedly compared the movie to how the violence and gore in Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn’t deter people from visiting, touring, or traveling in the state of Texas.

Overall, the depiction of Slovakia and the Czech Republic in Hostel is what makes the movie scary before the torture and violence even starts. The aesthetic of the setting is creepy from the get-go, and viewers become stressed just imagining themselves in such an unfamiliar location. Roth even kept a similar aesthetic for Hostel: Part II, which also takes place mainly in Slovakia, and was filmed in the Czech Republic. With the third installment, director Scott Spiegel avoided making the same mistake, choosing a Las Vegas setting for Hostel 3 instead.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/hostel-eli-roth-movie-controversy-explained/

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