Beyond the Multiplex

A new release that ranks among the greatest of all Holocaust films. Plus: Horror king Eli Roth defends his excess.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Jan. 5, 2006 | Horror films have a much more direct relationship to political and social reality than those who make them and watch them and write about them generally care to discuss. It's sort of a dumb-dream-state relationship; you know, the kind of thing where you wake up in the morning and smite your brow in sheer exasperation at the obviousness of that dream about making it with your second-grade teacher or discovering that your parents are cannibals.

Too much has been written (some of it by me) about how the decades of the Bomb and the Red Menace produced giant monsters and all-absorbing blobs, how consumerism and generational alienation fueled the zombie boom, and how Freddy Krueger in his dank suburban basement represented the bad conscience, or whatever, of the Reagan era. That's not all B.S. by any means, but sometimes this critical theorizing misses the easy stuff that's in plain view. If horror films like Eli Roth's new "Hostel," or Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects," or the "Saw" series, present ever more gruesome images of torture and carnage, well, why are we surprised?

Thankfully, most of us will never be exposed to such things, except in the movies. Actual crime and violence remain at historically low levels. But let's just say that torture, fear and powerlessness are very much on our minds. Is some deranged wacko with a medieval ideology going to blow us up? Or is our own deranged government the real enemy, with its increasingly nuanced definition of torture, its international network of secret jails known and unknown, and its habit of abducting suspects for "rendition" to foreign governments with deep, dark dungeons?

I'm not suggesting that Eli Roth, with his topless Euro-babes and horrific scenes of violence, is trying to sneak in a political message while he's rocking and shocking the mostly young and mostly male horror audience. Or anyway, I wouldn't be suggesting it if he hadn't pretty much told me he was.

Maybe the only thing more disturbing than "Hostel" this week was seeing Lajos Koltai's Holocaust odyssey "Fateless" -- which you could call a more serious and artful kind of horror film, aimed at an entirely different audience -- and realizing how similar the two movies are under the skin. Yes, it's an outrageous comparison, but an irresistible one. Both depict an ordinary, comfortable European existence that abruptly descends into atrocity, and both seek to capture, or perhaps fuel, our anxiety about the permeable barrier that separates normality from nightmare.

Roth says "Hostel" is about arrogance and xenophobia, and the human tendency to exploit others, even to unimaginable extremes. OK, fair enough. But more specifically, it's about overconfident young travelers out for adventure, who arrive at an unexpected and horrible destination. Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, a concentration-camp survivor who adapted his own novel for Koltai's film of "Fateless," has said that he sees nothing specifically Jewish or German about the Holocaust. What he found in Auschwitz, he says, was "the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his 2,000-year moral and cultural history." Pack your bags, everybody!

"Hostel": It's "Animal House" plus "European Vacation," but with chainsaws
His movie "Hostel," says Eli Roth, "might do for tourism in Slovakia what 'Midnight Express' did for American tourism in Turkey."

Actually, the torments inflicted on Brad Davis' drug-smuggling character in Alan Parker's 1978 quasi-classic seem like lunch in the Louvre cafeteria compared to what befalls the dudely backpackers of "Hostel." During a happy-go-lucky summer interlude in Amsterdam, college buds Paxton (Jay Fernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) and their Icelandic friend Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) are inhaling copious amounts of weed and chasing chicks, with limited success. (As Oli's T-shirt announces, they're on "Sneepur Patrol," that being a phonetic version of the Icelandic word for clitoris.)

But the free-roaming chick population of Amsterdam isn't all that impressed with frat-boy-style Yank visitors at this point, and the hookers are, well, hookers. Our boys are heading to Barcelona next, but en route they hook up with a slightly shady Eastern European guy named Alex who assures them, no, that city's overwhelmed with Americans too. For girls, you go east, past Berlin, into the former Soviet bloc. He knows a hostel outside Bratislava that isn't in the guidebooks, where the girls are beautiful and "because of the war, there are no guys."

As Roth tells me during our phone conversation, this is meant to be complete nonsense. "What war?" he asks rhetorically. "There's been no war in Slovakia. Basically, Alex is telling them what they want to hear. He's appealing to their lust, their prejudice, their ignorance. When it comes to girls, guys will believe whatever they want to." It's hard to say how much of the film's audience will even get this joke, but the larger point -- that these half-likable American jerkasses are wandering into an unknown and unpredictable situation in quest of sneepur -- seems clear enough.

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