Theater of Cruelty: Reconsidering ‘Hostel,’ the Masterpiece of the Torture Porn Era

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” The ad wizards who wrote that copy were certainly onto something when they created this memorable tagline, but Decider’s “Take Two” series was specifically formulated in a laboratory by the world’s foremost pop culture scientists to provide a second chance for movies that made a less than stellar first impression upon their original release.

“Torture porn” is an insult disguised as a genre designation. Coined in the mid-2000s by New York film critic David Edelstein, the term referred to a new wave of ultraviolent films, centered on protracted depictions of human suffering inflicted in gory detail. Some exist firmly in the horror tradition: the ouevre of lifelong horror fanatic Rob Zombie, the Texas Chain Saw–eque Australian import Wolf Creek, and the unstoppable Saw franchise (which just debuted its tenth parade of death-trap set pieces straight out of one of those expensive, intense Halloween haunted houses). Others are essentially European art-house fare — Antichrist, Irreversible, Funny Games — while still others blended the two vibes into the “New French Extremity” of films like Martyrs and Inside. Even TV got in on the act, with shows from Lost to 24 giving torture an almost heroic spin.

The very name “torture porn” is a swipe at both the filmmakers and the audience. Porn, after all, is something you consume to get off; what does “torture porn” say, then, about those who watch or make it? Surely their interest in such extravagantly cruel and disgusting work is, at best, a massive aesthetic failing, and most likely a moral one as well. (This was before “porn” became a catch-all term for “a really good pic or video of something you’re really into,” and it was clearly meant as an insult.) As such, movies falling under the torture porn umbrella are seen as akin to many hypermacho artifacts of the ‘00s — from lad mags and nu-metal to orange alerts and “shock and awe.” Best to condemn and then forget them. 

No film better exemplifies this condemnatory mentality than Hostel. Writer-director Eli Roth, whose film Cabin Fever made fans of grindhouse aficionados Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino (QT produced Hostel and later directed Roth in Inglourious Basterds), is the perfect torture-porn poster child. A handsome, bro-ish enfant terrible, he’s not unlike Paxton (Jay Hernandez), Josh (Derek Richardson), and Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), the heedless tourists whose booze, drugs, and sex-fueled tour of Europe ends in the viscera-caked dungeons of a Slovakian cartel that charges high-rollers big bucks for the chance to torture young people to death, consequence-free. 

Indeed, watching the opening reel of this movie is like taking a shotgun blast of the worst of ‘00s culture to the face. The three men — well, two of them anyway — are relentlessly sexist in their pursuit of women, who almost always referred to insultingly (pussy, bitches) or infantilizingly (girls rather than women). The men’s dialogue is a ceaseless, almost comical torrent of overcompensatory homophobia, rising to the point of gay panic. Roth himself even has a cameo as an American rando in a Boston Red Sox t-shirt, getting fucked up at an Amsterdam weed cafe while yelling “dude!” (It takes bros to know bros.) Combine that vibe with the purity of Hostel’s brand of torture porn — the set-up really is like porn or sex work, in that people are paying money for the chance to do something physically to another person’s body for fun — and you’ve got the perfect scapegoat for an entire genre’s excesses.

It’s a reputation that this smart, complicated, emotionally involving film does not deserve. Revisited now, Hostel is a fascinating and wholly successful horror film, deserving of a spot in the canon. 

To understand why, it helps to have seen a lot of Saw movies. (Try having a 13 year old horror hound as a kid and believe me, you’ll see a lot of Saw movies.) Though inventive with its kills and amusing with its increasingly baroque mythology, it’s a franchise with approximately zero to say about anything, beyond its villain’s ridiculous comic-book-villain musings about appreciating life or punishing the guilty or whatever point his latest art-installation murder is supposed to prove. 

By contrast, Hostel is positively bristling with ideas, as varied and as sharp as the torture implements laid out for members of the Elite Hunting society to use as they see fit. Its biggest idea is to take aim directly at the same ’00s bro-culture atmosphere to which people think the movie itself belongs.

Central to this is Josh’s closeted homosexuality, brought to the fore by a Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasák), himself living in the closet, who will eventually reveal himself to have a much darker secret than that. Watching Josh try to fit in amid Oli’s chronic womanizing and Paxton’s never-ending torrent of porn-brained misogyny and homophobia, then watching how far fitting in gets him, is like seeing a major American cultural tragedy rendered in perfect miniature. That ceaseless barrage of f-slurs and objectification is Roth mocking this mindset, not exemplifying it.

(As a side note, one thing that’s changed about the bro culture Hostel targets is that when Josh and Paxton take their clothes off, they’re just regular dudes. Today those characters’ insecurities — and Hollywood aesthetics, which drive those insecurities — would be expressed through both men being shredded as hell.)

Ditto the entire concept of the Ugly American abroad, an extremely salient point during those War on Terror years.(We learn that members of the torture club pay a premium for authentic American victims, which feels a bit like payback. Reflective of the hostility between the U.S. and the rest of the world at the time, the guy who tricks them into going to the titular hostel actually says something like “Hey, not all of us want to kill Americans.” So much for that.

But Roth’s work is as sharp as it is broad, using little details to make its big points. Both Oli and the Dutch businessman, for example, are revealed to have adorable young daughters, over whom the others coo sweetly and sincerely — oblivious to how these adorable kids will be treated, by them, as less than human when they grow up into women. No “as a father of daughters” bullshit here; patriarchy lets no one off the hook. 

Meanwhile, the Slovakian setting, explicitly described as bereft of its young men thanks to the ruinous, genocidal Balkan wars, is set up as a potential vision of America’s future after Afghanistan and Iraq. (To say nothing of the future of Afghanistan and Iraq themselves.) It isn’t hard to draw the connection between the army of goons in shapeless pleather jackets guarding the torture complex and the piggish Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and other such groups bedeviling the American “homeland” following the unsuccessful completion of our own bloodbaths abroad.

(It’s worth noting here that the film’s depiction of Eastern Europe is, uh, not flattering, to the point of stereotyping: the men are all glowering thugs in unfashionable clothes, the women dead-eyed sex objects. But this is a peril of any fish-out-of-water horror film, a subgenre that requires the local population to be rendered as alien and hostile for the story to work; cf. such classics as Deliverance and The Wicker Man, the latter of which is a major influence on Hostel, including a sex scene that borrows the TWM soundtrack standout “Willow’s Song.”)

It’s easy to miss amid the carnage and chaos, but there’s also a pointed and pathos-generating shot at American racism. When Paxton realizes he’s a premium item at the torture factory because he’s American, he denies it, begging his torturer to “look at me!” As a brown-skinned man, Paxton recognizes he doesn’t fit the American mold, no matter how much he’s tried to.

Beyond sociopolitical points, these characters are characters, complicated and self-contradictory, rather than meat puppets introduced to have a dark secret for which they are subsequently punished by John Jigsaw or whoever. Josh’s queerness is accompanied by a genuine sweetness towards others, which he also spends his life trying to mute or mask. Oli is a classic Divorced Guy, footloose and fancy free after the end of his eight-year marriage; one of the other boys jokes that he doesn’t get out of his cage of respectable fatherhood very much, hence his constant ass-baring antics.

Paxton is the real revelation here, though. Easily the most contemptibly bro-ish pig of the trio, he sheds this facade as his situation gets worse and worse, revealing it as a smokescreen for a childhood trauma — he tried and failed to prevent a little girl from drowning when he was eight years old — that permanently warped his relationship with the opposite sex. He’s also a vegetarian, and a polyglot, traits you wouldn’t expect from such an archetypal frat boy. The tenderness with which he treats Kana (Jennifer Lim), a fellow victim of the titular hostel’s feeder system, is heartbreaking to see.

Which leads us to the most important thing about Hostel: Despite its spectacular nature, its violence is taken seriously. 

Maybe you’re thinking “Of course it is, they’re torturing people to death, are they gonna play it for laughs?” The answer, if you’ve seen any of the Saw sequels, is yes. True, they’re hardly splatstick comedies in the Evil Dead 2 vein. But those films’ elaborate death traps have the same emotional valence as a particularly gnarly Jackass stunt: It’s unpleasant, it’s painful, you wouldn’t want it to happen to you, but at the same time the thrillingly queasy, peeking-through-your-fingers sensation of “oh my god, they’re actually gonna do that?” is the overriding reaction.

This is not the case in Hostel. The scissors and drills, flails and scalpels, guns and chainsaws and blowtorches used to torture the film’s young victims produce not just pain and fright in those victims, but misery. Two of the victims, our two protagonists in fact, vomit from agony and terror while being tortured. In Paxton’s case, the vomit is blocked by a ball gag, and viscous chunks are shown leaking around the surfaces until his torturer pulls out the gag and allows him to expel the rest of it — not out of pity, but to prevent him from choking to death before the real fun can begin. I remember being blown away by this, as much as I was when The Sopranos showed one of Tony’s victims pissing himself before his execution. The fear and humiliation are part of the point.

In the other case, a runny green-brown film of fluid coats Josh’s chin and neck as he tries as hard as he can simply to understand why what is happening to him is happening to him, at the hands of a man he’d considered, if not a friend, at least someone he could talk to about the secret dominating his life. Now he’s tied to a chair in his underwear, his body pockmarked with holes bored into him by a power drill, wielded by the very same man who saved him from a pack of feral kids and spoke with candor about the compromises required of gay men in a homophobic world. All that’s out the window now. 

It’s clear from Derek Richardson’s performance that part of his terror stems not just from the physical pain or the fear of death, but from the revelation that the connection he’d formed with this man is meaningless. Kindness, camaraderie, even a shared secret about a fundamental truth of who they are: all of it means nothing in the face of one person’s desire to inflict misery on another. 

At its heart, Hostel is about suffering, about our compulsion to inflict it in ways both large and small, political and personal, extravagant and intimate. If it is indeed torture porn, it’s not here to jerk you off, metaphorically or otherwise.

Throughout, Roth makes his movie look like a movie, not like a bad music video. The aesthetic is squalid, but realistically so: These are just really dirty rooms in an abandoned factory where a bunch of unsmiling men have placed knives and saws and mallets and shit. Roth knows when he has a good image on his hands, and he makes the most of it every time: Josh opening a door into a room in a brothel like he’s stepping into a spaceship; Paxton, shot from a distance; standing in silhouette as he confronts the woman who led him into the massive rubble-strewn entrance to the torture factory; the dreary afternoon light in the crummy bar where the glamorous catfishers who led Josh to his death are revealed to be pretty but deeply tired-out women with dark circles under their eyes and deep cynicism oozing from their fake smiles. Throughout, Nathan Barr’s grandiose orchestral score ties the film to the past, rather than trying to make it of-the-moment with electro-industrial beats and guitars. This movie wants to be thought of as something classic, and it earns it.

Watching it back after all these years, I think all of this is concentrated in the character of Kana, the Japanese woman whose suffering Paxton finds himself unable to ignore, turning down a surefire shot at escape to head back into hell to rescue her. When he finds her, she’s been horribly disfigured by a loudmouthed American, played by Suits star Rick Hoffman in a show-stealing two-scene performance. Her eye has been pulled from its socket, and half of her face has been reduced to a red ruin with an acetylene torch. 

The pair manage to escape, in a car chase sequence that brings out the splatter side of Roth — lots of run-over bodies and smashed skulls — but Kana can’t escape what’s been done to her. When she sees her reflection at the train station where Paxton hopes to evade the guards and cops to make their getaway, she freezes, then slowly walks over to the edge of the platform and tosses herself in the way of an oncoming train. 

The surface read of this scene is that she can’t bear to go through life looking that way, and I don’t doubt that’s a huge part of it. But watching her inch her way across that platform like a zombie to her death, I felt this time around that it’s not her face that broke her spirit, but the knowledge that someone was capable of doing that to her face, on purpose, for fun. Every time she looks at herself for the rest of her life, she’ll remember the braying American who decided to mutilate her while she begged and screamed. No matter how long she lives, Kana knows she’ll never leave that room. Could you? 

That’s what makes Hostel worth revisiting and reconsidering. If you’re a horror person, it’s as fun (“fun”) to watch as anything; it wouldn’t have made major bank at the domestic box office if it weren’t. But at heart, it’s a film about suffering, about our compulsion to inflict it in ways both large and small, political and personal, extravagant and intimate. If it is indeed torture porn, it’s not here to jerk you off, metaphorically or otherwise. Hostel has a lot to say, as long as you have the stomach to listen.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.