A gore merchant isn't born, he's made.
Consider the case of Eli Roth, whose gory, lucrative films are often described as "torture porn" or with an especially pungent new term: "gorno." This Friday, Roth's latest, "Hostel: Part II," will land in theaters with a splatter -- the plot finds three nubile coeds trapped in an Eastern European sadism club where fiends on vacation pay to slowly carve up strangers. If the thought of watching that makes you nauseated, well, Roth can understand. He's been on the other side of that popcorn bucket.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday June 07, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
'Hostel': An article in Sunday's Calendar section about filmmaker Eli Roth said his film "Hostel" hit No. 1 at the box office in 2005. It was in early 2006.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday June 10, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 31 words Type of Material: Correction
'Hostel': An article in the June 3 Calendar section about filmmaker Eli Roth said his film "Hostel" hit No. 1 at the box office in 2005. It was in early 2006.
Roth spent years vomiting in the middle of matinees; he threw up so often that the theater ushers near his home in Newton, Mass., would groan when they saw him coming. He was easy to spot too, because he was so young. He was all of 8, for instance, when his parents (a Harvard University Medical School psychiatrist and a New York artist) took young Eli to see a creepy science-fiction film called "Alien." In no time, the boy was racing for the lobby with his mouth covered. That also happened to be the day Roth decided that he wanted to be a filmmaker.
"That was the one, I left there and knew that was what I wanted to be when I grew up," he recalled as he cruised around the Warners lot in a golf cart. "It sort of took over my life." He started making Super-8 movies with brothers, friends and pets as stars and, by his bar mitzvah, he asked the rabbi to introduce him as a film director-producer ("I was already a hyphenate"). The cake was shaped like a director's clapper and, in case anyone thought he wanted to make romantic comedies, was splattered with red food-coloring.
All of this would be merely quaint if Roth wasn't making some of the most disturbing films in memory. He is at the forefront of a movement in Hollywood to not only resurrect the blood-and-breasts-style slasher films of the early 1980s but also take them to new heights of realistically based narrative. Many have drawn-out murders, usually of bound victims who sob, hyperventilate, shriek for mercy or (here's that word again) vomit. It seems audiences can't get enough: The three movies in the delicately titled "Saw" series cost a combined $15 million to make and have grossed $222 million in U.S. theaters.
The filmmakers are called the "Splat Pack," of course.
