A queasy-does-it guy

The men behind these movies have a club called the Masters of Horror. Roth is a member; so are filmmakers Alexandre Aja ("The Hills Have Eyes"), Darren Lynn Bousman ("Saw II," "Saw III") Neil Marshall ("The Descent"), James Wan ("Saw") and Rob Zombie ("House of 1,000 Corpses"). Each is young, well-educated, hyper-aware of film history and proud to the point of giggling that they have slightly tilted Hollywood away from big-budget action movies.

Roth says that his films are political commentary. On a Fox talk show he created a stir by blaming President Bush for the recent torture horror. He called it all art responding to a world of ugly violence and a country disdainful of other cultures.

In "Hostel," Roth said, the ugly Americans who get carved up (or carve others up) are purposeful examples of "consumption in our culture." The slow-rip murders are also meant to help us deal with the blood of the real world. "You look at the war, you look at 9/11, the tortures at Abu Ghraib, the things going on down at Guantanamo -- these are real horrors and we are all scared. There's no place left to scream in public. I think these films help people deal with the real world."

That presumes quite a bit. Look on the Internet at the chats of Roth's fans and geo-politics and cultural angst are not exactly frequent threads. Roth shrugs that off.

"There were things I saw in movies that resonated with me later, like in 'Night of the Living Dead,' the fact that people were killed and turned into zombies and just by habit went to the mall and just look for living things to consume," he said. "It was about American consumption and dehumanizing effects of technology and corporate America."

Sitting next to little Eli through most of those horror films were Sheldon Roth, the noted psychiatrist and professor, and Cora Roth, a well-regarded painter. The filmmaker's father dismissed any guff he took from other patrons as "that bourgeois sensibility.... We knew Eli was a good boy." The thing he remembers is seeing the passion in his son's eyes for the stories he witnessed there in the dark.

At his bar mitzvah, Roth talked his parents into having him cut in half by a nervous magician with a chain saw. Marvello the Magnificant was sweating bullets because he had never done the trick before, and his "victim" kept screaming that the blade was really ripping into him. Roth loves telling the story. "He kept whispering to me, 'Just hold still, for God's sake.' But I just kept screaming."

The father has a theory on why his nice-guy son is so good at peeling flesh. "It's as Plato said, 'Bad men do what good men dream.' My son puts his dreams on the movie screen."

But is there film life after all that blood? Filmmaker Roth has long modeled his career on Sam Raimi, who made "The Evil Dead" and other horror classics before putting the knife down and going into the crowd-pleasing "Spider-Man" franchise. Roth may do the same, but his next project, an adaptation of Stephen King's bloody novel "Cell," is certainly staying in his old familiar red zone.

These are good days but not perfect. "I feel like nothing really scares me anymore. I don't want to be jaded, I don't want to be bitter," Roth said glumly. "But not a lot of movies freak me out. It's sad, really."

*

geoff.boucher@latimes.com