"Advertising by definition is exploitation," Palen said the other day. "It's easy to shock people. But you have to know when you're crossing the line. It's all about appropriateness. As a marketer, you have to have an appropriateness meter or you run the risk of people laughing at you or shunning you."
The problem is that we all have different standards for what's appropriate. Many of the same people who are outraged by violent lyrics in rap music had no problem with Johnny Cash singing, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." On the other hand, hip-hop artists get a pass when they insult black women in the most vulgar, demeaning way imaginable, but when Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed hos," he quickly got the old heave-ho.
Palen's "Hostel: Part II" images are especially provocative because they can't easily be dismissed as trash. They are disturbing because they get under our skin, being almost in equal measures volatile, vulgar and inspired. Palen wanted to start the campaign with an image that would stand out amid the clutter of endless movie posters. So he went to a butcher's shop, bought five different cuts of meat and photographed them in his kitchen.
The winner was a cut of boar meat: "We had to prove to the MPAA that it wasn't human, so I sent them the receipt from the butcher shop," he recalls. Shown in an extreme close-up that gives the veins of fat in the meat the look of someone's intestines, the poster instantly established the film's bona fides to horror fans.
The next image in the campaign was from a photo session Palen did with film costar Bijou Phillips. It shows Phillips nude, holding her own severed head in her hand. Knowing the image was too graphic to ever be shown in a theater or in a newspaper ad, Palen gave the poster to international Internet sites, which are not subject to MPAA guidelines, and Comic-Con festivals.
His next image was a mash-up of the previous two, with Phillips' severed head embedded in the rivulets of close-up boar fat. This poster was displayed in theaters, though only in multiplexes that weren't playing G or PG movies. Palen followed this up with another poster, this one with Heather Matarazzo, who plays one of the women tortured in the film. He photographer her hanging upside down, her face contorted, the veins in her neck bulging, a tiny rivulet of snot dripping from her nose.
