Roth 4-Eva

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There's a really, really fantastic interview with Eli Roth (yes, I might as well call this Eli Roth Month, because he's gonna be talked about A LOT as Hostel: Part II approaches and I finally see it in - sigh - two weeks) over at AICN; he talks a lot about the phrase "torture porn" and what it means and how he it's a way for critics to be dismissive without actually thinking about what the violence means - and that it does mean something, and express something very real about our modern fears:

"...there are soldiers in Iraq that write me and tell me that HOSTEL is one of the most popular movies in the military. They love it. I wrote back and asked, "Why on earth would you watch HOSTEL after what you see in a day?" And he wrote back and said that he was out during the day with his friends and they saw somebody's face get blown off, and then they watched the movie that night with about 400 people and they were all screaming. But when they're on the battlefield, you have be a machine. You can't react emotionally. You have to tactically respond to a situation. And these guys are going out every day seeing this horrible stuff, and they're not allowed to be scared. But it all gets stored up, and it's got to come out. And when they watch HOSTEL, it's basically saying, for the next 90 minutes, not only are you allowed to be scared, you're encouraged to be scared because it's okay to be terrified. It doesn't mean you're a coward; it means you're scared of the movie, and that's okay. It's socially acceptable, and they let those feelings out. And I think to a much lesser degree, I think that's the purpose they serve in society right now. And if you think about, since September 11, a lot of these teenagers were 10 or 11 years old at the time. Now they're 15, 16, 17. They've grown up in those formative adolescent years with the war in Iraq, images coming home from Iraq, people they know coming back from Iraq, and the fact that they're next if there's draft. I remember when the Gulf War broke out when I was 19, all my friends were thinking, Oh my God, is there going to be a draft? And that's what's going on right now. These people are terrified, and they need to let it out and they need these images to scare them. And I think that's what any art form does, whether it's a piece of music or a book or a painting. It stirs up feeling, it helps you let those feelings out."

Yeah that's a long quote, but it's about half as long as what I wanted to quote, which was basically half the interview (really, seriously, check it out).

But what he's saying here is what I've been arguing for a good long while about why this sort of horror has been popular as of late, and that it serves a very real, practical need. He talks about how thirty years ago the same accusations of disgust were levelled at films like Salo and Dawn of the Dead and how now, with distance, they're able to be seen as the political and social allegories that they were obviously intended to be.

He also talks up the fact that he sees this as a "feminist horror film," which ought to lead to some interesting commentary...

I do wish he'd stop talking up the ending of the film though; he says here he thinks some theaters will pull the movie because of it, and now even the TV ads are telling us it's the "most shocking ending in horror movie history" and, I love ya Eli, but don't dare us to be disappointed with your ending, mkay?

He also talks about his adaptation of Stephen King's book Cell, and says:

"But I told everyone, it's going to be an adaptation, not a re-creation. I'm not filming the book; I'm using the book as source material and writing a script based on that. That was the first thing I said, I don't want to piss of Stephen King. I hear he didn't like THE SHINING, and THE SHINING's my favorite. I said, As long as I can change stuff I'll be involved, and he said it's totally cool."

Which is great, because the book needs some alterations to reach greatness. It had it within it but I don't think King really got there. Can't wait to see what Roth does with something he didn't write next time out.
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