SLIFR FORUM: THE FUTURE OF HORROR?

In the past week, no less august a publication than the Los Angeles Times has joined in, in their own ambivalent manner, of course, with the anticipatory parade of publicity paving the way for this weekend’s release of Eli Roth’s envelope-pushing sequel to his own button-pushing horror movie, Hostel. Patrick Goldstein spends several column inches wringing his hands over whether the deliberately revolting and disturbing advertising campaign created for Hostel Part II is exploitation or art. (Decide for yourself.)

Goldstein makes some interesting observations near the end of the piece regarding our eagerness to geek out on charnel fare like Roth’s movie, while government censorship and our own tendencies to avoid grim reality keeps us from more important, long looks at real-life horrors happening in Iraq and other devastated parts of the world:

“Art can often make us squeamish, whether it's high-minded social commentary or squishy horror porn. What I find depressing is that while Hostel: Part II will play at multiplexes everywhere, the disturbing images of carnage in Iraq are largely hidden away from view, in part because the Defense Department refuses to allow them to be shown, in part because the public acts outraged whenever the media put them on display.”

This is the Los Angeles Times, however. The fact that you’ll see that aesthetically compelling ad featuring Heather Matarazzo hanging upside down while grimacing right there in the Times movie pages alongside ads for Shrek the Third is given its token nod of ambivalence. And the gist of Goldstein’s piece is the kind of have-it-both-ways attitude that has become all too frequent in the paper’s movie coverage— yes, those posters are sickly beautiful, and we know there’s gonna be a lot of interest in this movie, so we have to give the public what it wants by covering it, but you should know we don’t approve, and by the way, aren’t you kinda sick for being interested in it?

The obligatory Sunday feature on Eli Roth was a much more straightforward, easily digestible puff job designed to prop up the back story of this up and coming bad boy of horror. His parents—Father was a psychiatrist, Mother a well-regarded painter—often took him to see horror films without much worry that their son would become deranged as a result. There’s the story of little Eli at his bar mitzvah being sawed in half by a nervous magician who was horrified when the little imp began screaming as though the blade was actually ripping into him. (See where it all comes from?!) And the article gives Roth plenty of space to quote the usual stuff about social commentary regarding his own movies as well as classics from the likes of George A. Romero. “People were killed and turned into zombies and just by habit went to the mall and (looked) for living things to consume,” says Roth of Dawn of the Dead (1978). “It was about American consumption and dehumanizing effects of technology and corporate America.” Of his Hostel series, Roth says in the Sunday piece. “You look at the war, you look at 9/11, you look 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.” Even Roth’s dad, being a psychiatrist, gets a few words in on analyzing his son’s motives: “It’s as Plato said: ‘Bad men do what good men dream.’ My son puts his dreams on the movie screen.”

(And just for the record, the Times piece feels it's important we know that Roth, no ordinary horror geek he, was named “fittest director” by Men’s Fitness magazine. For a glimpse of Roth’s own self-image, however parodistically rendered, check out this Diggler-esque fantasia from New York magazine’s Web site.)

However disturbing they may or may not be as indicators of any kind of trend in horror films, I think the Saw films, particularly the last two installments, had some genuine daring in them as far as they were willing to acknowledge that there might be some sinister logic worth following behind Jigsaw’s moralistic nightmare scenarios. But I’ve yet to be impressed by anything from the Eli Roth oeuvre, with the giddy and ghastly exception of the hilarious Thanksgiving trailer he concocted recently for Grindhouse. Despite Peter Jackson’s endorsement, I found Cabin Fever as brainless and numbing as the ‘80s splatter opuses to which it was a deliberate throwback. And though I approached Hostel with dread, I did indeed think the first half was genuinely effective. Whether Roth mined suspense or a much less complex sensation of simple dread in the opening hour of the film, it worked—the audience knows, like we knew of Hitchcock’s bomb under the table, what was coming, and we squirmed like little guinea pigs in anticipation of the arrival of the gruesome sights and sounds to come. But once Hostel gets inside that darkened abattoir, all the fear drained out of the movie for me. There was no sick feeling in the pit of my stomach; just disappointment that after being so skillfully led to the bowels of hell, all there was inside was lots of yelling and bad makeup applications and an increasingly preposterous scenario of escape.


Those Hostel Part II posters are brilliantly demented, and they must account for whatever desire I have to see the movie—and I do, despite my dissatisfaction with Roth’s previous work, want to see it. But I question the implication of articles like those puff jobs in the Times and other entertainment vessels that seem to be so eager to bestow upon Roth the role of none-too-reluctant leader of an aggressive movement into a new age of, as David Edelstein would have it, torture porn, or in the Times’s own coinage, gorno. (Could you hear my eyes rolling on that one?) True, when no less an expert than Quentin Tarantino puts his name on your movie and dubs you “the future of horror,” who’s to be shocked when the entertainment press just blindly jumps on board and offers up no considered resistance to the idea? Personally-- and I’m speaking as a moviegoer, a critic and a fan of the horror genre—Roth’s own idea of what a horror movie should be seems a bit too limited for one who’s supposed to be the genre’s future. In the Times, during one of the many comments in which the director seems a little too pre-New Flesh Max Renn for comfort, Roth likens his audiences to ones who go for roller-coasters over merry-go-rounds. “If you’re going to see a movie like Cheaper by the Dozen, at the end you’re supposed to feel good,” Roth claims. “The point of a horror movie is you’re supposed to feel bad.”

The problem I have with that rather limited assessment is the problem I have with Hostel in general. Roth is eager to take into account and indulge the most ghastly elements and implications and garish displays of the horror genre. But by defining your aesthetic as being one intended solely to make the audience feel bad, I think he’s exposed himself as having a pretty narrow understanding of what has appealed to fans of the horror genre from Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera straight up through The Bride of Frankenstein, Cat People, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Psycho, Tales from the Crypt, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing. The universe of Hostel, after all, is a pretty narrow and humorless one. Where are the influences in Roth’s movies of emotion, humor, true empathy, cheeky satiric intent and, most of all, full-throttle craft that movies like the ones cited above, as well as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead pictures, Stuart Gordon’s Re-animator, Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and Bad Taste, Don Mancini’s Seed of Chucky and Ronny Yu’s Freddy vs. Jason have in spades? And Hostel’s self-serious relentlessness isn’t a ragged patch on something organic and vital and terrifying like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Neil Marshall’s The Descent, let alone the stylistic orgasms of Dario Argento’s Suspiria.

I remain open to the possibility that Hostel Part II might go to some unexpected places, and if it does, and they are places worth going in this context, I will be, I guess, grateful. But I really wonder, can someone who thinks the point of a horror movie is simply to make the audience feel terrible really be the future of horror? And if Eli Roth really is the future of horror, will it continue to be a genre worth following?

UPDATE 6/7/07 11:30 p.m.: The Lionsgate people must be in anticipatory cash-cow heaven right now. They've just successfully pulled the wool over about $6 million worth of ticketbuyers' eyes with the advertising on Bug (only about 2% of those ticketbuyers likely had any real sense that what they were paying to see wasn't the as-advertised post-Cronenebergian horror romp), and now they await the inevitable arterial spray of big money returns on this coming weekend's release of Hostel Part II. And as Damian and Cinebeats, among others, in the comments below have noted, there hasn't been any lack of conversation about the movie, either in the positive or the negative. If you desire a thorough updating, here's a list of links provided by Damian that should get you up to date on what will surely be the watercooler topic of conversation come Monday morning, once everybody's had a chance to actually see the movie:

Some have suggested that Roth's movies, like a lot of transgressive horror (and punk rock, and fashion), are really about "freaking out the squares." Consider Jeffrey Wells and David Poland officially freaked out.

The Reel Fanatic and Moviezzz are foaming a whole lot less at the mouth over exposure to Roth's latest contagion, but they seem concerned nonetheless.

Damian Arlyn has been thinking long and hard about the Roth phenomenon, and his conclusions aren't very pretty.

Unfortunately for the timing of my own discussion post (with further comment to come later this weekend once I've actually seen the movie myself), Damian seems kinda burnt out on the topic, but he's jumped in the fray below anyway. The same goes for Cinebeats-- she agrees with Damian that the topic may have already peaked in terms of fascination (SLIFR, behind the curve again!), but that's about all she agrees with. Cinebeats, perhaps one of the foremost authorities I know of when it comes to the horror/sci-fi genre-- that is, a woman with an open, intelligent mind who couldn't be in any way brushed off as a slavering fangirl-- is a big fan of Hostel an has a great post about the return to the genre of actress Edwige Fenech.

Cinebeats also points out another very smart man in the Hostel Part II camp-- Michael Guillen gushes about the movie at Twitch and links the movie up to its various giallo roots, giving Roth's newfound awareness of Italian horror the credit for the sequel's success. And D.K. Holm likes it too. Boy, does he ever!

Other positive takes on Roth can be found at The Bleeding Tree and from Harry Knowles.

Damian, thanks a ton for all the links and for making me aware of how much discussion has already gone on about Hostel Part II. My own late arrival stems not from a lack of interest-- as I said, even though I didn't much care for the first movie, the advertising and the awareness of a different narrative tack in the sequel makes me at least hope there might be something to chew on this time around. Really, I just didn't have much to say, not having seen the movie, until I read the two pieces in the Times, which spoke to concerns that I could legitimately express without firsthand experience with the new movie. That will hopefully come this weekend, at which point I hope that the discussion can start anew.

UPDATE 6/9/07 3:59 p.m.: Well, I bought my tickets for tonight's 9:45 Hostel Part II show at the Arclight in Hollywood, so I'll have something more than speculation and/or reaction to Roth's other movies to add to the discussion below very soon. In the meantime, here's the Shamus on five terrifying movie characters and Kim Morgan, gearing up for her own thoughts on Hostel Part II, with a couple of pre-show thoughts and a round-up of the good, the bad and the ugly reactions to Roth's opus.

UPDATE 6/12/07 9:54 a.m.: Well, the arguing rages on even, when the movie didn't do particularly well over the weekend, and here I am, ready to sit down and finally write about Hostel Part II. But for some reason, I am suddenly unable to access any Blogger-based sites, including my own, from any of the three computers I have at home. (I'm writing this at work.) So, until I get home tonight and can sit down in front of Microsoft Word and do a little writing, my thoughts will have to wait. If Blogger magically fixes itself and I can post tonight, I will. If not, I'll bring it in and post from here tomorrow morning.

Until then, here's a couple more essential links to the argument swirling around Roth's rumpus.

SLIFR friend and all-around great blogger and film aficionado Campaspe checks in and does not worry about being perceived as Crowtheresque in her negative reaction to the whole Eli Roth phenomenon. Her terrific piece is called "You Think I'm Hostile Now..." (and stick around for the comments!)

Neil Sarver has more to say (and to link to) at his blog The Bleeding Tree.

And Christopher Stangl has some of the most intelligent and passionate commentary you're likely to read anywhere, regarding not so much the movie, but the reactionary response to it, as capsulized by the term "torture porn." Many thanks to Chris for writing such a smart post which addresses, among other things, the assumption by a lot of folks who don't care for Hostel Part II, or horror movies in general, that there's something a little bit wrong with those of us who do. You'll find it at his great site, The Exploding Kinetoscope-- it's called "Critical Disconnect: The 120 Days of Hostel Part II".

Finally, if you're tired of Eli Roth altogether (and who isn't honestly, at this point?), Peet offers up an altogether more pleasant alternative topic of conversation. And he has pictures too! Suddenly I feel much better about the world.