Hostel II

What price can one put on the life of a human?

Somewhere upwards of US$30,000 but lower than $100,000 according to members of the Elite Hunting sports club in Hostel II.

Following the success of last year’s torture-filled horror film Hostel, director Eli Roth has returned with a sequel that offers more blood, more sadistic torture and a number of key scenes that should never have been committed to film.

The premise of Hostel II picks up from where Hostel left off. In Hostel, three men, including two young American students, visited a youth hostel in Slovakia with the intention of having some anonymous sex with countless numbers of local women.

The film took a nastier turn as the available women turned out to be the bait that lured the men to a mysterious warehouse establishment. Here rich men from around the world paid large sums of money to torture then kill young men and women for a sick and supposedly invigorating hobby.

Hostel concluded with one of the students escaping the Elite Hunting premises – minus two fingers. However, a number of other people in the film were tortured to death in ways that broke new ground in depicting on-screen horror violence.

So, most people going to see Hostel II will know what they’re in for. The questions most viewers would have is “What boundaries will Roth cross this time?”and “What taboos will he break in making Hostel II with the intention of surpassing its predecessor?”

Before I answer these questions, let me say that at their best, horror films have the potential to do two worthwhile things.

Firstly, they can open the minds of the public to the possibility of a real spiritual realm and a living God. Recent horror films like the The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Reaping suggest it is foolish to deny the reality of the spiritual realm. They also point towards a God who is active in the lives of humans today.

Secondly, horror films can open us up to the idea of a saviour that exists outside of ourselves. With so many films telling us that we have everything we need inside of us to save ourselves, horror films can be refreshing in the reminder that forces outside of our power can both harm us but also be essential for our salvation.

That said, Hostel II does not operate in either of these ways.

Eli Roth operates on a level primarily concerned with shocking and repelling his audience. The suspense in the film is built around the anxiety that we share about torture. In this sequel, we follow three females, rather than three males. The girls are lured into similar traps much in the same way as the three men in Hostel. And again, our three leads find themselves in the same horrific situations, being bid upon as future victims of torture and murder.

Unlike Hostel however, Hostel II also follows two American men who together have successfully won the bid to kill two of the girls. Todd, a successful businessman is very excited about the upcoming opportunity. Stuart, on the other hand, is a family man who is clearly disturbed by what he is about to do and constantly questions his own involvement in this expedition. However, the Todd urges him on like a high-schooler provoking his mate into shoplifting at the corner store.

Certainly, the film never promotes torture of this kind as an acceptable practice. The viewer is made to sympathise with the female leads and the conflicted Stuart. We are made to be disgusted by Todd’s keenness and all those involved with the Elite Hunting business.

However, the way the torture scenes are portrayed – often from the point of view of the perpetrator – gives the viewer a glamourised depiction of torture. Admittedly, we should be repulsed by a lady sitting naked in a bath as she uses a scythe to slice the back of a girl who is chained upside down above her as she drinks the blood that drips down. Yes, we should be repulsed as a man pushes a circular saw into the face and skull of a girl chained to a chair, then pulls it out leaving her alive, but with her brain partially exposed. And we should be repulsed when a woman punishes a man – no matter how bad he is – in a way that only a man can be punished…

However, Roth assumes the viewer is like a driver who slows down while passing a car crash. He lingers on the scenes of torture, making us voyeurs of this atrocious behaviour rather than lamenting it. While Roth never scripts the film in a way that makes the torturers or their actions sympathetic – except for the act of revenge by one of the leads at the end of the film –he lets the camera linger on the scenes of torture in a way that forces the viewer to bask in the torture.

Also, the scenes of torture don’t serve any purpose in the telling of a story with a greater moral. Rather, the story is constructed to serve the numerous scenes of torture. It wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that the scenes of torture in Hostel II function like scenes of sexuality in a pornographic film. The dramatic scenes seem to merely serve as lead-ins to the ‘money shots’ of torture. In fact, the physical reaction of a number of the perpetrators of torture is so close to orgasmic that it is almost impossible to not link the acts of violence with transgressive sexuality.

It is a shame that with the advancement of cinematic technology, filmmakers have used this as an opportunity to show more realistic and disturbing scenes of violence. Once upon a time, the camera would pull away when a scene of extreme violence was taking place. It was partly to allow the viewer’s imagination to create the terror and partly because the technology of the day meant to “actually show it” would just look fake. Nowadays, it might look realistic when filmmakers “actually show it” but the suspense and imagination has all but disappeared.

To paraphrase Patrick Stewart from the first season of the television show Extras, “Now we’ve seen everything”. And now that Roth has shown “everything” to us, I think a lot of viewers are asking “Is that what it looks like?” and remarking “We didn’t really want to see that”.

Roth certainly has a talent for creating terror. If he could just use it to give us an insight into what really frightens humanity instead of stringing together some violent set pieces, then he might have something more worthwhile to offer.

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