If you’ve seen “Hostel”, or any of its sequels, you know about the horror film’s terrifying premise: a hostel that lures in tourists so that wealthy members of the “Elite Hunting Club” can pay to torture and kill them.
If you’re wondering how fucked up the film is in comparison to Eli Roth’s other horror films, I’d say it’s definitely more disturbing than “Knock Knock”, but not quite as fucked up as “Green Inferno”.
In an interview with Dread Central, Roth explained how he got the idea for the film from a real life website,
“It started with a conversation with Harry Knowles. Harry and I were talking about sick stuff we’d seen on the Internet, like that the guy in Texas who set it up so you could control a gun and hunt lions and wild game online. The FBI had shut this guy down. I think his legal defense was that he was making it so handicapped people could hunt, too. It was so fucked up (laughs).
I thought, ‘Jesus. Why wouldn’t they just put a human being in a room? ’ and Harry said, ‘Well, actually I found something like that’ and he sent me a link to a site where you could go to Thailand and for $10,000 walk into a room and shoot somebody in the head. The site claimed that the person you were killing had signed up for it and that part of the money would go to their family because they were so broke and were gonna die anyways. It was to give you the thrill of taking another human life. ”
When asked if the website he had previously talked about was real, Roth replied,
“The site itself was real, but you had to give credit card information, and I was at the point where I wanted to do a documentary about it, and it’s like, to get any further I would have had to give personal information and I figure these people kill people for a living, I’m not gonna find out…
Whether this place exists or not is not important. The point is that somebody built a website about it. Somebody thought up, realized, and conceptualized this site. They figured that there’s some guy out there that’s so bored with money and drugs, they can’t get off from going to a hooker or strip club or doing drugs. They’re looking for that next level of thrill and that, I said, was real. I know people like that. I can just see someone to money means nothing, they’ve got all these things and they’re just numb. They want to walk into a room and just kill someone without any consequences. ”
Of course, in the film, Roth took things a step further allowing members of the club to torture their victims before killing them. Besides, it really adds to the plot knowing that the killer once wanted to be a surgeon.
