Abstract

In Eli Roth’s 2005 film Hostel, two American frat boys and an Icelander are let loose on an archane and sexually licentious Europe. Lured to a hostel in Bratislava, Slovakia by the prospect of nymphomaniac women who just “love Americans,” the trio slowly discover they have booked themselves in as victims for a torture chamber where the wealthy live out their sadistic fantasies by creatively murdering innocent tourists. Hostel presents dark images of the flipside of capitalism; a world where the fall of communism has led not to the fruits of capitalist labour but instead plunged East- ern Europe into a terrifying trade where life is easily bought and sold. Part of an ultraviolent wave of splatter films seen as driving a 78% rise in domestic horror box office profits from 2003-2006, 2 Hostel controversially combined dystopian representations of capitalism with the detailed exposition of brutal violence. Made for a little over US$4million, Hostel opened at number one at the US and Canadian box offices to generate more than US$20 million in its opening weekend, pushing Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia out of the top spot. 3 As one of the smash hits of the splatter wave, Hostel was read as cementing the trend towards violent cinema evidenced by House of 1000 Corpses , The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , Saw , House of Wax , The Devil’s Rejects and the Australian production Wolf Creek . Dubbed “torture porn” by critics who highlighted the verisimilitude between the violent images leaked from Abu Ghraib and the torture of ordinary Americans in these films, this association mobilized a narrative that linked the rise in popularity of the splatter film to audience’s unconscious fears of the “Global War on Terror”. This discourse, repeated by journalists, critics and the industry itself, positioned the post-9/11 horror as an avatar for debates over the limits, use and justification for state violence. 4 However, if Hostel’s images could be seen as a critique of US imperialism, this critique was leveraged off the presentation of Slovakia as a lawless state. Featuring lines such as, “I hope bestiality is illegal in Amsterdam, because that girl’s a fucking hog”, Hostel refuses the subjective alignment that characterizes much of American cinema. In this sense, Hostel might be seen as an example of what Fredric Jameson calls a “cultural text” in that its importance lies in the way it generates antagonism and debate over the ideological assumptions inherent in shaping social discourse. This provocation in Hostel centers on the fusion of sex and imperialism through the figure of the “fucking American”, providing an example of how politics circulate under postmodern culture