Eli Roth first attracted attention with his 2002 debut Cabin Fever, a horror film in which paranoia and disease wreak havoc among a group of friends vacationing in a remote cabin. Shot through with an obvious love for and knowledge of the horror genre, Cabin Fever also showcased a technical acumen that reached beyond its miniscule budget. Those skills were put to good use in 2005's Hostel, an intensely violent film about vacationing American college students whose pursuit of hedonistic extremes takes them to a remote Slovakian hostel, where the exploiters become the exploited. Hostel and its gender-reversed 2007 sequel Hostel: Part II attracted a fair share of controversy for their graphic violence, usually from those who chose to ignore the strong undercurrents of political commentary and black comedy. (Maybe all the screaming drowned out the subtlety.)
In anticipation of Halloween, we invited Roth to program a virtual 24-hour horror-film festival for A.V. Club readers. All the titles below are available on DVD, and though it may be traumatic, we suggest readers do try this at home and post their experiences in the comments section below.
The A.V. Club: What time would you start this marathon?
Eli Roth: Well, usually when you're doing a 24-hour marathon, noon-to-noon works. You can go midnight-to-midnight, but starting at midnight never really works. If you start at noon, you're kind of ready for it. You've had a huge breakfast, you slept a lot the night before, and you get the afternoon. You can start off with a couple of slower films, have a short break for dinner, then get into the harder stuff. The last two or three movies are usually pretty delirious. When we do all-night marathons, we go 8-to-8, and by 6 in the morning, you're just exhausted. You know you're gonna go 24 hours, and you get your caffeine ready. But starting it at noon is always good. Plus, if you start it on Saturday at noon and go all night, it kind of gives you Sunday to recover. You sleep a couple hours, wake up to have dinner, then go back Sunday night. Usually if you do a noon-to-noon, by Monday you can be close to recovered.
AVC: Assuming you aren't in shock over what you've just seen and can still go about your life.
ER: Exactly. So you can still leave your house.
Noon: The Thing (1982)
ER: I think you gotta start off with John Carpenter's The Thing. It really holds up as one of the best horror films of all time, if not the best. The effects are amazing. The acting is so good, Kurt Russell is just so unbelievably badass. Cabin Fever was very much inspired by The Thing. It's really a perfect guy's horror movie: There's no love story, it's just straight-up horror. And it's so well-done. It moves at a slow pace, but it's really terrific.
AVC: It seems like its reputation just gets better over the years.
ER: It was very underappreciated when it first came out. Commercially, it was not a hit, really. It was kind of a bomb. It was a huge disappointment. And what's interesting is that John Carpenter was called a "pornographer of violence" after that film came out. He went and made Starman after that. And I have been accused of similar crimes. But the film—it's got such incredible over-the-top gore, which at the time was kind of unheard of. If it was released today, it would still hold up perfectly.
2 p.m.: Zombie (1979)
ER: After The Thing, if we're gonna go for some splatter, I would follow it up with the Lucio Fulci film Zombie. Zombie is the Italian sequel to Dawn Of The Dead. Dawn Of The Dead came out in Italy under the title Zombi, so these producers said, "Quick, let's do a rip-off!" But they called it Zombi 2 to trick people into thinking it was a sequel. It's actually an amazing film. Lucio is this Italian director—they call him the godfather of gore, and the gore scenes in this movie are just unbelievable. I mean, there's one scene of a wood splinter going through an eye, shot in close-up, and it just goes on and on and on and on.
4 p.m.: The Vanishing (1988)
ER: Now that you've gone two splattery movies back-to-back, I would watch the Dutch film The Vanishing. The Vanishing is technically not a horror film. It's much more of a thriller, but it is genuinely one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen. It's horrific. And you can't watch the American version; you have to see the Dutch version. A lot of Hostel is very much inspired by The Vanishing. Just the obsessive need to know what happens. And also the Dutch businessman in Hostel was inspired by the character in The Vanishing.
AVC: Why did the American version not work? I've never seen it.
ER: In the American version, they changed the ending. They tried to make a different ending, and it's so dated now. It looks like they used Apple computers from 1993. Sandra Bullock's in it, Jeff Bridges, and Kiefer Sutherland. And [George] Sluizer's there—the same director is doing the American version—but in the Dutch version, the film looks so beautiful and so dark, and it's so much about the Europeans. It's set in Europe, in the countryside and in the gas stations. Part of what makes The Vanishing really, really work is the locations this guy used. In the American version, the director didn't really have a visual command of what would make it interesting. The ending is terrible, and it's just a much more stale, boring, plain-looking film.
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