Eli Roth is a good-looking chap. With his shock of dark hair, Hollywood teeth and Bambi eyes, he could have been David Schwimmer’s sexier younger brother in Friends. Close-fitting jeans and a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words My Love Is Dead show off a solid, muscular frame. He has the slightly studied charm, the fresh openness to newcomers, the conversational “energy”, that young LA types cultivate with casting directors in mind, and that draws you in just as you resist. Sitting restlessly on the edge of a sofa in a suite in London’s terminally trendy Soho Hotel, Roth could be talking up his role as the leading man in some new romcom about shiny twentysomethings.

In fact, he is a director, and one with a speciality: he is at the forefront of a new wave of horror films that, in their explicitness, gore and sadism, have been dubbed “torture porn”. Those in the dismemberment subgenre of the movie business - both the film-makers and their fanatical followers are not known for their appealing aesthetic attributes. A visit to any of the many horror conventions will not yield much leading-man material, so in the kingdom of the pasty and the pallid, the 35-year-old Roth stands out a mile. Which might account for the reverence in which he is held by the legions of blood-and-guts enthusiasts.

That, and the fact that, two years ago, he made Hostel, the story of a group of young, clueless and obnoxious American backpackers in eastern Europe who stumble upon hell on earth, in the form of a torture chamber set up for the benefit of the international rich, whose pleasure is in the killing of the unwilling. The film - only Roth’s second feature, after he had scored a cult success with the gruelling teen horror Cabin Fever - cost a mere $3.8m to make, but knocked The Chronicles of Narnia from the top box-office slot.

Some critics hailed him as the future of horror; others begrudgingly admired the film’s style, while recoiling from the scenes of blowtorches taking out eyeballs. Still others condemned it as repulsive, a sick new low in mainstream cinema. But maybe not for long, as Hostel: Part II, this time featuring a group of female students in the wilds of eastern Europe, is now upon us.

Background

• Hostel: Part II

• Hostel: Part II - Sunday Times review

• Hostel

• Festival: If you go to the woods

Here’s blood in your eye

Eli Roth’s movies revel in disgust, but the director proclaims himself the ‘horror Borat’

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Roth can certainly talk the talk. He insists that his films work on many levels - that they should be purely entertaining date movies, with lots of blood and splatter, but that there is far more there if you want to see it. “Le Monde picked Hostel as one of their top movies of the year. They saw it as a commentary on American capitalism gone too far,” he says. “Americans buying things is no longer enough for them. They’re not getting that thrill, they want something more.”

Oh, dear, here we go. “Art Forum magazine said this was a political comment on American imperialism, and on Americans going into other cultures and thinking they can buy and sell them. People saw different things in the movie.”

And Roth? What did he see in it? He made it, after all. “I like having my disgust with the Bush administration, and my feelings of upset about Iraq, and my fears for that - I like putting that all into the movie, and it’s there if you want to see it,” he says. He wants to start a discussion about the fear that he sees enveloping Americans, as well as simply entertain people. “You can get people talking about these taboo subjects.”

As self-justification goes, this is almost beyond parody - a kind of This Is Spinal Cord. Yet, as Roth continues to dump on his fellow countrymen, I start to wonder whether this is all for the European media’s benefit. The clichés pour forth. Americans are ignorant. Only 12% have passports. They don’t travel, they don’t know about other cultures, and so on.

If this is Roth’s sincere view, then why are the Europeans also shown as a pretty appalling bunch? Hostel depicted gangs of feral, murderous kids roaming the Slovakian streets. Other natives were portrayed as positively antediluvian. In the films, the Europeans are stereotypes, he says, and the Americans are also stereotypes of certain US travellers. “The film taps into fear of other cultures. It’s like a horror Borat.”

Of course, Sasha Baron Cohen was ultimately aiming his fire at Americans. There would have been no question of Borat reporting from Saudi Arabia. I ask Roth whether, for all his alleged concerns about Bush and imperialism, he wouldn’t be better taking on the all-too-real kidnappers and decapitators out there, and making a film about them? He seems fleetingly nonplussed. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t,” he says, “but this particular story is about this particular fear of mine.”

For Roth, handling your fears in a safe environment is one of the good things about horror. He had seen The Exorcist by the age of six, and watching Alien at eight made him want to be a director (as well as making him throw up). He started filming on Super 8, as well as consuming as many movies as he could, sometimes watching four a night, and became fascinated with special effects and make-up. “When you’re a kid, you have lots of fears – of monsters, of adults, of adolescence, of having sex,” he says, “and when you see them in a horror movie, you can scream about it. For me, it actually made me cope more with real-life fears.”

Not that “torture porn” is remotely about screaming, or even fear, for that matter. The current wave of horror, which has also included movies such as The Devil’s Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek and a French effort, High Tension, is more about how much you can take without having to look away in disgust. (Torture has even made its way to James Bond.) Roth credits himself with being one of the directors who brought back to horror the sexuality and nudity of the 1980s, and there have been the inevitable charges of misogyny, which he predictably dismisses as absurd.

“Any time you kill a woman in a movie in a violent way, you are going to get charged with being misogynistic,” he says. People don’t accuse him of being a man-hater if he kills male characters, he adds. Why, then, do the women have to be naked? “They’re not always naked,” he says. The girls get their revenge, the guys their comeuppance. “There were gangs of girls going to see Hostel, and they were screaming; they loved it. And they loved watching the guys get it.”

With the sequel, he was, he says, “very sensitive” in doing torture scenes with girls. “I said, ‘Okay, it’s the difference between hunting a lion and hunting a deer. Someone shoots a lion, they’re brave; someone shoots a deer, they’re cruel.’ So I wanted to write scenes that were horrifying, but also scenes that were watchable. I didn’t want people to feel they’d been punched in the stomach repeatedly.”

That might take some doing, in an era when genuine beheadings can be downloaded from the internet. Presumably, the makers of horror movies simply have to up the ante?

“I definitely think that,” he says. “It is definitely the YouTube effect. You can’t be more gory, as that would be cartoony, but you need stuff that’s going to match that and be at that level of intensity.”

Where all this is leading us is anybody’s guess, but it’s certainly not the bright, sunlit uplands. Roth wants to continue to “push horror forward”, but the future may see a change of direction for him. “I don’t think I’ll be here three years from now. I think I’m ready to move on to something else,” he says.

He will be making a film of Stephen King’s Cell. He’d also like to do a comedy. He had a great time, and got what he calls the best reviews of his career so far, when he made a jokey fake trailer that can be seen in Quentin Tarantino’s new double bill, Grind-house. Called Thanksgiving, it features a seminaked, trampolining cheerleader who is impaled on a knife between the legs. As the saying goes, comedy really is the hardest thing of all.

Hostel: Part II opens on June 29

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