Eli Roth makes box office gross — literally

By Mary Ellen Egan

updated 6:12 p.m. ET June 14, 2007

The scene from Hostel opens with a keyhole shot of a tabletop strewn with tools of torture: saws, pickaxes, knives, hooks. Cue sound effect — an ominous, metallic whine — and the camera opens up on an electric drill wielded by a sadist in surgical mask, black rubber gloves and black rubber apron. He approaches a screaming, bare-chested man who is chained to a chair. Cut to closeup: flesh being chewed up by the drill bit, replete with dangling chunks of gore.

That's entertainment! It comes from the twisted mind of filmmaker Eli Roth, a new prince of horror in Hollywood. Roth, 35, makes cheap, grisly films —  "Cabin Fever," "Hostel" and the new "Hostel: Part II" — as tightly written thrillers that build to extremely graphic bloodbaths. His detractors call it "torture porn." " Hostel's purposeful but mindless carnage unfolds into a ridiculous moral. Awful. Offal," a movie critic for the Denver Post decreed. "This is one of the most misogynistic films ever made," as the New York Times put it. Horror fans clamor for more.

Which is one reason Eli Roth endeavors to scare the bejabbers out of theatergoers. "I set out to make a sick, scary move," he says of Hostel, the story of three college boys who backpack across Europe, get seduced by three comely gals and end up on the wrong side of a torture den. "But also a film that hits different chords, like Americans' fear of other cultures, our feelings of superiority and people's need for control."

Horror is hot — again — in Hollywood, capable of turning low-budget violence into a box-office bonanza. In the past three years horror films have populated the top 50 international box office lists and turned in combined ticket and DVD sales of an impressive $1.5 billion. Roth's first feature, "Cabin Fever," about campers threatened by flesh-eating bacteria, cost $1.5 million to make and returned $43 million in ticket and DVD sales. He made "Hostel" for less than $5 million, and it reaped $20 million at the box office the weekend it opened and a total $101 million from theaters and DVDs.

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The sick thriller "Saw" and its spawn, "Saw II" and "Saw III," cost a combined $16 million to make and grossed $416 million worldwide, spurring its producers, Mark Burg and Oren Koules, to form a production company devoted exclusively to horror: Twisted Pictures. "Saw IV" is set for later this year, and scripts are being written for versions five and six.

"The horror audience is a lot smarter than people give them credit for," Burg says, "and if you want to be successful, you've got to be edgy." Edgy, these days, translates into onscreen torture (two "Hostels," three "Saws"), rape (the recent remake of "The Hills Have Eyes") and dismemberment (all of the above).

Burg considers Roth a friend and cheers his success, but he gloats nonetheless: Roth was forced to rewrite a scene in the script for "Hostel: Part II" when he discovered a similar bit had just been shot for "Saw III": a young woman's belly ring gets ripped from the flesh of her comely tummy. "We beat him to it," Burg says.

"Horror films tell us a lot about our culture," says Aviva Briefel, a professor who studies the genre at Bowdoin College. "They make us think about violence, fear and danger, but from a safe distance." She praises Eli Roth for his "smart and provocative" films and calls him the "next Wes Craven," the iconic director of such venerated slashfests as "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "The Hills Have Eyes" (the first one, in 1977).

Roth's fascination with scary movies began at age 8 when he watched "Alien," a sci-fi thriller about a monster that kills the entire crew of a doomed spaceship (except for the requisite damsel-in-distress, Sigourney Weaver). "That was the day I decided to become a director,'' he says. He persuaded his parents to buy him an 8mm camera, and by the time he entered New York University's film school in 1990, he had made 50 short films. In one sequence his brother is attacked with a circular saw and blood (ketchup) splatters all over the floor.

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