Hostel director Eli Roth explains what gore goes too far for him in movies
Eli Roth wants people who watch his films to feel they had 'their ass kicked, but not get kicked in the balls’
Horror film director Eli Roth has explained exactly how far he’s willing to push the gore in his movies, saying you’re ‘betraying the audience’ if you take it too far.
Roth - the man behind gross out horror hits Hostel, Cabin Fever and Thanksgiving - is currently promoting his new movie Borderlands.
The film is a ‘totally bonkers’ adaptation of the beloved video game franchise starring Cate Blanchett, Barbie’s Ariana Greenblatt and Everything Everywhere All at Once star Jamie Lee Curtis.
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He tells UNILAD: “You know me from my horror films, but I love Star Wars. I love Escape from New York. I love totally bonkers movies, whether it's Time Bandits or The Fifth Element.
“I knew the game Borderlands, and the opportunity came along to direct it, and it very much matches with my sense of humor. There's a sense of total insanity.”
Borderlands has been rated PG-13, but those who follow Roth’s work know the man often has viewers reaching for the sick bucket.
He made his name with 2002’s Cabin Fever, a repulsive contagion movie where half the cast’s flesh melts off by the end credits.
Then came 2005’s Hostel, a movie about a black market Slovak torture basement which sees fingers lopped off, achilles tendons severed and eyeballs hanging out of people’s faces.
But Roth does have a line he won’t cross when it comes to movie gore. As he puts it, he wants viewers to feel like they’ve had ‘their ass kicked, but not get kicked in the balls’.
He says: “I try to push it in every single movie, but sometimes you feel like you're betraying the audience. It's easy to put a shocking, violent image [on screen]. The challenge is, how do you do an image and [viewers] want it there. They want to know what happens next.
“For me, it's about finding that line of having people uncomfortable and going, ‘I don't know if I'm allowed to watch this. Is this OK?’.”
It’s all about having people laughing along at the OTT violence one minute, but pushed to an ‘uncomfortable place' the next.
He points to - and spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t watched these movies - the early kills in Thanksgiving, which he says are ‘a level of violence that’s acceptable’, particularly as we see the killer feed a cat after killing its owner. As we know, kill a pet in a horror movie and people will be baying for your blood.
But when we get to the dinner scene and the movie starts ‘killing people we like’, ‘you want to put people in that uncomfortable place’.
He says killing Josh (Derek Richardson) halfway through Hostel is a similar move, but then you ‘reward [viewers] with something cathartic at the end’, which in this case involves Paxton (Jay Hernandez) enacting bloody revenge on the torturers.
Ultimately, Roth knows there’s only a certain amount of violence film studios will accept, and he can’t match the stomach-churning gore of movies like A Serbian Film.
He continues: “If you're going to make a movie that's just flat out Serbian Film level disturbing, you’ve got to do it on a much smaller budget.
“So if you're making a larger budget film, I want to push the boundaries as far as I can, but still have people going, what happens next?”
Borderlands hits cinemas on Thursday August 8.
Topics: Horror, Film and TV
Simon Fearn