Featured Image Credit: Lionsgate
Topics: Film and TV, Horror, News
Kit Roberts
Content warning: This article contains discussions of horror and graphic content
When we talk about horror films, one point always seems to come up, which is which movie has the dubious honor of being the scariest of them all.
There are plenty of contenders for that, including multiple films so disturbing that they have been banned in several countries.
One notorious film is Cannibal Holocaust, where the director reportedly even had to publicly produce members of the cast to reassure the authorities that they had not actually been killed in the film.
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But another series which is so bad that films in the franchise have been banned in several countries is the 2005 film Hostel, as well as its 2007 sequel.
The first film follows two college students who are caught up in a horrifying scenario while travelling to Slovakia, including them being kidnapped and tortured.
At the time the movies were heavily criticized over their depiction of graphic violence, including close-up shots of tendons snapping and people being butchered with chainsaws.
The plot hinges on a shadowy organization which allows the rich and powerful to bid on normal people in an auction, and if they win then they get to hunt, torture, and kill them.
And the sequel is just as gruesome as the first instalment as well, involving cannibalism on a living person, a character bathing in a victim's blood, and castration.
When we said it was graphic, we really meant it.
The first movie was directed by Eli Roth, whose other work includes 2001 Maniacs (2005) and The Green Inferno (2013).
It's not just the graphic nature of the film, which has been called 'torture porn' by some critics, but also the dark themes which have seen the movies subject to intense criticism.
Not only that, but many people from Czechia and Slovakia criticized the way the movies portrayed Eastern Europe.
This criticism was particularly focussed on showing Slovakia as poor and full of crime.
Linda Heldichova, a member of the Slovak culture ministry at the time, even alleged that it 'damaged' the reputation and image of the country.
The movie was so graphic that it was even banned in Ukraine, while the uncut sequel was banned in Germany and debated in the UK parliament over concerns that it could be illegal.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the controversy generated by the first two films there was even another sequel.
This time the setting was switched from Slovakia to Las Vegas, where a bachelor party ran foul of the shadowy organization.