Blood brother: Director Eli Roth, inventer of 'torture porn'

Occasionally, a society gets the films it deserves. In a recent review, the US critic David Denby advanced the proposition that, in two recent releases - the vigilante conservatism of Shooter, and the imperialist fantasia of 300 - one could discern something of the mindset of the culture which produced them: "Made in a time of frustration," he wrote, "when Americans are fighting a war that they can neither win nor abandon, [they] feel like the products of a culture slowly and painfully going mad." Some would say the same of Eli Roth, whose horror movies have attracted fervent praise and equally strident condemnation. Few contemporary film-makers have been so polarising.

He came seemingly out of nowhere, travelling fast. His first film, a blackly comic slasher flick called Cabin Fever (2002), written mostly while he was working for US radio shock-jock Howard Stern, inspired a bidding war between North American distributors that ended with Lionsgate paying a reported $3.5m. It wound up repaying that investment tenfold, becoming the company's biggest release of that year. Roth was just 30, but had reportedly been making amateur films for 22 years, since an early exposure to Ridley Scott's Alien.

His next film, Hostel (2005), did even better. Presenting in gruelling detail the torture and slaughter of American backpackers by the inhabitants of a remote European backwater, it earned millions, and predictably, has inspired a sequel, Hostel 2. This time around, the prey are three young women, and their predators a group of businessmen, Americans like themselves, who have paid for the privilege of hunting them down.

It also spawned a number of similarly films, such as the recently released Captivity and Vacancy. The most directly spin-off, though,is Paradise Lost (or Turistas, as it was originally known), in which yet another group of backpackers - three Americans, two Brits and an Australian - are menaced, tortured and killed in rural Brazil (currently on release). (Its makers proudly declared the film's 98-minute full cut "too gruesome for theatres".) And though he had no involvement with the production, Roth's influence is apparent in every frame.

He's also a canny businessman, making his movies cheaply, and so retaining creative control - the risk on a $4m-feature is exponentially less than that attached to, say, Spider-Man 3. Tellingly, he has resisted the lemming-like urge of newly successful directors to keep upping the ante, to work with bigger budgets and A-list stars. Such choices would not only open the gates to the marketing men, with their pesky, risk-averse notions of how his film should be, but would anyway invalidate the central premise of his cinema. Which is all about communicating a particular aesthetic: cheap, sleazy, and unrepentant.

According to Roth, "I'd seen all these films on the festival circuit like Audition, Ichi the Killer, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, and I said, this is the kind of movie I want to make. Something that's sick, and disturbing, and fucked- up... [but] I wanted it also to be a fun ride."

Yet it's the sleaze that has drawn fire. In January of last year, New York magazine attacked him, crediting him with inventing a new genre, "torture-porn". Roth has been quick to criticise his detractors for equating horror with pornography, and remarkably vociferous in his own defence. His concern is not hard to understand. As most viewers will be aware (not to mention anyone who saw Kirby Dick's excellent 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated), American cinema has shown itself to be far more accommodating to explicit onscreen depictions of violence, than to sexuality. For Roth to be seen as peddling smut means that he might attract unwelcome attention from the censors. But so long as he just keeps inflicting bloody ruin on the human body, he is safe.

As he explained to an interviewer: "The ratings board... kinda get it with horror movies. They understand that if it's a horror film and there is blood, then there are certain expectations that have to be met by the fans... It's incredible, but the sex is what they're really tense about."

Also, he added (echoing Denby), there is the matter of context: "Right now we're at war, and people are dying every day. Americans are getting killed, bodies are being burned, and no one knows when it's going to end. You put my film up against that, and it's like theatre, magic tricks."

In one sense, he's the linear descendant of those 1970s horror greats, so unfairly excluded from the canon of important American film-makers, trash-art auteurs such as Wes Craven, John Carpenter and George A Romero. But where their films turned inward, depicting America as a lawless frontier - the deadly rural backwaters, the corrosive malaise of industrial towns - Roth's films, and their heirs, look further afield. The first Hostel was set in what appeared to be a Slovakia of the subconscious, and played on every backpacker's unease at foreigners and their strange ways: the weird food, the incomprehensible jabbering, the insatiable lustmord. It might have been titled Let's Go: Hell.

It's easy - and tempting, at first glance - to dismiss these works as the by-product of a particular historical moment, one in which the US and the rest of the world - and Europe in particular - are at odds. But America is hardly alone in this. After all, the most sustained and ferocious piece of culture-baiting of the past 12 months, Borat, was a British product; never mind that it was also one of the most complex and discomfiting comedies of our time. And Severance, the wittiest of recent horror-comedies, was another UK title, stranding its cast of doomed misfits in a Hungarian backwater straight out of Deliverance.

Roth's cinema differs from that of his predecessors, too, in its oddly monotonal quality. In the slasher flicks of Craven or Carpenter or Tobe Hooper, the victims were given at least a semblance of personality, even if they were mere archetypes: the nerd, the jock, the slut, the virgin. Lip-service was paid to the notion of actual people, in the hope that the audience might recognise something of themselves up there on the screen.

Roth's cinema doesn't do this. His characters are barely distinguishable from one another, and are uniformly self-centred - the effect is a little like watching rats run a maze. Some would call this a failure - not only in human terms, but also cinematically, since it diminishes the viewers' emotional involvement in the story, and therefore their interest. But it also speaks to the lack of empathy in contemporary American culture, as well as other trends - the fragmentation of narrative, the increasingly utilitarian, disposable tenor of human relations.

But such factors are strictly incidental: collateral damage. Amoral in the strict sense, Roth's film-making does not seek to illuminate any great truths, nor to convey any message. It simply is a set of sensations, calibrated for maximum efficiency and effect. One might say its very blankness is the most terrifying thing about it. Beside the ruthless expediency of its maker, its array of monsters and maniacs can barely compete.

What does the future hold for Roth? In recent years he has aligned himself with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino (he even takes an acting part in QT's latest film, his contribution to the Grindhouse double bill, Death Proof. Lately he's floated the possibility of joining Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright to make Grindhouse 2 - feature-length versions of the imaginary trailers they contributed to the original film. It's a cute idea, but Roth may have problems: executive producer Harvey Weinstein is still smarting from the box-office failure of the first Grindhouse. Grindhouse 2 is unlikely to materialise, except perhaps as a straight-to-DVD item. Hostel 2 opened in the US a couple of weeks ago to disappointing box-office returns over its first weekend. We get the culture we deserve, and the US is realising that it perhaps deserves better than this - as for the UK, we'll know soon enough whether we still have a taste for "torture porn".

'Hostel 2' is released on Friday

Gore blimey: Flicks to make you think while you cringe behind the cushions

Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972)

Still brilliant, 40 years on: a tale of backwoods tortures and murder, filled with nightmarish images, and almost primal sense of terror

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Atrocity, not horror, is the point of this unrelentingly brutal masterpiece. Genuinely shocking, and also discomfitingly smart

My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981)

Underrated slasher flick, benefiting from smart plotting and imaginative (for the time) set-ups

Seul Contre Tous/I Stand Alone (Gaspar Noé, 1998)

Pre-'Irréversible', Noé's debut feature paints a bleak picture of a debased world, seen through the eyes of a nihilistic French butcher

The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (Thomas Clay, 2005)

British wunderkind Clay's elegant début, set in a dismal northern town, outraged even the most hardened of critics

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