Show notes
Today we have a very, very special guest. Somebody who I've wanted to have on the show since I first started the show a few years ago. That is the legendary Eli Roth. We basically focused the conversation on Thanksgiving, his latest movie, which I highly recommend you go see. In any case, I figured I would give everybody a brief overview of the life and career of Eli Roth before getting to the interview.
Eli Roth was born in Newton, Massachusetts. His father was a psychologist, and his mother was an artist. He grew up on '80s horror and even had a horror-thriller theme to his Bar Mitzvah, where he got sawed in half. He went on to attend the NYU Tisch Film School, and he made what he called a Tarantino rip-off, a short called "Restaurant Dogs," which he spent about $10,000 on and used as a calling card to get his first feature made.
His first feature, of course, was Cabin Fever in 2003. So Cabin Fever was based on a real-life skin rash that he got while riding ponies on a farm in Iceland. Turns out it was ringworm, and he claims that when he was scratching his leg, entire pieces of skin were peeling off. He then went to shave his face, and it had affected his face too.
And as he tried to shave, entire swaths of skin came off of his face. Eli claimed that he essentially shaved off half of his face before realizing this is a perfect concept for a horror movie. He then went on to write the script, but it took six years for him to raise the $1.5 million budget, which he raised through private investments.
The movie went on the festival circuit, and Tarantino saw it and claimed it was the best new American movie. It was eventually bought by Lionsgate at the Toronto Film Festival in what was the festival's biggest sale and then went on to earn $35 million globally. Perhaps Eli Roth is best known for his breakout horror hit, Hostel.
This is my favorite Eli Roth movie. There's something about it that I find to be just timeless and ruthless but still a lot, a lot of fun. It mixes brutality with fun in equal measure and it gets really dark and really brutal and really scary, and you almost don't think you can handle it, but somehow you can.
Hostel was made for a budget of $4 million and opened number one at the box office opening weekend, eventually taking in $20 million in its first weekend and grossing $80 million worldwide at the box office. Eli turned down multiple studio directing jobs and took a directing salary of only $10,000 on Hostel to keep the budget as low as possible so there would be no limits set on the violence. In 2006, film critic David Edelstein in New York Magazine credited Eli Roth with creating the horror subgenre, "torture porn."
So when you think about it, the early 2000s was a pretty watershed time for horror. The '90s were relatively tame compared to the '80s. Of course, in the '90s you had Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, but they paled in comparison to the buckets of gore that we saw with franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and even the Texas Chainsaw sequels that came out in the '80s.
However, the early 2000s led to the Splat Pack. This is a number of directors who were considered to contribute to a gleeful revival of gore being put back into movies, and Eli Roth was a big part of it. They include Eli Roth, Alexander Aja, Adam Green, Rob Zombie, and James Wan.
There were a few others, but these were the main guys credited as being part of the Splat Pack.
So to put this into chronological order, first came High Tension in 2003, which also kick-started French extremism. That was director Alexander Aja. And that movie is fantastic. I highly, highly recommend it.
Next came Rob Zombie's amazing House of a Thousand Corpses. I recently bought the Blu-ray, and I think I've bought this movie about five times now because I just cannot stop. In any case... Saw is what really kicked off torture porn in 2004 and essentially paved the way for Hostel, which came out in 2005.
Hostel was then followed up by Hatchet from Adam Green in 2006. The Hatchet movies are a lot, a lot of fun. If you're a Friday the 13th fan, you definitely need to check these out.
SO I also figured I would give you Eli Roth essentials. These are what I consider to be Eli Roth's core horror movies. First is Cabin Fever. As I mentioned before, it's fun. It's fantastic. It is really, really repulsive. It's great to see what he was able to do on a limited budget, and you get glimpses of his overall sensibility. Next, Hostel. Unmatched brutality and humor. Eli Roth's best movie, in my opinion. Next was Hostel 2, which I think was a very worthwhile follow-up.
He claims that he lost audiences on this one because it was too brutal and it lacked the humor of the first one, but I kind of disagree.
It might not be as funny, but it is a great movie, and the whole thing is worth the final kill at the end, which I still don't know how they got away with an R rating for that. I'm not going to ruin the ending for you, but I do recommend you see it.
Fourth would be Green Inferno from 2013. This movie is highly underrated, and I don't know why I don't hear more people talking about this.
Socially, it's very much ahead of its time and it explores what Eli Roth referred to as slacktivism, basically people who claim to get behind causes just for the vanity of it and actually don't understand the causes nor do they actually do anything about it, they just tweet about it. Somehow this feels more relevant today than ever before. Green Inferno is fantastic. It's basically Eli Roth's version of Cannibal Holocaust, which I highly recommend if you haven't seen it. Apparently you can get an animal cruelty-free version, and I highly recommend watching that version. If you're not sure what you're watching, if you see a turtle, a monkey, or a weird aardvark-looking thing.
Start to fast forward. It is just not worth it. But the movie itself is fantastic. So Green Inferno, I actually almost vomited watching this movie, which has never ever happened before. I saw a screening of it, and I had to eye the exits. I had to figure out an escape plan. I didn't end up throwing up, but I had to plan for it. And like I said, never ever happened before in a movie. So yeah, so that is my Eli Roth essential core four. Again, that's Cabin Fever, Hostel, Hostel 2, and Green Inferno.
All of this brings us to Thanksgiving, Eli Roth's latest movie which just came out. So I'm hoping most of you listeners have seen Grindhouse from 2007. If you haven't... Run, don't walk.
Grindhouse is a fantastic, fantastic experience, and one of the most insane moviegoing experiences I've probably ever had. When you watch it now, it just feels like an impossible movie that could never ever get made ever again. Nothing like it. It's about a $70 million epic where Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino each made a grindhouse-style horror movie and in between the movies are these fake trailers for movies that don't exist.
So the first fake trailer was Machete, which actually spawned two movies, and then Rob Zombie did a trailer, Edgar Wright did a trailer, and Eli Roth did a trailer, called Thanksgiving, and the trailer is so awesome and so brutal and just so completely and totally insane.
And now Thanksgiving is a feature-length movie has finally come to theaters and it is a lot of fun. It's very different from the trailer. It is not an '80s style slasher. It's very much a modern reinterpretation of it, but it is a really fun theatrical experience.
So when approaching the feature-length Thanksgiving, Eli had to come up with a way to contextualize the new movie against the old movie. And what he basically did was he thought of the old movie in his imagination as a movie that came out in the '80s but it was so brutal, so appalling, that it was pulled from theaters and all of the reels were destroyed and the only thing that survived was that trailer.
Thanksgiving movie is a remake of that Thanksgiving movie. Pretty interesting way to frame it. And, uh, yeah, it explains why they are not all that alike, but regardless, the new Thanksgiving does not disappoint. So don't wait for streaming, just get out to the theaters and see it.
So I am very pleased, very humbled, very grateful to introduce today's guest, the legendary Eli Roth. Oh
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