ABSTRACT
In 2005, the year of its theatrical release, I watched Eli Roth’s Hostel for the first time. The experience is not one I will easily forget. At the time, I was not the seasoned Horror viewer I am today, hard to scare and aware of the major tricks of the genre.1 I went to see the film mostly because it had been described as one of the scariest ever made and because Tarantino endorsed it. Perhaps for this reason, and because the film managed to affect me in a way that many others have not, I can remember my response to it very vividly, and it was multi-layered. Affectively, the film managed to do things to my body: I was on edge for its last half hour and some of its scenes were truly hair-raising. I was startled and disgusted, and I felt anxiety for Paxton (Jay Hernandez) when he tries to escape the building where Elite Hunting carry out their sick business. Representationally, the film did not make me aware of gender in ways that, say, the films of Dario Argento had in the past; I was mostly shaken by its cruelty, and especially, by its explicit scenes of torture. Emotionally, the film “hit” me just as effectively: I was horrified by the thought of the plausibility of its premise – to make things worse, Hostel claimed to be based on true events – and the possibility that people, somewhere in the world, would be mad enough to pay money to kill or torture someone they did not know for the mere pleasure of seeing someone suffer and die. This aspect of the film stayed with me for a few days, as I pondered not just about the ethics of the characters’ actions but also my own involvement and role as consumer of violent spectacles: had I enjoyed the film? If so, did that make me complicit in the torture-for-sale business at the heart of the film? Was I in some way responsible for the carnographic spectacles I had witnessed? And worst of all, why did I want to carry on watching Horror?
