Hostel and the Slovakia that wasn’t there
Eli Roth’s Hostel turned a real European country into a horror-movie trap. The film is remembered for its violence, but its geography is the stranger legacy.
The setup of Hostel is a backpacker’s fantasy turned inside out. Two American students and an Icelandic friend they have met on the road are drifting through Europe looking for parties. In Amsterdam a stranger tells them about a hostel in Slovakia, not far from Bratislava, where the women are beautiful and the visitors are few. They take the train east. What they find is not a party but a business that sells wealthy clients the chance to torture and kill travellers.
A film built on a rumour
Roth wrote and directed the film, with Quentin Tarantino attached as an executive producer, and it was made on a small budget. It premiered at festivals in 2005 and opened widely in January 2006, when it became a substantial hit for its size. Along with the Saw series it came to define the mid-2000s wave that critics took to calling torture porn, a label that stuck to Hostel more than to almost any other film.
The movie depends on a specific kind of ignorance. Its heroes know nothing about the place they are travelling to beyond a promise of easy sex, and the film’s structure punishes them for it. That is a sharp idea, and for its first act Hostel is a pointed satire of a certain kind of entitled tourist. The trouble is that the film shares the same ignorance. Its Slovakia is a postcard of decay: grim factories, gangs of feral children, a town where everybody is in on the scheme.
The country that objected
None of it was shot in Slovakia. Hostel was filmed in the Czech Republic, and the village at its centre does not exist. That did not stop the film from becoming, for a while, one of the best-known images of the country abroad, and Slovak officials and tourism representatives publicly objected to the picture it painted. Their complaint was simple: a real, modern member of the European Union had been used as a byword for lawlessness. The sequel in 2007 returned to the same imagined Slovakia, with the same results.
Two decades on, the film’s rumour has a mundane answer. Bratislava is an ordinary Central European capital, cheaper than Vienna an hour up the road and busy with weekend visitors, and its nightlife and adult scene are about as unsinister as anywhere else’s. Anyone who wants to know what Bratislava’s real amateur scene looks like will find local listings, private flats and the usual advice about safety and discretion, not a hunting lodge.
Why it still matters
Hostel is worth revisiting less as a shocker than as a document of how horror films use geography. The genre has always needed a dark wood beyond the edge of the map. In 2005, for an American audience, that edge was apparently a train ride east of Vienna. The film’s best idea is that the tourists who treat a country as a playground deserve to be frightened. Its weakness is that it never asks what the country itself might look like.
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