So there’s this guy—the hero—and he’s strapped to a chair in a dungeon, with a chain saw-wielding masked villain moving slowly toward him. What am I hoping for here? Do I want the hero to break loose and flee? Or break loose and turn that chain saw back on the predator? Or maybe—just maybe—do I want to see the hero get cut a little? Those are questions worth asking in the wake of Hostel and Wolf Creek, two especially brutish new horror films that have critics and movie lovers debating whether queasy effectiveness excuses outright sadism. Roger Ebert gave Wolf Creek zero stars and found it deeply offensive, while my friend and colleague Scott Tobias wrote a lengthy defense of the film, comparing it to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and saying that writer-director Greg McLean makes each death “count.” On the other hand, Tobias didn’t like Hostel much, and I can’t say I really enjoyed either one. In her essay “Fear of Movies,” Pauline Kael once argued that most people who consider themselves high-toned movie buffs are too timid to appreciate movies that stimulate their basest emotions: panic and arousal. But I like plenty of violent movies and don’t always care whether or not they have a point. It may be thoroughly decadent to enjoy stylish manslaughter, but sometimes thrills are thrills. My problems with Hostel and Wolf Creek have more to do with tone and style. If anything, neither film is glib enough. Ninety minutes or so of torture and bloody irony needs some element of fun to be wholly effective (as in the films of Quentin Tarantino, George Romero, Brian DePalma, et al.). Wolf Creek in particular is dim and dire, following three young people in the Australian outback as they meet a seemingly friendly local who good-naturedly complains that tourists are infesting his backyard like kangaroos, before admitting, ominously, that he shoots kangaroos. The first half of the movie is like an especially dry, aimless indie relationship drama, noteworthy only for its extreme camera angles, creepy music and grimy visuals. Then the bloodletting begins, with a single-minded, unrelenting resolve that would be more impressive if the picture weren’t so murky and joyless throughout. Writer-director Eli Roth’s Hostel has more moments of humor and a much more ingenious plot. Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson play backpacking Americans who leave the decadence of Amsterdam for the rumored pleasures of an impoverished Eastern European village. But like Lilya 4-Ever in reverse, Hernandez and Richardson eventually learn they’ve been duped into selling their bodies, to rich men who get off on butchery. There’s a fairly interesting point being made here, about sex tourism and human exploitation, though Roth betrays the cruel symmetry of his story by giving it a gratuitously crowd-pleasing final twist. (He also betrays the movie as a whole by making Hernandez and Richardson too generally vacuous and by giving them useless dialogue, mostly along the lines of, “Fuck, dude,” and “Oh shit.”) As to the question of whether either Hostel or Wolf Creek is excessive, some would argue that movies like this need to be excessive, to make audiences feel the brutality. And it’s not like the intended audience for Hostel and Wolf Creek doesn’t want to be shocked and appalled. Horror-movie fans wear their psychic scars like war wounds—the rougher the ride, the cooler they are for taking it. Don’t judge them too harshly if some part of them would be just as happy seeing the heroes carved up. They came for gore, not moral lessons. It’s more interesting to place movies like these in a larger cultural context. The ’70s grindhouse standouts have been read as a response to the slaughter in Vietnam and frequently played off of the generation gap, making either counterculture freaks or uptight Nixonites into villains, depending on the sensibilities of the filmmakers. In Hostel and Wolf Creek, slightly obnoxious middle-class kids meet “common” folk and literally get their asses handed to them. The films are full of cultural signifiers—especially the digital cameras and cell phones that wind up being used against people who rely on them—and both climax with a common nightmare, of being chased through a place with more walls than exits. What does it all mean? Well, it’s becoming a critical cliché to relate every genre movie to life in the post-9/11 world, but there’s something unshakable about the central conceit of both Hostel and Wolf Creek, in which the heroes go to sleep happy and wake up with knives at their throats. More nerve-wracking is the question that inevitably follows: now what?
