Bonus Episode: Was Hostel Based on a True Story?

"Say what you want about the film, but the concept of 'Hostel' is downright terrifying."

Agreed!

There's a story that Eli Roth based the film Hostel on a real website that offered people the opportunity to commit murder for a fee.

Is this true? Are the Hostel films a metaphor or are we being shown something that actually happens? 

⚠️ Spoilers lie ahead for Hostel & Hostel: Part II. Both films have pretty grotesque subject matter, so please be advised.

Links:

https://collider.com/eli-roth-hostel-murder-website/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/26/cannibal-restaurant-flime-germany

https://consaracytheories.com/f/its-time-to-rethink-what-now

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134783-600-is-it-time-for-a-more-subtle-view-on-the-ultimate-taboo-cannibalism/

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/07/europe/dutch-police-belgium-torture-shipping-containers/index.html

https://www.cbr.com/hostel-eli-roth-real-life-inspiration/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostel_(2005_film)

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai. Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's bonus episode, I will be talking about ELI Roth's films hostile and hostile part two, and more specifically, to get into the question of, could this be real? Are we being told, like Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut? Are we being told something about the way the world really works, these decadent, hyper, elite, super rich assholes? Are we being told through the veneer of cinema, through the veneer of grotesque horror movies. What actually really happens? It's spooky month, which is one of my favorite times of the year. And I really like horror movies. Some people don't. Some people watch them all year round, which, to be honest with you, my hand is in the air on that. It doesn't matter to me if it's February or October, if it's the summer or the winter, if a good horror movie is on, I'll probably watch it. With that being said, this genre of horror, the Saw movies, the hostile movies, people cutting off limbs and the so called torture porn genre of horror is not my favorite. I'm much more into vampires, werewolves, ghosts, haunted houses, demons and devils and witches. I like paranormal type horror, as opposed to torture horror. Nevertheless, I wanted to record this episode because one of the movie channels had been showing hostile and hostile part two. And I thought, Gosh, I even thought about those movies in years, and it started to gnaw at me, this idea of, could this be like, Eyes Wide Shut? Is it possible that the filmmakers are telling us using the guys of cinema, like, Hey, this is all fiction. Wink. Is it, though? Or are they telling us that the hyper elites actually do this kind of thing? Pick out your frosty beverage of choice. Be aware that spoilers lie ahead. I'm not going to get into a lot of graphic detail about the films, but in order to discuss the plot, I'm gonna have to get into some spoilers for hostile and hostile part two, and we're gonna be delving into some pretty graphic and gross subject matter. I'm not trying to pull an exorcist on you here and hype you up for no reason. I just want to be clear, especially if you're not terribly familiar with these films, they're pretty nasty. If you're squeamish, if this is not for you, skip this episode, because when we dive into these waters, we're gonna get into some real mess. Pick your frosty beverage of choice, and we will saddle up and take this ride. The first hostel movie came out in 2005 and I even though I hadn't thought about it in a long time when the movie channel was showing it, I did remember going to the movie theater with one of my best friends, who was also a horror movie enthusiast, to see this film when it came out. And I remember we left the theater like with a sense of the creepy crawlies, not that that horror movie feeling of, oh my God, I need to sleep with the lights on. I'm scared a serial killer is going to show up, or I'm scared the devil is hiding under the bed. Not like that. We just felt like, ew, like Could, could somebody do that? Like, what would be wrong with a person? What's wrong with the insides of a person's brain, the insides of a person's soul, that they would want to go somewhere and do that? And then we also thought about the college kids in the movie, like, who does that as well? Who goes off to some foreign country you don't know anybody, you don't speak the language. You're going off with weirdos. Like, who does that as well? That's just basic safety 101, don't go off to have some kind of forbidden adventure in a foreign country where you don't speak the language when it gave us the creeps so hostile opens up and it's a group of three obnoxious college bros that are in Amsterdam, at least. That's how, especially being in my 40s, I look at dudes like this. I'm like, Oh, God, just annoy. Super annoy. So this group of three obnoxious college bros are in Amsterdam, one of them. Says they should actually check out a museum instead of smoking dope. However, they continue smoking dope. Their vacation is basically a montage of sex, drugs and clubs in the red light district. One of them says he's not turned on by going in a room and paying to do things to another person. This is clear foreshadowing. We learned that the two Americans went together, and I think their names in the movie are like Josh and Paxton, and they picked up a ski V Icelandic pervert named Ollie one night at the hostel. Another creepy dude named Alex shows them pornographic photos and says these women can be found at a special place in Slovakia. It's not a place you can find in any guidebook. Off they go to Slovakia in search of perversion. Ollie reveals he has a six year old child and was married for eight years. Presumably, he's not some young college bro, after all, even though he acts very immature, a middle aged well to do man on the train tells the boys that Slovakia is great because you can pay to do anything. And he really emphasizes anything. The man awkwardly eats a salad with his hands and gives them a creepy speech about something dying so he should not go hungry. He then attempts to molest one of the guys, and they kick him out of their train compartment. They get off at porichani, at what looks to be a desolate, impoverished area, their cab driver tells them, we make plastic for Slovakia. And they start to wonder if this has all been a giant waste of time. Finally, they arrive in a beautiful area, and the hostel is very nice. The spa is filled with naked women and lots of fake boobs. They head off to a nightclub where the women give them party drugs. One of the guys is accosted by a menacing gang of little kids, but is rescued by the weird salad eating pervert from the train. Ollie vanishes with a woman, but then vanishes completely. He resurfaces and leads them into a museum of torture, because there's nothing foreboding about that. But the man is not Ollie. He merely has on Ollie's clothes. We see a brief vignette as the audience to let us know that Ollie is dead. One of the boys, Josh, takes ill and goes back to the hostel to sleep. The other boy grows bored of his prostitute girlfriends, as they have grown bored of him. He gets locked into a storage room by accident at the nightclub where he, too, takes ill. It's apparent they've been drugged the first I'd say 30 to 40 minutes of the movie are really just an annoying boob filled, slow paced setup for the film. If you like annoying, slow paced, boob filled setups for a horror movie, this is the one for you, because you're going to get plenty of fake boobies and slow pacing. Just my opinion, we see Josh in some kind of medical torture room. His torturer is the salad man from the train. He says he always wanted to be a surgeon, but the boards would not pass him a surgeon holds life in his hands, and the man says he is paying for the ability to torture the other boy, Paxton, wakes up in the bar storage room, which probably saved his life. He returns to the hostel and finds a new group of prostitutes running the same shtick. The people around him keep disappearing, and the little kid gang steals his cell phone. The police are no help. The cop asks the boy where he's from, and he says he's from California. The cop makes a menacing comment about how the boy is so far from home. He finds the prostitutes from the night before and demands to know where his friends are. They give him a weird, flippant answer about how they're at an art show, and they agree to take him there. He sees a man outside and asks how the art exhibit is, and the man replies to Him, be careful in there, because you could easily spend all of your money. The place looks like it's been bombed, and I thought of John Carpenter in this documentary about the Amityville Horror I'm going to release an episode about that, probably for next Halloween. But there's this great like part in this Amityville Horror documentary, behind the scenes, behind the series, the supposed True Story of everything, where John Carpenter is interviewed, and he says people don't immediately leave a haunted house. In a movie normal people would get into a haunted house and leave immediately, but movie people don't, because they're movie people. And I thought. Thought that because it's like this idiot boy is going into an obvious death trap, because he's an idiot. In the movie, he sees the surgeon performing an autopsy on his friend, and the hooker laughs that she's paid a lot of money for luring him there. Paxton escapes his torture room and has to figure a way out of the building. He disguises himself in another man's expensive suit. While going through the man's wallet, he finds a business card about elite hunting. Apparently, it's $5,000 to kill a Russian, 10,000 to kill a European, and 25,000 to kill an American. In the locker room as he's trying to leave, he meets a man who says he's paid $50,000 to torture a female. The man says, All whore houses and strip clubs are the same at the end of the day, but killing someone is different. We get a happy ish ending, I guess because Paxton escapes back into Europe and kills the amateur surgeon who tortured his friend. Now we go to hostile part two. This film opens with a man rifling through someone else's possessions, burning some and keeping others like cash and liquor. After this scene, we see the boy from the first movie, Paxton, he's taken to an Italian hospital and visited by police, he tells them that he was taken to a factory where rich people pay to torture and kill kids. It's designed like a hunting club for humans. The police ask questions about the man that Paxton killed at the train station. However, as Paxton is being murdered by the dirty cops, he wakes up. It was all a dream. Paxton becomes paranoid and has nightmares, as you would after you've survived a murder club like that, one would have PTSD and nightmares. I'm sure his girlfriend assumes that he has gone crazy, and it seems to me that she doesn't completely believe his story of the hostel. The next morning, Paxton is murdered after warning his girlfriend that the hunting club is full of rich, powerful, well connected people. Paxton, severed head is brought to a man, possibly a Russian oligarch, who looks inside this box containing the severed head and simply replies, ad lichten, which means great or wonderful or good, very good, like so in Russian, for example, if we were to say something like Leach, no, we Mola ditz, it would mean like, very good. You did a great job. So we go now to a group of girls in Italy taking art classes. Of course, the models, male and female, are very good looking and overly friendly. We have flashbacks to the first movie with the prostitutes luring the guys to the hostel and spa, two girls who want to party have teamed up with a standard horror movie nerd girl who does not one of them immediately finds a drug dealer. Another is targeted by one of the Italian models from the class who seems to be following them. The drug dealer gets violent. The Nerd Girl is mugged on the train. I've written in my notes, basically the train to Prague is a loud hellscape. The female model from Rome swoops in to save the day. She somehow fends off the drug dealer and his pals and retrieves the stolen items for the nerd girl, the one the woman who we assume was an Italian figure model toast the girl with vodka and says nasdarovia. So it's like, why would an Italian be saying nasdarovia? Nasdarovia is actually in Russian. More so what you would say, like, if you've been to a dinner or a dinner party and you want to say something nice to the host. If the host says thank you for coming, then you would actually say something like nasdarovia in return. It's really not the same as like cheers or to your health. It gets mistranslated that way a lot, but that's really not quite accurate. Nevertheless. Why is an Italian figure model drinking vodka and telling the girls nazderovia, that's weird, she convinces the other girls to go with her on a spa vacation to Slovakia. So here we go again. Same creepy place, same creepy people, same creepy hostel. This time we get more plot exposition, the hostile worker takes the girls passports downstairs to a scanner, and old rich dudes cell phones start blowing up. Thereafter, it's not difficult to guess why the elites are bidding on the chance to torture and kill. Some are sitting with wives business. Colleagues or even grandchildren, as they do this one man gets a call, and right next to the phone is a milk carton with a missing child's photo on it. I feel like Eli Roth is telling us something very important here. He could have used any prop or not had a prop there by the telephone at all, but yet he has a missing child's photo on it, on this milk carton in a film about people paying to torture and kill young people. I don't find that a coincidence. This man has a wife and two young children who rush off to catch the school bus. Meanwhile, he's getting a call about sadistic torture and murder. The Ritchie's arrive in Slovakia and are given the red carpet treatment. Chauffeurs, luxury cars, nice hotels. They are given pagers like you'd get at a 2000s era restaurant for when your table is ready, except it's for when your murder victim is ready. The girls go off to some harvest festival. We learn that one of them is herself quite rich. And I wonder how this will play out. One of the richies tries to back out on getting a tattoo that's required of all the murderers. It's made clear to him that there is no option to back out, do it or be killed yourself. The girls have a good time at the festival not knowing what they're being set up for. There's a creepy interlude where one of the girls is approached by a man offering to help her. She rebuffs him because he's unattractive and she has no idea what he's talking about. The nerdy girl wants to go off on a boat ride with a boy who speaks little or no English. He takes her to a secluded area where she is abducted. Two of the businessmen, waiting for someone to murder, are discussing how it will feel. Everyone will subconsciously know that they have killed and will fear them. So it's almost like they're doing it as a business decision. They compare it to being in high school, like, Hey, you remember the first guy in class that started having sex? Yeah? You know, you could just tell there was something different about him. Like, animals can sense when somebody's been laid, yeah? Yeah. I get that. Well, they're gonna know that about us too. They're gonna know that we've killed. They're gonna know they can't fuck with us because we're murderers, super creepy, the party girls assume the nerd is in post coital bliss with a man. Instead, she's hanging upside down in some sort of Bath chamber. A naked woman walks in wearing a cape, which she sheds in order to lay under the suspended girl. She does this in order to take a literal blood bath. There's a bizarre scene where a gangster kills one of the child bandits in the woods. And yet again, I'm asking myself, What is Eli Roth telling us here? Because there doesn't seem to be any real reason, like this little band of little boy child gangsters figures into the first movie, especially when they steal Paxton cell phone. But it's almost like superfluous in this film. So I feel like he's doing it intentionally to tell us that these people are also child murderers. I mean, I'll get there. I don't want to get too far into it, just giving you this sort of basic plot rundown. But I feel like that scene is put in for a reason. On the way to the murder, one businessman asks the other, do you think we're sick? He says, No, in places where there are no laws, like Chad or New Orleans, this is what people do. We're normal. I also have to wonder, mean, I've read that in the nation of Chad, there is quite a horrific problem with human trafficking. You just have to wonder, like, are there things going on in these specific locations? Is that the reason why Eli Roth, because he could say any nation, he could say any city like are these places hot beds for human trafficking, for sex trafficking, for torture rings. One businessman has a fantasy of killing his own wife, so he has selected a woman who resembles her. Another man is cannibalizing his victim. Everything happening in this torture factory is not only monitored, it's filmed. Just long pause there. Think about that. I'm going to come back to that, but especially knowing what we know, or what we've been allowed to know, which I'm sure is a fraction of a fraction about old teffre tipstein, everything happening in this torture factory is not only being monitored, it's being filmed. The rich girl offers to buy her way out. The proprietor says no one can leave without killing this definite. Me, sounds like a murder version of a honey trap. The rich girl kills the businessman who would have killed her. She also kills the Italian model who lured her into this situation to begin with, and with that hostile part two ends. So you have the first film coming out in 2005 then you have the sequel coming out in 2007 and I'm sitting here in 2024 revisiting these films like, what are we being told? Netflix came out with squid game in 2021 which that could easily be its own episode as well. It's the same type of notion people being forced to do terrible things by hyper elites that find it amusing, like, I can just buy you. I can buy and sell you. You're nothing to me, you're just chattel. According to a variety of websites, the film hostel was actually inspired by something real. Now, I would argue, much like Stanley Kubrick's film, Eyes Wide Shut, I believe that Kubrick was actually telling us these types of sex orgies and weird esoteric rituals actually happen amongst the hyper elites. I feel like Eli Roth is telling us this type of torture and inhumane treatment, along with just outright murder, happens amongst the hyper elites. Now you can say it's just a metaphor, Sara, it's a stand in for something else, and we can get into those themes before the episodes over with. But I tend to believe he's communicating a very clear message to us. If you go to collider.com you will find Eli Roth's hostel was inspired by a horrifying murder website, torture. Horror films like hostel ushered in a new wave of horror movies featuring blood lust, gore and extensive scenes of torture, shocking audiences. Hostel is based on a real life website offering people the chance to pay $10,000 to travel to Thailand and shoot someone in the head, with profits going to their families. Eli Roth, the director of hostel, was inspired by a real life conversation about disturbing things on the internet, and Quentin Tarantino encouraged him to make the film, leading to its success and multiple sequels. End Quote, hmm, so is it really true that he hears about gross things on the dark web and then decides, well, hey, that would make a great movie, because there's all this creepy shit on the internet. I don't know that that's the full story. I'll tell you a story of my own, and I'm going to change the name here, because I honestly don't even know if this person is alive or dead. I have not heard from them in over a decade, so I don't know, and in case he is still alive, I want to protect his privacy. Had this friend who I will just simply call Bob, not his real name, but it's an alternative to calling him John Doe or John Q Public. Bob was born in NorCal, and he loved movies when he was a kid, he idolized people like James Dean, Paul Newman, Marlon, Brando, Pacino De Niro, and he knew from childhood that he wanted to be an actor. He wanted to go to Hollywood and become an actor. He was part of a large family, and his parents always lived paycheck to paycheck. The kids always had hand me downs, and Bob was telling me that they always had just enough. Never anything extra, but always just enough. They always had breakfast, lunch and dinner. But like when he would go to his friend's house and they'd have a cupboard or a little part of the pantry that was full of snacks and junk food, he would always be like, Oh, that was a big deal for him, because they just didn't have anything like that at his house because they couldn't afford it. There were no seconds it was always, we're going to give you a portion, and it's going to be enough to keep you healthy and keep you alive, but you're not ever going to get anything extra. And the parents that told the kids, we don't want you to just work minimum wage dead end jobs. We want you to aspire to more than what we've been able to accomplish, but we can't pay for it. You need to look at scholarships or grants for college, maybe go to vo tech and learn a trade, join a union and get Apprentice by somebody and learn a trade, or enlist in the military, that was pretty much what they told all of the kids to do. And my friend Bob was fairly close with his older brother, so when his older brother graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Army, and the parents thought that Bob would probably do the same thing, even though Bob had told them ever since he was. Old that he was going to go off to Hollywood and be a famous actor. They figured that's just child stuff, but he'll grow out of that, and he'll probably just enlist in the army like his brother did when Bob was a kid. One of the things that they liked to do, you know how, back in the day, they would have like Saturday night and Sunday night movies. The family would always watch those because it was free. They could all just gather around the TV and watch the Saturday night, Sunday night movies that were just on regular network television, and Bob would be glued to the screen. He just loved movies. He loved the escapism. He loved the actors and the actresses, and that's what he wanted to do when he got into high school, he started working every odd job, anything that he could do to make money, he did. His grades suffered quite a bit. He told me that he passed, but only just because he was focused on working and making money and he wanted to get out. And toward the end of high school, he bought a van, and the week after he graduated, he packed up that van with what little he had, he didn't, didn't have much, what little he had, and the cash that he still had, and told his parents, I'm going to Hollywood. I've always told you, that's what I'm going to do, that's what I'm going to do. And they were like, We can't tell you not to you're an adult. You're 18 years old. You can do whatever you want to do. We would encourage you to not do that, but we can't prevent you from doing that if it's what you really want to do, and that's what Bob really wanted to do. So off, he went through the state of California, making it down to Hollywood, and he got out there, and he had already, to some degree, been accustomed to living hand to mouth, I guess because his his parents had always been that way, just paycheck to paycheck and always having barely enough, just enough, but barely enough. And Bob lived in his van for a while. And over the years, there would be times when I would talk to him, and sometimes he'd be in an apartment with two or three roommates, and sometimes he'd be living in his vehicle. You never really knew where he was going to be, and he went through tons of jobs while he was out there, because the first time that he would have a boss that said, No, I'm not going to let you off to go to an audition, he would just quit. So sometimes he'd be doing valet parking. I remember for a while he was a fry cook, and he was talking about how terrible the food was, and terrible the quality of the food and terrible the quality of his cooking. He was like, I can't believe anybody would actually eat this stuff. He would wait tables and he would tend bar for a while. He kept a job at a grocery store that he really seemed to like, but the first time that his boss told him, I'm not gonna let you leave to go to an audition, that was it. He turned in his stuff and walked out. And this went on for years, and Bob was trying and trying and trying, and it just was not happening for him. I mean, he never even made it into like, a B movie or some bottom of the barrel TV show in the middle of the night that nobody's ever even hardly heard of it just was not happening for him. One of the times that I went out to LA he had asked me where I was planning to stay, and I was taking this gal with me that was my best friend at the time, and I told him where we were staying, and he said, Listen to me, you need to be very careful in that area. Make sure that you keep your doors locked. If somebody comes up to you and they seem to be overly friendly or overly chatty, don't have anything to do with them. In fact, don't hang out in that area when you're when you're here to do the touristy stuff. Go and do that. But if you want to go there to the motel to sleep, that's fine, but don't linger in that area. I'm like, Well, why not everything had good reviews. I don't know what you're uptight about. And I said, first of all, I wouldn't just hang out with some random stranger that comes up starts trying to chat me up. You know me better than that. But what's wrong with this place? This is what he tells me. Hand to God. He says that area is an absolute hotbed of Satanist. It's like the moment you know, where the record skips and everybody on the dance floor stops. And I was like, what? And I said, a hot, an absolute, hog bed of Satanist. What are you talking about? And he says, I'm not talking about teenage kids. I'm not talking about teenagers that put on black robes and devil masks and they cut up cats and they go to the cemetery and they think they're so avant garde. I'm talking about for real, true believers, highly dangerous Satanist. And again, I'm sitting there, and I'm like, Whoa, because he had never said anything like that to me before. It was just very odd. And he said, you know the phrase of fate worse than death? Said, Yeah, of course I do. And he said, Lift. People get a hold of you, that's what you'll think. You'll think that you have arrived at a fate worse than death, because there are things that can happen to a person that are worse than being dead, and whether they're trying to recruit you because they want you to join up with them, or whether they're trying to lure you off because they're going to victimize you, the tact is always basically the same. It's like these people have a sixth sense of knowing what you need to hear or what you need to see to go off with them. They're master manipulators. So whether it's an incredibly handsome man a beautiful woman, somebody saying, Oh, hey, can I take your picture? Oh, hey, you're really beautiful, why don't we go to dinner here? Let me buy you a drink. Oh, you don't have a ride home from this party. Well, don't call a cab. I'll take you like whatever it is that they think you need or that you need to hear, they will accommodate it, just so they can get their clutches on you. Get you into their clutches. I was like, Holy shit, man. It weirded me out. It totally did when he told me that the next to the last conversation that I had with him was a couple of years after that. Fortunately, I didn't go off with any Satanist. But it's like, look as a woman, we get told early in life, there are a lot of predators. There are a lot of creeps. You don't want to accept a drink from somebody you don't know. You want to make sure that everything like you're touching it. You're handling it, you know, what's been done to it. You're not taking meals or food or anything that could be drug, anything that could have GHB in it. You don't want to take that. You don't want to go off with strangers. You don't want to get in the car with somebody that you don't know. It's just too dangerous. So a couple of years after all that, next to the last time that I ever spoke to him, he was pretty down. He had gone down the rabbit hole with drugs and alcohol, and he was just not in a good place, because he had tried and tried and tried to live this Hollywood dream, and it was just not fucking happening. And he told me about this party, he never did name the actor, so I have no idea who it was, and thank God for that. I don't need to know morbid curiosity. Yes, I would never want to watch any of this person's films after knowing this, but I'm glad I don't know, because I don't want somebody coming out here after me. So Bob tells me this story. He it was he was working a catering job. He would do that from time to time. Sometimes he'd be waiting tables. Sometimes he'd go be a waiter, like at a private party or a private event. Sometimes he'd do catering gigs. He was working for a catering company, and they had been hired by, he just said, a famous actor who lived in Hollywood. That could be anybody. He didn't tell me, young, old, nothing. I have no idea of just a famous actor in Hollywood. So he had hired this catering company to cater a party that he was throwing. And Bob said that before they had even packed everything up, it was like the party, the dinner, the drinks, that part of the evening was dying off, and the next part of the evening was beginning. And he said that like, Okay, so the catering team and some of the wait staff, they're still there, and they're breaking down their stuff. They're loading up the van. They're getting all the the stuff out of this man's house, and he says, this van pulls up full of sex workers, male and female. It was obvious that they were prostitutes. And he said, like we hadn't even left yet, and they were already in this man's living room in flagrante delecto Getting started. And he said, it wasn't just sex. He told me point blank. He's like, these people are not capable of laying in a bed and having sex like a normal person. And I'm like, What do you mean? They're not capable of laying that doesn't make any sense what you're talking about. He's a normal person. Can lay down with somebody else that they find attractive, or somebody else that they're in love with, and have intercourse, and it's just normal. It's just normal. He said, When I was a teenage boy, if somebody had come up to me and be like, Hey, baby, you want to go to bed, I would have been thrilled. But he said that's not how these people are. They can't do it. What do you mean? They can't do it? And he said it's so blase to them, what a normal person would find to be erotic, what a normal person would find to be fun. It's not fun to them because they're so jaded. They've had so much sex with so many people, every race, every color, every creed, sex all over the globe with a wide variety of people just laying down in the bed and having intercourse is not anything that they're interested in doing. They have to do things that are really obscene and grotesque and perverse. I was sitting there on the other end of the phone listening to this like, holy shit. This freak is starting to freak me out even more than his speech about the sameness. I was like, Man, that place is. Cesspool, apparently. So he says, like, this van load of sex workers gets into this dude's living room, and they start doing violent things, not sex, but violent type things, like two of them were instructed, according to Bob, I wasn't there, two of them were instructed to have a fist fight, and they were told by this dude and his creepy Friends, we want to see blood. We want to see black eyes. We want to see bloody noses. We don't we're not telling you to play fight. We're asking you to really fight each other, and you better make it convincing. There was a man, he said, that was being sodomized, and then at the same time, somebody else was standing in front of him, beating him. And Bob was like, We need to get out of here, if this is what they're willing to do, if this is the beginning of the sex party, if this is what they're willing to do, in front of waiters and waitresses and catering staff. Imagine how bad it gets as time goes on, when nobody's there and there are no witnesses. What are they actually doing to these people? As a postscript to the story, the last time that I talked to Bob, it would have been 2011 2012 at the latest, and he had told me, I'm giving myself six months, and that's it. I hate this town. It's gross. It's full of the worst types of people I have got to get out of here. So in six months, if it hasn't happened, if I haven't landed a role in a movie, if I don't have a role on a TV show, I'm out of here. And I asked him if he knew where he was going to go, and he said, I don't have any place ironed out completely just yet, but I'm leaning towards the Desert Southwest. I love it out there, so I think I might land in Arizona or New Mexico. I want to just get a job and actually keep it, since it's not going to be an issue anymore about going off to auditions, I won't have to quit every time they say no, that's not going to be happening. So I'd like to just have a job that's stable. I just want to get an apartment and work a regular job and just be stable. So if this doesn't work out for me, that's what I plan to do. And I never heard from him again after that, a few months later, I tried to call the number was no longer in service. I emailed I never heard back. His social media had gone dark. It was weird. It was like Bob just disappeared off the face of the earth. I like to believe that Bob made it to Arizona or New Mexico, got a job. Maybe he changed his name because he just wanted to get completely away from that identity that he had in Hollywood. That's my fantasy. That's my happy ending for the story. Anyway. I really don't know what happened to him when he vanished like that. My first gut instinct was that it had something to do with drugs and alcohol, that maybe he owed money to the wrong person. Maybe he o deed somewhere. I don't think that Bob came to a happy ending, but man, he saw some shit out there based on what he told me. So I'm thinking about all of that and the hostile movies, and it's like, I really feel that Eli Roth is telling us some truth about what actually goes on with these hyper elites. Because in the film, actually, in both the first movie and then in part two, you hear the same theme. It's blase, all of these whore houses, all of these strip clubs, all of these women's vaginas, they're all the same after a while, you've just seen it all, but murder torture coming in here to drill somebody through the eye socket or cut their kneecap with a chainsaw. Oh, whoo, boy, that's living I thought about Bob's story about them telling people to fist fight, about beating somebody at the same time that you're having sex with them. I mean, it's like, clearly this kind of violence and sadomasochism actually happens for people that have enough money to make it happen. Now, what's wrong with somebody the psychology of that? I don't know, but it's so incredibly creepy. In the second movie, we also get this idea that it's not just men, because we have this woman who has paid to cut up a girl and bathe, literally, take a bath in her blood, which immediately makes one think of Elizabeth Bathory. Now, look, there are people just like historians say, Nero didn't really fiddle while Rome burned. That's an urban legend. Marie Antoinette did not really say let them eat cake. That's an urban legend. There are some historians now who claim that Countess Bathory did not take blood baths. She was not a serial killer. This is. All just a bunch of urban legends and lies. That's a topic to get into on another episode. Frankly, I would need to read more about it, but the imagery is certainly evocative of the idea of Countess Bathory taking a blood bath. And it's like, what is going on with these people? Because this woman is laying there nude, covered in somebody else's blood, apparently somewhat sexually excited by what's going on. And it's like this is so fucked up and grotesque. We also, in part two, see a short vignette about cannibalism, and that made me think of this restaurant that allegedly specialized in human flesh. There was a story that had gone around for a while about a restaurant, allegedly in California, where people who had, like, donated their bodies to science, or people who had donated their bodies, specifically to this restaurant, could be cooked and eaten. And it's like, I hope to God, that is an urban legend. However, let's go over to the Guardian cannibal restaurant adverts turn German stomachs, fly or flea May. I don't know, take your pick. Restaurant seeking diners willing to donate body parts to be turned into gourmet meals. But some suspect a ruse. An article cannibal restaurant plan leaves bad taste, wrote of an advertising campaign in Germany seeking people willing to donate bits of their bodies to be cooked and served to restaurant diners. However, one of the articles expressions of doubt about whether such a restaurant really is about to open was cut in the editing process while the advertisements and some resulting complaints from members of the public were real enough, as the article reported, there is no confirmation at present that a so called cannibal restaurant in Berlin is anything Other than imaginary. We get these stories every so often, of supposedly there's a restaurant, or there's some underground Cafe somewhere that we're not going to murder anybody. But if somebody is willing to donate body parts, or if somebody donates their carcass to us, like they would donate it to science. Well, it's fair game for us to cook it and eat it, but then, oh, it's an urban legend that's not real. It's a hoax. It was done for marketing. It was done for attention. With that being said, there was an article that I linked to over on the conserracy theories blog under the post that I wrote on April 4, it's time to rethink what now New scientist.com this is real. Please go and check it out for yourself. I'll drop the links. Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo cannibalism? Their byline reads new archeological evidence shows that ancient humans ate each other surprisingly often, sometimes for compassionate reasons. The finds give us an opportunity to reassess our views on the practice. Maybe it's time to normalize cannibalism. Maybe it's time to normalize Soylent Green. So again, we see this vignette in hostel part two of this creepy Italian dude sitting there eating. He goes and cuts off pieces of this man's leg while he's still alive and sits and eats it. And I'm like, I think maybe Eli Roth is telling us something here about the predilections of the hyper elite. I'm just saying. It's also worth noting that back in 2020 when we were all worried about the Rona and the pandemic, there was an article I don't remember hearing anything about this on the news. This was on CNN. I'll drop a link and check it out for yourself. Dutch police discover secret torture site in shipping containers. Authorities in the Netherlands have discovered an apparent torture site hidden inside shipping containers, which were lined with soundproofing material and filled with assumed torture devices. The country's national prosecutor office has said, officers raided the site at the I'm not even going to try to pronounce that, because I am not good with Dutch raided the site at the word I can't pronounce on the Dutch Belgian border on June 22 arresting six men suspected of kidnapping and hostage taking, they found six shipping containers which had been converted to what are believed to be prison cells, as well as a stash of weaponry, including pruning shears and loppers. In each of the cells, handcuffs were attached to the ceiling and the floor in order to be able to chain someone standing up with their arms raised. The statement said the rooms were finished with noise isolating panels, and he. Insulated foil. One of the units also contained a dental chair with straps for feet and arms. The sea container with a dental chair contained bags with objects that were presumably intended to torture, or at least put pressure on victims. The statement added in quote, wow, wow. I'm going to hop over for a second to CBRs article about the real life inspiration for hostel, Roth and Knowles briefly pondered upon the website's credibility. And by this, they're talking about the supposed Dark Web tie website where allegedly you could go and pay to murder someone by shooting them in the head. Roth and Knowles briefly pondered upon the website's credibility, and Roth proposed that it was probably genuine, given humanity's constant obsession with brutality as a form of entertainment. But after a while, Roth concluded that it didn't matter if the website was authentic. The fact that someone had a mind twisted enough to conjure such a sadistic website was sufficient to run Roth's imagination wild. The auteur director, pictured people who have been so desensitized by sex, drugs and money that nothing thrilled them anymore. In fact, he claimed he knew such people. He said they've got all these things, and they're just numb. They want to walk into a room and just kill someone without any consequences. End quote, I got to be honest with you, that matches with what my friend Bob was telling me about this shit going on in Hollywood. I do guys, I really think that Eli Roth is giving us some information about how the world actually works. On the Wikipedia page for the first hostel film, under the tab critical response, we read Entertainment Weekly's film critic Owen gleiberman, commended the film's creativity, saying, you may or may not believe that slavery redneck psychos of the kind who leer through Rob Zombie's the devil's rejects can be found in the southwest, but it's all too easy to envision this sort of depravity in the former Soviet bloc, the crack up of which has produced a brutal marketplace of capitalistic fiendishness. The torture scenes and hostile snipped toes, sliced ankles and pulled eyeballs are not, in essence, much different from the surgical terrors in the saw films only Roth by presenting his characters as victims of the same world of flesh for fantasy they were grooving on in the first place, digs deep into the nightmare of the society ruled by the prophet of illicit desire. There's also a French film critic who listed it as the best American film of 2006 calling it an example of modern consumerism. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that hostile was silly, crass and queasy and not in a good way. David Edelstein of New York Magazine was equally negative, deriding director Roth with creating the horror sub genre torture porn or Gorno using excessive violence to excite audiences like a sexual act. German film historian Florian Evers has pointed out the Holocaust imagery behind hostels, horror iconography, connecting Ross film to the Nazi exploitation genre. End quote. So look, we could say this is about consumerism. This is about flesh for fantasy. This is about how people use each other. It could be certainly a metaphor for how the hyper elites use john and jane Q public, not necessarily that they have factories for actual, literal torture and cutting off limbs and eating somebody while they're still alive. But think, let's think about some of the imagery there for a second. If we want to just go down the metaphor rabbit hole, eating someone alive. It's a metaphor. If he comes over here with that bullshit again, I'm just going to eat him alive. Well, in hostile part two, we see a hyper elite actually eating a man alive. Think about also the turn of phrase to bleed someone dry. I worked at a company once, and that was something that we would say about the owner, you know how he is, he'll bleed you dry. Because he wanted people to practically live at the workplace and have no life and just devote themselves to his company. He was a skin plant. He didn't want to give anybody as much money as they deserved. But man, he would work your ass to death, and we would say that he will bleed you dry. So in hostile part two, even though immediately we think of Countess Bathory, the so called Blood Countess, there's also the idea there of somebody being bled dry, somebody saying, I have given all that I have to give to this workplace or to this crony capitalism, and now I am. There's nothing left. Right? I've been exsanguinated, and I'm left to die as a metaphor. I get that modern, modern consumerism, flesh for fantasy. We're being bled dry. We're being eaten alive by the system. I totally get that as a metaphor. Again. I just think that there's more to it than metaphor. You could use it certainly also in terms of the way that humans exploit each other, man's cruelty towards man, man's injustice towards man. We can also say that there's some parallels about animal rights as well. You're seeing this girl being strung up and bled out, which is what happens to livestock. I mean, it's a very cruel and grotesque kind of industry, kind of world. Nature is red and tooth and call. I'd love to sit here and tell you that when you're involved in agriculture, it's all about a Norman Rockwell painting, but I've seen some grotesque things out here as well, vultures eating carcasses. And it's just, it's gross. There was also backlash from Slovakia and the Czech Republic, like, here we are. We're being portrayed as a place to go to get murdered. We're full of crime, full of prostitution, full of opportunities for Americans to get their throats cut if they come over here. And Roth's defense was, it's just like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's still people that travel to Texas. There will still be people that go to Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Not too long after hostile came out. There was a woman I worked with who was going to go to the Czech Republic. She was going to stay in Prague for a week with her husband. And we were all like, dude, have you seen hostel? She would roll her eyes, yes, but we're staying in a nice hotel, and we're not going to go off with anybody. We're not staying in a hostel like a bunch of college kids. I don't think anybody ever told her this, but there actually was morbid as this will sound, there actually was like an over under pool on whether or not they were going to come back, because we were convinced they were going to wind up like the people in hostel. So I imagine that it probably did put quite a dent in the tourism industry. If there was a tourism industry for Slovakia at the time were people because, I mean, that's what as Americans. But right? There's another potential theme, this idea of what was lurking behind the Iron Curtain. Do we think back to Cold War propaganda, the Empire of evil, the Iron Curtain? People being oppressed, people having nothing well. Now it's not sufficient to assume that people were being subjugated and politically repressed and economically repressed and impoverished. No, we have to assume that there are also engines of torture going on in these former Eastern Bloc countries. I think you could also argue that that's what happens with the infusion of capitalism. And it's interesting because I had a deep conversation one night with a friend of mine who was raised in Moscow. She was at an age where she remembered Sovetsky, say, use the Soviet era, but then also the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev, Glasnost, deepest Troika. She remembered the change that happened when the USSR dissolved and all of these nations started to slowly have boundaries redrawn and to become independent nations, and she was talking about this infusion of capitalism and the idea that it was going to make everything better for everybody. And yes, there were improvements, but it wasn't this miraculous panacea. It wasn't like it overnight solved all of the country's ills. And she was particularly critical of Putin, and said that, in her opinion, he had really decimated the middle class, that capitalism under Putin had worked very well for the Russian oligarchs. And so for her, we were talking about crony capitalism, because I feel like that's what we have in the United States. The fat cats are a bunch of piggies that all eat from the same trough, and they don't give a fuck about John and Jane Q public, and that's her feeling about Moscow, that Putin is catering to the oligarchs, and he makes sure that the oligarchs are taken care of, but doesn't really care about middle class, slash working poor Russians. So it could also be a metaphor, this idea that the wall comes down the west charges into the east, and it not only brings with it these ideas of so called democracy and capitalism, but also this decadence, like what my friend Bob was talking about. These people are so jaded. They've had so much sex everywhere across the globe that they have to do perverted things to be able to get off. Did some of that get transferred over into these Eastern Bloc countries? Now I'm thinking of Bono's character, Mr. Mcphisto, I've given you capitalism so now you can all dream of being as wealthy and glamorous as me. It's interesting. So what do you think is Eli Roth using this torture porn genre as a metaphor, bleeding someone dry, eating someone alive? This is how the hyper elites cannibalize us economically. It's what they do to us, fiscally and politically and or is he telling us? No, this shit literally happens. There are literally torture factories where somebody can buy the opportunity to torture and kill another human being, and they'll never go to justice for it. A point to ponder. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode. 

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