There are many strange addictions out there but the strangest of them all is the societal addiction to torture as entertainment. Torture as entertainment is seen in a variety of mediums such as books, magazines, comics, tv shows, real life shows etc but what I am specifically going to focus on is the film series Hostel.
For those of you out there who don't know the first thing about the film series Hostel or what a hostel is, in general, let me break it down for you. A hostel is a very cheap way for backpackers to have a place to stay; this place is similar to a hotel but often times very run down and dilapidated. Now, the film series Hostel is about a group of backpackers who go to a Hostel and one by one get kidnapped and taken to an underground torture ring. This torture ring provides victims, supplies, and a place to inflict torture for paying regular citizens of society. The idea of the movie is that torture is a calculated operation meant for the pleasure of those who can pay for it.
In the film, the torturers are portrayed as regular everyday citizens of society. There are scenes showing these people in the regular world. Then there are scenes of these people talking amongst themselves while they getting ready to torture. Their conversation runs along the lines of them discussion their membership within the torture ring as being elite, how much they paid and what they asked for, and then curiously their lives at home with their families, friends, and jobs. This establishes in our heads these dark desires for torture exist in almost anyone. This idea is then carried along throughout the films which cause a sort of paranoia within the viewer because the viewer now believes that any character within the films, or even further, and the person, in reality, could have these fantasies. This is disgusting on at least two levels: one because it is sick to actually think that people actually derive pleasure from torturing others and two because the film warps the viewers minds into believing that such people actually exist and they exist within the normalcy of our current society.
Hostel does not in any way shy away from showing the horror and gore of the subject at hand. There are many torture scenes that are shown in explicit detail such as the scene where a woman gets her eyeball burned out of her socket and another scene where a man gets his face cut off. It's interesting that the film engages with these torture scenes instead of merely alluding to them without actually showing the torture. The shocking aspect of this though is that Hostel is a series which proves that depict the detailed horrors, the demand was high enough to create a second and even third film. The shocking part does not end there however because upon my searches of the series Hostel I came across their startlingly high reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. When the first Hostel came out, it was rated a surprising 61% on Rotten Tomatoes which is unusually high considering Rotten Tomatoes is known for its unusually harsh critiques. The second movie was slightly less at a 44%, but still gracious for Rotten Tomatoes standards. The third film went back up to a 60%, thus revealing that not only were people watching these movies but that they liked them.
I too have seen the film series Hostel with a couple friends of mine and while none of us were completely enthralled with the movie genre or gore, we found that we could not look away when watching the film. After finishing the first film we quickly moved on to the other two. Something about the horror of what was going on was too fascinating for us not to watch which brings me to my next point. Our society seems to have a love/hate relationship with torture as entertainment. We critique the idea of torture as entertainment and we throw stones at those who produce it but ultimately, we are all consumers of it. As much as we want to hate on torture as entertainment and shine a politically correct light on it, we simply cannot get rid of it because the industry knows that despite our feeble complaints, we just can't get enough of it.
