[IMG:L]Brewing up a horror flick is a little like cooking, that is according to carnage king Eli Roth, “If you put in too much of your favorite ingredient, it can spoil the whole thing. If you have too much violence, it’s cartoony and if you have not enough violence, then people are pissed off. Really in the editing I see and feel when I’m getting bored because honestly, I hate to say it, too many shots of a scissors cutting off a dick, it’s boring. If you have just the right amount, people go, ‘Awww.'”
It was all about “Shock and Awe” when Roth teamed up with fellow filmmakers to talk to fans about their perspectives on issues facing so-called exploitation cinema with the help of moderator FX Feeney of LA Weekly. Jack Hill directed such films as Switchblade Sisters, The Swinging Cheerleaders, The Big Doll House and well known hits Foxy Brown and Coffy in the ’70s. Craig Brewer broke into Hollywood with his Oscar-winning Hustle & Flow. He followed it up with the controversial inter-racial sex and religion fable Black Snake Moan. Roth has taken gross-out gore to a new level with his Hostel films and Cabin Fever.
As casual as any moderated public discussion could be (Roth wore a Devo T-shirt and khaki shorts), fans got a chance to ask specific questions about their favorite films from each director. Feeney, however, gave all three a chance to comment on broader issues of the art of shock.
Critics may dismiss these filmmakers as making exploitation films just full of shocking imagery, but the movie makers were quick to explain their cinematic process.
Veteran Jack Hill praised Roth for his cooking analogy, “That’s called pacing,” said Hill. “Which a lot of people aren’t very good at. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had producers tell me they want wall to wall action. Nothing is more boring.”
[IMG:R]Roth continued, “It’s true. Plus, you’ve got to know what the audience is expecting. I know in Hostel II they’re expecting lots of violence. Give them a little at the beginning, then tease them and tease them and tease them. Hit them hard in the middle, then tease them again and just give them that barrage at the end. It depends what expectations you create. If I’m watching a ghost film like The Ring or The Grudge or The Sixth Sense, I don’t need to see that violence. But if I’m seeing Saw and it’s PG-13, I feel ripped off.”
Brewer‘s latest film, Black Snake Moan, shocked audiences with its sexuality. Samuel L. Jackson plays a blues man who chains a nymphomaniac (Christina Ricci) to his radiator so he can cure her. When he first picks her up on the side of the road, beaten and raped after her latest encounter, she jumps right on him because she can’t get enough.
“She lunges forward and she kisses him,” Brewer said. “Her mouth just covers his mouth. It’s really been interesting to watch audiences flinch. I’ve seen it. They’re really shocked like, ‘Oh my God, she kissed him. We knew it. We knew it was going here and now it’s going on, they’re going to start fucking.’ There’s all that kind of stuff that’s within that very interesting kiss between two people. She doesn’t even know who she’s kissing.”
These filmmakers seem to relish in making people squirm, but they have much more noble intentions. Yes, they are skilled at pacing their extreme scenes, but they consistently have underlying messages. Black Snake Moan was a personal metaphor for Brewer‘s loss. His father had died of a heart attack at 49 and the Genesis story represented in the film expressed his own feelings.
“The cool thing about Genesis is it’s so fantastic,” said Brewer. “I’m not a literalist by any means but it just seems like a fantastic parable to just look at it. So I just began thinking a great deal about well, when Man sinned and Adam and Eve sinned, how did God feel kicking them out of the garden? That’s how I felt, like man, I’m just ruined. Sinner? Right here. Now looking back at Black Snake recently, we watched it again…I think I was just kind of wanting my dad to go, ‘It’s okay. Don’t worry about it, this is all going to pass.’ So I wanted to put that in a movie and I knew that it was going to be probably criticized. People call the movie conservative. Many, many Christian groups come up to me, strangely enough about Black Snake Moan saying that it’s an oddly religious movie. They were surprised that there would be religion.”
[IMG:L]Roth‘s experience with religious groups has been different. “They call me the antichrist specifically,” Roth joked. “All of my movies have been officially condemned by the Catholic church. That said, I think that certainly in the way that people might look to a movie and see the girl chained the radiator and then see the movie and see there’s heart and thoughts, I do think that specifically with Hostel and Hostel II, people get so blinded by the violence that that’s all they see.”
Of course, Roth just said that if he didn’t have violence, the audience would be pissed off. But he still justifies the gore with a political message in both torture films.
“Hostel II is about a corporation that profits off the death of Americans. That’s what the movie essentially is. Both Hostel and Hostel II have a very moral core to them in that the way these guys treat the hookers in Amsterdam is the way they get treated. They’re making fun of them like they’re pieces of meat and they themselves get bought and sold as pieces of meat. It’s all very much a critique of my feelings that there’s a very small group, at the end of Hostel II, it’s whoever has the most money controls who lives and who dies. That’s how I feel it is with Dick Cheney and these Haliburton fuckers. I feel like they’re making decisions about Americans who are over there and it’s just getting worse and worse.”
Perhaps the religious groups are as conflicted over the morality of Hostel as they are over its violence. “To me, it’s just amazing when the religious groups go after me because they’re the ones who put a lot of these cocksuckers in power. I know the violence blinds them. You just hope over time, I don’t think people get a lot of this stuff the first time watching it. They’re just into the story which is fine. But I think with the DVD, people watch it over and over and over again, if you put that thought into it, you put theme into it, people love it. They want it.”
Hill weighed in the evolving interpretations of his own work over the decades. “I think you’ll find really, really interesting in 20 years what people see in your films that you can’t begin to imagine,” said Hill. “There’s a guy who’s actually writing a book about my films and he’s seeing all this stuff and he’s asking me these questions. I keep telling him, ‘Look, it just seemed like a good story.’ The way we look at films like this changes over time too as the society changes. Switchblade Sisters, much to my surprise, many, many, many years later when it kind of got resurrected, I discovered that the company that had it on home video for many years was selling it as a lesbian cult film. Go figure. I never had any such idea but actually you can see that because it has to do with friendship between women and caring between women which maybe that’s one reason why the picture holds up and works but at the time, I wasn’t really thinking of that. I was just thinking about doing what I thought felt good, like a good story.”
A connoisseur of horror movies, Roth actually knows the history of filmmakers injecting messages into unexpected movies. He did an audio commentary for the DVD release of Bloodsucking Freaks that began such research.
“Even movies that you would totally write off, films like Bloodsucking Freaks, I actually tracked down the director,” said Roth. “[I] talked to him and I’m like, ‘Is it me, or is your movie actually a satire of the New York theater world?’ He’s like, ‘Absolutely, Sardu was Joseph Papp, the critic was Clive Barnes… They thought that shut up. Actually Bloodsucking Freaks had a fucking purpose to it. Even Mother’s Day, the characters are named Ike and Abbey. This is the overflow of the American sewer system. You listen to them on the director commentary going, ‘Look, we put a television in every single scene and we shot fake commercials.’ You can see that even if they didn’t pull it off, a lot of these people the intent was there.”
Hill still disagreed. “That’s interesting because I never put any such intent.”
