Hostel (2006) on Netflix
Paxton Rodriguez, Josh Brooks and Óli Eriksson tour Europe. A man named Alexei steers them to a hostel near Bratislava, Slovakia, promising beautiful women who pursue Americans.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.9/10206,463 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes59%
Trailer
Plot summary
Paxton Rodriguez and Josh Brooks, two American students, are traveling through Europe with their Icelandic friend Óli Eriksson. In Amsterdam a fight at a nightclub gets them thrown out, and a curfew at their hostel leaves them with nowhere to sleep until a man named Alexei offers them his apartment. He talks them out of Barcelona, describing a hostel near Bratislava, Slovakia, where he says beautiful women pursue Americans. On the train a Dutch businessman makes an inappropriate advance on Josh, who lashes out until the man leaves. In Bratislava two women, Natalya and Svetlana, are their roommates at the hostel, and they invite the three to a spa and then a disco. Outside the disco, local Romani children accost Josh.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hostel (2006)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The idea came from a conversation with Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles, who told Eli Roth about a Thai "murder vacation" website on the dark web where one could pay $10,000 to shoot someone dead. Knowles called it the most disturbing thing he had ever seen, and Roth built Hostel's premise around it.
- In the scene where the cab drives Paxton, Josh and Óli to the hostel, the actor playing the cab driver turned up on set drunk, so a stuntman doubled for him. The scene was rewritten so the three keep their bags on their laps, because the actor could not load them into the trunk.
- Slovak and Czech officials were outraged at their countries being portrayed as poor, uncultured and crime-ridden, fearing it would damage Slovakia's good reputation. The tourist board of Slovakia answered by inviting Eli Roth on an all-expenses-paid trip to see the country was not run-down factories, ghettos and kids who kill for bubble gum.
- After Cabin Fever, Eli Roth met with Mike Fleiss and Chris Briggs to discuss future projects, and it was Briggs who supplied the title, saying he wanted to make "a movie called Hostel about backpackers, but I have no idea what it's about." Roth liked the idea and developed the film around it.
- Eli Roth first debated making the film as a fake documentary using real people and locations from supposed underground "murder vacation" spots. Hardly any credible information could be found on the topic, so he scrapped it for a traditional narrative with fictional locations and characters.
- The dungeon torture chamber scenes were filmed in a wing of a Prague hospital that had been abandoned since 1917. Other scenes were shot in the Czech Republic, many of them in the town of Český Krumlov.
- The nightclub scene features Mephisto Odyssey's song "Some Kinda Freak", whose repeating hook "everyone's some kinda freak..." is an audio sample from the 1973 horror film Ganja & Hess, directed by Bill Gunn and starring Duane Jones.
- Slovak actress Barbara Nedeljáková read for the part of Vala at a casting session in Prague, but Eli Roth instead asked her to read for the part of Natalya.
