This Cult Horror's Real-Life Inspiration Is Even More Dreadful Than The Movie Itself
The "based on a true story" tag often draws the viewer’s attention, but in this case it may have been true.
Today, before traveling to a new city or abroad, we always go through reviews of the places where we are going to stay. This service is relatively new, as only 15-20 years ago you had to trust the information provided by the hotel itself, which sometimes led to unfair advertising.
Eli Roth drew his inspiration for his horror movie Hostel from presumably real stories passed from website to website about the ominous Red Rooms in hotels in Southeast Asia, where the guest is supposedly transformed into an object of torture.
Roth shifted the setting to Eastern Europe, but otherwise followed the path of the famous creepypastas – as soon as you stop at an unspecified location, you are immediately taken in by creepy butchers who want to cut off your head or hang you on a hook.
Hostel and its sequels are one of those movies you like to think of as fictional from start to finish, but according to its creator, Eli Roth, the idea was inspired by something real – something Roth himself encountered.
In Hostel, members of an elite hunting club spend money to torture kidnapped tourists, and Roth didn't pull that idea out of thin air. As he said in the interview with Dread Central, one day a journalist he knew sent him a link to a certain website that advertised a "murder vacation":
“He sent me a link to a site where you could go to Thailand and for ten thousand dollars, walk into a room and shoot somebody in the head. The site claimed that the person you were killing had signed up for it and that part of the money would go to their family because they were so broke and were gonna die anyways.”
It is unknown if this website, or the entire story, was true. Of course, we can assume that it was all a joke in the spirit of the "dark side of the Internet," but... who knows.
Source: Dread Central