[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]
On the
horrifying xenophobia at the heart of two of the 21st century
biggest hits.
It’s hard
to argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the most
unexpectedly successful films of the 21st century’s first two
decades. Hostel made more than $80
million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two years
later, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally known
as “torture porn”). Taken
cost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the
box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), spawned multiple sequels and
imitations, and fundamentally changed the career
arc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither
film was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, but
clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please their
audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense)
formulas.
What the
two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and
debate (although
Eli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about);
moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and
many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they
both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American
travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the
travelers themselves (in Hostel) or
the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young
Maggie Grace gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-types
in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to argue
that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a result
of their chauvinistic attitudes toward European women (in the
sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly
innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of
evil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young
travelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the
different world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales
about that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.
It’s that
last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both
horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t
necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would
argue that the
multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond films is a
thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found
everywhere. Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the
relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals
of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening
and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe,
young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to
kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by
them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for, and indeed a terrifying
contribution to our 21st century American worldview.
Next
political horror tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?
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