“Fucking Americans”: Postmodern Nationalisms in the Contemporary Splatter Film

In Eli Roth's 2005 film Hostel, two American frat boys and an Icelander are let loose on an archane and sexually licentious Europe. Lured to a hostel in Bratislava, Slovakia by the prospect of nymphomaniac women who just "love Americans," the trio slowly discover they have booked themselves in as victims for a torture chamber where the wealthy live out their sadistic fantasies by creatively murdering innocent tourists. Hostel presents dark images of the flipside of capitalism; a world where the fall of communism has led not to the fruits of capitalist labour but instead plunged Eastern Europe into a terrifying trade where life is easily bought and sold. Part of an ultraviolent wave of splatter films seen as driving a 78% rise in domestic horror box office profits from 2003-2006, Hostel controversially combined dystopian representations of capitalism with the detailed exposition of brutal violence.