10 Great Horror Movies Turning 20 In 2025
3. Hostel
If the first Saw movie gave cinephiles a taste of “torture porn,” Eli Roth’s career-making Hostel served up a main course of overwhelmingly detailed and cruel dismemberments.
After all, Roth’s vicious tale focuses on three unfortunate backpackers – Paxton, Josh, and Óli – who get lured into an underground Slovakian dungeon to be tormented by rich businessmen who pay to enact their mercilness fantasies without judgment or jail time.
Hostel certainly wasn’t the first exploitation film to subject its subjects to such awful circumstances (see – or better yet, don’t see - the Guinea Pig and August Underground franchises in addition to earlier examples), but it was among the first times such depravity reached mainstream American audiences.
Indeed, the ruthlessness and explicitness of Hostel’s brutality – including multiple body parts being severed – was audaciously upsetting, breaking new ground for what could be shown to (and enjoyed by) the masses.
Plus, Paxton and Josh are initially presented as unsympathetic symbols of toxic masculinity and American excess/entitlement, prompting Stateside audiences to question their responses to the pair’s fates as they evaluate their own cultural privileges and their willingness to explore foreign locations.
By no means cinematic perfection, Hostel was a game-changer that nailed what it’s going for.