10 Horror Films You Won't Believe Were Based On True Stories

6. Hostel

The film: Beginning like an unofficial sequel to gross out teen sex comedy Euro Trip, Eli Roth's breakthrough feature from 2005 soon takes a turn into torture porn. Horny college students Paxton and Josh and their Icelandic friend “li meet a young man named Alexi who convinces them to visit a hostel in Slovakia filled with beautiful women, rather than heading onto Barcelona. They take him up on the offer and, at first, it seems to be everything Alexi promised them and more. At least, until the girls and the discos disappear and they wake up tranquillised, bound to a series of torture devices and slowly disembowelled by a bunch of psychopaths who turn out to be incredibly wealthy individuals who live such decadent lives that the only way they can get off is to torture and kill innocent people. Which is what the hostel's actual business is. So, never trust anybody Alexi, we guess? The true story: The scariest thing about Hostel, it turns out, might be that it isn't as far-fetched as it seems. If Eli Roth is to be believed, the original concept came not from his depraved imagination, but from the deepest, darkest bowels of the internet. In promotion for the film he spoke about a Thai website which offered anybody the chance to walk into a room and shoot a stranger in the head...if you had enough money, anyway. According to the site the victims weren't kidnapped backpackers but volunteers who needed money for their family or else were suffering from terminal illnesses and wanting to leave something of an inheritance. Roth himself admitted that he wasn't sure if the site was real or an internet prank, but it didn't really matter since "someone took the time to make the site." Again, we don't know for sure if the urban legend that inspired Hostel is 100% true, but we've definitely seen some messed up stuff on the internet in our time...