20 Most Controversial Movies Since 2000

8. Hostel

The "torture porn" label has been around for some time now, but it was Eli Roth's 2005 movie Hostel which kick started it all. Set in Slovakia, it tells the story of a backpacking holiday gone horribly wrong, as a group of unwitting travelers find themselves kidnapped by a powerful group whose clients pay top dollar to torture to death without fear of prosecution from the authorities.

Watching Hostel and you can certainly see where the "torture porn" label came from - Roth's camera isn't shy of fixating on the many scenes of torture scattered throughout the film, as people are drilled, slashed across the throat, attacked with chainsaws before finally being dispatched in all manner of gruesome ways. Perhaps not surprisingly, the bulk of the complaints about Hostel came from the Slovakian people, who were more than a little outraged at having their homeland depicted as a breeding ground for psychopaths. Roth responded that, despite the films in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series people still visited Texas, and that the geography wasn't the issue but rather Americans' ignorance about the world around them.