In 1995, Roth co-wrote
Cabin Fever with his roommate and friend from NYU Randy Pearlstein. Much of the script was written while Roth was working as a production assistant for Howard Stern's movie Private Parts; Stern remembered and congratulated Roth on his January 11, 2006 radio show. The movie was filmed in 2001 on a shoestring budget of 1.5 million (raised with private investors) and was sold at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival for $3.5 million dollars after a massive bidding war between eight studios. It was the biggest sale of the festival that year.
Cabin Fever made $30,553,394 theatrically worldwide. It was the highest grossing film for Lionsgate that year.
Lionsgate used the theatrical success of
Cabin Fever to raise the money to purchase Artisan Entertainment. Lionsgate's stock rose from $1.98 a share at the time
Cabin Fever was purchased at the Toronto Film Festival to nearly $6 a share after "
Cabin Fever" was released theatrically. (Source: Lionsgate website financial reports.)
Roth's second feature film,
Hostel, was made on a budget of a little more than $4 million, in 2005. It opened to #1 at the box office in January of 2006, taking in $20 million dollars opening weekend, and knocking out The Chronicles of Narnia from the #1 spot. It went on to gross $80 million worldwide in box office, and over $180 million worldwide on DVD. In April of 2006, on
Eli Roth's birthday,
Hostel opened on DVD at #1, again outselling The Chronicles of Narnia, which had opened at the #1 sales slot only one week prior. The movie takes place in Slovakia, where two college students visit a hostel, where they think that all of their fantasies will come true. Instead, they find an international syndicate with the express purpose of torturing and killing random people for profit and sexual pleasure and release. Arguably the most horrific scene is when a girl has her face burned with a blow torch and her eyeball removed with a pair of scissors. The film was voted the #1 scariest movie moment on the Bravo TV special 100 Scariest Movie Moments: Even Scarier Moments.
Roth reportedly turned down numerous studio directing jobs, including The Dukes of Hazzard and House of Wax, to make
Hostel, although at one point he was (and perhaps still is) the producer of a Baywatch movie that has yet to be made. Roth took a directing salary of only $10,000 on
HOSTEL in order to keep the budget as low as possible, so there would be no limitations on the violence. Roth shot the film as an NC-17 movie, but the film passed through the ratings board with an R.
In January, 2006, New York Magazine credited Roth with creating the horror sub-genre 'Torture Porn,' or 'Gorno,' using excessive violence to excite audiences like a sexual act. Roth has publicly spoken out against the term, saying it exemplifies how critics are always quick to reduce horror to a sub-class of pornography, and that many horror films are much smarter and better made than critics give them credit for.
In 2007, Roth directed the fake trailer segment Thanksgiving for Grindhouse, in addition to acting in
Death Proof,
Quentin Tarantino's segment of the film. In recent interviews, Roth has vehemently expressed interest in expanding Thanksgiving into a feature-length motion picture, along with
Edgar Wright - who would expand his trailer Don't - for a Grindhouse sequel.
Roth is working on other film projects, including an adaptation of the Stephen King novel Cell. He also talked about doing a film called Trailer Trash; a film made of fake trailers; according to an appearance on G4.
This article is licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article
Wikipedia article "Eli Roth"