Original subtitles

With the slasher films,

the rock stars are the killers.

You don't know what pain is!

Everybody has this dark side

that needs to be filled.

West used to call Freddy the bastard stepfather

of us all.

This killer that can kill you in your dreams.

Candyman.

It doesn't get much scarier than that.

Be my victim.

You're never gonna catch him.

Everybody's a suspect.

I think the fun of "Scream"

is the self-awareness...

Oh, you wanna play psycho killer?

And the deconstruction of the horror genre.

The entire audience

jumped out of their skin.

In a movie, we have a chance to...

almost externalize the fears that we have.

Could I saw off my leg if I had to?

We invented a whole new term.

Torture porn became the cathartic release.

You have to work with the dark side.

Horror is the only genre

where it's flattering if somebody says,

"Ah, I couldn't watch your movie.

Had to leave."

Oh, my God!

We're not allowed to be scared anywhere in life.

You can't be scared at work. But for 90 minutes,

you can be afraid and not be a coward.

After John Carpenter's "Halloween"

made box office history in 1978,

slasher films ruled the screen.

But by 1984,

audience fatigue and critical backlash

had taken hold.

Slashers looked dead in the water.

But the genre was only sleeping.

I'm certainly not the first girl to play a woman character

who fights to the death in a battle against a monster.

There will always be men and there will always be women

who are, you know, forced to be that person.

So "Nightmare on Elm Street" is about a group of four kids,

teenagers, who realize

that they've all shared the same nightmare.

- Eee. - Nancy...

you dreamed about the same creep I did.

That's impossible.

And they don't really think anything about it

until each one of them, one by one,

starts dying in their dreams.

No. No. No!

No!

No!

My character wants to figure out,

like, why this is happening,

who it is that's killing them.

And so the movie's about Nancy's quest

to discover Freddy Krueger

and why he did it.

He did it as an act of vengeance against

some vigilante parents

who killed him in a boiler room.

Who are you?

Freddy Krueger was a child murderer,

and there isn't anything funny about that.

They kind of gloss over that later.

The creation of Freddy Krueger,

this man who had knives for fingers

who would come to children in their dreams

and kill them, was terrifying.

It was just a terrifying idea.

I mean, "Nightmare on Elm Street"

is the next quantum leap forward,

- I think, in horror. - Yeah, definitely.

I mean, this killer that can kill you

- in your dreams. - Yeah.

So suddenly you have a slasher whose arm...

It crosses into the supernatural.

It crosses into the supernatural, yeah.

It is a blend of supernatural and slashers.

The rules of any sort of world don't apply.

- Right. - I think that's what made

Freddy Krueger such a unique character.

It just took us to a different place.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wes Craven was a visionary, I think,

in terms of fear,

understanding what that... what that could be

and maximizing that

in these broad strokes,

which "Nightmare on Elm Street" has.

What is one of the earliest things

I can think of as a weapon

that would have terrified human beings?

The cave bear reaching around the corner

with his massive mitt

with daggers on the end of every finger.

That's primal.

Even the colors.

I read an article on the two most difficult colors

for the iris... or the retina to see next to each other

were those two colors.

And then finding an actor who was brilliant

and who could bring it to life.

Wes used to call Freddy the bastard stepfather

of us all.

But when I got the part,

I didn't know what I was gonna do.

And the makeup sessions informed

a lot of what I did.

They were dabbing at me with a crusty brush

and basting me like a turkey

with Vaseline so that I picked up the light better.

And in comes Johnny Depp and Heather Langenkamp,

arguably the two most attractive young people

in the world at that moment,

and it got me angry and envious of their youth and their beauty

and the fact that these two kids

had their whole careers ahead of them.

And I went, "Wait a minute. I can use that."

This is just a dream! He isn't real!

He isn't real!

Of course, all my fights with Freddy

were fantastic, and we would work on them

for a long time.

Once the camera was rolling,

you know, we got into our characters,

and I bashed him over the head with a coffeepot.

I think the real reason it had

such a massive audience and still does

is, every single one of the films

has a really strong, well-written survivor girl.

Come out and show yourself, you bastard!

So something really interesting

about Nancy Thompson in "A Nightmare on Elm Street"

is that it's sort of her breaking free

from this chain of suburbia

being this ideal because her family is broken.

Nancy.

I'm gonna go and get the guy who did it.

And I want you to be there to arrest him

when I bring him out, okay?

Just tell me who did it. I'll go get him, baby.

Fred Krueger did it, Daddy.

Her father, while, I think, very loving,

is very inept.

He refuses to believe her.

Her mother's an alcoholic.

She breaks free from it by destroying the home,

thereby destroying Freddy Krueger,

who came because her parents had killed him.

I guess I'd say my very first fans were young gay men.

And they told me that they were using Nancy

as they faced their folks or their parents

or their families in revealing their true selves.

I take back every bit of energy I gave you.

You're nothing.

And they expressed to me that it was just, like...

it was their Freddy, you know,

just, like, that scary thing that they have to face,

that they have to fight.

I would often listen to all sorts of people

talk about what their Freddy was.

And, I mean, it can be anything,

I'm telling you. It can be anything.

Kids who were bullied would tell me

that they would use the images

of "Nightmare on Elm Street"

to help them face bullies in their life.

You think you was gonna get away from me?

I know you too well now, Freddy.

You know, Wes Craven probably never knew

how many he people he was gonna help

by creating this Nancy-Freddy dynamic.

It seems to me there were several

peak nightmares,

that the first one was really terrifying,

but there was a couple others way downstream

that were really satisfying

and did interesting things intellectually.

There's a lot of echoes to Kafka,

you know, and that, insects and other things.

Freddy Krueger's pretty terrifying

in the first "Nightmare on Elm Street."

Watch this.

But he became a one-line reader.

How's this for a wet dream?

Silly, funny, like, puns

and double entendres.

This is it, Jennifer.

Your big break in TV.

Welcome to prime time, bitch.

With a joke here, a joke there,

a wisecrack here, there,

it makes it easier to set them up

for another dark sequence

or another horrific thing or just a cheap-thrill scare.

Got your nose!

Did we go too far sometimes? Perhaps.

And did we load it up too much?

Sometimes, perhaps, yeah.

I'll get you, my pretty, and your little soul too.

You know, I've been, you know,

listening to

what... how crowds respond to horror

for most of my life.

You know, talking about sort of...

with the Freddy movies, with the Freddy sequels...

- Mm-hmm. - How a black theater could...

You know, the relationship to Freddy

is almost... is closer than it is to the victims

- of those movies. - Of course.

- Right? Of course. - You identify with Freddy.

He's funny. You identify with him.

There's... you know him. You don't know

these new mother coming to get killed.

- Right. - They're just sheep

for the slaughter.

No!

By the way, we're identifying with Freddy,

the child murderer.

Yes, but black people also love them some Jason...

- Yes. - And some Michael Myers.

No!

There's something about these...

first of all, these characters that don't give a...

- Mm-hmm. - That are cold-blooded...

That I think scratches an itch,

a frustrated itch, a societally frustrated itch.

That itch would be scratched

by a slasher with a hook,

a monster driven by love

and the need to kill.

Be my victim.

Candyman.

Candyman.

Candyman.

"Candyman," in a nutshell,

is a dark love story.

Virginia Madsen and I were deeply in love

in another life.

Candyman was an artist,

and unfortunately her father was a racist.

Had him lynched, cut off his arm,

and replaced it with a hook.

And he was trying to reclaim his lost love

by getting her to honor, you know,

him as a mystery man.

Oh!!

What "Candyman" tried to do

was using slavery

and some of the violence of slavery

to explain the emergence of this monstrous character

who, if you say his name

into a mirror five times...

Dare you.

both: Candyman.

Candyman. Candyman.

Candyman.

He comes if you just say his name.

Candyman.

It doesn't get much scarier than that.

Most slasher films start with

a traumatic experience that happens

as, like, a... sort of a

precursor to where the film is set in modern day.

The trauma itself serves as a triggering effect

for the killer in the present time.

What's so interesting about that is that

a lot of it is based in loss and grief.

It had a real impact on a lot of audiences.

Black audiences because, hey, even though

he's the monster...

Believe in me.

Be my victim.

We will turn out to see blacks in a horror film.

It was based on Clive Barker's book

"The Forbidden."

And I think what Bernard Rose, the director and writer,

did brilliantly was to transpose it

to Cabrini-Green,

which is now gone but was one of the most

dangerous housing projects in America.

I thought "Candyman" was really cool

because, you know, you're so used to seeing

these traditional haunted house movies,

and it's, like, the opposite.

The setting is so gritty.

I think "Candyman" is intended more

for a white audience.

It's looking at kind of the fear of the urban setting,

and Cabrini-Green and the sprawl

of poverty in Chicago

and what might come out of that.

Damn it.

One of the brilliant things about the film

is that he doesn't appear until 45 minutes into...

into the film.

He's spoken about. They mytholize him.

Everybody's scared.

He... he could come right through these walls, you know.

I-I'm scared.

Scared for my child.

They ain't never gonna catch him.

Who?

Candyman.

I think some audiences were troubled

because so many of the people he killed were black.

So if it was a straight revenge story,

he would have been killing nothing

but white people, right?

But the residents of this project

were also his victims.

If you were to explain,

"Well, it's about this black dude who was

"murdered for having sex with a white lady,

"and then he comes back and hunts the white lady

and lots of other people too," you'd be like,

"Nah, I don't think we're gonna make that movie."

You know what I mean? But somehow,

through his level of magnetism and charm,

he manages to make Candyman someone...

I don't know if they love him, but who they love to fear.

Be my victim.

Be my victim.

He's got a passion. He wants what he wants.

And this is his unrequited love.

This is the woman that got away,

the woman that he cherished, you know?

And it happens to be in a horrific environment,

but, you know, he'd do anything for her.

Even kill her if they can die together.

Your death would be a tale to frighten children,

to make lovers cling closer in their rapture.

Come with me

and be immortal.

I think that mixture of terror and empathy

is very powerful.

Every great work of horror fiction

is an exercise in extreme empathy.

It's about falling in love with characters

and then staying with them as they endure the worst.

- No! - And he's an iconic monster.

He had bees coming out of his mouth.

He had bees all over his face.

We used over 100,000 bees on that set.

It was all practicals, which is... you know,

totally makes a difference.

I think I got maybe 26 stings

altogether, but they were

an essential part to...

creating the terror for the situation.

You know, what happens to a ghost

if he's still living flesh?

Will he be inhabited by maggots?

Well, then we chose bees 'cause...

they're just that... you know,

every kid is afraid of a bee sting.

You know, there's nothing ambiguous about horror.

Horror is an engine.

It's like a great white shark.

It has a purpose, something it wants to do.

It wants to scare you.

And in that way, that lack of ambiguity

is really freeing as a filmmaker

'cause you know what you're trying to do.

Help! Help me!

It's a beautiful thing to play with,

and it's even more beautiful thing when it works.

Candyman is an icon,

one of the great supernatural monsters.

But the masked serial killer was ready to make a comeback

with a postmodern twist.

Slashers kind of go away for a while.

Like, once we're sort of out of weapons...

I think the public starts to get bored of it.

Well, there were so... and there were so many sequels.

And they were always diminishing returns.

Exactly, and they were never about being scary.

And then "Scream" comes along.

My whole goal when writing "Scream" was,

I wanted a horror movie to sort of

live and breathe in a time

where the other horror movies existed.

If you were the only suspect in a senseless bloodbath...

would you be standing in the horror section?

Kevin was smart enough to make it

not about the filmmakers and the actors

but about the audience.

"Scream" is the story of Sidney Prescott.

And it's one year after

the horrific murder of her mother.

Just when she's about to have

some semblance of her normal life,

just when she's starting to trust again

and she's starting to date again

and she's got her boyfriend,

on the anniversary of her mother's death,

murders start occurring

as it looks like perhaps someone takes their love

of scary movies too far.

And they start using horror movie lingo

as a way to stalk and kill victims.

You never told me your name.

Why do you want to know my name?

'Cause I want to know who I'm looking at.

What did you say?

The opening of "Scream" is so iconic at this point.

And it's so masterfully done.

That is Wes Craven at the height of his career.

It happens. Take it easy.

The thing about Wes Craven is that the scary stuff

comes instinctive to him.

And I think he has a really great eye

and a sensibility to stage it and to craft it.

The tracking shots behind Drew Barrymore

as she just sort of walks through this very...

this shadowed house and she moves in and out of light,

it beautifully sets the pace.

You know, when to dutch the angle,

when to... you know, when to pull back,

when to go wide, when to go close.

The interesting thing about that is,

you have... at that time, certainly...

your most famous cast member

dying right away.

So it really sort of tells an audience,

"You have no idea what to expect."

When I auditioned for it,

there were two very different scenes.

There was one of this loving, caring boyfriend,

and then there was one of this psychopath.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

- No, Billy! - Oh,.

Wes really wanted to see

somebody who could... who could convincingly play

both sides of that.

Billy's the killer.

And you got to believe fully that he's the killer

so much so that you go, "Oh, there's no way

he's the killer."

I wanted to sort of take the genre, rip it apart,

open it up.

There's a formula to it,

a very simple formula.

Everybody's a suspect.

When you talk about the tone of "Scream,"

I think what he's so successful at

is balancing that horror comedy that we don't see so often

pulled off very well.

Damn little.

What'd you call me?

- Huh? - Not you, Fred.

I was quite against it at the time.

I thought, "Wow, I thought I was in a documentary

"about a serial killer

"and they're playing this,

you know, for laughs."

Wes found the right balance and the tone

through the editorial process,

but I do remember we were like,

"Should he be falling down that much?"

He's kind of, like, the clumsiest killer alive.

And we were always worried about

that skirt he was wearing, you know,

how silly that would look.

But it all seemed to work out.

Yeah, at the beginning, they wanted me to come meet

for Skeet's role, Billy.

I didn't do anything.

Do you wish to give up your right

to speak to an attorney and have him present...

But the role of Dewey, I thought it was so funny.

He was written as, like,

this big, buff, like, meathead.

And I was like, "I think I could bring

a different meathead quality to it."

People treat me like

I'm the antichrist of television journalism.

I don't think you're that bad.

No?

My favorite part about working

on the "Scream" movies

was working with Wes Craven.

You meet few people in this world that are...

turn out to be your heroes, like, living heroes.

And he held himself like a professor.

He was a really intelligent guy.

But he'd say things like, "Well, that was horrible.

You wanna try it again?"

You really have to respect your audience.

You have to know these kids are damn smart, you know?

The wonderful thing about the "Scream" series

was that Kevin Williamson

said, "Yeah, I've seen all the movies too,

"and let's talk about them, but this is not

like that," you know?

Help me, please. I'm at Stu Macher's house

on Turner Lane. It's 261 Turner Lane.

Please, he's gonna try and kill me.

These movies get a bad rap

for sort of being antifeminist and misogynistic

because they are, you know?

And... and... and... or they have been.

You know, what's great about genre today is,

we can change all of that.

We don't have to sort of adhere to,

you know, the rules.

In the '70s and '80s,

if a girl had sex, she...

the rule was, she had to die.

There are certain rules

that one must abide by

in order to successfully survive a horror movie.

For instance, number one, you can never have sex.

We allowed her to have sex.

So you're almost ensuring she's gonna die.

But not in this movie.

Right up to the very, very end

where she's like, this is the moment

where the killer...

Comes back to life

for one last scare.

And she just ain't gonna have it.

It was just another way

to dismiss those old notions of the final girl

and so that we can move our heroine

into sort of a new place.

Not in my movie.

Horror gets a visceral reaction out of people.

And it's always...

looked down upon by critics to this day.

It astounds me.

Horror starts from kind of a minus 25 position

and has to claw its way upwards.

It's fun to turn that on its head.

I think where that anarchistic sense

of wanting people to burn the theater down

comes from wanting to show people,

like, what horror can really do.

Good evening, Clarice.

If you hate us and you think we're bad,

then I'm really gonna go for it.

A census taker once tried to test me.

I ate his liver with some fava beans

and a nice Chianti.

"Silence of the Lambs" is a perfect film.

It kind of shirked the in-your-face

occasionally vulgarities of the horror genre

and painted them with a much finer brush

that made it a story that was about being human

as opposed to a story that was

about the horrors of the world.

What is your worst memory of childhood?

Death of my father.

Horror is a ghetto as far as

the film industry is concerned,

but "Silence of the Lambs" changed everything.

It suddenly was not only big box office

and not only horrific but respected.

You have Sir Anthony Hopkins...

I'll help you catch him, Clarice.

You had Jonathan Demme, a great, admired director,

dipping their toes into really unsavory material

but done in such a highly polished

and Hollywood style that you could not

deny the power of it and the intelligence of it.

There's things we need to do for her.

I know that y'all brought her this far

and that her folks would thank you if they could

for your... for your kindness and your sensitivity.

Now, please, go on now. Let us take care of her.

Go on now.

I think, with "Silence of the Lambs,"

having a fantastic female protagonist

that is brought to life by Jodie Foster

gave it a life that allowed people

who do not appreciate the horror genre

to appreciate that performance.

And that performance was the introduction

for a lot of people who are uncomfortable with horror

to actually step back and enjoy it.

Jonathan mentioned to me

that perhaps

the Clarice Starling character,

the Jodie Foster character,

was in a way so central to the nature of the film

that the music could reflect her character

and be a point of view through her eyes.

Generally, that type of film

might have focused more on the monster,

the Lecter character, and I think,

by switching that up in that film,

it humanized the story in a way

that, I think, broadened the appeal of it.

Senator Martin.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

I mean, Anthony Hopkins, my God,

what an iconic performance.

Hannibal Lecter is the most terrifying villain

ever put on-screen,

and he is in that film for about 14 minutes.

He's barely in it at all.

We only see slightly more of him than we see

of the shark in "Jaws."

And both pictures sort of bring home the idea

that what we can't see is scarier

than what we can.

And that's tremendously effective.

There are these moments where

something plays different for white people

than it does for black people.

Hannibal Lecter, he's a psychopath.

He's a white psychopath,

but for some reason it's, like, "Yo, that mother cold."

"This mother eating a face?

"Oh.

"That's right there.

"That is Hannibal Lecter.

"That's my right there.

"That's... if I'm anybody in this movie, I'm him.

"I'm not the who got his face eaten.

I'm Hannibal Lecter."

What became of your lamb, Clarice?

It came out in February,

and it played right through the year.

It was one of those films that just

gathered momentum week by week.

And it won five Oscars.

When "Silence of the Lambs"

was nominated for Best Picture,

nobody wanted to call it a horror film.

You know, all the press stayed away from the fact

that "Silence of the Lambs" is really a horror film.

It's a slasher film.

Uh, get in the truck.

And I want to push it all the way up.

I really appreciate this.

But a slasher film as Best Picture?

No, can't do that.

It was an example of what can be done

with the genre when it's done just right.

Hey... hey, are you about a size 14?

Sorry?

What is that people love about going

to see horror movies?

I think what we love about it

and what the average person loves about it,

I think, is different.

We'd see a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre,"

"Dawn of the Dead," I go, "I wanna live there.

I wanna live inside this movie."

"I want to re-create this in my house."

And essentially we did do that, right?

Right. Yeah.

But I think, for the average person,

it's like, you can

safely experience something demented.

It's also coming to grips with our own mortality.

Maybe there's some weird catharsis

of, like, "Okay, well, thank God my death

"could never nearly be as bad as what I just saw,

"so maybe it's not so bad.

Maybe I'm just gonna fall asleep..."

I think it's all dealing with the fear of death.

After 9/11,

fear escalated to nearly unbearable levels.

And that fear was reflected in movies

that dared us not to turn away.

I want to play a game.

People always ask me,

"How do you make a horror film scary?"

And I think that the only common thread

that I've found is when

the filmmaker, the director,

is truly terrified by the subject matter.

You can tell when other people are phoning in

and trying to imitate a genre.

And you can tell when someone loves it.

I met James Wan at film school.

We both loved horror movies.

We were both obsessed with "The Evil Dead"

and Dario Argento

and "The Shining" and all the rest of it.

We realized we should team up

and try to make a movie with our own money.

And so we figured out that the cheapest thing

we could do would be two actors in one room.

Finally, we hit upon the idea for "Saw."

Ahh.

"Saw" is about two men who wake up

chained to the wall in this dilapidated,

dirty bathroom, basically.

They don't know how they got there.

But lying between them is a dead body.

And they find out that they've been put there

by a sadistic serial killer

who forces people to play games for their lives.

John Kramer is a mechanical engineer.

He's an architect.

He is somewhat of a philosopher.

He is a master at prosthetics,

a bit of a magician of sorts,

And with John, what you see is often not what you get.

Whoever brought us here could have killed us by now.

But they didn't.

They must want something from us.

You got Leigh over here,

and you got Carry Elwes over here,

and you got this guy in the middle

and this strength and this silence.

But I always felt his centralness to this story.

The way that I see Jigsaw

is kind of the Zen master of sadism.

Hello, Amanda.

You don't know me,

but I know you.

I want to play a game.

His mission, of course, is to

help people to see the value of life.

And whether we think his methods are appropriate

or not, that's a different story altogether.

My family!

There was something about watching human behavior

in extreme circumstances in "Saw,"

and I think... and I thought to myself,

"Well, could I saw off my leg if I had to?

"Would I do it? How would I do it?

Could I do it?"

When you don't have a big star

in the lead role and you don't have the money

for special effects,

the only thing you have going for you

is that question, "What's gonna happen next?"

What are you doing?

Both James and I always loved really great...

twist endings that made you go back

and reexamine the movie.

We really thought we had something good.

I think I was there about 12 or 13 days,

Lying in this pool of blood on the bathroom floor.

You're quite convinced that he's where he is,

and you forget about it in some way.

The biggest reaction that I think

I've had in my career was the ending of "Saw,"

that ending when he stands up off the floor.

Which is one of the reasons why I did the film,

'cause I thought it would be a remarkable moment.

It was worth doing just for that moment.

And to actually physically see people lose their mind

and yell at the screen...

I mean, people would just be shouting, like, "No way!

No way!"

So that was the best feeling,

you know, we could have ever had.

The last thing he says before he closes the door

to leave, he says, "Some people..."

Are so ungrateful to be alive.

But not you.

Not anymore.

Game over.

To me, "Saw" is that original film,

and then all the other movies, they sit over here,

and then the original film, to me, sits on its own.

The later "Saws," yeah, they became more...

more about the torture, but really they were

torture about people who deserved it.

The "Saw" movies, it's the bad guys

who are being tortured.

According to your policy,

your secretary is older and weaker

and therefore less worthy to survive.

By, I think it was "Saw 6,"

where they're going after insurance companies

that have denied people their claims, and...

I don't know... maybe they kind of deserve it

in the world of that movie.

I've had skateboarders, 12-year-olds,

come up to me, groups of them, and say,

"Yeah, we love those movies."

You have one minute to pull the fishhook

from her stomach and unlock her device.

And I say, "Yeah, really? Why? Why do you love 'em?"

And they say, "Because...

they teach you stuff."

I said, "Like what?"

They say, "Well, like, to... that you need

to appreciate your life."

No!

And they're not talking about the traps.

They're not talking about the blood.

They're talking about concepts

that resonate in the film.

So when you get this little germ

of an idea, of a thought,

when it's surrounded by that kind of intensity,

it makes the germ resonate in a certain way.

One of the issues with the "Saw" movies...

and you can take it however you want...

is the fact that we invented a whole new term,

"torture porn."

But we invented it at the very same time

America, as a nation,

was under world indictment

for actually torturing people.

The torture porn cycle of horror films

is strongly linked to the height of what

George W. Bush termed the War on Terror.

This crusade.

Use any means at our disposal.

This war on terrorism.

The torture porn cycle is kind of

the cycle of the extreme horror movie,

the "can you not look away?"

"Can you believe how far they're taking this?

Can you handle it?"

And I think it really kind of

was crystallized with "Hostel."

A lot of people say it started with "Saw."

I think the original "Saw"

plays more as a thriller horror movie

than a torture porn movie.

Hostel becomes a little bit more

of the "how much can you stand to watch?"

When we started making our movies,

the term "torture porn" came out.

I'll credit... I'll give you that one.

All right, I'll take that one.

One of the things about torture porn

is that we are no longer afraid of bogeymen.

Michael and Jason and those characters

lost a certain currency.

And what really strikes fear,

particularly in the United States

in a post-9/11 moment, is other people.

Other people are frightening.

You're not going?

I've seen this show.

The "Hostel" franchise speaks truth to power

and presents Americans in the way

that the world perceives us.

The whole first section of the film...

it's kind of done like a teen sex comedy, right?

Like, before it gets into the horrific scenes,

we see Paxton, Josh, and their friend Oli

in Amsterdam.

And they're just there to party and smoke pot

and especially, in a very extended sequence,

have sex with prostitutes.

It invokes this whole kind of privilege

of paying to do something to somebody else.

But it's just like everyone's out for themselves.

You're not meeting friends.

You're meeting someone who could be the person

that's gonna kill and rape and murder you.

You're very patient.

I don't... I don't remember...

- It was 45 minutes. - Yeah, you go 45 minutes.

Then we kill our first character.

In that time, you are

allowing us to identify with the soon-to-be victims,

but you're also subtlety allowing us

- to hate them in a weird way. - Mm-hmm.

'Cause they're being kind of rude...

they're being so American.

So by the time you get to the killing,

we're half identifying with the killer,

half identifying with the victim, and I think

that part of it is the weirdest thing about horror.

Like, we need to be able to identify

with that dark side of us that maybe wants

to kill somebody sometimes.

I am an American. I got rights.

Get the out!

What I think is important and interesting

about "Hostel" is that it doesn't allow the viewer

to feel that sense that the American

is exempt from implication in the War on Terror

and in the use of torture.

Who are you?

- What the... - where the am I?

I guess it's kind of like a pushback kind of?

- Mm-hmm. - Like, oh, you think

you rule the world? You don't.

The first extended scene of torture that we have

is of this kind of privileged,

young, white American male.

And we see his body kind of taken away

secretively to this foreign torture center

and tortured in an act that reminds us

of the extraordinary rendition program.

No!

And the viewer identifying with Josh,

you know, is forced in a position

of having to imagine themselves

as being subject to torture.

There are people that, you know,

watch torture videos.

And you pay a certain amount,

and you can become Mr. Director.

And the fact that that exists

internationally in much poorer countries

where, you know, maybe the parents have died

and the kids are easier to get,

it's a really disgusting quality

that exists in humanity

that we don't even want to talk about.

And I think that's why we just got a little peek

of a window into it in "Hostel."

And it was too much for most people to accept.

The real world is much scarier than anything

that Eli Roth or Stephen King could come up with.

It's a really disturbing, sick, violent world

we live in. Horror films reflect that.

And horror films are a way of people

coming to terms with the violence in society,

trying to deal with it and trying to,

you know, escape it a lot of ways.

We're not allowed to be scared anywhere in life.

I hear from soldiers on military bases

that were watching "Hostel"

and watching my films and screaming.

And, like, they're dealing with death,

but they're not allowed to be afraid.

But for 90 minutes, you can be afraid and not be a coward.

More than any other monster in horror,

the slasher taps into our primal fear

of the predator.

And when that predator comes in human form,

you have to wonder...

"Will I be the resourceful survivor..."

"Or just another kill?"

He's gone.