Agent 99 - Online story telling

Ok, just put this together while watching that charming film ‘the Hostel’ by Eli Roth. Ok, it’s a little juvenille from time to time (but that’s kinda the point of the genre - see my genre notes for horror - but this guy knows what he’s doing.

I was about thirty minutes in and was checking the time as I go (I do this, track when the turning points occur in my head as I watch a play or movie) and thought that they were falling very close to the 12 minute average of a ‘reel’. So I started taking notes as I watched. And I was watching at home on my laptop so this wasn’t disturbing anyone!

You can see that the major turning points fall pretty cleanly - he is giving his audience something new every 12-15 minutes and doing it very well. Sure this is ‘only’ a horror but never the less this is a disciplined, well-written and tight movie that respects the horror genre while still introducing enough variation to make it interesting. Below are the sequences and notes on how/why they are working. If you have no idea what I am talking about then read my intro to the ‘Sequence Approach’.

0:00 A: Searching for it (12 minutes)

Two friends Josh and Pax are back packing through Europe on a gap year looking for action. The meet a crazy Icelandic dude Oli. They make it in Amsterdamn but paying isn’t the real thing. Locked out of their Hostel late at night they meet a crazy Dutch guy who tells them that the hottest chicks are in a Hostel just outside Bratislava. They decide to go.

Note: The main audience for this movie is gotta be groups of teenage boys. Roth knows this so the first section of the movie is about getting laid. Note that the three main characters form a whole between them: Oli is the outward jokester, Josh is the neurotic afraid of experience and Pax is the normal one, the balance.

The catalyst is getting locked out of their hostel (nice play on movie title). The ‘gatekeeper’ is the one who opens the idea of the second act to them, the Hostel outside Bratislava. They decide to go. This is the easiect choice they can make at the time - they want to get laid, how little effort do they need to take to get it? Just jump on a train…

Also note that the ‘hook’ under the credits - the tools of torture and obscured shots of fleshy stuff are meant to invoke unease in the audience. But they are also a binding promise; by the end of the movie we had better see these used!

11:55 B: Easy action… too easy? (14 minutes)

After meeting a strange Businessman on a train they make the hostel and find they are sharing a room with some hot girls. This is the place of their dreams. They all get laid, remarkably easily.

Notes: Continuing with the sex theme there is copious flesh and a bit of drugs (teenagers anyone?). There are two dissonant notes introduced ‘The Dutch Businessman’ (credits name) who is a little creepy and the Gang of Boys. We’ll see both later. It’s pretty much a given that the German Surgeon is going to be bad - but then when he rescues Josh from the gang we think that he might be all right after all.

The two girls in this sequence take the part of the Sirens - they are luring the boys to their doom, one by one.

26:00 C: Where’s Oli? (13 minutes)

Waking up “Mission accomplished” they discover that Oli is gone. They look high and low, and follow someone wearing a jacket - they follow him into the ‘Museum of Torture’. It’s a false lead. Later they get a call from Oli. The audience sees that he is dead, his head on a pole (presumably the torture museum). Later, when they party with the girls again, they are both drugged.

Notes: Once their goal is accomplished we very quickly move into a new state of unease bought about by the sudden disappearance of Oli. One interesting aspect of this sequence is that the boys chase the man in Oli’s jacket down into an old style ‘Torture Museum’ just as we are getting shots of Oli’s head on a pole: This suggests that the tortures are happening in the Museum. A red herring as it happens, but a nice thematic introduction of the theme.

The boys are about to take the next easist option (not care about Oli and get the fuck out of there) but they are thwarted by a couple of small things and the lure of the girls is too much and they stay another night.

In a classic slasher the turning point into this sequence would have involved the introduction of the monster in full flight; here we have elements of a mystery instead. It’s this use of mystery/thriller genre elements inside a horror that give this movie some serious edge. The entry for Hostel in IMDBpro lists this as a ‘Horror/Thriller’ so we can safely assume that Roth knew what he was doing.

38:46 D: Victims (11 minutes)

Josh wakes up to find himself bound to a chair by the weird Dutch Businessman where and is tortured. Why? ‘I always wanted to be a surgeon, but my hands weren’t steady enough. [The surgeon] touches, he has a relationship, he is part of it’. We think this is the revelation of the character of the torturer… The torture continues. Lovely.

Pax wakes up, finding his friend and himself ‘checked out’ from the hostel - same deal as Oli. He investigates and then goes to Police, who are no help. Pax finds the girls, now less than sympathetic, who tells him that Josh has gone to be an ‘exhibit’. Natalya agrees to show Pax ‘The show’.

They enter the grounds of a crumbling factory. A place where a warning figure tells Pax that a man ‘could spend all their money’ in there.

Notes: Ok, now we get the payback for all that waiting, some fairly gruesome horror with a healthy dollop of disgust. The Monster is revealed to be the Dutch Businessman - this is not the full extent of the monster, but it is enough to be going on with.

The task for the Roth now is to get Pax into danger (so he can get him out again). As the Monster in this movie has a lair (the Asylum) he needs to get Pax in there with the help of someone who knows the way. This turns out to be a suddenly less than sympathetic Natalya. While this section is slightly contrived it’s driven covered by Pax’s need to find his friend Josh so works fine.

Towards the end of the sequence Pax’s goal of finding Josh slides into needing to know what ‘The Exhibition’ is. Of course we know it’s a bad idea (this is the ‘look our behind you’ aspect of horror) and we fully expect to be grossed out.

At the end of the sequence, just as he enters the asylum, words of doom are uttered by a man who is just leaving. This is the ‘warning on the lintel’; all who enter here are lost.

As we are hovering around the half-way point in the movie now we really want to see a major revelation…

50:31 E: You are the show. (13 minutes)

Pax enters and sees various men torturing people. ANd now it all clicks. This is a place where men pay for the privilege of torturing and killing people, and they are on the price list. He tries to leave but is caught and chained to a chair.

Pax’s tortruer comes in (a new one) but he starts to loose his nerve when Pax (fortuitously) pleads with him in German. When he gets his nerve back he goes to chainsaw Pax, but slips and chainsaws himself. Pax manages to manages to shoot him and free himself from the chair.

Notes: Here is another aspect of the thriller - it’s about this point in a thriller where we get to learn the full plan of the antagonist, and so it is here. And just as Pax relises it we are back into horror land. The unusual thing here is that we get to know the details of the scam, but we NEVER get to see the direct antagonist - who is running ‘Elite Hunting’ the company behind all this? No idea. So for the duration of the movie we get to see various ‘heads’ of the monster, but not the body. If we were to get a little arty about it we might say that they are battling a hydra.

63:00 F: The escape (10 minutes)

Pax plays dead and tries to make an escape. He makes it to butchers room - and finds Josh dead. Pax kills the butcher and flees up the lift and finds himself in a dressing room where he meets one of the clients, an American who pays money to kill girls. The full extent of the operation and the horror emerges. He sees the police outside - everyone is taking their cut.

Pax runs out of the factory, sneaks past some minders and is about to flee, but hearing the sound of a girl screaming, he turns and goes back into the factory, shoots the American and frees the girl (and mistakenly cuts her eyeball out!)

Notes: This sequence is all about escape, though to keep things interesting Roth throws in some revelations - Josh is dead. We also get a great little scene where Pax has to pretend to be a client of Elite hunting and ‘bigs it up’ with a revolting American who is contemplating his next kill.

Roth has Pax go back into the dungeon for a Japanese girl that he has chatted to at the Hostel. This is quite important as once Josh is found dead there is nothing for him to do but escape. The rescue of the Japanese girl gets a twist later, but for the moment it’s a nice way to show Pax is at least tolerably human.

In a drama we would expect a big twist and character test or development as we are coming into the third act, but as this is a horror we are in the game of surviving, so the main thing here is escape.

73:00 G: Getting the train (9 minutes)

Grabbing her, Pax manages to steal a car and they leave, pursued by Russians: Road sign ‘railway station in 16kms’. On the way he gets to run down the girls who run the entrapment racket and gets some youths he befriended earlier to kill his pursuers for a bag of bubblegum.

Final obstacle is a road block. They get out of the car and continue to the station on foot. The girl he rescues sees her face and jumps under an approaching train, inadvertently providing the cover Pax needs to get on the train and flee…

Notes: This is pretty straight forward and deeply unexciting. There are a couple of good moments - where he gets to run over some of the ‘Elite Hunting’ squad and the twist with the Japanese girl providing cover by committing suicide - but because the monster is only really dangerous when contained in a lair (the dungeon) once Josh gets out of the dungeon it really is all over, making this sequence boring, despite the car chases and its brevity.

82:20 H: Revenge (10 minutes)

Pax rides on the train. Hearing the accent of the German man he follows him off the train at the other end and into a toilet in the underground. Pax cuts off a few of his fingers and drowns him in a toilet bowl before re-boarding the train to…

A sequel…

Notes: This is what we get instead of character development - revenge. Josh finds the Dutch Businessman on the train - is he scared? No, instead he murders him. This is quite different: Josh is the balanced hero, the one who is meant to be the most normal, and Roth has him take vigilante action. Justified? Not in my book, but it has revenge-catharsis value that compensates for horrors lack of emotional development (and that bungled previous sequence).

In terms of the Monster all Josh has really been able to do is cut off a few heads - there is no question at all that the corporate hydra ‘Elite Hunting’ has survived. So there’s a credible way into a sequel (especially considering how well this did at the box!).

And now I am going to watch it…