Garo
Boy Wonder
TRIGGER WARNING: this thread will discuss a film involving such topics as murder, rape, and cannibalism.
Eli Roth, the director known for such "horror" titles as Cabin Fever and Hostel, is finally back with his new film, The Green Inferno, a horror film inspired by the cult found footage classic/snuff film Cannibal Holocaust.
I generally like Eli Roth as a director - he's very singular and while he's in large part responsible for horror veering into "torture porn" in the mid 2000s, his films always feel distinctly his - nobody else has that dark spirit of utter glee in such violence and gore. But The Green Inferno sounds like it might be a bit too troubling.
Concerns have been raised about the film's depiction of indigenous peoples, apparently depicting them as uncivilized savages who will jump to rape and murder immediately upon encountering outsiders. I think there's some merit to that; it's disingenuous to suggest that native tribes are savage peoples who would just as soon eat you as shake your hand. But honestly what concerns me more are the semiotic implications of a horror film that uses cannibalism as its primary method of dispatching characters.
Typically horror films are used to moralize; a character uses drugs or has premarital sex, and then they die in some grisly fashion - often killed by a masked serial killer, maybe some supernatural creature, etc. Is it really cool to send the message that somebody doing something not all that bad in retrospect deserves to have their organs eaten away? At least before there's a certain malevolence to the killings - a serial killer's gonna kill and might have some messed up agenda of his own. But a massive tribe of people killing with ostensibly no greater goal, and then eating people's organs away? That's a little more general and seems potentially troubling, morally.
All this to say I'm still gonna be there opening night, because I love horror films and I've missed Eli Roth's unique directorial voice. What about you? Do you care about The Green Inferno? Does the potential for bizarre anti-native sentiment and strange moralizing deter you from seeing it at all?
Eli Roth, the director known for such "horror" titles as Cabin Fever and Hostel, is finally back with his new film, The Green Inferno, a horror film inspired by the cult found footage classic/snuff film Cannibal Holocaust.
I generally like Eli Roth as a director - he's very singular and while he's in large part responsible for horror veering into "torture porn" in the mid 2000s, his films always feel distinctly his - nobody else has that dark spirit of utter glee in such violence and gore. But The Green Inferno sounds like it might be a bit too troubling.
Concerns have been raised about the film's depiction of indigenous peoples, apparently depicting them as uncivilized savages who will jump to rape and murder immediately upon encountering outsiders. I think there's some merit to that; it's disingenuous to suggest that native tribes are savage peoples who would just as soon eat you as shake your hand. But honestly what concerns me more are the semiotic implications of a horror film that uses cannibalism as its primary method of dispatching characters.
Typically horror films are used to moralize; a character uses drugs or has premarital sex, and then they die in some grisly fashion - often killed by a masked serial killer, maybe some supernatural creature, etc. Is it really cool to send the message that somebody doing something not all that bad in retrospect deserves to have their organs eaten away? At least before there's a certain malevolence to the killings - a serial killer's gonna kill and might have some messed up agenda of his own. But a massive tribe of people killing with ostensibly no greater goal, and then eating people's organs away? That's a little more general and seems potentially troubling, morally.
All this to say I'm still gonna be there opening night, because I love horror films and I've missed Eli Roth's unique directorial voice. What about you? Do you care about The Green Inferno? Does the potential for bizarre anti-native sentiment and strange moralizing deter you from seeing it at all?