ELI ROTH’S HALLOWEEN HORROR-THON

Love him or hate him, Eli Roth (Saddam to Nikki Finke‘s Dubya) knows a fair bit about horror movies. The Hostel director has curated a horror marathon over at The Onion‘s A.V. Club where he’s made a suggested schedule for 24 hours of Halloween DVD viewing. Roth’s discussion of the films he chose acts as a great primer on horror and shows that he’s a connoisseur of great cinema as well as, you know, torture porn. He presents a really great selection of movies, putting classics (John Carpenter‘s The Thing, Dario Argento‘s Suspiria) alongside foreign obscurities (Pieces, Who Would Kill A Child?) and cult classics (Cannibal Holocaust, Evil Dead). But what I found most impressive was that Roth also included films that are not horror films in the strictest sense, fantastic movies like David Lynch‘s Eraserhead, Miike Takashi‘s Audition and, best of all, the original Dutch version of The Vanishing.

These three choices in particular bode well for Roth’s future career, and seem to be in sync with comments he made recently about the kinds of films he plans to make from now on:

“As far as violence goes, I think at this point I’ve pushed the boundaries of horror as far as I can, and it’s someone else’s turn to take over spilling blood and guts. I have new challenges and much more ambitious ideas that are not horror related that I’m working on, as well as other artistic endeavors outside of film. I love directors like Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, who pushed the boundaries of gore and horror in their early career, and then took that same energy and aesthetic and applied it to other genres. I’ll always love horror and I’m sure I’ll make more horror movies, but once you’ve spilled that much blood, you kind of have it out of your system and look for other ways to make audiences scream and cheer and vomit.”