Is The Movie Hostel Based on a True Story?

Hostel’s release in 2005 left many horrified yet fascinated. How could a film depict such violence and terror? While horrifying on the surface, rumors and stories have flooded the rumor mill claiming that it was indeed based on a true story, marking the dawn of the torture porn genre.

What Is the Movie Hostel About?

The movie focuses on two travelers who set off on what they thought would be a fun and memorable budget backpacking trip across Europe.

What Inspired Eli Roth To Make the Movie Hostel?

With Hostel being such a violent film, many wondered what inspired its director, Eli Roth to create it. The answer might shock some. While hosting an AMA on Reddit, he revealed that he received inspiration for the film in a very peculiar way. He said, it was something a friend told me about, a place I thought was real. I was backpacking in 1996 and heard about this thing in Thailand. It wasn’t a hostel, it was like a place you could go and actually kill someone as a ‘tourist’. Roth went on to say that while visiting Amsterdam Nazis had started a fight with him, so he spent a lot of time online. It was here that he stumbled on the site: Thai drug dealers would kidnap tourists and handcuff them to a pipe in the basement, then charge interested parties around $10,000 to do whatever they wanted to them. He added, You could do anything you want. They would only bring tourists who had no families. No wives, no brothers or sisters, parents, no children. So no one would look for them.

He further emphasized that it wasn’t a hostel itself that inspired him, but the story surrounding this website. He was so shattered by the discovery that he tried to report it to the FBI but never got a response. He explained, Hostel is a cautionary tale about traveling abroad and making decisions you wouldn’t normally make in life. Hostels are a conventional hotel accommodation for backpackers and travelers.

How Closely Does Hostel Hew to Its Inspiration?

Hostel director, Eli Roth, said that while he did draw from the story of the Thai drug dealers and the website he saw upon his return to the US, no one was ever able to verify the story. He did say that they shot the movie in the Czech Republic and that every setting in the movie was an actual location.

With this being the case, why is there so much conjecture around elements of reality in Hostel? Ultimately, it’s been proven that no website as described in Hostel existed at the time of its release. However, Roth has not been shy about putting bits of realism in all of his projects, which is why some aspects feel so authentic. But as far as the actual story goes, all of the frights in the movie are fiction. So though it may count some parts as having been inspired by true events, no aspect of the story is supposed to be fact.

Roth has commented that, as far as he and other crews are aware, no site ever existed like what he described. While the story of Hostel isn’t fact, it’s inspired by what Roth described as a very real site. However, the horrific story of Hostel doesn’t quite have any real-world basis and is completely a work of fiction.

*TAGS* – Eli Roth Thailand kidnapping inspiration, real torture website story, Hostel verification attempts, backpacker urban legend horror, Czech Republic filming locations accuracy