From the latest issue of Film Stories magazine, Eli Roth talks exclusively about his upcoming Hostel TV show and its White Lotus inspiration:
For the new issue of Film Stories Magazine, we chatted to director Eli Roth about his latest film, Borderlands, which the director but we couldn’t resist asking him about the recently announced Hostel TV show. News of the show broke in early June, which Roth says wasn’t meant to happen.
“The news leaked early,” he told us. “We didn’t intend to announce it yet, but people heard we’re making the deal with Paul [Giamatti], so it’s out there in the world.”
Giamatti has been tapped to star in the TV adaptation of one of Roth’s best known films, but his role is being kept secret for now.
The filmmaker also said the show won’t hold back on the bloodshed, stating that TV is “more violent than movies now”.
The show doesn’t yet have a platform on which it might air, but it’s being produced by Fifth Season, which is the production company behind AppleTV+’s Severance and Netflix’s The Eddy. Roth says it’s still early days, but they “want to shoot next year” and the show might take inspiration from a surprising source: hit satire, The White Lotus.
“I had this idea that I’ve worked on for a long time on how to do it, like a horror White Lotus, where I can write and direct all of it, where each season, you can take a different mystery and really go into what disturbing things are underneath the surface, right outside,” Roth teased. “We’re in a beautiful place, and just go off the path a little bit where you’re not supposed to, all the dark, fucked up things people do with money.”
Now that he mentions it, The White Lotus formula would be a good fit for Hostel. The first Hostel, released in 2005, followed a group of young backpackers who find themselves at the mercy of wealthy people paying for the pleasure of torturing strangers.
“Hostel seemed so crazy at the time, and now it seems like a documentary, once we’ve seen all the horrible, sick things that billionaires do,” Roth noted. “I’m still interested, there’s a lot more to mine there.”
You can read more about Borderlands and Roth’s comments in the latest issue of the magazine, which you can get right here.