Last night director Eli Roth screened a previously unseen version of his controversial horror masterwork.  And usually alternate endings, like "deleted scenes," leave me pretty cold.  That's because often it's fairy clear why a particular sequence didn't make the final cut.  Not so in this case.

Audiences at the New York City Horror Film Festival are impressively conversant on recent titles/trends in the genre, which is why I was surprised that so many in attendance reacted to the shocks and reversals in Hostel (2005) as if they'd never seen the movie before.  Or maybe their response just points to its strength on multiple viewings—it certainly more than holds up for me.  In fact, I was so engrossed that it took me a second to catch on to why some shots in the climactic scenes seemed unfamiliar.  Yes, it was a real Homer Simpson moment as I realized, "Oh, yeah, this is the original ending that I came here to see…"

That's how well the ending works—although, upon further reflection, its seamlessness should of course come as no surprise.

In any case, this original ending is now available as a feature on a "Director's Cut" DVD.  In fact, in terms of Hostel's actual content, its inclusion pretty much marks the only the difference between this release and the "unrated" version that's long been available.  Still, seeing this ending in a theatrical setting, and how well it flows narratively and thematically from the rest of the movie, left me with the initial thought that… well, it's just better in a lot of ways than the ending we've all seen the last couple of years.

In a spirited Q&A session, Roth explained that in the original script the Dutch Businessman's young daughter has her throat slit by Paxton, the Jay Hernandez character who does this to avenge the death of his friend Josh.  According to Roth, the script called for Paxton to put her body in a "dumpster" while her father is "looking around" frantically for her.  However, as production of the movie progressed, Hernandez and others expressed concerns about the character behaving so viciously.

So then the original ending was arrived at, which preserves some of the flavor of the scripted climax.  In it, the movie ends on a similar note of anguish from the Dutch Businessman as his daughter has indeed gone missing.  However, the audience sees that Paxton has kidnapped her and is keeping her quiet on a train that's pulling out of the station.

I love the ambiguity of this ending as well as the shift in tone it signifies.  Apart from avoiding the obvious risk of explicitly turning the hero into a cold-blooded killer, the abduction works by creating a kind of elliptical psychological horror that I guess I'm a sucker for if it's well done.  And this was done well, right down to the apparent lack of help/compassion our Dutch monster receives from the other travelers.

  It paints him as alone in a world that has now been as cruel to him as he's been to his victims.  A bit existential I'll grant you, but powerful nonetheless.  In contrast, the on-screen death of the little girl, in addition to creating all kinds of other problems, would have actually hinted at closure for her father when her body was inevitably discovered.  With such closure forever denied him, though, Roth suggests a kind of never-ending psychological "torture" that well serves Paxton's goals and, moreover, unexpectedly yet effectively trumps the physical torture depicted heretofore.  Elegant and chilling at the same time.  You can't ask for much more than that from a final shot.

The first audience member who commented on the ending last night expressed thoughts along these lines, praising its "minimalism" and opining that it was "darker" than the theatrical ending.  Roth nodded, immediately conceding that is was "very depressing" for him to hear this perspective articulated—it was too much like his own.  He shared that at the initial test screening only about "ten out of three hundred people" felt this way about the ending (I guess I would've been the eleventh).  Everyone else, it seems, required that blood be shed as a kind of necessary catharsis and visceral capping point to all of the violence that had already occurred in the story.  Thus, the more standard ending, where good guy kills bad guy, ultimately prevailed.  As some Screen Gems reps pointed out at the time, although Roth hadn’t set out to do this, he had in effect made a revenge movie.  And since the audience was perceiving it as such, the revenge taken at the end had to be dramatized in more literal terms.

In addition, Roth acknowledged that several audience members at that long-ago test screening drew attention to several errors in logic with the abduction ending.  For example, how did Paxton imagine he would communicate with the girl, given the language barrier?  For Roth, such questions were not much of an issue as he referenced Guillermo del Toro's theory that after a certain point "flow" in a horror movie is much more important than logic per se—and cited the work of Argento as prime example of this axiom.  I would tend to agree with this.  Perhaps not across the board, but certainly in the case of Hostel, which, unlike its sequel, operates within a very tight set of narrative logic.  For the ending to bend realism a bit would have been acceptable:  the movie had earned the right.  In fact, one could argue that problems in logic could point to the desperation—and audaciousness—of Paxton in the film's closing moments, which is actually perfectly logical in terms of character development.

Anyway, that's all for now.  Come back soon for more of what Roth shared with fans and filmmakers as well as continuing coverage of the NYCHFF itself.