Thanksgiving director Eli Roth admits his biggest fear is… Paul Hollywood
WATCH: Thanksgiving director Eli Roth shares his concerns about Bake Off
Eli Roth has murdered teenagers, beheaded backpackers, and stabbed students, yet the director behind such horrors as Cabin Fever, Hostel, and the upcoming movie Thanksgiving (in theaters Friday) has another surprising set of victims on his hit list: the Bakers .
“I would love to make a horror movie about The Great British Baking Show,” the American director tells Yahoo UK (referring to what we call Bake Off here).
“For me, this is the scariest, most tense show to watch. When they’re racing to save time and their stuff’s loose and Paul Hollywood is staring at them intensely and Prue bites it and the pie collapses, that’s the most tense thing in the world to me.”
“When people watch horror movies and they freak out, I sit there and watch The Great British Bake Show and I cringe as I watch it.”
What would a horror movie, Bake Off, look like? Yahoo suggests that judge Paul Hollywood’s eyes could play a role.
“Just laser holes, cutting people in half, cutting their heads off,” Roth adds passionately.
Before this horrifying and immature idea inevitably hits the big screen, Roth’s next release is Thanksgiving , a horror movie based around the American holiday. The film focuses on a killer, using the alias John Carver, who begins killing a group of teenagers who had previously participated in a deadly Black Friday riot.
Thanksgiving was first put on celluloid in 2007, when the director made a fake trailer for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s controversial double act, Grindhouse, which paid homage to 1970s exploitation films.
Tarantino has been a strong supporter of Roth’s work, not only casting him in a supporting role in his half of Grindhouse, Death Proof, but also calling Roth “the future of horror.” At the time, much of Roth’s work was dismissed as “torture porn” in the same way that “Saw” was. Since then, the horror landscape – and the general public’s perception of horror – has changed radically.
“I haven’t heard (that term lately), and I don’t think this kind of movie is being made, or kind of shot to death, it’s very old-fashioned,” he says now.
“But (this term) says more about the critic than it does about the film. It is just a way of isolating and rejecting films.
“Fifteen years later, people talk about the movies like they’re classics. 20-year-olds, who were 4 when they came out, don’t know the term. They just love them. People tell me that Grindhouse and Hostel were the scariest movies Influenced in the 2000s, they don’t consider it torture or anything like that.
“It’s just movies they love. The only critic that matters is time.”
The only critic that matters is time.Eli Roth
A big part of that changing perception has also come thanks to how television has evolved in the years since Hostel first hit theaters in 2005.
Watch: Eli Roth recalls his memories of calling him “torture porn”
“Just look at what’s on TV,” he says. “There was no solid television at that time. You can look at Last of Us, Game of Thrones. There’s a lot of gore. Anything on Netflix, any of the horror series, Fall of the House of Usher, people get it at home, It’s not shocking anymore.
“You have to be creative. You have to come up with great new ideas. Everyone has seen every person disemboweled, every part of their body torn apart.”
“The creative thing is (like at Thanksgiving) doing it with corn holders. It’s doing it in a new way that people haven’t seen before. It’s inventing something where you go,” which is disgusting because I didn’t even know that anyone could think in that”.”
It seems that if Roth gets his wish, it won’t just be the bakers in the Bake Off tent getting creative…
Thanksgiving is in cinemas starting November 17.
Read more: Horror
Watch a Thanksgiving trailer
