A business filled with horrors

THE piece on the director of the “Hostel” films, Eli Roth, was eye-opening to say the least. Trying to defend this gore as a generational and “artistic” response to the politics of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is reductive and irresponsible, with a skewed perspective on cause and effect. Roth’s psychiatrist father may dismiss criticism for accompanying the young Eli to horror films as “bourgeois,” but I have a different take: A parent who would allow an 8-year-old to watch “Alien” is a borderline psychopath and is also very likely to raise one.

JOE ALLEGRETTI

Santa Barbara

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I find any promotion of a guy like Eli Roth despicable. You can put all the window dressing you want on what he does; you can call it “gorn” or whatever you want. What it is, is pure mental illness. Roth is a metaphysically degenerate, psychologically retarded guy who is producing dehumanizing torture films. Kids see commercials for these movies at 8 and 9 at night, and some will see this article. This kind of exposure normalizes what is inherently sick and sadistic. We all, with everything we do and don’t do, with everything we say and don’t say, genuinely affect the world we live in. Roth can be as glib as he wants about what he does, but it’s having a genuinely negative effect on the world.

RAYMOND DELAURENTIS

Westlake Village

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EVEN at his tender age, Eli Roth has perhaps been living in the world of “pretend” just a little too long. It is terribly sad when a person is so disconnected from the damaging effects of his work that he can make the comment (without a touch of irony) that “nothing really scares” him anymore. How much more obvious can the effect of his work be?

Why don’t Roth and the other “masters of horror” spend their valuable time doing something to truly confront the political conditions that make it acceptable to torture prisoners and carve up women? I’ll tell you why -- because there’s no horse ranch in Iceland, no mansion on Malibu Beach, resulting from that work. In the end, there is one rationale only -- profit.

VALERIE MILLER

Calabasas