Eli Roth’s parents knew their son was different when he asked to be sawn in half for his barmitzvah. “They couldn’t have been more supportive,” says the gore-fixated director, who grew up to make Y2K splatter classics such as Hostel and Cabin Fever. “In fact, my parents were worried about me [before then], because I never did anything wrong. I was the model kid. I was the camp counsellor. I was the babysitter. So when I got interested in horror, they were like, ‘Oh, this is a healthy expression of his creativity … This is Eli’s way of being mischievous. This isn’t, ‘he loves blood’, this is Eli finally doing something a little shocking and inappropriate, but in a smart and clever way’.”
The magician Roth’s parents hired for his 13th birthday did indeed pretend to cut him in two using a circular saw. And Roth’s mother did indeed have to explain over the years that her son wasn’t interested in “real violence” but rather “representations of violence”. And when Roth started making films – which featured not only women shaving their legs to the bone with pink razors, but men losing their appendages in Slovak torture chambers – his mum and dad were first in line to watch.
