The film follows a group of American tourists, as they end up in Slovakia where they are eventually taken one-by-one by an organization that allows people to torture and kill others.

[4] Two college students, Paxton Rodriguez and Josh Brooks, travel across Europe with their Icelandic friend Óli Eriksson.

Briefly exiting the disco, Josh is accosted by a gang of local Romani criminal children, but the Dutch businessman intervenes to defend him.

When the train stops in Vienna, Austria, Paxton follows the Dutch businessman into a public restroom and tortures him before slicing his throat.

In the director's cut of the film, Paxton follows the Dutch businessman being accompanied by his young daughter into a public restroom of a train station.

After finding her teddy bear in the women's restroom, the Dutch businessman frantically searches the crowd for his missing daughter.

Knowles then shared with Roth a Thai "murder vacation" website he came across on the dark web, where one could pay $10,000 to shoot someone dead.

"[5][6] Roth had also met with Mike Fleiss and Chris Briggs after Cabin Fever to discuss future projects.

Upon hearing his pitch, Tarantino loved the idea and encouraged Roth to immediately start writing a draft that day, which later formed the basis for Hostel.

When hardly any credible information could be found on the topic, the idea was scrapped in favor of a traditionally flowing narrative using fictional locations and characters.

Jay Hernandez was cast as Paxton, with Roth praising his acting as "such a good actor that he feels like a regular guy."

[8] Jan Vlasák, a Czech actor with limited screen appearances known for his work in Shakespearean theater, was cast as the Dutch businessman.

The song featured the repeating hook, "everyone's some kinda freak...", an audio sample taken from the 1973 horror film Ganja & Hess directed by Bill Gunn and starring Duane Jones.

[13] Hostel opened theatrically on January 6, 2006, in the United States and earned $19.6 million in its first weekend, ranking number one at the box office.

[17] Entertainment Weekly's film critic Owen Gleiberman commended the film's creativity, saying "You may or may not believe that slavering redneck psychos, of the kind who leer through Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, can be found in the Southwest, but it's all too easy to envision this sort of depravity in the former Soviet bloc, the crack-up of which has produced a brutal marketplace of capitalistic fiendishness.

The torture scenes in Hostel (snipped toes, sliced ankles, pulled eyeballs) are not, in essence, much different from the surgical terrors in the Saw films, only Roth, by presenting his characters as victims of the same world of flesh-for-fantasy they were grooving on in the first place, digs deep into the nightmare of a society ruled by the profit of illicit desire.

[20] David Edelstein of New York Magazine was equally negative, deriding director Roth with creating the horror subgenre "torture porn", or "gorno", using excessive violence to excite audiences like a sexual act.

Slovak and Czech officials were both disgusted and outraged by the film's portrayal of their countries as undeveloped, poor, and uncultured lands suffering from high criminality, war, and prostitution,[23] fearing it would "damage the good reputation of Slovakia" and make foreigners feel it was a dangerous place to be.

[24] The tourist board of Slovakia invited Roth on an all-expenses-paid trip to their country so he could see it is not made up of run-down factories, ghettos, and kids who kill for bubble gum.