The horror movie Eli Roth calls “the Holy Grail”
There’s an unexpected depth and gravitas to the horror work of Eli Roth. Coming through in the early 2000s, Roth emerged as one of horror cinema’s biggest talents with his truly visceral, grotesque and graphic imagery infused with a unique and genuinely dark sense of humour, as shown in early efforts like Cabin Fever.
Roth followed up on his early success with Hostel, a film which not only managed to instil fear in his audience but also made a sly commentary on the darker side of globalisation. Subverting expectations while continuing to raise the heart rates of his viewers, it’s easy to see why Roth is one of the most respected names on the horror circuit.
Being one of the horror genre’s biggest names naturally comes with the territory of having a deep understanding of its biggest history. When Roth named his favourite horror movies in a feature with The Daily Beast, he noted how some films sit higher in his estimation than others, including this one he considers “the Holy Grail” of horror.
“I’m actually going to do a screening of this movie soon,” Roth said of his love for 1982’s Pieces. “I own a 35mm print of it because it’s going out of circulation, and me and Tarantino are buying up these old prints to preserve them. This is the Holy Grail. The Spanish title is One Thousand Cries in the Night.”
Pieces is the Spanish-American slasher movie directed by Juan Piquer Simon, written by Dick Randall and starring Christopher George, Lynda Day George and a handful of other actors. It focuses on a mysterious assailant who kills several female students at a Boston university before using their body parts to make a grotesque puzzle.
“There are two sequences,” Roth explained. “There’s one where the killer gets into the elevator, casually hiding a chainsaw behind his back, has a conversation with a college girl, and then just pops it out and saws her arms off. But there’s another sequence that’s really effective where she goes from the tennis court to the locker room, and the killer takes out a chainsaw and cuts her in half. This girl is petrified because it’s so low-budget; they really used a real chainsaw”.
The director signed off on his thoughts for Simon’s film, “Filming this thing almost cut her head off, but the actual cut of the slice is so realistic and so horrific. I remember seeing Scarface and feeling ripped off. I couldn’t see the chainsaw cutting the guy’s arms off, but this satisfied that for me. It’s pure exploitation. And afterwards, the undercover investigator who’s posing as a tennis coach has one of the greatest lines after: ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard!’”
Check out the trailer for Pieces below.
