Looking all the way back to 1968 with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, solid social commentary always makes a horror film better. And that’s still the case.
I haven’t been this excited for a genre pic in quite some time – and Eli Roth‘s motivation behind his upcoming The Green Inferno only makes it sound even better!
Roth recently spoke with the LA Times about his Amazon-based cannibal horror The Green Inferno, in theaters September 25th, and revealed his inspiration. It’s a doozy.
“I see that a lot of people want to care and want to help, but in general I feel like people don’t really want to inconvenience their own lives,” said Roth. “And I saw a lot of people just reacting to things on social media. These social justice warriors. ‘This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.’ And they’re just tweeting and retweeting. They’re not actually doing anything. Or you see people get involved in a cause that they don’t really know a lot about and they go crazy about it.”
“I wanted to make a movie about kids like that,” he continued. “I think there’s a lot great things, obviously, about activism: people commit their lives to it. But I wanted to make a story about kids who don’t really know what they’re getting into. Get in way over their heads, and it actually works. And then the irony is on their way home their plane crashes and the very people they saved think that they’re invaders, and just dart them and eat them.”
This has always been my biggest issue with the “voices” of social media, and love that Roth is taking a swing at them with Green Inferno. Hopefully the movie not only connects with audiences, but lands a punch with those on social media who haven’t lifted a finger to help anyone out…
Heading deep into The Green Inferno with Lorenza Izzo are Ariel Levy, Daryl Sabara and Kirby Bliss Blanton, who star in the pic that “follows a group of student activists who from New York City travel to the Amazon to protect a dying tribe, but crash in the jungle and are taken hostage by the very natives they saved.”