I’m chatting up Cabin Fever director and fellow horror nut Eli Roth this morning. Vintage VHS horror collection in tow, ready to drill him on his new film, ’course, but also on the glory of oversized Lucio Fulci slipcases, vintage Fangoria, the all-time best horror one-sheets (Blood Beach, anyone?) and our multi-region DVDs of such banned nasties as Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust.

But it’s early--too early--in the morning to get into this full-on geek mode in the company of a beautiful European actress and budding American movie star, Barbara Nedeljakova, caught in this trajectory and who no doubt will see us for the drooling adolescents we’re about to become (again). Stalk and slash, slice and dice--call ’em what you want--but you gotta love those 70s and 80s horror pics, which made an indelible impression on Roth as a young boy in Massachusetts and on my own rural Michigan childhood. Growing up, we shared a similar dilemma of being too young to see the seminal horror movies we so longed to experience. Says Roth, "I remember being a kid in Massachusetts and looking at the posters, and not being old enough to go see Last House on the Left, remembering the movie ads in TV guide and the newspaper, and how awesome those ads were. As soon as the TV Guide would come out, I would obsess over every movie that was playing."

Thankfully, Czech star Barbara Nedeljakova is running a bit late as Roth and I sit down to discuss Hostel, his new uber-terror Grindhouse homage supreme. A giant leap from the fun of his first effort and a freak-out of a horror picture that makes no bones about its considerable scares being a lucid, terrifying, waking nightmare firmly set in reality. The sobering tale of cocky, oversexed American backpackers (Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson) on rail across Europe, looking for kicks but finding themselves on the wrong end of a torture chamber. Hostel is a nightmarish, Grand Guignol descent into evil that makes it the rare modern horror picture that stays with you after you’ve seen it. Or at least manages, with the best of them, to haunt your dreams.

Like many great horror flicks, Hostel was born in reality. In this case, a demented web site that Roth found so disturbing he decided to pen his screenplay on the idea. He explains, "People are so numb; they’re so bored, that what is that next level of thrill that people are seeking? We’ve seen a lot of videos of people that are captured, like Al-Qaeda, and they’re beheaded. What about the thought of being in a room, and somebody tries to kill you and there’s nothing you can do, and nothing you can say?"

At this point, Hostel star Nedeljakova enters the room, and contrary to most young actresses, looks every bit the part in person that she does in Hostel. And if you’ve seen her performance as mysterious, too perfect European seductress Natalya, that’s really saying something, particularly this early in the morning. Roth wastes no time addressing her on our mutual obsession: "This is all we did," gesturing to the VHS stash between us, "Was go and find the sickest movie we could, rent them and go and watch them obsessively." She’s bemused. So am I. As much as I love horror, Nedeljakova has just turned my head--and attention--from Roth, something he’s undoubtedly counting on for the Hostel audience. He knows the power of a grade-A femme fatale in a film like this, and has found a talented muse to embody black widow Natalya’s dark duality. Avoiding any spoilers, suffice to say that when the subject turns to her complex European screen queen, she offers that Natalya is dealing with ¾ "Something in her past that she needs to get through. What reason would make her like that inside? She’s broken."

Nedeljakova speaks in impressively polished English for a beginner, whom Roth cast out of four hundred other Czech hopefuls, completely taken with her from the get-go: "There wasn’t even a close second. She came in and had this quality like Monica Bellucci--this real, European beauty and this bombshell quality. And then the darkness came out when she read!" Roth is spot-on in his assessment that Nedeljakova’s Natalya radiates "that feeling when you’re talking to someone who is on drugs when you can’t get a straight answer out of them, and she’s kind of playing that ‘lost in translation’ game, where it’s like, is she out of it, or is she just f**king with me?" Adds Nedeljakova, "That’s what was so interesting about her--you don’t know exactly where she’s coming from."

But we may know where Barbara Nedeljakova is going. If Hostel is any indicator, she’s got a long career ahead of her, currently contemplating a move from Prague to Los Angeles. A trained theater actress in the Czech Republic, her fascination with acting is her love "To transform, be another person, be somebody else, and try to find out why this person is like that. What was the reason why, for example, Natalya, was so cold?" She deflects praise to her director: "Eli knows how to get performances from people!" On the subject of the audience’s strong reaction to her character in Hostel’s harrowing final reel, she says, "I love the reaction--that people love it!"

We can attest for our own quickening pulses. But does the material ever scare its creator? Says Roth of the film’s decaying, labyrinthine third act lair, "We were filming the exterior of that sugar factory, and the downstairs, where all the rooms were, was a mental hospital, built in the Czech Republic in 1915, which had been closed down for 15 years. When we went down there it was so f**king terrifying, like God knows what kind of experiments and s**t went on here--meat hooks, tubs and drains. The crew was freaked out. Derek’s (Richardson) torture scene was so upsetting nobody could watch it on the monitor. People on the crew told me they had nightmares after that. The vibe on the set changed." Interestingly, however, in Hostel’s most extreme scenes, it’s not what we’ve seen but what we think we’ve seen that really hurts. Roth adds, "Absolutely. If you do show everything, it becomes about the effects. So it was finding a delicate balance. The Jay Hernandez scene is back to the gore because you see the blood. But seeing the look on his face with this strained, horrible agony--for me that’s more upsetting. "

Speaking of gore effects, and Hostel has plenty, if you’ve ever wondered how they look up close, on a movie set versus on actual film, Roth explains, "You get a little nervous on the gore days. You want the gore effects to go off. If it looks fake in front of you, it looks fake on film. You can’t light it to look good. You can cut around stuff, but like the fingers getting cut, right up close--that looked like a real hand! I mean, it looked so real. Chris Nelson did that hand, and Chris had been on set in Kill Bill and he’s amazing. It’s a low budget and tight schedule, and I thought they did an amazing job." Interestingly, Roth might be the only director who sends his actors to the effects shop as soon as they are cast--for molds of their (soon to be mutilated) bodies.

Today, we’re jaded on the modern horror flick, with a been there-seen that mentality focused on hip coolness, ironic giggles and manufactured bumps in the night. But Hostel is a different kind of horror, and it offers no such comforts to the viewer. It’s not what’s jumping out of the shadows; it’s what exists in the shadows that just might kill you--even if she’s in broad daylight when you first meet her. Says Roth, "There are two kinds of horror. There’s jump horror, where it’s like ‘boo!’ And then there’s resonant and disturbing horror, where afterwards you say, ‘That really f**ked me up!’ I really wanted to make a movie that was a straight down the middle horror film. After Cabin Fever I got offered a lot of movies to direct--House of Wax-type films. I feel like American horror has to take itself seriously. Many directors today use horror as a stepping-stone to make other movies and don’t love it. I wanted to make the best one I could make!"

Hostel more closely resembles seminal, unblinking 70s horror classics than any of today’s post-modern, ironic horror. Says Roth of his influences, "In the 70s, A-list directors, the best directors--Spielberg, Kubrick, Scott, Donner, Friedkin--were doing horror films. It was really like an art. What happened then? The 80s sequels. The slasher movie came in--movies that we LOVE and adore--and suddenly horror lost its artistic credibility. Then direct-to-video came, and a lot of drive-ins were closing, there wasn’t really a place where you could run low budget, Grindhouse horror movies. A lot of the low-budget theaters on 42^nd Street were gone. Multiplexes were coming in with movies like Back to the Future. There was a backlash of conservatism and family values. These movies were going straight to video and there was no incentive to make them good, because the studios figured out that you could make a piece of s**t and all people cared about were the deaths. In the 70s, you were terrified for the main character, but by 1984, you were rooting for the villain. People just wanted to hear Freddy tell jokes. The villains became the heroes. If you’re an A-list director doing a horror movie, you were going to ruin your career in the mid to late 80s. It took Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs to really bring back violence in movies, and it became arty again and suddenly it swung the other way to where we are now--sex is the thing you can’t do."

On the contrary, Hostel, with its horny collegiate frat boys and wet dream Euro-babes like Natalya, does do sex, and lots of it. It’s as hard an R rated film as we’ve seen in quite some time. Roth lights up at the suggestion. "Thank you! I like adult horror movies. The movie is very much about exploitation and sex. I wanted to show that. These guys think, ‘We’ll just get them to f**k us because we’re American.’ They’re not looking at them like human beings. We might have the most sex and violence combined into one movie since Caligula! It’s sex, and then that pretty much stops and then turns into horror and violence. When Natalya says, ‘I get a lot of money for you, and that makes you my bitch,’ at that point in the story people are saying ‘Good. You f**ked her, you deserve it.’ " How in the world did Roth get this by the censors? He adds, "I don’t know how the f**k it happened, but we got by the ratings board! Tarantino, who is so cool and supportive, and is like the godfather for young filmmakers, told me, ‘Take out all the scary sound effects.’ So when Jay (Hernandez) is cutting the eye out, I put in the Beastie Boys and Outkast! So the ratings board was like, ‘Well, it’s Tarantino and it’s Eli, and it’s violence, but I guess this is what the kids are into. Yeah, that’s fine.’ Nothing got cut!"

Hardcore horror fans rejoice. In Hostel, Eli Roth has delivered a cavalcade of sex, death and good old movie thrills. Count your B-movie blessings--fast laughs, sexy babes and money shots that flow blood red. And a damn good movie to boot.