Hollywood Byte #49:The Man Who Made Hostel

When it comes to horror, Hollywood's goriest creator is Eli Roth. He's the guy who pushed boundaries with his flesh-eating virus movie, Cabin Fever, and then brought terror to the word Hostel in a breakout horror hit that launched a new franchise. Now Roth has his sites set on videogames. And for good reason, he grew up playing them and he acknowledges that games have influenced his big screen work.

"Growing up playing games influenced me as a director," said Roth. "In a weird way, the graphics of the games were so limited, so you actually had to use your imagination. When you're playing Adventure, you look at the box on the Atari and you see a dragon but then you're this little square in the game. And as a kid you picture yourself killing the dragon. And then when you think back to playing the game, you're like,' I was in the catacomb, and then I killed the dragon and then I was in the maze.' You were just dealing with lines and squares, but when you'd think about the game, it's almost like a book...I'd imagine the whole universe as I was playing the game. I grew up on videogames and horror movies. I'd play games for hours and hours and hours. That's why I never met any girls until I was 30."

Roth is one of a growing number of Hollywood movers and shakers that has come into a position of power and still loves the videogame medium, as well as the traditional film medium.

"I think being a gamer, you appreciate different forms of entertainment and storytelling," said Roth, who was a presenter at SpikeTV's "VGAs" this year. "There's narrative storytelling where you sit down and watch a movie, but there's active storytelling where you're inside the story. Now, the technology is at the level of the games I've always dreamed of doing. I grew up on Atari games. I had ideas for games but I thought they'd never be able to do them with those graphics. But you see what they're able to do now with videogames and the technology's really there."

Roth said that the game industry has really warmed up to Hollywood, seeing that there are a lot more movie and game crossover. He believes game companies need good creative people, as well as good technical people.

"They need storytellers and people with a certain fan base," said Roth. "If I can carry the Hostel fans over to the game world there's a lot of crossover. I want to be a filmmaker who can tell different stories and some of those stories are not narrative, they're interactive."