The Price of a Shot

 

The word Golem means "shapeless mass" in Hebrew. Rabbis summoned these clay creatures during persecutions, silent guardians who protected ghettos when authorities looked the other way. The legends persisted until World War II. Quentin Tarantino understood this when he gave Eli Roth a baseball bat in Inglourious Basterds and turned him into Sergeant Donnie Donowitz, nicknamed "The Bear Jew." The Nazis whispered that he was a Golem. He wasn't. He was something worse: a man who had discovered that revenge has texture, weight, and makes a specific sound when the skull gives way.

In 2005, Roth directed Hostel after stumbling upon something on the Deep Web that no one wanted to confirm: a site offering trips to Thailand where, for ten thousand dollars, you could kill someone. No consequences. He told Tarantino, who said exactly three words: "Make the movie." What followed was a franchise that critics despised under the term "torture porn," coined by David Edelstein with all the condescension of someone who sees art where others see packaged atrocity. But the label failed. Hostel wasn't pornography. It was a commercial document. An acknowledgment that everything has a price if you find the right buyer.

The film works because it touches a live wire: American tourists in Eastern Europe, seduced by promises of cheap pleasure, turned into inventory. Roth cited Takashi Miike's Audition as an influence, that Japanese masterpiece where horror grows in silence until a piano wire cuts more than tendons. But Hostel rejects silence. Its horror is transactional, explicit, capitalist. An efficient market where supply meets demand without moral intermediaries. That's what's unbearable. Not the blood. The invoice.

What almost no one mentions is that this had already happened. Not on a screen, but in the mountains surrounding Sarajevo during the longest siege in modern history, from 1992 to 1996. While the city starved under grenades and snipers, something worse was happening in the hills: tourists arrived. Businessmen from northern Italy, aristocrats from France, Germany, Russia, and the US. Retired mercenaries with money, tired of hunting in the Black Forest, who traveled from Trieste to Belgrade under the euphemism "war tourism." Hidden in the mountains from Friday to Sunday, then back to their normal lives. They paid up to a hundred thousand euros to shoot at civilians trapped below. Human safaris. They chose targets: a woman carrying water, a child crossing the street, an old man in a window. There was talk of a price list. The most expensive: shooting a child. The elderly were free. They shot. They paid. They left. The documentary Sarajevo Safari by director Miran Zupanić denounced the facts. Many dismissed it as "urban legends" or propaganda. It wasn't. It wasn't until the investigation by Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni, who gathered testimonies and documentation, that the story began to be taken seriously.

Eduard Limonov was there. The Russian poet, punk dissident in 1970s New York, erratic nationalist in post Soviet Moscow, traveled to those mountains in 1992 and fired toward Sarajevo in front of cameras. The video is still available. Emmanuel Carrère, the French writer of Russian descent who now regrets that heritage, immortalized him in Limonov, turning him into a literary character: brilliant, repulsive, magnetic. Limonov had been a figure in the New York underground, co founder of the National Bolshevik Party alongside philosopher Alexander Dugin and fugitive punk Yegor Letov, yearning for Soviet imperialism without its communism. Letov became a legend of post Soviet punk. Dugin became Putin's go-to ideologue. Limonov ended up as a regime opponent alongside Garry Kasparov. But in Sarajevo, in 1992, he was just a tourist with a rifle in the mountains, alongside the Serbian army responsible for genocide.

The connection to Hostelbis not metaphor. It is continuity. Roth built a hell where millionaires torture tourists in Slovakian basements. Sarajevo proved that hell already operated, only outdoors, with long range rifles instead of power saws. Both scenarios run on the same logic: money as the master key to any moral door. If you can pay, you can do anything. The victim stops being a person and becomes a product. A premium experience. An exclusive service. Hostel premiered in the decade of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, when torture images stopped being spy fiction and became news content. The siege of Sarajevo happened while Europe celebrated the end of the Cold War, convinced it had buried the ghosts of the 20th century. But ghosts don't disappear. They evolve. They learn to use credit cards and cryptocurrencies. They become efficient.

Limonov shooting from the hills and the anonymous clients of Hostel answer the same question: what happens when power, political, economic, cultural, meets an absolute moral vacuum? Both stories conclude the same: for certain people, someone else's life has no intrinsic value. It only has market price. And if the price is right, the transaction is complete. No witnesses. No judgment. No memory. Maybe Hostel hurts because it doesn't lie. And maybe the images of Sarajevo remain unbearable for the same reason. Both stories show us something we'd rather ignore: when violence becomes business, it stops mattering who dies. It only matters who pays. And in that precise moment, all of us, victims, witnesses, spectators, stop being people. We become extras in a movie no one wants to watch but that never stops filming.