In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. For Eli Roth in spring, however, his fancies tend to turn darker, more menacingly humorous, and toward the more bloodily outrageous. Take his plans for March 21. That’s when the horror film director-writer will be putting out the first release of his collaboration with the Italian soundtrack label CAM Sugar, “Eli Roth’s Red Light Disco: Dancefloor Seductions From Italian Sexploitation Cinema,” which will be distributed through Universal Music.
March 21 is also the day that Roth begins offering “stock” to his rabid fanbase in what he calls his independent “mini-studio,” the Horror Section, in partnership with the investing platform Republic.
An obsessive when it comes to music and film — be it admiration for the currency of horror filmmakers, his own slasher cinematic catalog, or the “commedia sexy all’italiana” soundtracks of the 1970s and early 1980s — Roth is a fast-talking and funny fount of knowledge.
“I have a fucked-up sense of humor,” says Roth, in considering the black comedy ripe within his most popular films, such as 2005’s “Hostel,” 2007’s “Hostel: Part II” (infamous for its elaborate blood-gushing torture scene featuring Heather Matarazzo) and 2023’s “Thanksgiving.”
“I like putting things in my movies that are so sick, they’re funny. That’s because when I was a kid, I watched the Three Stooges poke each other in the eye, and discovered Monty Python early on. I didn’t know you weren’t allowed to chop people’s arms off for comic effect like they did in ‘Holy Grail.’ But that’s me. I love David Lynch, I love John Waters, stuff that’s bonkers and weird.”
Italian cinema is also a weird passion of Roth’s, an operatic brand of filmmaking starting with what he calls “the eenies” (Antonioni, Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini), on through the over-the-top, high-octane violence of less prestigious films like 1985’s “Demons,” where everything was obviously dubbed into English and seemed off-kilter. “I felt as if it was made on a parallel planet, until I found out that it was ‘Demoni’ from director Lamberto Bava.”
While Bava and “Demoni” led Roth down the rabbit hole of Italian horror legends such as Dario Argento and further stylized violent giallo fare, it also paved the way for his love of Italian sex comedies, the unfortunately titled spaghetti Western genre, and the music for all of this fare.
“There’s an interesting relationship between Italian and American cinema,” he says, pointing to Westerns as the best example. “In America, you couldn’t show violence or blood. When John Wayne shot someone, they grasped their chest and fell down dead. In Italian films, they don’t know the rule that you’re not allowed to show on-screen blood, so you had the Sergios — Leone and Corbucci — doing graphic violence, and in color, with blood squirting in slow motion.”
Additionally, what made Italian Westerns more visceral than their American counterpart was the former’s use of stinging electric guitars in their soundtracks, a noise that made the legend of 1960s-era spaghetti Western composers such as Ennio Morricone and 1970s commedia sexy all’italiana composers Bruno Nicolai vital and alive.
“After Morricone, American Westerns changed overnight,” says Roth. “Anything orchestral sounded out of date and out of touch.”
Italian sex comedies benefited from their high-wire scores filled with frantic, fuzz-tone guitars, sleekly whirring synthesizers and, eventually, cheesy disco rhythms that never quite matched the action on screen. Thinking back to U.S.-made sex comedies of the 1970s and 1980s (“Porky’s,” “Zapped!”), American soundtracks were, again, quaint in comparison to the Italians.
“A director like Joe D’Amato, who uses the song ‘Sexy Night’ from composer Nico Fidenco for the film ‘Porno Holocaust’ — two great tastes that taste great together — it’s one of the weirdest, craziest… it’s indescribable. You can’t believe that people saw this in a cinema. Is it a horror film? A hardcore porn film? A zombie movie? It’s totally fucking unhinged. And the music is its own thing too, with English lyrics from someone whose native language isn’t English singing about being a lady of the sexy night, and something about moving like tigers, over an American disco beat…. Love Fidenco’s music. He did a number of the Italian sex comedies. This music has its own charm. I became obsessed with these songs.”
The “disco sound, for sure,” is, according to Roth, the greatest dynamic within the music of the commedia sexy all’italiana, “But for me, it is the Italian vocalists singing in English or trying to sound American that really gets me. A song like ‘What Can I Do’ by Stelvio Cipriani from the film ‘La Supplente Va in Citta’ is cool, but that’s instrumental, as are many of the ‘Red Light Disco’ tracks. ‘La musica è’ by Gianni Ferrio is sung by actress Gloria Guida in Italian, and that’s cool. But when you can tell that the vocalists are singing the words phonetically, because they don’t really know what the words are, or are written in an odd cadence, it is as if an alien came down and tried to speak our language. That’s the fun of it — songs like ‘Sexy Night’ and ‘Running Around,’ where you know the film companies tried to sell the movies overseas to the American market with additional overdubbing.”
The director-turned-curator rhapsodizes about the vintage Italian sex comedy composers he compiled on “Eli Roth’s Red Light Disco,” like Scorsese would Robbie Robertson or Tim Burton would Danny Elfman. Rattling off legendary Italian composers such as Franco Campanino, Stelvio Cipriani, Bruno Nicolai, Paolo Gatti, Gianni Ferrio, Riz Ortolani and Daniele Patucchi, Roth compares their oddly stylized music to the vibrancy of each of their films.
“I wanted to live within these movies, from the furniture to the rugs, as their style and their music was equally vivid,” says Roth.
There would be ample opportunity to hear these tracks repeatedly, as very often these composers’ music would go into the music library of CAM (a Rome-based sync house and cataloger of film scores, founded in 1959), then get recycled into other, additional movies.
Roth gives the example of the Spanish slasher film “Pieces” from 1982, which uses a CAM-credited track, “Running Around,” that’s been included, anonymously, in many Italian films. “No one knew who wrote or sang on it until I met up with CAM’s Andrea Fabrizii to curate this collection. He hands me like 300 songs, and the first one is that track. Turns out the original film was 1980’s ‘Bionda Fragola’ (with original music by Daniele Patucchi). Amazing.”
Because there has, according to Roth, never been “clean, pristine” albums where the soundtrack songs were available, CAM Sugar and their new hire wanted to release something collectible and attractive with comprehensive self-penned liner notes (“a 28-page zine”) and gorgeous graphics such as “Red Light Disco: a Sexploitation Cinema Compilation.” And, with over 8,000 never-before utilized tracks at his disposal within the CAM Sugar library, not only does Roth have enough songs for countless compilations, he can easily fill his own new films with angular disco-oriented songs enunciated in weirdly cadenced English.
“Getting the ‘Red Light Disco’ compilation into the world is going to make the world a groovier place,” he says. “Especially if you are a movie soundtrack fan or trust my tastes.”
Having audiences trust Roth is how he came to open and seek funding for his newest enterprise, a fan-funded studio called the Horror Section, with partners in production and distribution Media Capital Technologies. The Horror Section has a backstory based on his successes, and also those of his contemporaries.
Mention his influence on successful 21st century fright-focused filmmakers such as Robert Eggers (“Nosferatu”), Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”), Oz Perkins (“The Monkey”) and Ti West (“MaXXXine”), and Roth turns to masters from his past as a way of paying things forward. “I just look at the people that did it before me — Sam Raimi being brought up on obscenity charges for ‘The Evil Dead’ (from the British Board of Film Censors), or Quentin Tarantino getting flack for the violence and blood in ‘Reservoir Dogs’ — and I’m happy to have broken down barriers for the next generation.”
Roth quickly notes that their successes, and his, would never have occurred if the audience for graphic ultra-violence, bloody gore, body horror and black comic slasher stuff had not grown. “Understanding and accepting that violence and gore in film is not real — that it’s all pretend, make-up and play — shows that horror culture has grown, united, gotten stronger, and has been saving movie theaters at the box office. It’s a healthy, thriving genre.”
Going back to his directorial debut, 2002’s “Cabin Fever,” Roth states that he had to convince producers, studio heads and critics how that same genre wasn’t dead. “No, shitty movies were dead,” he laughs. “If you make something theatrical and worthy of getting people back into cinemas, they will come.”
Come they did to “Cabin Fever,” a film made for $1.5 million that won a box office of $30.6 million. With that, Roth is quick to credit friends and fellow scare-mongers at the top of the 2000s such as Rob Zombie, James Wan and Darren Bousman for pushing the boundaries of guts, gore and terror. “From what we did 20 years ago, and what new filmmakers are doing, to what Jason Blum’s done with Blumhouse, I’ve always believed that horror is as big as the comic book movies, and cheaper to produce.”
This brings him to the Horror Section, his “horror kind-of-studio” where Roth offers “tiny pieces” of his films, for the first time ever through Republic. That’s an online investment platform that recently helped filmmakers and producers Robert Rodriguez and Robert Kirkman launch their own independent content creation spaces, Brass Knuckle Films and Skybound Entertainment, respectively.
“We have the backing for the company already, but I wanted to offer fans a chance to invest, to give them a piece of what I’m doing,” says Roth. “If you want to put down $100, you’re a minority owner. It’s like buying stock in a company, only here, you’re investing in characters and stories.”
The March 21 “stock” launch of the Horror Section on the aforementioned dot-com allows potential investors to purchase up to a 10% stake in Roth’s endeavors and an ownership in the filmmaker’s storylines, characters and franchises going forward. With that, scare-stock holders of Roth’s can share in any potential profits while getting investor perks such as early screening opportunities and even the possibility of getting bloodied on camera.
“Look, I like innovating,” says Roth. “I like pushing the boundaries. With the Horror Section, I can write and film my own movies with no one telling me what to do, and I can just put it out there. I’m excited for the horror genre and where it will go within the next 20 years. Obviously, I love horror, but I also love Italian sex comedies and all of their music. I guess my interests are many and varied.”
