Eli Roth has been documenting the making of "Hostel: Part II" with a series of diary entries for MTV. Yesterday Roth talked about hearing the final sound mix for the film for the first time. Today he discusses how he and his peers came to be known as "The Splat Pack."

About a year ago, I read an article by the British film journalist Alan Jones, who referred to the current wave of new horror directors as "The Splat Pack." This group was myself, James Wan ("Saw"), Neil Marshall ("The Descent"), Alex Aja ("The Hills Have Eyes"), Darren Boussman ("Saw II"), Leigh Whannell (who wrote the first three "Saw" films) Greg McLean ("Wolf Creek"), and Rob Zombie.

Having met most of these guys, we all immediately learned that we had one thing in common: we love R-rated horror movies, and we felt that horror had gone soft, and we wanted to bring back the "hard" R. Everyone, in their own way, wanted to make the kinds of films they grew up on that they felt was missing in mainstream cinema today. Rob Zombie had been making "House of 1000 Corpses" while I was making "Cabin Fever," without any knowledge of each other's films. When I first met Rob, we talked about the horror films we grew up on and how we missed the visceral, grizzly, realistic horror films. We couldn't figure out why sex and nudity had evaporated from scary movies, and we talked about how horror fans want their horror movies horrific, not safe and PG-13. Not that there's anything wrong with PG-13, but that rating tends to best suit more supernatural movies like "The Grudge" and "The Sixth Sense," whereas the films we were making were more realistic, and more brutal. Read more...