According to a new interview with UK movie site Empire Online, director Eli Roth and the cast and crew of his new cannibal epic The Green Inferno had to endure some real-life jungle perils on location. If you haven't already heard, Inferno is Roth's return to the director's chair and a big-budget nod to the infamous 1980 gore classic Cannibal Holocaust, which is itself a forerunner to the modern found-footage horror genre. Roth claims to be side-stepping the original film's grindhouse tone, but he's still aiming for brutal realism, taking his team into regions of the Amazon that have never before been captured on film.
"Thank God no one got killed,” Roth told the magazine, “but there were tarantulas, there were spider bites, there were snakes. It was insane. Everybody had to get de-parasited after we got back.” But they all made it out alive, returning with footage he describes as “incredible.” He also described a surreal scenario in which he tried to explain the making of the movie to Amazon natives who didn't even know what a movie was. His solution? Screen them Cannibal Holocaust, of course. “They thought it was the funniest thing that they had ever seen,” he said.
Roth is now editing Green Inferno, which is slated for release next year. In the meantime, his new horror series Hemlock Grove will premiere on Netflix April 19th. Here's a trailer for that one: