Eli Roth

Eli Raphael Roth (born April 18, 1972) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. He is best known for his work in the horror genre, particularly splatter films such as Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005). As an actor, he starred as Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino's war film Inglourious Basterds (2009). Many journalists have included Roth in a group of filmmakers dubbed the "Splat Pack" due to their explicitly violent horror films.

Roth was born in Newton, Massachusetts, as the middle of three sons to Sheldon Roth, a psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor, and Cora Roth, a painter. Raised Jewish, he attended Newton South High School and later studied at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where his student film Restaurant Dogs won its division at the Student Academy Awards in 1995. While in college and early in his career, he worked various jobs, including serving as a production assistant on Howard Stern's Private Parts and working for producer Frederick Zollo and actress Camryn Manheim.

Roth's early creative projects included the unbroadcast animated shorts Chowdaheads and the stop-motion series The Rotten Fruit. He achieved his directorial breakthrough with the 2002 horror film Cabin Fever, which he co-wrote based on a personal experience with a skin infection. Produced on a $1.5 million budget, it sold to Lionsgate at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and earned $35 million worldwide, establishing him as a prominent figure in the horror genre.

Roth followed Cabin Fever with Hostel (2005), which grossed $80 million worldwide in box office sales and was credited by critics with popularizing a controversial horror subgenre. He went on to write and direct Hostel: Part II (2007), direct the faux trailer segment Thanksgiving for Grindhouse (2007), and direct the cannibal horror film The Green Inferno (2013). Expanding beyond horror, he directed the erotic thriller Knock Knock (2015), the action remake Death Wish (2018), and the fantasy comedy The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018).

As an actor, Roth's role in Inglourious Basterds earned him a Critics' Choice Movie Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the film's ensemble. In television, he directed the pilot for Netflix's Hemlock Grove, hosted Curiosity and Shark After Dark on the Discovery Channel, and collaborated on Fright Krewe. In 2013, he received the Visionary Award at the Stanley Film Festival for his contributions to the horror genre.

In recent years, Roth directed the feature-length film version of Thanksgiving (2023) and the action-comedy video game adaptation Borderlands (2024). In 2025, he founded the media venture The Horror Section in partnership with Media Capital Technologies. Throughout his career, he has also served as a producer on various films, including The Last Exorcism (2010), The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), and Clown (2014).