Eli Roth’s New Horror Film Is About Social Justice Warriors (and Cannibals)

Writer and director Eli Roth, best known for his horror film Hostel, is promoting his new film The Green Inferno at Comic-Con. In an interview on Friday, Roth explained the film was inspired by so-called social justice warriors (SJWs) operating on social media.

A trailer for The Green Inferno features scenes of deforestation followed by an earnest young woman explaining to her business-like father, “I just think I should be doing something about the rainforest.” She joins other like-minded young people on a trip to Peru to put her idealism into action. But after their small plane crashes in the jungle, she and her compatriots are rounded up as food by a native tribe.

The LA Times asked Roth what motivated him to write the story, and he explained it was all about SJWs online.

I wanted to write a movie that was about modern activism. I see that a lot of people want to care and want to help, but in general, I feel like people don’t really want to inconvenience their own lives. And I saw a lot of people just reacting to things on social media—these social justice warriors. ‘This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.’ And they’re just tweeting and retweeting. They’re not actually doing anything. Or you see people get involved in a cause that they don’t really know a lot about, and they go crazy about it. I wanted to make a movie about kids like that.

Asked directly if the story was inspired by “the SJWs of Twitter,” Roth says, “Yeah.” He adds, “the SJW culture has gotten so out of control, that you feel like everyone—are they doing it because they believe in it? Or do they just want to look like good people?”

The Green Inferno will be released in theaters on September 25, 2015.