Many crazy things happened to Eli Roth and the cast and crew of The Green Inferno. The horror filmmaker would only see actors who agreed to get yellow fever vaccinations and trek deep into a tarantula, snake, poisonous frog-infested Amazonian jungle. In short, no divas. But the craziest thing to happen to Roth’s film involved receiving a baby as a gift.
To promote The Green Inferno, Roth went on Reddit for an AMA session. One user cited his unique casting prerequisites and asked for more crazy stories. Roth replied with a doozy. He said:
…our production designer Marichi lived in the village for 3 weeks getting it ready for the shoot. At the end she had to go back to Chile to finish prepping the rest of the film. The village gathered around to give her a gift - they handed her a 2-year-old. She was like WTF and they said, "This is our gift to you." She had to politely decline the baby.
To give you more context, Roth took his crew to Peru and got a real Peruvian village to be in The Green Inferno. This village never saw a movie before Roth’s producers showed them Cannibal Holocaust using a TV, generator, and DVD player. According to Roth, the people thought it was a comedy, and after that everyone agreed to be in the film.
The story of The Green Inferno centers on a group of college students turned activists. After Justine (Lorenza Izzo) meets Alejandro (Ariel Levy), who’s been on a hunger strike on behalf of underpaid janitors, she decides to help him with his initiative to save the Amazon. After their plane crashes in the jungle, however, their group is taken captive by a tribe of hungry cannibals.
Not to diminish the impact of this film or anything, but it’s eerily reminiscent of that South Park episode, “Rainforest Shmainforest,” in which the kids and their school group go to Costa Rica and try to save the rainforest before a trip through the cannibal-filled forest has them (literally) singing a different tune.
Not saying, either, that Roth jacked this idea, but…South Park already did it. Though, Cannibal Holocaust did it before any of them.
The Green Inferno stars Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Sky Ferreira, Daryl Sabara, Magda Apanowicz, and Nicolas Martinez. The film hits theaters this Friday, September 25.
