Monday 13th October 2003: Cabin Fever Update:
New writer for The Z Review sat down in London last week with hot new Director Eli Roth and they talked about Cabin Fever....

“The future of horror”

By Ann Lee

“People miss violent horror,” says Eli Roth, director of Cabin Fever, as he tries to explain why his debut feature has become one of this year’s most eagerly anticipated and over-hyped horror films. Hailed as a return to the back-to-basics low-budget all out gore of the 70’s, Roth certainly delivers up the horror with a vengeance and lashings of violence.

The premise is simple enough – five college kids on holiday, a remote cabin and a flesh-eating virus. Throw in some hillbillies, a lot of blood, a smattering of nudity and plenty of violence and it all gets very, very messy. “What makes a great horror movie is when the director or writer makes it from the point of view of what truly scares them,” says Roth. “In Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tobe Hooper was afraid that he’d be living next door to the Mansons. In Dawn of the Dead, that America was cannibalising itself, that people were just worshipping in shopping malls.” Roth knows what he’s talking about as Cabin Fever was based on his own horrific medical experiences.

When he was 12 he was struck down by a rare virus. He recovered only to be infected by mono and a parasite called giardia when he was 17 on a trip to Russia. When he was 19 he went to work with horses in Iceland and got a skin infection which meant that every time he shaved or scratched his face chunks of skin would fall off. To top it all off he contracted a bad case of psoriasis when he was 22.

“I am the ultimate hypochondriac. After what I’ve been through with psoriasis, with this disease I had on my face and with giardia, anytime I get so much as a paper cut and I don’t know where it came from I immediately think its AIDS or cancer. That’s why I’m insane but I think it’s human nature.”

He started researching highly contagious diseases such as necrotizing fasciitis and ebola, discovering that not even his wild imagination could keep up with the reality of these gruesome diseases. “Even the part of disease I had fictionalised in my head for the film (infection through the water) I later found out it had actually happened.”

The film has been propelled Blair Witch style from the indie circuit into mainstream success after it sparked a bidding war at the Toronto Film Festival. The distribution rights eventually went to Lions Gate in one of the biggest deals in recent years at the festival. Not bad for a debut feature made for $1.5m and which nearly didn’t get made when it ran into union trouble.

Roth describes the attention Cabin Fever has received as “overwhelming”. Peter Jackson stopped filming of Lord of the Rings three times to screen it and Quentin Tarantino was so impressed he invited Roth to his house to watch movies. He is understandably bowled over. “The thing I didn’t expect was that my favourite directors - my idols - responded. I am the fan still very much and it’s been the most trippy, surreal, incredible, wonderful thing.”

Roth proved he is still very much the fan when he dressed up as Kakihara a character from Ichi the Killer to the premiere of his own film. Cabin Fever - written, produced and directed by Roth - is also littered with references to his favourite horror films. Some critics have seen it as a homage to the best of 70’s horror movies, others have labelled it an out and out rip-off. Roth does not deny borrowing elements from 70’s horror. He explains: “I looked at all my favourite films - Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, The Thing - and broke down the core structural elements.

“I lined up all the scenes from the movies in a row and looked at what made them a success. There’s no question I took scenes but I wanted to do it in a way that people knew I was paying homage to these films and I wasn’t just doing a straight rip-off.”

Roth certainly knows his stuff and delights in taking horror clichés and splattering them to smithereens. “The fun is taking those conventions and twisting them on their ear that further engages people into the story. But it’s hard because everyone is constantly comparing your movie to everything they’ve seen before.”

Along with films like House of 1000 corpses and Wrong Turn, Cabin Fever is leading a backlash against the ironic, post-modern horror films of the 90’s typified by the Scream trilogy. But Roth is disparaging about these new throwbacks to the glory-days of horror which he says fail to push the genre’s boundaries to its limits. “I think there’s a very big difference between 70’s horrors and p****-assed 90’s horrors which call themselves 70’s horrors.”

“You have a movie like the Wrong Turn going ‘look how 70’s we are’. If you have girls tied up in bed by hillbillies and the hillbillies don’t rip their clothes off that’s not 70’s that’s 1997. That’s Urban Legend 2 valentine p****-assed shit.”

Hollywood’s refusal to bring out anything other than PG-13 horror movies after the success of The Ring and The Others has left audiences bored and now they are ready to see some real horror, Roth says. “People just got tired of it. Enough already! We don’t want to see movies with f****** TV actresses where they live to the end of the movie because you know they’re going to be needed for a sequel and they don’t do the nudity or the sex scene. It’s just boring.

“Seventies horror movies were all made from the point of view of how is this idea scary.”

Surprisingly the most influential film on Roth was not horror but a Monty Python film. He says: “The first time I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail that probably warped me and changed me more than any other film.” And Cabin Fever is certainly not lacking in any laughs. As a protégé of David Lynch, Roth injects a healthy dose of quirky humour into the film most noticeably with a stomach-heaving leg shaving scene. He says he tried to achieve a fine balance between the humour and the violence in the film. “Any point for me when it goes too far is when it becomes gratuitous. That’s when you lose the audiences, when they’re taken away from the story and they’re not taking it seriously.

“There was a lot of humour that we shot that we had to cut out because I felt it was going too far and I felt that if we had too much violence then the leg shaving scene would lose its effectiveness.”

Roth will be putting his own particular brand of humour into his next project Scavenger Hunt for Universal which he describes as a “full-on early 80’s sex comedy”. He has also teamed up with good friend Richard Kelly, who directed Donnie Darko, to write another horror film The Box. “Its perfect because Cabin Fever is 99 per cent Evil Dead and 1 per cent bunny man and Donnie Darko is 99 per cent bunny man and 1 per cent Evil Dead. We sit there laughing because we’re like this is going to be so f****** disturbing. We can just see the protest signs.” His dream project though is “to make a film with the Olsen twins, Scott Baio and a monkey”.

For someone who had a cake which was a director’s slate with blood splattered on it at his Bar Mitzvah, horror has always been a life-long passion for Roth. He is now setting up a company called Raw Nerve with Scott Spiegal who co-wrote Evil Dead 2 and Boaz Yakin who directed Remember the Titans. “We’re going to produce three low-budget, ultra-violent horror movies a year. I’m basically building the company I wish I could have gone to first eight years ago with Cabin Fever.” It’s no wonder that Quentin Tarantino is introducing Roth to friends as “the future of horror”.

“People want horror in their horror movies, they don’t want to play it safe.” With Eli Roth there’s no danger of that.

Ann Lee