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Low-Budget Horror Film a Career-maker for first-time moviemaker
Much-anticipated Cabin Fever brings old fashioned terror back to the cinema
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| Writer-director Eli Roth directs Arie Verveen on the North Carolina set of Cabin Fever. Photo by: Gabriel Roth. |
For years, Eli Roth, the 31-year old writer-director of Cabin Fever, wondered if the horror genre had a place in the world of independent cinema-or any cinema for that matter. It took six years for Roth to raise the financing for Cabin Fever, a film he shot in the grainy backwoods of North Carolina in 2001 for "way less than a million dollars."
For Roth, a former protégé of David Lynch, it was more than a little ironic when the same studios who passed on Cabin Fever years earlier were engaged in a heated bidding war when the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September of 2002. "They would say the same stupid things over and over again," he recalls. "They didn't like the fact that there was no killer like Jason or Freddy in the film, and they didn't think that anyone would want to see a '70s-type horror film. They all thought it was going to be some made-for-cable piece of trash. To be in Toronto and see all of these companies bidding on my film was really strange and wonderful."
Indeed, most of the buzz and excitement generated in 2002 at Toronto surrounded Cabin Fever, which eventually sold to Lions Gate for a staggering $3.5 million- along with the promise of a wide theatrical release and an additional $15 million in advertising and promotion.
The plot of Cabin Fever is disarmingly simple: five college friends take a trip to an isolated cabin in the woods for a weekend of beer and sex. When one of the friends becomes infected by the titular virus, chaos and panic sets in as the friends start to turn on each other. Roth feels that a simple approach is best when trying to make an entertaining horror film.
"People say that Cabin Fever's a tribute to '70s horror films, and I think that's because horror films today take themselves too seriously. The key for me was to make Cabin Fever funny and scary. I also wanted to pay tribute to the old classics without the audience being totally conscious of it and without me getting sued."
David Grove (MM): One of the interesting things about Cabin Fever is that there's no villain. The flesh-eating virus is the villain.
Eli Roth (ER): Yeah, I think the actors found that interesting, as well. There's no monster that you can see like Freddy or Jason. It's the virus and the virus causes the flesh to eat itself so, in a way, the flesh is the villain. It's the characters that become the monsters in the film.
In a typical zombie film, you'd have the girl get infected by the virus and then she turns into a zombie and starts killing her friends, right? We've all seen that. So what I did was to make the actions and behavior of the characters, in essence, the monster in the film. When Jordan Ladd's character get the virus, her friends turn on her. They lock her up in a shed, almost abandon her, and it's kind of shocking. It's all about them and their actions.
MM: You had some firsthand experience with a flesh-eating virus, didn't you?
ER: Yes, I did. A few years ago, in a past life, I was working on a farm in Iceland with a bunch or horses when I got this horrible infection all over my face. I was terrified and I didn't know what to do. I tried shaving my face, which was really disgusting because the flesh would just peel off. It didn't hurt because the skin was, basically, dead.
I went to a doctor who gave me some medicine and then I started reading about viruses and discovering how real the phenomena is. Actually, it's funny because one of the guys on our crew, John Neff, had come down with a similar virus, which he got in a hospital during some routine surgery. He had to be put in intensive care and he almost died. He told me how accurate the stuff in the film was.
MM: Prior to making Cabin Fever, you wrote and directed some animated films. How did that prepare you for making your first theatrical feature?
ER: I was in my early twenties when me and my writing partner, Randy Pearlstein, were going around trying to pitch Cabin Fever. I could see that it wasn't going to happen overnight. I had to work my way up the ladder.
I was able to get financing for an animated show, which was called Chowdaheads, and then I got financing for a stop-motion project called Rotten Fruit, both of which were great experiences because I was making something that I could show people. More importantly, I could show people in the industry that I could raise money and then come up with a finished product. I'd also won a Student Academy Award in 1995 for my thesis film, which was called Restaurant Dogs, so I had some contacts.
MM: One of those contacts was David Lynch. How important was he in terms of getting Cabin Fever made?
ER: David's support was invaluable. I met David when I was still at NYU and I was hired by him to do research for a Broadway project that David wanted to do. I did that for five or six years.
I then moved to Los Angeles and worked on David's official Website. I told him that I was having a hard time raising financing for Cabin Fever, and he agreed to lend his name to the film. Once David was attached as an executive producer, everything changed in terms of getting actors to appear in the film and in terms of the industry's perception of the film. With David attached, people thought the project was classy, not schlock. Actually, when I asked David for his support, we were in Cannes and I was trying to raise money to do another animated project. From that point on, the financing slowly came together.
MM: David Lynch receives a "special thanks" credit in the film. Why isn't he credited as an executive producer on the finished film?
ER: It got too much publicity and we both agreed that it wouldn't be good for the film if he was too closely associated with it. He wanted it to be my film and he didn't want people to look at it as a David Lynch film in any way and the expectations that would've created. He just wanted to help me get the film made, nothing more.
MM: You also worked for Howard Stern and that's when you wrote a lot of the script for Cabin Fever, isn't it?
ER: Yeah, Howard was filming Private Parts at the time and it was my job to wake him up when it was time for him to go to work, which meant I had to wake him up real early in the morning. That meant I couldn't ever sleep and it was during those graveyard shifts that I worked on the spine of the Cabin Fever script. It was strange, but the environment seemed to work for me in terms of writing.
MM: What was the toughest part of filming?
ER: The financing was a daily concern because we were always running out of money and that was really stressful. One of our investors dropped out at the last minute and I'd have to call people and beg for money. I would shoot for 15 hours straight and then I'd have to get on the phone, in North Carolina, and beg for money. Then we'd get enough money to shoot for a couple of more days and it would just keep going and going.
My father invested money in the film so it was very satisfying to me when the film sold and I was able to give my father a return on his investment.
MM: The influences of The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are very prevalent in the film.
ER: Rider Strong, the star of the film, saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then he called me up and said, 'That's the same shot you used in the film.' He was talking about a swing-shot in the film with one of the girls that's directly inspired by a similar shot in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Those two films were obviously big inspirations for me and I also tried to pay homage to John Carpenter's The Thing, which is a film I really love, and, of course, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead.
MM: The film very much has a '70s feel to it. What's the difference between the horror films from that era and the horror films of today?
ER: I think the main thing is the editing of the films, because the old films really felt like documentaries and that kind of grainy approach is a lot more scary and real. There's too much editing in today's horror films and too much lighting and the films are just too slick. I also think that the acting in today's horror films is pretty bad.
I think another important thing about '70s horror films, which I was very conscious of when making Cabin Fever, is the music. Everyone remembers the music from the old films, whereas today they use nothing but rock. I paid tribute to Last House on the Left, another classic horror film from the '70s, by using the songs from that film which were composed by David Hess, the star of the film. I spoke to David and asked his permission and he loved the idea of it because you never hear that music in horror films anymore. The music works really well in the film and I think, even more than the references, it lets the fans know what I'm all about-that I really have a deep understanding of the history of the genre.
MM: Cabin Fever is free from all moral constraints in that it's full of gore and sex, cheerfully so, like a badge of freedom. Was that another tribute to the classic horror films from the '70s?
ER: Well, I didn't necessarily want to make a really gory film because a film doesn't have to be gory to be really scary. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for instance, wasn't that gory in terms of what you see on-screen, but the atmosphere was really powerful. In addition to the films from the '70s, I grew up with the horror films and the teenage sex comedies of the early 1980s: films like The Burning, The Last American Virgin and My Bloody Valentine. Those films had lots of nudity and that's what I wanted in my film, just in terms of not wanting to be formulaic. I wanted to show the audience everything I could. It goes back to the idea of the film being funny and scary. Some people think it's more funny than scary and vice versa.
MM: Now you're in a position of power. You've got a Hollywood agent and you've signed several deals at Hollywood studios. What's next for you and, as a lifelong genre fan, do you feel like you're in control of your own destiny?
ER: It's all been a wonderful dream and I've now been given lots of wonderful opportunities. I'm working on a film called The Box with Richard Kelly from Donnie Darko, and we've gotten along great because we both have really sick minds. It's based on a story by the great Richard Matheson that I love a lot. I've also been a huge Stephen King fan all of my life and I've been given a chance to write and direct a project called 1408 which was a short story of Stephen's. Besides that, I've still got about 10 other horror films I want to make.
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