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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - September 12th

"CABIN FEVER" released in 2003

A group of recent college graduates head to a remote lakeside cabin for the weekend, but, unbeknownst to them, a lethal flesh-eating virus has contaminated some of the local townspeople, putting them in very real danger of being infected next, in Eli Roth's debut splatter film, Cabin Fever!

Watch the Cabin Fever trailer below!

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While couples Jeff (Joey Kern) and Marcy (Cerina Vincent), Paul (Rider Strong) and Karen (Jordan Ladd), and "fifth wheel" Burt (James DeBello) are driving to a remote cabin in the woods they've rented to celebrate the start of spring break, they stop at a local convenience store and encounter some of the locals; especially an unusual boy named Dennis (Matthew Helms), who has a tendency to bite people. On their arrival, Burt leaves the two couples to go squirrel hunting in the woods by himself, and inadvertently wounds a hermit named Henry (Arie Verveen), who flees into the woods. Burt decides not to tell the others about the incident, but that night the hermit shows up at their cabin, now disfigured and bloody. When the refuse to let him in, the hermit tries to steal their truck, but ends vomiting blood all over it. Paul tries to ward the hermit off but accidentally ends up setting him on fire. The next day, the group decides to look for help; Jeff and Burt find a helpful neighbor (but leave when they find out she's the dead hermit's cousin), while Paul gets assistance from police Deputy Winston Olsen (Giuseppe Andrews), who promises to send up a tow truck, but in the meantime encourages Paul to have a good time and party. When Paul goes to comfort Karen he notices a massive bloody infection on her thigh, forcing the group to isolate her in a shed outside of the cabin. Later, Burt begins to cough up blood (revealing he is also infected) while back at the convenience store and inadvertently infects Dennis with the disease when Dennis bites him. Meanwhile, Marcy is also heavily infected and later killed in the woods by Dr. Mambo, a vicious German Shepherd owned by local stoner, Justin "Grimm" (Eli Roth). With Jeff abandoning them (and taking all the remaining beer), Paul is now left alone to face a heavily infected Karen, Burt, and murderous local posse, before he too succumbs to the flesh eating disease!

[crying]
Karen: That guy asked for our help. We lit him on fire. You'll understand if I'm not in a particularly social mood.

Top:   Friends Jeff (Joey Kern), Marcy (Cerina Vincent), Paul (Rider Strong) and Karen (Jordan Ladd) arrive at the cabin;

Above:   The friends have an uninvited guest as infected hermit Henry (Arie Verveen) shows up at their door! 

Eli Roth first conceived the idea of Cabin Fever while he was working on horse farm in Iceland when developed skin infection from the rotting hay in the barn that was severe his face broke out in sores, bled and peeled off when he shaved. Years later, Roth would co-write the screenplay with his friend and former NYU roommate Randy Pearlstein in 1995 while Roth was working as a production assistant for Howard Stern's Private Parts (Roth served as Stern's nighttime assistant, working the late shift from about 11pm to 7am and making sure nobody interrupted Stern while he was sleeping - leaving Roth ample time to work on the script). Early attempts to sell the script were unsuccessful because studios felt that the horror genre had become unprofitable, until, in 1996, Scream was released to great success, leading studios to once again become interested in horror properties. But even then Roth could not find suitable financiers as each studio told him to make the script more like Scream. Finally, Roth's debut film was produced by Lauren Moews of Tonic Films and executive-produced by Susan Jackson, to be made on a budget of $1.5 million raised from private investors. Much later, Jackson brokered a deal to sell the film to Lionsgate at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival for $3.5 million (the biggest sale of that year's festival) which also included a guaranteed eight-figure commitment to prints and advertising, making Cabin Fever the most money Lions Gate has ever spent acquiring a motion picture!

Filming on location in North Carolina began in October 2001, with Roth almost immediately coming into confrontation with one of his leading stars, Cerina Vincent, regarding a nude/sex scene. Roth originally wanted Vincent to be completely naked, but Vincent - having previously played an exchange student who never wore clothes in Not Another Teen Movie (2001), and did not want to be typecast as a 'nude scene chick' - refused. The standoff between the director and actress became so intense that Vincent informed Roth that if he truly wanted a naked ass in the scene, he would have to get another actress to play the role of Marcy. Eventually the two came to a compromise; Vincent would show one inch of her ass on film, no more, no less. When the scene was set to be filmed, Roth bought along a ruler and literally measured one inch of Vincent's butt crack and then had the bed sheet's taped to Vincent's ass at the designated level before the sex scene was shot. Ironically, Vincent later volunteered to bare her breasts in a scene that didn't call for them. During the bathroom scene where she discovers the rashes on her back, the script had her wearing a robe, which she lowered when she turned her back to the mirror. But Vincent thought this scenario was too unrealistic and volunteered to do it topless.

[From the trailer]
Paul: Is it safe?
Marcy: [Having sex with him] Don't worry, I'm healthy.

Top:   Police deputy Winston Olsen (Giuseppe Andrews) offers Paul "help";

Above:   In one of Cabin Fever's most gruesome scenes, Marcy discovers she is infected while in the shower!

Jordan Ladd (playing Karen) also found the production stressful, albeit for completely different reasons. After seeing her gruesome 'faceless' make-up in the mirror for the first time, the sight reportedly drove her to tears. Similarly, Rider Strong had an interesting encounter while in full make-up, when he decided to take walk in the woods between takes and ran into a group of about 35 schoolgirls! The girls screamed at the sight of this blood-drenched hiker, but then screamed even louder when they realized the hiker was the star of Boy Meets World (1993), and even chased Strong back to the film set - he subsequently vowed never to wander off between scenes again. The original killer dog "Jake" was hired without a rehearsal and sight unseen because Eli Roth loved the idea of using the dog in the Patrick Swayze movie Black Dog (1998) and there by being only "two degrees from Swayze". The problem was the dog was by then 4 years older, arthritic, and tired. After a full day of shooting, and if all the few second bits were spliced expertly together, they only had about a minute or so of usage footage. All dog scenes had to be re-shot with a new dog, but with no time or money to find a replacement, the producers cast a real police attack dog that was so vicious and unpredictable no actors could appear with it on camera. The crew would hide behind trucks during its scenes, and cameras were operated by remote control.

Out of 347 films shown at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, the premiering Cabin Fever was screened last, and became the highest selling movie at the festival. Nearly all of the nine studios who engaged in the bidding war for the film had passed on the movie at the script stage (the exception being the eventual winner, Lion's Gate, which was not in existence when the script was first written). Cabin Fever spent the next year on the festival circuit, screening at such festivals as; the Sitges Film Festival, South by Southwest Film Festival, Auckland International Film Festival (where reportedly director Peter Jackson would halt production on Return of the King to screen Cabin Fever for the cast and crew!), and the Frankfurt Fantasy Filmfest. Cabin Fever eventually received a wide release on 12th September 2003, grossing over $20 million in the US and Canada for an overall $30 million worldwide, making Roth's debut film one of the most profitable movies ever released by Lions Gate (although this record was surpassed the next year by another horror release, Saw (2004)).

TRIVIA:   Crew member Robert Jones took home the decapitated body prop once the film wrapped, and was pulled over while driving home by police officers at gunpoint who thought the corpse in the passenger seat was real. The police held Jones at gunpoint until they were able to confirm the lifelike body was only a prop.

Top:   Debit writer and director Eli Roth;

Above:   Roth with the cast at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival. 

Cabin Fever received mostly positive reviews from critics, with Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles reviews from a wide range of critics, giving the consensus, "More gory than scary, Cabin Fever is satisfied with paying homage to genre conventions rather than reinventing them." Also, Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it "an unusually potent blend of dread, gore and gallows humor". Cabin Fever would later become a cult favorite, with Roth being nominated for several Saturn Awards, and an Empire Award for Best Newcomer, and would spawn two more films in the series, a sequel Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009) and a prequel Cabin Fever: Patient Zero (2014). Initially a fourth film, entitled Outbreak, was planned with the story taking place on a cruise ship (and was supposed to be filmed back-to-back with Patient Zero), but these plans eventually fell through when the idea for remake was formed. Original director Eli Roth - already receiving further success with his follow up films, Hostel (2005), Hostel: Part II (2007), and The Green Inferno (2015) as well as producing many more horror films - returned to write and produce the remake with Travis Z as the new director. Sadly, the remake was not as well received as it's predecessor, and after a limited theatrical release, the 2016 Cabin Fever was distributed on video-on-demand.

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:    63%  

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