Cabin Fever by Eli Roth
It started with an itch in the middle of the night. But not an idea itch, this was a real
itch, so intense like the worst mosquito bite that wouldn’t stop itching no matter how
hard I scratched. I was living on a farm in Selfoss, Iceland, in summer of 1991 with my
brother, training horses. I could write an entire essay on what led up to these
circumstances, but let’s just say I was excited for a new adventure after a year at
N.Y.U. film school living in Greenwich Village and throwing myself into early ’90s New
York City life. It was there, in midnight light, that I looked at my hand and saw chunks
of my face in my fingernails. At which point I promptly went back to sleep, assuming I
was hallucinating. The next day I went to shave, noticing the werewolf claw streaks
down my face, and you can probably guess what happened next if you haven’t heard
me tell the story of how I shaved half my face off. Never one to waste a bloody life
experience, the idea began to germinate (ahem) for a body-horror film where the
protagonist would be a flesh-eating disease that rips through a group of friends on a
weekend getaway.
I first wrote the story for Cabin Fever shortly after this experience, under the title
“Flood.” I wrote Flood from the point of view of one of the kids in the group who’s
rotting away while a torrential storm pours down, knocking out the power, the roads,
and the ability to leave. Knowing this would be an issue when making a low-budget
horror movie, I took out the flood element and started working on what would be the
first draft of Cabin Fever. I showed it to my roommate Randy Pearlstein, who had
been my filmmaking partner on all my movies at N.Y.U. film school. Randy had also
studied to be a director, but he had tremendous acting experience, and was even
testing for major network T.V. shows right out of film school. Randy was continually
booking small roles on big movies, and really understood writing from the actor’s
perspective. We rewrote the script together, working on the characters and getting the
dialogue to sound more natural. The film is very much about being twenty-two years
old. The fears, the humor, the way the characters relate to each other and see the
world. It’s a marker of what jokes we found funny (“the nougat”) and what scared me
at the time (shaving my face off, an idea transferred to Marcy’s legs). We finished the
script July 4, 1995, and, armed with my Student Academy Award-winning N.Y.U.
thesis film Restaurant Dogs, we went out to a number of producers hoping to get the
funding. Comments ranged from “There’s no killer” to “Horror movies are dead” and
“You can’t have a sequel if you kill everyone” were all I heard for six years. Eventually I
moved out to Los Angeles, where I teamed up with my old N.Y.U. classmate (old at the
time, we were 27 I think) to make a series of animated shorts called “Chowdaheads”
and then a stop-motion short series for a now dead website called The Rotten Fruit.
Once it was clear the dot-com boom was over (it took one summer, the summer of
2000, for every company to go bankrupt, including the one funding us), Evan Astrowsky
said, “We should make a movie.” He had just produced a film ― an actual feature film ―
and knew people with money, so I dusted off the script, changed the date on the cover
page to make sure that it seemed like it was just written, and off we went.
It wasn’t easy, but eventually we teamed up with the right producers and found the
money, half of which fell out right before shooting. We shot the film in the fall of 2001,
a month after 9/11, when nothing was shooting on the East Coast. The union shut us
down despite us not breaking any laws, and we limped back to Los Angeles, where I
had to edit two thirds of a movie and use that to raise the rest of the money to finish the film,
which we did in the spring of 2002. In September 2002, we took the film to the Toronto
Film Festival to sell it. There weren’t many films for sale, and we had the right film at
the right time ― it inspired an eight-studio (remember when there were eight studios?!?)
bidding war, eventually landing at Lions Gate (yes, it was two words at the time)
because they committed to making it the widest release in the history of their company,
at 2,000 screens. I talk about this in the making-of we produced for this release, but
we then spent a year fighting over the edit of the movie. What you’re going to see here
is the definitive version of the film. This is the film exactly as people saw it at the 2002
Toronto Film Festival (when the movie sold), only now, I could go in and color correct
and bring out some of the beautiful detail that had gotten lost in the photochemical
printing process. We went right to the source ― the original negative, with no steps in
between ― and rescanned it and cleaned it up and it looks better than I could have ever
imagined. I was very conscious to film the movie with timeless elements such as the
kids driving a truck, because trucks generally don’t get dated in movies. You can see
all the spectacular makeup by KNB EFX, Scott Kevan’s lush super-35mm
photography, all the details in Franco Carbone’s production design, and hear Brian
Best’s exquisite sound design and Nathan Barr’s beautiful orchestral score in 7.1. The
movie has never looked or sounded better.
And then there’s the cast. I cannot say enough about this wonderful group of actors,
who I am lucky to still call my friends. Every single one of them gave it their all, and there’s
no one standout of the group because they all stand out. Not a moment wasted. They
gave their humor, their warmth, their souls ― it’s what makes the movie work. They all
came together and worked for scale to make a classic, and I am forever grateful to
them all. You’ll also see the birth of my acting career as Justin, a look I actually
adopted for a while after the film wrapped until I realized maybe that wasn’t such a
cool look after 2007. The film is a time capsule of where I was at 22 years old, even if
we photographed the film when I was 29, and wrapped the additional photography
filming the bowling alley massacre the night of my 30th birthday at the KNB
warehouse.
It’s amazing to see how the fan base for the film has grown over the years, and be at fan
conventions where people come dressed as the characters. Other filmmakers I love
and admire have praised the film, such as Peter Jackson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and
especially Quentin Tarantino, who recently put Cabin Fever in his top 20 best films of
the century on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast. I wanted to make a film that was just fun
to hang out with. Something you could create drinking games to, and develop inside
jokes and catchphrases that only you and your friends understood. Rewatching it
takes me right back to that time, to that place, in the woods of North Carolina, where
we created Bunyon County and all its weird inhabitants.
Many of the people who made the film what it was are no longer with us, like the wonderful and brilliant Angelo Badalamenti, who created the “Red Love” and “Deputy Winston” themes as a favor to me, or Joe Adams, one of our casting directors who appeared on film in his one and only appearance as the Bowling Alley Killer. Also, Michael Reardon, our coproducer ― who was one of the biggest cheerleaders, and helped raise the final $350,000 to finish the film ― and my friend John Neff, who was David Lynch’s sound mixer and bandmate (who also got his skull cracked in by the infamous Bowling Alley Killer). Then there’s George Folsey Jr., the master editor who helped work a deal for us to edit the movie for a back-end point at the edit house in Santa Monica, and whose son, Ryan, edited the film with me for back-end points and whatever money we could raise. Susan Jackson, our executive producer, who took me and Evan to the 2001 Cannes Film Festival with a stack of scripts and set up meetings for us with every distributor who would read it and hear our pitch. It was a wild festival, and I learned so much. She then sold the film with Cassian Elwes at the Toronto Film Festival. So many people help make a film a success, and I’m so grateful to them all, none more so than Jason Constantine, the wonderful Lionsgate executive who championed the film and bought it at Toronto and who I miss dearly since his untimely passing. And especially David Lynch. I still can’t believe he’s gone, and in a way he isn’t, because everything about him was magic and I can still hear his voice and feel his presence even writing this.
Man, I really didn’t mean for this essay to go this dark, so let me end on a lighter note.
After I finished playing back the transfer, I went over to Tarantino’s house and he
showed me the anime sequence from Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. Quentin
reminded me that he took a break from editing Kill Bill to go see Cabin Fever at the
2002 Los Angeles Film Festival, where he waited on line with everyone else for an hour
to watch it. There’re actual photos of us (I had dumped blood all over my head for the
occasion). He loved the movie so much that the next night he invited me to his house,
where he showed me the “House of Blue Leaves” sequence from Kill Bill. We were talking
about what an amazing time that was, for us, for movies in general, and how excited he
was that Lionsgate was releasing The Whole Bloody Affair in theaters in December. I
told him how excited I was that Lionsgate was finally releasing a beautiful, restored 4K
of my director’s cut of Cabin Fever in January, and that I had just checked the final
color and sound playback. We both laughed that all these years later we were finally
restoring our movies to the original vision we had for them. Quentin just smiled and
nodded and said, “Pretty cool, man. Pretty cool. Hey, you want to play a board
game?”
Los Angeles, California
December 2025