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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Eli Roth on the atrocious state of horror movies, actresses who won't get naked, his pal David Lynch, and the flesh-eating inspiration of his new film, "Cabin Fever."
Sep 11, 2003 | Say what you will, horror fans take care of their own.
In 1981, Stephen King saw a gruesome little movie called "The Evil Dead" and liked it so much he gave the filmmakers a quote to put on their artwork: "The most ferociously original horror film of the year." Thousands of underage VHS junkies -- myself included -- rented "The Evil Dead" on the basis on this endorsement and were treated to 85 of the most stomach-churning minutes in motion picture history.
"The Evil Dead," directed by Sam Raimi (who went on to make "A Simple Plan" and "Spider-Man"), inspired hundreds of budding filmmakers, including a New Zealander named Peter Jackson. The future "Lord of the Rings" director promptly went out and shot "Dead Alive," the only film to date able to approximate Raimi's wildly inventive use of gore as comedy.
Today, the cycle continues. The one sheets and TV spots for Eli Roth's "Evil Dead" homage "Cabin Fever" are dominated by a quote from Jackson: "Brilliant! Horror fans have been waiting years for a movie like 'Cabin Fever.'" The nod is merely the latest in more than a year's worth of hype, beginning with Lion's Gate dishing out a record "high seven figures" for the film at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival and ending on every horror-film message board on the Internet. Not since "The Blair Witch Project" has a horror flick been so frightfully overexposed.
The bad news is that "Cabin Fever" is not the Second Coming -- in fact, the film is somewhat redundant if you're at all up on your horror history. But stranded as we are in a sea of irrelevant rubbish like "They," "FearDotCom" and "Darkness Falls," "Cabin Fever" is a bona fide adrenaline shot, a vivid reminder of the potent potential of horror.
The setup is simple but brutal. Five college friends rent an isolated cabin in the woods and discover a bloody, pus-covered drifter who communicates to one of them a deadly flesh-eating virus. Nobody wants to be next. Boyfriends turn on girlfriends. Best pals turn on best pals. Some barricade themselves in. Others try to flee. But can you ever really outrun a virus?
Roth spoke to me by telephone from his parents' home in Boston.
It's obvious right from the start of "Cabin Fever" that you genuinely love horror films.
Yeah, I love them and the genre's been so fucking ghettoized in the last 20 years. It's in shambles right now. We're really in trouble.
We are. Have you seen "Valentine," for example?
Things are fucked. It's so bad. I wrote the story for "Cabin Fever" 10 years ago and finished the script eight years ago -- that's how long it took us to get this film made.
Why, of all things, a flesh-eating disease?
I've had a bunch of really horrible rare illnesses. When I was 12 I got this weird virus in my hip that paralyzed me. It's called toxic synovitis and it strikes one in a million kids -- and I was the one. Then, when I was 17, I went to Russia and I got this parasite called giardia and on top of it I had mono, so I spent about five months in bed drinking this poison that made my stomach feel like it was on fire, but if I didn't drink it these things would be eating me. Then, when I was 19, I was in Iceland and I was working on this farm and got this weird infection in my face. I woke up one night and was scratching my face in my sleep and looked and there were chunks of blood and skin in my hand. The next morning I went to shave and literally began shaving off chunks of my face. It peeled like a banana.
Yuck.
Then, when I was 22, I was lying in bed and it felt like there was glass cutting my legs. I peeled back the sheet and my legs looked like Karen's legs in "Cabin Fever" -- just rotted, black, bleeding. And I hadn't even had sex; I was like, "What the fuck is this?" And I went to the dermatologist and he said, "This is psoriasis." But I'd just picture this army of things multiplying inside me and eating me from the inside.
Now that you mention STDs, "Cabin Fever" could be viewed as an AIDS parable.
Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times felt the same thing. My feeling was that I wanted to make a movie where if people wanted to see blood, guts, death, mayhem and tits they'd go and have a great time. But if they wanted to go again, they could think of the nature of the way people treat each other when they have a disease and that gray area where compassion turns into self-preservation. I wrote this story in 1993 and, yeah, AIDS was a big concern. We grew up watching these '80s movies where everybody's having sex with everybody and nobody's discussing condoms. Then suddenly we were in college and everyone's like, "If you have sex with the wrong person you're going to die." I mean, in a best-case scenario, bacteria and viruses get all of us.
