Cabin Fever first published (in a slighly different version) by Movie Gazette, 10 April 2010
It is something of a cliché amongst fans of horror that the genre had its (second) Golden Age, starting in 1968, peaking in the Seventies, and finding new, more commercial forms in the 1980s, and that it has been slowly rotting from the inside ever since, with late 1990s postmodern parodies like Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) rapidly feeding on the last remains of that period’s flesh. Recently, however, thanks to a new generation of directors who were kids in genre’s glory days and still worship at its altar, this style of horror has risen again from the grave, as frightening, funny and downright misanthropic as it ever was. First in the revival came the low-budget woods-and-cabin shocker The Blair Witch Project (1999), then Danny Boyle‘s George A. Romero tribute 28 Days Later… (2002), and this year there is Rob Zombie’s Tobe-Hooper-worshipping House of 1000 Corpses (2003), and now Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, an affectionately nasty celebration of everything which bled, oozed and suppurated in Friday the 13th, The Burning, the Evil Dead films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and The Thing.
Take a cabin. By a lake. In the woods. In redneck country. Introduce some self-centred college kids who are into drinking, drugs and premarital sex, and then have them killed one after the other by a relentless, unseen killer. The plot of Cabin Fever is familiar from any number of films from horror’s peak period, and is full of references to them – but in Eli Roth‘s film the killer is not a man, or even a monster, but a flesh-eating virus, and it is able to kill only because the co-eds are too squeamish to deal sensibly with it and too selfish to cooperate. So here the horror (and comedy) arises out of failings and foibles that are all too human, with the virus serving merely to expose a much deeper sickness in the principal players, and in the end there is the grisly satisfaction of seeing everybody get no more or less than what they deserve.
Cabin Fever features a moody soundtrack combining music from David Lynch’s favourite composer, Angelo Badalamenti, and songs by David Hess from Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972). The putrescent body horror is carefully balanced by a hilarious script involving disgruntled bowling alley employees, reason-challenged hillbillies, ineffectual cops, and a Berkeley dopehead nicknamed Grim (Eli Roth in a cameo). There’s a typically (for the 1970s, at least) doom-laden apocalyptic ending, followed by a brilliantly throwaway gag – and then one final pay-off after the credits have rolled. In short, Cabin Fever offers a sick new twist on old-school horror, a form of unadulterated entertainment harking back to a decade when mutilation, murder and mad malevolence seemed somehow more innocent.
strap: Eli Roth’s foul, funny debut feature uses a throwback mode of horror to expose the inner sickness of its Noughties co-eds
Anton Bitel
