Eli Roth has horror fever

First-time director Eli Roth puts his love for the game first in "Cabin Fever"

Media Credit: photo courtesy Lions Gate Films Eli Roth (left) and Arie Verveen on the set of Cabin Fever.

A portion of the lobby at the Marquette Hotel in Minneapolis is under quarantine. Workers pound, cut and pry inside a nearly opaque plastic tent. Watching them is almost perverted, like watching several figures conduct a loud, violent, machine-assisted shower orgy. It's later when I'm walking to my car that I realize the experience, that bizarre act of voyeurism, that exhibit of mechanic pornography was a perfect setting for Eli Roth, the director of Cabin Fever.

Roth's film is much more explicit - a real shower orgy spiced with an ice pick murder would be more appropriate. But the construction motif works. Construction is going on in the horror genre. But whether Roth's tale of five youths secluded in the wilderness, contracting narcotizing fasciitis - the flesh-eating bacteria - signals a revival of '70s horror or a full rebirth of the genre is still not discernable.

If nothing else, Roth's film is just as passionate about violence, sex and '70s horror as he is.

The 31-year-old NYU film grad looks and sounds like any college student. And his dress - Ron Jeremy T-shirt and khaki shorts - doesn't help at all. 

His responses gush out in near-lecture form as if I'd entered the words "horror movie" into a Google search.

University Chronicle: What is horrifying to you?

Eli Roth: For me it's like, I was always terrified of possession movies. And I had a bunch of horrific medical experiences. I'm like the king of like rare, freak illnesses. Like sh- that nobody else gets. When I was 12 I had this weird virus that paralyzed me for like six weeks that affects like one in a million kids. When I was 17 I went to Russia and I got this parasite called Giardia. For like six months - I also got mono at the same time - I was lying in bed and just picturing these things inside of me like eating me from the inside. When I was 19 I went to Iceland. I got this weird infection in my face. I started scratching my skin and ripping out chunks of it. And I went to shave and it started peeling like a banana and my skin was so itchy underneath it actually felt good, like it didn't even hurt. Then when I was 22 I woke up one morning and my legs were killing me. And I peeled down the sheets and my legs were like covered in sores and cuts and fissures.... It turns out I went to the doctor and they were like 'you have psoriasis.' It's a genetic skin condition. They were like 'It's not contagious. It's genetic. And um, you know, it's like your body is attacking your body; now it's figuring out how to deal with it....'

There's this feeling that you could be totally healthy one day and the next day you wake up and it's like this alien force has invaded your body, like completely taken it over. My dad is a doctor so I've had amazing medical care. But it's like, if I didn't have great doctors around me all the time I would've been wiped out years ago....

...It's a reminder that we're not at the top of the food chain and that virus and bacteria are going to get us all. It's just this game of survival to see how long we can last....

UC: You said you wanted this film to be a throw-back to the heyday of horror movies in the '70s. What things about those movies did you want to emulate?

ER: The things that I love about the '70s.... Number one: they were honestly reflecting the fears of the culture at the time. It wasn't just like trying to cleverly kill the kids. No one was trying to be ironic and there was none of this bullsh- Dawson's Creek humor where everyone's like wink-wink at the camera like you know 'oh aren't we clever because we know we're in a horror film.' Like, no. They were just like setting out straight to be scary. They took their time, they were paced differently. They didn't have MTV editing or stupid rock music. They had score, they had mood....

...And also anybody could die in those movies. If you went to see a '70s horror movie, it's not like the prettiest person lived the longest. People got killed. Anybody could get killed at anytime. They were much much darker. And that's what I love about them.

UC: The relationships really really abruptly disappear after the disease is found. Are you trying to suggest that maybe our minds are just as susceptible to panic, paranoia and selfishness as our bodies are to disease?

ER: Absolutely, I mean, I think that, you know, just like I said. There's this paranoia that I get where people call me and they say 'I'm really really sick, can you take me to the doctor?' And it's like they're in your car and you're thinking 'God, when am I going to get it?' It's like if you're that sick, if you're too sick to drive, I don't want you in my car. So then you start thinking 'when am I going to get it? Who's going to take me to the doctor when I get it?' I go crazy thinking about this. I think that people really really, right away go into survival mode. There's something in human behavior that when someone else gets sick, if you don't understand what the illness is, you want to get as far away from them as possible.

Like the horror films of the '70s, Cabin Fever can be seen both as a reaction to the director's well justified phobias and as a reaction to real world horrors. And even though it was written in 1993, Cabin Fever could possibly be considered our SARS flick.

ER: "Two hundred years ago it was the lepers, you know, let's put them in a leper colony. And 100 years ago it was small pox, if someone had small pox you just locked them away and let them die. And then here we have, less than a year ago, the SARS outbreak. The very first outbreak, the very first thing they did, that apartment building, they sealed it off. Nobody gets in. Nobody gets out. And nobody really questioned it. Like we don't know what this is, it's in this building, we're sealing it out. And that's like a real horrible thing to have to confront. But imagine if you were going to your buddy's house - that apartment building. It's not these people's fault. They just live there or they were visiting there. And now the government seals it off because there's this mystery illness. Nobody knows what they have; they don't know the cure for it. And there you are, they're just going to let you die so it doesn't spread to the rest of the population.

Roth's thoughts continue to unspool like a stream of conscious horror fan-zine as he arrives at a topic I've neglected to cover: sex.

ER: Horror movies are the best date movies, always, across the board. You have a better chance of getting laid going to Cabin Fever than How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

...In Cabin Fever, every two minutes you have an excuse to grab your date's hand. Every two minutes you can grab your date's knee. You can put your arm around your date. That's guaranteed. That's why people go to horror movies, because you can grope your date.... If you don't f-ing hook up with your date after Cabin Fever, you're pathetic. Because this movie is engineered to get you laid. 'Cause after a horror movie the girl is like 'I'm too scared, I don't want to go home and sleep alone.' It's like 'Yeah, well come back to my room.' Then you take her back to your room, you put on Willy Wonka and you f-cking close the deal. Like that's how it works."