Cabin Fever (2003) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 26

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I got a Fever. And the only prescription is more Cabin!

A week of anniversaries on 31 Days of Horror continues with the 20th Anniversary of Cabin Fever, a unique and disturbing film about personal responsibility and hygiene. Also maybe a film about being a little nicer to people as well.

Before Viewing

Unlike many other cabin in the woods films, the trailer for this appears to show the young adults catching some kind of virus or in some way going crazy. This either kills them or turns them on each other–which is hard to tell. Either way, it’s a remote location that slowly kills the main characters. It’s a unique take on the phrase Cabin Fever.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

In the woods of North Carolina a trapper (Arie Verveen) finds his dog dead from something. Examining it, he is sprayed with the dog’s blood. Five friends on a trip to a remote cabin stop in at the local General Store for supplies. An old man (Robert Harris), who appears to be racist, warns them to be careful in the woods, while a young introverted boy Dennis (Matthew Helms) bites Paul (Rider Strong) on the hand. The young visitors leave for their cabin shocked at how backwoods the people are around this town.

At the cabin Jeff (Joey Kern) and Marcy (Cerina Vincent) immediately pick a room and start having sex. Paul and Karen (Jordan Ladd) go swimming at the lake, while Bert (James DeBello) finds a gun and goes to shoot squirrels. He accidentally ends up shooting the trapper, Henry, who is a bloody mess, apparently having contracted whatever his dog had. When the man shows up at the cabin later asking for help, the group tries to force him to leave, disgusted with his appearance. They accidentally set him on fire, and he stumbles off into the woods.

Henry’s body is shown floating in the reservoir that feeds the cabin’s water supply. Having damaged their car in preventing Henry from taking it, Marcy and Jeff & Bert set off in different directions to look for help. Deputy Winston Olsen (Giuseppe Andrews) arrives to talk to Paul. He is creepy, but promises a tow truck to assist their stranded vehicle. Karen, who has been tired lately, asks Paul to lay down with her. He discovers a giant open sore on her thigh. When the others return they all check each other for signs of infection. They lock Karen in a shed as a quarantine precaution.

Jeff, freaked out by the lack of hygiene, grabs a bunch of beer and sets off into the woods. Bert manages to get the truck started and goes for help in town. At the General Store, Dennis bites Bert (who also appears to be infected). Dennis’ father Tommy (Hal Courtney) grabs two other men and chases Bert back to the cabin. With everyone else either sick or gone, Marcy and Paul have sex as a hopeless last resort. Afterwards, Marcy shaves her legs in the bathtub and her skin begins to come off. She runs outside distraught and is attacked by a wild dog that tears her apart.

Paul shoots the wild dog and checks on Karen. She is still alive, but the flesh has fallen off her face. He smashes her head with a shovel to put her out of her misery. A wounded Bert returns to the cabin, followed by the three men from the General Store. They shoot Bert, but Paul surprises them, killing all three. He takes their truck to look for help, realizing he’s infected now too, and hits a deer along the way. Walking through the woods he finds Deputy Winston hosting an underage drinking party. Screaming for help, Paul clubs the deputy before passing out on a highway. A trucker drops him off at the hospital where he’s interviewed by the local Sheriff (Richard Fullerton).

Realizing the kids at the cabin are infected, the sheriff has Paul transferred in a car driven by Deputy Winston, who “disposes” of the boy off screen. Jeff wanders out of the woods and returns to the cabin to see all the carnage from the past day. He happily steps outside vocally rejoicing in his survival, only to be shot dead by police officers believing him infected. The cops place all the bodies on the firepit and burn them. In the final scenes, two young children fill a cooler at the river, just downstream from where Paul’s infected body was dumped. They set up a lemonade stand outside the General Store that becomes popular with dozens of people. In a post-credit scene, a truck driver drinks some lemonade and leaves in his truck labeled “Down Home Spring Water.’

“That disease. That was here before we got here. You tell them!” – Paul

Cabin Fever is a unique horror film where the antagonist is not a monster or maniac, but some sort of undefined virus. While viruses are not unheard of in horror films, they usually create some new antagonist, such as zombies, in films like Cooties or Dawn of the Dead. In fact, zombie films are the primary example of films about contagions. There is a good example of a plague movie this month with The Masque of the Red Death. However, that film includes a separate antagonist in Prince Prospero. Cabin Fever uses an unknown and unrevealed virus which attacks the characters, and in that process, brings out the worst in everybody. In this way the film functions more like traditional viral outbreak films like Outbreak, Contagion, or The Andromeda Strain.

The film’s title is a play on the term “cabin fever,” which is the irritation or restlessness of being stuck in the same place for a long time. That is an applicable description for what the characters begin to go through. They’re confined to the cabin and become more restless and irritable the longer they stay. The title also can refer to the characters in the cabin getting a fever, though there’s not specifically a fever associated with the outbreak–just a rash and bleeding. Their continued confinement to the cabin may or may not have changed the outcome of the film, as there were several ways the disease was spreading. For certain all five main characters would have died, and the virus might have been contained. And because the characters believe that until they see visual evidence of the infection that they are safe so they venture outside, they do so several times, encountering others. It ends up being a series of catastrophic mistakes, bad decisions, and lack of knowledge.

Any film with dumb characters is not a good film. But horror films with dumb characters are the worst, since it only makes the audience feel frustrated. Obviously if the character did x,y or, z they would have survived, people scream at the movie. While Cabin Fever creates some tense moments, a lot of the progress of the film’s plot is made from poor choices and random happenstance with the characters. It has things that just seem to be contrived and placed in the script by the filmmakers to create the story without any thought about realism. Everything seems to hinge on Bert accidentally shooting Henry, which brings him back around the cabin later (even though he lives nearby). This puts the body into the reservoir, which pollutes the water supply, which infects Karen, Marcy and Bert. Perhaps if Paul hadn’t pissed off the police deputy then his infected body would not have been dumped by a stream which leads to the perceived horrific events shown at the film’s end, with “everyone” drinking tainted water. Obviously the characters never believe that anything like this could happen to them and do not practice safe hygiene. It’s just tragic on so many levels.

Director Eli Roth crafted this original story for his first feature length film. Unfortunately he created a film with characters that went from mildly unlikeable to downright unsocial. Karen might be the most normal character, but instead of having her survive to the end, Roth kills her off first. He then fills the frame with characters like Bert, who is oblivious to his own asinine behavior, Marcy, who thinks only of herself–saying she’s healthy before having sex with Paul without really even understanding what that means, and Paul who ends up making some horrible decisions while not having enough characterization of his own for audiences to know if they even like him. Then there’s Jeff, a chronic germaphobe, who returns to the cabin and decides to wander around through the carnage. That’s stupid on so many levels. He was unwilling to be around his friends when they were healthy, but now seems content to explore the viscera, which leads him to being shot by police. Let’s not even begin to talk about the annoying deputy, or Roth’s inelegant portrayal of rural characters like the older man in the store. The old-timers use of the ‘N-word’ when asked what the gun is for is used for shock value at the beginning of the film, portraying him as a racist. At the end of the film several black characters enter the store, and the old man gives them the gun, greeting them using the ‘N-word’ as a friendly greeting. It’s a poorly made joke that shows insensitivity, and should never have been made in a film from this Century.

The makeup effects in the film are all well done, with research apparently having been done on how to make flesh appear to be falling off a body. But the amount of gore in the movie appears to be just for the sake of gore. Roth crafted a virulent disease that would allow for plenty of graphic grossness, which is not entirely surprising given his later films. 31 Days of Horror looked at Hostel last year and thought it was a little bit overboard as well. Roth seems to be enamored with the Quentin Tarantino style of over-showing, but without the clever dialogue and characters to back it up. That level of discomfort only works the first viewing since audiences might choose not to return to the film again because they don’t like the characters.

These complaints may be part of the minority opinion, since this film did well enough to spawn two sequels and a remake, made only 14 years later. Based on the synopsis for Cabin Fever 2: Spring Break, it seems as if Paul might not be as dead as he appeared in this film. The third film Cabin Fever: Patient Zero appears to be a prequel showing how the disease got released into the woods of North Carolina. It seems strange that a remake was made so close to the release of the original film. Without delving further into the production of that 2016 film the reasons seem to be entirely fiscal. There’s nothing in this original film to suggest that it lacked budget or quality enough to warrant a reboot. The best thing that Cabin Fever provides is a “what if” scenario showing audiences how things can play out under the worst possible circumstances. If only the youth had been a bit more self-aware and responsible, instead of looking out for themselves.

Assorted Musings

• Jeff’s apparent victory over the virus only to be gunned down by police attempting to stop an outbreak is an homage to Night of the Living Dead, where Ben survives the zombie attack only to be shot by the police the next morning.
• The film has homages to several other films including: Dawn of the Dead (Paul shoves a screwdriver into the ear of one of the men from the General Store), The Evil Dead (the camera races through the woods in the same way), and The Shining (Paul sees a person in a rabbit costume standing over a bed in the hospital).
• The setting and some of the interactions with the locals at the General Store are very similar to elements of Deliverance, which is not particularly a horror film, but has its own type of terror.
• Jordan Ladd, daughter of Cheryl Ladd, also appeared in Roth’s Hostel Part II, as well as Broken Lizard’s Club Dread as Penelope.
• Rider Strong and Cerina Vincent may be better known to television fans as Shawn from Boy Meets World (and Girl Meets World) and the yellow Power Ranger from Power Rangers Lost Galaxy.