Funeral director

Eli Roth is the loquacious 31 year old behind low-budget horror sensation Cabin Fever. Widely regarded as this year’s Blair Witch breakthrough hit, the film harks back to such backwoods classics as Evil Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre though Roth was also inspired by his own brush with a flesh-eating virus, which shows up as the villian of this piece.

Cabin Fever is Roth’s directorial feature debut, but he’s already been earning attention as an animator and the protege of David Lynch. Currently, he’s collaborating on a horror script with director Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), and writing Scavenger Hunt, his own contribution to the teen sex comedy, which he promises will put the ‘T & A’ back in the genre. Movie House caught up with the director in London recently to ask him just how a nice Jewish boy from a middle-class (painter mother, doctor father) Boston home ends up with flesh-eating viruses on the brain, or indeed on the body.

One of the most impressive aspects of Cabin Fever is its use of score. Was it a major focus point for you?
I worked on everything – I co-wrote, and directed, and produced, but I’m glad people are noticing the score, because scores make the horror. I mean, imagine Psycho without the score.Or Halloween, or Texas Chain Saw Massacre – it’s the music that makes those films scary. I was lucky enough to work with Angelo Badamenti on a couple of themes for the movie – he’s done work with David Lynch, and his music has that wonderful dreamlike quality, but with a great sense of humour coming through. But most of the score was done by a terrific young composer – Nathan Marr, and I just took one look at his DVD collection – there was The Shining, The Evil Dead – and I knew he was the guy. We wanted to blur the line between music and sound design – that you wouldn’t even know what instruments are being used, just to give everybody a horrific creepy feeling – so we listened to The Shining, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Sixth Sense, and worked from there.

You reference these kinds of movies in other ways as well. Is the horror film a genre you’ve always wanted to pay homage to?
Oh, I love horror films. I loved them since I was a little kid, for as long as I can remember. I saw The Exorcist when I was six, and so many of my favourite directors started out making horror films – Coppola with Dimension 13, and Raimi, and Peter Jackson, and I just always knew that I wanted to make a disgustingly sick low-budget horror movie when I grew up. There’s just something so forbidden about them, because they never came to television or got mainstream attention.

There were always regarded as falling somewhere between hard and soft porn in the respectability stakes. Does that still hold?
Oh, you better believe it. It’s disgusting. If you say you’re making a horror film, it’s very much akin to announcing that you are making a porn, and it’s sad because everybody loves horror movies, and yet there’s still this snobbery about them.

I heard you had a hard time getting actresses who would agree to the nudity in Cabin Fever. Do you suspect that’s why?
You wouldn’t believe what I went through There were girls who could act, and then there were girls that could do nudity. I blame the 90s and Scream, because as soon as that happened, then you had all these TV actresses – like Jennifer Love Hewitt in I Know What You Did Last Summer – all crossing over into horror. And these girls wouldn’t take their clothes off. Like, there’s a sex scene, and they have their clothes on. What’s the point? What are you giving me that I can’t get on primetime TV? Like Wrong Turn when Eliza Dushku gets tied up by these hillbillies, and they don’t fuck her or even take her clothes off? And this is universal. So I would see these actresses, and they would say “I can’t do the nudity – it’s exploitation”. Exploitation, huh? What about the seven page spread you did in FHM last month, with the dental floss barely over your nipples? “That’s different. That’s publicity”.

So, they just didn’t dig the flesh-eating virus...
Exactly. They just assume that becuse it’s a horror film, that it cannot be artistic. In the ’70s and even the early ’80s you had every major director like Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick all making horror films. It was taken seriously as an artform, there was a respectability to it. Now if you make a really good horror film, they call it a thriller, or they just make something up. Like for The Sixth Sense, they just made up the term ‘supernatural thriller’. It’s a horror film, but they won’t call it that. So you get actresses who will drop their clothes in a heartbeat for an art film turning up their noses at horror.

But don’t they have a point? When you consider that most contemporary horror films are fairly worthless?
Like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, or Valentine, or Darkness Falls? I hate those movies so much. Horror movies are supposed to push the envelope. They’re supposed to take things that people don’t want to think about, and put them up there on screen, and make you confront them. But the last thing that the studios want to do is threaten people, or frighten them. They want movies that will play to everybody. They want Finding Nemo. That’s why the use test audiences, to find out what offends people, so that they can remove it. And horror films can’t be apologetic like that. The ones that last certainly aren’t.

I know that Cabin Fever was also inspired by your own brush with a flesh-eating virus. Just so I know, how do you get rid of such an affliction?
Well, you basically have a 20 percent chance of survival. I mean you should check out the websites like www.stopthebacteria.com – nobody knows how you get it, but just look up the survivor stories, and read what these people went through to survive. You really do start to wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off dead. One guy was treated by a doctor who didn’t wash his hands and gave it to 15 people – the guy ends up having surgery on one hundred percent of his body. I get e-mails from loads of these people saying the effects in the movie are realistic. They’re not sure what I had, ’cos I was in Iceland when I got it, but they got it early before I needed reconstructive surgery.

That must make you forever paranoid about lurking bacteria?
Let me tell you, it ruins you. Like when I was 17, I went to Russia and I drank the water and I got a parasite. I had to spend eight months trying to get this thing out. There’s an army of these things eating me from the inside out. It makes you feel like your body is not your own, that you’re only renting spaces here, and that at the end of the day bacteria and viruses are going to get us all no matter what we do. It makes you a total germaphobe, and I’m now completely obsessed with hand-cleaning products.

Cabin Fever is now on general release