Eli Roth Wrote the Most Repulsive Scene in ‘Cabin Fever’ Based on His Own Nightmare Travel Story
Cabin Fever (2002) was Eli Roth’s directorial debut. He wrote the film with his former NYU roommate, Randy Pearlstein, while he was working as a production assistant for Howard Stern’s Private Parts (1997). Roth went on to write and direct Hostel (2005), The Green Inferno (2013), Knock Knock (2015), and Thanksgiving (2023) among others. He is currently working on a horror movie called The Ice Cream Man.
Cabin Fever is about five college friends who go to a cabin in the woods for spring break. After drinking contaminated water, a flesh-eating virus spreads. Relationships splinter and the group descends into brutality.
Filming took place at a 3,200-acre Boy Scout camp in North Carolina where the Scout’s “Mountain Men” program used to be held. Taking a break between scenes, Rider Strong (most famous for playing Shawn Hunter in Boy Meets World) went for a walk in the woods despite being covered in fake blood. He actually ran into a group of girls on a school field trip who thought they were seeing a recently murdered Shawn Hunter! When they realized it was Rider Strong filming a movie, they chased him back to set.
In writing Cabin Fever, Roth was inspired by his own experience with a flesh-eating virus. At 19, he worked on a horse farm in Ireland and came into contact with rotted hay that gave him an infection. Broken out in sores, when Roth scratched his face, “chunks of flesh” fell off. The most upsetting scene in Cabin Fever is based on this, as his skin “peeled off” when he shaved.
Roth wasn’t the only one on the Cabin Fever set with personal experience with the subject matter. John Neff, a sound editor who played one of the victims, once contracted flesh-eating bacteria himself during a routine surgery. Neff says he needed 24/7 medical care for 13 days to get rid of the bacteria and says Cabin Fever‘s special effects are totally accurate.
I woke up in the middle of the night scratching my cheek, thinking I had a mosquito bite. I looked down at my hand and saw chunks of skin. The next morning I attempted to shave and literally shaved half my face off. The strangest part was not only did it not hurt—it actually satisfied some strange itch underneath my skin. I went to see a dermatologist, who, judging by the horrified and puzzled look on her face, had never seen anything like it before. She gave me steroid creme and luckily, my face cleared up.
Eli Roth, on the inspiration for Cabin Fever
An unrelated morbid fact about Cabin Fever is that casting was taking place on September 11, 2001, and the audition scene included the dialogue, “[It’s] like being on a plane, when you know it’s gonna crash. Everybody around you is screaming ‘We’re Going Down! We’re Going Down!’ and all you want to do is grab the person next to you and fuck them, because you know you’re going to be dead soon, anyway.”
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