Movies
Eli Roth Blown Away By the ‘Cabin Fever’ Remake!
Eli Roth’s 2002 horror comedy Cabin Fever has already been remade. We even exclusively shared the first image (see below) from the film that used Roth and Randy Pearlstein’s exact same shooting script.
Starring Gage Golightly (“Teen Wolf”), Dustin Ingram (Paranormal Activity 3), Samuel Davis (“From Dusk Till Dawn” – TV), Matthew Daddario (Delivery Man) and Nadine Crocker (Deadgirl), Cabin Fever 2.0 is now in post production and could be coming sooner than you expect. In fact Roth has seen it, and was “blown away.”
Promoting his production Clown, out now in the UK, Roth spoke about how much he liked the new Cabin Fever.
“It’s great. And I’m saying that honestly,” exclaims Roth to IGN. “I saw it and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe it. Travis Zariwny the director did a fantastic job.
“They came to me exactly a year ago and said ‘We want to remake Cabin Fever using your original script.’ You’ve got to realise that from an egotistical point-of-view I wrote Cabin Fever when I was 22-years-old. Right out of university. And for six years everyone told me ‘This is an un-makeable piece of shit.’ So the fact that the same script would get made twice and that 20 years later, 20 years after I originally wrote it, it got sent around Hollywood and people were reading the same dialogue. I looked at it as like staging a play – as an experiment I just wanted to see how it would turn out. So I came on as one of the executive producers – I was actually shooting “South of Hell,” the TV show, so I was unable to be there during the shoot.”
And although it’s the exact same screenplay, Roth reveals there are some significant changes he calls “smart”.
“I saw the cut and thought that what Travis did was so smart – he kept the original script, but he changed the deaths, so all the kills are different,” Roth reveals. “You don’t know how they’re going to come. I was watching it, and he didn’t tell me that he did that and I was so happy he did – because nobody wants to see a re-do that’s the same thing that they already know. So he leads you in one direction, with the audience thinking that the know what’s coming, then puts a fantastic spin on it.
“And it looks awesome – it’s a really fun movie. I’m happily surprised at how it’s turned out.”
In this reboot a group of five college graduates rent a remote cabin in the woods and begin to fall victim to a horrifying flesh-eating virus, which attracts the unwanted attention of the homicidal locals. As it spreads among the friends, their true feelings and personalities emerge as they struggle to survive the virus and each other.
Watch for release news as it comes in.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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