2003, R, 94 minutes

Every year around this time, Hollywood releases a slew of horror pictures in hopes that audiences across the country will gobble them up like zombies having a flesh feast. This is all good and well as long as the product is fresh and well packaged, but within the last few years, horror films, especially the major studio offerings, have become more rotten than a week old corpse. They are either too hip or self aware of how clever they are to be very scary (the Final Destination series) or they have stole from each other so often that they have become a parody of themselves (Freddy vs. Jason and the Scream sequels). Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever is not one of those films.

Cabin Fever starts off stereotypically enough; a group of young adults rent a secluded cabin in the woods, and before long they come under attack from an unspeakable evil, but this terrifying monster is not your typical horror fiend. It’s a virus, and not a phony one, but one based on a real virus - fotobacterum damsela - a flesh-eating contagion that can eat through a human body in less than a day. And as this bug continues to eat away at the inhabitants of the cabin, they begin to eat away at each other’s ability to cope with their situation.

Eli Roth, the co-writer and director of Cabin Fever, is a self proclaimed horror movie freak who was raised on the low budget fright films of Sam Raimi, John Carpenter and Wes Craven, and you can tell that he studied them heavily before embarking on this film. Unlike other recent horror films which have cannibalized themselves to the point that you can’t tell Scream 3 from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Roth has decided to borrow from the masters: the visual style of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the paranoia of John Carpenter’s The Thing, with a healthy dose of George Romero’s Dead Trilogy thrown in for good measure. The good thing about Roth’s use of elements from these films (not to mention countless others) is that, unlike other horror films that simply “steal” formulas from whatever scary movie that packed in the crowds before them, you truly get the feeling that the director has a real love for the horror films he is paying homage to.

Another reason that this film clicks is the low budget spirit in which it was made. The effects are top notch, but the real squirms (and there are dozens of them in this film) come from what you don’t see most of the time. Things are hidden under blankets, or seen just offscreen, allowing the viewer to create in their own mind what horrifying thing may be happening to the unfortunate victims of this killer virus. Roth also creates a fine balance between humor and horror in nearly every seen in the movie. One minute you’re laughing at some truly inspired dialogue or situation, and the next your squirming in your seat from some of the most unsettling images in recent memory. And if the images aren’t enough to freak you out, then combine it with the director’s use of sound effects to heighten the creep-out factor tenfold. Roth worked as an assistant for David Lynch (the master of using sound to convey mood in movies) for many years before embarking on Cabin Fever, and you can tell from the opening credits that he knows how to use the sound of buzzing flies to maximum effect.

The acting also contributes to making Cabin Fever genuinely scary. While none of the cast is the second coming of Laurence Olivier, they are believable as the young people they are portraying, and that goes a long way towards selling their plight to the audience. And if the lead actors help to sell the scares, the actors in background parts, including a police deputy that lives for a good party and a pancake loving, karate kicking youngster with social problems, definitely go the distance in supplying “Twin Peaks” style strangeness to the rest of the picture.

While Cabin Fever isn’t a perfect movie, it is about as close to perfect as a horror film is going to get. It’s a raw assault on the senses that deserves to take its place alongside the great horror films that it pays homage to.

A word to the more squeamish film fans out there; if you are going to see Cabin Fever, be prepared to leave the theater with your skin crawling, then be prepared to get even more freaked out when you begin scratching at your skin and then thinking to yourself “what if I got it?”