Eli Roth's Cabin Fever is now twelve years old: plenty old enough, apparently, to be ripe for the remake treatment. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to turn the cabin-in-the-woods / flesh-eating-virus horror into a franchise, a new team has decided to start again from scratch. Travis Zariwny (Intruder) is the director, and the unforntuate kids this time are Gage Golightly (from MTV's Teen Wolf series), Dustin Ingram, Samuel Davis, Matthew Daddario and Nadine Crocker.
Roth is acting as executive producer and is also the writer. That's not because he's re-tooled the script, but because Zariwny is working from the exact same screenplay that Roth co-wrote with Randy Pearlstein just over a decade ago.
“Travis had an amazing vision for my original script," says Roth, "and as a scary movie fan I really wanted to see it. I almost see this like re-staging a play, and I’m excited to see what ideas Travis and the cast bring to it. They’re all fans of the original and want to make a film that’s a new classic and I believe they will."
Cabin Fever, if you missed it, involves a group of teens holing up in a remote cabin for a spot of misbehaviour. Sadly their partying is ruined by an unpleasant and virulent outbreak of necrotising fasciitis. Seven years later, Ti West butted heads with studio Lionsgate over the ill-fated sequel Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. And a prequel, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero, starring Sean Astin, was released just recently.
Whether this much Cabin Fever is a good thing is a moot point at this stage. Depending on who you listen to, the remake is either just about to start shooting or is already in the can having wrapped recently in Portland, Oregon. Whatever, it's currently looking for a deal at the American Film Market.