When Eli Roth was six he saw The Exorcist, a film whose mix of horror and religion was considered so unsettling that Britain’s censors deemed it unsuitable for adults. Eli made up his mind then. When he grew up, he wanted to be a director of horror films. When he was 11, he borrowed his father’s video camera and power tools, requisitioned the ketchup bottle from the kitchen and enlisted his brothers as cast members. He called the end result Splatter on the Linoleum.

Now, at 31, Roth is being feted as the most exciting “new” writer- director on the resurgent American horror scene. His debut feature Cabin Fever receives a late-night premiere at this month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival — and it comes with the considerable endorsement of Roth’s mentor David Lynch, who directed Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and created Twin Peaks.

Cabin Fever marks a return to classic horror, before the genre was hijacked by computer effects and tongue-in-cheek jokiness, but gives the form a new twist, eschewing misogynist slashers in favour of a new enemy — a flesh-eating virus that consumes his characters, male and female, as they holiday in an isolated cabin in the woods.

The world premiere, at the Toronto Film Festival, prompted a bidding war among studios. Ironically, most of them had turned down the film at the script stage, forcing Roth to shoot the film as an independent production, on a modest $1.5m budget. But then Roth has spent his life making movies for next to nothing. It is just that up until now virtually nobody has seen them.

BACKGROUND

• Hostel: Part II

• Hostel: Part II - Sunday Times review

• Hostel

• Festival: If you go to the woods

Here’s blood in your eye

Eli Roth’s movies revel in disgust, but the director proclaims himself the ‘horror Borat’

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

“I became really obsessed with horror movies when I was a kid,” says the spiky-haired Bostonian, with the Super Cool Manchu T-shirt and handsome looks undermined by a manic intensity. “When I was eight years old I saw Alien and I actually vomited in the theatre,” he enthuses.

After that incident, Roth’s mother and father, a psychoanalyst, banned him from seeing horror movies. He soon persuaded them to relent. The young Roth may have been physically revolted by gore, but he was also fascinated, and he knew the difference between reality and illusion.

“When I was 13, at my bar mitzvah, since I wasn’t really friends with any girls and I didn’t have a dance, I had a magician and he sawed me in half with a chainsaw. That was kind of like my dream come true.”

Graduating from New York University’s film school in 1994, he wrote Cabin Fever the following year. His aim was to return to the horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s, which mixed gore with suspense. “There was the classic set-up of a bunch of kids going into the woods and getting into trouble . . . You can go into the woods in America and really very quickly get isolated.”

He was inspired by an experience he had when he was working on a ranch in Iceland a few years earlier and contracted a skin infection cleaning out a barn.

“I woke up in the middle of the night, scratching my cheek, thinking I had a mosquito bite,” he says. “I looked at my hand and saw chunks of skin. The next morning I attempted to shave, and literally, shaved half my face off.”

After reading an article about a flesh-eating bacterium that can eat through a human body in a day, he wrote a script. All the studios he sent it to told him that straight-faced horror had had its day. This was before The Blair Witch Project became one of the most profitable films ever, on the back of a similar danger-in-the-woods scenario.

Meanwhile, Roth took a number of junior posts on films and carried out research for a musical that David Lynch was planning about scientists in New York. In 1999, he moved from New York to Los Angeles and continued his association with the older director, who had de facto become his mentor.

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